Psych 135 UCLA Exam 1
Costs and Benefits of Schemas
Costs: problems arise if they are not accurate Benefits: guide attention & memory and help us interpret ambiguous situations
"End of History Illusion" study
Dan Gilbert -Survey: how much they have changed and how much they expect to change - People say that have changed a lot in the last decade, but will change little in the next decade (i.e., liking the same things they currently like)
The Principle of Serviceable Associated Habits
Darwin's thesis was that human emotions derive from motivations and displays that were evolutionarily advantageous for our mammalian and primate ancestors.
What is likely to impact how sequential decisions/judgements are made in contexts such as medical decisions, financial decisions, college admissions decisions?
Decision Fatigue
Knowing about the common heuristics and biases can make you ...
...less influenced by irrelevant factors
Subjective Construals
(i.e., our subjective interpretations of objective stimuli) -determine how we respond to particular situations.
Larry David's Happiness Recipe:
- A sense of purpose - Satisfying relationships - A living wage (i.e., enough money to meet one's basic needs) - Being engaged with work or other activities ("flow")
Focalism:
- A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of associated factors or other events. - May neglect thinking about how we will feel after the initial event or the importance of other events in determining our feelings. (school, work, etc) -For example, a happy wedding day doesn't guarantee a satisfying marriage.
Why Does A Prisoner's chance of parole depend so heavily on when the judge hearing the case last took a break?
- Decision Fatigue: decision-making is tiring if forced to repeatedly make decisions, people will get tired and begin to default to easy answers instead of engaging in careful, considerate deliberation. - Consistent With this Explanation: # of cases heard (not time) since last break best predicted decision outcomes unfavored decisions were arrived at more quickly and took fewer words to explain. - cognitive biases are inevitable - extraneous factors are inevitable
Sensory-Motor Origins of Emotional Expressions (fear and disgust)
- Eyes widen when experience fear → increases sensitivity (but not acuity) - Eyes narrow when experience disgust → increases acuity [detail] (but not sensitivity)
"Taking it in" vs. "Getting it out":
- Fear expressions allow us to take in more air - Disgust expressions do the opposite - When you are afraid, you can take in larger amounts of air. - When you are disgusted, you take in smaller amounts of air. -FEAR → raised brow,widened eyes, flared nostrils, open mouth - DISGUST → lowered brow, narrowed eyes, closed mouth Example: bitter foods we have a natural aversion to perhaps because a lot of toxins have a similar taste. (an innate "poison detector" with babies that evolution has taught us)
Satisfying Relationships
- Happier people tend to spend more time with others - Happier people tend to have more satisfying relationships - Likely a bidirectional relationship -Social relationships make us happier; happier people tend to be more social - After people's basic needs are met, money only appears to improve happiness when it's used in ways that enhance our relationships (e.g., shared experiences, helping others)
Communication Pragmatics
- How we use language in social interactions - For example: we implicitly learn how to hold conversations with people --> taking turns, how close to stand to people, not to jump thought to thought
What Makes Us Happy?
- Income doesn't strongly predict happiness once an individual is not in poverty. Spending money on experiences is more satisfying than spending on goods. A $20,000 increase in leisure spending was equivalent to the happiness boost from marriage. We quickly habituate to new material goods, but memories of experiences tend to linger. Spending on leisure activities tends to make people less lonely, and builds social relationships. Spending money on others makes us happier than spending it on ourselves.
Heuristics and Biases
- Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgement. - sometimes cause us to think and behave in predictably irrational ways.
