PSYB10 Notes

Chapter 1

Kurt Lewin

  • Studied physics and applied this discipline to study human social life
  • Considered the founder of modern social psychology
  • Forces are psychological and physical agents that change human behaviour

The Milgram Experiment

  • Study on learning and memory for money
  • The participant is the ‘teacher’ who administers the shocks
  • Most participants administered shocks despite hysterical screams by the ‘learner.’
  • The power of situation → people are governed by situational factors such as being pressured by someone

Seminarians as Samaritans

  • Seminarians were good Samaritans by helping a man who needed help, only when they weren’t in a rush
  • The power of situation → people are governed by situational factors, such as when they are late

Internal factors –such as how kind a person is– have less influence than people assume

  • Dispositions – beliefs, values, personality traits, and abilities that guide behaviour
    • People tend to think they are the underlying causes of behaviour, but this is not true.
  • External factors (situational factors) play important roles

The Fundamental Attribution Error

  • The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the role of dispositions.
  • For example, assuming the seminarians were uncaring, if they did not offer to help the man who needed it, but they were in a rush.
  • People should consider situational factors when trying to understand other people’s behaviour before assuming that behaviour is a result of dispositions.

Nudge – Channel factors

  • Help explain why certain circumstances that seem unimportant can have great consequences for behaviour
  • These factors are considered “nudges” – small prompts that can have big effects on behaviour
  • For example, employers make an “opt-out” policy to encourage participation in retirement plans
  • Also works for organ donors
    • 99% of Austrians are organ donors, whereas only 12% of Germans are – not because Austrians are more generous (fundamental attribution error)
    • Germans have to check a box if they want to register as organ donors, whereas Austrians have to check a box if they don’t want to

The Role of Construal

  • Automatic and non-conscious perceptual processes and assumptions about the visual world
  • People fill in gaps to what they expect something to be
  • For example, the picture of the beautiful woman or witch – what we see is determined by what is in our heads

Gestalt Psychology – people perceive objects not by means of some passive and unbiased perception of objective reality but by active, usually nonconscious interpretation of what the object represents.

  • For example, in the Milgram study, participants weren’t registering what the situation was; instead, they were interpreting in ways that the experimenter was encouraging.

Construal – how we interpret situations and behaviour and how we make inferences, often nonconscious, about the contexts and the people we are encountering.

  • Our perceptions drive our behaviour toward people

Schemes – generalized knowledge about the physical and social world, such as what kind of behaviour to expect when dealing with certain people and how to behave in specific places.

  • We depend on stores of systematized knowledge to understand the simplest and most “obvious” situations.
  • Capture the regularities of life and lead us to rely on certain expectations, so we don’t have

Stereotypes – schemes that we have for people of various kinds

  • We tend to judge people based of particular person schemes we have
  • Nationality, gender, religion, occupation, neighbourhood, or sorority

Automatic and nonconscious processes based on emotional factors tend to occur before conscious thought takes over.

In general, automatic processes give rise to implicit attitudes and beliefs that can't be readily controlled by the conscious mind; controlled, conscious processing results in explicit attitudes and beliefs that we're aware of--though these may become implicit or nonconscious over time.

Conscious processes are generally slow and can run only serially--one step at a time. Automatic processes are typically much faster and can operate in parallel.

Just as evolution has prepared humans to live together in groups and to communicate in order to promote survival and reproduction, it may also have provided humans with a "theory of mind"--the ability to recognize that other people have beliefs and desires and that understanding others' beliefs and desires allows us to understand and predict their behavior.

Older regions of the brain that we share with other mammals appear to be involved in nonconscious, automatic reactions to our social environment.

Working-class people have more interactions with their families than middle- and upper-class individuals do

Societies tend to become tighter when they are under threat from sources such as freuent invasion, natural disasters, and chronic food scarcity.

Chapter 2

Applicant’s felony: Retailers from the South complied with the applicant's requests more frequently than those from the North did. And the notes from Southern business owners were much warmer and more sympathetic.

To conduct a thought experiment, you need to speculate about the results you might obtain under two different sets of circumstances. When resources are limited to create an experiment, thought experiments clarify your assumptions and general conceptual understanding of the phenomenon in question

Types of Research:

  • Observational – observing some phenomenon at close range
  • Archival – look at evidence found in archives of various kinds, including census reports, police records, sports statistics, newspaper articles, and databases containing ethnographic (anthropological) descriptions of people in different culture
  • Surveys – asking people questions
    • Random samples – likely to capture proportions of given types of individuals as a whole
    • Convenience samples – can produce proportions that are severely skewed
      • May be biased
      • Includes too many people of a certain type and too few from another type

Lecture 1

5 Pillars of Psychology

  • Biological – biopsychology/neuroscience, sensation, consciousness
  • Cognitive – perception, thinking, intelligence, memory
  • Developmental – learning, lifespan development
  • Social & personality – social, personality, emotion, motivation
  • Mental & physical – abnormal, therapies, stress, lifestyle, and health

Social psychology – personality and social interaction determine human behaviour

Studying the Power of Situation

  • Situations often determine behaviour, regardless of an individual’s attributes
  • Example: Nazi Germany
    • Were all Nazi soldiers evil people or were most of them regular people who were following evil orders?
    • Kurt Lewin fled Nazi Germany
  • Milgram's “study of learning”
    • Participants assigned as “teachers”
    • Instructed to shock another participant “learner” after wrong answers
    • The participant was not actually shock
    • Increase volts every time the learner gets something wrong
    • Although learning was screaming, 62% participants went to a very dangerous level
    • Same effects with males and females
    • Under pressure from authority → obedience
      • Even if its immoral commands

