Psych Exam #1 Studies

Lee Ross/Construal

"NAIVE REALISM" → the conviction that we perceive things "as they really are" Ross has been working closely with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. These negotiations frequently run aground because of naive realism; each side assumes that other reasonable people see things the same way they do (each side believes that it is their opponent that is "biased") Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians

Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap

"power posing"; high-power poses, such as standing behind a table, leaning forward with hands planted firmly on its surface; in the other condition, these were low-power poses, such as standing with feet crossed and arms wrapped around one's own torso Immediately after holding the high-power poses, participants reported feeling more powerful

Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich

Analyzed the videotapes of the 1992 Olympics Silver medal winners appeared less happy than bronze medal winners Moral → if you are going to lose, it is best not to lose by a slim margin

Edward Jones and Victor Harris

Asked college students to read an essay written by a fellow student that either supported or opposed Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba and then to guess how the author of the essay really felt about Castro In one condition, the researchers told the students that the author freely chose which position to take in the essay, thereby making it easy to guess how he really felt. In another condition, the students learned that the author had been assigned the position as a participant in a debate. Yet the participants in this study assumed that the author really believed what he wrote, even when they knew he had no choice as to which position to take People often tend to UNDERESTIMATE EXTERNAL INFLUENCES when explaining other people's behavior

Joan Miller

Asked people of two cultures --Hindus living in India and Americans living in the United States--to think of various examples of their friends' behaviors and to explain why those behaviors occurred American participants used more dispositional explanations for the behaviors Indian participants gravitated towards situational explanations of their friends' behaviors Miller took some of the behaviors generated by the Indian participants and gave them to Americans to explain. The attributional difference remained: Americans still found internal, dispositional causes for behaviors that Indians had thought were caused by the situation Important reminder that environmental forces play a major role in social perception processes as well We arrive in a world with a flexibility of thinking style that is molded over time by cultural influences

BF Skinner

Behavioral psychologist who believed that all behavior could be understood by examining the rewards and punishments in the organism's environment

Leon Foster/Cult

Cult (Seekers) predicted that the world will end with a giant flood Leon Foster thought that it would be interesting to observe this group closely and chronicle how they reacted when their prophecy was disconfirmed They became members and pretended to believe that the world was going to end Rather than admitting that they were wrong when the world didn't end, they dumbed down their beliefs → COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Richard Nisbett

Examined how different kinds of graduate training influenced people's reasoning on everyday problems involving statistical and methodological reasoning Researchers predicted that students in psychology and medicine would do better on statistical reasoning problems than students in law and chemistry would Students in psychology and medicine improved on the statistical reasoning problems more than students in law and chemistry did The different kinds of training they had received appeared to influence how accurately and logically they reasoned on everyday problems

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

Experiment with teachers and kids who were expected to become "bloomers" Teachers have been found to treat "bloomers" differently in four critical ways: they create a warmer emotional climate for bloomers, giving them more personal attention, encouragement and support, they give bloomers more material to learn and material that is more difficult, they give bloomers more and better feedback on their work, and they give bloomers more opportunities to respond in class and give them longer to respond Teachers who think a child from a low-income family doesn't have what it takes to succeed in school inadvertently acted in ways that made that child do more poorly in school

thin-slicing

For the study, the researchers videotaped more than a dozen instructors while teaching and then selected three random 10-second clips from each one. After removing the audio track, they showed the silent video clips to students who had never before taken a class with these instructors. Students were asked to rate the teachers on a series of variables including how competent, confident, and active they appeared to be The thin-sliced impressions were incredibly similar to the perceptions of students who spent an entire semester with the instructors → with 6-second clips participants were still able to accurately predict who the highest-rated teachers were

Ying-Yi Hong

Fundamental ATTRIBUTION ERROR among Hong Kong Chinese students These students were bicultural, deriving their identity from Hong Kong Chinese culture and also from Western culture The participants were shown a series of images and asked brief questions about them. The purpose of the photographs was to activate, or prime, one aspect of their bicultural identity. Half the participants saw images representing American culture, the other half saw Chinese images. Control: geometric shapes Shown a picture of fish swimming in front of a school of other fish However, participants primed with thoughts of one culture or the other showed markedly different patterns. These primed with Chinese cultural images were more likely to make situation attributions It appears that Western cultures prompt people to think more like personality psychologists, viewing behavior is dispositional terms. Eastern cultures seem to prompt people to think more like social psychologists

Bertram Forer

Gave feedback to a group of students and asked them to rate how well it described them, on a scale from 0=very poor to 5=excellent. The average rating was 4.26--a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Barnum effect. Why do people believe that this personality describes them so well? One culprit is the REPRESENTATIVE HEURISTIC: the statements are vague enough that virtually everyone can find a past behavior that is similar to (representative of) the feedback

