Weeks 3-4 Flashcards
What is social cognition?
The cognitive processes and structure that affect and are affected by social context and behaviour.
Focuses on how our thinking processes and thoughts are affectd by wider and more immediate social contexts, andhow thinking and thoughts affect our social behaviour.
How is thought different to cognition?
Thought is a conscious process, or at least something we can be aware of.
Cognition also refers to mental processing that can be largely automatic.
Cognition can’t be observed directly. How do we study it?
We infer from people’s expressions, actions, writings, and sayings.
What is cognitive consistency?
The theory that people feel uncomfortable when their thoughts are contradictory, and engage in all manner of behaviours and rationalisations, including changing their minds, to resolve the inconsistency.
Lost popularity in the 60s as it became clear that people are broadly tolerant of cognitive inconsistency.
Which model of social cognition is characteristed by people using rational scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world?
Naive scientist model
What type of theory is the naive scientist model?
Attribution theory
Attribution is the process of assigning a cause to our own behaviour and that of others.
What term was used to describe how people are often economical rather than accurate when jumping to a conclusion?
Cognitive miser
What term would Showers and Cantor use to describe fully engaged thinkers who had multiple cognitive strategies available and chose among them based on goals, motives and needs
Motivated tactician
“Sometimes the motivated tactician would choose wisely, in the interests of adaptability and accuracy and somtimes…defensively, in the interests of speed or self-esteem”
What branch of psychology does social cognition borrow research methods from?
Cognitive psychology
How has social neuroscience led to developments in social cognition?
Cognitive activity is monitored by fMRI, which detects and localises electrical activity in the brain associated with cognitive activities or functions.
Different parts of the brain light up when people are thinking positively or negatively about friends or strangers or social categories, and in general about interpersonal processes.
What is the ‘God spot’?
Idea that the human brain has developed to believe in a God in order to improve our survival somehow.
What is a criticism of social cognition?
Some aspects of social cognition focus too much on cognitive activity and brain functioning of an isolated individual and too little on social interaction among individuals and processes within and between groups.
What are Smith and Lazarus’ Seven Appraisals?
Primary
- How relevant is this to my needs and goals?
- Is this good or bad for my needs or goals?
Secondary
- How responsible am I for what is happening?
- How responsible is someone or something else?
- Can I act on this situation to make or keep it more like what I want?
- Can I handle and adjust to this situation however it might turn out?
- Do I expect this situatino to improve or to get worse?
What are Asch’s central traits?
Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation. E.g. Warm / cold descriptors will have more of an effect on our impression of someone than polite / blunt.
What are peripheral traits?
Traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation.
How did Asch test his theory trait theory?
He presented students with a 7-trait description of a hypothetical person in which either the word warm or cold, or polite or blunt appeared. The percentage of students assigning other traits to the target was markedly affected when warm was replaced by cold, but not when polite was replaced by blunt.
How do personal constructs challenge the idea of central traits?
Personal constructs are the idea that people have their own idiosyncratic and enduring beliefs about which attributes are most important in making judgements of people.
E.g. One person may value humour, while another values intelligence.
What model of person perception is characterised by enduring general principles about what sorts of characteristics go together to form certain types of personality?
How do these models manifest within and across cultures?
Implicit personality theories
Widely shared within cultures but differ between cultures
Are you more likely to make an impression based on the first things you learn about someone, or based on new information?
How was this studied?
First impressions disproportionately affect your overall impression
Asch found that people had a better impression of a hypothetical person when positive traits were listed first and negative last than vice versa.
How do appearances influence our impressions of people?
Tall men earn more money
Good looking men are perceived as more capable
But the effect is reversed for women! People suspected that women had been promoted for their looks, not their ability.
What are some other issues with appearance-based first impressions?
Racial, ethnic, and gender cues are highly visible, causing people to generate impressions from these cues that may be based on stereotypes.
Are we more likely to give weight to positive or negative attributes when forming impressions?
Why?
Negative
Negative information may have survival value because it signals potential danger.
