Midterm 1 Psy340

Correlational

• Helps understand relationships

• Easy to conduct (surveys)

• You can’t infer cause and effect

Experimental

• You’re able to see cause and effect

• It’s precise

• It is not real, and does not mimic real-life

• You can only test one subject at a time

Suppression and rebound

• show pictures

• suppress picture (you do not think about it)

• allowed to thunk freely

• show facilitation (rebound) for picture-related information

Implicit associations

• Our thoughts and beliefs

  • focuses on our hidden bias

  • biases of which we may be unaware of or unwilling to share

Implicit association test

• IAT score calculation 

  • “Consistent” pairing (SDSU/ Good and UCSD/ Bad) minus “inconsistent pairing (SDSU/ Bad and UCSD/ Good) 

  • Negative score = bias against UCSD 

  • Score of 0 = no bias 

  • Positive score = bias against SDSU 

Clark and Clark

• Took a group of dolls to elementary schools

  • Used to collect responses from 253 black students

  • 134 from the south

  • 119 from the north

• Shown 2 black and 2 white dolls

• Asked 8 questions about the doll

  • preference (1-4)

  • Knowledge of racial differences (5-7)

Clark and Clark findings

• kids knew how to distinct the dolls

• “colored” had a higher identification %

• 33% of kids gave the researcher a white doll despite being black

  • distancing themselves from their black identity because of preferential treatment (south and north)

• helped overturn segregation

Darley and Latane

• 72 undergraduate students (59 female, 13 male) 

• Randomly assigned to a condition 

  • 2,3, or 6 participants (one victim) 

  • Discussion on personal problems in college 

• A fictitious participant has a seizure 

  • Could not speak to other participants or victim

Darley and Latane findings

• 2 (participant, victim) 85%, 52 seconds

• 3 (participant, victim, 1 other) 62%, 93 seconds

• 6 (participant, victim, 4 others) 31%, 166 seconds

• when there’s more “others” they responds slower

Self concept are made up of

• self-schemas

• self-guides

• what we know and believe about ourselves

Social desirability

• worrying about how someone will view you

• not an accurate representation of your schema

self presentation bias

• the self that one presents to other people

Self-complexity (interdependent view of self)

• less complex

• One piece of daily life affects another aspect of your life

Self-complexity (independent view of self)

• more complex

• traits do not influence each other

• “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”

More complex self-construals

• more independent, do what you want, not what your friends and family want

• we strive for personal achievement

Less complex self-construals

• more independent, more likely to do what your friends and family want (their beliefs matter)

• we strive for the group and group achievement

Spotlight effect

• the belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are

illusion transparency

• the illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others

3 types of self

• actual self (who we are)

• Ideal self (who we want to be)

• Ought self (who we should be)

Actual-ideal discrepancy

• promotion, focus, dejection/ sad emotions

Actual-ought discrepancy

prevention focus mindset, agitations/ disturbed emotion

social roles

• the hats we wear

social identity

• I am what I am

We gain self knowledge through

• social roles

• social identity

• Social comparisons

• success and failure

• other’s judgments

We gain self “Mis-knowledge” through

• explaining our behavior (misattribution)

• Predicting our behavior

• Predicting our feelings

Entitlement

• I deserve an award, I deserve a prize

State self-esteem (Heatherton and Polivy)

• Situation specific

  • Social 

    • “I am concerned about the impression I am making right now.” 

      • 1-5 scale 

  • Academic/ Intellectual 

    • How you feel about yourself intelligence-wise 

  • Appearance 

    • Do I look good? How we appear to others 

State self-esteem (Heatherton and Polivy) findings

• Appearance should not affect your academic aspect, just the appearance itself 

  • They are independent of each other 

Trait (global) self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) 

• difference between Low self-esteem and High self-esteem

  • High self-esteem (HSE) is more clear and stable

    • They will respond quicker, they are more confident in their judgment 

  • Low self-esteem (LSE)

    • when they feel threatened, they may feel bad for a while

Dangers of high self-esteem

• unsafe sex

• violence

• gang membership

Example of unrealistic optimism

“I know I am going to get an A, so I do not put int he work”

High self-monitors

• Managers, Politicians

Low self-monitors

• better at research, detailed work

mundane realism

• The degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations 

experimental realism

• the degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants 

• Will sometimes require deceiving people with a plausible cover story 

• ⅓ of social psychological studies in the past decade involve deception

Heuristics

• simple, efficient thinking strategies

Two sides of self-esteem

• state versus trait self-esteem measures

• state self-esteem (Heatherton & Polivy)

  • more situation specific

Trait (global) self-esteem scale (Rosenberg)

• individual difference measure

• assesses your general feelings of self worth

Better than average effect

• we use social comparisons to see where we fall in relation to other people

Base rates (Kahneman and Tversky)

• (ignoring prior probabilities)

• we forget to consider the number of people in a population

Ignoring sample size

• make sure you have a stable enough observation that does not change the mean value

Misconception of chance

• coin toss

• we have to be careful of when things are independent and dependent

• Independent: does not matter what happened before

Regression to the mean

• an extreme event is not the true level, you need multiple observations to get a true sense (think of David’s softball story)

Representativeness heuristic

• Categorizations are based on the degree that resembles the category

  • the resemblance is often a good indicator of an exemplar-category relationship

  • EX: Einstein and Hawking can be but in the physicist, professor, smart person categories 

Why we commit the representativeness heuristic

• ignore base rates

• ignoring sample size

• regression to the mean

• conjunction fallacy

  • something specific is now less likely

availability

• accessibility

• ease of retrieval

• explaining the phenomena in terms of frequency, egocentric bias, salience

Bridge study (Dutton & Aron)

• male participants, one female researcher

• males on the scary bridge would call the female more

But features are not always diagnostic (Fischoff & BarHillel)

• make judgements about people’s occupations

• 100 samples, 70 were engineers the others were different occupations

• Is Frank an engineer or a lawyer?