Fundamental attribution error – the failure to recognize or underestimate the impact of situational influence on behaviour, along with the tendency to overemphasize the impact of dispositions on behaviour

  • If someone cuts you off in traffic → you say they are a bad person
  • If you cut someone else off → you say you are in a rush
  • Attribute bad disposition for strangers but situational factors to describe why you did a bad thing

Dispositions – internal factors such as beliefs, values, personality traits and abilities that guide a person’s behaviour

Channel factors – situational circumstances that may appear unimportant on the surface but can have strong effects on behaviour by facilitating it, blocking it, or guiding it in a particular direction

  • Also called ‘nudges’ – central to a new field at the intersection of social psychology and economics
  • Employee with a retirement plan
    • Opt-out is more successful in getting people to save for retirement
    • It is the same choice but rates differ based on the nudge

Construal – an interpretation or inference about the stimuli or situation that people confront

  • A way that people perceive, comprehend, and interpret their world, particularly the acts of others towards them
  • Lens through which you interpret reality → shapes your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours

Gestalt psychology – we perceive objects not by means of some automatic registering device but by active –usually unconscious– interpretation of what the object represents

  • Seeing somebody as a whole

Schemas – knowledge structures consisting of any organized body of stored information that is used to help in understanding events

  • May be about the physical or social world
  • How to behaviour in certain social settings is based on schemas
  • Prior expectations influence construals
  • Influence behaviour and judgement

Stereotypes – schemas we hold about people

  • Characteristics of members of a particular group
  • Mental shortcuts to social interactions
  • We know how to interact with people we have stereotypes about
  • But can be applied incorrectly
    • Can be applied to ‘wrong’ individuals
    • Give too much influence on judgements → a person’s individuality is denied
  • Activated automatically – we don’t choose it

Automatic processing – involuntary and unconscious processing tied to emotional reactions

  • Automatic processes give to implicit attitudes and beliefs that cannot be readily controlled by the conscious mind
  • Implicit – present but not consciously held or recognized

Controlled processing – conscious, systematic, deliberate processing that can override automatic responses

  • Results in explicit attitudes and beliefs
  • Explicit – openly shown and expressed

Types of Automatic Processing (Nonconscious)

  • Influences occur without awareness
  • Social psychologists have shown that much of our cognitive activity is hidden from us
  • Subconscious mimicry
    • If your sitting across a stranger and adjust your hair → see if they also adjust their hair

Functions of Automatic Processing

  • Conscious → generally slow and can run only one step at a time
  • Automatic → typically much faster and can operate in parallel
    • Smell something very nice while also listening to music and then also notice someone

Natural Selection – animals and plants with traits that increase survival/reproduction are more likely to survive and pass those on to subsequent generations

  • May explain human behaviours
  • We have universals → we get these norms from evolution
    • Marriage
    • Incest prevention
    • Baby talk
    • Need health care

Group Living and Language

  • Evolutionarily adaptive – protection from predators, cooperation needed to obtain resources
  • Language ability – facilitates ability to live in complex groups
    • Infants might be prewired to learn language
      • Babble sounds but lose the ability to do that when that babble is not used in their language

Theory of Mind – the understanding that other people have beliefs and desires

  • Vary in ability level
    • Autistic children, ‘psychopaths’ might lack in their ability

We want to avoid Naturalistic Fallacy

  • The idea that the way things are are the way they should be
  • People oppose the idea that human behaviour is heavily governed by genetics and biology
  • Just because something comes to us naturally doesn’t mean it’s good

Social neuroscience – scientists study the role of brain activity in social behaviour

  • fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging
  • Specific areas of the brain are more active during different cognitive and emotional tasks
  • Certain parts of the brain are regularly activated in social related contexts

The Social Brain

  • Links between the brain and the development of social behaviour
  • Areas of the brain linked to sensing danger remain poorly developed until early adulthood
    • This explains why adolescents engage in more risky behaviour than adults

Human Behaviour

  • Human have the great flexibility to adapt to different circumstances/contexts and environments
  • Massive differences among human cultures
  • Argentinian Black and White Tegu are also adaptable

Independent Cultures – people tend to think of themselves as distinct, individual entities

  • Social bonds and group memberships are voluntary, but we view ourselves as separate from other people holistically
  • We think of our attributes as existing in the absence of others

Collectivistic Cultures – people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, tied to others in their group, and place little importance on individual freedom or personal control over their lives

  • Clash between immigrant parents’ cultures where its more collectivistic and your own where you want independence

Nota Bene

  • Both evolution and culture influence human behaviours
  • Some behaviours may be ‘innate’ but are edited by cultural influence
    • All living beings need food, but the context of the food we consume differ based on culture
  • One person can have relatively independent orientation in some situations and more interdependent orientation in others
    • Trying to ace an exam – independent
    • Ultimate frisbee match – interdependent
  • Cultural factors determine independent vs interdependent social orientations
    • How income is earned – cultures based in economic cooperation → interdependent
    • Kin associations – cultures organized along lines of families, clans, tribes → interdependence
      • Inherited land or money from family depends on interdependence
      • Without these → independent

