Theory Flashcards
Being social = ?
Being Human
What is the social baseline theory by J.P. Coen?
- Brain’s responses to threat cues are minimized with social proximity.
- Our baseline is calm while close .
- Being alone is stressful.
What are the three parts of Social psychology?
The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context.
Scientific study: systematic observation, measurement, description.
Focus on the psychology of the induvidual -> groups and crowds can also be seen as “the individual”
Interaction with context -> can be both offline and online
What are the three parts of “The self”?
Three question: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where do I fit?
Self-awareness: knowing yourself (intrapersonal)
Our interaction with others (interpersonal)
Agency and self regulation (intrapersonal)
Name 3 parts of Self-awareness?
-Being aware of who you are
-Effect of mirror in our self-awareness
-Not only knowing yourself, but who are be COMPARED to others
This either improves performance and socially desirebale behavior.
When behavior or outcames are bad, self-awareness is avoided.
What is the Self-concept? Ask yourself three questions?
Is self-concept coherent?
Everything you believe to be true about who you are, what you are and what is important to you. The self-concept is formed by different and multiple scherma’s.
This is not one coherent idea about yourself, but instead people have multiple specific ideas about themselves that might reinforce or contradict each other.
What are Schema’s?
Individual beliefs about the self.
What is a trait?
A trait is a more stable and enduring characteristic or pattern of behavior, such as extraversion.
Extraversion: if you are an outgoing person or not.
What is a state?
A state is a temporary way of being and changes per situation or context, such as happiness.
What are the 5 different ways we form our self-concept?
- Introspection: thinking about who we are
- Behavioral perceptions: we listen to our bodies (whether your body feels angry, sad or happy) Motivation: intrinsic vs. extrinsic
- Interaction with the self: self-perception theory observe yourself, also over-justification effect if you are no longer extrinsically motivated for something, we quite doing it
- Intercation with others: how you define yourself in depenedent on who is listening, social comparison theory
- Memory
Name three reasons why forming the self-concept is not objective?
- Diagnositicy: Preference to acquire information that can provide the clearest, most unambiguous information about the self.
- Self-enhancement: Preference for the favorable information about the self.
- Self-verification: Preference to verify or confirm whatever you already believe about yourself.
What is self-deception?
Believing what you want to believe about yourself without a lot of evidence for those beliefs.
What is self-esteem?
Part of self-concept, but evaluative (comparison with others)
Is high self-esteem better than low self-esteem?
This is still debated. However, it seems to be the case that people with high self-esteem have clear and consistent beliefs about themselves, whereas the beliefs of people with low self-esteem are often confused, contradictory, and fluctuating.
What is the sociometer theory?
Self-esteem is an internal measure of how much we are accepted by others.
What is self-presentation?
Our efforts to portray ourselves in a certian way to others.
What is impression management?
Behaving differently when other are watching.
Do you answer a question differently or do you behave differently when you know other people are watching you?
Our drive to present ourselfs in a nice way to others can be HAREFUL to out health and can even be very dangerous -> smoking, driving without a helmet.
What are the two way social categorization can be devided?
In-groups: a group of people that we identify with family, friends, colleagues, like minded.
Out-groups: everyone who fall outside the in-groups everyone who is different from us in a perceived way.
Out-groups are seen as homogeneous and are dehumanized we should defend us against the out-group its us or them.
Social categorization is arbitrary and easy to manipulate, as has been shown by the Stanford prison experiment.
What are the two aspects of the social facilitation effect?
Performing a task in presence of audience
- if you know the task well -> performence inproves
- if you do not know the task well -> performence declines
example: running a marathon with many people cheering you on along the way vs. going a speech in front of an audience without having the possibility to practice.
What is self-regulation, name 4 things?
- The self’s capacity to alter
- Both internal and autonomous control
- self-awareness
- Ego-depletion
- The self’s capacity to alter and change itself and its states, particularly so as to bring them into line with standards such as norms, goals, ideals or rules.
- Both internal and autonomous control such as heart rate variability, as deliberate control such as choosing whether to eat cake or lose weight over time.
- You can only self-regulate when you are aware of yourself (self-awareness).
