PSYCH TEST 1

What is social psychology: Psych that is most applicable to your life

Social Psychology - The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, ad behaviors are influenced by other people

History and Methods:

Philosophy - Focuses on thoughts and ideas that can be connected to how we interact socially

Sociology - Focuses on the group (how individual is affecting group, or how group is affecting individual)

Anthropology - Examine specific cultures and groups, understand the effects that that culture has

Common Sense:

Hindsight Bias - Once you know the result of something, you assume you’ve always believed it

Lead us to wrong conclusions - Can lead us to the wrong decision, we need to come to best conclusion

Doesn’t apply in all situations - There are boundaries to common sense, could potentially lead us down wrong path

Does help in future situations - Trying to understand future interactions

History:

Norman Triplett (1890s) - Oftentimes recognized as doing the first social psychology experiment, he was sitting on his porch and noticed when bicyclists were riding by, that they go faster in groups, brought children in lab and gave them fishing yarn and measured how long it took them to reel in the yarn by themselves and in a group, competition fosters better performance

Max Ringelmann (1880s or 1913) - Studied how many different oxen you need to simulate a worker, brought people in as different group sizes, found people exerted less effort in a group compared to when they were by themselves, accidentally discovered social eloping

  • Social eloping - You work less hard in a group

Hitler - Caused a large number of scientists to leave Europe, US saw an influx of people that we never considered, social psych grew because of that migration, first time a mass atrocity was done on a global scale, people across the world wanted to understand how this happened, wanted to understand why people do things just because an authority figure tells them to

Gordon Allport (1940s-60s) - Recognized as the father of social psychology, studied many different areas, wrote lots of textbooks, built this area of psych, studied attitudes, racism, group effects, ethics, important for saying we need to design experiments with an ethical eye

Explosion in 60s - Started to see more funding going into this area, students went to college for this area, more diverse population and looking at a diverse group of topics

Integration of emotion, motivation and cognition - Happened in 70s and 80s, people had a broader perspective on interactions with others, how different emotions cause different interactions

Genes and evolution - Twin studies between fraternal and identical twin, which seem to be more genetic or environmental, why we are doing some things that we are doing, why do we find certain people attractive, aggression and antisocial behavior and why are we acting negatively towards others and what that could have gotten us in previous generations

Culture - Tried to look as social psychology in terms of global effects, what we can expect from every human in the world, incorporate culture and perspective into psychology

Basic Principles:

Social Influence - Study of how the presence of others affects us, how we respond and our beliefs

Social Thinking - How we think about ourselves and others, what leads us to form beliefs about ourselves

Social Behavior - How do we act in social situations, how does the existence and implied existence of others change the way we interact

Social Achievement - A lot of times we think about achievement in regards to getting a prize or award or both, trying to get into a social realm

Person-situation interaction - Which has more influence the environment or situation the person is in

Four Major Theoretical Perspectives:

Theory - The scientific explanation that connects and organizes observations

Sociocultural Perspective - Take more of a cultural lens, much of a person's thoughts and behaviors are affected and influenced by larger groups

  • Edward Ross (1908)

Evolutionary Perspective - The way that we interact with others is rooted in the elements that help our ancestors survive and thrive, focus on natural selection and that there are more similarities with people on earth than differences

  • McDougal (1908)

Social Learning perspective - Past experiences with reward and punishment are going to influence our behaviors

Social Cognitive Perspective - Subjective experiences and interpretations determine our social behavior, important to understand how an individual is interpreting a situation, focus on the internal

Applied Psychology - Psychology that has an application to a real world or a real world problem

Basic Psychology - Research and psychology that is there to expand knowledge

Scientific Method:

Develop a theory - Explanation for the observances that you're seeing

Generate a hypothesis - Testable statement, specific to study you are going to run

Test the hypothesis - With an experiment that you are going to design
Analyze the data - Know what data looks like and what its telling you

Evaluate and potentially revise the theory - If data supports, cut next tests, if it refute the theory could be wrong or there is an issue with your set up

Methods:

Observational - Not trying to change anything, but see what said phenomenon looks like In the real world, focus on describing the experience of the phenomenon