Culture and Gender Roles

  • Sex differences are present in all cultures, but the degree differ
  • Wide variation in cultural views of gender roles and gender equality
  • Cultural variation in sexual practices
    • In America, one man, one woman get married → in other cultures this might seem crazy
  • Can also vary within subcultures in the same country

WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic culture is what the bulk findings in social psychology are from

Evolution and Culture

  • Both affect how people see the world and behave
  • Evolution has given us all the capacity for a wide range of behaviours

Social Media

  • Who are we?
  • How are attitudes and behaviours influenced by new communication technologies

The Good Life

  • Social psychology helps us identify what makes us happy
  • Helps manage stress

Question: Research on fundamental attribution error suggests it is common for people to assume that disposition are the underlying causes of most behaviours

Question: Judy continually compliments the people with whom she works. Bob, one of Judy’s best friends, thinks that Judy is genuinely thoughtful and friendly. Sarah, who does not know Judy well, thinks that Judy is shallow and fake. This example suggests how friendship influences: Construals

Classroom Etiquette

  • Professors have a schema for how students ought to behave in the classroom
    • Arrive on time
    • Don't talk or wear headphones
    • If you are late, don’t come in with food or drinks
    • Don’t sit and go on your phone

Hindsight Bias – people’s tendency after learning about a given outcome to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a given outcome

  • The mind reconstructs past events in a way that makes the result seem obvious, even when the original situation was uncertain
  • “I knew that would happen” – the tendency to believe after an event has happened that the outcome was predictable all along
  • Example: students believing an exam question was easy only after seeing the correct answer
  • Different from confirmation bias – how we interpret information when we try to assess something

Thought Experiments

  • Can’t conduct experiments to test ideas
  • Set theories and hypotheses

Types of Social Psychological Research

  • Observational, archival, surveys, correlational, experimental, natural

Observational Research – social psychologists observe social situations, take notes and interview participants

  • Conclusions should be made with caution
  • Combine with experimental methods
  • Only getting information you are able to see – no past or future information

Archival Research – analysis of social behaviours documented in the past

  • Can be used to test theories about social behaviour

Surveys – asking participants questions via interview or questionnaire

  • Often conducted online
  • Number and type of people is key
    • Can be limited if the sample is biased
    • But can be accurate from a small sample if unbiased
  • Unbiased → randomly choose people form a population
    • Every person has an equal chance of being studied
  • Convenience sampling is not random
    • Wanting to know which major is the best → only sampling everyone in my classes as a pysch major is biased
    • Can cause skewed results

Correlational Research – no random assignment to different situations or conditions

  • Tests for association among two or more variables
  • Reverse causation – in correlational research, the opposite direction of causation than when variable 1 is assumed to causally influence variable 2; instead, variable 2 is assumed to influence variable 1
  • Third variable – exerts a casual influence on both variable 1 and variable 2
    • Does ice cream predict more murder? No.
    • Does murder predict more ice cream sales? No.
    • Third variable – heat
      • People get more agitated when it’s hot outside
  • Self-selection – participants ‘select’ their level on each variable as well as unknown properties → causal interpretation of a relationship is difficult
    • Can’t manipulate
  • Advantages: develop hypotheses about aspects of the world

Experimental Research – randomly assign people to different conditions/situations

  • Enables researcher to make strong inferences about why a relationship occurs and how different conditions affect behaviour
  • Can establish causation
  • Independent variable
    • In correlational research → measured
    • In experimental research → manipulated
  • Dependent variable is measured not manipulated
  • Randomly assign participants to different groups
  • Control – identical to manipulated condition except what you want to test
    • Lacks the component that is hypothesized

Natural Experiment – naturally occurring phenomenon with variable conditions

  • Can be compared with almost as rigor as experiments
  • Test academic achievements of whether sesame street was aired in that area

Manipulated a situation too much → limit the validity of results

External validity – how well the results of a study apply to contexts outside of the study itself

  • How well the results of a study can be generalized to other situations, people, settings or times

Field Experiment – conducted in the real world

  • Usually participants are not aware they are in a study
  • High in external validity

Internal validity – the likelihood that only the manipulated variable could have produced the results

Internal and external validity may be oppositely related

  • The more closely a situation resembles real life (external validity), the more difficult it may be to tightly control the situation (internal validity)

Reliability – the degree to which a particular measure of a given variable yields consistent results

  • If you took the same test twice, would you get the same score?

Validity – the extent to which a measure, measures what it is supposed to

  • Does IQ tests truly measure what people think of as intelligence?

Regression to the Mean – the tendency of extreme scores on a variable to be followed by, or associated with, less extreme scores

  • Normal distribution
  • Breaking a record is an extreme → it will not happen every time

Statistical significance – a measure of the probability that a given result could have occurred by chance

Replication – process of reproducing the results

  • Controversy may arise because of failure to replicate
  • Open science → make data available to other people

Ethical concerns – needs approval from IRB/REB

  • Committees that examine research proposal and makes judgements about their ethical appropriateness

Informed consent – a person’s agreement to participate in a procedure or research study after learning all the relevant aspects

Deception – research in which the participants are misled about the purpose of the research or the meaning of something that is done to them

  • Strictly banned in some fields

Debriefing – use to ask participants directly if they understood the instructions

Question: Experiments are different from other research methods in that they include random assignment

Lecture 2

Willian James – the nature of social self

  • The social me – the parts of self-knowledge that are derived from social relationships
  • Our sense of who we are (self) is forged largely by our social interaction

Introspection – “Know Thyself”

  • People often go past basic introspective to construct complex stories about themselves
  • Narrated self
  • Introspection can → accurate self-knowledge
    • But some aspects of the self are often more accurate by perceivers/judgers
    • We may lack insight on certain things we would rather not know about ourselves
    • For example, we don’t self reflect on our annoyingness, but others will

Self-schemas – cognitive structures about ourselves

  • Formed from our past experiences
  • Vary by situation
  • The basic units of organization for self-knowledge
  • Stored information that is used to help in understanding events

Stereotypes – schemas we hold about people

  • Can make social interactions more efficient
  • Allow us to believe we know what to expect
  • Can be applied incorrectly

Where does our sense of self come from?

