Social Psychology Ch1

Social psychology

Scientific/empirical study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions are influenced by the presence or perceived presence of people

Empirical

Something that comes from experimentation or direct measurement

Evolutionary psychology

Explains social behaviors in terms of genetic factors that evolve over time, hard to test the hypotheses because change is slow over time

Personality psychology

Explaining people’s behavior in terms of their traits

Focuses on individual differences but can ignore social influence

Construal

How a person perceives, comprehends, and interprets social world

Context

What is the main thing that construal is shaped by

Sociology

Analyses at level of group, society, or institution at large the social aspects of that group

Individual within group

What is the analysis level in social psychology

Fundamental attribution error

Tendency to explain behavior entirely with personality underestimating social influence

Fundamental attribution error

Often happens when people get security from feeling they could never be like the other

Increases vulnerability to destructive social influences because less aware of susceptibility

Oversimplifies problem and increases victim blaming

Behaviorism

Only need to consider reinforcing properties of environment to understand behavior

Overlooked importance of how people interpreted environment

Gestalt Psychology

Study subjective way things are to people rather than objective

First proposed theory on how people perceive

Lewin was one of the founding members and helped shaped US social psych

Gestalt psychology

What psychological approach is the basis of construal

Naive realism

Belief we see things as they are underestimating personal bias

Thinks if person sees things differently, they are biased, not us

Self esteem motive, and social cognition motive

What are the 2 major motives that shape construals

When motives are in opposite directions

According to Festinger, when do we get our most valuable insights

Self esteem motive

The need to feel good about ourselves

Social cognition motive

Need to be accurate

Self esteem motive

Which motive do people tend to prioritize

Self esteem motive

Can have effects like justifying behavior and tolerating suffering, impeding self improvement

Social cognition

Study of how people select, interpret, use, and remember info to make decisions and judgement

Assumes that all people try to view world as accurately as possible

Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic

Many social psychological studies have been limited to this group

Aristotle

Stated that people were naturally social creatures

Freud

person who focused on individual and their traits, but had minimal focus on environment impact

Skinner

Focused on environment and key figure in behaviorism

Thought people didn’t have free will and were at mercy of environment

Lewin

Father of social psychology

Behavior is a function of a person and their environment (B= f(p,E))

Emphasized need to understand individual and environment

Naive realism

When someone doesn’t realize they are construing something they are exhibiting what phenomenon

Construal

Valone, Ross, and Lepper

Showed neutral stimulus and depending on beliefs, viewers believed that it was biased against their side, demonstrating what

Construal

Valone, Ross, and Lepper as well as peace plan experiment demonstrate which psychological concept

Liberman, Samuels, and Ross study

People played 7 round of prisoners dilemma

Subjects were selected based on if RA said were more cooperative or competitive

Were told game was either community game or wallstreet game

Showed no difference between cooperative and competitive group, but difference depending on name

Construal

The Lieberman, Samuels, and ross study is a best example of what concept as an underlying factor

Hindsight bias

After people know something happened, exaggerated how much they would’ve predicted it before

Observational research/ basic observation

Observing people and recording behavior

Observational research

Good for describing behavior and can get more accurate behavior if people don’t know are being observed

Don’t discuss the why behind behavior and some thing are hard to observe because are rear/subtle

Theory developed, hypotheses are derived, hypothesis is tested, theory revised

What is the typical order of theory development

Ethnography

Researchers try to understand group by observing behavior from inside

Try not to impose bias and is great for anthropology

Should have 2+ people so can independently observe behavior and avoid bias

Archival analysis

Analyzing documents, archives, media, and diaries to gian more information

Correlation method

2 variables and relationship between them is specifically measured

Correlation coefficient r

Statistic that shows how well something can predict 1 variable from the other with range of + or - 1

Survey

Sample of people are asked about attitudes around social behavior

Often used with correlation and is best with a random sample

Extraneous variable

3rd variable that affects both accounting for correlation

Experimentation

What is the only was to establish causation

Internal validity

Keeping everything but IV same, only IV influences DV

Random assignment

Allows to minimize affect of personal difference on experiment

Probability value (p)