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

Investigation of a phenomenon called the SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY: you expect that you or another person will behave in some way, so you act in ways to make your prediction come true They informed each teacher that, according to the test, a few specific students were "bloomers" who were about to take off and perform extremely well The children labeled as bloomers were chosen at random by drawing names out of a hat and thus were no different, on average, from any of the other kids At the end of the school year, bloomers were performing extremely well

Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan

Participants were asked to make sentences out of sets of provided words from next they could make a sentence Next, as part of what was supposedly a different study, participants played an economic game in which they were given ten $1 coins and asked to divide them up between themselves and the next participant. Only the next participant would know what they decided, and that participant wouldn't know who they were People want the money, but this conflicts with their goal to be nice to others

Kaheman and Tversky

People do not use BASE RATE INFORMATION sufficiently, paying most attention to how representative the information about the specific person is of the general category People often focus too much on INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS of what they observe and too little on the base rates

G. Daniel Lassiter

Presented 21 courtroom judges and 24 police officers with a videotape of an individual confessing to a crime The judge and police participants were show one of three different versions of the videotape: a) the camera's focus on the suspect only, b) the camera's focus was on the detective only, or C) there was equal camera focus on the suspect and the detective Participants were asked to rate how "voluntary" the confession was, as opposed to "coerced" For both the judge and the police respondents, the videotape that only focused on the suspect produced significantly higher ratings of "voluntariness" than the other two videotape versions. In other words, the perceptual salience of the suspect when shown alone, triggered a fundamental attribution error, making him appear guiltier than when he was less perceptually salient

Bias Blind Spot

Presented participants with descriptions of a number of biases. We focus on two here: self-serving attributions and victim blaming. The descriptions the participants read never used the word "bias" (which makes it sound like a bad thing); instead they were described as "tendencies" to think a certain way, which were then explained. Participants were asked to rate how susceptible they thought they were to each of these thought tendencies, using a scale ranging from "not at all" to "strongly." Next, participants made the same ratings for how they thought the average was to these tendencies The results indicated a shocking difference: participants thought that they were only "somewhat" susceptible to self-serving attributions, while the average American was rated as much more susceptible, an ironically self-serving belief in its own right It appears that we realize that attributionally biased thinking can occur--in other people--but we are not so good at spotting it in ourselves

Takahiko Masuda

Presented research participants in the US and Japan with cartoon drawings of people in groups. One person in each cartoon was the central figure, shown in the foreground. This person had a facial expression that was happy, sad, angry, or neutral. The other people in the group had facial expressions that either matched the central figure or were different. The participant's task was to judge the central person's emotion on a 10 point scale. The researchers found that the facial expressions of the other group member's faces had little effect on Americans' ratings of the central figure. If the central figure was smiling broadly, he received a high rating for "happy." It didn't matter was the rest of the group was expressing. Japanese → the meaning of the cartoon character's facial expression depended on his "context"

Priming

Research participants were told that they would take part in two unrelated studies. In the first, a perception study, they would be asked to identify different colors while at the same time memorizing a list of words. A second was a reading comprehension study in which they would read a paragraph about a man named Donald and then give their impressions of him In the first study, the researchers randomly divided people into two groups and gave them different words to memorize. People who had first memorized the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent later forms positive impressions of Donald People who had first memorized reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn later formed negative impressions of Donald Priming is a good example of automatic thinking, because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and unconsciously

Lee Ross

They described the game to RAs in student dorms and asked them to come up with a list of undergrads whom they thought were either especially cooperative or especially competitive. Ross invited them to play the game in a psychology experiment. The researchers varied a seemingly minor aspect of the social situation--what the game was called. They told half the participants that they would be playing the Wall Street and the other half that they would be playing the Community Game. People who were judged as either competitive or cooperative played a game that was called either the Wall Street or the Community Game, resulting in four conditions: cooperative people playing the Wall Street Game, cooperative people playing the Community Game, competitive people playing the Wall Street Game, or competitive people playing the Community Game The name of the game played a tremendous difference in how people played When it was called the Wall Street Game, approximately two-thirds of the students responded competitively; when it was called the Community Game, only a third responded differently The name of the game sent a powerful message about how the players should behave. But a student's alleged personality trait made no measurable difference in the student's behavior. Aspects of the social situation that may seem MINOR can OVERWHELM the DIFFERENCES in people's PERSONALITIES

Shelly Taylor and Susan Fiske

Two male students engaged in a "get acquainted" conversation (actors) At each session, six actual research participants also took part. The conversationalist who was visually salient--that is, the individual the participants could see better--was cleverly manipulated Participants were asked questions about the two men Even though all the observers heard the same conversation, those who faced student A thought he had taken the lead and chosen the topics, whereas those who faced student B thought he had taken the lead and chosen the topics

