Topic 1 - Intro to Study of Social Psych

Question 1

What is social psychology?

Answer 1

the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.

Question 2

What is the purpose of psychology?

Answer 2

to understand and predict human behaviour

Question 3

What is social influence?

Answer 3

the effect that words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviour

Question 4

What are 3 pieces within social influence?

Answer 4

Direct attempts to influence others (persuasion)

Mere presence

Social imagination - imagined disapproval or approval

Question 5

What is the difference between social psychology and philosophy?

Answer 5

Philosophy addresses many of the same questions about human nature; it often builds off of one another and theoretical speculation.

Social psychology explores those questions about human nature scientifically (using scientific method).

Question 6

What is an example of how social psychology and philosphy are not the same?

Answer 6

Philosopher Benedict Spinoza - Hate fuels lasting love - no evidence to actually support that

Question 7

What is common sense?

Answer 7

Folk wisdom (knowledge or beliefs about psychology that are widespread amongst the ordinary people of a country/culture)

Question 8

What is personality psychology?

Does it look at the role played by social influence?

Answer 8

Focuses on how individual differences impact behaviour; study qualities of the individual; often looks more at the individual’s traits

Does not always take into account the powerful role that social influence may play

Question 9

Describe the ecological approach to psychology.

Answer 9

Shows the interaction between the:
- microsystem (network of personal settings in interaction - family, workplace, classroom, friend group, church group),

• exosystem (larger institutions such as government, education system, organized religion, media, economy), and
• macrosystem (culture - ideology, mores, folkways, customs).

Question 10

Looking at the ecological approach to psychology, what does social psychology look at?

What does personality, clinical, and biological psychology look at? Cultural psychology?

Answer 10

Social psychology: interplay between how larger systems impact individuals and shape them

Personality, Clinical, Biological: microsystem - looking at the individual

Cultural: looking at exosystem and macrosystem

Question 11

What is the level of analysis of social psychology?

Answer 11

Level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation.

Question 12

What is the difference between sociology and social psychology? What is their focus at large?

Answer 12

Sociology: focus on society at large, studies group of people and important institutions

Social psychology: focus on the individual in the context of a social situation, studies the influence of human groupings and institutions on individual behaviour

Question 13

What is the social psychological impact of incarceration?

Answer 13

• dependence on institutional structure and contingencies
• hyper-vigilance, interpersonal distrust, and suspicion
• emotional over-control, alienation, and psychological distancing
• social withdrawal and isolation
• incorporation of exploitative norms of prison culture
• diminished sense of self-worth and personal value
• post-traumatic stress reactions to the pains of imprisonment

Question 14

What is the goal of social psychology?

Answer 14

To identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture

Question 15

What is the level of analysis of social psychology?

Answer 15

The individual in the context of a social situation
- emphasizes the individual’s construal of the situation (how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world and act accordingly)

Question 16

Define personality psych, social psych, and sociology:

Answer 16

personality psych: the study of the characteristics that make individuals unique and different from one another

social psych: the study of the psychological processes people have in common that make them susceptible to social influence

sociology: the study of groups, organizations, and societies, rather than individuals

Question 17

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

Answer 17

The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behaviour entirely in terms of intrinsic personality traits

Underestimating the power of social influence
Most likely to make a dispositional attribution - attribution related to an internal characteristic or personality trait

Question 18

What’s the issue with attributing behaviour solely to personality?

Answer 18

When we underestimate the power of social influence, we gain a feeling of false security.
- increases personal vulnerability to possibly destructive social influence
- lulls us into lowering our guard
- oversimplifies complex situations
- decreases our understanding of the true causes
- can lead us to blame the victim when people are actually overpowered by social forces

Question 19

Is how humans behave in a given situation determined by the objective conditions of a situation?

Answer 19

No - rather how they perceive it (your construal)

Question 20

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 20

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need consider only reinforcing effects of environment.

• does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling; ignored construals of the situation

Question 21

The emphasis on construal has its roots in what psychology?

Answer 21

roots in Gestault psychology

Question 22

What is naïve realism?

Answer 22

The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see.

Question 23

Construals are shaped by what two basic human motives?

Answer 23

1- the need to feel good about ourselves (self-esteem motive)
2- the need to be accurate

Question 24

What is the self-esteem motive?

Answer 24

Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem

People will often distort the world in order to feel good about themselves

Question 25

What are cognitive distortions?

Answer 25

Patterns of thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately.
(May not see things in a way that is accurate or in our own best interest)

Question 26

What is the point of the Rosenberg Scale?

Answer 26

Simply used to measure self-esteem - originally made to be used for high school students

Question 27

What is the suffering and self-justification effect?

Answer 27

The more unpleasant the procedure the participants undergo to get into group, the better they like the group.
1- human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behaviour.
2- under certain conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical.

Question 28

Even though hazing is harzardous, why is it continued?

Answer 28

It DOES build cohesiveness

Question 29

What is the Social Cognition Motive?

Answer 29

The need to be accurate.
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
We try to gain accurate understandings so we can make effective judgements and decisions.

Question 30

Do we attain accurate information?

Answer 30

We may be able to, BUT we typically act on the basis of incompletely and inaccurately interpreted information.

Question 31

What was the purpose of the cereal box short-cuts?

Answer 31

We rely on a series of expectations and other mental short-cuts in making judgements about the world around us, from important life decisions to which cereal to buy at the store - a fact with which advertisers and marketers are very well acquainted.

Question 32

Is TV violence tied to aggression in children and adolescents?

Answer 32

Strong evidence that exposure to violence through the media can increase aggressive behaviour in children, and that increases in behaviours that are aggressive and violent, desensitization to violence, bullying, fear, depression, nightmare and sleep disturbances, are all related to viewing violent content.