PSC 1 Midterm 4

id, ego, superego

ID- amoral, pleasure, devil. SUPEREGO- moral, society, angel EGO- decides between angel and devil

reason why obedience, social conformity occurs

Obedience to Authority: -if a trusted authority figure says we should do something, then there is probably a good reason for it -we don't want to get into conflict with authority figures -if we don't obey, we might suffer negative consequences Social conformity: -if other people are doing something, then it's probably normal -we don't want to appear weird by failing to conform

Obedience vs Conformity

Obedience: following instructions from someone in position of power or authority Conformity: doing what other people like you are doing

Physiological Reactivity and Behavioral Inhibition

PR: a measurement by looking at the activity of the autonomic nervous system such as heart rate, breathing, and the skin conductance response -reactive infants typically have a relatively high resting heart rate, and they'll show an exaggerated increase in heart rate to stimulus like a loud sound BI: infants who are physiologically reactive will tend to move and cry more in response to a loud sound, and they'll tend to be very quiet and reserve in social situation; uninhibited children tend to smile at a stranger or approach a new toy, inhibited children tend to look away from a stranger and initially ignore a new toy both may ultimately impact someone's personality in adulthood an infants whose genes lead to a strong physiological reaction when an unfamiliar child approaches will be less likely to interact with that child; likewise, an infant who is less reactive might find it easier to start playing with the other child, these experiences will then impact the children's further development

social norms

expected standards of conduct

minimal group paradigm

experiment in which volunteers were randomly assigned to two groups that were given a task in which they divided up money participants gave more money to their ingroup members, but they also tried to prevent the outgroup members from receiving any money

implicit vs. explicit attitudes / biases

explicit: a deliberate, controlled, and conscious appraisal process of an object and its evaluation (attitudes we can openly deliberate and communicate to others) implicit: an automatic, unconscious, ad intuitive association between a attitude object and their evaluation (attitudes we are not aware of that are measured indirectly)

foot in the door

if you agree to a small request, you are more likely to comply with a large request ex: you agree to help a friend move a couch. now you are more likely to comply when she asks you to help her move all of her belongings to her new apartment

door in the face

if you refuse a large, request, you are more likely to comply with a smaller request ex: A marketer calls, and you refuse to answer a product questionnaire that takes 20 minutes. Now you are likely to agree to answer 5 questions about a product.

Definition of Emotion

immediate, relatively brief, response to environment or thoughts involves conscious feelings, physiological responses, changes in behavior can be both positive or negative, and often trigger further changes in our behavior and other mental processes are fundamental drivers of mental processes and behaviors connect with mood, temperament, personality, mental and physical health, social interactions, culture, biology, and relationships

implicit vs. explicit attitudes

implicit: attitudes that influence a person's feelings and behaviors at an unconscious level, accessed with little conscious effort or control explicit: attitudes that a person can report to other people, ex:

ethinics of deception approval by Institutional Review Board (IRB)

many studies in psychology require deceiving participants in some cases, participants may become anxious or distressed by what they think is happnening or might happen ( even though nothing bad actually happens) most people believe that a small amount of short-term distress is OK if the research is important All research involving human subjects must be approved by an IRB -they look closely at research involving deception to ensure that the psychological distress is minor and is justified given the importance of the research -studies that use deception are required to "debrief" the participants at the end of the study (explain what really happened) -the researchers are extensively trained in research ethics

The Implicit Associations Test (IAT): Goals, Procedure, Typical Results

measure strength of associations between concepts and evaluation using a sorting task captures implicit bias not seen with explicit measures may not reflect how you consciously feel, but is predictive of some aspects of behavior

Circumplex Model of Emotion

model that says that emotions vary along two primary dimensions called arousal and valence Arousal: the degree of intensity of emotion, comes from your body Valence: whether your emotion is positive or negative, comes from your cognitive appraisal of the situation

big 5 personality traits

openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (moody/dramatic feelings)

Self Reports

A convenient way of measuring personality traits that people are willing and able to tell you about, this encompasses a lot of personality traits people know quite a bit about their own personality, because they're always around to witness their own behavior, thoughts, and feelings Pros: access to thoughts and feelings that nobody has but yourself which is great for measuring personality traits, which can make accurate reports of these traits Cons: biased towards self

Personality

A person's genotype can impact how that person reacts to positive and negative life events. The path from an infant's temperament to an adult's personality is complex and impacted by both genes and experience. Genes account for ~50% of variation in personality among people riase in middle class American households, pairs of siblings that are similar in trait like IQ can be used to estimate contribution of genes to the trait not only does your personality depend on what genes you have and what events you experience, how your personality changes in response to your experiences will depend on what genes you have the effect of genes on personality depend on the environment

