Quiz 1 Review (Chapter 1-2)

Chapter 1:

Social psychology: the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. It’s an interdisciplinary of sociology and psychology.

Major themes:

• We construct our social reality

• Our social intuitions are often powerful but sometimes perilous

• Social influence shape our behaviour

• Personal attitudes and dispositions also shape behaviour

• Social behaviour is biologically rooted

• Relating to others is a basic need

• Social psychology’s principles are applicable in everyday life

How do values affect social psychology?

• Choice of research topics, types of people who are attracted to the study, hidden assumptions when forming concepts, choosing labels, and giving advice

Hindsight bias: often makes people overconfident about the validity of their judgments and predictions

How do we do social psychology?

• Organize ideas and finding into theories

• Conduct correlational research (discern the relationship between variables) or experimental research (explore cause and effect by constructing a mini reality that is under their control)

Random assignment: randomly assign participants to an experimental condition, which receives the experimental treatment, or to a control condition

Informed consent: an ethical guideline that protects people from harm, and afterward, fully disclosing any temporary deceptions

Why are lab experiments important for social psychologists?

• They enable them to test ideas gleaned from life experience and then apply the principles and findings to the real world

What are the 2 concepts of the impact one individual has on another?

• Direct and explicit (intention)

• Indirect and implicit (unintentional)

• Ex, telling someone to vote versus bringing it up casually and telling them its good to vote, to which they would pick it up on their own

How does a group impact its individual members?

• Through the establishment of rules and norms (There’s specific norms in groups, we might not know where they come from but we just do it)

Norms: the informal rules that govern our behaviour

What impact do individual members have on the groups they belong to?

• Leadership

What impact does one group have on another group?

• Through gang conflict, business conflict, etc.

• It’s an area of research-intergroup conflict

What impact does social context and social structure have on groups and individuals?

• Society impacts individual and individual impacts society

• We change things (including the legalization of pot)

Symbolic interactionism: a perspective for sociology developed by Charles H Cooley and Herbert Mead. People act towards things based on the meaning those things have for them.

What are the three elements to the looking-glass self:

• We imagine how we appear to others

• We imagine others peoples reactions to our appearance

• We respond to these with some sort of feeling (strong emotions help shape who we are)

Social exchange theory: takes elements of psychology, sociology, and economics to understand group dynamics and how we interact with each other

Social structures: relationships between groups of individuals (ex, social class, religion, family, and school)

Cognitive perspective: places emphasis on mental activities as determinants of social behaviour. Cognitive processes are an intervening factor between external stimulu and behavioural responses

What are the 3 cognitive concepts?

1. Cognitions (mental processes of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses)

2. Cognitive structure (cognitions are interrelated, and emphasis is placed on how they are structured and the affect on behaviour and judgement)

3. Schemas (a blueprint of people and things)

Evolutionary theory: states that social behaviour is linked to genes

Empirical research: the systematic investigation of observable phenomena (behvaiour, events) in the world

What are the the 8 research methods in social psychology?

• Surveys

• Field studies

• Ethnography

• Archival research

• Content analysis

• Experiments

• Lab experiments

• Field experiments

What are surveys and what are the advantages and disadvantages?

• A set of questions geared toward collecting information about a certain group

• Strengths: Inexpensive, clear picture of phenomena under study, glimpse into frequent or private behaviours

• Weaknesses: problems with self-reporting

What are Field Studies and what are the two different measures involved?

• Qualitative research that is an observation of everyday life in action.

• Unobtrusive measures (individuals dont participate) and participant observation (engaging with people)

What is enthography and its strengths and weaknesses?

• The most in-depth participant observation that includes observing people in everyday life for a period of time.

• Strengths: real-world behaviour, can study private and sensitive matters (unobtrusive), in-depth understandings

• Weaknesses: significant effect on data recording method chosen, the issue of consent, time consuming

What is archival research?

• The analysis of data that has already been collected by others

What is Content analysis?

• The systematic study of documents to identify themes and make inferences based on these themes

What are the two characteristics in experiments?

• Independent variables must be manipulated/changed

• Participants must be assigned randomly

What are the strengths and weaknesses of a field experiment?

• Strengths: high level of internal validity, more researcher control

• Weaknesses: limits to what we can be studied, ethical concerns, costly, subject effects and experimenter effects, low external validity

What are ethics important in research?

• To protect and respect research participants

• Ethics approval is required for any research involving human subjects

What is the Stanford Prison experiment?

• An experiment conducted in 1971 where Zimbardo randomly assigned male college students to the roles of a prison guard and prisoner.

• A number of ethical issues occurred such as; violation of the harm principle

Chapter 2:

What is the self and it’s two concepts?

• The self is our sense of who we are as individuals.

• The self is both active (I) and passive (me)

What does Meads concept of “I” and “Me” mean?

• Mead says that both the I and Me make up the self.

• The “Me” is the socialized self (our learned behaviours, attitudes, and expectations)

• The “I” is the impulse (responses; “i cant believe i did that”, “that’s so not like me”)

Why is language important?