What is a schema?
Circumscribed and coherent set of interrelated cognitions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) that allows us to quickly make sense of something on the basis of limited information.
Certain cues activate a schema, and then the schema ‘fills in’ missing details to provide a rich set of perceptions, interpretations, and expectations.
Do schemas facilitate top-down (concept- or theory-driven processing) or bottom-up (stimuli- or environment-influenced) processing?
Top-down, concept-driven, theory-driven processing
What is a person schema?
Idiosyncratic schemas we have about specific people
You have a schema for airline pilots (they fly the plane and should not drink on the job). What kind of schema is this?
Role schema
You have a schema for going to a restaurant (you are greeted when you enter, order form the menu, receive your food, etc). What kind of schema is this?
Script schema - schemas about events
What is a self-schema?
Schemas about your self
Often more complex and varied than schemas about other people.
What kinds of schemas do not describe people or categories, but are ‘rules’ about how to process information?
What is an example?
Content-free schemas
E.g. Specifying how to attribute causes to people’s behaviour.
If you like John and John likes Tom, you should also like Tom to maintain balance.
What is meant by ‘family resemblance’?
Defining property of a category of membership.
Considered to be ‘fuzzy sets’ of features organised around a prototype.
What is a prototype?
Cognitive representation of the typical / ideal defining features of a category.
However they may also represent the most extreme version of something.
E.g. Environmentalists vs developers - we may perceive the prototype of an environmentalist as an extreme version rather than a moderate.
What are exemplars?
Specific concrete instances of category that you have encountered
E.g. Americans may represent the category of ‘Australians’ using Steve Irwin as an exemplar.
What determines whether we represent a category as a prototype or an exemplar?
As people become more familiar with a category, they shift from using prototypes to exemplars.
What’s the difference between schemas and prototypes?
In some circles they are interchangeable, but generally prototypes are fuzzier and schemas are more organised.
What is a schema of a social group called?
A stereotype
What is an out-group?
A social group with which an individual does not identify
What associations are often made for out-groups?
Ethnocentric stereotypes often associated with prejudice, discrimination, and conflict between groups.
How do stereotypes persist or change?
The persist if we can readily access them in memory, the more we use them.
The change slowly, usually in response to broader social, political, or economic changes.
When are stereotypes acquired?
Some stereotypes are acquired in childhood before the child has any knowledge of the target group, while others crystallise as the child ages.
What is Tajfel’s accentuation principle? There are three parts.
We accentuate:
- Similarities among instances within the same category
- Differences between instances from different categories
- Differences between different categories as a whole.
What are basic-level categories?
Middle range categories that have cognitive priority because they are the most useful
E.g. ‘Chair’ rather than ‘furniture’ or ‘rocking chair’
Career woman instead of woman
What is optimal distinctiveness theory?
People strive to achieve a balance between conflicting motives for inclusiveness and separateness expressed in groups as a balance between intragroup differentiation and intragroup homogenisation.
What sorts of schemas are especially liked to be used or invoked?
Schemas that are accurate enough for day-to-day interaction, that we use automatically (???)
What happens when people need to use more accurate schemas?
What happens if the costs of indecision are high?
We are more attentive to data and use more accurate schemas.
People make quick decisions and form quick impressions; any decision or impression, however inaccurate, may be preferable to no decision or impression. This becomes important when people perform a task under time pressure, or when they are anxious or distracted.
Explain the role of experience when it comes to schema acquisition.
Experience allows a schema to become more characteristic and less descriptive. E.g. Evolving from “Roberta dyes her hair pink” to “Roberta is extroverted”
Experience also allows a schema to become more complex and informative. E.g. An experience uni student is more likely than a first year to have a detailed schema of someone who would make a good roommate.
Schema also become able to incorporate exceptions rather than disregarding them because they might threaten the validity of the schema.
Briefly describe the process of schema change as suggested by Rothbart (1981).
Schemas do not easily change because they suggest a sense of order, structure, and coherence to a social world that would otherwise be highly complex and unpredictable. Schemas may persist even when faced with contradictory evidence (Ross, Lepper and Hubbard, 1975).
