Social Psychology 311 Units 1-5

Chapter 1

08/20/24

Fundamental Attribution Error

• The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, underestimating the power of social influence.

Social Psychology is the study that behavior is influenced by real or imagined people.

Folk Wisdom

• Although a great deal can be learned from “common sense” knowledge, there is at least one problem with relying entirely on such sources: They frequently disagree with one another, and there is no easy way of determining which of them is correct. ​

• Are we to believe that “out of sight is out of mind” or that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”?​

• Which is true, that “haste makes waste” or that “he who hesitates is lost”? ​

Social Psychology is based in empiricism

• How might we reduce prejudice? What factors cause aggression? What kind of political advertisements work better than others?

• Level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation

Sociology is concerned about the group

Strong vs Weak situations

• Strong: Environment has a strong influence on behavior (funerals)

Chapter 2- Methodology

08/22/24

• Scientific Methods

  • Correlational Method

  • Experimental Method

  • Meta-Analysis

• Describe, Explain, Predict Behaviors

  • Ex: Freud explained behaviors, but could not predict them

  • Sometimes behavior can be predicted without being explained: Ex: military model airplane

• Hindsight Bias: Tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred

  • So, it is important to predict the outcome of an experiment before running it.

• Hypotheses come from real life.

  • Latane and Darley’s Bystander Effect. In 1968 they called it Diffusion of Responsibility.

  • Video: 1 person would alert about the fire. 3 people, and no one would say anything.

• The Observational Method- the technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

  • Goal: to describe what a particular group of people or type of behavior is like

  • Ex: Observing aggression at a children’s playground

  • Ex: Observing clothing choices after a select football team wins/loses

  • The observer needs to concretely define particular behaviors before the observation begins

• Interjudge (or Interrater) reliability- The level of agreement between two or more people who independently observe and code a set of data.

  • Ensures that the data is good quality.

• Archival Analysis- where does data come from?

  • A form of the observational Method in which the researcher examines accumulated documents (archives). Ex: diaries, magazines, newspapers

  • Identify the domain in which you are interested. (what types of data, how you classify things, how will you collect data)

• Limits of Observation

  • Certain behaviors are difficult to be observed because they occur in private or rarely.

  • With archival analysis, the original writers may not have included everything the researchers would need.

  • Internal traits, and mental states are not able to be observed.

• Surveys- research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviors.

  • Often correlational designed

  • Respondents should be selected randomly from the population in order for the results to be generalizable.

  • Advantages of Surveys

    • Researchers can judge the relationship between variables that are difficult to observe

    • Ability to sample representative segments of the population

    • Random Selection

  • Potential Problems

    • Accuracy- people don’t know the answer, but think they do

• Primary Research Designs

  • Meta-Analysis is used to summarize previous work. Original studies almost always use correlational or experimental design.

  • Correlational Method- The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e.,: how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed.

    • Ex: Correlation between pornography viewership and aggression

    • Positive Correlation (1.00) - Increase in one variable is associated with an increase in the other variable. Ex: height and weight

    • Negative Correlation (-1.00) - Increases in the value of one variable are associated with decreases in the value of the other variable. Ex: happiness at a job, amount of times they’ve thought about quitting

    • No correlation (0) - Two variables are not correlated

    • 0.3 is a pretty good correlation

  • Limits of the Correlational Method- Correlation doesn't equal causation

    • Only two variables can be correlated

    • A social psychologist's job is to explain the causes of behavior, but correlation cannot do that. A is correlated with B, A does not cause B.

    • If two variables are correlated, there are three possible causal relationships:

      • Maybe A makes B become x

      • Maybe B are more likely to A

      • Maybe there is an outside variable

  • The Experimental Method- the only way to determine causality

    • Method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures these conditions are identical except or the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people’s responses)

    • Deterministic causation: If A then always B

    • Probabilistic causation: If A then more likely B

      • We use probabilistic causation. Ex: smoking and lung cancer. Smoking won’t always cause lung cancer

    • Independent vs Dependent Variables. Control vs Experimental

08/27/24

• QUIZ: Open book, no time limit for quiz. DUE Thursday by 11:59pm.

