Exam 1

Something can be accessible for three reasons...

1) Some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience (AKA the schemas are constantly active and ready to be used) - Ex) If alcoholism runs in your family + you see someone who is acting strange -> you might think they are an alcoholic 2) Something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal - Ex) If you are currently studying abnormal psychology, you might see the man's weird behavior as a sign that he is mentally ill 3) Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences - Priming

Two different ways to view athletic ability...

1) View athletic talent as a gift you either have or you don't - The problem is that when such people do poorly, as every athlete does on occasion, it is a devastating sign that they don't have it 2) View athletic performance as a skill that can be improved - Failure is a sign that they need to work harder, not that they should give up How people view their own abilities and interpret the reasons for their behavior can be crucial determinants of their success - But how do people even know themselves?? (How do I come to be this person that I call "myself")

Why do people fall prey to the fundamental attribution error?

1) When we try to explain someone's behavior, our focus of attention is usually on the person, not on the surrounding situation - The situational causes of another person's behavior are practically invisible to us (we do not know what happened to that person earlier in the day + even when we know her situation, we do not know how she interpreted it) - Although the situation may be invisible, the individual is Perceptually Prominent- Our eyes + ears notice people - People, not situations, have Perceptual Salience

Evolutionary Theory-

A concept developed by Charles Darwin (1859) to explain the ways in which animals adapt to their environments - Central to this theory is Natural Selection

Cover Story-

A description of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpose and is used to maintain psychological realism

Attribution Theory-

A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior

Examples of Automatic Thinking and Metaphors about the Body and the Mind

- Ex) Participants sat down in a room that had just been sprayed with citrus-scented Windex or in a room with no odor - Those who were in the room that smelled clean were more trusting of a stranger and more likely to donate time and money to a charity - Ex2) Also the study with holding a hot drink vs. a cold drink - Activates the metaphor that friendly people are "warm" and unfriendly people are "cold" - Ex3) Students who held a survey on a heavier clipboard thought that students should have more say in pressing matters on campus - This is true because there is a metaphor that associates weight with importance In each of these studies, a physical sensation (smelling something clean, feeling a hot beverage, holding something heavy) activated a metaphor that influenced judgments about a completely unrelated topic or person - The mind is connected to the body, and when we think about something or someone, we do so with reference to how our bodies are reacting - Ex) If we are tired, we might interpret the world more negatively - Metaphors about the body and social judgments also influence our judgments and decisions - Ex) Cleanliness is usually associated with morality, and dirtiness with immorality, as seen by such phrases as "washing away our sins" and "dirty thoughts."

Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock, 2014

- FB manipulated the feeds of 700,000 people by either reducing positive or negative content in the feed for one week - Number of positive and negative words from that user was then measured for that same week

Mobile Phones allow us to...

- Have survey apps - Apps that monitor app usage - "EAR" - Conduct health and wellness studies

Self-Knowledge

- How we come to know ourselves - Highly variable - Traits and aspects vary on ____ - Very flimsy - Typically based on what you have done before (Self-perception theory)

Microexpressions

- There is a lot of research investigating Microexpressions - There is also a lot of new technology - Correlations to behaviors are very flimsy - Humans can recognize microexpressions but often do not realize they do and there is little evidence that microexpressions affect other people

Issues with Covariance theory (and the other theory, but I do not know its name)

- They both give people too much credit - They both overestimate how much knowledge you have

Drouin, Boyd, and Romaneli, 2017

- Took one year of chat logs from a non-profit called PJFI - Compared logs of those who had reoffended vs those who had not - Those that reoffended were more likely to show language associated with social dominance + increases in personal pronoun use, insight, time and ingestion - Total words and use of sexual words were not predictive

Leon Festinger-

"It is precisely when these two motives pull in opposite directions that we can gain our most valuable insights into the workings of the mind" - The need to feel good about our decisions can fly in the face of the need to be accurate, and can have catastrophic consequences (People often would rather feel good about themselves - Most people have a need to maintain high Self-Esteem

Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson (1977)

"Telling More Than You Know Phenomenon" - A number of studies in which people often made inaccurate reports about why they responded the way they did - Their reports about the causes of their responses pertained more to their theories and beliefs about what should have influenced them than to what actually influenced them

Kurt Lewin-

"There is nothing so practical as a good theory." - He is also one of the founders of Social Psychology and this is the field's motto

Fixed Mindset-

(Carol Dweck) The idea that we have a set amount of an ability that cannot change

Bias Blind Spot-

(Emily Pronin) The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are In a study conducted... - Researchers presented participants with descriptions of a number of biases (self-serving attributions and victim blaming) - BUT the descriptions the participants read never used the word "bias" - Participants were asked to rate how susceptible they thought they were to each of these thought tendencies - Next, participants made the same ratings for how susceptible they thought the average American was to these tendencies - Participants felt they were only "somewhat" susceptible to self-serving attributions, while the average American was rated as much more susceptible

Belief in a Just World-

(Melvin Lerner) A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people - This phenomena can lead to sad + tragic consequences... - Ex) Victim Blaming -- A defensive attribution process by which people might try to make themselves feel better about the attack by placing some of the blame onto the victim

Thin-Slicing-

(Nalini Ambady) Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person's personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior - In an Ambady experiment -> Thin-sliced impressions of professors were incredibly similar to the perceptions of students who spent an entire semester with the instructors

Ethnography-

(One example of observational learning) The method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have - The goal is to understand the richness and complexity of the group by observing it in action - Is the main method of Cultural Anthropology (the study of human cultures and societies) - As social psychology broadens its focus by studying social behavior in different cultures, ethnography is increasingly being used - The key to ethnography is to avoid imposing one's preconceived notions on the group and to try to understand the point of view of the people being studied - Sometimes, however, researchers have a specific hypothesis that they want to test using the observational method - In such studies, it is important to establish Interjudge Reliability An example... Leon Festinger- Observed a small cult of people called the Seekers predicted that the world would come to an end with a giant flood on the morning of December 21, 1954 - When the world did not come to an end, they believed it was because of the Seekers faith - This is when Festinger created his theory Cognitive Dissonance

Display Rules-

(Paul Ekman) Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display - Ex) Display rules of more individualistic cultures discourage the expression of shame in front of others, while the display rules of more collectivistic cultures allow (or even encourage) it - Ex2) American cultural norms typically discourage emotional displays in men, such as grief or crying, but allow the facial display of such emotions in women - Ex3) In Japan, traditional cultural rules dictate that women should not exhibit a wide, uninhibited smile

Observational Method-

(if the goal is describing) The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior - This method may take many forms depending on... - What the researchers are looking for, how involved or detached they are from the people they are observing, and how much they want to quantify what they observe

Big Data and Social Network Model uses in Social

- Amazon's mechanical turk (people take surveys for money) - Looking for trends in pop. culture - Respondes to unique events - Linguistic inquiry and word count - Try to correlate language patterns with behavior - Keep track of various types of words - Affective words and pronouns

Internal Validity

- Are there ulterior explanations? - The third variable problem? - Construct and internal are often confused

Attention

- Broadbent Model of Attention

Understand Emotion

- Emotions are more situationally based than we might think

23 and Me

"External researchers will be able to access information on thousands of diseases and traits for more than 400,000 people" - Has received multiple federal grants for research purposes

To answer questions objectively...

1) Make an educated guess (hypothesis) about the specific situation 2) Design a well-controlled experiment sophisticated enough to tease out to tease out the situations that would result in one or another outcome

There are conditions under which overjustification effects can be avoided

1) Rewards will undermine interest only if interest was initially high - If a child has no interest in reading, then getting him or her to read by offering rewards is not a bad idea because there is no initial interest to undermine 2) Also, the type of reward makes a difference - Task-Contingent Rewards VS Performance-Contingent Rewards

Suppose you're driving home from watching a scary movie about a hitchhiker who was a murderer when you see someone talking loudly with a friend. Because you saw the movie, you assume that you are witnessing an argument that will probably end in a fight. This is an example of:

priming

Enrolling in which of the following graduate programs would be most likely to improve your statistical reasoning ability about problems in everyday life?

psychology

Which of the following is the best way to increase the external validity of a study?

replicate the study with a different population of people in a different setting

Which of the following is the best summary of the function of schemas?

schemas are very useful in helping people organize information about the world, but they are problematic when they result in self-fulfilling prophecies

Rob is definitely not the most attractive guy in the dorms, but he is extremely confident about who he is and how he looks. He is convinced that most women find him to be very attractive, and he in fact usually gets dates with women who are much more attractive than he is. What is the best explanation of Rob's success?

self-fulfilling prophecy

Which of the following is true about social neuroscience?

social psychologists are increasingly interested in the connection between biological processes and social behavior

Suppose you are buying a new home and have looked at several different houses. According to research on automatic decision making, what would be the best way for you to make up your mind about which one to buy?

spend a few minutes thinking consciously about the alternatives and then several minutes distracting yourself by working on puzzles

Suppose you are trying to raise money for your favorite charity and you set up a table in the lobby of a campus building. Which of the following is likely to increase the likelihood that passersby will donate money?

spray some citrus-scented cleaning solution on the table

Over Thanksgiving break, your parents ask you if you can think of 12 reasons why your college is better than its archrival. You find it hard to come up with so many reasons and so end up thinking, "Hmm, maybe the schools aren't all that different." Which of the following mental strategies did you probably use to reach this conclusion?

the availability heuristic

Megan reads a research study which shows that children who see a lot of violence on television are more likely to be aggressive on the playground. Megan thinks, "This is obvious; I could have predicted that!" Megan's reaction to the study is probably an example of:

the hindsight bias

What is the "level of analysis" for a social psychologist?

the individual in the context of a social situation.

Which of the following is NOT a way in which schemas can become accessible in people's minds?

the more negative in content a schema is, the more likely it is to be accessible

Which of the following is true about cross-cultural research?

the purpose of cross-cultural research is to see which social psychological findings are universal and which are culture-bound

Research on controlled thinking and free will shows that:

there is a disconnect between our conscious sense of how much we are causing our actions and how much we are really causing our actions

The basic dilemma of the social psychologist is that:

there is a trade-off between internal and external validity in most experiments

Researchers who study social cognition assume that people

try to view the world as accurately as possible.

If our goal is to feel good about ourselves ->

we are likely to engage in Downward Social Comparison

The topic that would most interest a social psychologist is

whether people's decision about whether to cheat on a test is influenced by how they imagine their friends would react if they found out.

Which of the following research topics about violence is one that a social psychologist might investigate?

why some situations are more likely to provoke aggression than others

If your goal is to know what excellence is ->

you are likely to engage in Upward Social Comparison

Archival Analysis-

A form of the observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers) - Ex) One study, for example, analyzed millions of Twitter messages sent in 84 countries to examine daily rhythms in people's mood - Found that most people's positive moods peak at two different times of the day: when they wake up and before they go to bed - Ex2) Researchers have also used this tactic to answer questions about porn - By looking at the Credit Card numbers (and their zip codes) of people who pay for porn -> blue and red states consume a similar amount of porn

Institutional Review Board (IRB)-

A group made up of at least one scientist, one nonscientist, and one member not affiliated with the institution that reviews all psychological research at that institution and decides whether it meets ethical guidelines; all research must be approved by the IRB before it is conducted - Note: Some of the studies explained in later chapters were carried out before the IRB was created in the early 1970s

Availability Heuristic-

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind - The trouble with the availability heuristic is that sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture - We often lack firm schemas about our own traits - We thus might make judgments about ourselves based on how easily we can recall examples of our own behavior - Ex) Researchers performed a clever experiment in which they altered how easy it was for people to remember examples of their own past behaviors - In one condition, they asked people to think of 6 times they had acted assertively - In another condition, the researchers asked people to think of 12 times they had acted assertively - All participants were then asked to rate how assertive they thought they really were - People asked to think of six examples rated themselves as relatively assertive because it was easy to think of this many examples

Representativeness Heuristic-

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

Probability Level (P-Value)-

A number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable or variables; the convention in science, including social psychology, is to consider results significant (trustworthy) if the probability level is less than 5 in 100 that the results might be due to chance factors and not the independent variables studied

Random Assignment to Condition-

A process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants' personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions - Researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants' personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions - Even with random assignment, however, there is the (very small) possibility that different characteristics of people did not distribute themselves evenly across conditions

Prototypes-

A schema specific to objects

Behaviorism-

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment - When a behavior is followed by a reward it is likely to continue (and vice versa) - Behavioral Psychologists (Esp. BF Skinner) believed that all behavior could be explained by rewards and punishments - But because behaviorists overlooked cognition, thinking, and feeling, they overlooked phenomena vital to the human social experience

Gestalt Psychology-

A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people's minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

Tiffany has a hard time trusting her friends because she believes they are irresponsible. Accordingly, when she makes dinner plans with one friend, she also makes backup plans with someone else, and she goes to one or the other. Her friends soon in turn begin to "blow off" their arrangements with Tiffany, because they are never sure whether she will show up. Tiffany thinks to herself, "See, I was right, my friends are irresponsible." Which of the following best explains why Tiffany made this conclusion?

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Naive Realism (Lee Ross)

A special kind of construal; the conviction that we perceive things "as they really are." If other people see the same things differently, therefore, it must be because they are biased Ross conducted a simple experiment - 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 - The hope is that once negotiators on both sides become fully aware of this phenomenon and how it impedes conflict resolution, a reasonable compromise will be more likely

Correlation Coefficient-

A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another—for example, how well you can predict people's weight from their height - A positive correlation means that increases in the value of one variable are associated with increases in the value of the other variable - A negative correlation means that increases in the value of one variable are associated with decreases in the value of the other - It is also possible, of course, for two variables to be completely unrelated, so that a researcher cannot predict one variable from the other

Meta-Analysis-

A statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable - Similar to the P-Value, but it averages out the results of many different studies - Most of the findings you will read about in this book have been replicated in several different settings, with different populations

Sociocultural

A theoretical viewpoint that searches for the causes of social behavior in influences from larger social groups (norms within cultural groups, social class differences, nationality/ethnicity, and fads) - In a study, they asked anglo-americans and asian-americans to solve word puzzles - Anglo-Americans solved more word problems when they picked the word puzzle to do (and vice versa)

Social Psychologists engage in a continual process of theory refinement ->

A theory is developed; specific hypotheses derived from that theory are tested; based on the results obtained, the theory is revised and new hypotheses are formulated

Covariation Model-

A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether the behavior occurs - Like Heider, he assumed that when we are in the process of forming an attribution, we gather information, or data - The data we use, according to Kelley, are about how a person's behavior "covaries" or changes across time, place, and depending on the target of the behavior - By discovering covariation in people's behavior (e.g., your friend refuses to lend you her car, but she agrees to lend it to others), you can reach a conclusion about what causes their behavior He distinguished three types of covariation information we examine when forming an attribution: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency

Holistic Thinking Style-

A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures (e.g., China, Japan, and Korea)

Which is the definition of analytic thinking?

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context

Analytic Thinking Style-

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures

Independent View of the Self-

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

Interdependent View of the Self-

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

Random Selection-

A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Social Neuro. Research adv and disadv.

Adv... - Additional empiricism to psychology - Behavioral data is better than attitudes - Can answer previously unanswerable Qs Disadv... - Biological data is not as conclusive as some people think - Expensive - Lab settings are artificial

Lab Experiments pros and cons

Adv... - Allow cause and effect conclusions and allows control of extraneous variables Disadv... - Artificial

Adv and Disadv. of smartphone research

Adv... - Ecologically valid data - Reduced attrition - Previously uncollectable data Disadv... - People do not know how to use their technology - Too much data

Field experiments pros and cons

Adv... - Increases ecological validity - Can discover phenomena that is not considered Disadv... - Allows for influence from 3rd variables

Big Data and SNMs adv. and disadv.

Adv... - Understanding very large things - Greater access to information - Allows data collection to be done where it could not have been done before Disadv... - Analysis can be hard - Even this much data does not represent the whole population - Can often feel inauthentic

Worm Eating Social Psych Experiment ->

After a 10 minute delay -> 12/15 people would eat the worm With no delay -> only 1/16 people would eat the worm Why you may ask? - They think they are deserving of a punishment - They devalued the unpleasantness

Informed Consent-

Agreement to participate in an experiment, granted in full awareness of the nature of the experiment, which has been explained in advance - However, in some cases, it is not possible to get Informed Consent - Ex) Latane and Darley experiment - In this kind of experiment, it is important that the participant experience events as if they were real (deception experiment)

Which of the following is true?

All human beings have the same cognitive "tools" that they can use

How do social psychologists formulate hypotheses and theories?

All of the above (They construct hypothesis and theories based on personal observations in everyday life, They disagree with a previous researchers' interpretations of his or her study, They are inspired by previous theories and research)

Facilitated communication (another example ^^)

Allowed communication impaired people to express themselves - A trained facilitator held the fingers and arm of a communication-impaired client at a computer keyboard to make it easier for the client to type answers to questions - Soon discredited -> the facilitator was actually doing the typing - But, the facilitators were not deliberately faking it; they genuinely believed that it was the communication-impaired person who was choosing what to type and that they were simply helping them move their fingers on the keyboard Shows how there can be a disconnect between our conscious sense of how much we are causing our own actions and how much we really our causing them

Which of the following is most true about cultural differences in social thinking?

Although everyone uses schemas to understand the world, the content of those schemas is influenced by the culture in which they live

Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974)

An attractive young women asked men at a park if they would fill out a survey for her - When they were done, she told them she would call them to explain it more - They had the women approach the men in two different situations - 1) The men were walking across a 450-foot-long suspension bridge that spanned a deep canyon - 2) The woman waited until men had crossed the bridge and rested for a while on a bench in the park before approaching them - A large proportion of the men approached on the bridge telephoned the woman later to ask her for a date + relatively few of the men approached on the bench telephoned the woman

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy-

An expectation of one's own or another person's behavior that comes true because of the tendency of the person holding it to act in ways that bring it about - AKA People have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true

Cultural Influences on the Self-Concept

An important influence on our self-concepts is the culture in which we grew up - In many Western cultures, people have an Independent View of the Self - Many Asian and non-western cultures have an Interdependent View of the Self

Where do Analytic vs Holistic Thinking styles comes from?

Analytic vs Holistic differences come from the different philosophical traditions of the East versus West - Eastern thought has been shaped by the ideas of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, which emphasize the connectedness and relativity of all things - Western thought is rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition of Aristotle and Plato, which focuses on the laws governing objects, independent of their context Recent research also suggests that the differences b/w Analytic vs Holistic differences may come from differences in the environments

Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich (1995)

Analyzed videotapes of the 1992 Olympics - Silver medal winners appeared less happy than bronze medal winners - Silver medal winners engaged in more counterfactual thinking (because if they did something different, they could have won gold)

Two-Step Process-

Analyzing another person's behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution - We often don't make enough of an adjustment in this second step - Indeed, when we are distracted or preoccupied, we often skip the second step altogether - This is true because the first step happens quickly when the second step takes a lot of effort - We engage in the second step if we are cognitively alert and motivated to make as accurate a judgment as possible OR if we are suspicious about the behavior of the target person - Also, this two-step model of attribution may be less applicable to individuals in cultures in which internal attributions are not a default response

There are other channels of nonverbal communication besides facial expressions ->

And these nonverbal cues are STRONGLY shaped by the culture - Ex) Eye contact/Eye gaze - In American culture, people often become suspicious when a person doesn't "look them in the eye" while speaking - But in other parts of the world, direct eye gaze is considered invasive or disrespectful - Ex) Personal Space - Americans like to have a bubble of open space, a few feet in radius, surrounding them - Some other cultures it is normal for strangers to stand right next to each other, to the point of touching (someone who did not stand close would be odd + suspicious) - Ex) Gestures of the hands and arms - Americans are very adept at understanding certain gestures ("Ok" and the middle finger)

The six major emotional expressions=

Anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness

Fritz Heider-

Another early founder of social psychology - "Generally, a person reacts to what he thinks the other person is perceiving, feeling, and thinking, in addition to what the other person may be doing." - Our guesses are often wrong - This is why construal is so important (in court, many a jury does not actually care about the actual evidence, but if a key witness seemed to be too arrogant)

Judging Why We Feel the Way We Do: Telling More Than We Can Know

Another function of introspection is trying to figure out why we feel the way we do - The problem is that knowing why is not so easy - Many of our basic mental processes occur outside of awareness - We are usually aware of the final result of our thought processes (e.g., that we are in love) but often unaware of the cognitive processing that led to the result - SO, Introspection may not lead us to the true causes of our feelings and behavior, but we'll manage to convince ourselves that it did

The correlational method is best at answering which of these questions?

Are people from the Southern United States more polite in public places than people from the Northern United States?

Construct Validity

Are they talking about what they say they are? - Measurements - Manipulations How well is it operationalized?

Statistical Validity

Are your claims supported by your analysis? Was the analysis done correctly?

Personality Psychologists:

Ask and try to answer questions about people's behavior in terms of their traits - Generally focus on individual differences - Social psychologist think only studying people's traits ignore a critical part of the story: social influence

Edward Jones and Victor Harris (1967)

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 - In another condition, however, the students learned that the author had been assigned the position as a participant in a debate - Yet the participants in this study, and in dozens of others like it, assumed that the author really believed what he wrote, even when they knew he had no choice as to which position to take In summary, people often tend to underestimate external influences when explaining other people's behavior even when the influence of the situation on behavior is obvious

Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan (2007)

Asked participants to make sentences out of the words-> felt, she, eradicate, spirit, and the - Next, (they thought this was apart of another game), they were given 10 one coins and asked to divide them between themselves and the next participant - The next participant would not know who split the coins a certain way - In conclusion, their action depended on how they were primed - If people had words to deal with God (divine, spirit) -> they acted more kindly (gave on average 4.56 to the next participant) - People in the control group got neutral words + (gave 2.56 on average to the next participant) - In a third condition, the words were nonreligious but instead they had to do with fairness (civic and contract) (gave on average 4.44 to the next participant)

Joan Miller (1984)

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 toward situational explanations for their friends' behaviors - Then took some of the behaviors generated by the Indian participants and gave them to Americans to explain - Americans still found internal, dispositional causes for the behaviors that the Indians had thought were caused by the situation Miller also analyzed the attributions of 8, 11, and 15-year-olds - United States and India were more or less indistinguishable in terms of how they explained their friends' behaviors - AKA cross-cultural differences in social perception do not appear to be in-born; rather we arrive in this world with a flexibility of thinking style that is molded over time by cultural

In addition to affect blends, what else can make decoding difficult?

Aspects of the same facial expression can have different implications based on context and other cues - Ex) Studies indicate that decoding of facial displays varies depending on eye gaze - Anger is decoded quickest when the face is staring right @ you - But for avoidance, decoding is easiest when a face displays a averted glaze

Descriptive Methods

Attempts to measure or record behaviors, thoughts, or feelings in their natural state - Answers, "What is Going On??" - Where we start if we have no prior knowledge

What are the four core processes of social cognition

Attention, interpretation, judgment, and memory

Reasons-Generated Attitude Change-

Attitude change resulting from thinking about the reasons for one's attitudes; people assume that their attitudes match the reasons that are plausible and easy to verbalize - This happens because.... - A) Bring to mind reasons that don't really reflect how they feel - B) Talk themselves into believing that this is how they feel

Which of the following is the best summary of research on automatic thinking?

