Chapter 12 - Psychology 111

Impression Formation

how we form opinions of others

First impressions are involuntary responses

Long lasting and difficult to change

Social Schema

Self fulfilling prophecy

your initial impression reflects in their personality

Attribution

Personal explanation for behavior

Dispositional causes

Internal causes

Situational causes

Environmental factors

Fritz Heider

people tend to focus more on behavior of others than on circumstances in which the behavior occurs

• Fundamental attribution error - tendency to attribute behavior to internal or dispositional causes such as intelligence or laziness

  • ignore external circumstances that influence behavior of others

Actor Observer effect

Attribute ones own behavior to external factors

Cognitive dissonance theory

Inconsistencies between attitude and behavior lead to a state of dissonance or emotional discomfort

Elaboration Likelihood model

People are more likely to carefully evaluate a persuasive message when their motivational state is high

Characterizing Attraction

1. Similarity

• Hold similar values and attitudes

• physical appearance, social class, religious views, ethnicity, height, etc..

2. Physical attractiveness

• “What is beautiful is also good.”

• Matching hypothesis: people will seek partners similar to themselves in physical attractiveness and other characteristics

  • with less attractive people that one will somehow compensate through money

Steinberg’s Triangle

Steinberg proposes that relationships are balanced when the love triangles of both partners are overlapping

Altruistic motives

Unselfish motivations to help someone

Self centered motives

Helping in order to seek some sort of external or internal reward

Situational ambiguity

• In an ambiguous situation where its not clear what happening, people are less likely to help

• Also less likely in unfamiliar environments

• If the perceived cost is low

• Diffusion of responsibility - the number of people around the situation

• Similarity - helping people who are like themselves

• empathy

• Facial features

• Mood and gender

• Social norms

In Groups

social, religious, ethnic, racial, and national groups

Out group

all other groups

Out group homogeneity

tendency to perceive members of other racial or ethnic groups as being alike in homogenous white preceding ones own group as being different

• authoritarian personality is associated with prejudiced attitudes

Contact Hypothesis

Best way to reduce prejudice is bringing groups closer together in contact with each other

Conformity

1. people assume that the majority is correct

2. so concerned about being accepted by the group that they don’t care whether their judgement was correct

3. they feel its easier to go along with the group than to disagree

Legitimization of authority

obey authority figures

Social validation

people are generally more willing to comply with more extreme requests once they have shown willingness to comply with lesser requests

Social facilitation

tendency for people to work better or harder when they work in the presence of others

Groupthink

group of people to become so concerned with reaching a consensus that they lose the ability to critically evaluate the problem before them

• the presence of conformity to the major opinion

  • members are strongly attached to the group

  • an external threat is present

  • strong minded leader directing the group

Encoding

1. Acoustically (sound) - auditory singal’s to recognizable sounds

2. Visually (mental pictures) - visual patterns

3. Semantically (meaning) -transforming visual images and sounds into meaningful words

Retrieval cues

Cues that help jog information back into awarneness

3 Stage Model #1 Sensory Memory

• Strong sensory information for a short period of time (fraction of a second to 3-4 seconds)

• Sensory Register - the sensory impression then disappears and is replaced by the next one and so on

  • Iconic Memory - almost all we see enter this sensory register

    • type of photographic memory for a fraction of a second

  • Eidetic imagery - photographic memory

    • recalling an image so accurately seeming as through they are still looking at this

    • this is very rare and is primarily in children

  • Echoic memory - auditory stimuli encoded as a mental representation (about 2-3 seconds longer than visual images)

3 Stage Model #2 Short Term Working Memory

• Some sensory impressions don’t just fade away and get to be processed further

• Can last 30 seconds, but you can expand the 30 second rule through maintenance rehearsal: repeating information over and over again to help succeed at short term memory but not processing it into deeper meaning

• +- 7

• Visual and acoustic but mainly acoustic

• Chunking - grouping large number of bits of information

3 Stage Model #3 Long Term Memory

• Can be days, weeks, or a lifetime

• Is limitless of what it can hold

• Consolidation: unstable fresh memories into stable long term memories

• Semantic coding - meaning

• Elaborative rehearsal - focus on the meaning of the material

  • Better than maintenance rehearsal because of the levels of processing theory: the level at which information is encoded or processed determines how well or how long information is stored in memory

• Semantic Network Model - information is retained within network of interlinking concepts

Declarative Memory

Facts and personal information that requires a conscious effort to bring to mind

Semantic

Memory of facts

Episodic

Memory of a personal experiences that constitute the story of your life

Retrospective

Memory of past experiences

Prospective

process of remembering to remember

Procedural

memory of how to do things

Implicit

memory evolved without any conscious effort to remember

Explicit

requires conscious effort

Constructionist theory

memory is a process that stitched together bits and pieces of stored information and reconstructing personal memories

• produced an interesting perspective on negative stereotyping - ascribing negative traits to people of certain groups that can influence perceptions and attitudes of stereotyping

Flashbulb memory

extremely stressful or emotionally arousing personal or historical events may leave which lasting, and highly detailed memories

Decay theory

memories consist of traces in the brain that gradually deteriorate and fade over time

Ebinghaus Forgetting curve

Employed a savings method to test retention

Interference theory

explains why some memories are easily forgotten and others are vivid

• Retroactive interference : interference occurring after material is learned but before its recalled

• Procedure interference: caused by the influence of previously learned material

Helps explain serial position effect

• Primary : remember first thing you learned

• Recency: remember the last thing you learned

Recall tasks

1. Free recall - asked to recall as much information you can

• Serial - order

• Paired - pairs

2. Recognition task - asked to pick out correct answer over a range of alternative answers