Responding to near and far harms
- It's morally wrong to drive past someone who is bleeding to death and not offer them help BUT - It's morally fine to spend money on luxury goods instead of giving it to charities
Science's Happiness Recipe:
- Money: we only need enough to raise us out of poverty - Flow: being deeply engaged in a task - Purposefulness & Meaning: working towards achievable goals - Close Personal Relationships
Correll, Park, Judd, and Wittenbrink Study (2002)
- Participants played a video game in which they saq photographs of Black or White men holding a gun or another object (e.g., a soda can) - Pretended they were a police officer; instructed to "shoot" the person if holding a gun, not shoot the person if he was not holding a gun - Had .6 seconds to respond to each picture - Results → strong evidence of systematic bias - When person in the photo was white, there wasn't a difference in the errors - When person in the photo was black, there were much more errors make
Basic Research Design
- Research concerned with trying to understand a phenomenon in its own right in order to inform our understanding of the world. - Trying to understand how the world works
Predicting Judges' Rulings
- Researchers followed Israeli judges for 10 months as they ruled over 1,000 cases made by prisoners from 4 different prisons to parole boards. - Things that did NOT predict ruling outcomes: - severity of crime - time served - ethnicity or sex of prisoner - TIME did predict ruling outcome: - Judges had no control over the order of cases - Judges' days were divided into 3 sessions that bookended 2 meal breaks (AM snack, lunch) - 65% --> 0%(e.o.s.) --> 65% - The effect persists after controlling for factors like time served, severity of crime, previous incarcerations, and availability of rehab programs.
The "Bloomers" Study: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Teachers told 20% of their students that they were gifted "bloomers" (randomly chosen) - End of the year: Bloomers did better on actual IQ test Why is this? - warmer client for child, treated better - teachers gave bloomers better feedback - teachers gave bloomers more opportunities to respond and shaped their answers ** the teacher's expectations that the bloomers would perform better was a self-fulfilling prophecy -> how the teachers EXPECTED the bloomers to act shaped how they TREATED them, & eventually caused those students to fulfill their teachers' expectations that they would perform well.
Immune Neglect:
- The tendency for people to underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events, which leads them to overestimate how life's problems will reduce their personal well-being - Painful, difficult experiences often are less upsetting than we expect them to be. - For Example, people often expect relationship breakups to be more traumatic and depressing than they actually are.
Examples of Content of the Self-Concept:
- Traits: typically more good qualities than bad, physical descriptions, likes and dislikes - General Roles & Qualities: abstracted away from specific actions Often Future-Focused (wishes, hopes): more likely to do this instead of mentioning the past, can define who we are " I am a student planning on becoming a doctor..."
The Hedonic Treadmill
- We adapt to things getting better or worse to maintain a constant level of happiness. - People adapt to both positive and negative conditions, returning to a stable baseline level of happiness.
Inequity Aversion (monkey):
- Would a rational actor reuse the cucumber? No. - Why reject an unfair offer? --> Nonsocial Hypothesis: Domain-general mechanism for relative loss aversion-gauge your own payoffs vs. expected payoffs
Moral Foundations Theory:
- a theory proposing that there are 5 evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgements 1. care/harm 2. fairness/cheating 3. loyalty/ betrayal 4. authority/subversion 5. purity/degradation
Applied Research
- aims to solve practical/real-world problems - example: how do we create anti-smoking apps?
Informed Consent Debriefing
- an ethical principle that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate - given after the experiment
"The Costs of Automatic Thinking/Schemas" -Langer Study
- as long as the request to cut in line is small and you use a meaningless reason, then you can have a more impactful strategy. - by saying "because", we assume they are giving us a meaningful request (lol)
Flow:
- becoming lost in a task that is challenging, but attainable (don't even worry about looking at a clock) - pursuing something makes us happier than getting it. - flow STOPS when a goal is achieved - our minds resume wandering and we think about the achievement less
Experimental Research Design
- can help us determine cause and effect - IV and DV - Operationalization: turning an empirical question into an experiment - figure out how to measure them in a lab - Example --> "Do the number of witnesses affect whether someone will help?"
Blind individuals will still show expressions similar to those of sighted people...
- emotional expressions may be innate - blind and sighted athletes show similar emotional expressions of pride and sadness after winning and losing competitions
Helping others...
