Social Psychology Final

How is social psychology defined by the book?

The scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations.

What do social psychologists do?

Study situations in which people influence one another as well as the way people respond to the attempts to influence them.

The Milgram Experiment

The teacher had to shock the learner every time they got a question wrong, increasing the voltage each time. The experiment was set up so that the learner was the same person each time, and the teacher was not really shocking the learner, though they thought they were. It was estimated that only 1% of people would keep shocking the learner when they were asked to stop by the learner. 62% of people went all the way up to 450 volts when they were ordered to do so by the experimenter.

Why was obedience so easy in the Milgram studies?

The fast pace reduces thinking about behavior(Milgram encouraged participants to go quickly through the questions and punishments); shocks increase in small increments(self-perception theory-using behavior to tell about attitude. 15 volts being a tiny bit more than the last shock); someone else to blame(teacher is only the instrument; the experimenter giving orders is the responsible party).

The Seminarian Study

Participants are all studying to become priests, and are going to the chapel where they are giving a lecture about helping people. As they are walking to the chapel they walk by a man slumped over and moaning. Half were in a hurry and the other half were not. When people had time, the majority stopped to help the man. When people were in a hurry, only 10% stopped to help the man. 

The Fundamental Attribution Error

The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior.

Construal

How we interpret situations and behavior and how we make inferences, often non-conscious, about the context and the people we are encountering.

Automatic v.s. Controlled Processing

automatic processes give rise to implicit attitudes and beliefs that can’t be readily controlled conscious mind. Controlled processes result in explicit attitudes and beliefs that we are aware of.

What are some ways that humans are similar across cultures?

group living, prewired ability to acquire language, theory of mind.

group living

In the past, groups were required to care for highly vulnerable offspring, providing protection from predators, and enabling greater success in hunting and foraging. The ability to produce and understand language facilitates living in groups because it allows people to convey not only emotions and intentions but also beliefs, attitudes, and complex thoughts to others.

language acquisition

Children typically learn language at developmental stages that are almost identical across different cultures. At birth, all infants can produce the full range of possible sounds (phonemes) that exist in the totality of languages spoken anywhere on Earth, and they babble all these sounds in the crib.

theory of mind

the ability to recognize that other people have beliefs and desires and that understanding others’ beliefs and desires allows us to understand and predict their behavior.

naturalistic fallacy

The claim that the way things are is the way they should be. Has no logical foundation because we are predisposed to do many things that we can overcome. For example, all humans are predisposed by violence, however the incidence of it has declined over the past few centuries.

Social Neuroscience

Social scientists use an fMRI to detect by blood flow which areas of the brain are activated during social behaviors. Older regions of the brain that we share with other mammals appear to be involved in non-conscious reactions to our social environment.

Independent Cultures

A culture in which people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people and having attributes that exist in the absence of any connections to others.

Interdependent Cultures

A culture in which people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and placing less importance on individual freedom or personal control over their lives.

familialism

a social value defined by interpersonal warmth, closeness, and support.

What does social psychology study?

Social psychology studies the environment as well as the mind. It studies functional and dysfunctional behavior. It studies what makes people similar to each other, not what makes them different.

What influences how we see reality?

Heart-striving for mastery, seeking belonging/self-value. Head-cognitive/conservatism/accessibility/superficiality v.s. depth.

Social World

Social cognition is the influence our thinking has on our perception of, and behavior in, the social world.

Social Psychology v.s. behaviorism

In the 1930s, when behaviorism was dominant, social psychologists fought against simple stimulus-response thinking. Behaviorism said that people will do the bare minimum to get the reward, while social psychologists said that people will keep trying to make the task harder to leave their mark on the world.

Gestalt Psychology

Emphasizes that human beings do not react to the world exactly as it is; rather, they respond to how they perceive and interpret their social environment.

Social Psychology During WWII

WWII used persuasion techniques to change domestic eating habits in order to preserve meat supplies, to boost troop morale and performance on the battle field, and to make troops resistant to enemy propaganda.

Social Psychology After WWII

Universities flourished and tried to understand what happened in WWII. They led studies such as Group norms and conformity(Asch), Communication and Persuasion(Hovland), Obedience to authority(Milgram).

Self-concept

What we believe to be true of ourselves (traits, feelings, qualities, how we relate to others).

gender differences in self-concept

Women tend to think of themselves in terms of their relationships with others. Men think of larger collectives less specific.