Correlational - Understand the relationship between two variables, how variable work together and in opposition, what predictions can we make when we understand that relationship

Experimental - Allows us to say that A caused a change in B

Operational Definition - Turn an abstract concept into concrete data

Construct Validity - Does your definition actually represent the concept that its intended to

Confederate - A research assistant that plays a role in a study, gives us more control

Naturalistic Observation - When a researcher is unobtrusively observing a phenomena in its natural setting

  • Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter (1956) - Infiltrated a group that believed that aliens were going to come and destroy the planet to understand what would happen when a strongly held belief when it wasn’t supported, pretended to be members of the group, had done so much good so that the aliens would decide to save the earth
  • Issues - Based on what you are seeing and how you are interpreting it, if the researcher have a belief pf what they may find, it could influence the way they interpret that data

Ethnography - Go and observe a culture in order to understand the influence of that culture on psychology

Surveys - Put a series of questions together and ask participants to answer the questions, diverse sample

  • Social Desirability Bias - Answer on what you think is socially acceptable rather than how you truly feel

Archival Analysis - Looking at data that has already been collected, do different analysis and run different tests based on unconnected variables

Meta-Analysis - Take research that is already published and run analysis to see if there is agreement

Experiment - Considered the gold standard, determine causality because you have an independent variable under control of the researcher and because participants are randomly assigned

Quasiexperiment - Where variable of interest cannot be manipulated or under control of the researcher, ex: gender

Within-subjects design - Participants are exposed to every level of independent variable

Between-subjects design - Where the participants are only exposed to one level of the independent variable

Important Things to Consider:

Confounds - Variable outside your experiment that is causing a change in your experiment

  • Li (1975) - Survey sent around Taiwan, strongest correlation was between amount of electrical appliances and birth control use, money is the confound

Stimulus Sampling - Make sure items are generic in order to not cause change

Cultural Shifts - Something about the culture has changed that could change your study

Ethics:

Historically an Issue

IRB - Internal Review Board, any research between human subjects has to go through this process, read and review study to see if it holds up against ethical standards

Deception - If you use a confederate you are using deception, it is allowed as long as it is justifiable and that the deception isn't in relation to potential risks or harm, have to come clean once the study is done

Informed Consent - Participant has to be aware of what they are doing and any potential risk or harm that they may encounter

Debriefing - Tell the participant what they did, why they did it, and come clean about any deception

Correlation:

A statistic describing the relationship between two variables

-1 to +1

Closer you are to 0 the weaker the correlation

CORRELAION CANNOT DETERMINE CAUSE AND EFFECT

Positive Correlation - When the two variables move together, as one increases the other also increases

Negative Correlation - Two variables are moving in opposition, as one goes up the other goes down

No relationship - Where variables do not have any typical pattern of movement within each other

Come up with an Operational Definition:

Prejudice

High self-esteem

Love

Issues in Social Psychology:

Replication Crisis - Tendency for research to not be replicated when done multiple times, large number of social psychology has not been replicated , due to social behaviors and thoughts changing based on environment

Student Sampling - Large number of participants are undergrad students which can be different from the regular population

WEIRD - Most participants are from western countries, educated, industrialized cultures, richer countries, democratic countries

Basic Dilemma of Social Psychology - Tradeoff between internal validity and external validity

  • Internal - How much control a researcher has over a study
  • External - How similar a study is to the real world

Nature:

Nature vs Nurture - You need to understand a person's cognitions to understand a person

Nature - Physical world that is around us and has supported us

Theory of Evolution - Focusing on how things change across a long period of time

Natural Selection - What do we need to continue to live and reproduce

  • Continue Living
  • Reproduction

Bidirectional Relationship:

Usually nature has a stronger influence

  • Food
  • Amount of disease or bacteria
  • Eating behavior
  • Average life span of individual
  • Infant Mortality Rate

Sometimes though Culture shapes Nature

The Social Aspect of Nature:

Social Animals - Most animals need interaction with another of their species in order to flourish, animals that seem more similar to us have more complex social interactions

