Social Psych 280 Exam 1 Study Guide

Automatic Processing

unconscious, fast, effortless, and involuntary cognitive operation triggered by environmental stimuli, part of intuitive system

Controlled Processing

a mode of thinking that is conscious, intentional, effortful, and resource-heavy, part of reasoning system

Independent Culture

cultural framework that prioritizes individual autonomy, self-reliance, personal identity, uniqueness, etc

Interdependent Culture

cultural framework where individuals view themselves as fundamentally connected to others rather than as separate, autonomous agents

Construct

The conceptual representation of the intangible psychological phenomenon being studied (ex., motivation, excitement, etc.)

Operationalization

The concrete, observable instance of a construct that is studied (ex., amount of time working on a task, self-reported motivation, etc.)

Independent Variable

• The variable manipulated or controlled by the researcher (X)

  • The experimental group receives the treatment; the control group receives no treatment

Dependent Variable

The measurement of the consequences of the independent variable (AKA response variable)

Reliability

degree to which a particular way of measuring a variable yields consistent results (get similar or same results every time experiment is conducted)

Correlations

• The measure of the extent to which two variables vary together (how closely two variables are associated) (ranges from -1.00 to +1.00)

  • Positive correlation → 1 variable is 1 direction from the mean; the other is in the same direction

  • Negative correlation → 1 var. Is 1 direction from the mean; the other is in the opposite direction

  • Zero correlation → no connection between the two

Correlational Studies

• Determine how much and in what way two pre-existing variables are related → Cannot determine causation

  • Strengths = study things you can’t/shouldn’t manipulate, lots of data, cost-effective

    • ex.) variable 1 = hunger → rate how hungry, variable 2 = anger → rate how angry, conclusion = people who are hungry tend to be more angry

Experiments

• Way to establish causation: a research method in which an investigator manipulates the independent variable to observe its effect on some behaviors or mental processes (dependent variable)

  • Take a sample, split it, give one group food & another group fasts (IV), and see how angry they are/difference in anger (DV)

Random Assignment

randomized controlled trial (random assignment of a subject into control or treatment group), helps determine causation

Confounds

confounding variable, third variable that could interfere with determining causation (aka it causes/influences both)

Internal Validity

confidence only the manipulated variable (and no other external influence) could have produced the results

External Validity

An indication of how well the results of a study generalize beyond the sample of the immediate study → who the sample is made up of, how the study is designed, etc.

Self-Schema

• A cognitive representation of a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self in general and in certain situations

  • Functions → processing info, retrieving evidence, rejecting (or contextualizing) contradictory information

  • We have multiple self-schemas

Self-Concept

• The collection of beliefs, ideas, and evaluations that an individual holds about themselves (Who am I?)

  • Tendency to focus on characteristics that are uncommon or unique in a context

    • McGuire and Padawer-Singer study on children (how much people focus on individuating features varies by culture)

Working Self-Concept

the part of a person’s self-concept that is active at a particular moment

Reflected Appraisals (or Reflected Self-Appraisals)

our perception of other’s evaluation of us, internal guess about what someone else thinks of you, which you then use to shape your own self-concept

Social Comparison Theory

• People assess their own characteristics by comparing themselves to others; this happens when there is no objective standard, as with many important characteristics (e.g., friendliness, morality).

  • More likely to make comparisons to others similar to you

    • ex.) a beginner comparing themselves to other beginners rather than to pros

  • Upward social comparison = comparing the self to people who are considered better at something

    • Downward Social Comparison = comparing the self to people who are considered worse at something

Dunning-Krueger Effect

• Bring in average people and give them a grammar/logic test; put scores on the x-axis, ask them to pick out their score. People with lower scores tend to be much more overconfident in their scores, while higher scores tend to guess their score more accurately

  • Lower-score people don’t know what they don’t know (don’t know if they got it wrong bc they don’t know it at all)

    • There is a better-than-average effect present here; most people think they did better than the average/low scores (shows why we overestimate ourselves)

Self-Esteem

• Overall positive or negative evaluation of the self

  • Trait self-esteem = more stable, long-term evaluation of the self (how you feel about yourself in general)

    • State self-esteem = moment-to-moment evaluations of the self (how you feel about yourself right now)

Contingencies of Self-Worth

People base their self-esteem more heavily on domains that they personally value; Self-esteem is contingent on success or failure in key valued domains

Sociometer Hypothesis

Self-esteem is an internal reflection of how we are seen by others → we feel good about ourselves when other people feel good about us (a psychological gauge or monitor that measures a person's level of social acceptance and relational value to others)

Self-Enhancement Motive

desire to bolster a positive self image, motivates biased and overly positive assessments of the self, especially in valued domains, common but not ubiquitous

