Social Psych exam 1

social psych

-the study of how people affect, and are affected by,

others

• Helps make sense of social world

• Helps us understand basic principles of social influence as well as

other principles of social behavior

Late 1800s

two experiments point in opposite directions (start of social psych)

Norman Triplett and Max Ringelmann

social psychology experiment kick offs

Norman Triplett

competition enhances performance

Max Ringelmann

As group size increases, individual effort decreases

1908

publication of social psychology textbooks

-Edward Ross

-William McDougall

Twentieth century

-rapid changes and world events lead to new ideas

Stanley Milgram

-studied the role of obedience to understand atrocities of World War II

1950s and 1960

- Psychology is divided between two camps

-Behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis

Behaviorism

-learning principles (e.g., rewards and punishments)

Freudian psychoanalysis

-elaborate interpretations of individual experiences

combines methods and uses scientific approaches to measure behavior, thoughts, feelings, and other inner states

social psych

recent history

-Study of cognitive processes such as attribution theory

-Biological and evolutionary processes - social neuroscience

-The self - self-control, self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation

The ABC Triad

-Affect

-Behavior

-Cognition

Affect

-how people feel (emotions)

Behavior

-what people do

Cognition

-how people think (how you get someone to think ex. guilt)

social sciences

-Anthropology

-Economics

-History

-Political science

-Sociology

Psychology Subdisciplines

-Biological psychology

-Clinical psychology

-Cognitive psychology

-Developmental psychology

-Personality psychology

-Social psychology

Why Do People Study Social Psychology?

-curiosity

-philosophy

-making the world better

curiosity

-why people act the way they do

philosophy

-Reliance on science separates psychology from philosophy

making the world better

-Assume solutions begin with better knowledge of problems

-Engage in applied and basic research

basic reasearch research

-og reasearch in lab (happens first)

-general knowlegde gain

applied research

-taking basic research and applying it

-focuses on solving a particular problem with the basic knowledge

common wisdom is not always accurate

-Adages are sometimes contradictory (ex. “birds of a feather flock together” and “opposites attract”)

-Understanding biased ways of thinking (ex. the hindsight bias)

-Intuition is a poor method for discovering truth

-Common sense may be a starting point for asking questions, but science is what takes us further

Empirical Approach

- Collect data through observation and use data to form our knowledge of something

Scientific Method

6 steps

Step 1: Scientific Method

- State the problem

Step 2: Scientific Method

-formulate a testable hypothesis

Step 3: Scientific Method

-Design the study and collect data

Step 4: Scientific method

-test hypothesis with gathered data

Step 5: Scientific Method

-communicate the rest of the results to the scientific community

Step 6: Scientific Method

-replicate or repeat the finding to validate the findings

independent variable

-variable that gets manipulates

dependent variable

-variable you’re measuring

theoretical stimulus

-cause and effect

theoretical response

-trait being measured

Accomplice/confederate

-working with researchers secretly

deception

- Have to debrief participants after study is complete

Construct validity of the cause

-Independent variable is a valid representation of the theoretical stimulus

Construct validity of the effect

-Dependent variable is a valid representation of the theoretical response

Scientific theories must be testable

-Define its theoretical constructs operationally

Experimental studies

-Researcher has control over the procedures

-Participants are randomly assigned

Quasi-experiment

-no random assignment

internal validity

-Confidence that changes in the independent variable caused changes in the dependent variable

PTSD study

-woman who developed PTSD and were with child, gave birth to children who had significantly lower levels of cortisol levels than mom without PTSD

Why does PTSD study matter?

-found that PTSD can be transferred genetically in utero

-low cortisol levels are linked to PTSD because there is a stress dysfunction

- Children are at a higher risk to PTSD than a child whose mom didn’t have it

social evolutionary benefits

-find more food

-alert others of danger

-mate + reproduce easier

social evolutionary downsides

-social living is more difficult to achieve than solitary life

meta-analysis of relationship and health study

-50% greater survival for participants in strong social relationships

Sex Differences in Mate Preferences: A Cross-Sectional Study

-males looked for traits giving off reproductive viability/capacity (age, weight, height)

-females looked for characteristics like resources and dependability

social animals

-People seek connections to others and prefer to live, work, and play with

other people

cultural animals

The richness of culture is a defining characteristic of humans

cultural significance and important ideas

-Defined: Culture is the essence of what makes us human and differentiates us from other animals

-Shared ideas: brain puts special priority on information directly experienced as shared

-Culture as social system: a network linking many different people

-Culture as praxis: depends on shared ideas of practical ways of doing things

-Culture, information, and meaning: encoding and sharing meaningful

information, which helps in planning for the future

Automatic system

-Outside of consciousness

-Simple tasks

-always on, even in sleep

- Examples: implicit biases, driving a route you do every day, singing to music you know

Deliberate system

-Mostly operates in consciousness

-Turns off during sleep

-Examples: taking exams, taking a different way to work than normal “lock in”