Automatic thinking is vital to human survival, but it is not perfect and can produce mistaken judgments that have important consequences

What is a huge flaw of Social Psychology?

Because social psychology is a young science that developed in the USA, many of its findings have not been tested in other cultures to see if they are universal

Why is reality TV popular?

Because we enjoy trying to figure people out - Even more traditional forms of TV have become grittier + drive by more complex characters

Facial Expressions have a long history of research...

Beginning with Charles Darwin's book, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872)

How to avoid a negative self-fulfilling prophecy?

Being told "make sure you make the impression you want to make" instead of being told to "go with the flow" "Make the impression you want to make..." is helpful because people usually lose sight once they get into a situation

Social Neuroscience Evidence

Beyond eye movements, other researchers have explored how differences in cultural thinking styles predict how the brain responds to social stimuli

Social Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the connection between...

Biological processes and social behavior - Include the study of hormones and behavior, the human immune system, and neurological processes in the human brain

Dalbert, 1997

By avoiding self-focused rumination

What is the third variable that makes decoding hard?

CULTURE

Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson

Call this phenomena ^^ "telling more than we can know"

Nisbett and Ross (1980)

Collectivists vs individualistic cultures (seeing an ocean vs seeing just fish)

Wilson and Kraft (1993)

College students involved in relationships wrote down why things were going the way they were with their dating partner - This caused them to change their minds about how their relationship was going - If they wrote down positive reasons, they became more positive (and vice versa) Over time, though, the effects of analyzing reasons tends to wear off, and people's original "hard to explain" attitudes return - Thus, if people make important decisions right after analyzing reasons they might make a decision they later regret - Because right after analyzing reasons, people tend to focus on the things that are easy to put into words (e.g., those acid-wash jeans) and ignore feelings that are hard to explain (chemistry)

Gordon Gallup (1997)

Compared the behavior of chimpanzees raised in normal family groupings with that of chimps who were raised alone in complete social isolation - The socially experienced chimps "passed" the mirror test - The socially isolated chimps did not react to their reflections at all

Upward Social Comparison-

Comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability - This can make us feel inferior

Downward Social Comparison-

Comparing ourselves to people who are worse than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability - Another way to make ourselves feel better is to compare our current performance with our own past performance - People use downward social comparison here, too (though the point of comparison is a "past self," not someone else)

Stanley Schachter + Jerome Singer (1962)

Conducted an experiment... The researchers set up a situation in which the two crucial variables—arousal and an emotional explanation for that arousal—would be present or absent, and then they observed which, if any, emotions people experienced - Some participants received epinephrine, a hormone produced naturally by the human body that causes arousal (the experimenter didn't tell you the shot contained epinephrine, so you don't realize that the injection is making you feel this way) - The other half received a placebo that had no physiological effects - The participants who had been given epinephrine reacted much more angrily than did participants who had been given the placebo

Sam Gosling

Conducted research on "what your stuff says about you" that is presented in his book "Snoop" - Ex) An individual whose office or car does not have much decoration in the form of personal objects or photos - This could mean... the person wants to establish a clear separation between their private self and their work/public self OR that they are low on the personality trait of extraversion

People are likely to make an external attribution when...

Consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency are all high

The University and The Cooperation

Corporations are hiring more and more psychology phDs or working with university research groups - Instagram, SnapChat, Pet food companies, and genetic sampling companies

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968)

Demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy in an elementary school - They administered a test to all the students in the school and told the teachers that some of the students had scored so well that they were sure to "bloom" academically in the upcoming year - But the "bloomers" were actually just random students - At the end of the year, they gave all the students an IQ test - The students in each class who had been labeled as bloomers showed significantly greater gains in their IQ scores than the other students did (AKA the teacher's expectations became a reality) they did treat the "bloomers" differently in four critical ways...

Lee Ross's Board Game Experiment ->

Described the game to resident assistants in a student dorm and asked them to come up with a list of undergrads whom they thought were either especially cooperative or especially competitive - The one twist is what Ross told the participants the game was called - Either Wall Street Game or Community Game - The name of the game made a huge difference in how people behaved/played the game - When called Wall Street Game -> 2/3s were competitive - When called Community Game -> only ⅓ were competitive - A student's alleged personality trait made no measurable difference in the student's behavior

Ted Singelis (1994)

Developed a questionnaire that measures the extent to which people view themselves as interdependent or independent - People who live in East Asian countries agree more with the interdependence items, whereas those who live in Western countries agree more with the independence items - We do not mean to imply, however, that every member of a Western culture has an independent view of the self and that every member of an Asian culture has an interdependent view of the self - Ex) In the USA, people who live in states that were settled more recently by European Americans (Oklahoma and Utah) tend to have more of an independent view of the self than do people who live in more "settled" East Coast states (MA and CT) - One sign of this -> babies born in recently settled states have more unique names (one sign of an independent self-construal)

Jennifer and Nate are walking along the street when they see a man walk out of a convenience store clutching a bag. The owner of the store runs out and shouts for the man to stop and come back. Jennifer immediately assumes that there has been a robbery, whereas Nate immediately assumes that the man forgot to get his change and that the store owner wants to give it to him. What is the best explanation for why Jennifer and Nate interpreted this event differently?

Different schemas were accessible in Jennifer and Nate's minds, perhaps because they had different recent experiences that primed different schemas

The experimental method is best at answering which of these questions?

Does playing violent video games cause people to be more rude to someone who cuts in line in front of them?

External Validity

Does this study generalize to the target population? Who is the target population? - Often overlooked EV is often exchanged for IV

Other researchers have used event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity among individuals from different cultures

ERPs provide a more fine-grained analysis of the onset and offset of neural firing by measuring electrical activity through sensors placed on the scalp - Researchers presented participants with a series of simple perceptual tasks that involved visual information about "targets" and context - Their participants were all Americans who had grown up in American culture but were of two different ethnic backgrounds: European American or East Asian American - European American participants paid more attention to the targets, while the East Asian American participants paid more attention to the context surrounding the targets

EEG

Electricity of the brain measured

EEG-

Electrodes are placed on the scalp to measure electrical activity in the brain

Illustrators

Emphasize or reinforce a verbal word

Richard Nisbett

Examined how different kinds of graduate training influenced people's reasoning on everyday problems involving statistical and methodological reasoning - After 2 years of graduate work, students in psychology and medicine improved on the statistical reasoning problems more than students in law and chemistry did (Psych and medicine include more training in stats than the other two disciplines)

Field Experiments-

Experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the laboratory - One of the best ways to increase EV - They still control the IV to see its effect on the DV and use a randomly selected sample - The participants in a field experiment are unaware that they are apart of a study - Ex) Latane and Darley tested their hypothesis outside a store in NYC - The reason that not more field experiments are conducted is because it is very difficult to satisfy all the conditions outside the lab - There is almost a trade off between Internal Validity and External Validity (This trade off is known as The Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist)

Debriefing-

Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired - Several investigators have gone a step farther and assessed the impact on people of participating in deception studies - These studies have found that people do not mind mild discomfort or deception - Sometimes they even enjoy these experiments more because they learn and they have fun (compared to non-deceptive experiments)

Self-Serving Attributions-

Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors - This phenomena is seen in sports - 80% of the attributions for wins were to such internal factors - Losses were more likely to be attributed to external causes

Jessica Tracy

Explored pride and its opposite, 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 However, shame, expressed by slumped shoulders and a sunken chest, was significantly associated with losing for all the athletes except one group... - Sighted athletes from highly individualistic cultures such as those of the United States and Western Europe (In individualistic cultures, shame tends to be hidden)

Cross-Cultural Research

Extremely valuable, because it sharpens theories, by demonstrating their universality or by leading us to discover additional variables that help us improve our understanding and prediction of human behavior

Affect Blends-

Facial expressions in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

Strelan, 2007

Forgiving

They found two things ->

Found than people's emotions are somewhat arbitrary, depending on what the most plausible explanation for their arousal happens to be (showed this in two ways...) A) They could prevent people from becoming angry by providing a nonemotional explanation for why they felt aroused - When the drug started to make people feel aroused, they inferred that it was not because they were angry but because the drug was taking effect B) They also could make participants experience a very different emotion by changing the most plausible explanation for their arousal - Participants received the epinephrine but did not get the insulting questionnaire, and the accomplice did not respond angrily

Tim Wilson

Found that analyzing the reasons for our feelings is not always the best strategy and in fact can make matters worse (AKA making a pros and cons list maybe is not the best idea) - It is hard to know exactly why we feel the way we do about something, especially in an area as complicated as romantic relationships - Some of the very same things you have on the pro side of your list, for example, also might appear on the con side - Some things are easier to put into words than others The problem lies in the fact that we often convince ourselves that the reasons we generate reflect how we actually feel, even if they just happen to occur to us at the moment

Kahnmen and Tversky (1973)

Found that 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 (e.g., Californians= tan, blonde, fit, etc.) - This can get us in trouble when the information is flimsy - All in all, people focus too much on individual characteristics and not enough on base-rate information

East Asian cultures such as those in China, Japan, and Korea tend to stress ____

Group autonomy - The individual is more likely to derive his or her sense of self from the social group - Intellectual history of this belief derives from the Confucian tradition, as well as from Taoism and Buddhism

Suppose a researcher found a strong positive correlation between the number of tweets people send each day and their reported happiness. Which of the following is the best conclusion he or she can draw from this finding?

Happy people are more likely to send a lot of tweets than sad people

The self as we know it...

Has only emerged a few hundred years ago - We use to think of the self as all of us (we use to never write in the first person)

The American Psychological Association (2010)

Has published a list of ethical principles that govern all research in psychology - In addition, any institution (university) that seeks federal funding for research is required to have an Institutional Review Board (IRB)

In general, schemas...

Help keep us calm, they are not universal, and they evolve

According to research in social psychology, why do many people believe that their horoscopes are accurate descriptions of who they are and what is likely to happen to them?

Horoscopes are written in a vague way so that most people view them as representative of their personalities and past behaviors

Accelerometer

How our phones know how fast we are going

Gyroscope

How our phones know which way they are tilted

Magnetometer

How our phones knows in what cardinal direction we are going

Social Cognition-

How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions - But, that is not to say that humans are perfect social thinkers

Social Cognition-

How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions - Researchers who investigate processes of social cognition begin with the assumption that all people try to view the world as accurately as possible - Unfortunately, we often make mistakes in that effort to understand and predict, because we almost never know all the facts we need to judge a given situation accurately - It is usually impossible to gather all the relevant information in advance. Moreover, we make countless decisions every day - SO we usually rely on a series of expectations and other mental short-cuts in making judgments about the world around us (these shortcuts are not always accurate -- actually they usually are not accurate)

The observational method is best at answering which of these questions?

How polite are people in public places?

Interpretation

How we give meaning to situations - Schemas are one way to give meaning - The dentist vs. Prof. Ewell's dentist

Researchers used a variation of the red-dye test with toddlers + found that ->

Human self-recognition develops b/w 18 and 24 months - Then, as we grow older, this sense of self develops into Self-Concept

Which of the following is true about Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)?

IRBs review psychological studies before they are conducted to make sure they meet ethical guidelines

The self-concept is shaped by people around us

If we never interacted with other people, our own image would be a blur because we would not see ourselves as having selves distinct from those of others - The red dye + mirror test was used to prove that social interaction is essential to form a self-concept

Suppose a researcher found a strong negative correlation between college students' grade point average (GPA) and the amount of alcohol they drink. Which of the following is the best conclusion from this study?

If you know how much alcohol a student drinks, you can predict his or her GPA fairly well

Adrian Furnham (1993)

In a society where most people tend to believe the world is a just place, economic and social inequities are considered "fair" - Ex) People believe that the poor and disadvantaged have less because they deserve less - In cultures with extremes of wealth and poverty, just-world attributions are more common than in cultures where wealth is more evenly distributed - Participants in India and South Africa received higher scores on the just-world belief scale than participants in the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, and Zimbabwe, who had scores in the middle of the scale

In everyday life, one might argue, people usually know why they are aroused BUT

In many everyday situations, however, there is more than one plausible cause for our arousal, and it is difficult to identify how much of the arousal is due to one source or another - So, we sometimes misidentify our emotions

Dana Carney

In one study, participants were asked to assume a series of nonverbal body postures for two minutes - In one condition, these were 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 - They even experienced a surge in testosterone

Shadow Priming Experiment (Mackay 1973)

In the attended ear they heard, "They threw stones at the bank today" In the unattended ear they heard the word money or river If they heard river in the unattended ear then they were more likely to think the sentence in the attended ear said "they threw stones into the river today" (and VV)

However, studies have also found that...

Individuals from Western cultures maintain more rigid boundaries between the six major emotions when applying them to faces, whereas Asian respondents show overlap in their use of these categories - Also, other studies has supported universality when asking participants from across cultures to match emotional labels to faces, but found evidence of cross-cultural differences when allowing people to freely sort faces into their own grouping system

Distinctiveness Information-

Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli (Does the boss yell at other people besides Hannah?)

Consensus Information-

Information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does (Do other people yell at the employee, Hannah?)

Consistency Information-

Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

Base-Rate Information-

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Ying-Yi Hong

Investigated the fundamental attribution error among Hong Kong Chinese college students (These students were bicultural—deriving their identity not only from their Hong Kong Chinese culture, but also from Western culture) - First shown a series of images and asked brief questions about them - Was meant to activate, or prime, one aspect of their bicultural identity (Half the participants saw images representing American culture and the other half saw Chinese images) - Participants in the control condition saw geometric figures - Next, in a supposedly unrelated task, participants were shown a photograph of a fish swimming in front of a school of other fish - They were asked why this fish was not swimming with the other fish - 30% of the control group made situational attributions about the central fish - However, participants primed with thoughts of one culture or the other showed markedly different patterns - Thus, it appears that Western cultures prompt people to think more like personality psychologists, viewing behavior in dispositional terms - Eastern cultures seem to prompt people to think more like social psychologists, considering the situational causes of behavior

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson-

Investigated the phenomenon called the self-fulfilling prophecy - The mere fact that the teachers were led to expect certain students to do well (because of their SAT scores) caused an improvement in their performance

Naturalistic Observation

Involves observing behavior as it unfolds in a natural setting Adv... - Behaviors are spontaneous - Does not rely on self-reports Disadv... - The researcher may interfere with the ongoing behavior - Some interesting behaviors are very rare - Observer Bias- Researchers may attend to certain events and ignore others - Time consuming

Social Psychology-

Is the scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people: parents, friends, employers, teachers, strangers, etc.

Self-Esteem-

Is the way in which we try to maintain positive views of ourselves

Self-Control-

Is the way we make plans and execute decisions

Impression Management-

Is the way we present ourselves to other people and get them to see us the way we want to be seen

Self-Knowledge-

Is the way we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information

Are we the only species that has "self"??

It is doubtful that other species can think of themselves as unique beings - Though, some studies do show that other beings have at least a basic understanding of self

Which of the following is the best example of a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Jill thinks her daughter is not a very good reader and doesn't spend much time reading to her. As a result her daughter falls behind in reading at school

What are the two major types of experimental methods...

Lab experiments and Field experiments

Pennebaker and Boyd, 2015

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - Keep track of various types of words (affective words and pronoun usage) - Can analyze writing styles - Attempt to predict future behavior - Analyzing how certain types of language can predict behavior

Toma & Hancock (2012)

Linguistic deception in in online dating - Had participants print out their online dating profiles and bring them to the lab - Research assistants measured height, weight, and age (from their ID) and took their photo - People that were deceptive showed similar LIWC - Used fewer overall words, used fewer personal pronouns, used more negations, and used fewer negative emotion words Using the LIWC they concluded that Shakespeare did indeed write the first half of the play where this man name Fletcher wrote the second half

Regulators

Maintain/modulate conversations (cue people in that you are listening) - Ex) Head nods - Cultural based

Darwin's research on facial expressions ->

Major impact on the field in many areas - He had a belief that the primary emotions conveyed by the face are universal - All humans Encode in the same way - All humans can Decode with high accuracy - AKA he thought that nonverbal forms of communication were species-specific and not culture-specific - He proposed that facial expressions were vestiges of once-useful physiological reactions - Ex) If early hominids ate something that tasted terrible, they would have wrinkled their noses in displeasure and expelled the food from their mouths

The covariation model assumes that we...

Make causal attributions in logic, rational ways - Research has confirmed that people often do make attributions this way, but with two exceptions 1) Studies have shown that people don't use consensus information as much as Kelley's theory predicted - They rely more on consistency and distinctiveness when forming attributions 2) People don't always have the relevant information they need on all three of Kelley's dimensions - So, people proceed with the attribution process by using the information they do have + making guesses about the missing data Also, people are not always logical/rational - Sometimes they distort information to satisfy their need for high self-esteem - At other times they use mental shortcuts that, although often helpful, can lead to inaccurate judgments AND the attributions we make are sometimes just plain wrong

Internal Validity-

Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions - Keeping everything but the independent variable the same in an experiment

Donnerstein and Berkowitz-

Males were angered by a female accomplice and then were randomly assigned to see one of three films: violent pornography (a rape scene), nonviolent pornography (sex without any violence), or a neutral film with no violence or sex (a talk show interview). The men were then given an opportunity to act aggressively toward the woman who had angered them, by choosing the level of electric shock she would receive in an ostensibly unrelated learning experiment (the accomplice did not really receive shocks, but participants believed that she would). The men who had seen the violent pornography administered significantly more-intense shocks to the woman than did the men who had seen the nonviolent pornography or the neutral film, suggesting that it is not pornography per se that leads to aggressive behavior, but the violence depicted in some pornography

Neuro Revolution

Many fields are being invaded by neuroscience - For instance, social psychology - Neuro. can use brain imaging to explain social behaviors

A fundamental principle of social psychology=

Many social problems can be studied scientifically - The results of some of the experiments you encounter will seem obvious - This is true because it concerns topics we are familiar with -> social behavior and social influence - This is what sets Social Psychology apart from other sciences - BUT often times things seem obvious in retrospect (does not mean they are obvious, though)

fMRI

Measure blood flow in the brain

Social Network Model

Measure how connected a group of people are (red dots are people and blue lines are connections) - Does being central in the social network have adv.?

Knowing Ourselves by Comparing Ourselves to Others

Measure our own abilities and attitudes by seeing how we stack up against other people

Judgmental Heuristics-

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently - We use this technique when there are too many schemas that could apply and it is not clear which one to use + then sometimes we do not have a schema that could apply - Sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job at hand or are misapplied, leading to faulty judgments - But most of the time, they are highly functional and serve us well

Schemas-

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember - A "schema" encompasses our knowledge about many things (other people, ourselves, social roles, specific events, etc.) - In each case, our "schema" contains our basic knowledge + impressions - Schemas are very useful to fill in the gaps of our knowledge - Particularly useful when we are in confusing events, because they help us figure out what is going on - However, sometimes what we see is not ambiguous at all (and thus, we do not need to use schemas)

Counterfactual Thinking-

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been ("If only I had answered that question correctly") - These types of thoughts can heavily influence our emotional reactions to events - The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional response to it - Sometimes the emotional consequences of counterfactual reasoning are paradoxical - Counterfactual thinking is conscious and effortful (we know we are talking about the past), but it is not always intentional or voluntary - It can be hard to turn off the "if only" thinking - Rumination has been found to be a contributor to depression - Counterfactual thinking can be useful if it focuses people's attention on ways they can cope better in the future

Deception-

Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire - When deception is used, the postexperimental interview (debriefing session) is crucial

The way to resolve this dilemma is...

Most social psychologists opt first for internal validity, conducting laboratory experiments in which people are randomly assigned to different conditions and all extraneous variables are controlled; here there is little ambiguity about what is causing what. Other social psychologists prefer to maximize external validity by conducting field studies. And many social psychologists do both

Emblems-

Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations, such as the OK sign - Each culture has designed its own emblems

Joshua Susskind

Offers support for Darwin's view - Found that the muscle movements of disgust and fear = completely different - Found that the "fear face" enhances perception while the "disgust face" decreases it - For fear -> facial and eye muscle movements increase sensory input, such as widening the visual field, increasing the volume of air in the nose, and speeding up eye movements - For disgust -> Eyes narrow and less air is breathed in It seems the Darwin was right about facial expressions being universal

Another important question about controlled thinking is when do people do it?

One circumstance is when we experience a negative event called a "close call" - Under these conditions we engage in Counterfactual Thinking

Their is a debate about the different types and which is more important and blah blah blah

One focus of this debate is on the age-old question of free will (Do we really have control of our actions) - Although it certainly seems like our ability to choose what we do demonstrates the existence of free will -> there can be an illusion of free will - A third variable (unconscious intent) may have caused both the conscious thought and behavior - Ex) As you were watching television, the desire for ice cream arose unconsciously first (perhaps primed by something you saw in a commercial) - Led to the conscious thought that you wanted ice cream + your decision to go to the freezer - Ex2) Sometimes, people find themselves going to the fridge without having the conscious thought that it was time for a snack (AKA their unconscious desire triggered the action without any intervening conscious thought) - Ex3) Sports fans feel like they are helping their favorite hockey team by wearing a lucky hat - AKA people sometimes believe that they are exerting more control over events than they really are - And it can also work the other way (People can actually be controlling things more than they realize)

There are two kinds of Social Cognition...

One kind of thought is quick and automatic - EX) Jamming on our brakes really fast or first impressions - This is called Automatic Thinking - Other times, people think carefully about the right decision - This is called Controlled Thinking - Quite often automatic and controlled modes work together - Humans have "automatic pilots" that monitor their environments, draw conclusions, and direct their behaviors - But, we can also override this automatic type of thinking and analyze a situation slowly and deliberately

What exactly is a social situation, though??

One strategy for defining it would be to specify the objective properties of the situation, such is how rewarding it is to people, and then document the behaviors that follow - This approach is taken by Behaviorism

Scripts-

Order of events esp. for routine occurrences

Mobile Sensing

Our phones can measure our movement

We are moe likely to use the fundamental attribution error on...

Outgroup members

Tamir and Mitchell, 2012

Participants self-disclosed vs read the opinion of others - People were willing to pay money to talk about themselves instead of get money to listen to others opinions

According to this chapter, which is the best analogy to describe people's thinking abilities?

People are flawed scientists

fMRI-

People are placed in scanners that measure changes in blood flow in their brains - Social Psychologists take these measurements when people think about and process social information - This, obv., allows them to correlate different kinds of brain activity with social information processing

"Barnum Effect"

People believe that this personality description describes them so well because... - The statements are vague enough that virtually everyone can find a past behavior that is similar to (representative of) the feedback (Representativeness Heuristic)

OFC people do not just rely on causal theories

People have a great deal of information about themselves, such as how they have responded in the past and what they happen to have been thinking about before making a choice

Cultural Differences in the Fundamental Attribution Error

People in individualist cultures do prefer dispositional attributions about others, relative to people in collectivist cultures, who prefer situational attributions

Which of the following is true of the holistic thinking style?