Self-Verification Motive

motivation to feel one’s self-evaluations are accurate whether positive or not (consistent and stable sense of self, may desire or actively seek feedback from others confirming self-evaluations)

Impression Management Motive

the conscious or subconscious process by which people control, regulate, and shape how others perceive them and the internal drive, effort, or degree to which a person seeks to control the image they project to an audience

Self-Discrepancy Theory

• Self-regulation goals are determined by perceived discrepancies between who they currently are (actual self), who they want to be (ideal self), and who they think they are supposed to be (ought self)

  • The kinds of self-regulation people focus on (regulatory focus) depend on which self they are discrepant with

    • Discrepancies with the ideal self lead to promotion focus; discrepancies with the ought self lead to prevention focus

Prevention Focus

when facing self-discrepancy with the ought self, a person puts an emphasis on avoiding negative outcomes, concentration safety, security, and responsibility

Promotion Focus

When facing self-discrepancy with the ideal self, a person puts an emphasis on attaining positive outcomes, growth, advancement, ideals, etc.

Fluency

how easy it is to process information → affects a lot of social cognition, we have more positive evaluations of things that are easy to process (attitudes), we respond more positively to messages that are easy to understand (persuasion)

Top-Down Processing

Theory-driven mental processing uses pre-existing expectations to filter and interpret information

• ex.) where did my roommate go? → they usually have class around this time, probably walked to campus

Bottom-Up Processing

Data-driven mental processing, basing judgments on stimuli in the environment

• ex.) where did my roommate go? → shoes gone, backpack gone, probably walked to campus

Schemas

• An organized network of related information or expectations stored in memory

  • Can have these for lots of things; can be broad or specific

    • ex.) schema for furniture, schema for chairs, schema for norms about sitting down, etc.

  • Our brains can organize information so many ways, so there isn’t a single defined scope of a schema

  • Types: self-schema, script (schema for how to behave in a situation), stereotype (schema about a group of people)

  • Repeated activation can make a schema more accessible, and a bigger part of the self-concept

  •  Schemas direct attention (filter relevant information), shape construals (people interpret ambiguous information in schema-consistent ways), affects encoding (what information gets filed away for storage), affects retrieval (what info gets extracted from memory)

Schema Activation

When a schema is brought to mind or set to be used in the moment

• When a schema is activated, attention is directed to schema-consistent info

Accessibility

how easily something stored in memory can be activated (literally how accessible it is)

• A highly accessible schema is one that comes to mind quickly without much prompting

• Not defined by frequency but being activated easily can make something activated more often

Availability

whether something is stored in memory (a schema can be activated if it is available)

Priming

What you do to make a schema more accessible: presenting a stimulus to trigger accessibility temporarily

• Presenting a stimulus to activate a concept and increase short-term accessibility

Intuitive System (System 1)

part of the dual process model, intuitive and quick reasoning → thinking fast, relies on automatic associations, can process a lot of things at once → heuristics are part of system 1 → snap judgments

Reasoning System (System 2)

rational system, part of the dual process model, thinking slow, relies on deliberate deductive reasoning, requires focus (directed at one thing at a time)

Heuristics

mental shortcuts for making quick judgments, cognitively efficient but prone to error, some well-known common heuristics, most famous ones are about judgments of probability

Availability Heuristic

judge something as more probable when examples come to mind easily, originally named in reference to the amount of information or examples available but really about accessibility

Representativeness Heuristic

Judgments about how likely something is to belong to a category based on how similar it is to people’s mental representation of that category → ignores base rate information (how rare the category is to begin with)

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

A mental shortcut through which people with a rough destination as a starting point and then adjust this estimate to take into account unique characteristics of the present situation

• People rely too heavily on an initial piece of info (“anchor”) when making decisions or estimates under uncertainty, and then adjust insufficiently away from it

  • ex.) in discussion, activity about estimating mileage from LA to NYC

Primacy Effect

Judgments are more heavily influenced by whatever is presented first

• Happens when information is ambiguous or can be interpreted in multiple ways

  • What is presented first changes the interpretation of whatever follows

Recency Effect

Judgments are more heavily influenced by whatever is presented last

• Happens when judgments are based on what info people can recall

  • Things listed last are more recent, fresher in memory, & more likely to stand out

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it

• The original use of the term is about confirming a proposition, which doesn’t have to be something people have pre-existing beliefs or attitudes about

  • Can lead to false beliefs because people may fail to attend to disconfirming information

Motivated Confirmation Bias

people seek and/or interpret evidence to support their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs

Motivated Reasoning

interpreting or processing information with the goal of confirming existing beliefs → biased thinking

Selective Exposure

tendency to consume more attitude-consistent information than attitude-inconsistent information → biased info selection

Attributions

The explanation we give for behavior → the perceived cause of a behavior our own or others’

Internal Attributions

something internal to the person is causing the behavior (attitudes, beliefs, traits, etc.)

