Psych 280 exam 1
How is the self esteem motive demonstrated in positive bias and effort justification?
. It is demonstrated through effort justification because people report liking things more if they have had to work hard in order to get them.
27. What did Weiner (1980) do and what did he find?
A confederate would approach a student in a class and ask if they could borrow their notes, said they missed class becuase of illness or they just did not want to come Found that if they missed class because of illness then they were given the notes more than when they skipped
19. What is the availability heuristic, and how does it work? What's the problem with it?
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind The feeling of ease or difficulty of recall is used to make judgments (if it feels easy to recall, then it must be more correct) Sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture leading to faulty conclusions
16. What is the availability heuristic?
A mental shortcut we use when making judgments about the world, whatever comes to mind easiest is likely to have the strongest influence on our perceptions.
18. What is the representativeness heuristic, and how does it work? What's the problem with it?
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case It works by looking at the similarities between two ideas and use that to make judgements, if something looks like the right answer it must be the right answer People ignore info about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
14. What is a correlation coefficient? Be prepared to interpret a correlation coefficient.
A number that tells you to what degree two variables are related in a population. Can range from -1.00 to 1.00, the farther from zero the stronger the relationship
2. What is behaviorism?
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
3. What is 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.
4. What is a theory, and what are two things a good theory accomplishes?
A theory compiles many findings on a topic into a framework that explains the causes of one aspect of human behavior. Theories help us understand the causes of behavior and provides a guide for ways to improve lives.
1. Implicit personality theories (p. 82).
A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together, (Kind and generous)
17. What are the advantages and disadvantages of correlational research?
Advantages- Easy to conduct, can study variables that cannot be manipulated in experiments such as gender, culture or personality Disadvantages- correlation cannot prove causation and people may lie on questionnaires
12. What are the advantages and disadvantages of observational research?
Advantages- establishes presence of a phenomenon, often done in real world settings Disadvantages- cannot identify cause and effect, many psychological variables cannot be observed
26. Analytical vs. holistic thinking - what are they and what are their differences?
Analytical- focus on individual objects, think about objects attributes and component parts, objects exist outside of contexts Holistic- think of objects in a context, focus on associations and relationships between objects, context is important for understanding an object
19. What is self-handicapping? How does it protect a person's self-esteem?
Any act that makes failure more likely when you are concerned about your performance at a task If you fail you have an excuse, if you succeed, it looked impressive
8. What is a variable in research?
Anything that can potentially hold more than one value
8. What is covariation theory, and what are consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness in the theory? How do they influence attributions?
Attribution theory in which people make casual inferences to explain why other people and ourselves behave in a certain way. It is concerned with social and self perception Consensus- behavior consensus if other people respond the same way in this situation Consistency- behavior is consistent if a person responds in the same way at different times Distinctiveness- behavior is distinctive if a person does not behave like this in most other situations It helps us make either dispositional or situational attributions
1. What's the difference between an attribution and attribution theory?
Attribution- an explanation for behavior (Ours or others behavior) Attribution theory- A theory about how people explain the causes of behavior
4. Automatic vs. controlled processing - what are they and what are their differences?
Automatic thinking- quick, no conscious deliberation, everyday decision making Controlled thinking- slow, effortful and deliberate, carefully choosing options
4. Basic vs. applied research (p. 37).
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. Applied research- studies designed to solve a particular social problem
23. According to counterfactual reasoning, why are bronze medalists happier than silver medalists?
Because they can easily imagine that they may not have won at all while silver are less happy because they could have won
11. Why do people commit the FAE?
Behavior can be seen, situations cant be, behavior is available and representative, requires less proce
16. What is the belief in a just world, and why is it a problem?
Belief that there is justice in the world can be bad because it can lead us to blame the vicitm
24. What is the evidence both for and against our ability to control our automatic thinking?
Can control- it seems intuitive that we can move between controlled and automatic thinking. (ex- even though driving is automatic we can still be vigilant drivers at time Cannot control- automatic thoughts can persist even we are trying to control them
31. What is motivated cognition? Why is motivated cognition rational? Why is it a problem?
Cognition driven by desires, feelings, and pre-existing beliefs Rational because we still base our beliefs on reality, we will not believe something unless we think there is good evidence for it People are either being selective or applying different standards in selecting 'good' evidence for their beliefs
Why is it tempting to say social psychology is common sense? Why shouldn't you do that?
Common sense is folk wisdom and can be wrong about human behavior, social psychologists study folk beliefs and gather evidence to test them
3. Why does context matter in social cognition?
Context matters because as perceivers we are relying on what we already know to make sense of the world, the same event can be viewed differently depending on the context.
