Social Psychology Ch.1-4 Exam 1

Social Psychology

the scientific study of the way people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people (social situations)

Basically the study of social influence

Focuses on the content of the social situation

Ex) in what contexts do people on average, pay the most attention during class?

Social Situation

the real or imagined presence of others

Have A LOT of influence on us

Examples:

- going on a date w/ someone

- attending a class

- partying

Social Influence

the effect that social situations have on our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs

Empirically

answers can be derived from experimentation or measurement rather than by opinion

Personality Psychology

focuses on chronic traits, characteristics, or personalities of individuals

Ex) what types of people are best at paying attention during lectures?

Sociology

focuses on the more complex social structures that are more broad (like organizations, institutions, nations)

Ex) what universities produce the best students?

Construal

the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Social Cognition

the way people think about themselves and the social world

How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make accurate judgements and decisions

SUBJECTIVE (never a right or wrong)

Why do we do empirical research?

Helps us understand human behavior

Helps us predict and influence human behavior

What are the steps to do research?

Hypothesize

- To have a theory/come up with an explanation or prediction

- The explanation is made base on limited evidence

Reasons why we hypothesize:

- Extending theories

- Believing existing theory is wrong

- Not being able to explain observations using prior theory

Design Study

- Observational

- Correlational

- Experimental

Collect Data (test hypothesis)

Analyze the Data

Replication in Another Population

Hindsight Bias

the tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing that something occurred, how much they could have predicted it before it occurred

Observational Method (research design)

the technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

Easier Definition: when a researcher collects data by observing and recording people's behavior in their natural habitat

Strengths and Disadvantages of Observational Research Method

Strengths:

- Easy

- Naturalistic

Disadvantages:

- Can't learn about relationships between variables or causations (because we can't manipulate these relationships)

- Prone to bias

Ethnography

the method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have

The goal is to understand the complexity of the group by just observing it in action

Archival Analysis

the researcher examines the accumulated documents or archives of a culture

Correlational Method (research design)

the technique whereby 2 or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed

Easier Definition: measures the relationship between two or more variable

How much one can be predicted from the other

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION!!!!

Covariation

the relationship between 2 or more variables that change together

3rd Variable Problem

when you see a correlation between 2 variables, there might be a 3rd, unmeasured, variable that influences both variables

Makes it seem like those variables are correlated but they're not

Limitation of correlational research method

Correlations do not indicate the direction of a relationship, only indicate whether variables are related

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION!!!!

Correlation Coefficient

a statistical technique that assess how well you can predict one variable from another

Ranges from -1 to +1

Positive Correlation: means that increases in the value of one variable are associated with increases in the value of the other variable

Negative Correlation: means that increases in the value of one variable are associated with decreases in the value of the other

Random Selection

a way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in said population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Experimental Method (research design)

the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (which is the one thought to have a causal effect on people's responses)

Easier Definition: determines whether one variable causes an effect on another variable

Independent vs Dependent Variables

IV: the variables changed by researcher

DV: the measured variable

3 Characteristics of an Experiment

1) Manipulate the IV and measure the DV

- Manipulating the IV fixes the direction of relationship from IV to DV (A to B)

- The manipulated IV must have at least 2 levels (levels = conditions)

2) Randomly assign participants to conditions

- A process which ensures all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment

3) Try and control extraneous variables (that 3rd variable)

- This is hard

- Make sure all participants are treated the same except for the level of the IV

Experimenter Bias

due to knowledge of the hypothesis, the experimenter behave s in a ways that unintentionally influence the results

Subject/Participant Bias

participants may alter their behavior simply because they know they are being observed

Potential roles a subject may adopt (in terms of subject bias)

"Good" Subject: participants try to identify hypothesis and confirm it

"Negative" Subject: participants try to identify hypothesis and disconfirm it

Apprehensive: participant is anxious about being observed and tries to behave in a socially desirable manner

Probability Level (p-value)

a number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the IV

Easier Definition: a number describing how likely it is that your data would have occurred by chance

Internal Validity

the confidence that a causal relationship observed in a study is accurate and not influenced by other factors

How well is the experiment done??

Are you testing what you're saying you are testing??

Make sure that nothing beside the IV can affect the DV

External Validity

extent of which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

Solutions to this is to model extraneous variables (test everything!!!)

Test External Validity: the extent to which the result of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

Ask yourself if the results replicate

- Using different operationalizations

- Using different subjects

Psychological Realism

the extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life

Researchers usually use a cover story to avoid any biases

Field Experiments

experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the laboratory

Meta-Analysis

a statistical technique that averages the results of 2 or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable

Basic Research

studies designed to find the best answers to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity

Applied Research

studies designed to solve a particular social problem

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

research plan is first reviewed by an independent group of scientists and community members to wright potential risks and gains

Informed Consent

participants must a priori provided informed consent

They must be informed of the tasks and potential risks

The hypothesis doesn't need to be explained (this allows for deception if the experiment needs it)

Debrief

experimenter should explain the purpose of the study and why the risks were necessary

Cross-Cultural Research

research conducted with members of different cultures to see if the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or if its unique to that specific culture

Social Cognitions

how people think about themselves and the social world

How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions

Automatic/Implicit Cognition

thinking that is non conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and/or effortless

Controlled/Explicit Cognition

thinking that is conscious, intentional, controllable, and/or effortful

Schemas

mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember

Influences the information people notice, think about, how we interpret information, and what we remember

Especially true under ambiguity (when we are uncertain about what to expect)

Mental representations (like flashcards in your brain)

Person Schemas

contain information about the characteristics of people

Organized around "types"/clusters of traits

These schemas can guide our interpretation

Self Schemas

contain information about the self and guide processing of self-relevant information