Robin Dunbar (1993,1998) - Examined different animals with different levels of sociality, found that there were differences in their biology depending on if it was a more social or more solitary animal, found that bigger brained animals tend to be more social animals and have complex social roots, humans with larger prefrontal cortex tend to have a larger social network

Inner processes serve interpersonal functions

Not a guarantee but positive correlation

Universal Motivations:

Approval - We like to be accepted we don’t like to be rejected , engage in behavior and cognitions that will lead to acceptance in a group and avoid behaviors that may cause a group to reject us

Accuracy - We like to be right we don’t like to be wrong, engage in behaviors that seem like they are going to prove us right

Hedonism - We like to experience pleasure we don’t like to experience pain, engage in behavior in that will bring us pleasure

Culture:

Fairly unique to humans, complexity that human culture has

Evolution seems to support culture, evolution has changed the human psyche in order to support the human development and engagement in a rich and complex culture

Culture - A social system, provides the rules, regulations, and norms for engaging with others, provides structure through which we plan and engage in social interactions

Elements of Culture:

Provides Meaning - Meaning to yourself, interactions, and environment

Shared Information - Serves a starting point for interactions with new cultures

  • External - Food, animals, the terrain
  • Internal - Create social bonds by sharing internal processes, share personal information

Social System - Gives us rules and regulations that allow us to do more processing when it comes to social situations

Shared Practices - If we are in the same environment in the same cultural reference, we are likely to engage in similar behaviors

Shared Practices:

Individual Expression - The desire to be an individual is going to vary depending on the culture you come from

Individualist Cultures - Prioritize the individual over the group

Collectivist Cultures - Prioritize the group over the individual

Physical Behavior - How often and the way that we laugh, the speed at which we walk

Punctuality - Seen as an important part in US culture, some cultures this isn't as important

Personal Space - The bubble that we see as our own differs depending on where you're from

Tight vs Loose - Tight societies are concerned with rule breaking while loose societies still may care but consequences are a lot smaller

Culture:

Cultural Evolution

  • Internal change within a culture due to some large event that affects most people within a culture

Cultural Diffusion

  • Exchange and Assimilation, when you share information between cultures some may adapt to it and take it in or some may change it to fit a cultural structure that already exists

Cultural Transmission

  • Cultural Learning, how older members of a culture share cultural information with younger members of that same culture

The Duplex Mind:

Automatic System

  • Natural/ Reflexive, going to be very quick and automatic

Deliberate System

  • Purposeful, where you are directing your thoughts or cognitions, use a lot of resources to get to the end point, but tends to be more accurate than the automatic system

Animals - More unique in humans in regards to complexity

Culture Makes it Hard to Exist:

Requirements - If we violate requirements, we risk exile or ostracism

Relating - Can make it easy to relate to other cultural members, but difficult to relate to other cultural members

Trade Offs

  • The many compared to the one

Outsourcing Information - Can be a benefit in terms it makes load lighter on ourselves, can sometimes lead to incorrect information being spread

Three Parts:

Self-Knowledge

  • Self-Concept - How you perceive yourself

Interpersonal Self

  • Public Self - The face that you show to the world

Agent Self

  • Executive Function - What behaviors and thoughts fit with the self that is currently active

Theories of the Self:

Social Rules - Each role serves a different self, the role that is active is determining the self that is active

Looking Glass Self

  • Charles Horton Cooley (1902) - We determine ourself based on how others see us, people tend to be complimentary towards us rather than telling us how they really feel, different groups have different perspectives
  • Vazire (2010)
    • Internal vs External
    • Internal - Person is more accurate (anxiety and self-esteem)
    • External - Others tend to be more accurate (describe external traits)

Social Comparison

  • Festinger (1954) - Use ourself to understand our position, compare ourselves to people that we follow which led to different social comparison than what was originally defined
  • When do we do it? - More likely to engage in social comparison with subjective traits
  • What do we compare ourselves to? - Find similarities to those we are comparing, what the goal of the comparison is