People living in the West can think holistically if they are primed with pictures taken in Japan

Social cognition by no means is perfect

People make mistakes in reasoning, even to the point of unintentionally acting in ways to make their faulty theories come true (the self-fulfilling prophecy) - Whereas people are very sophisticated social thinkers who have amazing cognitive abilities, there is also plenty of room for improvement - People are like "flawed scientists" -> brilliant thinkers who are attempting to discover the nature of the social world in a logical manner but who do so imperfectly

Research begins with a hunch (AKA a "Hypothesis")

People often generate hypotheses from previous theories and research (science is a cumulative process) - Many studies stem from a researcher's dissatisfaction with existing theories and explanations - Ex) in 1950, Leon Festinger was dissatisfied with behaviorism to explain why people change their attitudes (Cognitive Dissonance Theory) - Other scientists were dissatisfied with Festinger's explanation, so they conducted further research to test other possible explanations

Which of the following is the best summary of research on automatic goal pursuit?

People often pursue goals that have been recently primed, without realizing that that is why they are pursuing the goal

Pronin and Kugler (2010)

People tend to believe that they have more free will than others - Asked Princeton undergraduates to predict what would happen the year after they graduate, either to them or a friend of choosing - They selected "both are possible" 52% of the time, whereas when they answered the questions about a friend, they selected "both are possible" only 36% of the time (AKA the students seemed to think their friends' actions were more predetermined)

Richard Nisbett

People who grow up in Western cultures tend to have Analytic Thinking Style AND People who grow up in East Asian cultures (China, Japan, or Korea) tend to have Holistic Thinking Style These differences in thinking styles also influence how we perceive emotions in other people - Ex) If you ran into your friend (Gina) and her friend group. In order to tell Gina's emotions... - A Western would look at Gina's face (the object of your attention) - An Easterner would scan everyone person's face

Higgins (1977)-

People who had first memorized the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent later formed positive impressions of Donald, viewing him as a likable man who enjoyed new challenges. People who had first memorized reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn later formed negative impressions of Donald - But it was not just memorizing any positive or negative words that influenced people's impressions of Donald - In other conditions, research participants memorized words that were also positive or negative, such as neat or disrespectful. However, these traits didn't influence their impressions of Donald because the words did not apply to Donald's behavior - Thoughts, then, have to be both accessible and applicable before they will act as primes

Korsakov's Syndrome

People who suffer from this disorder encounter every event/person as a new, terrifying situation (form new memories and must approach every situation as if they were encountering it for the first time, even if they have actually experienced it many times before)

Self-Esteem-

People's evaluations of their own self-worth—that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent - Self-esteem is obviously a beneficial thing, but when it causes people to justify their actions rather than learn from them, it can impede change and self-improvement

Affective Forecasts-

People's predictions about how they will feel in response to a future emotional event - Trusting other people's reactions (in this case of the dating app situation, your friend's opinion) can be a wise approach

Suffering (Hazing) and justification from the different perspectives...

Personality Psychologists -> Suggest that only extroverts who have a high tolerance for embarrassment would want to be in a fraternity Behavioral Psychologists -> Predict that Oscar would dislike anyone or anything that caused him pain and humiliation Social Psychologists -> Found that the major reason that Oscar and his fellow pledges like their fraternity brothers so much was the degrading hazing ritual itself - If someone goes through a severe hazing to become a member of the fraternity but later discovers unpleasant things about his fraternity brothers, he will feel like a fool - To avoid feeling like a fool, he will try to justify his decision to undergo the hazing by distorting his evaluation of his fraternity brothers

Most people will explain others behavior in terms of ____

Personality! - The fact that they fail to take the situation into account has a profound impact on how they relate to others

____ has been a major source of insight about human nature

Philosophy! - We are entering the world of the nature of consciousness and how people form beliefs about the social world - Psychologists address many of the same questions as philosophers, but psychologists look at these questions scientifically

They studied whether animals have "Self-concept" ->

Placed a mirror in an animal's cage until the mirror became a familiar object - An odorless red dye was painted on its brow or ear - When they looked in the mirror -> Members of the great ape family, such as chimpanzees and orangutans, immediately touched the area of their heads marked with the red spot, whereas lesser apes, such as gibbons, did not - AKA apes realize that the imagine in the mirror is themselves - Other animals have passed the "Mirror-Test" including two dolphins, one Asian elephant, and two magpies - But no other nonhuman species regularly passes the test other than great apes

Lipkus, 1993

Playing down the unfairness

Psychologists are not the only ones to recognize the importance of nonverbal communication

Political debates and press conferences are followed by people who analyze what was said (and how it was said) - Some of these analyses are more informed than others - The best ones draw on an extensive scientific literature concerning nonverbal communication - Interestingly, though, nonverbal forms of communication have typically been studied individually, in their separate "channels" (ex: some study eye gazes) - But in everyday life, nonverbal cues of many kinds occur all at the same time in a quite dazzling orchestration of simultaneous information

There is no doubt that rewards are powerful

Positive reinforcement, says that giving a reward each time a behavior occurs will increase the frequency of that behavior - BUT the danger of reward programs is that kids may infer that they are reading to earn something, not because they find reading to be an enjoyable activity in its own right - When the reward programs end, children may actually read less than they did before (Overjustification Effect) - This is especially likely to happen to children who already liked to read (ALSO obv. Reading is just an example)

What are some cons of the "Experimental Method", tho??

Practical and ethical difficulties

G. Daniel Lassiter

Presented 21 courtroom judges and 24 police officers with a videotape of an individual confessing to a crime - These judge and police participants were shown one of three different versions of the videotape: 1) the camera's focus was on the suspect only, 2) the camera's focus was on the detective only, or 3) 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" - The videotape that focused only on the suspect produced significantly higher ratings of "voluntariness" than the other two videotape versions New Zealand, has adopted a rule of "equal focus" camera perspective (suspect + detective) for videotaped interrogations

Takahiko Masuda

Presented research participants in the United States and Japan with cartoon drawings of people in groups - One person in each cartoon was the central figure (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 participants' task was to judge the central person's emotion on a 10-point scale - The facial expressions of the other group members' faces had little effect on Americans' ratings of the central figure - The facial expressions of the other group members had a significant effect on Japanese participants' ratings of the central figure The researchers also measured the eye-tracking movements of the participants as they looked at the cartoons - The Japanese spent more time looking at the cartoon characters in the background than did the Americans - Thought, both groups began by looking at the central character

What effects accessibility of a schema?

Priming and past experiences - Warm vs cold drinks - Elderly words -> ppl waking slower - Rude words -> people were more likely to cut off the experimenter Culture

Stanley Schachter (1946)

Proposed a theory of emotion that says we infer what our emotions are in the same way we infer what kind of person we are or what we like - We observe our behavior and then explain to ourselves why we are behaving that way - We observe our internal behaviors—how physiologically aroused we feel - aka Two-Factor Theory of Emotion-

One purpose of controlled thinking=

Provide checks and balances for automatic thinking - Often we have greater confidence in our judgments than we should

Which of the following is one of the ethical principles of the American Psychological Association?

Psychologists respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination

Using First Impressions and Nonverbal Communication to Our Advantage

Public Speaking -> Make sure the opening moments of your presentation are your most polished, for a job interview Job Interview ->How you dress, whether you maintain eye contact, your body posture—these are immediately apparent factors that may shape how others evaluate the rest of your visit - Even the slightest introductory act (how you shake hands) can have a dramatic effect You can also capitalize on the importance of nonverbal communication by using your own body language to change how you think, feel, and act

PET

Radioactive material placed in the body is tracked

Solomon Asch

Ran a study where he described hypothetical individuals with the same descriptors + he found that order of the descriptors made a big difference - Participants formed a more positive impression of someone described as intelligent-industrious-impulsive-critical-stubborn-envious, compared to someone described as envious-stubborn-critical-impulsive-industrious-intelligent - Because first impressions are powerful - Positive traits mentioned first create a filter (a schema) through which subsequent traits are viewed

EAR-

Records you whenever you talk (social psychologists what to know the frequency of your conversations)

Replications-

Repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings - Ultimate test of a study's External Validity

Cross-Cultural Research-

Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised - In these types of studies, researchers have to guard against imposing their own viewpoints and definitions. They also have to make sure the IV and DV variables are understood in the same way in different cultures - Ex) Cultures vary a lot in how they define whether or not another person belongs in their social group; this factor figures in how they behave towards that person - SO, you can't take one study, keep it the same, and move it to another country - Because, how the people in this new culture will act (help or not help the person in danger) will maybe be based upon if that person fits in their social group (and not about the other person's willingness to help) - Some basic psychological processes are universal, whereas others are shaped by the culture that a person lives in

Holistic vs. Analytic Thinking

Research has indicated that these differing cultural values predict the kind of information that people notice and pay attention to Values inherent in individualistic Western cultures cause people, as they grow up, to develop more of an analytic thinking style - Involves focusing on the properties of objects (or people) while paying much less attention, if any, to the context or situation that surrounds that object Values of collectivistic cultures, such as those of East Asia (e.g., China, Korea, and Japan) cause people to develop more of a holistic thinking style - People focus on the "whole picture"—that is the object (or person) and the context that surrounds that object, as well as the relationships that exist between them But of course, a great deal of variability exists within cultures as well

Surveys-

Research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes or behavior - Convenient ways to measure people's attitudes - Allow researchers to judge the relationship between variables that are difficult to observe - Also allow us to sample representative segments of the population - Answers to a survey are useful only if they reflect the responses of people in general—not just the people actually tested (called the sample) - Survey researchers go to great lengths to ensure that the people they test are typical - They select samples that are representative of the population on a number of characteristics important to a given research question (e.g., age, educational background, religion, gender, income level) - They also make sure to use Random Selection - Modern political polls are not immune from such sampling errors. Many polling companies only contact people on their home phones (landlines), because of the difficulty of obtaining directories of cell phone numbers. They do so at their peril, because research shows that Americans who rely solely on cell phones are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates

Currently, researchers are looking into what (related to this topic)

Researchers are investigating if there are other emotional states that are communicated with distinctive facial expressions - They are looking at contempt, anxiety, shame, determination, envy, and embarrassment Research has indicated that the emotion of pride exists cross-culturally - Pride is interesting because it involves a facial expression as well as body posture + gesture cues - Specifically pride looks like -> a small smile, the head tilted back slightly, a visibly expanded chest, and arms raised above the head or hands on the hips

In a study ->

Researchers asked a group of college women to look at a profile of a male student that included his photograph and information him + to predict how much they would enjoy a 5-minute speed date with him - Another group of college women weren't given any information about the male student, but they were told how much one other female student had enjoyed a 5-minute speed date with him - The women from both groups then had a speed date with the man and rated how much they enjoyed it - The second group of women made the better predictions - This is true because a small amount of information about what someone is like can be faulty (The man's profile probably didn't accurately capture what he was like in person) Moral = Even though other people's reactions to things are rarely perfectly aligned with ours -> knowing their reactions can be very useful

Content Analysis

Researchers can examine archives, public records, media content Adv... - Easy access to lots of data Disadv... - Many social behaviors are not recorded

Self-Awareness Paradigm

Researchers make participants self-aware and then observe them They can do this by using... Mirror Camera Monitor Bogus Pipeline

Hypotheses Based on Personal Observation

Researchers often observe something in their lives or the lives of others that they find curious and interesting, stimulating them to construct a theory about why this phenomenon occurred - Ex) Kitty Genovese case - Latane and Darley (1968)- Diffusion of Responsibility

Performance-Contingent Rewards-

Rewards that are based on how well we perform a task - This type of reward is less likely to decrease interest in a task—and may even increase interest—because the earned reward conveys the message that you are good at the task - Must be used with care, however, because they too can backfire - Can put pressure on people by making them feel evaluated, which makes it harder for them to do well and lowers their intrinsic interest in the activity

Task-Contingent Rewards-

Rewards that are given for performing a task, regardless of how well the task is done

When we first meet someone, we know what we can ____

SEE and HEAR - We also analyze nonverbal communication gestures -We form initial impressions of others based only on their facial expression in less than 100miliseconds/ 1/10 of a second - People as young as three years old have this capability Ex) "Baby faces" - Features that are reminiscent of those of small children tend to be perceived as having childlike traits as well (naive, warm, and submissive) Ex) Another example is after brief glances at photographs of men's and women's faces, research participants are able to judge sexual orientation at above chance levels of accuracy Ex) American participants rated the faces of Canadian political candidates on the dimensions of powerfulness and warmth - Their first-impression ratings correlated with actual election results - 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

Representativeness Heuristic is used by who??