Deindividuation

A state of reduced individuality, reduced self awareness, and reduced attention to personal standards; this phenomenon may occur when people are part of a group people often do things they would not do if they were alone or self-aware people become aroused and anonymous and responsibly is diffused loss of "self" within group ex: Stanford Prison Study -use of uniform for guards and prisoners -prisoners addressed by number -student-guards took on their roles with such vigor that the study was ended early because of the concerns for the well-being of the "guards" and the "prisoners", this demonstrates what some people are willing to do when put in a situation with defined social roles

Dimensions of Temperament (Buss, Plomin)

Activity Levels: how much the infant or child moves, runs, talks, etc Emotionality: the intensity of the child's emotional response to a situation; calm, angry Sociability: the extent that the child likes to be with others Impulsivity: basically the same as effortful control, but labeled with the opposite end of the scale; someone who is impulsive lacks the ability to focus attention and inhibit inappropriate behaviors

Behavior Observation

Directly observing people's behavior, and identify patterns in their behavior Must be measured over a span of several days, because one day might not be a representative of how they usually behave using an electronically activated recorder, EAR, that collects audio recordings while the participants are living their daily lives, however this can be unethical due to privacy can be more objective because it's not influenced by the biases that affect self-views or close others' views of a person useful when studying individuals who can't or won't provide self-reports, such as young children, animals, famous politicians, by analyzing what these individuals do, we can get a measure of personality traits such as aggressiveness without having to get them to fill out a questionnaire

Millgram Experiment

Experiment to test if ordinary men would follow orders that could result in pain or even danger to others used a fake shock generator buttons that cannot really produce strong shocks, both slips of papers said teacher and fake learner (confederate) social pressures can cause people to behave in ways that they would never think of behaving on their own

Social Norms: Hotel Towel Experiment

In half of the hotel rooms, they put up a typical sign asking people to reuse their towels and stressing the environmental benefits of doing so. In the other rooms, the sign provided this message. This is called the "descriptive norm" condition because the sign simply describes normative behavior. They found that only 35% of hotel guests reused their towels when the sign had the standard environmental message. However, almost 45% of guests reused their towels when the sign had the descriptive norm message. When the sign said that 75% of the hotel guests in that specific room reused the towels, towel reuse went up to almost 50%. People are more influenced by the attitudes and actions of people who they perceive as being similar to themselves. This example shows how social influence, which sometimes leads to horrible actions, can also be used for good.

Internal vs External Attributions

Internal: people infer that an event or a person's behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, and feelings; when an individual uses a personal reason as the cause for a situation or event External: people infer that a person's behavior is due to situation factors ex: maria's car breaks down on the freeway, if she believes the breakdown happened because of her ignorance about cars, she is making an internal attribution, if she believes the breakdown happened because her car is old, she is making an external attribution

Life History

Measurement of personality by using life outcome data using archival data such as school record, health record, criminal records, or marriage and divorce records to track what people have done in their lives this measurement can be unbiased however some personality traits do not leave a mark on a person's life outcome cannot tell much about a person's personality from life outcome data alone, often done with other methods

Bystander Apathy and Diffusion of Responsibility

People are much more likely to help someone or deal with a problem if there's no one else around, and part of this is because we rely on other people to determine if it's really a problem and if it's safe and appropriate for us to get involved the greater the number of people who witness someone in need of help, the less likely it is that any of them will step forward

fundamental attribution error (+studies)

People attribute behavior to the stable psychological characteristics of the individual even when the situation is clearly responsible for the behavior Jones Harris Experiment: Participants tended to attribute the views expressed in an essay to the opinions of the person who wrote the essay even when it was clear that the person did not choose the position expressed in the essay Even when it is clear that the situation is responsible for someone's behavior, we tend to attribute the behavior to the person's internal characteristics Rose et Al Study: Participants were assigned to be the questioner or contestant Questioner came up with difficult questions, which the contestant must answer Even if both the questioner and the contestant are equally knowledgeable, the questioner should be able to generate many questions that the contestant could not answer People who watched the game show judge the questioner to have a general knowledge level of 88, whereas they judged the contestants to have a general knowledge level of only 49 We tend to assume that people behave the way they do because of their internal characteristics even when it should be obvious that the situation was responsible for the behavior

Informant reports

Personality ratings made by people who know the target person well, used for measuring personality traits that are defined by someone's behavior rather than by their internal thoughts and feelings, no always valid measures of personality traits such as anxiety, optimism, or rumination, because these traits have more to do with a person's typical pattern of thoughts or feelings, and these are hard for other people to inter Pros: you can ask multiple informants to provide personality ratings, thus combing their rating;; and improving the reliability of your personality measure Cons: harder to collect than self reports, can be collected via web questionnaire, however, making them pretty practical, even if not quite as easy to collect as self reports; often biased, people tend to say nice things about family and friends

