Psychology 120, Midterm 2 (Based off Slides)

Info off slides from weeks 6-10 for Midterm #2 (week 10 and 9 up till the big five model)

What is Social Psychology?

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

How did Kurt Lewin explain Behaviour?

(1936) he belived ‘Behaviour’ was a function of the Person as well as their Environment.

Define Social Norms?

The unwritten guidelines for how to behave in social contexts

What is Ostracism?

A powerful form of social pressure where someone is ousted from a group of people for not following the social norm

What is mimicry?

When a person acts in a certain manner because social norms indicate they should.

Social Loafing

When individuals put less effort into tasks when working with others

Social facilitation

When one’s performance is affected by the presence of others.

What is Conformity?

Refers to our tendency to act and think like the people around us

What is Normative Influence?

A phenomenon where we go along with others because we are concerned about what they will think of us.

What is Informational Influence?

Where other people are often an important source of information, and occurs when people feel the group is giving them useful information.

What is Developmental intergroup theory?

A theory which postulates that adults heavy focus on gender leads children to pay attention to gender as a key source of information about themselves and others, to seek out any possible gender differences, an to form rigid stereotypes based on gender that are subsequently difficult to change.

What is the Gender schema theory?

Theory which argues that children are active learners who essentially socialize themselves. In this case, children actively organize other’s behaviour, activities, and attributes into gender categories, which are known as schemas.

What is the Social Learning Theory?

Argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modelling. Children are rewarded and reinforced for behaving in concordance with gender roles and punished for breaking gender roles.

What is Groupthink?

A decision-making problem in which group members avoid arguments and strive for agreement. Group members will trend towards the same ideas to minimize conflict.

Groupthink is more likely to happen if…

Typically a group is more susceptible to groupthink if there is a strong ‘directive’ leader. Specifically an individual who suppresses dissenters and encourages the group to consider fewer alternative ideas.

What are the three main problems associated with groupthink?

• Group members may minimize or ignore potential problems and risks in the ideas they are considering

• They may apply social pressure to influence people who are not fully in support of an idea in an effort to get them to conform

• The group often becomes overconfident and fails to think carefully or critically about its conclusions and decisions.

What does ‘Obedience Research’ examine?

How people react when given an order or a command from someone in a position of authority.

The Milgram Experiment examines what?

Obedience to authority (the shock machine and how long participants would continue to shock the perceived ‘victim’ of the experiment.

What is the Bystander Effect?

Diffusion of responsibility. If multiple people witness an emergency, that responsibility is diffused between them, so it is if each person feels only 10% of the responsibility of the situation, which may not motivate any individual to action.

What is altruism?

When a person acts without considering any benefit to themselves.

What are the two types of cognitive process?

Explicit vs. Implicit processes.

Fual-process models influences the judgements we make about a person.

What are explicit processes?

Corresponds roughly to conscious thought, deliberate, effortful, relatively slow, and generally under our intentional control.

What are Implicit processes?

comprise out unconscious thought, intuitive, automatic, effortless, very fast, and operate largely outside of our intentional control.

What is Person Perception?

Refers to the processes by which individuals categorize and form judgements about other people.

What are Schemas?

Clusters of knowledge and expectations about individuals and groups.

What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Occurs when a first impression (or an expectation) affects one’s behaviour, and then that affects other people’s behaviour, leading one to ‘confirm’ the initial impression or expectation.

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

A tendency to over-emphasize internal dsipositional) attributions and under-emphasize external (situational) factors when explaining other people’s behaviour.

What’s an In-Group?

Groups we feel positively towards and identify with (family, friends, home team, etc.)

What’s an Outgroup?

‘other’ groups that we don’t identify with

What is Ingroup bias?

Occurs when positive biases towards the self get extended to include one’s ingroups and people become motivated to see their ingroups as superior to their outgroups.

What is prejudice?

Our emotions towards ‘other’ groups

What are Stereotypes?

The way that we think about and frame ‘other’ groups

What is Discrimination?

How we behave towards (disfavoring) ‘other’ groups.

