PSCI/PSY 104: Social Animal Exam #1 Terms

UCI, Social Animal, Social Psychology, Exam/Midterm #1, What is Social Psychology, Methods, Understanding the Self, Understanding Other, Attraction & Relationships

Definition of Social Psychology

• The study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others

The Real of Imagined Presence of Others

• People can intentionally influence us— parents telling children to do things

• The mere presence of others can influence our behavior— someone just being in the vicinity of your

• Thinking of people can be influential— a child thinking their parents want them to do something without the parent being in the room

Strong Social Situation

• Strong social situations are that of where most people behave in the same way— in a class, funeral, etc.

Weak Social Situation

• Weak social situations are where most people behave differently— on a playground, at a party

Why do we Study Social Psychology

• Interested in how people think, behave, and feel by the influence of outside sources

• We want to understand how to deal with things

What Level Does Social Psychology Focus on

• Social psychology focuses on the individual level and how our surroundings impact us

Theory

• Theories are a beliefs or collections of beliefs about some phenomenon 

Hypothesis

• Coming up with a testable prediction about the conditions under which an event will occur

• Derived from theories

Observational Method

• Used to describe the nature of a phenomenon

• Don't have to worry about people lying,

• Harder to do/not always possible, can’t answer more complicated questions

Correlational Method

• Examines association between two variables

• Correlation ≠ causation due to third variable problem

• Used to examine phenomena which cannot be manipulated, such as gender, culture, personality, cognitive styles, health conditions

Experimental Method

• Manipulating one variable to see the effect on another

• When x is manipulated to see the effect it has on y

Experimental & Control Group

• Participants are split among two groups when specific treatment is being tested/experimented while the control is served as a baseline for comparison

Independent Variable

• The changing variable

Dependent Variable

• What is altered based on the independent variable

Random Assignment

• To randomly assign people into various levels to imply causation and remove confounding variable, equal chance of being in any condition 

Representative Sampling

• Ensuring a sample of people is representative of a population— smaller group that reflects key characteristics, demographics, and traits of a larger target

Random Sampling

• How participants are selected from a broad population

• Builds a sample that accurately reflects the population

Internal Validity

• The degree in which cause-and-effect behaviors are accurately established— free from confounding/third variables

• Reason for using experimental procedures

• Ensure internal validity

External Validity

• Would findings hold up with variations in the situation, different participants, different types of manipulations

• Strong external validity would be if it is very generalizable and repeatable

• Weak external validity would be things where findings are less robut and difficult to replicate

• Participants may think or act like they do in the real world

Construct Validity

• Are you measuring what you think you’re measuring— do your operationalizations represent what your conceptualize

Generalizability

• The degree to which findings can be applied to a broader population, setting, time or real world context

Mundane & Psychological/Experimental Realism

• Mundane realism is the extent to which an experiment is similar to real life situations

• Psychological realism is the extent to which the processes psychologically triggered in an experiment are similar to what would occur in everyday life

• Completely independent of one another— mundane is about the surface level similarity to real world while psychological is about the internal triggers’ similarity to real life

HOMER

• Hypothesis— testable prediction about conditions under which an event will occur

• Operationalize— how you get at a concept you are attempting to measure

  • Making it testable and making a conceptual variable something measurable

• Measure— conducting your study and measuring the concepts in which you are interested

• Evaluate— look at your data and see if your hypothesis was proven wrong or if there was not good evidence

• Revise or Replicate— prediction has been confirmed, you want to replicate study to confirm findings, if it is disconfirmed, then you want to revise your hypothesis or operations

Conceptual Definition vs Operational Definition

• Conceptual definition explains what an abstract idea or construct means in theoretical terms— an idea of what is going to be measured

• Operational definition details the exact, concrete steps and measurements used to observe or quantify an idea— exact measurable

‘I’ vs ‘Me’

• I: the self thinker, active processor of information, social psychologists not interested

• Me: the known self, thought and beliefs about ourself, self-concept

Self-Concept

• The sum total of an individual’s personal beliefs about his or her own personal attributes— made up of self-schema

• Such as being a mom and thinking certain things about being nurturing, caring, warm, knowledgeable

Three Functions of Self-Concept

• Managerial: tells us what we do— relationship to physical and social world, organizes behavior, plans for future