27. What has caused people to be analytical or holistic thinkers?
Depends on culture, people who come from the ancient Greeks will be more analytical and people from the ancient Chinese will be more holistic
6. What's the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics?
Descriptive statistics mathematically describe what is going on with the findings. Inferential statistics tell us if we can make inferences about the findings
4. What's the difference between a dispositional and situational attribution?
Dispositional- caused by factors inside the person, tells us something about the person Situational- caused by factors outside the person, tell us nothing about the person
11. What is ethnography and archival analysis?
Ethnography is a description from an insiders point of view Archival analysis is when a researcher examines accumulated documents
18. What is experimental research, and what kinds of questions does it answer?
Experimental research makes a strong argument for cause and effect. Is variable X a cause variable of Y?
Why is it useful to study social psychology?
Explains interesting events that occur in our everyday lives, can help you understand how best to interact with other people
2. Self-serving attributions (p. 96).
Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for ones failures that blame external, situational factors
3. How did Heider approach attribution theory?
He argued that we are all intuitive scientists systematically trying to understand the world
12. What did Higgins et al (1977) do and what did he find?
He had participants think about words associated with either recklessness (Stubborn, aloof) or Adventure (persistent, confident) and then participants read about 'don' and rated to how much they liked him. Found that participants liked 'don' more if they had been thinking about words associated with adventure. They were primed with words
2. Why is it important to study attribution?
Helps us predict and control environment, influences the development of attitudes
30. How has analytical vs. holistic thinking potentially affected art?
Horizon lines are higher in eastern than in western landscape paintings, higher horizon allows more objects to be seen in relation to each other
3. H.O.M.E.R.: What does it mean to hypothesize, operationalize, measure, evaluate, and revise or replicate?
Hypothesize- coming up with a testable prediction about the conditions under which an event will occur Operationalize- Process by which we make a theoretical variable one that we can measure Measure-Actually conduct your study and measure the concepts in which you are interested Evaluate- examination of your data to determine whether your predictions were supported Revise or replicate- if your predictions have been supported you will want to replicate your study to confirm the findings or expand on it. If your predictions have not been supported you will want to revise your hypotheses
When is personality most likely to influence behavior?
If the social situation is weak then personality plays a significant role in influencing behavior
12. Why is it important to understand the FAE?
If we understand that we are committing it we can catch ourselves and correct the situations
26. How do attributions influence your willingness to help someone?
If you see a situation as uncontrollable (Not their fault) you will be more likely to help
19. What are the following, and why are they essential in experiments: independent variable, dependent variable, and random assignment to condition.
Independent variable is the hypothesized cause, manipulated by the experimenter, important because its what you are testing to see if it causes what you think it causes. Dependent variable is the predicted effect, important because it helps you prove or disprove your hypothesis Random assignment to condition is when participants have an equal chance to be in any condition, it equates groups on individual differences like background, personality, and demographics
21. What is an informed consent? What is a debriefing? How do they help psychologists conduct ethical research?
Informed consent is when a person gives permission to the experimenters and is given a description of the study and their rights. Debriefing is when participants are given a complete description of the study and can ask questions and bring up concerns By doing both of these psychologists ensure that people know their rights and know exactly why they did what they did in the experiment.
3. Internal and external validity (p. 33-34).
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 External validity- The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people
22. What did Davis et al (1995) do and what did they find?
Interviewed people who had suffered the loss of a child Found that the more people imagined ways in which the tragedy could have been avoided the more distress they reported
5. Why do we need automatic thinking?
It allows us to come to conclusions and social judgments quickly
14. Why are people inclined to like things that they suffer for?
It is a form of cognitive dissonance that protects their self esteem. "I wouldn't work this hard for something if it was not rewarding and worthwhile"
10. Why is it important to understand people's perceptions?
It is important to understand people's perceptions because it helps us understand them.
14. What does it mean to prime a metaphor about the relationship between the mind and body?
It means that someone primed with a hot drink is primed with a 'warm and friendly metaphor' and someone holding a cold drink is primed with 'unfriendly people are cold' metaphor
7. If a finding is "statistically significant," what does this mean?
It means the group difference or correlation is not just due to chance, something is going on.
29. What did Masuda et al (2007) do and what did they find?
Japanese and American participants viewed an animated scene with a person in front and multiple people behind, emotions of people in back were consistent or inconsistent with the front person The background people influenced Japanese participants ratings of the front persons mood
17. Why is social psychology useful for solving social problems?
Many problems are based on our perception of the world, which we know is influenced by others. People have a strong influence on how we act, which can be harnessed to make the world a better place.