Sales people! They use this to make themselves more like you (they try to connect with you via common grounds)

In addition to schemas, there are...

Scripts and prototypes

Self-awareness is only aversive WHEN

Self-awareness, then, is particularly aversive when it reminds people of their shortcomings

Suppose you have invited a new acquaintance over to your apartment and want to make a good impression; in other words, you want this person to like you. Which of the following should you do

Serve the person a warm drink and hope that he or she holds it in their hands while you are talking to him or her

^^ Their second study...

Showed the pictures of American or Japanese cities to a sample of American and Japanese college students - Asked to imagine they were in the scene (with the idea that the Japanese pictures would prime holistic thinking, whereas the American pictures would prime analytic thinking) - Then the students completed the same airplane picture task described above - The people who saw the photos of Japanese cities were more likely to detect changes in the background of the test pictures - People who saw the pictures of the American cities were more likely to detect changes in the main object of the pictures - Suggests that people in all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or analytically, but their environment triggers a reliance on one of the styles

Folk Wisdom:

Social Psychologists are not opposed to folk wisdom, but they just often conflict with each other ("birds of a feather flock together" and opposites attract) - Part of the job of social psychologists is to do the research that specifies the conditions under which one or another is most likely to take place

People are often unaware of the reasons behind their own responses (to questions) and their feelings. SO ->

Social Psychologists have devised an array of scientific methods to test people's assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human social behavior, empirically and systematically - However, doing experiments in Social Psychology presents many challenges because we are trying to predict the behavior of very complex people in complex situations - Our goal is to find objective answers

In recent years, some exciting new methods have been developed ->

Social Psychology begin largely as a Western science - Raises the Q about if the findings are universal - Now we have Cross-Cultural Research

What are people trying to accomplish when they interpret the social world?

Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives: the need to feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate - Sometimes these needs pull us in the same direction BUT usually they pull us in opposite directions

Culture and Other Attributional Bias

Social psychologists have examined the self-serving bias and found a strong cultural component to it as well

Which of the following is true about new frontiers in social psychological research?

Social psychologists use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to correlate different kinds of brain activity with social information processing

How does social psychology differ from personality psychology

Social psychology focuses on the shared processes that make people susceptible to social influence, whereas personality psychology focuses on individual differences.

What is Social Psychology's closest relatives?

Sociology and Personality Psychology - Social Psychology and Personality Psychology share an interest in the individual - Social Psychology and Sociology share an interest in the way the situation and the larger society influence behavior

Social psychology is related to other disciples in the social sciences including...

Sociology, economics, and political science - Each examines the influence of social factors on human behavior - But important differences set Social Psychology apart-> Its level of analysis (The individual in the context of a social situation) - Other social sciences are more concerned with social, economic, political, etc. factors that influence events - Sociology, instead of focusing on the individual, focuses on such topics such as social class, social structure, etc. - There is some overlap between sociology and social psychology, though - share an interest in the way the situation and the larger society influence behavior - The major difference is that in sociology the level of analysis is the group, institution, or society at large Social psychology differs from other social sciences not only in its level of analysis, but also in what is being explained - The goal of social psychology is to ID properties of human nature that make almost everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture

Our view of others (and if they have changed) depend on...

Some changes, such as physical declines, minor cognitive deficits, and new preferences, do not change people's basic view of who someone is - But if someone undergoes a moral change, we can barely recognize them! - AKA morality is viewed as central to the self-concept

Focusing on the Self: Self-Awareness Theory

Sometimes our thoughts naturally turn inward and we think about ourselves - Other times, introspection happens because of external circumstances (Ex- seeing ourselves in the mirror) - When this happens, we are in a state of self-awareness

Which of the following is TRUE about research on free will?

Sometimes people underestimate the amount of control they have over their behavior

Knowing Ourselves by Adopting Other People's Views

Sometimes we use other people as a measuring stick to assess our own abilities - When it comes to our views of the social world, however, often we adopt the views our friends hold - People who hang out together tend to see the world in the same way - One explanation = people who have similar views are attracted to each other and are more likely to become friends than are people who have dissimilar views - It is also true that people adopt the views of people they hang out with (at least under certain circumstances)

Our phones also have other features such as...

Sound- Microphone Visual- Camera and Light meter Interaction- Wireless sensors and bluetooth (can pick up how many other phones are around you)

Harold Kelley (1950)-

Students in different sections of a college economics class were told that a guest lecturer would be filling in that day - Were told the economics department was interested in how different classes reacted to different instructors and that the students would thus receive a brief biographical note about the professor - Some students were told he was very warm and others were told he was very cold - The professor then conducted a class discussion for twenty minutes + then the students rated hi - The students who expected the instructor to be warm gave him significantly higher ratings than the students who expected him to be cold, even though all the students had observed the exact same teacher behaving in the same way

Applied Research-

Studies designed to solve a particular social problem - Geared toward solving a certain social problem - Here, building a theory of behavior is usually secondary to solving the specific problem - In Social Psychology, the difference between Basic Research and Applied Research is fuzzy - The endeavors of one group are not independent of the endeavors of another group - Ex) Basic research with dogs, rats, and fish on the effects of feeling in control of one's environment has led to the development of techniques to improve the health of elderly nursing home residents - Most psychologists would agree that, to solve a specific social problem, we must understand the psychological process responsible for it

Basic Research-

Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity - They are not trying to solve a certain problem

Brewer and Treyens (1981)

Study to show how participant's schema of an office influenced what they remembered. Each participant was taken into an office and left alone for 35 seconds while the experimenter 'popped out' to do something. Then the participant was taken to another room and asked to write down as many items that they could remember from the office as possible. - Found that schema congruent items are more likely to be remembered and vice versa - But, this goes the other way if something is really incongruent

"Cultural products"

Such as advertising, song lyrics, television shows, and art have content that reflects their culture's values

Self-Report

Survey method that involves asking people Qs about their beliefs and behaviors Adv... - Cost effective study of difficult to observe things Disadv... - People who respond may not be represenative - Social Desirability Bias -> Tendency for people to say what they believe is acceptable

The correlational method is often used in ____

Surveys

Additionally, the only way to be certain that results of an experiment represent the behavior of a particular population is to ensure...

That the participants are randomly selected from that population - Increasingly, social psychologists are conducting research with diverse populations and cultures, some of it over the Internet - But, unfortunately, it is impractical and expensive to select random samples for most social psychology experiments - Many researchers address this problem by studying basic psychological processes that make people susceptible to social influence, assuming that these processes are so fundamental that they are universally shared - But of course, some psychological processes are likely to be dependent on culture (in which case you would NEED a diverse sample)

Limits of the Correlational Method: Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

The CM only tells us if two variables are related - If a researcher finds that there is a correlation between two variables, it means that there are three possible causal relationships between these variables - X might cause Y - Y might cause X - Or there might not be a casual relationship between the two variables (Both X and Y could be caused by a third variable) - Ex) Consider a study of birth control methods and number of STDs - Found that women who rely on condoms had more STDs than women using other forms of birth control - The result was that diaphragms or contraceptive sponges caused a lower incidence rate of diseases - But this result could have been because women who use sponges have less sex than women who use condoms

The only way to determine causal relationship is with...

The Experimental Method

There are three types of methods ->

The Observational Method, The Correlational Method, and The Experimental Method - Any of these methods could be used to explore a specific research question - Each has its strength and weakness - Observational focuses on description and answers the question "What is the nature of the phenomena?" - Correlational focuses on prediction and answers the question "From knowing X, can we predict Y?" - Experimental focuses on causality and answers the question "Is variable X a cause of variable Y?"

Another potential problem with survey data is...

The accuracy of the responses - Often people simply don't know the answer (about why they acted a certain way)—but they think they do

Individual Differences-

The aspects of people's personalities that make them different from others

Evolutionary Psychology-

The attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection - The core idea is that evolution occurs very slowly, such that social behaviors that are prevalent today, are due in part to adaptions to environments in our distant past - A debate has arisen over this theory - Psychologists make their best guess about situations in the past and how specific kinds of behavior gave people a reproductive advantage - But, of course, these hypotheses are impossible to test with the experimental method - Ex) Did giraffes adapt and grow long necks to get food or were long necks and advantage for males to fight with other males and win the lady giraffe (and, then, ofc, ****)

In one study, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers introduced four new math games to their students, and during a 13-day baseline period they noted how long each child played each math game

The children initially had some intrinsic interest - Then, a reward program was introduced (credit and trophies) - SO, the amount of time they spent on the math games increased - But, after the reward program ended... - Overjustification effect occurred in that the children spent significantly less time on the math games

People are most likely to make an internal attribution when...

The consensus and distinctiveness are low, buts its consistency is high

Extrinsic Motivation-

The desire to engage in an activity because of external rewards or pressures, not because we enjoy the task or find it interesting

Intrinsic Motivation-

The desire to engage in an activity because we enjoy it or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or pressures - When intrinsically motivated kids start getting rewards for reading (or doing whatever activity) -> Their reading, originally stemming from intrinsic motivation, is now also spurred by Extrinsic Motivation

Social Influence-

The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors - Sometimes these influences conflict with each other (very interesting for Social Psychologists)

Stacey Sinclair's experiment

The experimenter acts in either a likable or an unlikable manner - You then sit at a computer and complete a simple task in which you press one key every time the word good appears on the screen and another whenever the word bad appears - The computer task is a measure of automatic prejudice - A photograph of a white or black face is flashed very rapidly right before the word good or bad appears - The faces are flashed so quickly that you do not consciously see them To see if people "tuned" their views to the experimenter, the researchers altered one other thing: In half of the sessions the experimenter wore a T-shirt that expressed antiracism views ("eracism"), and in half of the sessions she did not - When the experimenter was likable, participants showed less automatic prejudice when she was wearing the antiracism T-shirt than when she was not - When she was unlikable -> They showed more automatic prejudice when she was wearing the antiracist T-shirt than when she was not Moral = We tend to automatically adopt the views of people we like but automatically reject the views of people we do not

Accessibility-

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world

Psychological Realism-

The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life - PR is heightened if people feel involved in a real event - To accomplish this, researchers often tell participants a Cover Story

External Validity-

The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people - Two kinds of generalization are at place... 1) The extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real-life situations, referred to as generalizability across situations 2) The extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general, referred to as generalizability across people - Sometimes studies are critiques for being conducted in artificial settings - psychologists attempt to maxim the study's Psychological Realism

Which of the following is the best description of facilitated communication?