External Attributions

Something external to the person is causing the behavior (the situation, circumstances, etc.)

Discounting Principle

people assign less weight to a particular cause of behavior if there are other plausible causes

Fundamental Attribution Error

This is the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, and the corresponding tendency to emphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior

• ex.) inferences may be made about someone’s true personality even when we are aware that their behavior resulted from an assigned role

• May be affected by culture

  • Westerners define themselves in terms of their relationships with others less than other people throughout the world → internal cause attribution

    • Non-Westerners think about themselves more in terms of the social roles they occupy and their obligations to other people and institutions than Westerners → more inclined to attribute behavior to the situation

Actor-Observer Bias/Difference

a difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions)

• Attributions may differ between the person engaging in a behavior and a person observing the behavior

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

the tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances (external attributions) and to attribute success and other good events to oneself (internal attributions)

Emotions

a brief and specific affective response (ie, feeling-based reaction) to a stimulus or event (appraisals, physiological response, expression, action tendency)

• Features → brief (minutes or seconds), specific (lots of possible emotions depending on specific appraisals of stimuli or events), unbidden (involuntary onset, happens automatically)

Appraisals

construals of a situation that give rise to emotions

Action Tendency

a behavior prompted/motivated by a specific emotion

Social Functional Theory of Emotions

a key function of emotions is to coordinate social interactions and manage social relationships. Both emotional states and expressions serve these functions, does not mean an emotion is always beneficial for social relationships, emotions can serve social functions at multiple levels

• Individual level (guide judgments and behavior), interpersonal (strengthen ties), group level (sense of connection, hierarchy, conflict), cultural (transmit/reinforce cultural norms)

Broaden and Build Hypothesis

positive emotions lead us to think and act more broadly → more creative thinking, generating more solutions and possible actions, more likely to expand our social networks

Affect as Information

the idea that we use our emotional states as information about ourselves and our environments; depends on attributions for our emotional states; study on good & bad weather influencing judgments about life satisfaction (but only when the weather was not made salient as a cause of their mood, Schwartz & Clore, 1983)

Affective Forecasting

predicting future emotions, people tend to overestimate how unhappy they will be following negative events

Immune Neglect

not thinking about their capacity to cope with negative events

Focalism

focusing on central aspects of the event and not the many things in our lives that influence our emotions

Peak-End Rule

the most intense moment and the end of an emotional experience disproportionately influence recollection of emotions

Cultural Differences in Emotions

cultures vary in when and how powerfully they encourage people to engage in emotional suppression, emotions that promote cultural ideas are valued, cultural values shape ideal affect (what we want to feel)

Ideal Emotions

specific emotional states that people want or value experiencing, as opposed to how they actually feel in a given moment

Focal Emotions

Emotions that are especially common within a particular culture

• ex.) anger, embarrassment, & shame expressed more in some cultures than others

Emotion Regulation

the ways in which people modify their emotions to make themselves feel better or to fit the present context

Reappraisal

One strategy for emotion regulation → the process of reinterpreting the causes of an emotion and its meaning for the individual (changing how you think about the situation)

Suppression/Response Modulation

a strategy for emotion regulation → attenuating the outward signs of the emotion (masking emotional reaction)

Basic (Universal) Emotions Theory

There are distinct emotions that are universal; a categorical approach to emotions, some emotions evolved as to serve specific adaptive functions, emotions evolved as specific and distinct responses to survival related threats and opportunities → originally 6 basic emotions (happy, sad, fear, anger, surprise, disgust), can acknowledge individual and cultural variability in emotional experiences and expressions, but some emotions have a distinct universal and evolved basis

• Commonality of certain emotional expressions across species and across human cultures is the foundation of the theory

  • Distinct emotions are separate, natural categories (rooted in evolution)

Constructivist Theories of Emotion

Distinct emotions are constructed from more general psychological processes → many of the same elements (appraisals, physiology), subjective interpretations are used to piece together (construct) a conceptualization of the emotional experience

• Can be evolutionary, but disagreement on what the evolved components are

  • Distinct emotions are shaped by language, social roles, values, and institutions (which vary across cultures)

Circumplex Model of Affect

an emotion theory, saying that we categorize certain emotions on a spectrum of 2 core dimensions: valence (how positive or negative the emotion is), and arousal (how intense the emotion is), which are both core elements of emotions

Attitudes

Evaluation of an object on a positive – negative dimension (valence)

• Basically, whether you like or dislike something (person, place, thing, idea, activity, etc.)

