Psych final exam

culture

• beliefs, customs art, and traditions

individualistic cultures

• mainly western

• independence, competition, and personal achievement

Collective cultures

• value social harmony, respectfulness, and group needs over individual needs

• Asia, Africa, and South America

• people display more socially oriented personality traits

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality inventory (MMPI)

• self report inventory

• used to diagnose psychological disorders

• Many questions (338)

• True and False questions

• Scored on 10 scales

Likert Scales

• optimal option range- 5-7

Myers- Briggs type Indicator

• 16 personalities based on 4 dichotomies

• NOT diagnostic

Projective test

• people are shown ambiguous cards and are asked to interpret the image or tell a story

  • Rorschach Inkblot Test- interpretation of symmetrical Inkblot cards revealing unconscious feelings and struggles

  • Thematic Apperception Test- tell a story about 8-12 cards giving insight into their social world

  • Rotter incomplete sentence blank- complete 40 incomplete sentences as quickly as possible

Social Psychology

• interactions between people

Intrapersonal topics

• emotions and attitudes, the self and social cognition

Interpersonal topics

situationism

• the view that our behavior and actions are determined by our immediate environment

Dispositionism

• view that our behavior is determined by internal factors

Fundamental attribution error

• tendency to over emphasize internal factors as explanations/attributions for the behavior of other people and underestimate the power of the situation

• Quizmaster study- participants were randomly assigned to play the role of either the questioner or participant

Actor-Observer Bias

-explaining other peoples behaviors are due to internal factors and our own behaviors are due to situational forces

Self-Serving Bias

• tendency to take credit for making dispositional or internal attributions for positive outcomes but situational or external attributions for negative outcomes

• protects self esteem

Attribution

• belief about the cause of an event

  • locus of control

  • stability- extent to which the circumstances are changeable

  • controllability- extent to which the circumstances can be controlled

Just-World hypothesis

• belief that people get the outcomes they deserve

social role

• a pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or role

social norm

• a groups expectation of what is appropriate and acceptable

Script

• a persons knowledge about the sequence of events expected in a specific setting

• vary with cultures

Stanford prison experiment

• some people assigned prisoners and some were guards

Attitude

• our evaluation of a person, an idea, or an object

• components

  • Affective- feelings

  • Behavioral- the effect of the attitude on the behavior

  • Cognitive- belief and knowledge

Cognitive Dissonance

• psychological discomfort arising from holding two or more inconsistent attitudes, behaviors, or cognition

• Reducing Cognitive Dissonance

  • change their behavior

  • change their belief through rationalization or denial

  • Add a new cognition

effect of initiation

• justification of effort has a distinct effect on a person liking a group

  • Aronson and mills experiment- 3 conditions (no initiation, easy, and difficult)

Persuasion

• process of changing our attitudes toward something based on some kind of communication

Elaboration likelihood model

• central route

  • logic driven

  • fact based

  • works best with analytical audience

  • most effective in terms of long term perspective changes

• Peripheral Route

  • indirect route

  • uses cues to associate positive feeling with the message

  • celebrity endorsement

  • results in less permanent attitude change

• foot in the door

  • get a person to agree to a small favor, only to later request a larger favor

Conformity

• change of a persons behavior to go along with a group

Asch Effect

• influence of the group majority on an individuals judgement

Size of Majority- greater the majority, more likely to conform

Presence of another dissenter- causes conformity rates to drop to zero

Public vs Private Nature of responses- public responses cause more conformity than private

Normative social influence

• social influence to fit in

Informational social influence

• people conform because they believe the group is competent and has the correct information

Obedience

• the change of an individuals behavior to comply with a demand by an authority figure

Milgram experiment

• 40 men led to believe they were in a study to improve learning

• wrong answers results in shocking the learner

• 2/3 participants continued to administer shocks to an unresponsive learner

• shocking dropped when they were in the same room and even more when they were in contact, more when the authority was not in the room

Groupthink

• the modification of the opinions of members of a group to align with what they believe is the group consensus

• less likely to express diverse opinions leading to faulty decision making

• signs

  • believing it can do no wrong (morally correct)

  • self-censorship

  • holding negative attitudes toward the out-group viewpoints

Group Polarization

• the strengthening of an original group attitude after discussion of views within a group

Social Facilitation

• occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching them

Social loafing

• the exertion of less effort by a person working together in a group

• less common in harder tasks

Prejudice

• having a negative attitude toward someone based solely on ones memberships

Stereotypes

• belief or assumption based solely on their membership to a group

Discrimination

• Negative action toward an individual based on their membership

Dual attitudes model

• explicit- conscious and controllable and easily reported

• implicit- unconscious and automatic and measured indirectly

Formation

• new experiences may change explicit attitudes, but old implicit attitudes may remain stored in memory due to past learning