- enhances social relationships - causes us to view ourselves more positively - self-perception theory (" gee, I must be the kind of a person who cares about others!")
Schemas
- knowledge structures - frameworks for understanding new information *schemas help us make sense of ambiguous situations.
Automatic Thinking - Payne (2001)
- people presented with a black or white face for 200 ms (1/5 of a second) - Followed by a picture of a weapon or tool for 200 ms - Immediately replaced by meaningless letters - Participants told to ignore the face presented to them initially, judge as quickly as possible whether second picture was a weapon or a tool. - Results → more people saw it as a weapon when the face was black as compared to white.
Self-Presentation: Face:
- presenting the person we want other to think we are... the ACT of how you are displaying to others - the public image of ourselves that we want others to believe (what you are presenting and how it can change depending on the situation)
Harry Harlow & "The Wire Mother" Experiment
- providing comfort and warmth is imp for baby monkeys, not just nutrition (food) - external validity is not always essential: experiments LOW in external validity can be useful to clarify a general idea or to test a theory.
Self-Regulation
- refers to the processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior in pursuit of their goals. - often requires the ability to forego short term rewards in order to realize long term goals (marshmallows with kids) **simply doing nothing at all can require significant self-regulation when it comes to resisting temptations
Self-Handicapping
- the tendency to engage in self-defeating behavior in order to have an excuse ready if you perform poorly or fail. - you sabotage yourself beforehand Example: telling people you didn't study beforehand, so your friends don't come to the conclusion that you are not smart if you get a bad test score.
The Double Curse of Incompetence
- we don't know what we don't know - we often lack the knowledge to perform well and also to recognize that you performed poorly - this is an example of a non-motivational factor that can contribute to systematically positively biased self-assessments
Affective Forecasting:
-Predicting future emotions, like whether an event will result in happiness, anger or sadness, & for how long. - ex. how happy/unhappy we'd be after a romantic breakup - affective forecasting is often incorrect - People often assume that they will like or dislike a future event more than they actually do when it occurs.
Why do we tend to think our current self is more stable than it actually is?
...because we underestimate how much we change based on situations and in the future.
The ease of making simple judgements is dependent on what?
...is dependent on how available that information is to our minds.
Darwin's Hypothesis (regarding emotional expressions)
1. All humans have the same facial muscles and should use them to communicate emotions similarly. 2. Since humans share an evolutionary history with other mammals, most recently primates, our emotionally expressive behaviors should resemble those of other species. 3. Blind individuals, lacking the rich visual input a culture provides related to how to display emotion, will still show expressions similar to those of sighted people.
Why Are We Such Bad Affective Forecasters?
1. Immune Neglect 2. Focalism
The two measurable components of Happiness:
1. Life satisfaction, or how well you think your life is going in general 2. 2. Emotional well-being, which refers to the tendency to experience more positive emotions than negative emotions at any moment in time, or over a given length of time
Social Psychology is NOT...
Abnormal Psych, demographics, sociology, personality
Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
Comprehensive→ can identify all visually distinguishable facial movements by coding all possible combinations of facial muscle movements.
Milgram's Obedience Study
An experiment in which Stanley Milgram found that people will usually obey an authority, even if they might think what they are doing is wrong. - LOW in external validity because few people are ever put in a situation where an authority figure orders them to harm someone else; unrealistic. - most psychologist predicted they they wouldn't hurt other people, but were sooo wrong - this study is useful because it shows what COULD happen in such situations, which (although rare) have happened before and likely will happen again.
Moral Institutions About Harm
Can be driven by automatic emotional responses & more controlled cost-benefit analyses (i.e., utilitarian reasoning) - Intentions matter (Sugar/poison packet example) - Assessment of whether or not someone INTENDED to cause harm are particularly impactful on moral judgements about harmful transgressions - This may be related to why these moral intuitions evolved: harmful intentions are an important indicator of potential future harmful behavior
_________ ___________ selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgements
Cognitive Load
Upward Social Comparison Theory
Comparing ourselves with people we view as better than us to engage in self-improvement. -- can boost self-esteem as well. Only when catch up seems attainable Ex. "If she can do it, so can I" * can also lead us to feel badly about ourselves if the goal isn't as good as other people.