However they can change in the following ways:
- Bookkeeping - slow change in the face of accumulating evidence
- Conversion - sudden change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated
- Subtyping - they can form a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence.
Subtyping is probably the most common.
What is social encoding?
The process of representing externals social stimuli in our minds. There are four key stages.
- Pre-attentive analysis - automatic, non-conscious scanning of the enviironment
- Focal attention - once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified and categorised
- Comprehension - stimuli are given meaning
- Elaborative reasoning - stimulus is linked to other knowledge to allow complex references.
What is the property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention?
Salience
What makes a stimulus salient?
Stands out against its context
Does not fit expectations of behaviour or appearance
Important to you
Salient people attract more attention and are considered more influential in a group, more personally responsible for their behaviour (choosing to dress differently from others), and less influenced by the situation. We usually attend closely to them and form coherent impressions of them.
Encoding can also be affected by the accessibility of categories or schemas. What is meant by accessibility?
Accessible categories are ones we often use and are consistent with our goals, needs, and expectations. They are very easily activated or primed by things we see or hear.
E.g. People who are concerned about racial discrimination may see racism everywhere: it is readily primed and used to interpret the social world.
‘Priming’ is a term that refers to the activation of a cognitive representation to incrase its accessibility to make it more likely to be used. What happens once a category is primed?
Once primed, a category interprets stimuli, particularly ambiguous stimuli, in a category-consistent manner.
What is an associative network model of memory?
Nodes or ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread.
What is valence?
The affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness / “goodness” or averseness / “badness” of something.
Why are we less accurate at remembering outgroup faces?
How can this be fixed?
We pay less attention to them.
Just pay more attention!
What conditions make an eyewitness testimony more accurate?
The witness:
Mentally reviews the scene of the crime to reinstate additional cues
Has associated the face with other symbolic info
Was exposed to the person’s face for a long time
Gave testimony shortly after the crime
The person:
Was not disguised
Was younger than 30
Looked dishonest
How are trait memories stored?
Based on causal inferences drawn from behaviour and situations, and coded in terms of desirability (E.g. Warm, pleasant, friendly) and competence (E.g. intelligent, industrious, efficient)
E.g. We would remember running differently if it was for exercise rather than fear.
In what two ways do we organise information about people?
Person
A cluster of information about their traits, behaviour and appearance
Produces accurate person memories that are easily recalled
Most common with people we are close to
Group
More likely in first encounters; person is assessed in terms of stereotypical attributes of a salient social category
What term describes the way we process social information to form impressions of people and make judgements about them?
Social inference
What is the illusory correlation?
False belief in a correlation where none exists, or exaggeration of the degree of co-occurrence of two things after seeing the together.
Illusory correlation may cause people to imagine things together because they ‘ought’ to (e.g. bacon and eggs) or paired distinctiveness (they share unusual features)
What is the representativeness heuristic?
We assess how similar we think an instance is to a typical member in a category. If we feel the level of similarity is sufficient, we infer that the person has all the category attributes.
E.g. If Jane has a shaved head and wears black clothes, you might wonder whether she is a goth.
What is the availability heuristic?
Events or associations that readily come to mind are considered to be more common and prevalent than they really are.
E.g. Shark attacks
What are anchoring and adjustment?
Impressions are tied to earlier perceptions that are a starting point, similar to the primacy effect.
E.g. Dislike for someone can act as an anchor for which only small adjustments are made, even in the face of contradictory evidence.
What did Heider mean when he described people are “naive psychologists”?
People will constantly construct their own informal theories to explain and predict how people will behave.
What attribution did Heider make for personal factor such as personality or ability?
I.e. The process of assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to internal or dispositional factors.
Internal / dispositional attribution
What attribution did Heider make for environmental factors such as situations or social pressure?
I.e. Assigning the cause of behaviour to external or environmental factors.
External / situational attribution
What is Kelley’s theory of causal attribution?
