Psyc 212 Exam 1

What are the 5 key channels for nonverbal communication?

1) facial expressions 2) eye contact 3) body posture 4) body movements 5) touching

Ethical issues raised by the use of deception and why should informed consent be used

1) harm to deceived persons 2) resentment Informed consent-tell as much as possible Debriefing-explain true purpose and provide help if needed

Describe the basic steps involved in conducting an experiment

1) manipulate independent variables 2) control for all potential confounding variables 3) measure dependent variables

What are the 3 basic assumptions that most social psychologists have with respect to cognition processes?

1) much of social thought is automatic 2) shaped by our mental framework 3) sometimes social thought is controlled

What are the two basic requirements for a successful experiment

1) random assignment 2) holding all other factors constant

Define social psychology

The scientific field that seeks to understand the thoughts and behaviors of individuals in social situations

Kelley's theory of attribution

1) consensus 2) consistency 3) distinctiveness H,H,H=external L,H,L=internal

What is the relationship between social thought and social behavior?

"Two sides of the same coin"

What are the major causes of social behavior?

1) actions and characteristics of others(social) 2) cognitive processes-memories and reactions(why someone behaves that way)non social 3) environmental variables-ex. Crowdedness, heat 4) biological factors

Advantages of survey method

1) collect info from large number of people 2) can be administered easily(phone, web) 3) can collect info on sensitive topics 4) allows them to shape future innovation

Discuss the process of automatic processing in social thought

1st benefit is efficiency (unconscious thought has greater capacity)

couterfactual thinking

2 kinds: Upward-mentally compare our outcome to more favorable outcome(ex. Runner up) Downward- mentally compare to less favorable (ex. At least I placed)

How are our judgements regarding others are affected by availability heuristic?

2 rules: 1. Amount of information rule when making judgements that involve fact 2. Ease or recall- when making judgements that rely on emotion

Define social perception

A process through which people seek to know and understand others in 3 senses: 1) what other people are like 2) why other people do the things they do 3) how people might act in future

How can affect influence cognition?

Affect=moods &/or emotions When people are happy they tend to use heuristics more

What 3 things do schemas influence?

Attention-info we notice Encoding- storing noticed info in memory Retrieval

How do implicit processes influence our behavior?

Automatic reactions(first impression-like or hate for no reason)

Define schema

Cognitive framework centering on a specific theme that helps organize social information

correlational method-key advantage and drawback

Def.-examines relationships between events Adv- prediction(of possible relationships and other variables) Dis.- never addresses cause and effect

Define and explain social neuroscience

Focuses on attitudes and values and influence on behavior and emotional reactions (when you lose empathy, brain activity goes down)

Attribution and Jones & Davis

How we attempt to understand why people behave the way they do Correspondent inference theory had 3 factors: 1. Freely chosen 2. Noncommon effects 3. Impact of social desirability

Define social cognition

How we interpret, analyze, remember, and use info about the social world

Why do social scientists put faith in the scientific method?

It produces more conclusive evidence than other methods

Explain the role of mediating variables in causality

Independent and dependent variables are related through the mediating variable

magical thinking

Making compelling assumptions that are not really rational(won't eat chocolate that looks like poop)

representativeness heuristic and how it leads to base rate fallacy

Making judgement based on extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories (ex. Nurse=smile, gentle) Base rate fallacy-inaccurate when you ignore base rates

What are the ways you can recognize deception?

Micro expressions, INTERCHANNEL DISCREPANCIES(facial eco. eye contact), exaggerated facial expressions, linguistic style

self-fulfilling prophecy

Rosenthal and Jacobson study

Importance of multicultural perspective

Started in early 90s and recognizes people of different age, gender, ethnicity, ect. When in past it was mostly white males

Priming

Temporary increases in schema accessibility

optimism bias

We expect positive outcomes for ourselves

What are the 6 basic emotions?

anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise

Heuristics

mental shortcuts( allow us to remain reasonably accurate while reducing cognitive effort and avoiding information overload

planning fallacy

the tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project; look in the future instead of past