unit 3 - social psychology, motivation, emotion chapters 7 and 11

Question 1

Social psychology is the scientific study of how we influence, and are influenced by, the people around us.
Social cognition involves forming impressions of ourselves and other people. Doing so quickly and accurately is functional for social life.
Our initial judgments of others are based in large part on what we see. The physical features of other people — particularly their sex, race, age, and physical attractiveness — are very salient, and we often focus our attention on these dimensions.
We are attracted to people who appear to be healthy. Indicators of health include youth, symmetry, and averageness.
We frequently use people’s appearances to form our judgments about them and to determine our responses to them. These responses include stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Social psychologists believe that people should get past their prejudices and judge people as individuals.
Close relationships are based on intimacy. Intimacy is determined by similarity, self-disclosure, interdependence, commitment, rewards, and passion.
Causal attribution is the process of trying to determine the causes of people’s behaviour with the goal of learning about their personalities. Although people are reasonably accurate in their attributions, they also succumb to biases such as the fundamental attribution error.
Attitudes refer to our relatively enduring evaluations of people and things. Attitudes are determined, in part, by genetic transmission from our parents and, in part, through direct and indirect experiences.
Although attitudes predict behaviours, behaviours also predict attitudes. This occurs through the processes of self-perception and cognitive dissonance.

Question 2

Altruism is behaviour that is designed to increase another person’s welfare, particularly those actions that do not seem to provide a direct reward to the person who performs them. The tendency to help others in need is partly a functional evolutionary adaptation and partly determined by environmental factors.
Although helping others can be costly to us as individuals, helping people who are related to us can perpetuate our own genes. Some helping is based on reciprocal altruism, which is the principle that if we help other people now, they will return the favour should we need their help in the future.
We also learn to help through modelling and reinforcement. The result of this learning is norms about helping, including the reciprocity norm and the social responsibility norm.
Research testing the Latané and Darley model of helping has shown the importance of the social situation in noticing, interpreting, and acting in emergency situations.
Aggression is physical or nonphysical behaviour that is intended to harm another individual. Aggression has both genetic and environmental causes. The experience of negative emotions tends to increase aggression.
Viewing violence tends to increase aggression.
The social norm that condones and even encourages responding to insults with aggression is known as the culture of honour.
Conformity, the change in beliefs or behaviour that occurs as the result of the presence of the other people around us, can occur in both active and passive ways. The typical outcome of conformity is that our beliefs and behaviours become more similar to those of others around us.
The situation is the most powerful determinant of conformity, but individual differences may also matter. The important influence of the social situation on conformity was demonstrated in the research by Sherif, Asch, and Milgram.
Minority influence can change attitudes and change how majorities process information.

Question 3

The performance of working groups is almost never as good as we would expect, given the number of individuals in the group, and in some cases may even be inferior to the performance of one or more members of the group working alone.
The tendency to perform tasks better or faster in the presence of others is known as social facilitation. The tendency to perform tasks more poorly or more slowly in the presence of others is known as social inhibition.
The ability of a group to perform well is determined by the characteristics of the group members as well as by the events that occur in the group itself, known as the group process.
One group process loss that may occur in groups is that the group members may engage in social loafing. Group process losses can also occur as a result of groupthink — that is, when group members conform to each other rather than expressing their own divergent ideas.
Taken together, working in groups has both positive and negative outcomes. It is important to recognize both the strengths and limitations of group performance and use whatever techniques we can to increase process gains and reduce process losses.

Question 4

Emotions are the normally adaptive mental and physiological feeling states that direct our attention and guide our behaviour.
Emotional states are accompanied by arousal in which our experiences of the bodily responses are created by the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.
Motivations are forces that guide behaviour. They can be biological, such as hunger and thirst, personal, such as the motivation for achievement, or social, such as the motivation for acceptance and belonging.
The most fundamental emotions, known as the basic emotions, are those of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
Cognitive appraisal also allows us to experience a variety of secondary emotions.
According to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, the experience of an emotion is accompanied by physiological arousal.
According to the James-Lange theory of emotion, our experience of an emotion is the result of the arousal that we experience.
According to the two-factor theory of emotion, the experience of emotion is determined by the intensity of the arousal we are experiencing and the cognitive appraisal of the situation determines what the emotion will be.
When people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing, we say that they have misattributed their arousal.
We express our emotions to others through nonverbal behaviours, and we learn about the emotions of others by observing them.

Question 5

Motivation describes the wants or needs that direct behaviour toward a goal or away from an unpleasant experience.
We are intrinsically motivated to pursue goals that make us feel good when we achieve them.
We are extrinsically motivated to pursue goals with external rewards, like money or recognition.
William James’s instinct theory of motivation is problematic because it ignores the role of learning.
The drive theory of motivation predicts that physiological needs result in psychological drive states that direct behaviour to meet the need and bring the system back to homeostasis.
Physiological arousal is predicted to motivate behaviour. A moderate level of arousal is better for performance than under- or over-arousal, as shown in the Yerkes-Dodson law.
Several theorists have focused on understanding social motives. The best example is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that includes a range of needs from physiological to social. Maslow argued that higher needs cannot be met while lower needs are unmet.
The pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization.

Question 6

Biologically, hunger is controlled by the interactions among complex pathways in the nervous system and a variety of hormonal and chemical systems in the brain and body.
How we eat is also influenced by our environment, including social norms about appropriate body size.
Homeostasis varies among people and is determined by the basal metabolic rate. Low metabolic rates, which are determined entirely by genetics, make weight management a very difficult undertaking for many people.
Eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, affect about 1% of people, of which 90% are women.
Obesity is a medical condition in which so much excess body fat has accumulated in the body that it begins to have an adverse impact on health. Uncontrolled obesity leads to health problems including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, sleep apnea, arthritis, and some types of cancer.
The two approaches to controlling weight are to eat less and exercise more.
Sex drive is regulated by the sex hormones estrogen in women and testosterone in both women and men.
Although their biological determinants and experiences of sex are similar, men and women differ substantially in their overall interest in sex, the frequency of their sexual activities, and the mates they are most interested in.
Sexual behaviour varies widely, not only between men and women, but also within each sex.
There is also variety in sexual orientation: toward people of the opposite sex, people of the same sex, or people of both sexes. The determinants of sexual orientation are primarily biological.

Question 7

Babies are born with a variety of skills and abilities that contribute to their survival, and they also actively learn by engaging with their environments.
Attachment to a caregiver is an important first relationship in life. Attachment styles refer to the security of this relationship and more generally to the type of relationship that people, and especially children, develop with those who are important to them.
Temperament refers to characteristic mood, activity level, attention span, and level of distractability that is evident in infancy and early childhood. It is the foundation for personality.
Parents use different types of discipline, such as power assertion and induction, and have parenting styles characterized by levels of warmth and parental control.
Children’s knowledge of the self is evident as young as 18 months of age.
By the end of the preschool years, young children’s “moral self” reflects how they think of themselves as people who want to do the right thing, who feel badly after misbehaving, and who feel uncomfortable when others misbehave.
The habituation technique is used to demonstrate the newborn’s ability to remember and learn from experience.
Children use both assimilation and accommodation to develop functioning schemas of the world.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that children develop in a specific series of sequential stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Piaget’s theories have had a major impact, but they have also been critiqued and expanded.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory proposes that cognitive development is partly influenced by social interactions with more knowledgeable others.