social psychology exam 1

Social perception

The processes by which we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.

Social perception is a constructive model influenced by schemas

Meaning part of what we’re doing is seeing social reality, but we’re also constructing our own model of social reality

Verbal language

One of the most important parts of communication as it sets humans apart from others

Nonverbal behavior

It’s mostly automatic

Examples of nonverbal behavior

Facial expressions

Eye contact/gaze

Extravocal cues (volume, pitch, speed, inflection)

Intentional gesture

Body language (posture, orientation, distance, etc.)

Six basic emotions (culturally universal, appear early in life)

Fear

Anger

Surprise

Joy

Sadness

And Disgust

Facial expressions

Cultural influence of emotional expression

Decoding

Deception

Autism

Most people without this or other conditions don’t have any issues identifying the 6 emotions

Cultural influences of emotional expression

Display rules that are unique to each culture dictate when different nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display. Culture shapes how we think, feel, and behave

Eastern cultures

Typically display emotion less (statistically significant)

No matter the culture..

Our bodies respond to emotions similarly (not statistically significant)

Decoding

Less than 100% accurate because people may display blends multiple affects simultaneously, sometimes conflicting emotions

Deception

People can mask or exhibit emotions contrary to what they really feel

Women and nonverbal behavior

Better at both decoding and encoding nonverbal behavior, especially when interpreting emotions of someone on a screen who has observed an event

Women and nonverbal behavior: exception

It’s anger

Causal attribution

Inferring the causes of outcomes

Heider’s dichotomy for people’s explanations

Internal (dispositional) attributions and external (situational) attributions

Kelley’s Covariation model (relatively automatic)

How people make internal vs external attributions (3 dimensions)

Kelley’s Covariation model 3 dimension

Consistency

Distinctiveness

Consensus

If consistency is high, distinctiveness is high, and consensus is high

External

If consistency is high, distinctiveness is low, and consensus is low

Internal

If consistency is low

It’s external

Social psychology

The scientific way in which people’s cognitive processes (conscious and unconscious, affect (feelings, and actions (speech and behavior) are influenced by the real or imagined preference of other people

Power of the situation

Social psychology focuses a lot on what’s going on around us, and how the internal (past, current affect, expectations) interact with the situation

MAIN THEMES of SOCIAL PSYCH

Power of the situation

Social reality is constructive/subjective, thus subject to error and bias

Social behavior is largely automatic

Social psychology is a scientific discipline

Social reality is subjective/constructive

What we see around us is a model of what our minds build, especially for social situations

Social behavior is largely automatic

We have to respond very quickly in our daily life, and mostly on autopilot

The only actually scientifically proven theme from Freud

Social psychology is a scientific discipline

We rely on data, the whole data, and nothing but the data

We can’t rely on “common sense” because of..

Hindsight bias

Dueling proverbs

Correspondence bias

Error cannot be corrected

Conclusions are impressionistic (emotions hold as much weight as fact)

We seek to prove our own opinions like lawyers

Hindsight bias

Now that you know the outcome, it’s easier to predict

Hindsight bias examples

Invasion of Iraq

Dylan Roof and the mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

Personality predicts behavior

But is often overridden by the situation

Ross and Samuels 1993

The experiment where RAs were told to identify their most combative and most cooperative students, and all of those very polarized characters had to play the Prisoners Dilemma under the name “Wallstreet” or “Community.”

Wall Street (Ross and Samuels 1993)

30% played cooperatively regardless of whether they were “cooperative” or “uncooperative”

Community (Ross and Samuels 1993)

Roughly 75% played cooperatively, with the uncooperative groups actually playing slightly more cooperatively

Correspondence bias

We tend to overestimate the power of disposition (personality) and underestimate the power of the situation (external factors) in determining the behavior of others, resulting in FEA (functional attribution error)

Construals

Subjective, individualistic way in which people perceive the world around them (describing people’s perceptions of reality). Lead to expectations regarding other people’s behavior

Construals are primarily influenced by 4 motives

To be accurate

To feel good about ourselves

To achieve acceptance and approval from other

To reduced uncertainty and enhance perceptions of control

If something recently damaged your ego

Self serving bias can supersede our desire to be accurate

We need acceptance from others because

We have to be part of a group. We suck at surviving on our own. Sometimes this is the most important factor

People hate uncertainty

Helplessness is a cornerstone of depression. People will create certainty even when it isn’t there

Self fulfilling prophecy

If you believe something about yourself or others, you will act in ways that make it true, such as the Pygmalian effect

Rosenthal and Jacobson

Told teachers that certain kids were “bloomers” at random. Had high internal and external validity

rosenthal and Jacobson outcome

“Bloomers” actually gained 4 IQ points, with kids on the lower grade spectrum and kids from underprivileged backgrounds showing considerable

Theory

Coherent set of principles that explain some phenomena

Skinner’s theory (behaviorism)

Doesn’t really do a good job, neither does Freud

Hypothesis

A specific, falsifiable prediction made from a theory with empirical data

A hypothesis that cannot be falsified

Is unscientific, like Freud who kept coming up with excuses

Hypothesis requirements

All variables of interest but be measurable

Measurements must distinguish between conceptual and operational definitions of variables

Operational

What are you going to do to measure the variable? What are you looking for?