17. What is a heuristic? What are the pros and cons of using heuristics?
Mental shortcut Pro- facilitate quick and relatively accurate judgements Con- can lead to incorrect judgements
21. What is counterfactual reasoning? What are upward and downward counterfactual thoughts?
Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been, can have a considerable influence on our emotional reactions to events, the easier it is to mentally undo an outcome the stronger the emotional reaction Upward- focus on how things might have been better (bad luck: something good could have happened Downward- focus on how things could have been worse (Good luck- something bad could have happened)
17. What is attributional ambiguity? How is it related to discrimination and self-handicapping?
Occurs when it is not clear what the cause of something is some poeple have qualities that a stigmatized within their cultures and people will blame prejudice for the negative feelings towards them not their personal quialities Can handicap us because we want to protect our self esteem
20. How do we know that the FAE is not culturally universal?
Other cultures focus on the situation instead of dispositional factors
33. What did Santioso et al (1990) do and what did the find?
Participants completed a personality measure and were rated as either extraverts or introverts, they were told the opposite personality trait is associated with long term success, then asked to rate own personality, peoples ratings were biased in the direction of the successful trait, but ratings were still consistent with their actual personality levels
21. What did Miller (1994) do and what did he find?
Participants of various ages in India and US described a good or bad events they could experience, they explained the cause which was coded for dispositional or situational explanations Children under ago 10 in both cultures did not display the FAE, but this changed over time, as children got older they favored dispositional or situational attributions
16. What did Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) do and what did they find (two studies)?
Participants performed a scrambled sentence task with words relating to old people and then asked to walk down a hall to get to the next part of the experiment. They found that participants primed with thoughts related to old people took longer to get to the end of the hallway Participants did scramble sentence task with three conditions (Rudeness, politeness, and control condition) they were asked to get the experimenter when they were done but the experimenter will not stop talking to another participant. Found that participants primed with rude words were more likely to interrupt the experimenter
10. What did Jones & Harris (1967) do and what did they find? How is this an example of the FAE?
Participants read one of two speeches about Fidel Castro prepared by another student, one was pro Castro and the other anti Castro, student writers were either told to write the paper or they freely chose to write it Found that readers who read the students who were forced to write pro-Castro essays were still seen as pro-Castro, Participants ignored the situation people blamed the persons disposition not the situations
What did Bransford and Johnson (1972) do and what did they find?
Participants were assigned to three conditions: No topic- no mention of clothes washing Topic after- told about topic after hearing story Topic before- told about topic before hearing story Participants were then asked to recall as many facts from the story they were told Found that if participants had a schema to guide their processing, they remembered much more info from the story
8. What is a reason that social influence is so powerful?
People don't want to be deviants, they want to act correctly, and they want people to like them
7. What are: person schemas, self-schemas, role schemas, stereotypes, and scripts?
Person schemas- expectations based on personality traits (how you expect an extrovert to act) Self-schemas- Expectations and beliefs about ourselves (I am clumsy and will drop things) Role schemas- expectations based on having a role in a group (how leaders are supposed to act) Stereotypes- schemas that apply to a social group, when you have a stereotype you unfairly decide that a whole group of people share similar qualities Scripts- Schema for events, a mental representation of a familiar sequence of activities
What is personality, and how does it relate to social psychology?
Personality psych examines influences on emotion, behavior, and cognition that exist inside a person while social psych examines influences that exist outside a person
15. What's the difference between positive and negative correlations?
Positive correlation- As values of one variable go up, the others go up too Negative correlation- As values of one variable go up, the others go down
What did Liberman et al (2004) do, and what did they find?
Preformed an experiment in which some people were told a game was called the 'wall street game' and others were told it was called 'community game' both competitive and cooperative people worked better as a group in the community game in the wall street version people were more reluctant to work cooperatively
24. What is psychological realism, and why is OK for a social psychologist to use a laboratory setting that doesn't look like a real-world setting or situation?
Psychological realism- what matters is creating a genuine psychological response that feels real. If the response is real then the results should apply outside the research lab.
20. What are the goals of ethical psychology research, and how do psychologists follow those goals? What is an institutional review board?
Psychologists must ensure the safety and welfare of all of their participants and respect their freedom to choose whether or not to participate. All researchers must address potential ethical issues and have their study approved by a group of people called an institutional review board who see if an experiment is ethical and won't harm anyone.
9. What is a research design?
Research designs are hoe you operationalize and measure your variables in a research study.
What is Lewin's equation?