• Independent and Dependent Variables in the case of Latane and Darley

  • Independent- number of people supposedly present when a researcher pretends to have a seizure

  • Dependent- Number of people who try to help in the emergency

  • Cover story- intercom research.

  • Outcome:

    • • When participants believed four other people witnessed the seizure, only 31% offered assistance.

    • • When participants believed only two others witnessed the seizure, helping behavior increased to 62%.

    • • When each participant believed that he or she was the only witness, nearly everyone helped (85%)

Internal Validity in Experiments

• Experiments should be high in internal validity. This is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions

  • Internal Validity- Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable.

  • Internal Validity in the seizure study- the seizure was an audio recording in order to standardize what the participants heard.

  • Random Assignment

• Random Assignment in interval validity

  • A process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance in taking part in any condition of an experiment

  • Through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants' personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions.

• Sample Size in Random Assignment

  • With larger samples, say 1000, you can assume random assignment will result in roughly equal detail orientation for the groups of 500. WIth a smaller sample, say 10, it will likely NOT give you equal detail orientation for the groups.

External Validity- The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people.

• Limitation of Experiments- the situation can be somewhat artificial and distant from real life.

• Two Kids of generalizability are at issue:

  • Generalizability across situations. The extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real life situations

    • Mundane Realism- The extent to which an experiment is similar to real life situations

      • Psychological Realism- the extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life.

      • Cover story!

• Generalizability across people. The extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general.

  • To be certain that the results represent the behavior of a particular population is the ensure that the participants are randomly selected from that population

    • It is impractical and expensive

    • REPLICATION - repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings (tests the experiment’s external validity)

The Replication crisis

• Recently psychologists have made efforts to replicate landmark studies

  • Pressures on journals: sales, impact factors

  • Pressures on researchers- research universities and the tenure system

    • Teaching universities: Meredith

    • Researching Universities: NC State

    • Assistant professor, associate professor, full professor

  • These lead to a lack of replication attempts

  • Replications are often unsuccessful because of

    • Small effect size (weak probabilistic causation)

    • Sampling error

    • Selectivity in publication. People are not publishing the times that the studies do not work.

  • The File Drawer Problem

    • Journals don’t want to see results with null outcome

Small vs Large Effect

Generalizability Across People

• Several studies might find an effect on a behavior, while others don't. This can be explained by Meta-Analysis.

• Meta-Analysis is a statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable

The Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist

• Field Experiments: A field experiment has the same design as a laboratory experiment except that it is conducted in a real-life setting (sidewalk, store, street, campus grounds).

  • Participants in a field experiment are unaware that the events they experience are in fact an experiment.

  • External validity of such an experiment is high, as it is taking place in the real world with real people.

• There is often a tradeoff between internal and external validity.

Potential Ethical Issues in Psychology

• Researcher issues

  • Fabricating, deleting data

  • Suppressing undesirable findings, using alternative analytics techniques, fishing for results

• Participant Issues

  • Subjecting participants to stressful/harsh conditions

  • Not making clear voluntary nature of participation

  • Not providing alternatives to participants (if for course credit)

Chapter 3- Social Cognition: How We Think About The Social World

08/29/24

Social Cognition- How people think about themselves and the social world, or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions.

Two Types of Social Cognition- Thinking Fast and SLow

1. Quick and Automatic- without consciously deliberately one's own thoughts, perceptions, assumptions

2. Controlled Thinking- effortful and deliberate, pausing to think about self and environment, careful selecting the right course of action.

Autopilot

• People LOVE to be on autopilot

• Most people take every opportunity to rely on autimatic processes- often with no deliberate choice made

• Need for Cognition- an individual difference variable that tries to get at differences in personality related to how “painful” deliberate thought is.

Low Effort Thinking

• People often size up a new situation very quickly: they figure out who is there, what is happening, and what might happen next.

• Often these quick conclusions are correct.

• You can tell the difference between a college classroom and a party without having to think about it.

Automatic Thinking- Thinking that is non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

• We form impressions of people quickly after effortlessly and navigate new roads while driving without much conscious analysis of what we are doing.

Schemas- Mental Structures people use to organize knowledge about the social world around themes, or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

• Schemas affect how we interpret and store information, and how we make decisions.

• Schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations.

Types of Schemas

• Person Schemas- appearance, personality, preferences, behavior

  • Social Schemas- first date expectations, interview expectations

  • Self Schemas- how we see ourselves

  • Event Schemas- handshakes, professionalism

Stereotypes about Race and Weapons

• When applies to members of a social group such as a fraternity or gender or race, schemas are commonly referred to as stereotypes

  • Stereotypes can be applied rapidly and automatically when we encounter other people

  • Example:

    • Shoot or not shoot experiments with white males and black males.

Function of Schemas

• Schemas are typically very useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.

  • Schemas help us reduce ambiguity

  • Example:

    • Students are told that a speaker is warm and friendly vs cold and reserved.

Schemas as Memory Guides

• Schemas also help people fill in the blanks when they are trying to remember things

• We don't remember exactly as if our minds are cameras

• Instead, we remember some information that was there (particularly information our schemas lead us to pay attention to), and we remember other information that was never there but that we have unknowingly added.

• Memory reconstructions tend to be consistent with one's schemas

Which Schemas are applied?

• Accessibility- the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of peoples minds are are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world

  • Something can be accessible for three reasons.

  • 1. Some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experiences. Example: growing up with an alcoholic parent (LONG DURATION)

  • 2. Something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal. Example: taking an abnormal psych class. (Mental Illness) (MEDIUM DURATION)

  • 3. Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of recent experiences. Example: Seeing an ad for vodka prior to getting on the bus. (SHORT DURATION)

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

  • Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977 study. They memorize negative or positive words. This primed them for their opinions about Donald.

09/03/24

The Persistence of Schemas after they are Discredited

Making our Schemas Come True: Self Fulfilling Prophecy

The case whereby Person A

• Has an expectation about what Person B is like, which

• Influences how Person A acts toward Person B, which

• Causes Person B to behave consistently with Person A’s original expectations, making the expectations come true

Example in a Classroom

Climate- teachers create a warmer climate when they have higher expectations for them

Input factor- teachers teach more

Response Opportunity Factor- call on the children more

Feedback Factor- teachers give kids higher quality feedback

Behavioral Confirmation- acting in such a way as to make your belief true

Limits of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• People's true nature can win out in social interaction.

Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• People use schemas to understand new situations

• We do not always have a ready-made schema to apply to specific decisions

• So, we use heuristics to make judgments about the world

Judgemental Heuristics- mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

Example: buying a moderately priced bottle of wine. “You get what you pay for”

• Heuristics do not guarantee that people will make accurate inferences about the world

• Sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job at hand or misapplied, leading to faulty conclusions

Availability Heuristic- a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which someone can bring something to mind

• Vividness- things that come to mind easily are estimated to be more common/frequent

• Study: Name 6 vs 12 assertive behaviors

Representative Heuristic- A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

• Colors on a die

• Barnum Effect

Anchoring and Adjustment heuristic

• A mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor.

• Car MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price)

• 50% off sales

• “Inshittification Cycle” Ex: Amazon, doordash

Problem: completely arbitrary values can influence judgments. Example: Wheel of Fortune

Decoy Effect- Asymmetric Dominance

• Popcorn at the movie theater

Controlled Social Cognition: High Effort Thinking

Counterfactual Reasoning

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been. The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it.

• Example: “If I had answered differently, I would have gotten an A”

• Example: Silver Medalist winners

• Can be useful if it focuses people's attention on ways that they can cope better in the future

• Rumination-

Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing

• Thought Suppression- deliberately trying to avoid thinking about something

Improving Human Thinking

Overconfidence Barrier- the fact that people usually have too much confidence in their judgments

Chapter 4- Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People

09/05/24

Social Perception- The study of how we form impressions of, and make inferences about, other people.

Observable behavior

• What people do and say

• Facial expressions

• Gestures

• Tone of voice

We can’t truly and completely understand their thoughts and intentions. We can only go off their observable behaviors.

We rely on our impressions and personal theories, hoping they will lead to reasonably accurate and useful conclusions.