Trey Hedden

Used fMRI to examine where in the brain cultural experience predicts perceptual processing Some participants were told to ignore the box around each line ("ignore context") , and some were told to pay attention to the box around each line ("attend to context") They showed significantly more brain activity when they had to follow the instructions that were opposite of their usual-cultural thinking style

Roesch and Amirkhan

Wondered if an athlete's skill, experience, and type of sport predicted attributional tendencies They found that less experienced athletes were more likely to make self-serving attributions than experienced ones; experienced athletes realize that losses are sometimes their fault and that they can't always take full credit for wins They also found that athletes in solo sports made more self-serving attributions than those in team sports

Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto

explored pride and shame by coding the spontaneous expressions of judo athletes at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games; the pride expression was associated with winning for both sighted and blind athletes around the world Shame, expressed by slumped shoulders and a sunken chest, was significantly associated with losing for all the athletes except for one group--sighted athletes from highly individualistic cultures

Kurt Lewin

generally considered the founding FATHER of modern EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Took the bold step of applying Gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to social perception

Donnerstien and Berkowitz

males were angered by a female accomplice and then were randomly assigned to see one of three films: violent pornography, nonviolent pornography, and a neutral film. The men who had seen the violent pornography administered significantly more intense shocks to the women, suggesting that it is not pornography per se that leads to aggressive behavior, but the VIOLENCE depicted in some pornography

Yuri Miyamoto, Richard Nisbett, and Takahiko Masuda

ook photographs in randomly chosen locations in cities in Japan and the United States The Japanese scenes contained significantly more information and objects than the American scenes They showed the pictures of American or Japanese cities to a sample of American and Japanese college students The students were asked to imagine that they were in the scene depicted in each picture, with the idea that the Japanese pictures would prime holistic thinking, whereas the American pictures would prime analytic thinking The photos of Japanese cities were more likely to detect changes in the background of the test pictures, whereas people who saw the pictures of the American cities were more likely to detect changes in the background of the test pictures, whereas people who saw the pictures of the American cities were more likely to detect changes in the main object of the pictures People in all cultures are CAPABLE of thinking holistically or analytically but that the environment in which people live, or even which environment has been recently PRIMED, triggers a reliance on one of the styles

Solomon Asch

participants formed a more positive impression of someone described as intelligent-industrious-impulsive-critical-stubborn-envious compared to someone describes as envious-stubborn-critical-impulsive-industrious-intelligent (first words create a filter, a schema, through which other traits are viewed)

Latane and Darley

people listened to someone having a seizure, and they kept track of the number of people who left their cubicle to find the victim or the experimenter before the end of the victim's seizure

Harold Kelly

students in different sections of an economics class were told that a guest lecturer would be filling in that day. To create a schema about what the guest lecturer would be like, Kelly told the students that the economics department was interested in how different classes reacted to different instructors and that students would thus receive a brief biographical note about the instructor before he arrived. The note contained info about the instructor's age, background, teaching experience, and personality (warm/cold). Kelley hypothesized that they would use the SCHEMA provided by the biographical note to fill in the blanks

Joshua Susskind

studied facial expressions of disgust and fear and found, first, that the muscle movements of each emotion were completely the opposite of the other; they found that "fear face" ENHANCES perception while "disgust face" DECREASES it

Hazel Markus

television and newspaper sports Coded Japanese and American media accounts of their countries' gold-medal winning athletes. The found that the US media described the performance of American gold medalists in terms of their unique abilities and talents. Japanese media described the performance of Japanese gold medalists in much broader terms, including the individual's ability but also encompassing his or her past experiences of success and failure and the role of other people such as coaches, teammates, and family in his or her success. American coverage focused more on positive aspects than negative ones (self-serving attributional style) while Japanese coverage focused more equally on positive and negative aspects

first impressions

the more powerful the candidates looked, the more likely they were to have won their election → the warmer they looked, the less likely they were to have won How powerful their face looks emerges as a significant predictor of success

Bibb Latane and John Darley

they thought that the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that any given individual will intervene Kitty Genovese → brutally killed in an attack that lasted 45 minutes, no one attempted to help her (38 residents either saw/heard her)

Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen

traveled to New Guinea were they studied the decoding ability of the South Fore, a proliterate tribe that had had no contact with Western Culture. They told the Fore people brief stories with emotional content and then showed them photographs of American men and women expressing the six emotions; the Fore's job was to match the facial expressions of the stories. The Fore's were as accurate as Western subjects

Latane and Darley

two "robbers" waited at the checkout counter of a convenience store, they asked the cashier to retrieve the most expensive beer the store carried, when the cashier was gone they stole beer Significantly fewer people reported the theft when there was another customer-witness in the store than when they were alone

Fritz Heider

we are busy guessing all the time about the other person's state of mind, motives, and thoughts

Leon Festinger

when two motives pull in opposite directions that we can gain our most valuable insights into the workings of the mind