Self-Perception - We learn about ourself by looking at our behavior

  • Close Others (Goldstein & Cialdini, 2007)
  • Facial Feedback hypothesis (Laird, 1974) - If you give a certain facial expression it can cause you to feel a specific emotion, had participants come into the lab and hold a pin in their mouth, some had to hold it in their teeth and some held it with their lips, if you had to hold it with your teeth you're forced to smile and if you held it with your lips you would frown, then they would rate cartoons based on how funny they found the cartoon, they found that those who held the pin with their teeth found the cartoons funnier than those who held the pin with their lips
    • Power Stance - Of you stand with your feet apart and your hands on your hips it should make you feel good (doesn’t actually work)
  • Independent vs Interdependent
    • Independent - Conceptualize your own self in self-identity
    • Interdependent - Incorporate close others into your own identity
    • Trafimow et al. (1991) - Compared Chinese and American college students , given a sheet of paper with "I am" 20 times, American students were more likely to write traits, while Chinese students are more likely to write group affiliations

Self-Knowledge: The overall set of beliefs or understanding one has about themselves

  • Moves from physical to psychological as you age
  • Moves from traits to states/situations, describe past self in traits, describe self now in state like comments
  • Self-schemas - Shortcuts that allow for quicker processing, the knowledge or beliefs that are generally correct about you

Motives for Self-Knowledge:

Appraisal - Understand how we fit within ourselves, those around us, and the population as a whole, understanding our role in society, weakest of these motivations

Self-Enhancement - In order to feel better about ourself, we have to understand something about ourself

Consistency - Perceived consistency, we like to remain what we consider consistent, one of the stronger motivations

Introspection: Examining your own mind and or mental state

Nesbitt & Wilson (1977) - Had 4 different women come in and present them with 4 different options for stalking and hosiery and asked them to choose which one they thought was the best, all stalking's were the same but people were more likely to choose the last one presented and when asked why they would come up with reasons that seemed logical

Can lead us astray, since we often take shortcuts in our introspection, overestimate the positive components of ourself and underestimate the negative components of ourself

Don’t use this too much, because brains are very busy

  • Diaries (Mor et al. 2010) - Fewer than half of the details in the dairies are self-focused

The Self Matters:

Self-reference - Information relating to the self is processed more deeply, relating to information that you care about as a person

Endowment - Things relating to the self tend to be viewed as more valuable

Self-Discrepancy Theory (Higgins, 1987) - If these lists are more similar you are more comfortable with yourself

  • Represent your actual, ought, and ideal self

Self Esteem: How you evaluate yourself

The more discrepant your lists, the lower self-esteem, the more similar your lists, the higher self esteem

Sociometer Theory (Leary and Baumeister, 2000) - Use self-esteem as a gauge for how much others like us

Protect us from the terror of DEATH

  • Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski (1997) - People with healthy levels of self-esteem don’t get paralyzed when the thought of death is upon them, people with low self-esteem don’t have that barrier of protection

Gender differences - No difference between amount of self-esteem, self-esteem for different qualities there is a larger difference, men have higher self-esteem than women in relation to attractiveness and athletic ability, women have higher self-esteem than men when it comes to morality and ethics

Cultural differences - Individualist cultures tend to have a more stable self-esteem, collectivist cultures self-esteem tend to be more malleable or less stable, matters more for those in individualist cultures

Self-Esteem:

Poor Gauges

Positive Illusions - A tendency to overestimate the good, underestimate the bad, and overestimate the amount of control that we have

Benefits - Gives us a feeling of initiative, if we feel good about ourselves we are more willing to try things that may fail

Negatives - If these do start to be too extreme, they can lead to narcissism

  • Boehler et al. 2006 - Took medical students and after having a lesson on how to tie surgical knots, they had the teacher give complimentary feedback, general feedback, and specific feedback, people with specific feedback became more successful in the long term, too much self-esteem can stifle your abilities

Optimal Margin Theory (Baumeister, 1989) - Best to not have self-esteem that is not too high or too low

Self Enhancement:

Think positive traits are more descriptive than negative

Implicit Egotism - We search for things that remind us of ourselves

  • Pelham et al. (2002) - People flock to different cities and careers that remind them of themselves