  • Depends on varying ways in which the social situation shapes the nature of the self

Family

  • Birth order may influence personality traits
  • Older siblings → more responsible and supportive of norms
  • Younger siblings → more rebellious and open to new experiences
  • Siblings may have roles in the family
    • Minimize conflicts
    • Meet familial needs
  • “The looking-glass self”
    • Others’ reactions to us = a type of mirror
    • Reflected self appraisal – beliefs about what others think of us in social contexts

Situationism and the Social Self

  • Parts of the self change depending on the situation
  • The social self changes across different contexts
  • Consistent with situationism
  • Looking-glass self – we form our views of ourselves based on our perceptions of how others view us
    • Imaginings of how you appear to another person
    • Imagination of how you are judged by that person
    • The feelings generated from these imaginings
  • Thinking you are a baby when you are with your parents
  • Distinctiveness – aspects of the self that make us feel unique in a given context are prioritized
    • Age may be seen more important to self-definition if you are a 30-year old undergraduate
  • Sense of self may shift dramatically depending on who we are interacting with
    • We may feel different about the self when interacting with authority figures than interacting with subordinates

Culture and the Social Self

  • Independent view of self → the self = distinct, autonomous entity
    • Distinct from others
    • Defined by individual traits and preferences
    • More common in western cultures
  • Interdependent view of self → the self seen = connected to/overlapping with others
    • Defined by social duties and shared traits and preferences
    • More common in east asia, south asia, mediterranean, latin america, and african cultures
    • Holistic interpretation of an image with people’s expressions

Who Are You?

  • Westerners often think → self-contained
  • Non-westerners → view themselves less as individuals
    • Their sense of self is defined to a greater extent by family, property, and position in the community
  • The more individualist groups were more often naming themselves based on personal characteristics
  • The more collectivist groups were more often naming themselves based on their roles and group memberships

Gender and the Social Self

  • Cross-culturally:
    • Men → more independent views of the self
    • Women → more interdependent views of the self
  • Women are more likely than men to refer to their relationships when describing the self
  • Women → more attuned to external social cues
  • Men → more attuned to internal responses
  • Nature vs Nurture
    • Differences across genders likely due to socialization
    • Many agents of socialization guide women and men into different self-construals
    • The way you talk to kids, motherhood, jobs, etc.
  • Evolution may contribute to gender differences
    • Independent self view → historically, advantage males are those that can physically compete and hunt
    • Interdependent self view → historically, advantage females are those that maintain social bonds and are caregiving
  • Research on this is heavily on cisgender people and heterosexual people

Social comparison – the idea that we compare themselves to other people in order to obtain an accurate assessment of our own opinions, abilities, and internal states

  • Downward social comparisons → boost self-esteem by making us feel better about the self
    • If you get 70% on a midterm and compare yourself to your friend who got 60%
    • Look down
  • Upward social comparisons → motivate self-improvement by making us feel worse about the self
    • If you get 70% on a midterm that your friend got 80% on, you want to study harder
    • Look at someone higher

Self-esteem – overall positive or negative evaluations that we have for ourselves

  • People with low self-esteem → lower life satisfaction, more hopeless, more depressed and less able to cope with life’s challenges
  • These are correlation, so there is no proof that self-esteem causes this
  • Trait self-esteem → enduring level of self-regard across time
  • State self-esteem –. Dynamic self-evalutions we experience as context-specific feelings about the self
    • Feeling bad after losing a game
  • Contingencies of Self-Worth – the idea that self-esteem is contingent on successes and failures in domains in which a person has based his or her self-worth
    • Teacher doing a crappy job teaching, she takes that role seriously so if she receives negative feedback she will feel negative towards herself
  • Social acceptance
    • Sociometer hypothesis – self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favourably by others
  • Culture
    • Members of independent cultures report higher levels of self-esteem than members of collectivistic cultures
    • Feeling good about the self as an individual is more valued in western cultures
    • Doesn’t mean eastern cultures are less happy or feel worse about themselves
    • Interdependent cultures place more value on self-improvement than feeling good about the self
      • More about one’s contribution to collective goals
    • Contact with cultures can influence our views of ourself
      • Asians with greater contact with western cultures report higher levels of self-esteem
      • Exposure to western cultures → more exposure to what we think about self-esteem

Self-enhancement – the desire to maintain, increase or protect one’s positive self-views

