SOCPSY - MIDTERM PERIOD (COMPILATION)

Social psychology

Science that studies the influences of our situation with how we view and affect one another.

• Social thinking

• Social influence

• Social relations

Three pillars of social psychology

Evolutionary psychologists

Stated that our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that helped our ancestors reproduce and survive.

Social neuroscience

Interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors and how these things affect our brain and biology.

Culture

Enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and handed down generation to generation.

Social representations

A society’s wide held ideas and values including assumptions and ideology that help us make sense of our world.

Defining the good life

Values influence our ideas of how best to live, like Maslow being guided by his own values.

Professional advice

Psychological advice reflects the advice giver’s personal values.

Forming concepts

Hidden values seep into psychology’s research-based concepts and cultural definitions of mental health.

Labeling

Value judgements are often hidden within our social psychological language.

Hindsight bias

“I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon,” error in judging the future’s foreseeability and in remembering the past events.

Theory

An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. Ideas that summarize and explain facts.

Hypothesis

Theories also imply testable prediction/s called _______________.

Correlation

Asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated.

Experimental

Manipulating some factor to see its affect on another.

Status-longevity question

Illustrates the most irresistible thinking error made by social psychologist.

Coefficient

The degree of relationship between two factors.

Advanced correlational research

Can suggest cause-effect relations.

Time-lagged techniques

Reveal the sequence of events.

Statistical techniques

Can also give researchers the influence of third variables.

Random sample

Obtaining a representative group, one in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion.

• Unrepresentative sample

• Order of questions

• Response options

• Wording of questionss

Potentially biasing influences (4)

Unrepresentative samples

The importance that the sample represents the population under study matters greatly for accuracy of results.

Wording of questions

Survey wording is a delicate matter, subtle changes in the tone of a question can have marked effects on the results.

Random assignment

The great equalizer; eliminates all extraneous factors and creates equivalent groups.

Control

Manipulating variables

Independent variables

By varying just one or two factors at a time, we can pinpoint their influence.

Logic of experimentation

By creating and controlling a miniature of reality, we can vary one factor and then another and discover how those factors, separately or combines, affect people.

Replication studies

Repeating a research study, often with different participants in different settings to determine if the finding could be reproduced.

Mundane realism

Laboratory need not to be like everyday behavior which is mundane or unimportant.

Experimental realism

It should engage the participants to psychological processes.

Demand characteristics

Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.

Informed consent

Ethical principle requiring the research participant be told enough to enable them to choose whether to decide to continue or back out.

Debriefing

Post experimental explanation of the study to the participants. It usually discloses deception and often queries participants of their understanding and feelings.

Social cognition

Scientific study of how we think about one another.

Spotlight effect

Belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are; seeing ourselves center stage, thus intuitively overestimating the extent to which others attention is aimed at us.

Illusion of transparency

Illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.

Self-concept

What we know and believe about ourselves.

Medial prefrontal cortex

Neuron path located in a cleft just behind our eyes, helps stitch together our sense of self.

Self-schemas

Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.

Social comparisons

Evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.

Schedenfreude

German word for pleasure in others’ failures.

Looking-glass self

Describes our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves.

Individualism

Concept of giving priority to one’s own goals.

Independent self

Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

Collectivism

Identifying oneself in a group.

Collectivist

In __________ culture, self-esteem tends to be malleable.

Individualistic

In __________ cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational.

Self-knowledge

Sometimes we think we know, but our inside information is wrong.

Planning fallacy

The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.

Affective forecasting

Reveals that we have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and duration of their emotions.

Impact bias

Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.

Dual attitude system

Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (conscious) attitudes toward the same object.

Verbalized explicit attitudes

May change with education and persuasion easily.

Implicit attitudes

Change slowly with practice that forms new habits that replaces old ones.

Self-esteem

A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth; sum of all our self-views across all domains.

High self-esteem

____________________ people usually react to self- esteem threat by blaming other people or trying harder next time because it preserves their positive feeling for themselves.

Low self-esteem

____________________ people are likely to blame themselves and give up.

Terror management theory

Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of mortality.

Self-compassion

Leaving behind comparisons and instead treating oneself with kindness.

Longitudinal study

Research on the same people over a period of time or as they grow older.

Narcissism

High self-esteem becomes problematic when it crosses over to _______________ or inflated sense of self.

Self-efficacy

Our competence and efficiency in doing a task; belief that you can do something.

Self-serving bias

Tendency to perceive oneself favorably.

Self-serving attributions

Attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to something else.

Bias blind spot

We are bias even to our own bias.

Illusory optimism

Increases our vulnerability because believing that our self is immune to misfortune will lead us to be lax in precautions.

Defensive pessimism

A dash of realism that can sometimes save us from the perils of unrealistic optimism.

False consensus effect

Tendency to overestimate the commonality of our opinions and undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.

False uniqueness effect

Tendency to underestimate the commonality of our abilities and desirable behaviors.

Self-handicapping

Protecting one’s self image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.

Impression management

We are social animals, performing to an audience because so great is the human desire for social acceptance which can lead people to risk harming themselves.

Self-presentation

Act of expressing oneself designed to create a favorable impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.

Self-monitoring

Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create a desired impression.

False modesty phenomenon

We display a lower self-esteem than we privately feel, but when we perform extremely well, there is an insincerity disclaimer “I did well, but it’s no big deal.”

Motivated reasoning

Gut-level liking or disliking can powerfully influence how we interpret evidence and view reality.

System 1

Automatic and out of awareness  “intuition” or “’gut-feeling.”

System 2

Requires conscious attention and effort.

Priming

Activation of particular associations in memory.

Embodied condition

Physical sensations that prime our social judgements.

Intuitive judgements

Knowing something without reasoning or analysis.

Controlled

Active, deliberate, and conscious

Automatic

Impulsive, effortless, and without awareness

Intuitive

Offscreen where reason does not go.

Schemas

Mental concepts or templates that intuitively guides our perceptions and interpretations.

Emotional reactions

Instantaneous; before deliberate thinking.

Expertise

People may intuitively know the answer to a question.

Snap judgements

Given a thin slice of someone for just a second.

Blindsight

Loss of a portion of the visual cortex that makes one a person blind at some areas of visual field due to stroke or surgery.

Limits of intuition

Unconscious thinking may not be as smart as we thought it to be.

Overconfidence phenomenon

Tendency to be more confident than correct.

Overprecision

Identifying too narrow a range.

Confirmation bias

People tend not to seek information that might disprove what they believe but we are quick to find information that may prove our beliefs.

Self-verification

We tend to seek friends and spouses who bolster their own self-views; to seek experiences that will confirm perceived self-image.

Heuristics

Simple, quick, and efficient thinking strategies.

Representativeness heuristic

Tendency to presume despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group when it resembles a typical member.

Availability heuristic

Cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of availability in memory, when it is readily available to our mind, we tend to see it as a commonplace.

Probability neglect

We worry about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities.

Counterfactual thinking

Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have been, but didn’t.

Illusory correlation

Perception of a relationship when none exist, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.