• It’s essential to who we are

• An important step and one of the earliest in acquiring a sense of self is learning your name as a child - it separates you as an individual from your caregivers

Role-taking: the process of imaginatively occupying the position of another person and viewing the self and the situation from the persons perspective. An important step in developing the sense of self

What is the ‘looking-glass self’ and who created it?

• Created by Charles H. Cooley

• Refers to seeing the self as a social object, how we think of ourselves is based on how others think of us, and the image of our self is acquired through social relationships (significant others)

What is Meads play and game concept?

• It’s the two stages of development that lead to the emergence of self

• Play refers to children imitating roles that they see enacted by adults, ex; playing house

• Game refers to the more complex concept of children taking on the roles of others around theM

The generalized other: a conception of the attitudes and expectations held in common by the members of the organized groups with whom they interact. (Ex; we imagine what the group expects from us)

Spotlight effect: the belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they actually are

Illusion of the transparency: the illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others

What is individualism vs collectivism cultures?

• Individualism cultures: the emphasis is put on the individuals goals and self - western culture - independent self

• Collectivist cultures: the sense of self is related to others more, the collective, prioritizes the group over individual (eastern culture) - interdependent self

Identities: meanings attached to the self by ones self and others.

What are the two types of identities?

• Role identities (the role that people play in relation to the group that they are in and it depends on group expectations) and social identities (based on belonging to a particular group)

Identity salience: refers to which identity is more prominent. We have a hierarchy of identities depending on which one goes across most situations. (Ex; mothers usually have mom as first on hierarchy)

Self presentation: it’s inherent in all social situations. Refers to the processes by which individuals attempt to control the impressions that others form of them in social interactions. It’s authentic, ideal, and tactical.

Authentic self-presentation: refers to presenting who you are (just you doing you)

Ideal self-presentation: refers to the self you want to be or the self you think others want you to be (instagram vs reality)

Tactical self-presentation: refers to really thinking and working hard on how you act or look. (Usually done for job interviews)

What do we need for a social interaction to run smoothly?

• Shared understanding of the situation

• Sense of situated identity

• Shared sense of interaction goals

• Appropriate actions and behaviours

Frames: a set of widely understood rules or conventions pertaining to a transient by resistive situation that indicates which roles should be enacted and which behaviours are proper

Situated identity: refers to our conception of who we are in relation to the people around us. There’s shared definition/understanding that we have through frames.

Self-disclosure: refers to the social process of revealing feelings/behaviours to others. A reciprocal process

What is dramaturgy?

• Around the idea that identity is a performance

• Uses theatre as an analogy

• In the front stage, we have props, sets, lines, and we are putting on a performance

• In the back stage, we aren’t os pretty and put together, we are our authentic self, and we dont have to perform and think of what people think of you

tactical impression management: a conscious decision to control info in an interaction to influence impressions. We do it to get people to like us, respect us, fear us, or feel sorry for us.

What are impression management tactics?

• Physical appearance and props

• Ingratiation

What are ingratiation strategies?

• Opinion conformity (we agree even if we dont actually)

• Other enhancement (use of flattery)

• Supplication (presenting yourself as needy and deserving)

• Selective self-presentation (Self-promotion and self-deprecation)

What are aligning actions?

• Comes from when impression management ‘fail’ (Not knowing to react)

• We use disclaimers and accounts to neutralize the situation (disclaimers are preemptic strike that we use apringly, accounts can be excuses or justifications)

What happens when impression management fails?

• Audience cools out (failing individual is eased out of role) or identity degradation (failing individual is forced out of role)

What do spotlight and illusions teach us about ourselves?

• We believe others are paying more attention to us than they actually are, and we become concerned with the impression we make on others (spotlight)

• We believe that our emotions are more obvious then they are (illusion of transparency)

What two elements does the self-concept consist of?

• The self schemas that guide our processing of self-relevant information and;

• The possible selves that we dream of or dread

How is our self-knowledge flawed?

• We do not know why we behave the way we do

• When influences upon our behaviour are not conspicuous enough for any observer to see, we, too, can miss them

• The unconscious, implicit processes that control our behaviour may differ from our conscious, explicit explanations of it

What is self-esteem and what is it determined from?

• The overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities

• Determined from: roles we play, comparisons we make, our social identities, how we perceive others appraising us, and our experiences of success and failure

How does self-esteem motivation influence our cognitive processes?

• Facing failure, high-self-esteem people sustain their self-worth by perceiving other people as failing, too, and by exaggerating their superiority over others

Self-efficacy: the belief that one is effective and competent and can do something

What is self-serving bias?

• We take credit for successes while blaming failures on the situation

• We rate ourselves as better than average on subjective, Desireable traits and abilities

How do people manage their self-presentation?

• We adjust our worlds and actions to suit our audiences

• Sometimes we will even self-handicap with self-defeating behaviours that protect self-esteem by providing excuses for failure

Self-monitor: we note our performance and adjust it to create the impressions we desire