People act more like scientists than naive psychologists; they identify what factor covaries with a behaviour and then assign that factor a causal role.
E.g.
In the theory of causal attribution, what did Kelley mean by consistency, distinctiveness and consensus?
Consistency
How frequently the behaviour occurs in a given situation
Distinctiveness
Is the behaviour unique to the situation, or is it common across various situations
Consensus
Does everyone exhibit this behaviour in this context, or is it unique to the person being assessed
High distinctiveness and consensus leads to external attribution (behaviour is due to environment)
Low dinstinctiveness and consensus leads to internal attribution (behaviour is due to personality)
Describe Weiner’s attribution of task achievement to locus, stability, and controllability.
Locus
Is the performance caused by the actor (internal) or the situation (external)?
Stability
Is the internal cause a stable or unstable one? I.e. Is it predictable?
Controllability
To what extent is future task performance under the actor’s control?
How does context affect how we label an emotion, as demonstrated in Schachter’s experiment?
We are susceptible to the context when experiencing emotions. E.g. Arousal may be attributed to fear or excitement, depending on what is happening around us.
What is attributional conflict?
Where partners in a relationship disagree over attributions.
E.g. “I nag because you don’t respond” vs “I don’t respond because you nag”
How do people in good relationships credit positive and negative behaviour?
Positive behaviour
By citing internal, stable, global and controllable factors to explain them
Negative behaviour
By citing external, unstable, specific, and uncontrollable causes
Distressed couples behave in exactly the opposite way.
Are men and women different in attributional thought in relationships?
Women engage in attributional thought continuously.
Men engage in attributional thought only when the relationship becomes dysfunctional.
Contrary to popular opinion, men’s attributional behaviour is a better barometer of relationship dysfunction.
What phrase did Jones use to explain that people infer that a person’s behaviour corresponds to an underlygin disposition or personality trait?
E.g. If we see Alex making a donation, we may infer that he is altruistic.
Correspondent inference.
What cues suggest a correspondent inference will be made?
- If it is freely chosen rather than coerced or induced
2. If it is socially undesirable, it tells us more about a person than a behaviour that conforms to social norms
What is correspondence bias / fundamental attribution error?
Tendency for people to attribute behaviour internally to stable underlying personality dispositions, even in the face of strong evidence for external causes.
Why is correspondence bias less common in East Asian cultures?
People are more inclined to adjust their behaviour to the social context of other people and situational norms. Correspondence bias arises primarily because people tend automatically to focus on the person against the background of the situation. Correspondence is therefore weakened when people attribute more power to social context.
What is essentialism?
Why is it problematic?
Extreme form of correspondence bias in which behaviour is considered to reflect underlying and immutable, often innate, properties of people or the groups they belong to.
Causes people to attribute negative stereotypes of outgroups to essential and immutable personality attributes of members of that group.
What is the actor-observer effect?
We are more likely to experience correspondence bias when we make an attribution of others’ behaviour than our own.
Why does the actor-observer effect occur? List two possible reasons.
Focus of attention
We judge others against the background of the situation. We focus outwards on the situation rather than inwards on our self; the situation is causally more salient.
Asymmetry of information
We know more about ourselves and therefore know that our behaviour is influenced by situational factors.
What is the false consensus effect?
Seeing our own behaviour as being more typical than it really is, assuming that others behave in the same way we do.
Why does the false consensus effect arise?
- We usually seek out others that are similar to us, although they may not be representative of the broader population
- Our own opinions are so salient to us that they eclipse the possibility of alternative opinions
- We are motivated to ground our opinions and actions in perceived consensus in order to validate them and build a stable world for ourselves.
What are three attributional biases?
- Correspondence bias
- Actor-observer effect
- False consensus effect
What are self-serving biases?
We take credit for our positive behaviours as representing who we are and our intentions, but explain away our negative behaviours as being due to coercion, normative constraints, or other external situational factors.
What is self-handicapping?
People will intentionally and publicly make external attributions for a poor showing even before it happens.