  • Better than average effect – most people think they are above average on many personality traits and abilities
  • Everyone is a great driver if you ask them
  • Most westerners tend to have positive view of self
  • We tend to rate ourselves better than average on most traits
  • We weight abilities we excel at as more valuable
  • Self-affirmation theory – people can maintain an overall sense of self-worth following psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat
    • After I bomb during a frisbee game, I can feel good about myself by reading a nice email I’ve gotten from a student
  • People often assume that mental health goes hand in hand with realistic views of the world
    • Research suggests that well-adjusted people tend to have slightly unrealistic views about themselves
  • Depressive realism – people who are mildly depressed may have a more accurate view of reality than non-depressed people
    • Most people tend to overestimate their control, chances of success or how positively things turn out
    • Depressed individuals lack this bias → more realistic

Self-verification – theory that we strive for stable, subjectively accurate beliefs about ourselves because we need it for coherence

  • We selectively attend to/recall information that is consistent with our self-views
  • Easier when things just make sense or things we agree with

Self-regulation – processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behaviour in their pursuit of goals, including the ability to resist short-term rewards that plan the long-term goals

  • Marshmallow waiting test – wait and you get another one
    • The kids ate it
    • SAT scores were predicted by the amount of time they waited

Self-Discrepancy Theory – multiple types of self

  • Actual self → the self that people believe they are
  • Ideal self → the self that embodies an individual's wishes and aspirations
  • Ought self → the self that is concerned with the duties, obligations and external demands an internal feels compelled to honour
    • The need to grade tests in time
  • Behaviour is often motivated by standards reflecting ideal and ought selves
  • Falling short of these standards produces specific emotions → negative emotions
    • We want to do something and we can’t
  • Promotion focus → self-regulation of behaviour with respect to standards of the ideal self standards
    • Focus on attaining positive outcomes and approach-related behaviours
      • Getting ahead of time and doing cancer screens (detection)
  • Prevention focus → self-regulation of behaviour with respect to ought self standards
    • Focus on avoiding negative outcomes and avoidance-related behaviours
      • Putting sunscreen before going out (prevention)

Implementation Intentions – if-then plan to engage in goal directed behaviours

  • Goal → improve my cardiovascular health
    • If someone offers a cigarette, then I will politely say no
  • Making achievable small goals within your larger ones

Automatic Self-Control Strategies – many strategies can be deployed automatically, operating without or even realizing it

  • Influence behaviour as well as thoughts, leading people to approach goals and avoid temptations
  • I might have learned to automatically walk past the candy self when you are trying to get in shape

Self-Presentation – the act of presenting the person we would like others to believe we are

  • Impression management → attempts to control how other people will view us
  • Face → the public image of ourself that we want others to believe

Self-Monitoring – the tendency to monitor one’s believe to fit the current situation

  • High self-monitors → fit their behaviour to the situation
  • Low-self monitors → behave according to their internal preference

Self-Handicapping – the tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviour in order to have an excuse ready, should one perform poorly or fail

  • May be a strategy for protecting the public self → provides an excuse for poor performance and emphasizes good performance
  • “I haven’t practiced in a while”
  • Avoiding practicing before a game because you want an excuse if you do poorly

Lecture 3

Social Cognition – thinking about people and situations

  • Social judgements researchers may investigate how we make decisions, how we interpret past events, how we understand current events and how we make predictions for future events
  • Social judgements will influence behaviours
  • Social judgements are often inaccurate
  • Many errors and susceptible to biases
  • Mistakes can produce consequences that may be either harmless or very consequential

Snap Judgements – inferring personality from physical appearance

  • Sometimes we make judgements with very little information
  • Every day we make personality judgements based on physical appearances
  • To perceive trust and dominance – evolutionarily speaking
  • Social class and sexuality can also be determined through facial expressions
    • The effects are very slight, not very accurate
  • 10 second video clip of profs to predict how they are match what they feel at the end of the semester

Inferring the Causes of Behaviour

  • Our judgements of people = based on the meaning we assign to their behaviours
  • The same can apply to our own behaviours
  • If a friend cancels a plan because they have an exam → could assume the person is bailing
  • We are subconsciously try to figure out if others’ behaviours are caused by their traits
  • Behaviour is always a function of both the person and the situation

Covariation – the idea that behaviour should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the behaviour

  • Correlated variation of two or more variables
  • When two things always happen together → we assume they are naturally linked
  • Types of Covariation:
    • Consensus – what people would do in a situation
      • Would most people behave the same way?
      • Few or no other people would behave that way?
    • Distinctiveness – what an individual does in different situations
      • Is their behaviour unique to this situation?
      • Does this behaviour of theirs or occurs in all situations?

Situational Attribution – should be made when consensus and distinctiveness are high

  • When most people are doing the same thing in a situation
  • For example, most people sit quietly in class. This is unique to being in class.

Dispositional Attribution – should be made when consensus and distinctiveness are low

  • Everyone is behaving in different ways in class
  • It’s not what everyone does or not what you normally do
  • No situation for the weird behaviour

Discounting Principle – people should assign reduced ‘weight’ to a particular cause of behaviour if other plausible causes might have produced it

  • When we get sensory input of a behaviour, the discounting principle suggests that we put less weight on a possible cause and more on something that is more likely the reason
  • For example, interviewing someone and realizing they are pleasant and professional, but consider that it is an interview so they are behaving this way for a reason, so it doesn’t actually mean the person is always like this
    • Discounting the likelihood of her behaving like this because she is an amazing person

