Unit 12: Social Psychology Flashcards
1
Q
What are attitudes?
A
- Judgments that you have about various things that influence your behaviors and influence your way of thinking
- can be implicit (Unconscious) or explicit (conscious)
- People with explicit attitudes are able to discuss them, while people with implicit attitudes have a hard time acknowledging them.
2
Q
What are attributions and its various forms?
A
- A special attitude where you attribute success and failure
- Internal attribution - internalize the good and the bad, believe that you have control in the world. Also tend to put a lot of pressure on yourself
- External attribution - Constantly externalizes the good and the bad, lacks initiative, low effort, thinks its all luck and fate
- Self-serving bias - Internalize success and externalize failure, tied to narcissism, don’t pay atention to mistakes, high self-esteem, blames others
- Self-defeating bias - Internalize failure, externalize success, hyperfocused on criticisms, low self-esteem, can lead to depression and anxiety, imposter syndrome
3
Q
What’s the Fundamental Attribution Error?
A
- An individual’s tendency to rationalize their own and other people’s failures differently
- For our personal failures, we tend to come up with external reasons as to why it happened in order to let yourself off the hook.
- For other people’s failures, we internalize them and blame the person themselves for their own failures
4
Q
What’s cognitive dissonance?
A
- A conflict between two things that don’t go together, results in a psychological conflict
- This is a very stressful and taxing mindset to have
- Inconsistent attitudes and behaviors
- Trying to find a justifaction of effort, and ignore certain pieces of information
- Ex. You believe the corporate ladder is stupid, but still want a promotion
5
Q
What’s the difference between group norms, roles, and scripts?
A
- Norms - what’s considered typical for a whole group to do (very vague)
- Roles - individual people within the group and their expected roles
- Scripts - A certain set of patterns/behaviors (these can be very detailed)
- These are dependent on the culture
- Only some people witin the group can have roles
6
Q
What was the Stanford Prison Experiment?
A
- Started by Zimbardo who wanted to study group roles and norms, so he simulated a prison using young, white, male college students that was suppsed to run for two weeks but didn’t even last one
- The assigned gaurds became way too dominant and abusive while the prisoners fought against the cops
- Heavily criticized and highly unethical
- Thought that being assigned roles would allow people to propagate them within a group
7
Q
What does the term behavioral homophily imply?
A
- The term homophily means to like the same things, so behavioral homophily indicates a group that share the same behaviors
- Helps foster group cohesivness
8
Q
What’s groupthink?
A
- Where a group has an almost automatic consensus on a decision/idea
- Dominant perspectives take over
- Makes the ideas inferior as no one is speaking out and challenging the ideas, or thinking critically about the ideas.
9
Q
What’s social loafing?
A
- Can occur during group projects when group members don’t put in the same amount of effort as they believe that someone else will do it for them
10
Q
What’s the bystander effect?
A
- During emergencies that happen within a group, people automatically assume that someone else will act to save them
- Doesn’t occur when person knows they are the only one to help
- Ex. the murder of Kitty Genovese
11
Q
What is conformity within a group and how was it studied?
A
- People don’t want to break conformity as it helps us fit in (from an evolutonary standpoint, it helps keeps the species alive by doing what others are doing). Can often lead to cognitive dissonance
- Asch studied conformity within a group by taking a group of 7 indidivuals, 6 being confederates, and asking them questions about comparing the lengths of lines. Even though all the confederates gave the wrong answers, the actual participant still said what the confederates said
12
Q
What was the obedience study?
A
- Conducted by Milgram what he called the “learning study” where the actual participants played the role of the teacher, and the confederate played the role of the learner
- The experimenter told the teacher to administer electric shocks to the learner, but that wasn’t actually happening as it was all fake, but the teacher actually thought they were.
- Milgram wanted to see how far humans would go to remain obedient, even if it’s at the cost of hurting others
- Was inspired to do the experiment after what occured during the holocaust
- Very controversial and unethical, could not be replicated today
- The findings were shocking since most people continued to administer the electric shocks, even though the exerimenter wasn’t necessarily forcing them to
13
Q
What’s ingroup perception vs. outgroup perception?
A
- Only an individual within a specific group of people is able to understand the nuance and individuality of of each person within the group (ingroup)
- Since you don’t belong to the group, you don’t see the individuality of each group member. This can lead to stereotypes and naive ignorance about how the group behaves. Think of them only in generalities (outgroup)
14
Q
What’s xenophobia?
A
- To have a fear and wariness of the unknown and foreign, leading an individual to have a strong preference for their own group
- refuses to partake in other cultural experiences
15
Q
What are stereotypes?
A
- A percieved probability that you have about a group
- Not conscious, they occur automatically
- They filter out the individual uniqueness of groups, makes it difficult to understand different groups, which is inaccurate