What is the ultimate attribution error?
Tendency to internally attribute bad outgroup and good ingroup behaviour, and to externally attribute good outgroup and bad ingroup behaviour.
What are intergroup attributions?
Process of assigning the cause of one’s own or others’ behaviour to group membership.
Usually biased in favour of ingroups and against outgroups.
What are social representations?
Commonsense explanations of the world which are shared among members of a group.
E.g. The European Union is a relatively new and technical idea which has become an accepted part of European discourse which often emphasises more emotive issues of national and European identity.
What is the id?
Freud’s concept of the primitive and instinctual part of that mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories.
What is the ego?
According to Freud, develops from the id and ensure that the impules of the id can be expressed in a manner that is acceptable in the real world.
What is the superego?
Freud’s concept of the ethical component of the personality that provides the moral standards by which the ego operates.
What is McDougall’s concept of the ‘group mind’?
Out of the interaction of individuals there arose a ‘group mind’ which had a reality and existence that was qualitatively distinct from the isolated individuals making up the group.
What is meant by the collective self?
Aspects of the self that are based on membership in social groups in categories.
Refers to the perception of self as an interchangeable exemplar of some social category rather than a perception of self as a unique person.
What is social identity theory?
A person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s).
Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison, and then construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.
What is Mead’s symbolic interactionism theory?
The self arises out of human interaction that involves people trading symbols (through language and gesture) that are usually consensual, and represent abstract properties rather than concrete objects.
What is the looking glass self?
The self derived from seeing ourselves as others see us.
Is the looking glass self accurate?
People tend not to see themselves as others see them, but rather as they THINK others see them.
What is the self-enhancing triad?
People overestimate their good points, overestimate their control over events, and are unrealistically optimistic.
What is objective self-awareness?
Being aware of yourself as an object, similar to how you might be aware of a tree or another person.
When you are objectively self aware you make comparisons between how you actually are and how you would like to be. This often results in a sense of your shortcomings and may be accompanied by negative emotions. Attempting to rectify shortcomings is difficult and may lead to more negative feelings.
How does objective self-awareness generated?
By anything that focuses your attention on yourself as an object.
E.g. Being in front of an audience
What are the two types of self that we can be aware of?
Private self - private thoughts, feelings and attitudes
Public self - how other people see you, your public image
What are some extreme ways people try to reduce the discomfort of self-awareness?
Drinking alcohol
Suicide
What word is used to describe the process whereby people are blocked from awareness of themselves as distinct individuals, fail to monitor their actions, and can behave impulsively?
In what kinds of situations can this become apparent?
Deindividuation
In crowds and other forms of social unrest
In what ways are people self-schematic?
Dimensions that are important to them.
Dimensions on which they think they are extreme.
Dimensions on which they are certain that the opposite does not hold.
E.g. If you think you are sophisticated, and sophistication is important to you, then you are self-schematic on that dimensions; it is part of your self-concept.
If sophistication is unimportant to you, then being sophisticated is not one of your self-schemas.
How do rigidly compartmentalised schemas affect our moods?
May cause extreme mood swings according to whether a positive or negative schema is primed. More integrated schemas are preferable.
E.g. James believes he is a wonderful cook but a terrible musician; he may experience mood swings if those skills are called for.
Sally believes she is a reasonable cook, and an average musician; context effects on mood will be less extreme.
How does self-perception theory explain how we learn about ourselves?
When our thoughts and feelings are unclear or uncertain, we analyse our own behaviour to infer them, similar to how we assess others.
E.g. I know I enjoy eating curry because I will eat it of my own free will in preference to other foods. Not everyone likes curry, so I am able to make an internal attribution for my behaviour.
How does self-attribution affect motivation?
If someone is induced to perform a task by either enormous rewards or heavy penalties, task performance is attributed externally and thus motivation to perform is reduced.
In the absence of external factors to which performance can be attributed, we will instead look to enjoyment or commitment as causes, so motivation increases.
What is the overjustification effect?