Emotion Recognition Across Remote Cultures
Ekman's study of unvi. facial expressions 6 basic emotions (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, happiness) have evolutionarily determined, universally recognizable facial expressions - Modalities other than facial expressions (e.g., vocal cues, body movements, touch) convey universally recognizable emotional signals
Why Do Emotional Expressions Look the Way They Do?
Emotion (and expressions of same) are not arbitrary but aid sensory and motor processes that help us survive.
The Universality of Emotional Expressions
Facial expressions are recognized cross-culturally
Typical Ego Depletion Paradigm & Results
First Task: that requires self control or not (e.g., suppressing emotions, resisting eating cookies) Second Task: that requires self-control (e.g., holding a hand grip for as long as possible, persisting on difficult task) *people who engaged in the FIRST self control task perform WORSE on the second task relative to those who did not initially exert self-control WILLPOWER IS A LIMITED RESOURCE!
Ekman's 6 'Basic Emotions'
Happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness, and anger universal
_______ norms may have evolved to help us evaluate people around us as potential social partners, and limit our negative impact on each other when living in large groups - Especially in cases of accidents, it's really important to consider others' intentions so that we can make predictions about their future behavior and discern friends from foes
Harm
Moral Intuitions About Fairness
Help individuals from being taken advantage of from others in the group Animals have a sense of fairness too → monkeys reject unequal pay
Moral Institutions About Disgust
Intentions matter less for disgust-related than for harm-related moral violations. - Disgust output → nonverbal expression, behavior (withdrawal), physiology (nausea) - Universal things that elicit disgust: urine, feces, blood, rotten flesh - Moral disgust may re-use evolutionarily older mechanisms for avoiding substances that could make us sick - In some cases, our cultures teach us to associate the feeling of disgust with particular actions or groups of people
(Sources of Self-knowledge) How do we construct our self concepts?
Introspection: - mindful introspection:who am I - can aid discovery of changes in oneself over time - these are the stories we tell ourselves Attributions (inferences): - self-serving biases (e.g., the tendency to credit oneself with success; blame the situation for failures - will describe us in an overly-positive light Feedback & Reactions from Others: - others help us feel like a coherent self - socialization - looking-glass self (seeing ourselves through others' eyes - social comparisons
Correlational Research Design
Looking for a relationship between variables Advantages: - no manipulation - able to study variables that are deemed unethical to experiment - a useful 1st step in research Disadvantages: - no CAUSATION can be inferred
______ _______ are impaired in patients with damage to the VMPC, a brain area involved (brain damage)
Moral judgements VMPC = ventromedial prefrontal cortex (involved in generating emotional responses) - Damage to the VMPC increases utilitarian moral judgements - This suggests that emotion plays a causal role in generating 'personal' moral judgements but not others.
Self-Serving Construals
Most people think they they're above average in terms of kindness, leadership, popularity, the ability to get along with others, and fairness. - The Better-Than-Average-Effect: people tend to construe what it means to be high in a positive trait in terms of the ways in which they excel (favoring themselves, you define an attribute that favors your own) ***The Better-Than-Average-Effect is STRONGEST for traits that are ambiguous (e.g., kindness, creativity)
"The Dangers of Drawing Causal Claims from Correlational Data" --> POLIO AND ICE CREAM EXAMPLE
Observation: when ice cream sales rise, polio diagnoses spike (erroneous) conclusion: ice cream consumption is a risk factor for polio Reality: both polio and ice cream sales rise in the summer for UNRELATED reasons ^ third variable problem ( unaccounted for )
Kinds of Research Designs:
Observational/Archival Correlational Experimental Basic Applied
Implicit Learning
Picking up things about our environments without awareness For example: language acquisition and comprehension
___________________ taboos may reuse brain systems that evolved to regulate our own behavior to protect ourselves from contaminants. - Outcomes, rather than intentions, are important
Purity-related
How to control for individual differences?
