Social Psychology (Psych 135, UCLA Winter 2019): Exam 1

Social Psychology

The study of the impact of social influence on the experience of the individual (their construals of social situations)

Diffusion of responsibility

A person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.

Considered a form of attribution

Social influence

The power of the situation

Social construal

Individuals are influenced by their

construals of social situations

Social psychology is not (1) ...

Sociology

Social psychology is not (2) ...

Abnormal psychology

Social psychology is not (3) ...

Personality psychology

Research Designs

Observational, correlational, experimental, archival, survey

Operationalization

Turning an empirical question into an experiment

How do you control for individual differences?

Random Assignment

Internal Validity

Is high when more confounding variables are accounted for; Only the variables you manipulated in the experiment could have produced the results you see.

External validity

The ability to generalize the results of the study

Basic Research

Research in the pursuit of knowledge(Pure research)

Applied research

Research concerned with trying to solve real-world problems.

Introspection

Source of Self-Knowledge

Who am I?

Can aid discovery of changes in oneself over time

Attributions

Source of Self-Knowledge

Self-serving biases

Looking glass self

Source of Self-Knowledge

Seeing the self through other's eyes

Social comparison theory

The hypothesis that individuals compare themselves to others in order to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states

Downward social comparison

comparing yourself to someone who do worse than you on a test to feel better

Upward social comparison

comparing yourself to someone who did better than you

bad for self esteem

Situationism

the principle that states that the social self changes across different contexts.

Working Self-concept

Subset of self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context.

High self-monitors

self-monitors that pay close attention to their social context and adjust their self-presentation accordingly.

Low self-monitors

self- monitors that use inner beliefs and values in deciding how to behave in a situation.

Self-enhancement

the desire to maintain, increase, or protect one's positive self-views

The better-than-average effect

the tendency of most people to think of themselves as above

average in terms of various traits and abilities

This cannot be true because then there would be no average to be above.

Self-handicapping

The tendency to engage in self-defeating behavior in order to have an excuse ready should one perform poorly or fail

Self-affirmation

Engaging in efforts to maintain a positive self-concept, especially in the face of feedback or events that threaten a valued aspect of your self-image, by affirming a valued aspect of yourself unrelated to the threat.

Self-Regulation

Refers to the processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior in pursuit of their goals. Often requires the ability to forego short term rewards in order to realize long term goals.

Ego depletion

A state, produced by acts of self-control, in which we lack the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self-control.

Willpower is a limited resource.

Decision fatigue

Impacts how sequential decisions/judgments are made in other contexts; people get tired and begin to default to easy answers.

Controlled thinking

Conscious, Intentional, Voluntary, Effortful

Automatic thinking

Non-conscious, Unintentional, Involuntary, Effortless

Implicit learning

Picking up things about our environments without awareness

Schemas

Knowledge structures, frameworks for understanding new information

Social cognition hypothesis:

The police may have been doing their best to be accurate, but they made a tragic mistake because of stereotypic associations.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A belief that leads to its own fulfillment

Availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common

Representative heuristic

judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes

Base-rate information

Information about the relative frequency of events or of member of different categories in a population

Judgments based on representativeness may ignore other important sources of information (may neglect base-rate info)

Principle of serviceable associated habits

Darwin

Human emotions were evolutionarily advantageous for our mammalian ancestors

Darwin's Emotional Expressions (1)

All humans have the same facial muscles and should use them to commnuicate emotions similarly

Darwin's Emotional Expressions (2)

Humans share ancestry with other mammals and therefore our emotionally expressive behaviors should resemble those of other species

Darwin's Emotional Expressions (3)

People who are blind display emotion in the same way that people with sight do.

Sensory-Motor Origins of Emotional Expressions

"Taking it in" vs. "Getting it out"; Fear expressions allow one to take in more air Disgust expressions do the opposite.

Innate poison detector

The hedonic treadmill

We adapt to things getting better or worse to maintain a constant

level of happiness

Affective forecasting

Predicting future emotions

Immune neglect

the tendency for people to underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events, which leads them to overestimate the extent to which life's problems will reduce their personal well-being

Focalism

A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of associated factors of other events

For instance, a happy wedding day doesn't guarantee a

satisfying marriage

Flow

Becoming lost in a task that is challenging, but attainable

Science's happiness recipe

Money- enough to raise us out of poverty

Flow

Purposefulness & meaning

Close personal relationships

Moral foundations theory

Proposes that there are five evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgments

The five universal moral domains

Moral foundations theory

Care/harm

Fairness/cheating

Loyalty/betrayal

Authority/subversion

Purity/degradation

Dual-process theory of moral judgment

Moral reasoning involves automatic emotional responses, as well as more controlled cognitive reasoning

utilitarian reasoning

An ethical approach that emphasizes the consequences of an action and seeks the action or decision where the benefits most outweigh the costs.

Moral dumbfounding

Maintaining a moral belief despite not being able to construct evidence in support

"I can't explain why. I just know that its wrong"

Inequity aversion: Nonsocial hypothesis

Domain-general mechanism for relative loss aversion - gauge your own payoffs vs. expected payoffs

Inequity aversion:Social hypothesis

Regulate contributions to and payoffs from cooperative interactions (avoid freeloaders)

Hindsight bias

People's tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a given outcome

Debriefing

Participants must receive a full explanation of the research when their involvement is done.

Reflected self-appraisal

A belief about what others think of one's self.

Working self-concept

A subset of self knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context.

Contingencies of self-worth

A perspective maintaining that people's self esteem is contingent on the successes and failures in domains on which they have based their self-worth.

Sociometer hypothesis

The idea that self-esteem is an internal subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favorably by others

Self-regulation

Processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior in the pursuit of goals, including the ability to resist short-term rewards that thwart the attainment of long-term goals.

Self-discrepancy theory

A theory that behavior is motivated by standards reflecting ideal and ought selves. Fallin short of these standards produces specific emotions: dejection-related emotions in the case of actual ideal.

Actual self

The self that people believe they are

Ideal self

The self that embodies people's wishes and aspirations.

Promotion focus

Self-regulation of behavior with respect to ideal self standards; a focus on attaining positive outcomes through approach-related behaviors

Prevention focus

Self-regulation of behavior with respect to ought self standards; a focus on avoiding negative outcomes through avoidance related- behaviors.

Focal emotion

An emotion that is especially common within a particular culture.

Display rule

A culturally specific rule that governs how, when, and to whom people express emotion

Broaden-and- build hypothesis

The idea that positive emotions broaden thoughts and actions, helping people build social resources.

Social intuitionist model of moral judgment

The idea that people first have fast emotional reactions to morally relevant events, which influence the way they reason to arrive at a judgment of right or wrong.

Moral foundations theory

A theory proposing that there are five evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgments.

Fundamental attribution error

The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions of behavior.

Construal

One's interpretation of or inference about the stimuli or situations that one confronts.

Independent (individualistic) culture

A culture in which people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people and having attributes that exist in the absence of any connection to others

Interdependent (collectivistic) culture

A culture in which people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and placing less importance on individual freedom or personal control over their lives