Temperament

Refers to more basic aspects of the individual that can be assessed non-verbally, either by measuring physiologically variables such as heart rate, by observing behaviors such as fussing or playing or by asking parents or other caregivers to report their observations of the child's behavior a child's temperament influences the environment, and the environment then impacts how the child's temperament evolves into an adult's personality

Moods

Slow, long lasting, often no identifiable triggering event, general state

Stereotypes, Prejudice, Discrimination (studies)

Stereotypes: a schema, or mental shortcut, that helps us quickly process social information; may be positive, neutral, or negative Prejudice: involves negative feelings, opinions and beliefs associated with a stereotype Discrimination: Unjustified treatment of a person based on the group he or she belongs to Banaji/Hardin -presenting a prime word which was followed by a target word (female or male pronoun), participants were to ignore the prime word and focus on the target in which they were to press a button corresponding to the gender -used a stereotypically/definitionally prime for males and females -When the prime was a definitionally male term like FATHER, participants were faster to respond to a male pronoun target like HE than to respond to a female pronoun target like SHE -When the prime was a definitionally female term like MOTHER, participants were faster to respond to a female pronoun target like SHE than to respond to a male pronoun target like HE - • With male stereotypical primes like MECHANIC, reaction times were faster for male pronouns targets than for female pronoun targets - This shows that the word MECHANIC is more strongly linked to male-related concepts than to female-related concepts -For stereotypically female primes, reaction times were faster when the target was a female pronoun like SHE than when the target was a male pronoun like HE This result shows that the word SECRETARY is more strongly linked to female-related concepts than to male-related concepts -Priming effects were bigger for DEFINITIONAL primes than for STEREOTYPICAL PRIMES MacNeil study: -The same actual person led multiple discussion groups, but some groups thought they had a male instructor and other groups thought they had a female instructor. -Students who thought they had a male instructor gave a higher overall rating than students who thought they had a female instructor, even though it was exactly the same instructor. Fazio Study: -When European Americans see a European American face, this WILL NOT automatically activate negative concepts, so this will not have much impact on their reaction - Following an African American face prime (but not a European American face prime), reaction times were faster for BAD and slower for GOOD (in European American Participants) -- this was the same for African American students Bertrand and Mullainathan Study -Sending in same resumes but the only difference between these resumes were the names on the resumes - Resumes with European American sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback for an interview than resumes with African American sounding names Moss-Racusin: -The ONLY differences were the names of the applicants (ie. John and Jennifer) - Competence rated lower for applicants with a female name - Hireability rated lower for applicants with a female name - Starting salary estimated lower for applicants with a female name - Male and Female professors showed approximately the same amount of bias -Both male and female science professors gave more positive appraisals, on average, if they thought the applicant as a man than if they thought the applicant was a woman, even though it was exactly the same application except for the name

Dimensions of Temperament (Rothbart)

Surgency/Extraversion: combination of buss and plomin's activity level and sociability dimensions Negative Affect: similar to buss and plomin's emotionality dimension Effortful control: the extent to which a child is able to focus attention and inhibit appropriate behaviors

Correlations between Temperament/Personality and behavior

Temperament: biological based tendencies to feel or act in certain ways early childhood temperaments significant influence behavior and personality structure throughout a person's development

Conformity (Asch Experiment)

The altering of one's behavior and opinions to match those of other people or to match other people's expectations Experiment -a naive participant joined a group of five other participants. the five others were confederates, secretly in league with the researcher. each participant was asked to look at a reference line and then say out loud which of the three comparison lines matched it -12/18 trials, the five confederates deliberately gave the wrong answer -when confederates gave false answers, 3/4 of the real participants conformed by giving the wrong answer at least once. -this experiments shows that people tend to conform to social norms, even when those norms are obviously wrong

delay of gratification task and effort control

The extent to which a child is able to focus attention and inhibit inappropriate behaviors marshmallow experiment: -others eat it after a minute or two, and some can wait as long as seven minutes, older children can wait even longer, children who manage to wait often exhibit clear signs that they're really struggling the temptation to eat the marshmallow; study found that how long a 4year old can wait is correlated with effortful control, effortful control and delay of gratification in these 4 year olds was predictive of the children's grades several years later

Social Identity Theory (Tajfel)

The idea that in groups consist of individuals who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category ad experience pride through their group membership

Group Polarization

The process by which initial attitudes of groups become more extreme over time if most of the group members are somewhat cautious, then the group becomes even more cautious ex: when a jury discusses a case, the discussion tends to make individual jurors believe more strongly in their initial opinions about a defendant's guilt or innocence, when groups make decisions they usually choose the course of action that was initial favored by the majority of individuals in the group