Self-Serving Bias - Take credit for our successes and find someone to pin the blame on for our failures

Self-handicapping - If you believe that you can't do something, some have the incentive to prove themselves correct

  • Behavioral - Engage in behaviors that create obstacles for success
  • Reported - You already have excuses or reasons for failure

Bask in Reflected Glory (BIRG) - Living vicariously through close others, when close others succeed you view it as enhancement for yourself

  • Cialdini et al. (1976) - Went to different colleges and sat on campus and counted how many people they saw wearing merchandise relating to the school and compared it to the Monday after the win and the Monday after a loss, found significantly higher rates of wearing school paraphernalia after a win than a loss

Self-Presentation: How you present to others around you

Spotlight Effect (Gilovich, Medvec, Savitsky, 2000) - We believe that more people are paying attention to us than they actually are

Strategic Presentation - Trying to shape others perception of yourself in order to gain an advantage

  • Conspicuous Consumption - Influencers have a particular brand trying to exhibit in social media, they want to engage with brands that fit with their image

Braginski, Braginski, Ring (1969) - Mental patients were meeting with a psychologist that decided if they could leave or be moved to a more strict hospital, looked at their behaviors, those who were told that they would be released acted in a way that suggested they had serious mental issues, those that were told that they were meeting to go to a more strict area presented a more calm and quiet demeanor, both groups changed their behavior to avoid changing their environment

Identity

  • Bryan, Walton, Rogers, Dweck (2011) - Asked to speak about voting or the importance of being a voter, then they looked to see who was more likely to vote, when participants were forced to be attached to a voter identity, they were more likely to go and vote

Favorability and Plausibility - Make sure your identity is something that someone actually believes, if you engage in something not very plausible it will often have negative effects

Awesomeness vs Preservation - To get people to like us, people will engage in risky behavior

Self-verification - The idea that we want people to see us how we see ourselves

Other Self Elements:

Self-Awareness - Awareness of who you are what your place is and what you're doing, involves evaluation

  • We are not usually self-aware, but can be made so
  • Tend to put us in a negative mood
  • Public - Easy access to people, aware of norms and expectations
  • Private - More based on who we are as people, more existential
  • Being made self-aware increases morality
    • Beaman et al. (1979) - Had a sign on Halloween bowl that said take 1 half had a mirror and the other half didn’t, the one with the mirror made them more self-aware, when there was a mirror only 12% violated the take 1 policy, whereas when there was no mirror 34% violated the policy
    • Bateson et al. (2006) - Was supposed to pour their own coffee and pay a set amount, half had a poster with a flower while the other half had one with dramatic eyes, when you feel you are being watched it increases self-awareness, the people with the eye poster paid 3x as much as those with the flower poster

Phenomenal Self - Self that is currently active in your mind

Choosing:

Choices have increased - Average grocery store had about 9,000 options years ago, but now has about 30-40,000

Two Steps

  • Whittle - Cross off for different reasons
  • Compare - Compare options that you’ve whittled down with each other to one another to make the best decision

Influences on Choosing:

Risk Aversion - Humans are more influenced by potential loss than potential gain, leads us to make a safe choice

Temporal Discounting - Thinking about the Present vs Future

  • Present vs Future - Present has more influence on our decision making process

Certainty Effect - If things that are certain we are more likely to choose those rather than choosing things that are possible

Keeping our Options Open - Once we make a decision we have live with that decision, if we never make a decision then our options are still there

Influences on Choosing:

Status Quo Bias - Humans don’t like change so they are less likely to choose things that mean change

Omission Bias - Go with the default option

Choice Paralysis - If something is better than everything else, we won't experience it no matter how many alternatives there are, happens when all options are awful or fairly equivalent

Social Influence on Choosing:

Reactance Theory - If you tell me not to do something, I am going to do that thing

  • Brehm (1966)
  • Increase Attraction to forbidden choice
  • Freedom Assertion - Need to prove that I make my own decisions and show that you don’t influence me
  • Increase negative feelings toward authority

Change:

Entity Theorist - Our abilities and traits are stable and fixed, not as open to trying new things