• Organizational: helps organize, interpret, and recall information about self and world— more about how we take in information that’s coming to us— consuming information in a way because of your self-conceptual beliefs

• Emotional: helps us determine emotional responses— can guide emotional responses from things that happen in your life, we react differently to different things based on what we think is important in self-concept

Red-Dot Study

• Chimps raised alone or in a social group

• Paint a red dot on their forehead and then put in front of a mirror— if they have a self of self, they will touch their own forehead versus reaching for the mirror, raised with others led to development of sense of self

Independent vs Interdependent (Collectivist)

• Independent is the self is separate and autonomous, individual needs are most important and being true to yourself is very important, common in america and other western societies

• Interdependent or collectivist is when the self is connected with others, group and other needs are more important, more common in eastern societies

Implications of Self-Construal

• Since the self is connected to everything else, self-construal shapes cognition, emotion, motivation, social behavior

• independent v interdependent

Sources of Self-Knowledge - Introspection

• Thinking about yourself and looking within, searching for the ready-made answer in your own brain— typically used when the answer is clear and readily available

• Can be biased because we tend to want to see ourselves in a positive light

Sources of Self-Knowledge - Self-Perception

• Looking at your behavior to determine thoughts or attitudes, not searching through within your brain— only occurs if you are uncertain about your thoughts

• Such as learning you have a sweet tooth so you cut them all from your diet to see if you actually do

Sources of Self-Knowledge - Social Comparison Theory

• We learn about our own abilities by comparing ourselves to other people

• Tend to turn to others to evaluate opinions, abilities, and emotions

Counterfactual Thinking

• Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened but did not

• Upward counterfactuals do not typically make us feel better about ourselves— if only I did ___

• Downward counterfactuals make us feel pretty good about ourselves— at least I didn’t ____

Self Esteem

• The evaluative component to the self, consists of both positive and negative self-evaluations

• Attitude towards the self— how much we like ourselves

• High valance self-esteem is high self-esteem, low is low

• Stable could even mean they go to auditions and consistently get shut down, but stable self-esteem means they don’t change much based on the way the audition went

Self-Serving Cognitions

• Different ways people think about themselves or others to boost self esteem

• Rationalizing— thinking about things in a way that reflects positively on you

• Self-serving attribution— explanation for success is internally credits, failures are external

• False consensus effect— overestimating the extent to which others agree with our opinions to make us feel better about bad decisions, saying we all do something

• Better than average effect— thinking or rating ourselves as better than average on any given dimension

• Implicit egotism— tendency to automatically prefer things associated with ourselves

Self-Handicapping

• Creating some sort of obstacle to your performance in order to have an excuse for poor outcome

Person Perception

• The study of the beliefs that people have about others

• Includes inferences, EX: starting up conversation with a stranger and inferring they are funny without asking them

Accuracy

• How accurate we are

Self-Judgements

• Gold standard accuracy where we ask people to tell us how they think they are

• EX: ask a person how outgoing they are on a scale of 1-7

• Considered accurate if a perceiver agrees with the person’s self-perception

Consensus

• Average together rating from multiple people who are close to this person

• Considered accurate if it correlates positively with that others in general think of the person

Behavior

• Considered accurate if it correlated with behavior

• Anything that is observable is called behavior

• EX: count how many times a person makes another laugh to observe if they are actually funny

Zero-Acquaintance Paradigm

• Perceivers make judgement of people without ever interacting with them and without observing them with others

• EX: speed dating but you don’t get to talk, just stare

Extroversion Study

• People rated strangers on how extroverted they were with zero-acquaintance, consensus (average rating from people) was found for judgements of extroversion

Passini & Goldberg

• Accurate at zero-acquaintance where 12 groups of 6-9 members rated each other without any information across a set of personality variables

• Given that they did not know each other, expectation was inaccuracy, but it was found with consensus that the target’s self-rating agreed with the perceivers’ ratings

Thin Slices

• Brief information that is sometimes degraded

• EX: an audio tape that has content filtered and cannot understand what is being said, but we hear the tone of voice

• We are accurate with thin slices because judgements are fast and automatic, if you think about judgements too much, accuracy goes down