In the absence of obvious external determinants of our behaviour, we assume that we freely choose the behaviour because we enjoy it.
Is it possible for rewards to play a useful role in learning / tasks / work?
Yes, by reducing reliance on rewards that are task contingent and promoting use of rewards that are performance-contingent.
E.g. A performance-contingent strategy for working out may be to set targets using measures such as distance covered on a exercise bike, checking your heaert rate, and how many calories you expended.
What is Festinger’s social comparison theory?
Comparing our behaviours and opinions with those of others in order to establish the correct or socially approved way of thinking and behaving.
According to Wills, what kinds of people do we compare our performance to?
A. Those that perform much better than us
B. Those that perform slightly better than us
C. Those that perform slightly worse than us
D. Those that perform much worse than us
C. Those that perform slightly worse than us
This delivers an evaluatively positive self-concept.
However our choices are often limited
E.g. Younger siblings often have no option but to compare themselves to more competent older siblings.
Upward comparison can have a harmful effect on self-esteem.
What is Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance model?
People who are constrained to make esteem damaging upward comparisons can underplay or deny similarity to the target, or they can withdraw from their relationship with the target.
How do bronze and silver medallists demonstrate downward or upward comparisons?
Bronze medallists appear to compare themselves to non-medallists, resulting in greater happiness than silver medallists, who compare themselves to gold medallists.
Medvec (1992)
What is Turner’s theory of how the process of categorising oneself as a group member produces social identity and group / intergroup behaviours?
Self-categorisation theory
What is BIRGing?
Basking in reflected glory
Name-dropping to link yourself with desirable people or groups and thus improve other people’s impression of you
What is Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory?
What are its three types of self-schemas?
Theory about the consequences of making actual-ideal and actual-ought self comparisons that reveal self-discrepancies.
Actual self - how we currently are
Ideal self - how we would like to be
Ought self - how we think we should be
How does failure to resolve the actual-ideal discrepancy compare to failure to resolve the actual-ought discrepancy?
Actual-ideal - dejected
Actual-ought - agitated
What is regulatory focus theory?
People use self-regulation to bring themselves into line with their standards and goals, using either a promotion system or a prevention system.
How do the promotion and prevention systems in regulatory focus theory work?
Promotion
We adopt an “approach strategy” to attain goals.
E.g. Try to improve grades, find new challenges, treat problems as interesting obstacles to overcome
Prevention
Adopt an “avoidance strategy” to fulfil duties and obligations.
Focus on avoiding new situations or people, concentrate on avoiding failure rather than achieving the highest possible grade.
Will a child who is disciplined by withdrawal of displays of love develop a promotion-focus or a prevention-focus
Promotion
Children for whom affection is a reward will develop promotion focus.
A prevention focus can arise when children are encouraged to be alert to potential dangers or when punichsed and shouted at for behaving badly.
What are the two broad classes of identity that define different types of self as described by Tajfel and Turner?
Social identity
Defines self in terms of group memberships
Personal identity
Defines self in terms of idiosyncratic personal relationships and traits.
How did Brewer and Gardner describe three different types of self?
Individual self
Personal traits that differentiate the self from others
Relational self
Connections and role relationships with significant others
Collective self
Group membership that differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’
Is there a difference between how women and men place importance on relationships with others in their groups?
Women place greater importance on relationships with others than men.
What are three classes of motive that may interact to influence self-construction and the search for self-knowledge?
Self-assessment to validate ourselves
Seek new information to find out what sort of person we really are
Self-verification to be consistent
Verifies what we already know about ourselves
Self-enhancement to look good
Motivation to develop and promot a favourable self-image
What kinds of people have highly fragmented selves and find it difficult to function effectively?
People with schizophrenia, amnesia, Alzheimer’s.
What is self-affirmation theory?
People reduce the impact of threat to their self-concept by focusing on and affirming their competence in some other area.
Which motive is more likely to prevail in the pursuit of self-knowledge; self-assessment, self-verification, or self-enhancement?
Self-enhancement by far the strongest.