Sources of information

• Verbal communication

• Nonverbal communication

• Our implicit personality theories

  • Types of traits that go together

Nonverbal communication- the way in which people communicate intentionally, or unintentionally, without words

• Body language

• Facial expressions

• Use of touch

• Gaze

Tone of Voice

Some nonverbal cues actually contradict the spoken words. When verbal and nonverbal cues cash, we usually trust the nonverbal.

Facial Expressions

• Six major emotional expressions: anger, sadness, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust.

• For the most part, these emotions are universal

• Other emotions such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride occur later in human development and show less universality

• These latter emotions are closely tied to social interaction

• Affect Blends occur when one part of the face registers one emotion and another part, a different emotion

Decoding facial Expressions can be complicated

• Affect Blends

• Cultural

• Sometimes people try to appear less emotional than they are

Display rules- a social norm particular to each culture and dictate what kinds of emotional expressions people are supposed to show.

Example: Japanese women are encouraged to hide their wide smiles behind their hands

Eye contact, personal space

Emblems- nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations, like the “OK” sign

Implicit Personality Theory- a type of schemas people use to group various kinds of personality traits together

• To understand other people, we observe their behavior, but we also infer their feelings, traits, and motives.

• To do so, we use general notions or schemas about which personality traits go together

• Example: if someone is kind, we expect them to be generous as well. If someone is stingy, we expect them to also be irritable.

• Attractive people are assumed to be more: sociable/extroverted, friendly, kind, well-adjusted, popular, intelligent, sexual, assertive, happier

• In Western cultures, someone with an “artistic personality” is seen as creative, temperamental, intense, and has an unconventional lifestyle. The Chinese, however, do not have a schema or implicit personality theory for an artistic type.

Causal Attribution

• According to attribution theory, we try to determine why people do what they do in order to uncover the feelings and traits that are behind their actions. This helps us understand and predict our social world

The Nature of The Attribution Process

• Fritz Heider

• Internal Attribution- the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something abou the person, such as attitude, or character, or personality. (Falling because clumsy)

• EXTERNAL Attribution- the inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation they are in. The assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that citation. (Falling because floor is slippery)

• We tend to assume the internal explanation. Perceptual salience- we focus on the people, less on the context

Example In a relationship

• Internal attributions for positive behaviors

• External attributions for negative behaviors

Correspondence Bias - fundamental attribution error

The tendency to believe that people’s behavior watches (corresponds to ) their dispositions.

Example- Castro Speech Study (Jones & Harris, 1967)

The Covariation Model: Internal versus External Attributions

Harold Kelley’s major contribution to attribution theory

• 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 or not the behavior occurs.

• We make choices by using information on:

  • Consensus Information- information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does. (everyone skips this class, external)

  • Distinctiveness Information- information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli (she skips lots of classes, internal)

  • Consistency Information- information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances. (she skips this class often)

Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists

• We can’t see the situation, so we ignore its importance

• People, not the situation, have perceptual salience for us

• We pay attention to the person, and we tend to think that they alone cause their behavior.

Perceptual Salience- the seeming importance of information that is the focus of their attention as a starting point.

• The culprit is one of the mental shortcuts we discussed in chapter 3: Similar to anchoring and adjustment heuristic.

• The correspondence bias is another byproduct of this shortcut

• When making attributions, people use the focus of their attention as a starting point

Example: 2 Actors are talking about the same amount. The observers are stationed to watch the actors at varying angles. When the observers are facing one actor more than the other, they respond that their actor had contributed more to the conversation.

The Two-Step Process

We go through a two step process when we make attributions.

1. First, we make an internal attribution, we assure that a person's behavior was due to something about that person. (automatic thinking)

2. Then we attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in. But we don't make enough of an adjustment in this second step. To do this we need energy, time, and motivation. (controlled thinking)

Example: a student answers a question wrong in class. Many will assume the student is not very smart. With time, energy, and motivation, we might realize that the professor asked a bad question, or the student didn’t get enough sleep the night before.

• We will engage in the second step of attributable processing if we

• 1. Consciously slow down and think carefully before reaching a judjment

• 2. Are motivated to reach as accurate a judjment as possible, or

• 3. Are suspicious about the behavior of the target person (ex: we expect they are lying)

Culture and the Correspondence Bias

• People from individualistic and collectivistic cultures both demonstrate the correspondence bias

• Members of collectivistic cultures are more sensitive to situational causes of behavior and more likely to rely on situational explanations, as long as situational variables are salient.