James-Lange Theory

Theory that bodily perception comes before the feeling of emotion ex: when a grizzly bear threatens you, you begin to sweat, experience a pounding heart, and run. these responses will generate in you the emotion of fear problems with this theory: -multiple emotions produce the same bodily responses -bodily responses may happen without creating a feeling of emotion (going to a gym without feeling an emotion) -nervous system is too slow for the bodily response to precede the feeling of the emotion, action potentials from our brains cannot rigger changes in our body nearly as fast as our brains can process and appraise a situation to develop a feeling

Cannon-Bard Theory

Theory that says that we have subjective emotional experiences simultaneously with and independently from physiological arousal ex: when a grizzly bear threatens you, you simultaneously feel afraid, begin to sweat, experience a pounding heart, and run Neither one of them causes the other, because they happen along two different pathways in the nervous system

cognitive dissonance

an uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior to reduce discomfort, change in attitude to match behavior, OR change behavior to match attitude holding two or more contradictory thoughts/beliefs/actions at once way to attempt to justify behaviors ex: in the Stanford Prison Experiment, although actions were clearly wrong, guards didn't think behavior was too extreme at the time, provided reasoning for their behavior (prisoners were trouble makers, wimps, fakers) ex: "im a proud american" and "the US government engaged in waterboarding" (inconsistent) -> dissonance -> "Those people were terrorists who do not deserve humane treatment" or "the people who allowed waterboarding do not represent American values"

Obedience/Conformity increases or decreases depending on

individual personality whether we can hide our nonconformity/disobedience whether anyone else exhibits nonconformity/disobedience how authoritative the person is (in the case of obedience to authority)

Attitudes

people's evaluations of objects, of events, or of ideas shaped by social context, and play an important role in how we evaluate and interact with people held consciously and also remain below conscious awareness attitude accessibility: refers to the ease of difficulty that a person has in retrieving an attitude from memory

Self Serving Biases

people's tendency to attribute positive events to their own character but attribute negative events to external factors explanations of OWN BEHAVIOR maintain/enhance perceptions of self: -we attribute our own good behavior to stable internal characteristics (good manners) associated with psychological well being: reduced in people with depression ex: positive: you get an A for an essay and you attribute it to your own awesomeness negative: you get a C on an essay and you attribute it your professor not having explained what they wanted well enough

continuous dimension vs categorical

psychologists dont appoarch personalities by sorting them through categories, but on a continuous spectrum

social faciliation

the idea that presence of others generally enhances performance occurs in other animals, including horses, dogs, rats, birds, fish, and even cockroaches the presence of others leads to increased arousal, the arousal favors the dominant response (the response most likely to be performed in the situation), if the required response is easy or well learned, performance is enhanced, if the required response is novel or not well learned, performance suffers examples: professional golfers are less likely to be distracted by a crowd of spectators than a distracted novice golfer, the professionals practice so often that hitting a good shot is their dominant response, therefore professionals may be even more likely to hit well in the presence of spectators

ingroup favoristism

the tendency for people to evaluate favorably and privilege members of the ingroup more than members of the outgroup

Social loafing

the tendency for people to work less hard in a group than when working alone

groupthink

the tendency of a group to make a bad decision as a result of preserving the group and maintaining the cohesiveness; especially likely when the group is under intense pressure , is facing external threats, and is biased in a particular direction

compliance

the tendency to agree to do things requested by others

the actor-observer asymmetry/discrepancy

the tendency to attribute one's own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes

outgroup homogeneity effect

the tendency to view outgroup members as less varied than ingroup members

Eysenck's biological trait theory: extraversion, emotional stability

theory that personality traits had two major dimensions: introversion/extraversion and emotional stability. introversion: how shy, reserved and quiet a person is extraversion: how sociable, outgoing, and bold a person is emotional stablility: variability in a person's mood and emotion, consistency in mood and emotion

Two Factor Theory

theory that physiological arousal was essential the same across all emotions and that what differentiates fear from anger or sadness from embarrassment is how the individual person interprets or perceives their environment both arousal and your assessment of that arousal are needed to create the final emotion

obedience

when a person follows the orders of a person of authority

information influence

when people assume that the behavior of the crowd represents the correct way to respond ex: if you are at a train station, you turn and see a mass of people running for the exit, you might join them if you suspect they are exiting for a good reason, in situations like potential emergencies, other people's actions provide information about the right thing to do

normative influence

when people go along with the crowd to fit in with the group and to avoid looking foolish

low balling

when you agree to buy a product for a certain price, you are more likely to comply with a request to pay more for the product ex: You agree to buy a used car for $4,750. When the salesman says he forgot to add some charges, you agree to buy the car for $5,275.