- Ego-depletion: our self-regulation (or willpower) is finite, it is gone at a certain point (think about saying no to take care for 3 times and then saying yes the 4th time).
What is agency?
The need to assert oneself and make decisions based on personal interests and values.
What is self-determination theory (SDT)?
It is concerned with the motivation behind choices people make without external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which behavior is self-motivated and self-determined.
What are attitudes?
Attitudes are the good/bad evaluations that we attach to object in our social world (evaluation).
What can attitudes be towards?
Attitudes can be evaluations attached to almost anything. Such as people, social groups, physical objects, behaviors, and even abstract concepts.
What are the 4 ways to measure attitudes?
- very subjective (explicit) open interview question
- subjective (explicit) survey question using likert scale
- less subjective (implicit) implicit association task
- psychophysiological (implicit) EEG, skin conductence
In what two ways are attitudes structured?
Valence: positive or negative
Arousal: importance of this attitude for us (how much they elicit strong emotional responses).
What are the 5 base dimensions of attitude?
- strength
- extremity
- importance
- certainty
- accessibility
When in life are attitudes formed?
Attitudes are formed early in and throughout life.
In what three ways are attitudes learned?
- Direct exposure
- Mere exposure
- Evaluative conditioning
- Direct exposure: The link between our attitudes formed through direct exposure and our actual behavior is very strong.
However, base of attitude and behavior should be the same to have a strong effect on behavior.
Same for direct exposure to virtual experiences. - Mere exposure: an attitude towards stimulus becomes more favorable with increasing frequancy of exposure to the stimulus.
- Evaluative conditioning: The process by which the valence of an stimulus (positive, negative or neutral) van be transferred to other stimuli when they are repeatedly presented together. (Pavlov clissical conditioning)
Ecalucative conditionaing is not about repsonse, but about valence (positive vs negative).
Example: mapping pleasent music to a certian soft drink brand.
How do persuasion models effect attitudes?
Apart from leaning attitudes, we also change, reinforce or diverify them based on new incoming information. Not always an easy and straightforwards process.
Self-persuasion and persusaion through communication by others.
Name three ways of self-persuasion?
- Actively thinking about arguments in favor of a certian position
- Advocating for something
- Teaching yourself new perspectives/theories
What are the two parts of the hearistic-systematic model?
- What expert says is true.
- In-depth analysis of message content.
Not mutually exclusice routes
What is the elaboration likelihood model (ELM)?
Persuasion is a cognitive event, people use mental processes of motivation and reasoning to accept or reject persuasive messages.
The amount of elaboration is determined by the relevance to one’s own life, individual factors, such as need for cognition, and situation factors, such as distraction.
Which two routes can be used when being persuaded? On which two factors does it depend which was will be used?
Central and peripheral route.
Depends on:
Ability: whether you are mentally able to follow and understand the messenger’s arguments
Motivation: whether you are interested, motivated, and willing to follow the messenger’s arguments.
Example:
Think hard, central route processing
Be influenced by others peripheral route processing
What are the 3 influence factor catagories in persuadion models?
Name all the factors?
Source:
- Expertise
- Credibility
- Likeability
- Trustworthiness
Recipient:
-Emotions
Message:
- Argument quality
- Message length, depth, interestingness
- Subliminal priming
- Narrative
What is selective exposure?
Avoiding information likely to change your attitudes and seeking information to likely support your attitudes.
Can attitudes be changed?
Attutudes and beliefs are very RESISTANT to change.
What is cognitive dissonance?
When we hold two or more conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours at the same time.
We do not like this feeling of dissonance and try our best to “rationalize” the dissonance by dropping one belief or by convincing ourselves that these beliefs can fit together.
What is reactance?
Threat to or loss of freedom motivates people to restore freedom.
-Manifested through behaviour to restore freedom
-Person is often emotional, irrational and single-minded
Keep reactance in mind when trying to change behaviour, once reactance happens you won’t be able to change attitude or behaviour. It is hard to get rid of reactance.
What are values?
Values are motivational bases of attitudes and behavior.
What is a belief?
A person’s subjective probability of a relation between the object of belief and some other object, value, concept, or attitude and affects people’s understanding of themselves and their environments.