Hostile vs. Benevolent Sexism

Hostile Sexism — refers to the negative attitudes of women as inferior and incompetent relative to men.

Benevolent Sexism — refers to the perception that women need to be protected, supported, and adored by men.

What is The Contact Hypothesis?

Hypothesis which predicts that social contact between members of different groups is extremely important to overcoming prejudice.

Define ‘Culture’

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 is Enculturation?

The concept which refers to the ways people learn about shared cultural knowledge.

What are the pros and cons of an Ethnographic Study?

Pros — culturally sensitive, studies people in their natural environments

Cons — difficult to make comparisons between cultures

What are the pros and cons of a Cross-Cultural Study?

Pros — Able to make comparisons between groups

Cons — Vulnerable to Ethnocentric bias

Define Self-construal

The way people define the way they ‘fit’ in relation to others.

What are cultural scripts?

Cultural concepts which dictate how an individual should or shouldn’t behave.

How are Individualists likely to define themselves?

As being unique individuals with a stable collection of personal traits, and that these traits drive their behaviour

How are collectivists likely to define themselves?

As being defined differently in each new social context and social context rather than internal traits, and are the primary drivers of behaviour.

What is Cultural Intelligence?

The ability to appreciate differences, even if they do not necessarily share another cultures views or adopt its way of doing things.

What is Cultural Flexibility?

The ability to move from one cultural context to another and fir it. This involves the ability to be cognitively flexible to understand the cultural context by determining the norms and rules of each context/culture.

What is Motivation?

A force that initiates and directs behaviour. This can include thoughts, feelings, sensations, and bodily processes.

What is Homeostasis?

Refers to the body’s physiological processes that allow it to maintain consistent internal states in response to the outer environment

What is a Drive State?

Motivational mechanisms designed to ensure self-beneficial actions. Specifically goals that are beneficial to our survival and reproduction, like eating, thirst procreation, etc.

What is Allostasis?

A process in which motivation is not only influenced by current needs, but also by the anticipation of future needs caused by stress

What are drives?

Biological triggers that tell us we may be deprived of something and cause us to seek out what is needed, such as food or water.

What are incentives?

The stimuli we seek out to reduce our drives.

What is the difference between Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation?

Intrinsically Motivated — focused on the benefits of the process of pursuing a goal

Extrinsically Motivated — focused on the benefits of achieving the goal

What does it mean to be Amotivational?

A feeling of having little or no motivation to perform a behaviour

What is a Goal?

Represents our desired state, or how we want things to be. We make both Prevention goals and Promotion goals.

What are Prevention and Promotion goals?

Prevention — goals made for the sake of avoiding harm

Promotion — goals made for the sake of attaining an advancement in life

What is Self-Regulation?

The process by which we alter our perceptions, feelings, and actions to pursue a goal

What is Self-control?

Our capacity to control our impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist changing goals.

What are Emotions?

The mental and physiological feeling states that direct our attention and guide our behaviour. The most fundamental emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

What is the Amygdala, and what is it responsible for?

A group of nuclei in the middle portion of the temporal lobes in each hemisphere of the brain. The amygdala receives sensory input from the cortex approximately 200 milliseconds after an emotional stimulus appears.

Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion

proposes that the experience of an emotion is accompanied by physiological arousal

What is the James-Lange Theory of Emotion?

Proposes that our experience of an emotion is the result of the arousal that we experience

What is the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion?

Asserts that the experience of emotion is determined by the intensity of the arousal we are experiencing, but that the cognitive appraisal of the situation determines what the emotion will be.

What is a Polygraph test?

Measures whether heart rate and sweating increase when a person responds to different events or questions. Sudden changes in these levels suggest that the person is experiencing stress and may be hiding something. However this is an inaccurate measure of lie detection.

What is Personality?

A persons typical way of thinking, feeling and behaving. the field within psychology that studies the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, goals, and interests of normal individuals.

What are Nomothetic Approaches?

Examines personality in large groups of people, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure

What are Idiographic Approaches?

Focuses on detailed descriptions of individuals and their unique personality characteristics

What is the Big Five Model?

A personality model which includes the following traits:

• Openness to experience

• conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism