Social psychology

social psychology

the scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real, imagined presence of others or applied.

Construal

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

What doe common sense and folk wisdom do?

oversimplifies the possible reason

What does personality psychology study?

The characteristics that make individuals unique and different from one another

What does sociology provide?

Laws and theories about societies (not individuals)

What is social psychology study of analysis?

The individual in the context of a social situation

What does social psychology study?

The psychological processes people have in common with one another that make them susceptible to social influence

What is social psychology goal?

Identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence regardless of social class or culture

What does social psychology focus on?

The individual

What does sociology focus on?

Social class, social structure, social institutions

What is sociology concerned with?

Broad societal factors that influence events in a society

What does personality psychology focus on?

Individual differences

(the aspects of people's personalities that make them different from other people)

Behaviorism

a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider 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 minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object (The whole is different from the sum of its parts)

What are the 2 motives that underlie our thoughts and behaviors?

1) The need to feel good about ourselves

2) The need to be accurate

self-esteem

People's evaluations of their own self-worth

social cognition

how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

What did Alport say was the influence on personality?

their childhood experiences, present environment, and the interaction between the two concepts

What did Kurt Lewin argue?

Behavior is the result of the individual and the environment

automatic thinking

Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

Schemas

Mental shortcuts/mental sketches people use to organize their knowledge about the social world and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember (social, personal, interpersonal) (basic knowledge)

example of schema

stereotypes

Consistent schemas are easier to \________

retain

if we are unaware of a situation we use \________

Schemas

What makes it difficult to change schemas?

Cues

3 reasons why schemas can be accessible

1) Some schemas are chronically accessible because of past experiences

2) Schemas can become accessible because they are related to a current goal

3) Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences

independent variable

The experimental factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied.

dependent variable

The outcome factor; the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable.

Accessibility

the extent to which schemas are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments

Priming

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

self-fulfilling prophecy

When your expectations of a person influences how they act toward that person, which, in turn, causes that person to behave consistent with your expectations (our expectations come true)

embodied cognition

When bodily sensations activate schemas (hot pan feels like)

Heuristics

The mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently (not always accurate) (for solving problems)

Greek word for discover

Heuristics

Judgemental Heuristics

mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

availability heuristic

A mental shortcut when people base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring information to mind

Representative heuristic

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

Who is the founder of representative heuristic

Ruth Hamill

base rate information

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

What influences our schemas

our culture

analytic thinking style

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context (common in Western cultures)

holistic thinking style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other (common in East Asian cultures)

What are the 2 modes of thinking?

Automatic and controlled

Controlled thinking

thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

counterfactual thinking

mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been (ex: if only I put my seatbelt on)

overconfidence barrier

the fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments

Representativeness

base rate information (seeing is believing) (more tangiable)

extremity bias

perception bias to extreme rare cases (increase vulnerability) (lack control) (that wont happen to me unless it is relevant)

anchoring heuristic

use ourselves as the anchoring judgement (my opinion is typical) (we are a good judge of what's correct)

Give an example of the expectancy bias

self-fulfilling prophecy

pessimistic have more \_______ probability and but performance is \_______

accurate and worse

what is the German word for understanding?

verstehen

cognitive misers

seeking quick adequate solutions to problems rather than slow careful ones (motive to limit cognitive energy)

What did William say limited our mental energy?

the ideas we have are habits in mind (automatically) (rely on it)

what works over \_________ is good enough

accuracy

Exemplars

individual cases or one experience that defines all (dog category what dogs look like)

social perception

the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people

nonverbal communication

communication using body movements, gestures, and facial expressions rather than speech

What are the 6 universal emotions? Which 2 are less universal?

happy, sad, surprised, fear, anger, disgust (fear and disgust)

encode

to express or emit nonverbal behavior, (such as smiling)

decode

to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, (such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness)

affect blend

a facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers 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 a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations (ex: middle finger)

implicit personality theory

A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together; (ex: many people believe that someone who is kind is generous as well)

research confirms that people attribute less \_________ personality characteristics to someone who is described as having \_________ self-esteem rather than \________ self-esteem

positive, low, high

What are theories are strongly tied to culture?

Implicit personality theories

attribution theory

the study of how we infer the causes of other people's behavior or our own ( try to clarify interpretation)

Who discovered the attribution theory?

Fritz Heider

internal (dispositional) attribution

the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, (such as personality)

external (situational) attribution

inference that a person's behavior is caused by something about the situation

covariation model

a theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether the behavior occurs

what are the 3 types of covariation information?

1)consensus

2)distinctiveness

3)consistency

consensus information

information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does (ex: everyone yells at Hannah not just the boss)

distinctiveness information

information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli (ex: does the boss yell at everyone or just Hannah)

consistency information

information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances (ex: the yelling is consistent when Hannah and the boss are together)

more likely to make an internal attribution if ....

low in consensus, low in distinctiveness, high in consistency

more likely to make an external attribution if ....

high in consensus, high in distinctiveness, high in consistency

more likely to make a judgment on a different circumstance (unusual) if ....

low or high in consensus, low or high in distinctiveness, low in consistency

fundamental attribution error/ correspondence bias

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which peoples behavior is due to personality traits and to underestimate external attributions

perceptual salience

Information that is the focus of people's attention; people tend to overestimate the causal role of perceptually noticeable information ( pay attention to what we see and ignore what we cant)

two-step attribution process

analyzing another person's behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution

making internal attributions occur \_______ and \_______ while adjusting for the situation requires more \______

quickly and spontaneously, effort

actor/observer difference

the tendency to see other people's behavior as dispositionally caused but focusing more on the role of situational factors when explaining one's own behavior (I failed because I couldn't sleep but she failed because she is dumb)

Making internal attributions for your successes and making external attributions for your failures is an example of \________.

actor/observer difference

What may be a reason on why we use internal attributions rather than external attributions towards others?

lack of knowledge

self-serving attributions

explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors (self sabotage)

defensive attribution

explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality (blaming the victim)

belief in a just world

A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people (no such thing as victims just karma)

bias blind spot

the tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are

Attribution

cause of behavior

correspondent inference theory

systematically accounts for a perceiver's inferences about what an actor was trying to achieve by a particular action

discounting principle

if there is a good explanation for an effect, people will disregard other possible factors as irrelevant

Non-common effects

low frequency events that stand out are attribute to disposition (internal attributions)