• North American and some other Western cultures stress individual autonomy. A person is perceived as independent and self-contained; his or her behavior reflects internal traits, motives, and values

• In contrast, East Asian cultures such as those in China, Japan, and Korea stress group autonomy. The individual derives his or her sense of self from the social group to which he or she belongs.

Exercise:

Strengths: empathetic, kind, passionate, fun, carefree, understanding, sweet, independent, caring

Weaknesses: stubbornness, introverted, hive mind, too easily trusting, math, follower, irritable, anti social, anxious

The Actor/Observer Difference

• We think other people ARE the way they ACT

  • If you see someone trip and fall on the sidewalk, you might think “how clumsy”

  • If you trip yourself, you might think “this sidewalk is slippery”

• This difference is an amplification of the correspondence bias:

  • We tend ti see each others behavior as dispositionally caused, while we are more likely to see our own behavior as situationally caused.

  • This effect occurs because perceptual salience and information availability differ for the actor and the observer

• Actors have more information about themselves than observers do

• Actors know how they've behaved over the years. They know what happened to them that morning

• They are far more aware than observers are of both the similarities and the differences in their behavior over time and across situations, actors have more consistency and distinctiveness information about themselves than observers do.

Self Serving Attributions- Explanations for ones successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for ones failures that blame external, situational factors.

Defensive Attribution- Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality

Self Serving Bias: Interval vs External Attribution

the tendency to perceive ourselves favorably. More credit when we succeed, less credit when we fail.

• Four ways to demonstrate self-serving bias:

  • self-serving attributions,

  • Being better than average

  • Unrealistic optimism

  • False consensus

• Attributions: Explanations for events

• Example: my grade was bad on the test because the questions were bad

Past test: Green & Gross (1979) “you” vs “David”

1. Something good happens to oneself - Roger called me because something about me

2. Something good happens to david

3. Something bad happens to oneself - Roger couldn’t call because there was no phone

4. Something bad happens to david

- Self enhancing and self fulfilling bias

Self-Serving Bias: Doing Better than Average

• Ratings of sense of humor

• Lake Wobegon Effect: believing that we are above-average in virtuous traits, and below-average in negative traits

  • 95% of people believe that they are better than average divers

• Self-reported completion of chores in married couples

• Project team members’ estimates of how much they contributed will typically add up to more than 100%

Self Serving Bias: Unrealistic Optimism

• “Other people die from smoking, I should be fine though since I only smoke “lights”

• Illusion of invulnerability: Snyder (1997)

  • Average life expectancy was 75 years

  • Students overestimated their life expectancy by 9 years!

Self Serving Bias: False Consensus

• We tend to overestimate the number of people who agree with us o a given issue

  • Example: long showers, cheating on taxes, racism, sexism, stealing from the workplace

• Why does this happen?

  • Makes us feel less deviant

Self Serving Attributions

Why do we make these?

• Most people try to maintain their self esteem, whenever possible, even if that means distorting reality by changing a thought or belief

• We want people to think well of us and admire us. Telling others that our poor performance was due to some external cause puts a “good face” on failure.

• We know more about our own efforts than we do about other peoples

• One form of defensive attribution is to believe that bad things happen only to bad people or at least, only to people who make stupid mistakes or poor choices

• Therefore, bad things won't happen to us because we won't be that stupid or careless

• “Belief in a just world”

• Victim blaming!

Why a belief in a just world?

• The fear of facing vulnerability. If it could happen to anyone, it could happen to me

• Desire to minimize anxiety. An unjust world causes more anxiety than a just one.