Attribution Theory

• How people perceive the causes of everyday experiences

• What is the cause of explanation of our own or others’ behaviors

• Internal attribution: you believe you are to blame

• External attribution: you believe something else is to blame from the outside

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations in other people’s behavior

• We tend to underestimate the situational contributions when judging other people and overestimate internal factors

Castro Study

• Participants read a speech that was pro or anti-Castro and then told the student had a choice or was assigned a position

• Participants rated how pro-Castro the student was and ignored the fact that the essay was assigned for a position to argue, they believed it reflected true personal belief

• People over-relied on the internal traits and did not account for external pressures

Actor-Observer Effect

• We don’t know what caused other people’s behaviors, so we make an internal attribution

• We think we know what causes our behaviors so make situational attribution

• Typically self-preserving (self-serving attribution) 

Bias Blind Spot

• We tend to think that other people are subject to biases but not ourselves

• We see in their judgement but send to think we are objective

Naive Realism

• Tendency to believe that we perceive the world is an accurate representation of reality, we rarely thinking our thinking is biased

• We think other share our thinking

Schemas

• A mental structure used to organize knowledge about the social world

Attraction

• The start of friendship and love

• Multiple factors to getting attracted to another person

Proximity

• Physical proximity is the geographical distance to another person

• Functional proximity is the frequency in which we cross paths with others

Intensification Hypothesis

• Proximity may not always lead to attraction, the initial response can determine if more contact over time with intensify attraction or if it will lead to a decrease in attraction

Festinger, Schachter, & Back (1950) Study

• Dormitory experiment where people were more likely to become friends if they lived in closer proximity to people or those they functionally proximity crossed paths with

Familiarity

• People like things that are familiar to them

Mere Exposure Effect

• To be more familiar with a person, you will be more likely to be attracted to them

• People develop a preference for a person, object, song, or brand because they are familiar with it

Similarity

• Matching hypothesis where people tend to like people who are more similar to them

• Not superficial, but age, income, education, race, etc.

Matching Hypothesis

• Like people who are more similar to you

• People are more likely to form and succeed in committed relationships with partners who are of similar level of social desirability, attractive levels

Reciprocity

• Liking someone because they like you back

• Due to social rejection

Social Support

• Support provided by social network

Perceived Social Support

• Perceived social support is not necessarily how much you received, but that you noticed and you wanted to receive it (most important)

Quantity vs Quality

• People need both, but the most valued is 3 or 4 friends rather than a ton with no quality

• People tend to agree it’s difficult to maintain 120 relationships

Friendships

• Protecting mental and physical health

• Examines how mutual bonds shape human well-being, social development, physical health

• Work friends are made due to proximity and similarity

Love (3 types)

• Intimacy—liking (emotional closeness, bondedness, warmth, sharing of personal thoughts and feelings)

• Passion—infatuation (the drive toward romance, physical attraction, sexual arousal)

• Commitment—empty love (short-term decision to love someone and the long-term plan to maintain that love)

Time Course of Romantic Relationships

• Overtime, the amount of passionate love will peak and then decrease and continue stagnant

• Companionate love will continue growing (intimacy and commitment)

Predictors of Stable Marriage

• Older when married

• Parents are in a stable relationship

• Educated and have a stable job— less stressful 

• Religious commitment

Predictors of Break-ups

• How you fight

• Four horsemen of relationship

• Criticism: frequency of criticism— instead of asking for something, you criticize how they never do something

• Verbal Contempt: very judgemental to the person themselves— going for the person, subjective to how disrespected you feel

• Defensiveness: related to cross complaining— bringing up previous unrelated information

• Stonewalling: emotional withdrawal— ignoring

Self-Schema

• Cognitive framework of beliefs and memories or generalizations about yourself that organize how you perceive and process information

Social Role Schemas

• Not necessarily part of your identity, but on average how a person in a specific role should behave

• Such as knowing what a mom is supposed to be like

Personality Schemas

• A person might be neurotic, etc.

• Expectations of how a person with a certain personality is supposed to behave

Event Schemas/Scripts

• Knowing how to behave in a certain situation

• Such as coming to class and knowing how to behave or going to the doctors and knowing what to do

Stereotypes

• Schemas about groups of people