  • He sounds like a lawyer but it is likely that he is an engineer

Availability heuristic

• estimates of chance are biased by the ease of generating examples

But features are not always diagnostic (Fischoff & BarHillel) findings

• people IGNORE base rate information

  • they have the base rate information at the very beginning of the session

Attribution theory

• we may unconsciously apply this theory when we see someone shouting on public transport

• we try to infer the cause of others’ behavior or our own behavior

  • we put ourselves in the best possible light

• It is more self-serving to admit attractiveness rather than fear

Fritz Heider

• did work on attribution theory

• interested in how people explain other people’s behavior

• We misattribute the source, by attributing it to the person himself, failing to consider the situation

Rational explanation (Harold Kelly)

• we use behavior information or consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus to make attributions

• Bob can never fix his car in Auto Shop A, but in Autoshop B he is able to

  • something about A is making him not fix it

  • If he can’t fix it in auto shops A and B maybe he is a louse mechanic

  • If everyone in Auto A can’t fix cars, then there is an issue with the shop

  • If Bob is the only one unable to fix it in Auto Shop A he is the issue

Inferring traits (Jones and Davis) Less rational

• we infer that behaviors correspond with peoples’ intentions and dispositions

• a person who says something sarcastic, IS a sarcastic person

• attribution is more likely to occur after unexpected behavior

• behavior does not correspond to the situation

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

• We often discount the situation and simply focus on the person’s behavior, and we judge the person’s behavior as being caused by his/her internal state (discounting principle)

We enact our behaviors and we are focused on the

• the situation, not our internal state

• For the self, we want to maintain high self worth

• For others, we want to feel better about ourselves

FAE in everyday life

• the job that you are playing is the situation, you have to act a certain way

• authority figures lead more, making others assume that they are smarter, leaders

Lapiere study

• traveled for 2 months, with a Chinese couple (Chinese were discriminated against during this time frame)

• In every single dining experience, they were able to eat peacefully 

• Lapiere wrote a letter to the restaurants/ hotels letting them know that he would be traveling with a Chinese couple (after he had already done it)

  • Many responded with No 

• What people say and what they do has no relation 

Problems with attitudes

• it is not directly measurable, only inferred (attitude= what you are willing to express to me)

• they are expressions that are susceptible to situational or outside influences

Attitudes are

• evaluative in nature

• they are beliefs or thoughts (cognitions)

• they are subjective

• they are personal

Components of an attitude

• affective and cognitive

• Example

  • affective score =3

  • cognitive score =-1

Attitudes and social influence

• it is minimal

• we don’t always wanna share sensitive information, that may change responses

When attitude is strong

• it is similar to self-schema attributes

• self-interest

• value relevance

Theory of attitude accessibility (Fazio, 1986)

• to guide behavior toward an object attitudes must be affective (strong evaluative) and accessible (often automized)

Role-related behavior shapes your

• thoughts

  • think of Stanford experiment

Foot in the door phenomenon

• if you engage in some type of behavior, you’re likely to engage in it further down the line

Low ball techniques

• often used with sales

• I wan’t to get you excited about something, you start to think about that thing and start to form an attitude

Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger)

• We feel tension (dissonance) when 2 thoughts or beliefs (cognitions) are psychologically inconsistent

Attitude behavior match

• attitude change because we are motivated to maintain self-consistency

Insufficient justification

• when external reward is not enough

Attitude follows behavior

• chosen versus compliance

• can apply to more than one thing

• accountability

• inconsistency salient

Self-perception theory

• how we see others can apply to how we see ourselves

• When we have weak or unformed attitudes we often look to our own behaviors to discern our attitudes

Expressions and attitudes

• Attitudes follow expression

• mood follows expression

• empathy and mimicry

• we start to become like those we like

Overjustification

• unnecessary and award or praise

• turning play into work

Intrinsic

• doing something because you love doing it, it is fun for you

Ohio State University: Richard Petty

• there was more support from kids who shacked their heads up and down

Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich

• found that people overestimate the extent to ehich the internal states “leak out”

Self-concept

• what we know and believe about ourselves

self-schema

• beliefs about self that organize and guide processing of self-relevant information

individualism

• the concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identification

planning fallacy

• the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task

impact bias

• overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events

• we are prone to impact bias after negative events

self handicapping

• protecting one’s self image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure

false uniqueness effect

• the tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s. abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors

System 1

• the intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking (automatic processing)

System 2

• the deliberate, controlled, conscious and slower way of thinking (controlled processing)

priming

• activates particular associations in memory

embodied cognition

• the mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments

Counterfactual thinking

• imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happed, but did not happen

illusory correlation

perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists

regression toward the average

• the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward their average

belief perseverance

• persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives

misinformationn effect

incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it

attribution theory

• the theory of how people explain others’ behavior and what we infer from it

dispositional attribution

• attributing behavior to the persons’s disposition and traits

situational attribution

• attributing behavior to ones environemnt

spontaneous trait inference

• an effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior

role

• a set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave

self-presentation theory

for strategic reasons, we express attitudes that make us appear consistent

cognitive dissonance theory

• assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves