Midterm #1 Social Psych

Social Psychology

how peoples thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by other people

construal

how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world, the world as interpreted by the individual

fundamental attribution error

tendency to explain our own and other peoples behavior in terms of personality traits and underestimate the power of situation and social influence

Behaviorism

when behavior is followed by reward, it is likely to continue, when it is followed by punishment it is likely to stop

Gestalt Psychology

How an object appears to people, how people perceive things

Naive realism

conviction that we perceive things as they really are, underestimating how much we are interpreting or spinning what we see

Palestinian vs Israeli political opinions

observation

goal is to describe what a group of people or type is like, observes people, and take measurements or impressions of their behavior

archival analysis

examine accumulated documents (diaries, novels, music) of a culture

correlation

taking two data sets and comparing them together

correlation does not equal causation

internal validity

the only thing affecting the DV on the IV, is their external factors affecting the DV?

External Validity

how well do results generalize to other situations/ people

pyschological realism

make something more realistic, behavior can be different in a lab study

random selection

give everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

random assignment

all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of the experiment, researchers can be relatively certain the differences in backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions

open science movement

making scientific process more open to other scientists and the public

social cognition

the ways in which people select, interpret, remember, and use social information

Automatic Thinking

thought that is nonconscious, unintentional, and effortless

schemas

mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world

accessibility schema

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of the mind and likely to be used when making judgements

priming

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

self fulfilling prophecy

people have an expectation of what another person is like, this influences how they act towards the person, which causes that person to behave consistently with peoples original expectation

judgemental heuristics

mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

availability heuristic

basing a judgement on the ease which you can bring something to mind, problem is sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture

representative heuristic

mental shortcut we use to classify something according to how similar it is to the typical case

base rate information

relatively frequency of members of different categories, people tend to ignore base rate information

anchoring/adjustment

a judgement strategy where one adjusts their answer based on a starting value/exemplar(anchor)

Analytic thinking

people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context (western)

Holistic thinking

people focus on overall context, particularly how objects relate to each other (east Asia)

controlled thinking

thinking that is conscious, intentional, people can turn this on or off

counterfactual thinking

people simulate/imagine possible alternative outcomes to events by substituting normal antecedents for exceptional ones (if only scenarios)

planning falacy

tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project