Conceptual

The abstract idea of the thing you want to study, which is then worked into a practical application

Operational and conceptual definitions

Must match

Data reliability

Data Repeatability but does not inherently mean data validity

Data validity

An accurate measure of what you’re measuring. Requires reliablity

Scales of insecurity

Inaccurate because participants respond with things they want to feel or think others want them to feel

Not every study is what?

Is experimental, or it’s not, you know what I mean

Internal validity

Random assignment + control of extraneous variables

External validity

Representative sample + psychological realism

Why we never prove anything in psychology

We study samples, not populations

We draw inferences about populations using data obtained from samples

Therefore- any result can be due to chance alone!

Extraneous variables

Variables that affect the outcome

Internal validity is determined by

The lack of extraneous variables

Random assignment helps you

Eliminate the extraneous variables

factors that affect significance

magnitude of effect

Variability in data

Sample size

Fundamental attribution error

A mistaken inference that a behavior (or outcome) is caused by a person’s disposition (eg an internal attribution)

FAE key studies

Jones and Harris pro and anti Castro speeches

Ross et al “quiz show” (Stanford)

FAE causes

Correspondence bias

Actor observer bias

Biased sampling

Making attributions is the 2 step process

Cultures emphasize certain things and make certain assumptions

Correspondence bias

Assuming behavior responds to dispositions/who you are

Magnitude of effect

Size of difference, size of correlation, size of frequency, etc

Variability in data

Stuff changes all the time for a whole bunch of reasons, that’s random variation

Sample size

The bigger your sample, the less likely you are for your results to be coincidental

Statistical significance

When the outcome is not likely due to chance

Practical significance

When outcome is probably not due to chance

Experimental research allows us

To draw causal conclusions

Pearson’s R

Tells us the correlation of 2 variables on a line, and ability to predict 1 variable from another. Prediction (accurately) leads to success

Non experimental data advantages

Don’t have to worry about data manipulation

You can use in vivo data (real life)

Avoids ethical limitations

Non experimental data disadvantages

Cannot control or manipulate variables

Cannot create causal conclusions

Directional problem

3rd variable problem

Directional problem

You can’t prove 1 variable causes the other, just that they are correlated

3rd variable problem

Other variables affect the outcome and you don’t know what they are

Self esteem and academic achievement correlate

Possibility 1 is that higher grades create high self esteem

Possibility 2 is that high self esteem creates better grade

Possibility 3 it’s likely bidirectional, good self esteem creates good grades and good grades create a high self esteem

3rd variables

A confounding variable, something that causes both

Ethical issues in research (50s and 60s were the Wild Wild West for psychology)

Welfares and rights of subjects now must be the primary concern, not outcomes

Informed consent is required

Deception and concealment must be justified and debriefing is necessary

Institutional review boards must approve the design and its methods

How will your research be used by others? (Researchers don’t have much control over this)

Institutional review boards

A group of people who work for the institution (be it CDC, a university, whatever) and their job is to be unbiased and tell you if your study has ethical problems

Brain weight

3 pounds

Human beings are cognitive misers

Our cognitive resources- working memory and attention, are limited in capacity. That makes us misers over our limited resources

We don’t use them unless it’s important to do so

Human beings are satisficers

One who expends only the amount necessary for achieving one’s goal, and no more

If we don’t need to be very accurate, we spend very little of our resources

Human beings are users of limited sources

You can only pay attention to 1 thing at a time and hold about 7 items of information in your working memory

Human beings are meaning makers

We are often presented with ambiguous stimuli

Sometimes we see order and meaning where there isn’t any

Nature didn’t organize the elements of the periodic table, for example

Automatic social cognition

Automatic- we don’t know when they’re running, they’re in the background

Unintentional- we don’t start or control them, they’re a result of stimuli in the environment triggering them

They’re effortless- not using attention or memory because those important things are used for better stuff

They are fast!

They’re the default pathway because they’re cheap and quick

Controlled social cognition

Conscious

Intentional, so we turn them on at our own volition

Voluntary, under our control

Effortful, requiring attention and memory

Slow, compared to automatic processing

Some things can be both

Automatic and controlled!

Mental schemas

Mental structures used to organize/process social information and experience

Mental schemas become

Most important when information is ambiguous

How do mental schemas mold social reality

Regulating attention

Influencing construals

Guiding memory reconstruction

Memory is reconstructive

We store bits and pieces of past reality, and when asked to retrieve, we reconstruct them using our schemas

Mental schema examples

Scripts like what you say and do not say during a job interview

Categories, which we love because they help us organize the world like gender and race. categories are so common

Associations like stereotypes

Schematicity

= efficiency

Schema guided memory reconstruction (Carli 1999)

Had participants read a story that either ended in a marriage proposal or a rape, then a month later had a memory test. Nothing directly asked about the rape but they were given questions like “did the male character have a history of violence or being a drinker? Did he ask to meet her parents?” And none of which happened in the story, but the proposal participants “remembered” him buying flowers for her

Vallone, Ross, and Lepper 1985 (hostile media phenomenon)

Pro Arab and pro Israeli and unaligned students watched identical news clips about the Beirut massacre, both pro Israeli and pro Arab participants believed the coverage was biased against them

Schemas direct attention, like the gorilla suit video

Attention is a highly selective process. The imagine of the gorilla is picked up by the eye and sent to the occipital lobe, but it isn’t processed by your attention and memory because it isn’t what you’re looking for (inattentional blindness)