How likely findings were due to chance, usually is less than 0.05

External validity

How well study can be generated to other situations

Psychological realism

Extent that psychological processes from experiment similar to real life psychological processes

Cover story

Fake scenario that is used to make study more realistic and increase psychological realism

Field experiments

Study behavior outside of lab in natural environment

Trade of between internal and external validity

What is the dilemma of social psychologists

Replication

Can conduct same study with different settings and populations

Big test of external validity

Meta-analysis

Average results across 2+ studies to see if IV is reliable

Basic research

Research where the goal is to find why people behave as they do

Applied research

Research where the goal is to solve certain social problems

Empirical

Social psych is ____ and should have testable hypotheses

Hypothetical constructs

Constructs that we assume are real and can measure, even if not tangible

Confirmation bias

Searching for or processing information in a ways that are consistent with pre-existing beliefs

Theory

Broad integrated set of principles to explain and predict outcomes regarding how world works

Hypothesis

Testable proposition that describes that relationship may exist between events

Sets up falsification and can be from theories or personal observation

Normal

The more people that are in a study, the more _____ the distribution of the study will become

Cross cultural research

Lets social psychologists study effect of culture on social psychology and is important that researchers don’t apply own beliefs when doing it

Social neuroscience

Connection between biological processes and people’s behavior socially

Uses tools like EEG and fMRI while participants think of social scenarios

Open science movement

Make scientific process more open to public

Should have space where researchers share information so others can replicate results and expand it

Will publish studies regardless of results as long as it follows proper guidelines

Not crisis but can do better

What is the national academy of sciences’ stance on the replication crisis

Informed consent

Researcher explains nature of experiment to participants before start

Deception

Involves misleading participants to true person

Has to be justified with significant value and no other way to do experiment

Debreifing

Explains at the end of deception study to participants the purpose of the study and what happened

Try to alleviate any discomfort and allow for withdrawal of data

Institutional review board

Reviews research and federally funded projects

Beneficence and non maleficence, respect to rights and dignity, and integrity

What are the 3 main guidelines for the APA

Beneficence and non maleficence

Maximizes benefit while minimizing harm

Respect to rights and dignity

Confidentiality, privacy, self determination, or debriefing after necessary deception

Scientist, non-scientist, person not affiliated with institution

Each IRB needs at least 1 _____, 1 _____, and 1 _____

Integrity

Promote accuracy and honesty in science, teaching, and practice of psychology

Automatic thinking

Thought that is non-conscious, involuntary, effortless, and unintentional

Helps us understand new situations by relating them to previous ones

Schemas

Mental structures that organize knowledge about social world

Help us understand world by filling in knowledge gaps

Accessibility

Extent to which schemas are in forefront of mind and are likely to use them

Past experience, priming, related to a current goal

What are the 3 main things that affect how accessible a schema is

Priming

Recent experiences increasing schema accessibility

Accessible and applicable

For something to be able to prime it must be _____ and _____

Priming

Higgins, Rholes, and Jones did experiment showing interpretation of neutral stimulus depending on the trait words people had to memorize, demonstrating what concept?

Self fulfilling prophecy

Schemas influence actions, influencing other’s relations, which then further influence thoughts and actions

Self fulfilling prophecy

Rosenthal and Jacobson did experiment showing that teachers beliefs about students affected how they were treated in class, which affected their test scores, demonstrating what concept

Judgemental heursitics

Mental shortcuts that people use

Availability heuristic

Judging something based on how quickly and how many example you can bring to mind

Representativeness heursitic

Classifying something based on how similar it is to particular case or stereotype

Base rate information

Information about relative frequency of members from different populations

Representativeness heuristic

When it comes to base rate information vs. representativeness heuristic people tend to favor

Barnum effect

People think vague personality tests describe them well as vague language allows for representativeness heuristic to take over

Content

The ____ of schemas in influenced by culture and where people live

Analytic thinking style

Thinking where people focus on properties of object without surrounding context

Is more common in western cultures

Holistic thinking style

People focus on overall context and how object relate to each other

Is more common in east asian cultures

Physical environment of culture and cultural traditions

What two things are the main shapers of cultural differences in thought