Distant second is self-verification.
Very distant third is self- assessment.
The desire to think well of ourselves reigns supreme, dominating the pursuit of accurate self-knowledge and pursuit of information that confirms self-knowledge.
What are three major sources of threat to our self-concept that can affect our sense of self-worth?
Failures
Inconsistencies
Unusual and unexpected positive or negative events that make us question the sort of person we are
Stressors
Sudden or enduring events that can exceed our capacity to cope, including bereavement, illness, over-commitment to work
How do threats to our self-concept affect us?
Negative emotions - can lead to self-harm or suicide
Physical illness - affect our immune responses, nervous system activity, and blood pressure
How do people cope with self-conceptual threats?
Escape
Remove themselves physicall from the threat situation
Denial
May take alcohol or other drugs, or engage in risky behaviour
This is an unconstructive and potentially harmful coping behaviour
Downplay the threat
Re-evaluate the aspect of self that has been threatened or by reaffirming other positive aspects of the self
A more positive coping behaviour
Self-expression
Very effective response to threat.
Writing or talking about one’s emotional and physical reactions can help.
Reduces physiological symptoms of a threat such as emotional heat, headaches, muscle tension, blood pressure
Attack the threat
Discredit its basis
Denying personal responsibility
Setting up excuses for failure before the event (self-handicapping)
Addressing the problem directly by seeking help or addressing valid causes of threat
What evidence is there that low self-esteem causes societal ills such as violence, crime, delinquency, drug abuse, etc?
Very little. In fact some studies have shown that violence is more strongly associated with high self-esteem, particularly when those with high self-esteem have their self-images threatened.
Is a person who is flexible and malleable, motivated towards protecting the self, and want success and approval but are sceptical of it more likely to have high or low self-esteem?
Low
What is the theory that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death?
Terror management theory.
How is self-esteem linked to terror management theory?
Self-esteem may be a defence against the threat of death. Through high self-esteem people can escape from the anxiety that would otherwise arise from continual contemplation of the inevitability of one’s death. “High self-esteem makes people feel…immortal, positive, and excited about life.”
How is self-esteem related to social psychology?
Self-esteem is a good index / sociometer of being accepted by others and belonging, rather than rejected and excluded.
What is impression management?
Use of various strategies to get other people to view them in a positive light.
What is self-monitoring?
Carefully controlling how we present ourselves. There are situational differences and individual differences in self-monitoring.
How do high self-monitors and low self-monitors differ?
High
Adopt strategic self-presentation strategies because they typically shape their behaviour to project the impression they feel their audience or the situation demands
Low
Adopt expressive self-presentation strategies because their behaviour is less responsive to changing contextual demands.
What five strategic motives did Jones and Pittman identify in the way we attempt to present ourselves?
Self-promotion
Persuading others that you are competent
Ingratiation
Getting others to like you
Intimidation
Getting others to think you are dangerous
Exemplification
Getting others to regard you as a morally respectable individual
Supplication
Getting others to take pity on you as helpless and needy
How does ingratiation affect observers and targets?
Observer - little effect
Target - large effect; flattery is hard to resist
What are four principle strategies in getting people to like you?
- Agree with people’s opinions on important issues. Balance forceful agreement with weak disagreement.
- Be selectively modest, but (a) make fun of your standing on unimportant issues and (b) put yourself down in areas that do not matter very much
- Avoid appearing desperate for others’ approval.
- BIRGing works. Make casual references to your connections with winners. Only make links with losers when they can’t be turned against you.
What is self-preservation?
What is required for self-preservation to persist?
A deliberate effort to act in ways that create a particular impression, usually favourable, of ourselves.
Social validation; it is of little use to me if I think I am a genius but no one else does.
How does delinquent behaviour in boys demonstrate self-preservation?
It is almost always performed publicly, because its primary function is identity validation; validation of possession of a delinquent reputation.
How does social validation affect self-concept change?
It is not enough for you alone to perceive yourself in a certain way. Social validation is required for self-concept change to be effective.