Incremental Theorist - Our abilities and traits can be changed and improved

Learned Helplessness - Don’t engage in a behavior because you have been told or learned that you are only ever going to fail in that behavior

Self-Freedom:

Self-Determination Theory - We need to feel like we are an agent of our own destiny in order to feel motivation

  • Intrinsic - Internal, the reason you are doing something is because you want to
  • Extrinsic - External, motivation coming from outside of you usually from a reward or punishment threat
  • Over justification Effect - For a behavior or action that started with intrinsic motivation, if you start to get extrinsic motivation, that intrinsic motivation decreases
    • Lepper et al. (1973) - Recording children at a daycare playing with markers and recorded how long they were playing with markers, a week later they came back and either were told "if you play with the markers you get a gold star and a reward" or if they play with markers they were surprised with a gold star or a reward or they were told nothing, a week after that they returned and measured how long they played with markers, if they were given no reward they played with markers for the longest period of time, the surprised extrinsic played with it the least, the shift in motivation
  • Panic Button effect - We as humans need to believe we can leave a situation regardless if we can actually leave

Agency:

Goal - Desired future state

Short term goal - High level of self-motivation and goals

Long term goal - Levels of motivation fluctuate pretty regularly, break a long term goal into short term goals

Zeigarnik Effect - Our automatic mind reflexively and unconsciously brings us back to thinking about incomplete goals, happens more at night or when you're bored

Goal Shielding - Can hyperfocus on the goals you are trying to accomplish, block out other goals so you only focus on the directive goal

Plans - Steps that we need to take in order to achieve goals

Planning Fallacy - You believe that your goal Is the goal that is going to go perfectly while recognizing that other people's goals aren't

Self-regulation:

Self-control - Process by which we seek to control our internal processes or external behaviors

  • A key element in sociality

Marshmallow Experiment

  • Mischel, Ebbeson, Zeiss (1972) - Can children self-regulate when given one of their favorite treats if the promise is they get one of their favorite treats if they self-regulate, were told that if they wait for them to get back they get two treats and if they ate it before they got back they would only get the one, they revisited the children later in life to see how their lives connected, children who were able to self-regulate seemed to be doing better in school and had fewer behavioral issues

Standards - Expectation for engaging in cultural norms

Monitoring - Looking at your behavior and seeing how it matches with those standards

  • TOTE - Test, operate, test, exit (start by testing behavior against a standard, if it is in line with the standard you will immediately exit, operate is changing behavior so that it is more in line with the standard, then you need to test again, you may need to operate again but if behavior is in line with standard you can exit)
  • Likely important to move from social role to social role
  • Drops with age (Reifman et al. 1989) - Older people tend to care less so they stop monitoring phase

Willpower - Another term for self-control, ability to exert self-control

  • Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice (1998) - Put people in a room with a plate of radishes and a plate of chocolate chip cookies, radish condition were told to eat as many radishes as you want but ignore the cookies, the cookie condition was told eat as many cookies as you want but ignore the radishes, the control was to eat whatever you wanted, took more willpower to eat radishes and ignore the cookies, after they have had their fill they were asked to complete difficult math problems, the dependent variable was how long they worked on those math problems, the radish people worked on math problems for shorter period of time because they used up their will power
  • Decision fatigue - Making decisions can be a tiring process
    • Muraven and Baumesister (2000) - Looked at judges and their decisions on parole, people who came up first case in the day or first case after lunch tended to get lighter decisions because the person had a higher level of willpower, found that there is a reservoir of self-control and as you go about your day you use less and less self-control, you can increase your reservoir through practice
    • Danziger, Levav, Avnaim-Pesso (2011) - Compared judges decisions after they trained their reservoir

Habits: Behaviors made common and regulated by the automated system

Habits can develop from the pursuit of past goals

Self-regulation affects habits

Self-Sabotage: Unconsciously choosing to engage in bad behaviors

Rarely directly want failure

Tradeoffs - May barter with yourself that focus on temporal discounting

Faulty Cognition - We engage in self-sabotage because of the cognitive faults mentioned