Self-esteem

How we feel about our own sense of self worth (do we like ourselves).

Self-schema

the cognitive representation and structure of our self concept. How we organize our self concept.

Looking glass self

Cooley 1912. People’s sense of who they are based on what other people tell them about themselves.

Why do social psychologists conduct research?

To obtain insight into the reasons, not just for other people’s behavior, but for our own as well.

Hindsight bias

People’s tendency after learning about a given outcome to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted that outcome.

Hypothesis

A prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances.

Theory

A set of related propositions intended to describe some phenomenon or aspect of the world.

Participant Observation

Involves observing some phenomenon at close range.

Observational Research

systematically watching and recording human behavior in natural or structured settings without manipulation.

Archival Research

Researchers may look at evidence found in archives of various kinds, including census reports, police records, sports statistics, newspaper articles, and databases containing ethnographic descriptions of people in different cultures.

Surveys

can be conducted using either interviews or written questionnaires.

Correlational Research

Research that involves measuring two or more variables and assessing whether there is a relationship between them.

Experimental Research

In social psychology, research that randomly assigns people to different conditions, or situations, enabling researchers to make strong inferences about why a relationship exists or how different situations affect behavior.

Third Variable

A variable, often unmeasured in correlational research, that can be the true explanation for the relationship between two other variables.

Self-selection

A situation in which the participant, rather than the researcher, determines the participant’s level of each variable (for example, how many hours per day they spend playing video games or whether or not they are married), creating the problem that unknown properties might be responsible for the observed relationship.

Experimental Research

The best way to be sure about causality is to conduct an experiment. Requires an independent variable, which the scientist manipulates, and a dependent variable.

Independent Variable

In correlational research, this variable is measured. In experimental research, this variable is manipulated; it is hypothesized to be the cause of a particular outcome.

Dependent Variable

In experimental research, the variable that is measured; it is hypothesized to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable.

Control Condition

A condition comparable to the experimental condition in every way except that it lacks the one ingredient hypothesized to produce the expected effect on the dependent variable.

Random Assignment

Assigning participants in experimental research to different conditions randomly, so they are as likely to be assigned to one condition as to another, with the effect of making the types of people in the different conditions roughly equal.

Natural Experiment

A naturally occurring event or phenomenon with somewhat different conditions (e.g., before versus after) that can be compared with almost as much rigor as conditions manipulated by the investigator in an experiment.

External Validity

How well the results of a study generalize to contexts outside the conditions of the laboratory.

Internal Validity

In experimental research, confidence that only manipulated variable could have produced the results.

Field Study

An experiment conducted in the real world, usually with participants who are not aware that they are in a study of any kind.

Reliability

The degree to which a measure gives consistent results on repeated occasions.

Measurement Validity

The correlation between some measure and an outcome the measure is supposed to predict.

Statistical Significance

A measure of the probability that a given result could have occurred by chance.

Replication

Reproduction of research results by the original investigator or by someone else.

Open Science

Practices such as sharing data and research materials with anyone in the broader scientific community, in an effort to increase the integrity and replicability of scientific research.

Institutional Review Board

A committee that examines research proposals and makes judgments about the ethical appropriateness of the research.

Informed Consent

A person’s signed agreement to participate in a procedure or research study after learning all of its relevant aspects.

Deception Research

Research in which the participants are misled about the purpose of the research or the meaning of something that is done to them.

Debriefing

Asking participants at the beginning of the research if they understood the instructions, found the setup reasonable, and so on. After an experiment, it is used to educate participants about the questions being studied.

Authority and credibility

Increases the ability to persuade.

Rationality

the systemic integration of logical reasoning and empirical evidence to understand the natural world.

The Social Self

What we know about ourselves from our social relationships.

Self Schema

A cognitive structure, derived from past experience, that represents a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self, in both general and specific situations.

Internal thoughts and feelings

Not as visible to others and uniquely known to the self.

Reflected Self-Appraisals

A belief about what others think of oneself.

Working Self-concept

A subset of self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context.

Social Comparison Theory

The idea that people compare themselves to other people to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states.

Social Identities

The parts of a person’s sense of self that are derived from group memberships.

Self-stereotyping

The phenomenon whereby people come to define themselves in terms of traits, norms, and values that they associate with a social group when their identity as a member of that group is salient.

