Social Psych Exam 1

Tinbergen’s 4 questions

1. Ontogeny (development)
2. phylogeny (evolution)
3. mechanism (causation)
4. function (adaptation)

Social Psychology

the scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

persuasion

one person deliberately tries to change another person’s behavior or attitude

social influence

the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

Evolutionary psychology

the attempt to explain social behavior in terms in genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection

personality psychologist

focuses on the individual differences or aspects of people’s personalities that make them different

social psychologist

focuses on the individual in the context of a social situation and construal

construal

the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Fundamental attribution error

the tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Behaviorism overlooked

cognition, thinking, feeling, and how people interpret their environments

behaviorism

a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only the reinforcing properties of the environment

Gestalt Psychology

a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s mind rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

Naive Realism

the conviction that we perceive thing “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see

Self-esteem

people’s evaluations of their own self worth

social cognition

how people think about themselves and the social world

WEIRD

western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic

ecological niche

humans are their own niche, we evolved to be in a social group

Thoughts

Perception, memory, reasoning

feelings

motivation, emotions, attitudes

behavior

actions, communication, decision-making

structuralism

introspectionism, what components and structures make up the mind

Functionalist

what can the mind do and how does this help us

psychoanalysis

deep down into the subconscious

neurology

what is wrong with the brain

Gestalt

we need to think of the whole experience of the person

Behavior = f(person, situation)

behavior is a function of how people act in a certain environment

Salient goals

1. self-esteem maintenance r need for accuracy
2. your current goal in a moment
3. we need to feel good about ourselves and feel accurate

Distal-level situational factors

* natural environment
* migration history
* socio political system
* religion
* class structure

Proximal-level situational factors

* cultural products (books)
* communication practices
* social interactions
* norms
* language

psychological factors

* thinking
* feeling
* behavior
* personality

personality

a stable tendency to think, feel, and behave in a particular way

combination of biology, learning, and environment

Big 5 (OCEAN)

* openness to experience
* conscientiousness
* extroversion
* agreeableness
* neuroticism

Big 5

clumps of attributes that relate to each other, measures all the ways that people can be different from each other

OCEAN

* fairly stable across time
* predict behavior and other important things
* captures individual difference well

Openness to experience

interest in exploring the world and trying new things

Conscientiousness

self-controlled and goal-directed

Extroversion

seeking reward

Agreeableness

getting along with other people

Neuroticism

prone to negative emotions

Walter Mischel

triggered division of social and personality psychologists

Observational Method

technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

Correlational Method

technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed

Experimental Method

technique whereby the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable

Basic research

find the best answer to a question of why people behave as they do, intellectual curiosity

applied research

geared towards solving a particular problem

informed consent

agreement to participate in an experiment granted in full awareness of the nature of the experiment

deception experiment

misleading patients about the true purpose of the study

Automatic social cognition

* low effort thinking
* nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

Accessibility

the extent to which schemas are at the forefront of your mind

chronic accessibility

* accessible because of past experience
* constantly active and ready to use

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goal-based accessibility

the present situation could be related to a current goal because that goal is currently in your mind

temporary accessibility

* based off of recent experience
* that schema happens to be primed

priming

process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, concept or goal

self-fulfilling prophecy

people can inadvertently make a schema come true by how they interact with other people

automatic goal pursuit

when making the choice between two goals, you usually act in the interest of the goal that was most recently primed

Judgmental heuristic

strategies and shortcuts to make judgments and thinking easier and less time consuming

availability heuristic

a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

* a plane crash seems more likely to happen if you have experienced or seen one than it actually is

representative heuristic

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

base rate information

information about the frequency of members of different categories of the population, people do not use this efficiently

Controlled Cognition

* high effort thinking
* conscious, intentional voluntary, and effortful

Planning fallacy

the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past

Six Universal Emotions

* anger
* sadness
* happiness
* surprise
* fear
* disgust

encoding

expressing or emitting nonverbal behavior

decoding

interpreting the meaning of nonverbal behavior

Darwin

nonverbal behavior is species specific not culture specific

affect blends

one part of the face show one emotion and another part shows a different emotion

display rules

culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

emblems

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within given culture, usually direct verbal translations

Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen

New guinea, six major facial expression appear to be universal

thin-slicing

drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior

* considered pretty effective and accurate

Primacy Effect

when it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later

belief perseverance

the tendency to stick with an initial judgment even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

Asch 1946

primacy effect

Attribution theory

a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviors

covariation model

a theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we note the pattern between when the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible causal factors (behavior is a function of person x situation)

Consensus Information

the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

distinctive information

the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli

consistency information

the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

Cues

byproduct that can be interpreted

signals

exist to communicate

* influence behavior of the recipient

display rules

people from different cultures using different nonverbal signals

referential

refers to a particular concept/idea/thing

informational value

how strongly correlated the signal is with what it predicts

emotional

reflects emotional state of person

* smile versus frown

iconicity versus arbitrariness

does the signal tell us anything about what it means?

antithesis

conveying the opposite of a state of mind

vocalizations

size code hypothesis

size code hypothesis

seem big for dominant, little for submissive

cultural norms

* emblems
* nonverbal signals that have culturally significant meanings

confirmation bias

* biased in what we intend to
* schemas persisting in light of new evidence

preregistration

limits conformation bias in experiments

self-reinforcing

* can’t know an alternate reality
* we are not confirming our predictions, and these predictions whether right or wrong enforce schemas

attributions

* intentionality
* desire
* belief
* personality

understanding phenomenon

gives you power to anticipate it, change it, prevent it, trigger it

Internal attributions

behavior about a person

external attributions

cause of someone’s behavior

consensus

does everyone do this behavior in this context

distinctiveness

does this person always do this behavior regardless of context

* low distinctiveness if you do it everywhere with everyone

consistency

does this person always do this behavior in this context

self-serving attributions

we make internal attributions for something that goes well but things that go poorly are attributed to external attributes