Chapter 5: Self-Knowledge: How We Come to Understand Ourselves

09/10/24

Exercise

1. NO

2. NO

3. YES Remembered

4. YES Remembered

5. YES remembered

6. NO Remembered

7. YES Remembered

8. NO Remembered

9. NO Remembered

10. YES

11. YES

12. YES Remembered

13. YES

14. YES

15. YES

16. NO

17. YES

18. NO Remembered

19. YES

20. NO

5 Independent

4 Timid

3 Responsible

18 Relaxed

8 Romantic

9 Spontaneous

6 High strung

7 Complex

12 Sensitive

Remembered, YES - 5

Remembered, NO - 4

The Nature of Self

• Self Concept- Our knowledge about who we are

• Self Awareness- The act of thinking about ourselves

• Self Esteem- My sense of self worth

• Social Self- My role as a student, family member, friend

• Self Knowledge- How can i predict and explain myself?

Organizational Function of Self

Self Schemas- mental structures that people use to organize their knowledge about themselves and that influence what they notice, think about, and remember about themselves

Self Reference Effect- the tendency for people to remember information better if they relate it to themselves

09/12/24

The Nature of Self

• Self recognition develops at around 18 months

• As we grow older, this rudimentary self concept becomes more complex

• Typically, a child's self concept is concrete with references to clear cut, easily observable characteristics like age, sex, neighborhood, and hobbies

• As we mature we place less emphasis on physical appearance and more on physiological states (thoughts and feeling) and how other people view us

Cultural Differences in Defining the Self

• In many Western cultures, people have an independent view of the self

  • Independent View of the Self- A way of defining oneself in terms of one's own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions and not in terms of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people

  • Perceive images in the foreground

• Many Asian and non-western cultures have an interdependent view of the self

  • A way of defining oneself in terms of one's relationships to other people; recognizing that one's behavior is often determined by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others

  • Might do the Functional Attribution Error less. They understand situational context more than Western cultures

  • Perceive images in the background

Individualism vs Collectivism

Traits of collectivistic cultures (interdependent sense of self )

• Selflessness

• Working as a group and supporting others

• People are encouraged to do what's best for society

• families and communities

Examples: China, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Nepal, Poland, Russia, Somalia, Uganda, Vietnam

Traits of Individualistic Cultures (independent sense of self)

• Individual rights

• Independence

• Being dependent on others is shameful

• Self reliance

• Greater emphasis put on standing out and being unique

Examples: Australia, Israel, Italy, UK, USA, Spain, South Africa, Switzerland, Belgium

Not every person in an individualistic culture has an independent sense of self and vice versa. This is generalized.

Gender Differences in Defining the Self

• Women have more relational interdependence, meaning that they focus more on their close relationships, such as how they feel about their spouse of their child

• Men have more collective interdependence, meaning that they focus on their larger groups, such as the fact that they are Americans, a Wolfpack fan, or belong to a certain fraternity.

Organizational Function of the Self

The self regulates behavior, choices, and future plans, much like a corporation’s chief executive officer.

We appear to be the only species that can:

• Imagine events that have not yet occurred

• Engage in long-term planning

Self Regulatory Resource Model

• Self control is a limited resource kind of like a muscle that gets tired with frequent use but then rebounds in strengths.

• Study: Participants were asked to exert self control on one task to see if h=this reduces their ability to exert control on a subsequent and completely unrelated task. (Don’t think of a white bear, don’t laugh during a comedy film)

• This study has not replicated well.

• If people BELIEVE self-control works in this way, then it typically does. “I followed the diet all day, but now I'm tired and I can’t stop myself from getting a cookie”

Knowing Ourselves through Introspection

Introspection- the process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives

1. People do not rely on this source of information as often as you might think

2. Even when people do introspect, the reasons for their feelings and behavior can be hidden from conscious awareness

Self-Awareness Theory

• The idea that when people focus their attention on themselves, they evaluate and compare their internal standards and values

• Study: Beaman et al. (1979) Trick or Treating

• Study: Diener & Wallbom (1976) General Intelligence Test

• Slef focus is not always damaginng or averside. It can be good if you have just experienced a major success, focusing on yourself can feel good

• Self-focus can also be a way of keeping yourself out of trouble, reminding you of right and wrong

Judging why we feel the way we do

• It can be difficult to know why we feel the way we do

• In many cases, people are wrong about what predicts their mood

  • Example: sleep is unrelated to people’s moods

• Causal Theories- theories about the causes of one's own feelings and behaviors; often we learn such theories from our culture. Ex: “absence makes the heart grow fonder”

• Study: Nisbett & Wilson: Construction noise interrupting a video

Knowing Ourselves by Observing Our Own Behavior

• Self Perception Theory- the theory that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs

1. We infer our inner feelings from our behavior only when we are not sure how we feel

2. People judge whether their behavior really reflects how they feel or whether it was the situation that made them act that way

Example: How do you feel about classical music?

