PSY2110 Midterm 1 (round two)

spotlight effect

• People see themselves as centre stage

• Lawson (2010) found 40% of students predicted that other students would remember sweatshirt logo, however only 10% of students recalled the logo

illusion of transparency

• People overestimate the extent to which others can perceive or understand their internal thoughts, feelings, or emotions

• Savitsky and Gilovich (2003) found that knowing about the illusion can reduce the effects of being self-conscious and improve public speaking skills

• Spotlight effect and illusion of transparency show interplay between the self and the social world

self-schema

Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self- relevant information

the looking glass self

• how we imagine others see us

• imagining how we appear to others, imagining how others judge us, and developing a self-concept based on these judgements

different types of culture

• Collectivistic cultures:
  ⚬ Self-esteem is relational and malleable
  ⚬ Persist longer on tasks when failing
  ⚬ Upward social comparisons
  ⚬ Balanced self-evaluations

• Individualistic cultures:
  ⚬ Self-esteem is less relational and more personal
  ⚬ Persist longer on tasks when succeeding
  ⚬ Downward social comparisons
  ⚬ Self-evaluations biased positively

interdependent self

• Have not one self but many selves: self-with-parents, self-at-work, self-with-friends

• This self is embedded in social memberships

independent vs interdependent self

planning fallacy

tendency to underestimate how long a task will take

affective forecasting

prediction about future feelings

impact bias

overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events

immune neglect

the tendency to underestimate the speed and the strength of the “psychological immune system” or resilience

dual attitude system

• implicit (automatic attitudes)

  • change slowly, with practice that forms new habits

• explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes

  • may change with education and persuasion

narcissism

• Self-esteem’s conceited sibling
  ⚬ I am good vs I am the best

• Those high in both narcissism and self-esteem tend to be
  more aggressive
  ⚬ Not everyone high in narcissism is aggressive, though!

• Narcissism seems to have increased over the past decades

• Narcissistic people are more active and more popular on
  social media sites, increasing their influence in these online
  communities

self-efficacy

• A belief in your own competence

• Differs from self-esteem, which reflects how much a person likes themselves

  • Someone who thinks, “If I work hard, I can swim fast,” has high self-efficacy

  • Someone who thinks, “I am a great swimmer,” has high self-esteem

attribution theory

• Explains how individuals interpret events and how this relates to their thinking and behavior.

  • Internal vs. External Attributions: People attribute causes of behavior either to internal factors (dispositions, traits) or external factors
    (situations, environment)

  • Fundamental Attribution Error: Tendency to overemphasize personal characteristics and ignore
    situational factors in others’ behaviors

  • misattribution error: mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong cause

self-serving bias

• Explaining Positive and Negative Events
  ⚬ The tendency to attribute personal failure to external forces and personal success to internal forces

• Self-serving attributions
  ￭ The tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors
  ￭ Not always helpful - can contribute to negative outcomes

false consensus effect

Overestimating the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s
undesirable or unsuccessful behavioursa

false uniqueness effect

Underestimating the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s
desirable or successful behaviours

unrealistic optimism

• many have unrealistic optimism about future events

• many support this optimism by being pessimistic about the future of others

  • ex: undergraduates believe that they are far more likely than their classmates to get a good job

• illusory optimism increases vulnerability

  • optimism promotes self-efficacy

  • defensive pessimism helps people prepare for problems

temporal comparison

comparisons with our past selves

self-handicapping

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

• fearing failure

  • ex: partying the night before an exam

two brain systems that judge our social worlds

• System 1: Automatic

  • Functions automatically and out of our awareness

  • Often called “intuition” or a “gut feeling”

  • Influences more of our actions than we realize

• System 2: Requires Attention

  • Requires our conscious attention and effort

priming

• System 1
  ⚬ Activating particular associations in memory

  • e.g., watching a scary movie and interpreting household noises as an intruder

  • Subliminal priming and embodied cognition

• System 2

  • Can influence our thoughts and actions more consciously (e.g., seeing an ad for a delicious burger and recognizing the goal is to get us to buy the burger

overconfidence

• The tendency to be more confident than correct – to
  overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs

• Applies to factual information, judgments of others’ behaviour,
  judgments of own behaviour