Self-esteem

The overall positive or negative evaluation people have of themselves.

Contingencies of self-worth

The idea that people’s self worth depends on their successes and failures in domains they deem important to their self worth.

Sociometer Hypothesis

The idea that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favorably by others. social standing.

Self-enhancement

The desire to maintain, increase, or protect one’s positive self-views.

Better than average effect

The finding that most people think they are above average on various personality trait and ability dimensions.

Self-affirmation Theory

The idea that people can maintain an overall sense of self-worth after being exposed to psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat.

Self-verification Theory

The theory that people strive for others to view them as they view themselves. Helps maintain a sense of coherence and predictability.

Self Regulation

Processes by which people initiate and control their behavior in the pursuit of goals, including the ability to resist short-term rewards that thwart the attainment of long-term goals.

Self Discrepancy Theory

A theory that behavior is motivated by standards reflecting ideal and ought selves.

Actual Self

The self that people believe they are.

Ideal Self

The self that embodies people’s wishes and aspirations.

ought self

The self that is concerned with duties, obligations, and external demand people feel they are compelled to honor.

Promotion Focus

Self-regulation of behavior with respect to ideal-self standards; a focus on attaining positive outcomes through approach-related behaviors.

Prevention Focus

Self-regulation of behavior with respect to ought-self standards; a focus on avoiding negative outcomes through avoidance-related behaviors.

Implementation Intentions

An “if-then” plan to engage in a goal-directed behavior (“then”) whenever a particular cue (“if”) is encountered.

Self Presentation

Presenting the person we would like others to believe we are.

face

the public image of ourselves we want others to believe.

Self-monitoring

The tendency to monitor one’s behavior to fit the current situation.

Self-handicapping

The tendency to engage in self defeating behavior in order to have an excuse ready, should one perform poorly or fail.

Self-awareness Theory

when we are highly self aware, we compare our behavior to our standards and our values. If we see ourselves in a mirror and it doesn’t reach our standards, it motivated us.

Self-perception Theory

when our beliefs are weak or ambivalent we infer them from our behaviors. ex. People think that because their belief is they like larosas therefore they order a pizza. Self perception theory is that because they want a pizza they must like larosas.

Religion Questionnaire Study

Half participants are asked if they occasionally do religious related things. The other half are asked if they frequently did these things. The people in the occasionally group rated themselves as more religious. This only works if their beliefs are weak or ambivalent.

Worm Study

Participants are given a very nice dinner setup and then it is revealed to be a worm. They are given a questionnaire and have ten minutes to fill it out and that gives them time to think about eating the worm. Then they are told they can go participate in a different experiment but they have to stay longer. Then 80% of people stick with the worm and come up with excuses as to why they would do it.

Magic Marker Study

Elementary school children participated in an experiment where they were brought into the lab where they played with magic markers. After they played with them for a little bit, they were randomly assigned into groups of playing as normal, and a group with extrinsic awards(stickers, ribbons). Later, the experimenters stopped giving those children the extrinsic rewards and tested how many after this would still play with the magic markers. Students were more than twice as likely to play with the magic markers later, if they didn’t receive extrinsic rewards.

Two factor theory of emotion

Says that emotion is based on two factors: physiological arousal, and cognitive labeling. Seen in Rope Bridge Study.

Self-reference Effect

People exhibit enhanced memory retention for information that is related or linked to themselves. Often also applies with people who are very close to the person.

Overjustification Effect

Lose interest in an intrinsically-rewarding activity because it becomes associated with an extrinsic reward.

Name Letter Effect

If random, only 11% of people should choose one letter that’s in their initials. This experiment said that people like their initials more than other letters in the alphabet. 

Implicit Egoism

People do weird things that seem to suggest connections to their name. Ex. more people named Ken moved to kentucky later in life than there should be by chance.

Spouses and Housework Study

At stanford, they went around to people that were married and asked spouses what percentage of the time they do things routinely to help out(take the trash out, pay the bills, etc.) and the percentage came out to 120% because people usually inflate the amount that they help out. 

Hostile Media Effect Study

Study at stanford university in 1985 where there was a lot of conflict between Israel and Lebanon. Each side blamed the other. In the study they took news footage from the BBC that covered the bombing and showed the videos to two groups of students. One group was pro Israeli and the other pro palestinian. Both groups looked at the videos and said that they were taking the other side(discredited the messenger).