Study: Hold a pen in/above their mouth while watching a show

• Behavior comes first, perception follows

The Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

• The way in which we experience emotions has a lot in common with self perception processes.

• Our emotions are a reaction to the environment.

• Schachter’s idea that emotional experience is the result of a two step self perception process in which people

  • 1. Experience physiological arousal and then

  • 2. Seek an appropriate explanation for it (attribution)

• Study: Schachter and Singer (1962) Shots of epinephrine

Finding the Wrong Cause: Misattribution of Arousal

• The process whereby people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do

• Residual arousal from one source can enhance the intensity of how the person interprets other feelings5

09/19/24

Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic Motivation- The desire to engage in an activity because we enjoy it or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or pressures.

Example: hobbies such as playing piano, running, stamp collecting

Extrinsic motivation- the desire to engage in an activity because of external reasons, not because we enjoy the task or find it interesting.

Example: working for money, not because you love it

Applying self perception theory to this.

No external reward→ I must do it because i like it → intrinsic motivation

External reward → I do this because Im paid to → extrinsic motivation

Overjustification Effect- the tendency of people to view their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic motivations, making them underestimate the extent to which it was caused by intrinsic reasons.

Example: paying kids to read, and then stop paying them so they stop reading

Preserving Intrinsic Interest

The overjustification effect can be avoided:

1. Rewards will undermine interest only if interest was initially igh

2. The type of reward makes a difference. Performance-contingent rewards might do better than task-contingent rewards

Task Contingent Rewards- rewards that are given for the completion of a task

Performance Contingent Rewards- rewards that are given based on how well the task is done

Growth vs Fixed Mindset

Self Determination Theory- very popular theory (not in book, but important to know)

• Distinguishes between autonomous (similar to intrinsic) and controlled (similar to extrinsic) motivation

• People have three needs:

  • Competence- ti feel like we can perform or master something

  • Relatedness

  • Autonomy- to control our own behavior

  • Meet peoples needs to increase their autonomous motivation

Knowing Ourselves by Comparing Ourselves to Others

• One way to define ourselves is to measure our own abilities and attitudes by seeing how we stack up against other people

• We do this when there is ambiguity

• Social Comparison Theory- the idea that we learn about our abilities by comparing ourselves to other people

• We engage in social comparison when there is no objective standard to measure ourselves against and when we experience some uncertainty about themselves in a particular area

  • Tipping, charitable giving

• Who do we compare ourselves to?

  • The initial impulse is to compare themselves with anyone around them

  • This initial comparison occurs quickly and automatically

• Upwards social comparison- compare ourselves to people who are better than we are at that ability

  • Push yourself

• Downward social comparison- comparing yourself to people who are worse than you on a particular trait or ability

  • Lift yourself up

Social Media and Social Comparison

• People tend to post the highlights of their lives on social media. Your feed may be full of people doing interesting things in exotic places

• From your perspective, it seems as though everyone else is living it up

• But, these may be once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime experiences for most people posting content

• Social media “professionals” go to extremes with impression management

• There seems to be a significant and lasting drop in adolescent mental health and reduced sleep in mid-2010s as social media became more prevalent

• Impression Management- the attempt by people to get others to see them as they want to be seen. Self-handicapping- the strategy whereby people create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that if they do poorly on a task, they can avoid blaming themselves.

  • Ways to do this: prepare ready-made excuses (I dont feel well) or create obstacles to blame later. (I stayed up too late last night)

Ingratiation- a psychological technique where someone attempts to gain favor or acceptance from another person through flattery, opinion conformity, or other means:

Social Tuning- the process of unconsciously aligning one's beliefs with those of another person or group

Chapter 6: The Need to Justify Our Actions: The Costs and Benefits of Dissonance Reduction

09/24/24