Random Assignment!
Social Hypothesis:
Regulate contributions to and payoffs from cooperative interactions (avoid freeloaders)
Cultural Variation: National Smiles
Smiles may be viewed as 'Fake' by Americans when looking at British people, when in reality their smile is genuine. Fake vs Genuine smiles Genuine Smile --> involve the muscles around the eyes - skin around the eyes to "scrunch up" involuntarily (the "Duchenne" smile)
Observational/Archival Research Design
Takes variables from the natural world and searches for a relationship between them
Automatic Thinking: The Good News & The Bad News
The Good News: we possess a powerful unconscious mind that processes info quickly and efficiently. The Bad News: we can be led into making poor decisions (stereotypes)
Self-Enhancement
The desire to maintain, increase, or protect one's positive self-views. - U.S. college students value self-esteem boosts (e.g., getting a good grade, receiving a compliment) more than sex, food, receiving a salary payment, seeing a friend, or having an alcoholic drink Strategies for Inflating Ourselves: 1. self-serving construals 2. self-handicapping 3. self-affirmation *but non-motivational factors also contribute to inflated self-assessments.
Social Comparisons Theory
The hypothesis that individuals compare themselves to others in order to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states - likely to happen in an ambiguous situation where no objective standard exists (condition is relative so we compare ourselves to other people) - you're likely to compare yourself to someone roughly around your skill level (biased towards people who are slightly inferior to your skill level) - "Downward Social Comparison"
"The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality"
The moral intuitions that helped our ancestors survive and thrive in small groups are not always well-matched to our modern, globalized society.
Moral Intuitions About Harm : Trolly Examples
Trolly Examples: - Trolley 1: the switch (1 person vs the group) - Trolley 2: the footbridge (push a person off the bridge to save the group of people) According to the dual-process theory of moral judgement... - Moral reasoning involves automatic emotional responses, as well as more controlled cognitive reasoning * Both dilemmas recruit utilitarian reasoning * The footbridge dilemma also causes a pre-potent, negative emotional response, which wins out and drives moral disapproval. * The 'switch' dilemma does not cause much emotion, so utilitarian reasoning wins.
Does how we think about & define ourselves vary systematically across situations?
Yes! (i.e., working self-construals)
Ego Depletion
a state, produced by acts of self-control, where we lack the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self-control.
Working-Self Concept
a subset of self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context
Moral Dumbfounding:
an inarticulable but firm conviction that something is morally wrong (or right) "I can't explain why, I just know that it's wrong."
Situationism and the Social Self
aspects of the self may change depending on the situation - Situationism: the notion that the social self changes across different contexts.
Decision Fatigue
avoiding one form of depletion - minimizing decision fatigue by reserving mental resources (if you minimize # of decisions you make in a day, you limit the decision fatigue)
To have lasting happiness and fulfillment, most people need .....
both positive feelings and a sense of purpose
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
changing reality (making our schemas come true)
Downward Social Comparison Theory
comparing ourselves to people who are worse than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability, goal: to boost our ego we tend to be biased towards this because a goal we have in everyday life is to maintain a POSITIVE SELF-CONCEPT
Controlled Thinking Automatic Thinking
conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless
Social Psychology is...
empirical, applicable to practical problems how age, race, and gender can shape how people behave without their conscious consent understanding aggression and when it emerges etc.