The duplex mind and how they work together

-Automatic system makes conscious thought possible

—Serves the deliberate system

-Conscious override

—Systems can work against each other

—Deliberate system can suppress automatic urges

—Vital to life in culture

3 types of self

-interpersonal self

self-knowledge

-agent self

self-knowledge

-self-awareness

self-esteem

-self-deception

social roles

-social systems create and define roles

-individuals seek and adopt them to gain social acceptance

independent self-construal

-thinks of all parts of self that sets themselves apart from others

interdependent self-construal

-thinks how parts of self interact with others

The Behavioral Impact of Self-Construals study

-if you have high interdependent construal, you seek relationships

-if you have high independent construal, you seek solidarity

-for both males and females, relational identity was found to be a significant predictor of the performance of those tasks typically carried out by women

self awereness

-attention directed to the self

-private

-public

private self-awareness

-Looking inward at self’s inner traits

—emotions

—thoughts

—desires

—traits

public self-awareness

-looking outward to understand the self and how you are perceived by others

Where self-knowledge comes from

-standards

-escaping self-awareness Why

-why we have it

standards

-Falling short of standards can prompt people to change their behavior or

escape from self-awareness

escaping self awereness

People seek to escape from self-awareness when it feels bad

Why do we have self-awareness?

-vital for self-regulation,

-social acceptance

-perspective-taking

-goal reaching

social comparisons

-examining the difference between oneself and another person

-learning what the facts mean in the context of what ither people are like

-most useful comparisons involve people in the same general category.

-upward

donward

-parallel

upward comapriosns comparisons

-comparing oneself to someone better than you

-ex. sports, school

-can be discouraging and cause a lack of self-esteem, becomes discouraging

-can help you grow as a person and work towards a better goal

downward comaprions

-comparing ourselves to worse off others

ex. homeless person

-can help appreciate our current state and promote thankfulness

-can cause a lack of accountability by comparing yourself to someone who did worse or is worse off (“its okay becasue leah got a worse grade”)

parallel comparison

-comparing ourselves to people who are on our level

-helps get feedback and hain a sense of how you’re doing

-ex. same class and they got a similar grade so you don’t need to escape or take action

The looking-glass self has three components

-Imagine how you appear to others

-Imagine how others will judge you

-Develop an emotional response to imagining how others will judge you

Introspection

-examining your thoughts and feelings

Limitations of introspection

-Development and children’s views of themselves

-People often don’t realize how their minds work

Self-perception theory

-People observe their own behavior to infer what they are thinking and how

they are feeling

the overjustification effect

-The tendency for intrinsic motivation to diminish for activities that have

become associated with rewards

Three reasons for wanting self-knowledge

-appraisal motive

-self-enhancemnt motive

-consistency motive

appraisal motive

-Learning the truth about oneself

-ex. ask a friend how you are at playing the piano for honest feedback

self-enhancement motive

-Learning flattering aspects of oneself

-ex getting praise to boost self-esteem like social media

Consistency motive

-Getting feedback that confirms current beliefs about

oneself

-can be for a negative thing or positive

-ex. you tell a friend about a bad day and they agree so it’s confirmed you had a bad day

self-reference effect

-Information relating to the self is processed

more deeply and remembered better

-ex. passwords that mean something to you, you remember

Identity slowly changes over time

-Children add new knowledge and skills

-Adults take up new hobbies or break bad habits

-Our body changes throughout our life

Revising self-knowledge

-Change how you think about yourself or change your behavior and a change

in self-concept will follow

-Behavorial Activation Theory

Self-esteem

-how favorably someone evaluates himself or herself

-self protection

Self-protection

-trying to avoid loss of self-esteem

Reality and illusions

-are feelings about oneself really accurate?

Three “positive illusions”

-Overestimating good qualities

-Overestimating one’s perceived control over events

-Being unrealistically optimistic

Overestimating good qualities

-ex. when asked to give adjectives of what you are like, you say good ones and assume the same for others’ impressions of themselves

Overestimating one’s perceived control over events

-People tend to estimate the chances of something bad happening to them as very low

-ex. cancer, car crash, addiction

-victim blaming, “that would never happen to me”

Being unrealistically optimistic

-believing that we can achieve anything we want to do

just-world hypothesis

-The belief that if we’re good, good things will come back to us

People fool themselves and use self-deception strategies to maintain a positive

outlook

-Using self-serving bias

-Being more skeptical of bad feedback

-Remembering good things more

-Making comparisons with those slightly worse

-Skewing impressions of other people to highlight one’s own good traits as

unusual

-Choosing definitions wisely

self-serving bias

-tendency for us to embrace and accept positive feedback, but when it comes to something negative, to externalize it

-ex. good test grade you know it’s bc you worked hard; bad test grade we say it was becasue we had a bad morning

being more skeptical of bad feedback

-when someone criticizes us, we think they’re jealous

-ex. Someone says, “i don’t like your outfit” and you blame it on jealousy

remembering good things more

-We downplay instances in our life where we acted badly or fell short of our expectations

-ex. bringing something up to someone like a fight and they say, “I don’t remember that””

-making comparisons with those slightly worse

-downward comparisons