Counterfactual Thinking

  • Causal attributions – formed by comparing real outcomes to imagined alternatives ‘what if’
  • Counterfactual thoughts – of what might have, could have, or should have happened, ‘if only’
    • Comparing what actually happened to what could have happened
    • Result in emotional amplification – increase in emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening
      • We may feel more personally responsible for failure depending on how easy it is to imagine the alternative
    • Bronze medalists are often more happy than the silver ones
      • The alternative to bronze is not getting a medal at all
      • The alternative to silver is not winning gold → regret

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

  • Our tendency to attribute failure to external circumstances and successes to ourselves
  • Athletes may attribute losses to bad refs and victories to their own talent

Fundamental Attribution Error

  • Our failure to recognize the importance of situational influence on behaviour
  • Corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions (traits) on behaviour
  • Undervalue the situation and overvalue personality when we assume why someone did what they did

Actor-Observer Difference in Attribution

  • We tend to attribute effects to potential causes that stand out perceptually
  • People are usually more salient (noticeable) than situations/environment
  • We notice people more than desks/chairs
  • Actor → relatively inclined to make situational attributions
  • Observer → relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions

Sensitivity to Context and the Framed Line Task

  • Westerners were better at lines that are exactly 10cms even if the square size changes → focus on the detail
  • Japanese were better at replicating the line that was the same ratio as the overall square → take the whole situation

Asians are more inclined than Westerners to attribute behaviour to the situation

  • Westerners attend to disposition and internal causes
  • Asians attend to situations and contexts
    • Make the fundamental attribution error less extreme

Gender and Attribution

  • Boys are more likely to attribute their failure to lack of effort
  • Girls are more likely to attribute error to lack of ability
  • Particularly for math and science
  • Based on types of feedback children grow up with

Order Effects

  • Primacy effect – the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented first in a body of evidence
  • Recency effect – the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented last in a body of evidence

Framing Effects – the influence on judgement resulting from the way information is presented

  • Like the order of presentation or the wording
  • Types of framing effects
    • Order effect
    • Spin framing
      • 25% fat or 75% lean
      • Both are the same but one sounds better
    • Framing information to be seen as favourable or unfavourable
      • ‘Inheritance tax’ vs ‘death tax’
  • Negative information draws more attention
    • Information framed in negative ways → stronger responses
  • In decision making, an equivalent loss is more aversive than a missed opportunity
    • Losing $10 is worse than how good finding a $10 bill on the floor is

Temporal Framing

  • Construal level theory – theory about the relationship between psychological distance and abstract or concrete thinking
  • Psychologically distant actions → through about in abstract
    • High level thinking
    • Locking the door → think about safety
  • Psychologically close actions → thought about in concrete terms
    • Low level thinking
    • Locking the door → thinking about taking the key out of your bag and locking the door
  • Running a marathon
    • Abstract → 6 months prior, you think this will be really good for you, get in good shape
    • Concrete → day before, think about what clothes are going to be most comfortable

Conformation Bias – the tendency to test an idea by searching for evidence that would support it

  • Can lead to false beliefs
  • People fail to attend to (believe) disconfirming information
  • Asked participants if practicing resulting in winning or losing
    • Some were given whether practicing leads to winning
    • Others were given whether practicing leads to losing
    • People who were told to practice for winning → more likely to win

Motivated Confirmation Bias – we seek confirmatory information when we want to maintain a certain belief

  • Conscious
  • For instance, supporters and opponents of the death penalty were found to interpret the same evidence in different ways

Bottom-up processing

  • ‘Data-driven’ mental processing
  • We make conclusions based on the stimuli encountered in the environment

Top-down processing

  • ‘Theory-driven’ mental processing
  • We filter and interpret new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations
  • Using schemas, you already have an idea so you base the new information on what you already know

Schemas – knowledge structures consisting of any organized body of stored information

  • Guide attention
    • Our attention is selective
  • Influence memory
    • How information is encoded into memory and how it is retrieved
    • We tend to remember information that is consistent with our schemas better than inconsistent information
  • Guide inferences and construals
    • Information is often interpreted in ways consistent with schemas
    • Two groups are given words that do not describe a certain person
      • One group is negative words the other is positive
    • Then they are given a passage about a person, the ones that received the positive words tend to describe the person in the passage as positive
      • Based on the schema of words prior
  • Priming – the presentation of information designed to activate the concept and hence make it accessible
    • Primes – the stimulus presented to activate concepts in question
      • The words that were negative/positive
  • Schemas can influence judgements even when the schema activation occurs outside of our conscious awareness

Subliminal stimulus – stimulus below the threshold of conscious awareness

  • Still processed by subconscious mind
  • Can be used by companies to sell their product → can be misleading

Applying Schemas

  • Things we have recalled recently → more easily recalled now
  • Frequent application and chronic accessibility
  • People differ in schemas they tend to use when evaluation others
  • Our own contexts/lives → which schemas we employ in judgement
    • As a student, you may evaluate the prof with schemas that include all prior professional information
    • Different from what schemas you use to assess frisbee players
  • We often apply schemas because of preexisting expectations about what we will encounter
    • How should I behave to this fast food worker? What happened last time?
    • People being rude to fast food workers → it has probably worked for them in the past so they continue to do it

Intuitive System

  • Rapid responses based on associations that come automatically to mind
  • Intuitive information processing is done in parallel
    • Many things can be processed at the same time
    • You are walking up the stairs, not processing which foot steps where, you look around at people to avoid running into them – all happening at once

Rational System

  • Slower and more controlled
  • Based on rules and deductions
  • Performs operations one at a time
  • I’m focused on a math problem, I can’t do another one at the same time

Heuristics – Intuitive mental operations

  • Quick and automatic
  • Efficient answers to common problems of judgement

Availability Heuristic – judgements of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind

  • Influenced by personal attitudes, cultural learning or recent exposure
  • The easier it is to recall → the more likely we are to say something is common
  • Retrieval
    • Distinguishing ease of retrieval from amount retrieved
    • Importantly non-conscious
    • Not simply an assessment of the number of instances that are retrieved → it’s how easily you can retrieve things
  • Risk Assessment
    • Biased assessment of risk
    • Negative information is overreported in the news
  • Joint Projects
    • Biased estimates of contributions to joint projects
    • Easier to think of examples of what we did to contribute than to think about what others did

Fluency – feeling of ease when processing information

  • Availability’s close cousin
  • Some stimuli are easier to process than others
  • Unfamiliar or irregular words are harder to process than simple or familiar words
  • The effects of fluency in information processing are similar to the effect of mood
  • Information that is processed more fluently → judged more favourably
  • Information that is processed less fluently → more carefully scrutinized
  • Test – baseball and ball
    • Bat + ball = $1.10
    • Bat is $1 more than the ball → how much is the ball?
    • Ball is $0.05 and bat is $1.05
    • Everyone wants to say $1 and $0.10

The Representativeness Heuristic – judgements of the likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes

  • Base things on what our mental representation is
  • What we have in our minds as the image of a professor

Base-Rate Neglect – judgements based on representativeness may ignore the other important sources of information

  • Information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population
  • For example, when thinking of psychologists → we picture a man, but at UTSC 70% of psychology students are women
    • We neglect this fact and still picture a man
  • Strong sense of representativeness sometimes leads us to ignore base-rate likelihood

Illusory correlation – the belief that two variables are correlated when they are not

  • Use of projective tests to make psychological diagnoses
  • Expectation that people suffering from paranoia would draw people with unusually large eyes in a draw a person test
  • Study found that perceived connections between clinical diagnoses and draw a person test may be illusory
  • You’re just seeing the bigger eyes more → because you are looking for it, even if it is not there
  • People may believe that members of a minority group are more likely to commit a crime or behave negatively
    • Minority groups are more noticeable because they are less common
    • More noticeable because they stand out
    • When two rare things occur together, people remember them more easily and overestimate how often they happen together

Lecture 4

Emotion – a brief, specific response, involving appraisals, experiences, expressions and physiology, that helps people meet goals, including social goals

  • Can be positive/negative and activated/unactivated
  • Emotions help us interpret our situation and context → direct our actions
  • Guiding actions = motivating actions that advance our goals

Appraisal – a construal or interpretation an individual gives to a situation

  • Can lead to experience of emotion

Evolutionary approach

  • Emotions are adaptive responses to promote survival and reproduction
  • Emotional expression are physiologically based

Constructivist approach

  • Emotions are influenced by language, social role, and values
  • Emotional expression varies between cultures

Social psychologists support both the evolutionary and constructivist approach

Darwin’s Hypotheses

  • Human emotions are results of motivations and displays that were evolutionarily advantageous for our evolutionary ancestors
  • Emotions are universal
    • All humans have the same facial muscles
    • Humans share evolutionary history with other primates → our emotional expressions should resemble those of other species
    • Blind individuals expressions are still similar to those of sighted people

The Universality of Facial Expression

  • Facial expressions are recognized cross-culturally
  • Cultures unexposed to the West or Western media can accurately identify expressions of happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear shown by Westerners
  • U.S. college students accurately identified facial expressions shown by the Fore
  • Beyond the SIX emotions, researchers believe more than 15 facial expressions are similar across cultures

Emotional Expressions in Other Animals

  • Human facial expressions = similar to other primates
  • Human anger = other primates’ threat display
  • When playing, chimpanzees have a ‘relaxed open-mouth display’ = human laughter
  • Human embarrassment = appeasement display of other social mammals
  • Monkey shows anger when it is not given grapes, while the other monkey is

Emotional Expression Among the Blind

  • Facial expressions are similar between blind and sighted people
  • Blind and sighted athletes show similar facial expressions of pride after winning a competition

Emotions and Culture

  • Focal emotions – emotions that are especially common within a particular culture
    • Societies with a culture of honor may express more anger at insults
    • Western cultures → high arousal positive emotions
    • Eastern cultures → low arousal positive emotions
  • Ideal emotions – affect valuation theory
    • Emotions that promote important cultural ideals = valued and play more prominent role in social lives
    • Westerners more likely to engage in thrill seeking behaviours → high affective valence emotions
  • Emotional regulation – the processes in which people modify their emotions to make themselves feel better or to fit the present context
    • Before a final exam, you may feel scared, but instead u suppress that to study well
    • Strategies
  1. Reappraisal – process of reinterpreting the causes of an emotion and its meaning for the individual
  • Before an important ultimate frisbee match
  • Initial thought “I’m going to embarrass myself”
  • Reappraisal – “feeling nervous means I care and my body is preparing me to perform”
  1. Acceptance – adopting an open and welcome attitude to one’s emotion
  • I am feeling anxious right now and that is okay. Lots of people feel this way before a game.
  1. Suppression – attenuating the outwards signs of the emotion
  • I’m fine
  • Hiding the physical signs associated with nervousness and anxiety

Social Functional Theory – emotions coordinate social interactions in ways that enable people to meet social opportunities and challenges