Self-Affirmation
engaging in efforts to maintain a positive self-concept, esp in the face of feedback or events that threaten a valued aspect of your self-image, by affirming a valued aspect of yourself unrelated to the threat ( to enhance self-esteem )
The Case of the Dodo Bird
evolved in isolation from significant predators humans hunted them to extinction within 100 years of arriving on the island where they lived (dodos had no fear response to humans)
Socialization
how the people around us perceive us and treat us
Good visual acuity helps with stimulus_______. Good visual sensitivity helps with stimulus _________.
identification detection
External Validity (experimental design)
indicates the degree to which the situation you create in your experiment generalizes to real-life situations Experiments LOW in External Validity--> e.g., where the experimental situation is unlike anything someone would encounter in everyday life.
Internal Validity (experimental design)
is necessary to be confident that only variables you manipulated in your experiment could have produced the results you observed randomly assign people to conditions, nothing varies between conditions except for IV
Social Comparisons
judgments of one's own appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others Example: if you donate $50 to charity and then find out your friend donated $10 you can feel generous. If you find out your friend donated $100 you might not feel AS generous.
Can money ever buy happiness?
only indirectly
The Representativeness Heuristic
our archetypes bias our judgements - our judgements of the likelihood that individuals are members of particular social groups are sometimes shaped by assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes - Base-Rate Information: information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population judgements based on representativeness may ignore other important sources of information (e.g., may neglect base rates)
How can we reconcile situationism with the sense of having a stable self-concept?
our self-concepts are relatively stable ... we feel like the same person across different places and situations YET, we appear to have different working self-concepts in different situations. & it's possible to have both continuity and malleability - Example: when she is with her mom she is responsible, when she is with her friends she is loud and outgoing, when she is focused on finals she is less outgoing and focused. * there is a regularity/stability in HOW our self-concepts shift across situations.
Implicit Learning Example
participants can learn a set of rules but not be able to verbalize what the rules were
Morality (pl. moralities):
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong OR good and bad behavior moral judgements could vary a lot
We also strategically manage how we present ourselves to others across social contexts based on our goals and what we want others to believe about us. extreme end of this is:
some people are particularly attuned to what kind of situation they are in and change their behavior accordingly (high self-monitors)
Emotional 'accents':
specific ways people from different cultures express a particular emotion For example: in India, showing embarrassment is when they bite their tongue *although some signals of embarrassment are recognized cross-culturally, this one, which results from an 'emotional accent', is not. (American way of showing embarrassment and India's way. Both are recognized by India people but American did not perceive India's way of showing embarrassment as such)
Social Psychology
study of how we think about, influence, feelings, and relate to one another/group - PERCEIVED thoughts, feelings, behaviors of others can be just as influential as their ACTUAL thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
Social Psychology is About...
the power of the situation (social influence) and how individuals are influenced by their construals of social situations (social construal)
Diffusion of Responsibility
the tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by others who are acting the same way
Self-Serving Bias
the tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on the situation/external factors
High Self-Monitors
those who pay close attention to their social context and adjust their self-presentation accordingly. - much more dramatic in changes of behaviors according to situations. - social chameleons - depends on who they are around
Operationalization
turning an empirical question into an experiment
Looking Glass Self (Cooley)
we base our perception of self by how we think other people see us
Availability Heuristic - Daniel Kahneman
→ a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement (e.g., of frequency or probability) on the ease with which they can bring pertinent instances to mind. - People tend to think that something is more likely happen if you can think of more example of it. - For Example --> Media biases for reporting headline-grabbing and frightening events (e.g., shark attacks) lead us to overestimate the probability of certain risks (e.g., shark attacks) that are actually far less lethal than other risks (e.g., falling down the stairs) - Another Example --> How to make people feel loved or unloved... - Name 3 close friends (you will feel less lonely) - Name 10 close friends (you will feel lonelier) - most people have at least 3 close friends, so it strengthens your feeling of social support - most people don't have 10 close friends -Textbook Example --> Biased estimates of contribution in group projects. - easier to think of examples of what we did to contribute, we have more memories of making our own contributions