The facilitators believe that it is the communication impaired person who is choosing what to type, but are probably wrong and are unknowingly determining the answers themselves

Overconfidence Barrier-

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments - One approach is to address this overconfidence directly - Another approach is to directly teach people some basic statistical and methodological principles about how to reason correctly - Ex) If you want to generalize from a sample of information to a population, you must have a large, unbiased sample

Fritz Heider

The father of the attribution process - His book defined social perception - Discusses "naive" or "commonsense" psychology - People are like amateur scientists trying to understand other people's behavior by piecing together information until they arrived at a reasonable explanation or cause One of his most valuable contributions is a simple dichotomy: When trying to decide why people behave as they do, we can make one of two attributions - Our impression of the person will be very different depending on what attribution we use - This internal/external attribution dichotomy plays an important role in the most intimate parts of our lives - Ex) Satisfied spouses tend to make internal attributions for their partners' positive behaviors and external attributions for their partners' negative behaviors (and the opposite for distressed marriages)

The Covariation Model: Internal vs External Attributions

The first, essential step in the process of social perception is determining how people decide whether to make an internal or an external attribution

Kurt Lewin-

The founding father of modern experimental social psychology - Esp. explored the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping (he experienced Nazi Germany) - He applied Gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to social perception - "It is often more important to understand how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world, he said, than it is to understand its objective properties" - Social psychologists soon began to focus on the importance of how people construe their environments

Two-Factor Theory of Emotion-

The idea that emotional experience is the result of a two-step self-perception process in which people first experience physiological arousal and then seek an appropriate explanation for it - We use information in the situation to help us make an attribution about why we feel aroused

Growth Mindset-

The idea that our abilities are malleable qualities that we can cultivate and grow - People with the fixed mindset are more likely to give up after setbacks and are less likely to work on and hone their skills - People with the growth mindset view setbacks as opportunities to improve through hard work - Research also shows that the mindsets can change; people with fixed views can learn to adopt the growth view

Social Comparison Theory-

The idea that we learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to other people (Leon Festinger) - Revolves around two essential questions-- When do people engage in social comparison + with whom do they chose to compare themselves with - Answer 1) People socially compare when there is no objective standard to measure themselves against and when they are uncertain about themselves in a particular area - Answer 2) The answer depends on whether your goal is to get an accurate assessment of your abilities, to determine what the top level is so that you know what to strive for, or to feel better about yourself

Harold Kelley

The idea that we notice and think about more than one piece of information when forming such judgments - His theory is called the Covariation Model

Self-Awareness Theory-

The idea that when people focus their attention on themselves, they evaluate and compare their behavior to their internal standards and values - Seeing ourselves as an outsider would

A researcher wants to see whether people are more likely to donate money to a charity when they receive a small gift from that charity. She sends an appeal for money from the charity to 1000 people. For half of the people (randomly chosen) the letter includes free address labels and for half it does not. The researcher than sees whether those who got the address labels donate more money. Which of the following is true about this study?

The independent variable is whether people got address labels and the dependent variable is how much money they donate

External Attribution-

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation

Internal Attribution-

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality (disposition, personality, attitudes, or character)

Interjudge Reliability-

The level of agreement between two or more people who independently observe and code a set of data; by showing that two or more judges independently come up with the same observations, researchers ensure that the observations are not the subjective, distorted impressions of one individual

Social Psychology is concerned with who?

The majority!

Correlations can be "spurious". AKA

The math sometimes works out and says random things are correlated

Experimental Method-

The method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people's responses) - Usually the method of choice b/c you can draw a causal relationship with it

In one study, researchers asked 365 highschool juniors what they were thinking about @ random points of their day ->

The more often people said they were thinking about themselves, the more likely they were to be unhappy

The extent to which people believe they have free will has important consequences...

The more people believe in free will, for example, the more willing they are to help others in need and the less likely they are to engage in immoral actions - An experiment showed -> People cheated significantly more when they read the statements implying that there is no free will than when they read the statements implying that there is free will (because these people think that they are not really in control of their actions + so they should just follow their gut)

Self-Concept-

The overall set of beliefs that people have about their personal attributes - One way psychologists have studied how self-concept changes from childhood to adulthood is by asking people of different ages to answer the question, "Who am I?" - Typically, a child's self-concept is concrete, with references to clear-cut, observable characteristics (age, sex, neighborhood, and hobbies) - As we mature, we place less emphasis on physical characteristics + more on psychological states (thoughts and feelings) + on considerations of how other people judge us

We certainly have the mental sophistication to adjust our attributions more toward a situational explanation BUT

The problem is that people often don't adjust their judgments enough

Natural Selection-

The process by which heritable traits that promote survival in a particular environment are passed along to future generations; organisms with those traits are more likely to produce offspring

Priming-

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept - Priming is a good example of automatic thinking (quick, unintentional, and unconscious)

Social Tuning-

The process whereby people adopt another person's attitudes

Introspection-

The process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives - It is not perfect - Our feelings and behavior can be hidden from conscious awareness

Misattribution of Arousal-

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

We all have a fundamental fascination with explaining other people's behaviors BUT

The reasons people act in certain ways are hidden from us - We can not read their minds - All we have to go off of is observable behavior: what people do, what they say, their facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice - We also rely on subtle clues and first impressions Much of our mental energy is devoted to analyzing other people (People watching, first impressions, etc.) - This is true because thinking about other individuals and their behavior helps us understand and predict our social universe

People all around the world use schemas, but the content of their schemas vary (influenced by our culture) ->

The schemas our culture teaches us strongly influence what we notice and remember about the world - Ex) The Bantu people's memory for cattle is so good that they do not bother to brand them - Cattle are a central part of the Bantu economy and culture, and therefore the Bantu have well-developed schemas about cattle An analogy is that the human mind is like a toolbox - All humans have access to the same tools, but their culture can influence what tools they use the most (AKA culture can influence the kinds of thinking people automatically use to understand the world) - Unconscious thinking + the use of schemas are used by people all over the world - But some basic ways in which people typically perceive and think about the world are shaped by culture

Perceptual Salience-

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention

For social psychologists, the relationship between the social environment and the individual is a two-way street...

The situation influence people's behavior AND people's behavior also depends on their interpretation, or construal, of their social environment

In one study, college students recorded their daily moods every day for 5 weeks

The students also kept track of things that might predict their daily moods, such as the weather, their workload, and how much sleep they had gotten the night before - At the end of the 5 weeks, the students estimated how much their moods were related to these other variables - In most cases, people's estimates were wrong - But, people were not clueless (most knew that how well they were getting along with their friends was a good predictor of their mood) - It turned out that participants were relying on Causal Theories

Sociology-

The study of groups, organizations, and societies, rather than individuals

Social Perception-

The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people - One very important source of information= nonverbal communication (body movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice)

Personality Psychology-

The study of the characteristics that make individuals unique and different from one another

Social Psychology-

The study of the psychological processes people have in common that make them susceptible to social influence

How did the teachers in Rosenthal's experiment act?

The teachers actually did not spend more time with the "bloomers" But, they did treat the "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 There is evidence that teachers in actual classrooms are especially likely to act in ways that confirm their low expectations of minority and disadvantaged students - The magnitudes of these effects were small, amounting to a few points on standardized tests, indicating that low expectations do not doom students to be at the bottom of the class

Correlational Method-

The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed - People's behavior and attitudes can be measured in a variety of ways - Researchers can make direct observations - Researchers look at such relationships by calculating the Correlation Coefficient

Hindsight Bias-

The tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing that something occurred, how much they could have predicted it before it occurred

Overjustification Effect-

The tendency for people to view their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic reasons, making them underestimate the extent to which it was caused by intrinsic reasons

Fundamental Attribution Error-

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors - Explaining behavior in terms of personality can give us a false sense of security - We find it comforting to write off people who did odd things (kill their children) as flawed humans - Gives them the feeling that it could never happen to them - However, this actually increases are susceptibility because we are looking away from social influences - Moreover, by failing to fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend to oversimplify the problem, which can lead us to blame the victim

Fundamental Attribution Error-

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors (AKA correspondence bias) - When thinking this way, we are more like personality psychologists, who see behavior as stemming from internal dispositions and traits - Social psychologists, who focus on the impact of social situations on behavior

Belief Perseverance-

The tendency to stick with an initial judgment even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

Self-Perception Theory-

The theory that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs - First, we infer our inner feelings from our behavior only when we are not sure how we feel - Second, people judge whether their behavior really reflects how they feel or whether it was the situation that made them act that way - People use the same attributional principles (as we do in the attribution theory) to infer their own attitudes and feelings - But it is not only attitudes and preferences that we infer from our behavior—we also infer how motivated we are to do something

The Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist-

The trade-off between internal and external validity in conducting research; it is very difficult to do one experiment that is both high in internal validity and generalizable to other situations and people

Independent Variable-

The variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable

Dependent Variable-

The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; the researcher hypothesizes that the dependent variable will depend on the level of the independent variable

Nonverbal Communication-

The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words; nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and movement, the use of touch, and gaze - Serve a variety of functions in communication - They help us express our emotions, our attitudes, our personality (and to perceive those same characteristics in others) Emojis are so popular now because they allow us to fill in gaps created by the lack of nonverbal cues

Construal-

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world - The emphasis of construal has its roots in Gestalt Psychology

There is another way in which people's self-perceptions influence their motivations ->

The way in which they perceive their own abilities - Some people believe that their abilities are set in stone; they either have them or they do not

Causal Theories-

Theories about the causes of one's own feelings and behaviors - We learn many of these theories from the culture in which we grow up - EX) absence makes the heart grow fonder" and that people are "blue" on Mondays BUT our theories and schemas are not always correct! Which, lead to incorrect judgments

Functions of the Self

There are four main functions... 1) Self-Knowledge 2) Self-Control 3) Impression Management 4) Self-Esteem

Utility of the Self

There are four things that the self does 1) Self-knowledge 2) Self-control 3) Manage impressions 4) Manage self-esteem

Computers are getting smarter and smarter, but they have a long ways to go before they can match the human brain

There are key areas that computers are no match for humans... - Humans are much better at knowing people's behaviors (such as their intentions, wishes, and desires) - So, computers are bad at games like "Poker" - The human brain has evolved to be powerful instrument for understanding other people - AKA people are really good at Social Cognition

Many social psychologists study social behavior because...

They are curious and because they want to contribute to the solution of social problems - Their efforts have ranged from reducing violence and prejudice to increasing altruism and tolerance - They study such pressing issues as how to induce people to conserve natural resources like water and energy, practice safe sex, or eat healthier food - They study the effects of violence in the media - They work to find effective strategies to resolve conflicts within groups - They explore ways to raise children's intelligence through environmental interventions and better school programs, and reduce the high school dropout rate of minority students - What sustains love

When people are in a negative state of self-awareness (because they realize the disparity b/w who they are and what they want to be), they often try to escape this state ->

They can do this in multiple ways... 1) Avoiding looking at pictures of themselves on friends' facebooks 2) Abusing alcohol also temporarily diverts negative thoughts 3) Even binge eating + sexual masochism can be effective - This is an indication of how aversive self-focus can be Not all means of escaping the self, however, are so damaging, though - Many forms of religious expression and spirituality are also effective means of avoiding self-focus - And maybe you are not even sad/mad when you look inward (make you just accomplished something major) - Self-focus can also be a way of keeping you out of trouble by reminding you of your sense of right and wrong - Studies have found that when people are self-aware (looking at themselves in a mirror) they are more likely to follow their moral standards

Which of the following is true about social psychological findings?