  • Emotions + their expressions, related experiences, physiological reactions / correlates serve to help us maintain social relationship

Emotions with Friends and Family

  • Emotions promote commitment
  1. Expressing certain emotions signals our commitment to others’ well-being
  • Sympathy
  • Happiness when other people succeed
  1. Emotions motivate us to put aside our own self-interest and prioritize the welfare of others
  • If I see you are hurt, I am motivated to help → increases social bond

Oxytocin

  • Produced in the hypothalamus + released into the brain / bloodstream
  • In nonhuman species, oxytocin promotes commitment
    • The preference for one mate over desirable alternatives
  • In humans, oxytocin promotes commitment / generosity toward one’s ingroup (but enhance bias against outgroups)

Emotions in Collaboration

  • Expressing emotions in timely ways and knowing the emotions of other people can assist efforts to collaborate
  • Those who struggle with this → psychopaths, individuals with autism can struggle in dynamic group situations

Emotional Mimicry

  • One of the simplest ways we collaborate with others
  • Can be positive or negative
  • Group work → if one group member is expressing positive excited emotions, the rest of the group will likely (subconsciously) also smile more and become more positive and engaged
  • If one group member is anxious → other members will adopt similar expressions and tones
    • Still might be facilitative (all on the same page but still mimicry)

Touch and Collaboration

  • With a deftly placed touch, we can encourage people to dissuade them from inappropriate behaviour
  • The right kind of touch can prompt people to act in a collaborative fashion
  • Sending emotions through touching someone’s hand

Group Identity

  • Some emotions can help us feel like we are a part of a larger social collective
  • Brief experiences of awe in particular increase people’s sense of belonging
    • Awe is overwhelming positive emotions
  • Especially when experienced together
  • Collective Effervescence – a feeling of shared emotional energy, unity, and connection that emerges when people participate together in a group experience
  • Emotions amplified socially → feelings of being connected to something larger
    • Increased bonding and group value reinforcement
  • Massive protests

Status and Emotions

  • Displaying emotions like anger can increase social power within a group → linked to higher perceptions of social status and power in negotiations
  • Some emotions, such as envy, motivate people to influence the status of others

Emotions Influence Perception

  • Colour-based metaphors portray emotions as lenses through which we perceive our reality
  • Sadness in blue; anger in red; happiness has us looking at the world in rose-coloured glasses
  • The way we talk about these emotions (lexical) actually influence our perception

Understanding the World

  • Emotions influence how we process information and make judgements
  • We perceive events in ways that are consistent with the emotions we’re currently feeling
  • Fear → increased perceptions of intensity and rates of danger around us
    • We are able to see more fearful events
    • If i’m already scared, I will see a cat as more dangerous than when I am not scared
  • Emotions prioritize the information we should focus on and factor into our decisions and actions
  • Happiness → easier to identify congruent words
    • When we are happy, we can identify tasks that are positive

Reasoning

  • Positive emotions broaden thoughts
  • We will have a more open mind
  • Broaden-and-build Hypothesis – positive emotions broaden thoughts and actions → helps build social resources
  • Look at the global shape being a triangle

Meaning of Happiness

  • Varies over time and cultures
  • Indigenous cultures → interdependence with others + reverence for nature
  • Americans → personal achievements
  • Life satisfaction → how well you think your life is going generally
  • Emotional well-being → moment-to-moment balance of positive vs negative emotions
  • Peak happiness at 74 and then declines

Benefits of Happiness

  • Correlation and experimental evidence
  • Happiness → curious, creative and productive
  • Happiness ++ personal relationships
  • Happiness ++ better health and life expectancy

Knowing What Makes Us Happy

  • Affective forecasting – trying to predict future emotions
    • Whether an event will lead to happiness, anger, or sadness
    • How long and how intensely
    • Often incorrect
    • Having never experienced a break up, students predicted they would feel less happy than they actually ended up feeling
    • Overpredicting
  • Immune neglect – we underestimate our capacity to be resilient after difficult events which → leads them to overestimation of subsequent reduction in their personal well-being
    • Painful experiences are often less upsetting than we expect them to be
    • We actually come back to normal emotional baseline 6 months after a negative/positive event occurs
  • Focalism – we focus too much on a central aspect of an event and neglecting the possible impact of associated factors or other events
    • We neglect thinking about how we will feel after the initial event or the importance of other events in the future
    • Happy wedding day does not mean satisfying marriage
  • Memories of pleasure can be biased
    • Memories of good things are often inaccurate
    • Peak moment of pleasure → much pleasure you will remember from an event later
    • The end of the event also strongly predicts your experience of pleasure
    • Duration neglect – the relative unimportance of the length of an emotional experience in retrospective assessments of the overall experience
      • Duration does not matter
      • If you are sitting for a tattoo for 4 hours, you will not remember the 4 hours as being painful → you likely remember the most painful part and the most recent part
      • Colonoscopy → if the last few minutes are in a less painful positive, the patients had an overall positive experience

The Pursuit of Happiness

  • Cultivate social relationships
  • Money only increases happiness among those with annual income less than 75,000
  • Practice gratitude
  • In spending money, giving rather than receiving, can increase happiness
  • In spending money on yourself, focus on experiences over possessions
  • Cultivate experiences that lead to awe
    • Awe leads to an expanded sense of time and attenuate thoughts that can diminish happiness

Emotions do not last for hours or days.