social psychology exam 1

social psych

-looking at the social world through the eyes of a scientist requires us to face our biases and preferences

-study of how people come to believe what they do; how they explain, remember, predict, make decisions, and evaluate themselves and others

conceptualization and measurement in research

-process by which we describe meaning to the key facts, concepts, or other phenomena that we’re investigating

-need to translate ideas into “measurable variables”

-need to be in realistic contexts

basic research

tries to find the best answer to the question of why people behave the way they do, purely to satisfy intellectual curiosity

applied research

tries to solve a specific social problem

hindsight bias

(I knew it all along phenomenon)- the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out

social cognition

the study of how people come to believe what they do; how they explain, remember, predict, make decisions, and evaluate themselves and others; and why these processes so frequently produce errors

system 1 thinking

automatic processing:

-unconscious, involuntary

-schemas and heuristics

automatic thinking is pervasive and dominates much of our mental lives

system 2 thinking

controlled processing:

-conscious effort, novel problems

-check and balance for automatic thinking

schemas

mental models of the world. schemas can be stereotypes, categories, expectations, attitudes, and mindset

-generic knowledge structures that guide the comprehender’s interpretations, inferences, expectations, and attention

-knowledge structures that represent the general features

implicit personality theory

Infer unobservable traits through observable
• Form associations between different traits
• These associations form implicit personalities
• Personality, therefore, is a social artifact
• Inferences are mental shortcuts and are prone to errors

-primacy effects

-halo effect

instantiation

schemas are wholistic structures

-they include slots for the components and are flexible to details; have wide range of values that could fill in

-instantiate= to represent (an abstraction) by a concrete instance

functions of schemas

-simplify:

• impose structure and organization

• aid in understanding; reduce ambiguity

-guide information processing:

• direct attention and perception

• guide memory, expectations, inferences

-active construction of reality

• context determines meaning (construal)

advantages of schematic processing

-organize new info quickly

-better memory

-predict the future

disadvantages of schematic processing

-can be misapplied

-can lead to distorted memory

can cause interpretations and ambiguous info, leads to false conclusions

heuristic

mental operations that provide rules of thumb that guide problem solving and making judgements

-require little conscious/controlled thought

availability heuristic

Tendency to predict the likelihood of an event, or judge how risky it is, based on how easy it is to bring specific examples to mind

Errors occur when-

rare instances are vivid and easily brought to mind (more available)

common instances are difficult to bring to mind (less available)

sensation vs perception

perception involves constructing and interpretation of environmental stimuli by using knowledge contained in our schemas

social perception

process by which we form impressions of ourselves, others and the social world

representative heuristic

strategy of classifying an event according to how similar it is to the typical case

errors occur when-

people ignore base-rate info

-base rate fallacy

-conjunction fallacy

anchoring and adjustment heuristic

judgements are biased towards and initially presented value or reference point

errors occur when-

people do not sufficiently adjust their judgements away from the anchor

social inferences

process of drawing conclusions about things we observe

step 1- gathering data

step 2- integrating data

halo and horn

a perceiver forms of all impressions of who they meet/know

illusory correlation

the perception of a relationship where none exists

-a false impression that 2 variables correlate

casual attributions

inferences people draw about the causes of events, others, behavior and our own behavior

-we depend on attributions, strong need to make sense of experiences

dispositional- occurs when we assign the cause of a person’s behavior to their internal characteristics, such as personality traits, motives, attitudes, or abilities.

situational-occurs when we explain behavior based on external factors outside the individual’s control, such as environmental conditions, social pressures, or specific circumstances.

influences on attributions

-Cognitive style
• Explanatory Style
• Pessimistic
• Optimistic
• Just World Belief

-culture
• Individualistic vs
Collectivistic

fundamental attribution error

-applies to our attributions about others

-underestimate influences of situation

actor/observer differences

-attribute our own actions to situation

-attribute others actions to disposition

self-serving attributions

-attribute ones success to internal, dispositional factors

-attribute one’s failure to external, situational factors

activation of schema

Primacy effect – early information has more influence
than later information
• Priming – subtle cues that direct our thinking
• Framing – how information is structured (framed)

minimizing biases

Social Psychology:
• Mistakes are not accidents, but BIASES (patterned,
predictable)
• Reason for beliefs often not system II at root; system
II explains how it understands the belief
• Techniques to eliminate cognitive bias do not work
• Need ways to avoid some of the pitfalls
• Shape policies and situations to make better decisions
• To avoid mistakes, we must reshape the environment we’ve
built around us, rather than hope to change ourselves