• Fed by incompetence and underestimation of the importance of situational force

confirmation bias

A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions

representativeness heuristic

• snap judgements of whether someone or something fits a category

• may lead to discounting other important information

• ex: deciding that Marie is a librarian rather than a trucker because she better represents one’s image of a librarian

availability heuristic

• quick judgements of the likelihood of events (how available in memory)

• overweighting vivid instances and thus, for example, fearing the wrong things

• ex: estimating teen violence after reading news reports of school shootings

illusory correlation

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

  • e.g., Noticing “coincidences”

illusion of control

• The perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they are
  ￭ e.g., Gambling

misinformation effect

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

• Potential for the creation of false memories

• Reconstructing past attitudes

  • The construction of positive memories brightens our
    recollections

  • Rosy (or less then rosy) retrospections

attributing causality to the person or the situation?

• Dispositional attribution
  ⚬ Attributing behaviour to disposition and traits
  ￭ Motivation and ability

• Situational attribution
  ⚬ Physical and social circumstances

• Inferring traits
  ⚬ Spontaneous trait inference
  ⚬ Occurs when we infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions

the covariation model

• suggests that people attribute the cause of behavior to
  either internal (dispositional) or external (situational) factors based on these three types of information: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency

  • distinctiveness: This examines how unique a behavior is to a particular situation. If a behavior is distinctive (only occurs in one situation), it might be attributed to external factors (e.g., a person only being late to a specific job due to traffic)

  • consensus: This looks at whether others behave similarly in the same situation. High consensus suggests that the cause is likely external (e.g., everyone being late to work due to a common external factor like traffic), while low consensus points to internal causes (e.g., only one person being late due to personal reasons)

• Internal Attribution: Behavior is attributed to internal factors when there is high consistency, low consensus, and low distinctiveness.

• External Attribution: Behavior is attributed to external factors when there is high consensus, low consistency, or high distinctiveness.

how our social beliefs matter

• Self-fulfilling prophecy

  • Beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment

  • When our ideas lead us to act in ways that produce their apparent confirmation
    ⚬ Robert Merton (1948)

    • behavioral confirmation: A type of self fulfilling prophecy whereby peoples’ social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations

• Experimenter bias

  • Research participants sometimes live up to what they believe experimenters expect of them

    
    

the theory of planned behavior

one’s attitudes, perceived social norms, and feelings of control together determine one’s intentions, which guide behavior

the foot-in-the-door phenomenon

• Attitudes follow behaviour

  • The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request

• The “low-ball technique” is a variation:

  • Works even when people are aware of a profit motive

  • Takes advantage of the psychological effects of making a commitment

door-in-the-face technique

• Tendency for people who have declined a large request to agree to a smaller request

• Very effective, especially when the norms of reciprocity is salient

• Demonstrates how small actions can lead to a shift in our beliefs or self-perception

impression management

• Being concerned with making a good impression in order to gain social and material rewards, to feel better about ourselves, or to become more secure in our social identities

• Wanting to appear consistent

cognitive dissonance theory

• We feel tension (dissonance) when we are aware that we
  have two thoughts that are inconsistent or incompatible

• Also occurs when our behaviour is inconsistent with our
  attitudes

  • Selective exposure

  • People prefer to expose themselves with information that agrees with their point of view

• Predicts that when our actions are not fully explained by external rewards or coercion, we will experience dissonance, which we can reduce by believing in what we have done

• when we choose between two equally attractive or equally unattractive alternatives, this can create dissonance

• When people think their arousal is due to an external factor (like a pill or an external situation), they don’t experience cognitive dissonance as strongly, and therefore, they don’t feel compelled to change their attitudes

  • helps reduce the psychological discomfort

self-perception

• Assumes we make similar inferences when we observe our own behaviour

• When our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, we are
  in the position of someone who observes us from the outside

self-affirmation theory

• People often experience self-image threat after engaging in
  an undesirable behaviour, and they compensate for this threat by affirming another aspect of the self

• Threaten people’s self-concept in one domain and they will
  compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain

self-perception vs dissonance

• ex: I don’t sing because I am happy, I am happy because I sing (self-perception is at work)

• E.g., If someone frequently volunteers without feeling forced or conflicted, they may conclude that they genuinely value altruism

• Cognitive dissonance theory is inconsistent with two findings

  • Discomfort isn’t always needed for change

  • Overjustification effect
    ￭ May cause individuals to focus on external source