Dominated by "central traits"

Ex) intelligence

Affect perceptions of others

Ex) I am smarter than her

Role Schemas

contain information on how to act in certain roles

Ex) student's role/professor's role and doctor/patient roles

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

when people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward the person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true

Accessibility/Categorization

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world

Schemas can be temporarily accessible due to recent experiences (if a schema is formed due to an event)

Some schemas are more accessible, while others are not

Priming

the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, concept, or goal

Thoughts must be both accessible and applicable before they will act as primes, exerting an influence on our impressions of the world

Heuristics

the mental shortcuts people apply when thinking about the world

A predetermined answer/decision

Judgemental Heuristics

mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

Availability Heuristics

a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

Could be something recent, frequent, extreme, vivid, very emotionally negative/positive

Representativeness Heuristics

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

Classifying objects based on how representative they are of the typical case

Ex) someone standing in a suit in front of pillars (court house vibe) we might think they're lawyers

Base Rate Information

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Analytic Thinking Style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context (common in Western cultures)

Focuses on breaking down a problem into smaller parts and examining each piece individually

Prioritizing logic and details rather than the bigger context

Holistic Thinking Style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other (common in East Asian cultures)

You consider the whole picture and all interconnected parts of a situation

Controlled Thinking

thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

Counterfactual Thinking

mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have mean

Ex) "if only I hadn't erased my first answer to Question 17 and circled the wrong one instead" "i would have passed the test"

Dual Process Models

posit/suggests that, within a certain domain of cognition, automatic processes happen first, then controlled processes "come on-line" and "modulate" automatic processes

(automatic process happen before controlled processes)

Might go directly from automatic cognition → expression/action

Ex) i see chocolate → eat chocolate

Or go automatic cognition → controlled cognition → expression/action

Ex) i see chocolate → I'm on a diet i cant → doesnt eat chocolate

MODE Model

motivation and opportunity as determinants

Explains when and how someone's attitudes will influence their behavior, depending on how motivated they are to think carefully about the situation and how much opportunity they have to do so; meaning, if someone has high motivation and the time to deliberate, their attitudes will likely strongly predict their actions, while in situations with low motivation or limited time, their more readily accessible attitudes will guide their behavior

Automatically activated cognition leads to judgement or behavior

When we are motivated to think carefully and when we have the opportunity to do so

Motivation

a desire to correct/update/override automatic inclinations (beliefs, values, goals)

Opportunity

personal or situational affordances (physiological states, features of the situation or environment)

Planning Fallacy

the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past

People tend to think that this time will be different

Social Perception

how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people

Social perception is more than how we see each other, it's also how we explain why others behave as they do

We have a fundamental need to explain other people's behavior because we like to predict the future

We interpret behavior in the present in order to navigate the future (based on assumptions, schemas/heuristics)

Nonverbal Communcation

the way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words

Includes facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch, and gaze

Encoding

to express or emit nonverbal behavior

Ex) smiling or patting someone on the back

Decoding

to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express

Ex) deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness

Affect Blends

facial expressions in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

This can happen when someone tells you something that is both horrible and inappropriate

Makes decoding difficult

Display Rules

culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

Ex) Japanese norms often lead people to cover up negative facial expressions with smiles and laughter

Ex2) American cultural norms discourage emotional displays in men (like crying) but allow it for women

Emblems

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; usually have direct verbal translations

Ex) thumbs up sign

Thin-Slicing

drawing meaningful conclusions about another person's personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior

Evidence of thin-slicing: guessing someone's sexual orientation, political party, etc. based on just that brief sample

Primacy Effect

when it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later

We also have schemas regarding which traits tend to appear together in clusters

Ex) when you want to like a character in a show because originally he was nice

Belief Perseverance

the tendency to stick with an initial judgment even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

Attribution Theory

a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior

Why we THINK people do the things they do, NOT why people REALLY do the things they do

Internal Attribution

the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person

Attitude, character, or personality

Ex) this person cut me off because they're a jerk

External Attribution

the inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation they are in, with the assumption that people would respond the same way in that situation

Ex) this person cut me off cause they are late for work

Implicit Personality Theory (what are the pros and cons?)

a type of schema people use to group various personality traits together

Advantages: form impressions quickly, reduces the amount of cognitive processing need to make judgement about people

Disadvantages: can often lead to incorrect assumptions, stereotypical thinking

Covariation Model

a theory that states to forman attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we note the pattern between when the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors

Consensus Information

the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

Distinctiveness Information

the extent to which a particular actor behaves in the same way toward different stimuli

Consistency Information

the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

Fundamental Attribution Error

the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

We have a base-rate tendency to make internal attributions

Internal causes = overestimated

External causes = underestimated

We fall for attribution error because when we explain someone's behavior, we tend to focus on the person rather than the surrounding situation

The influence of a situation tends to be invisible

Actor-Observer Effect

external attributions for the self, and the internal attributions for others

This is because we can understand our own situations (so we make external attributions) but we cant see the other person's situation (we make internal attributions)

Perceptual Salience

the seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention

Leads to actor-observer effect

The situations influencing others' behaviors are not perceptually salient to us, peoples' personalities and characters are salient

Two-Step Attribution Process

analyzing behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior

We often don't change much of our analysis in the second step (the external influences)

Self-Serving Attributions

explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors

When we do good, we credit ourselves (internal)

When we do bad, we blame external factors

Defensive Attributions

explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability or mortality

Belief in a Just World

a defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people

The assumption that people get what they deserve, and deserve what they get

Bias Blind Spot

the tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are