Components of Attitudes (ABCs)

affect (feelings or emotions tied to the attitude object), behavior (actions tied towards the attitude object, approach/avoid), cognition (thoughts, beliefs, or memories relevant to the evaluation)

Response Latency

Time it takes to respond to a stimulus, including an attitude measure

• Can be used with lots of attitude measures including Likert Scales

• Faster responses = higher attitude accessibility

• Implicit Association Test - can be used to measure ____, has participants sort attitude objects with words, tests response latencies when sorting with positive vs negative words

Attitude Accessibility

how likely an attitude is to be activated and used (related to response latency, higher accessibility = faster response)

Attitude Strength

how durable or stable an attitude is, the extent to which an attitude is durable (persistent over time and resistant to change) and impactful (influencing cognitive processing and guiding behavior)

Functions of Attitudes

People can have attitudes for many reasons; the goal or need people are trying to fulfill with an attitude can influence how people form and change attitudes (4 main functions: instrumental, knowledge, defense, identity)

• Instrumental function - attitudes help us fulfill our needs, maximize rewards, or minimize punishments (get good, avoid bad)

  • Can be for attitude objects that are needs/rewards or a means to getting needs/reward

Knowledge Function

Attitudes help us make sense of the world, can use attitudes as schemas to make judgments or form beliefs

• You may like things related to other things you like

  • ex.) political endorsements from respected orgs, news from liked source

• Common finding - people believe attitude-consistent information is more accurate

  • Can use disliked thing or group as a scapegoat

Defense Function

Attitudes can help us maintain (or defend) self-esteem; we may like/dislike things based on how they reflect on the self

• ex.) attitudes about studies, about things you do

Identity Function

attitudes express who we are and what groups we belong to, can form attitudes to be consistent with personally valued identities, can help with impression management

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

inconsistencies between attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors creates an aversive emotional reaction (dissonance), which people are motivated to resolve; dissonance is resolved by changing the attitude (or behavior) to make them consistent → often observed after following a request

Rationalization

way to resolve cognitive dissonance: generating reasons for why the behavior is good to justify a behavior, change the attitude or add a new cognition that makes them consistent

• More likely to rationalize behavior when the attitudes/behavior are highly relevant to the self, when the action is freely chosen, when there is insufficient justification (cost outweighs benefits), when there are negative consequences for the behavior, when negative consequences are known in advance

Effort Justification

rationalizing behavior, when people do something that requires a lot of effort with little return, people generate additional reasons to justify the behavior

Induced Compliance

rationalizing behavior, when people are compelled to engage in an unpleasant behavior, they find ways to rationalize it

Ingredients for Cognitive Dissonance / When people experience more dissonance

when people are subtly instructed or pressured to do something they don’t want to do, when people do something very difficult or effortful with little payoff, after making a decision

Self-Perception Theory

the theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred, and then inferring what their attitudes must be (happens when attitudes are less known)

Compare Self-Perception Theory vs Cognitive Dissonance Theory

SPT explains cases where a behavior is inconsistent with a weak or unimportant attitude, CDT explains cases where a behavior is inconsistent with a strong or important attitude

Yale Model of Persuasion

outlines key factors involved in persuasive communication: who says what to whom? → message source (who), message (what), audience (to whom)

• Source effect - when characteristics of source of message influences persuasion (source is attractive, trustworthy, knowledgeable, etc.)

• Message effects: more persuasion when message is clear/easy to understand, has strong arguments, etc.

  • Audience effects: characteristics of audiences influence persuasion, need for cognition (trait-level interest in deep thinking, contemplation) influences how much people process arguments, more persuasion when audience is in a more positive mood (state)

Sleeper Effect

persuasive messages from unreliable sources can have a delayed impact on attitudes because people forget the source of information

Two-Sided Appeal

persuasive messages that also present opposing views/perspectives, more persuasive with audiences who initially disagree, less persuasive with audiences who initially agree

Elaboration Likelihood Model

two routes to persuasion → central and peripheral route; about the psychological process of the message recipient (can be used to understand when the recipient might attend to core features of the message or superficial features, such as source characteristics; route chosen depends on the motivation and ability to process a message (when motivation and/or ability are low, peripheral route, when both motivation and ability are high, central route)

Central Route

thinking carefully about the content of the message, persuasion is based on the strength and quality of the arguments (more about message quality)

• Used when motivation and ability are high

• Attitude change more stable if it happens through the central route

Peripheral Route

Attending to superficial parts of a persuasive communication, persuasion is based on superficial (peripheral) cues, more swayed by characteristics of the source that may be irrelevant to argument quality

• Used when motivation and/or ability are low

Motivation (Persuasion)

a person’s desire to understand an argument in the moment