They sometimes seem obvious after we learn about them, because of a hindsight bias

Why does he dislike the term "Automatic Thinking"

Thinking implies control (he prefers "Automatic Processing")

Descartes

Thinking is the only evidence that we exist

Controlled Thinking-

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful - People can usually turn on/off what they are consciously aware of - This kind of thought is effortful (it requires mental energy) - People have the capacity to think in a conscious, controlled way about only one thing at a time The emphasis is on automatic thinking, though, because the ability to think quickly + unconsciously is critical to our survival

Automatic Thinking-

Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless - Automatic thinking helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences - We categorize people, places, objects, and situations - AKA people use Schemas

Hazel Markus

This applies to television and newspaper sports commentary as well - Coded Japanese and American media accounts of their countries' gold medal-winning athletes - U.S. 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 - Japanese coverage focused more equally on positive and negative aspects

Thoughts VS Feelings explained

Thoughts are cognitive structure (your mind is doing work) and feelings deal with emotions - Emotions are a combination of valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low)

So, how do we answer the question, "Why did the person behave as she did"

To answer this "why" question, we will use our immediate observations to form more elegant and complex inferences about what people are really like and what motivates them to act as they do - How we go about answering these types of questions= the focus of Attribution Theory

Encode-

To express or emit nonverbal behavior, such as smiling or patting someone on the back

Decode-

To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness

Automatic Decision Making

Too much conscious reflection about a choice can get in the way of making a good decision - Sometimes a period of distraction helps us make the best choice - For distraction to help us make the best decision... - 1) People must have a conscious goal - 2) Conscious thought is superior when decision requires a series of simple rules - Ex) When there are a clear set of rules to follow, such as how to multiply two numbers, it is best to follow those rules consciously and deliberately Distraction helps the most when the decision requires people to integrate a lot of complex information

Yuri Miyamoto, Richard Nisbett, and Takahiko Masuda

Took photographs in random locations in Japenese and American cities + they matched the scenes as best as they could (the size of the cities were equal + the building were the same (a school)) - The Japenese scenes contained much more information + objects - Maybe this is why East Asians focus on the whole picture

Paul Ekman

Traveled to New Guinea, where they studied the decoding ability of the South Fore, a preliterate tribe that, until that time, had had no contact with Western civilization - 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 Fores' job was to match the facial expressions of emotion to the stories - The Fores were as accurate as Western subjects - The researchers then asked the Fore people to demonstrate, while being photographed, facial expressions that would match the stories they were told - These photographs, when later shown to American research participants, were also decoded accurately

Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1975)

Two male students engaged in a "get acquainted" conversation - At each session, six actual research participants also took part. They sat in assigned seats, surrounding the two conversationalists - Two sat on each side of the actors; they had a clear, profile view of both individuals. Two observers sat behind each actor; they could see the back of one actor's head but the face of the other - The conversationalist who was visually salient—that is, the individual the participants could see better—was cleverly manipulated - The person they could see better was the person they thought had more impact on the conversation - Those who could see both students equally well thought both were equally influential

Experimental Methods

Uncover causes of behavior by systematically varying some aspect of the situation

A psychologist's job (general)

Understand and predict human behavior - Different kinds of psychologists go about this in different ways

Bulman and Wortman, 1977

Unfairness as partly being self-inflicted

When people are self-aware they...

Use more first person pronouns and they attributed themselves to most likely be the cause of a situation and they are more accurate in filling out self-reports

Trey Hedden

Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine where in the brain cultural experience predicts perceptual processing - East Asians and Americans, underwent fMRI brain scans while making judgments about the length of lines inside boxes - 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") - Showed significantly more brain activity when they had to follow the instructions that were the opposite of their usual cultural thinking style - American participants showed greater activation in higher-order cortical regions (frontal and parietal areas) when told to pay attention to the context - East Asian participants showed greater activity in the same brain regions when told to ignore context

Social Cognitive

Viewpoint that focuses on mental processes involved in paying attention to, interpreting, and remembering social experiences - We acknowledge that our memory is not always true - Anne Wilson and Michael Ross (2002) conducted a study testing this viewpoint - Had participants describe how many positive and negative attributes you have - People thought they currently had many more positive attributes than they did in the past

Social Learning

Viewpoint that focuses on past learning experiences as determinants of a person's social behaviors - Ex) Classical conditioning - People wear their team's clothing because they are modeling the behavior of their team - Then praised by others for having good team spirit This viewpoint is a little outdated and so it is replaced with the next...

Evolutionary

Viewpoint that searches for the cause of social behavior in the physical and psychological predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce

Mary wants to find out whether eating sugary snacks before an exam leads to better performance on the exam. Which of the following strategies would answer her question most conclusively?

Wait for exam time in a big class, give a random half of the students M&Ms before the exam, and see whether the students who ate M&Ms perform better

Finally, when consistency is low...

We can not make a clear internal or external attribution, so we resort to a special kind of external or situational attribution, one that assumes that something strange must have happened in this particular circumstance

The Lingering Influence of Initial Impressions

We can use just a few observations of a person as a starting point and then, using our schemas, create a much fuller understanding - Suggests that our initial impressions have staying power—that they color the way we interpret the information we learn next

People are very good at sizing up a new situation quickly and accurately

We form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we are doing - We do these things by engaging in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world - Automatic Thinking

Charles Cooley (1902) "Looking Glass Self" -

We see ourselves and the social world through the eyes of other people and often adopt those views - This is esp. True when two people want to get along with each other - Social Tuning - Can happen even when we meet someone for the first time, if we want to get along with that person - It can happen unconsciously

We are the only species that has the ability to engage in conscious reflection about ourselves and the world

We use this ability to solve difficult problems + plan for the future

In their quest to create realistic, engaging situations, social psychologists frequently face ethical dilemmas

We want the study to be realistic, sound, and well controlled - But, we also want to avoid causing participants stress, discomfort, and/or unpleasantness - These two goals sometimes conflict Above all, the researchers are concerned with the safety and welfare of their participants - Researchers are also in the process of discovering important information about human social behavior + many of their discoveries are bound to benefit society - However, some of the events might make the participants feel uneasy (thinking that they are witnessing someone have a seizure) - The ethical dilemma is less problematic/solved if researchers obtain Informed Consent

Attribution Theory

When deciding about causes of behavior, we can make one of two attributions - External, situational attribution - Internal, dispositional attribution

Primacy Effect-

When it comes to forming impressions, the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later - We also have schemas regarding which traits tend to appear together in clusters (We use a few known characteristics to determine what other characteristics a person likely has) - Ex) We often believe that people with physical beauty will also have a whole host of other wonderful qualities But the Primacy Effect + Schemas are not the only reason that first impressions have lasting effects

Automatic Goal Pursuit

When it comes to setting goals for ourself (ex: picking a career) we often do so carefully and consciously - But, that is not the only way we choose what goals to follow - In our life, there are often competing goals + we choose what to follow semi-automatically - Psychologists have primed people's goals in subtle ways + then looked at how it influenced their behavior

Lord, Lepper, and Preston (1984)

When people were asked to consider the opposite point of view, people realized there were other ways to construe the world

Self-Awareness Theory

When the self is made salient, one tends to evaluate their thoughts and behaviors based on internal values

When do we make Self-Serving Attributions??

When we are trying to maintain our self-esteem - We locate "causality"—the reason something happened—where it does you the most good - We are particularly likely to engage in self-serving attributions when we fail at something and we feel we can't improve at it - But if we believe we can improve, we're more likely to attribute our current failure to internal causes and then work on improving - Also, we want people to think well of us. Telling others that our poor performance was due to some external cause can be a way to put a "good face" on failure - One more reason individuals make self-serving attributions has to do with our earlier discussion about the kind of information that is available to people - Ex) If Ron got As on all of his chemistry tests, he would explain a D on the midterm by saying the exam was unfair People also alter their attributions to deal with other kinds of threats to their self-esteem - We like to think that bad things happen only to bad people

Self-Perception Theory

When we are unsure about our thoughts or behaviors we infer them based on our behaviors or surroundings

Based on everything you've read in this chapter, what is the best conclusion about social cognition?

Whereas people are very sophisticated social thinkers who have amazing cognitive abilities, there is also plenty of room for improvement

Direct Attempts at Persuasion-

Whereby one person deliberately tries to change another person's behavior or attitude

Limits of the Observational Method

While the observational method describes behaviors, it does not explain why they happen - Furthermore, certain kinds of behavior are difficult to observe because they occur only rarely or only in private - To predict and explain behavior, you will want to use another method

Twitter Heat Map

Who is talking about what and when - Find out what cultures care about a certain topic

Roesch and Amirkhan (1997)

Wondered if an athlete's skill, experience, and type of sport predicted attributional tendencies - He 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 - Athletes in solo sports made more self-serving attributions than those in team sports

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

Which of the following reflect(s) the motive to maintain high self-esteem?

Zach has been involved in several minor traffic accidents since getting his driver's license. "There sure are a lot of terrible drivers out there," he says. "People should learn to be good drivers like me."

anchoring and adjustment heuristic

a mental shortcut through which people begin with a rough estimation as a starting point and then adjust this estimate to take into account unique characteristics of the present situation

The "self-fulfilling prophecy" is the reason that many people

act in ways to make predictions of their own behavior or others' come true.

Which of the following is true about the use of schemas?

although schemas can lead to errors, they are a very useful way of organizing information about the world and filling in gaps in our knowledge

A researcher is interested in whether moods vary by the day of the week. She codes the postings on thousands of Facebook pages to see whether people express more positive comments on some days than others. Which research method has she used?

archival analysis

Suppose you wanted your friend Stephan to feel like a more assertive person. According to research on ______ , you should ask him to think of _____ times in the past when he acted in an UNassertive manner.

availability heuristic; 12

If your goal is to get the most accurate assessment of your abilities ->

compare yourself to others w/ a similar background

The four validities...

construct validity, external validity, statistical validity, internal validity

Which one of the following involves the least amount of automatic thinking?

counterfactual reasoning

Where do differences in holistic versus analytic thinking come from?

different philosophical traditions of the East versus the West

Sam is playing a carnival game challenging him to guess which of the 20 cups is hiding the red ball. Unfortunately, he picked the cup directly to the left of the winning cup and thus did not win the stuffed donkey he wanted. According to social psychological research, he is most likely to:

engage in counterfactual thinking

Suppose a psychologist decides to join a local commune to understand and observe its members' social relationships. This is:

ethnography

Which of the following is true about evolutionary psychology?

evolutionary approaches can generate novel hypotheses about social behavior that can then be tested with experiments

low consistency

external

High consensus ->

external attribution

High distinctiveness ->

external attribution

A researcher conducts a study with participants who are college students. The researcher then repeats the study using the same procedures but with members of the general population (i.e., adults) as participants. The results are similar for both samples. The research has established _______________ through ________________.

external validity, replication

Amy Mezulis

he self-serving bias is strongest in the United States and some other Western countries—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - It is also prevalent in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia In many traditional Asian cultures, the values of modesty and harmony with others are highly valued - Ex) Chinese students are expected to attribute their success to other people, such as their teachers or parents, or to other aspects of the situation - Their cultural tradition does not encourage them to attribute their success to themselves

A social psychologist would tend to look for explanations of a young man's violent behavior primarily in terms of

how his peer group behaves

Which of the following is true about the ethical conduct of psychological research?

if research participants are misled about a study they must be fully debriefed at the end of the study

Social psychologists often do experiments in the laboratory, instead of the field, in order to

increase internal validity

North American and some other Western cultures stress ____

individual autonomy! - A person is perceived as independent and self-contained - His/her behavior reflects internal traits, motives, and values - Can be traced from the Judeo-Christian belief in the individual soul and the English legal tradition of individual rights

High consistency

internal attribution

Low consensus ->

internal attribution

low distinctiveness ->

internal attribution

Professor X wants to make sure his study of gifted youngsters will get published, but he's worried that his findings could have been caused by something other than the independent variable, which was a new teaching method he introduced. He is concerned with the ________________ of his experiment.

internal validity

A team of researchers wants to test the hypothesis that drinking wine makes people like jazz more. They randomly assign college students who are 21 or over to one room in which they will drink wine and listen to jazz or to another room in which they will drink water and listen to jazz. It happens that the "wine room" has a big window with nice scenery outside, while the "water room" is windowless, dark, and dingy. The most serious flaw in this experiment is that it:

is low in internal validity

Self- Knowledge can help us...

make decisions

Which of the following is a basic assumption that social psychologists make?

many social problems can be studied scientifically

Researchers took photographs in randomly chosen locations in cities in Japan and the United States. They found that on average, city scenes in Japan contained more:

objects that competed for people's attention