PSY 120: Social Psychology and Culture

Flashcards covering social psychology concepts, conformity, group dynamics, attribution theories, stereotypes, and cultural psychology.

How is social psychology defined?

The branch of psychological science mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

What formula did Kurt Lewin (1936) propose to describe behaviour?

$B = f(P,E)$, stating that Behaviour is a function of the Person and the Environment.

What are social norms and ostracism?

Social norms are unwritten guidelines for how to behave in social contexts, while ostracism is a powerful form of social pressure involving exclusion.

What did Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Study investigate?

The psychological impact of social roles and social norms on human behaviour in simulated prison conditions.

What is the difference between social loafing and social facilitation?

Social loafing occurs when individuals put less effort into tasks when working with others, whereas social facilitation occurs when one's performance is affected by the presence of others.

What is the distinction between normative influence and informational influence in conformity?

Normative influence occurs when people go along with others out of concern for what they will think of them; informational influence occurs when people conform because they view the group as a useful source of information.

In Solomon Asch’s conformity studies depicted below, which comparison line matches the standard line, and what was the main finding?

Line B is the correct match; however, many participants conformed to the confederates and gave an incorrect answer.

Under what social conditions does conformity increase or decrease?

Conformity increases with unanimity and a larger group (peaking at $5$ to $6$ people), but decreases when another nonconformist is present, when tasks are extremely clear and simple, or when responses are made anonymously.

How does developmental intergroup theory explain gender development compared to gender schema theory?

Developmental intergroup theory argues that adults' heavy focus on gender leads children to pay attention to it and form rigid stereotypes, while gender schema theory posits that children are active learners who self-socialize by organizing behaviours into cognitive gender schemas.

How does social learning theory explain the development of gender roles?

It argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modelling, where children are rewarded for adhering to gender roles and punished for breaking them.

What is groupthink, and what type of leadership fosters it?

Groupthink is a decision-making problem where group members avoid arguments and strive for agreement to minimize conflict; it is often fostered by a strong or 'directive' leader who suppresses dissenters and limits alternative ideas.

What are the three main problems associated with groupthink?

1. Members may minimize or ignore potential problems and risks. 2. Members apply social pressure to push non-supportive individuals into conformity. 3. The group becomes overconfident and fails to critically evaluate decisions.

What did Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments examine?

How people react and obey when given an order or command to deliver increasingly severe electric shocks to a 'learner' from someone in an authority position.

What social psychological concept is illustrated by the shift in perceived responsibility from 1 witness ($100\%$) to 10 witnesses ($10\%$) below?

Diffusion of responsibility, a key mechanism of the bystander effect.

What three factors did Latané and Darley (1968) identify in their study of the bystander effect?

Normative influences, informational influences, and diffusion of responsibility.

What heroic act by Wesley Autrey in New York City is cited as a prime example of altruism?

He jumped onto subway tracks to shield and hold down Cameron Hollopeter, who was having a seizure, while train cars rolled inches above them.

How did Malala Yousafzai demonstrate disobedience to authority?

She defied the Taliban's orders forbidding education for girls by insisting on going to school in Pakistan, survived being shot in the face, and became a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

How do explicit processes differ from implicit processes in dual-process models?

Explicit processes are conscious, deliberative, effortful, relatively slow, and intentional; implicit processes are unconscious, intuitive, automatic, effortless, very fast, and operate largely outside intentional control.

How quickly do individuals form first impressions regarding trustworthiness, competence, likeability, and aggressiveness from a photograph?

In as little as half a second ($0.5\,\text{seconds}$) of exposure.

What is a self-fulfilling prophecy in person perception?

A phenomenon where a first impression or expectation alters one's behaviour, which subsequently affects other people's behaviour, causing the initial expectation to be confirmed.

What is the fundamental attribution error?

The tendency to over-emphasize internal (dispositional) factors and under-emphasize external (situational) factors when explaining other people's behaviour.

What is ingroup bias?

A bias that occurs when positive attitudes toward the self extend to include one's ingroups, motivating individuals to see their ingroups as superior to outgroups.

How do social psychologists distinguish between prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination?

Prejudice refers to emotions toward other groups, stereotypes are how we think about them, and discrimination is how we behave toward or disfavour them.

What are the two components of ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001)?

Hostile sexism (negative attitudes viewing women as inferior and incompetent compared to men) and benevolent sexism (the perception that women need to be protected, supported, and adored by men).

What were the reaction time findings from the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) regarding racial pairings?

Participants took an average of $800\,\text{ms}$ to respond to Caucasian/positive and Black/negative pairings, but $1015\,\text{ms}$ (one-fifth of a second longer) for White/bad and Black/good pairings, indicating implicit negative racial associations.

What statistics demonstrate racial disparities in the Canadian criminal justice system according to 2018 reports?

Indigenous Peoples made up about $5\%$ of Canada's national population but over $25\%$ of prison intakes (Statistics Canada, 2018); in Toronto, Black men were $20\,\text{times}$ more likely to be arrested and Black people $20\,\text{times}$ more likely to be killed by police action than White people (OHRC, 2018).

What two primary methods can improve intergroup relations and reduce prejudice?

1. Reprogramming implicit networks through practice (training situational attributions; Kawakami lab). 2. The contact hypothesis (equal-status contact with cooperation on common goals).

How is culture defined?

A pattern of meaning for understanding how the world works, which is shared among a group of people and passed from one generation to the next.

What are emotional cultural display rules?

Rules learned early in life that specify how people in a given culture should express emotion.

How do universalist and social constructivist perspectives on emotion differ?

Universalists claim that at a fundamental level all humans feel similarly despite cultural differences; social constructivists argue that humans adapt to distinctive environments, resulting in emotional variability across cultures.

What is enculturation?

The fluid and dynamic process by which people learn about shared cultural knowledge and regional cultural norms.

How does cultural psychology differ from cross-cultural psychology?

Cultural psychology seeks to appreciate culture from within using ethnographic studies; cross-cultural psychology uses standardized measures (like Likert scales) to compare cultures and is vulnerable to ethnocentric bias.

What is self-construal, and how does it differ between individualists and collectivists?

Self-construal is how people define how they fit relative to others. Individualists rely on an independent self (stable traits driving behaviour), while collectivists rely on an interdependent self (social context driving behaviour).

What are the five central features of culture in social psychology?

1. Progressive Cultivation 2. Versatility 3. Sharing 4. Accumulation 5. Patterns.

What is progressive cultivation in the context of culture?

A relatively small subset of intentional activities aimed at 'being refined' (e.g., visual art, ballet, playing an instrument), which historically fostered an elitist mindset.

What is cultural intelligence?

The ability to understand and appreciate why members of other cultures act in the ways they do without dismissing them as weird, inferior, or immoral.

What differences exist between North American and East Asian cultural contexts regarding positive affective states (Tsai et al., 2006)?

North Americans prefer 'high arousal positive' states (e.g., excited, enthusiastic), whereas East Asians generally favour 'low arousal positive' states (e.g., calm, peaceful).

What are cultural flexibility and cultural inflexibility?

Cultural flexibility is the ability to cognitively scan, assess, and adapt to different cultural contexts; cultural inflexibility is the inability to adapt, which often fosters an 'us versus them' attitude.