Exam 1 Social Psych

Sociologists

study on the group level

Social psychologists

Study on the individual level

Most influential figure in social psychology

Hitler

Hot perspective

Based in emotion and motivation

Cold perspective

Focuses on logic and cognition

Self concept

develops from the way one is viewed by others

Looking-glass self

Other people serve as mirrors in which we see ourselves

Affective forecasting

Difficulty projecting forward events and predicting how one would feel in response to emotional events

Overjustification effect

the tendency for intrinsic motivation to diminish activities that have become associated with reward or other extrinsic factors

Individualism

Focuses on independence, autonomy, and self-reliance

Collectivism

Focuses on interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony

Self esteem

a universal need that differs on how it is achieved by culture

Sociometer

The mechanism that helps us detect acceptance or rejection and translate into low or high self esteem

Terror management theory

Humans are biologically programmed for self preservation and are aware/afraid of their inevitable death

Self discrepency theory

self esteem is defined by the level of alignment between how we see ourselves and how we want others to see ourselves

Actual self

Self concept, describes the kind of person you ought to be

Ought self

traits that would enable you to meet your self of responsibility

Ideal self

Traits that describe the kind of person you would like to be

The three attribution factors

Degree of choice, expectedness of behavior, intended effects or consequences

Jones’s correspondent inference theory

People try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the person

Availability heuristic

The tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind

False consenssus affect

The belief that more people share our opinions than in actuality

Base-rate fallacy

Failure to recognize how frequently events occur in reality

Counterfactual thinking

A tendency to imagine alternative outcomes

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to overestimate the role that personal factors play and overlook the impact of situations

The two steps of social perception

1) identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution 2) adjust that inference to account for situational influences

Personal attribution

Infer characteristics about the person based on the occurrence

Situational attribution

Infer how a situation lead the person to the occurrence

Motivational biases

wishful seeing, need for self esteem, belief in a just world

When we are more likely to blame the victim in a tragedy

they are similar to you, in a larger tragedy, and are more concerned with harm to self

Confirmation bias

The tendency to seek info that confirms our beliefs and reluctance to change opinions when confronted with new evidence

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The process of one’s expectations about a person eventually leading the person to behave in ways that conform those expectations

Self-fulfilling prophecy steps

1) Perceiver’s expectations 2) perceiver’s behavior towards target 3) target’s behavior to perceiver reflects the expectations

Evaluative conditioning

A neutral stimulus paired with a positive stimulus

Theory of planned behavior

A process of deliberate decision making

Steps that form a behavior

Attitude toward behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavior create an intention that leads to the behavior.

Dual process model of persuasion

Central and peripheral routes

Central route

thinks carefully and is influenced by the strength of arguments

Peripheral route

does not think carefully and relies on superficial cues

When fear is a useful appeal to emotion

When there is a solution provided