Week 3 Flashcards
Naturalistic Observation
Observe people unobtrusively in their natural environment.
Allows one to see patterns in the real world.
Pro: Observation cannot effect outcome
Con: If people notice you watching them this could effect the outcome
Case Studies
Focus on a single interesting case in detail
Pro: Allows depth
Con: Can’t generalize with a sample size of one
Surveys
Questions posed to participants about themselves
Pro: Easy, get a lot of data in a short amount of time
Con: People lie
Correlational Research
Attempt to determine the relationship between 2 variables.
Pro: Can suggest avenues for further research
Con: Can lead to false conclusions, correlation is not causation.
Typically a child’s self concept is concrete, what do we mean by this?
They describe themselves in terms of clear-cut, easily observable characteristics related to appearance and skills. As we mature we place less emphasis on physical characteristics.
Self-concept
An organized collection of beliefs about who you are.
Influences what information you look for and how you process it.
Self-schemas
Mental boxes
Mental structures that people use to organize their knowledge about themselves and influence what they notice, think about, and remember about themselves.
Based on past experiences.
Peripheral self-conceptions
Event we don’t feel is relevant to how we conceptualize ourselves.
Actual Self
Who you think you are
Ideal Self
How people would ideally like to be
Ought Self
How people think they ought to be
Self discrepancy theory
A theory for when self views conflict. This can predict depressive symptomology.
Upward social comparison
Compare ourselves to someone who is better off than we are in a given dimension.
Downward social comparison
Compare ourselves to someone who is worse off than we are in a given dimension.
How do social networking sites effect our self-concept?
People are posting to sites either their ideal self or ought self, this is impression management. This gives us a distorted view of reality, we believe other people have it better than us.
What shapes the self concept?
Social comparison
Feedback from others
Social context
Cultural values
Self Attributions
When trying to decide what cause our own and others behaviour we can make one of two attributions:
Internal: Dispositional, something to do with who we are.
External: Situational.
Internal and external attributions may differ in stability and controllability. External attributions are general uncontrollable. Using the test example, what are controllable, uncontrollable, stable, and unstable internal attributions like??
Stable and uncontrollable: Grade reflected intelligence
Unstable and controllable: Grade reflected study strategies
2 kinds of cognitive processing:
Automatic processing:
- Occur outside of consciousness awareness and with little effort
- Low effort thinking
- We are cognitive misers
- Adaptive, fast, and efficient, but we are more likely to make an error
Controlled processing:
- systematic processing
- Deliberate, intentional and effortful
- Can get better answers but it takes time
Motives guiding self-understanding
Self assessment: We want to know the truth about ourselves
Self verification: We want people to confirm what we already believe about ourselves
Self improvement: We want to understand ourselves to make ourselves better
Self enhancement: We want to feel good about ourselves. This is the strongest motive for self understanding.
Illusory Superiority
A tendency to feel better than average