Says that behavior is caused by your personality and your social environment, both matter
6. What is a schema? What do they do? Why do we need them? What are their drawbacks?
Schema- Mental frameworks that bundle knowledge together in an organized way. They determine what info we attend to, how we interpret info, and what we remember, organize what we know, interpret situations We need them because they increase the speed with which we can understand people and events, allow us to find key pieces of info, and allow us to go beyond the given info and provide structure to ambiguous settings Drawbacks- our beliefs or expectations about a situation, object or group of people may be wrong or too broad, you may recall events incorrectly, be biased in your perceptions, and treat people unfairly
32. What are the mechanisms of motivated cognition, and how do they work?
Searching for evidence but doing it in a biased way Focusing on info that justifies a conclusion and ignoring info that doesn't Motivated memory search- searching through your memory in a biased way
28. What did Masuda and Nisbett (2001) do and what did they find?
Showed Japanese and Americans a scene with a green background and fish and Japanese made 60% more references to background objects
1. What is social cognition, and why do we study it?
Social cognition- How we perceive, remember, and interpret information about ourselves and others. We study it because social psych is the study of how people influence us and to understand this influence we must know how people perceive, remember, and interpret social information
1. How does social psychology compare to the fields of sociology and personality?
Social psych and sociology share an interest in the way the situation and the larger society influence behavior but social psychologists focus more on the psychological makeup of individuals that makes people susceptible to social influence. Social psych and personality psych both emphasize the psych of the individual rather than focusing on what makes people different from one another. Social psych emphasizes the psychological processes shared by most people around the world that makes them susceptible to social influence
What is social psychology and how do we define it?
Social psych is the study of how individuals think about, interact with, and are influeneced by other people Defined as the scientific study of the way in which peoples feelings, behaviors, and thoughts are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others
23. What are Weiner's attribution dimensions: locus, stability, and controllability?
Stability- will keep happening (stable), this may not happen again (Unstable) Controllability- you can change it (Controllable), you cannot change it (Uncontrollable) Locus- Was the cause inside or outside of you?
14. What is the Three-Stage model of attribution? (It's called the two-stage model in your text.)
Stage 1- we automatically notice a behavior stage 2- we automatically make a dispositional attribution for the behavior Stage 3- If we have time and energy we can use controlled judgement to correct our attribution
13. What's the difference between subliminal and supraliminal priming?
Subliminal- below the level of consciousness (words or images presented so quickly they cannot be consciously recognized) Supraliminal- at the conscious level (sentence unscrambles, word searches, showing images and objects)
2. Surveys and random selection (p. 27-28).
Surveys- Research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes and behaviors 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
1. Self-fulfilling prophecy
The case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with peoples original expectations, making the expectations come true
9. What is accessibility? Why does accessibility matter? How do concepts become accessible?
The degree to which schemas and concepts easily come to mind Thoughts that are at the forefront of people's minds are likely to be used when we are making judgements about the social world Frequent past experiences makes a concept almost permanently accessible, If the concept is related to a current goal then it is accessible when pursuing the goal
16. What is the directionality problem? What is third-variable problem? Can you give examples?
The directionality problem is when instead of A causing B, B causes A or What you think is the cause is the effect. The third variable problem is when C causes both A and B or When another variable is causing the correlation. Example- Researchers have found that the more sexual intercourse a person has, the happier they are. Directionality problem- happy people are more desirable sex partners, depression can lower the sex drive. Third variable problem- People in relationships have more sex and are happier
12. What is the self-esteem motive?
The need to feel good about ourselves
10. What is priming? What can be primed?
The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept Feelings, emotions, personality traits, behavior, intentions, thoughts, ideas, words, attitudes, suggestions, anything humans can do think or feel can potentially be primed
1. Hindsight bias
The tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that is occurred
9. What is the fundamental attribution error? Why should you avoid making it?
The tendency to explain other people's behavior entirely in terms of personality traits. We should avoid making it because people are often influenced by the situation and we underestimate its influence.
15. What is the actor-observer effect?
The tendency to make personal attribution for the behavior of others and situational attributions for ourselves
20. What is the false consensus effect, and how is it related to the availability heuristic?
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others agree with us We have a lot of experience of our highly similar friends agreeing with us and we use this info to make the judgement
9. What is the fundamental attribution error (FAE)?
The tendency to underestimate the effects of a situation on a persons behavior and overestimate the effects of the persons dispositions
5. How do theories guide research and hypothesizing? How do hypotheses influence theories?
Theories guide the generation of testable hypotheses for research. Research is conducted that either supports or fails to support the theory. This research is used to refine and improve the usefulness of the theory.
13. What did Aron and Mills (1959) do, and what did they find?
They had participants take part in a group activity in which they discussed normal, mildly embarrassing or severely embarrassing topics. People who were asked to talk about extremely embarrassing topics reported liking the group more
15. What did Williams and Bargh (2008) do and what did they find?
They had some people hold cold drinks and some people hold hot drinks. they found that people who held warm drinks had a more positive reaction to someone they talked to and the cold drink people had a colder reaction to the same person.
23. Why do social psychologists sometimes produce distress in experiments, and what makes it OK to use?
They produce distress because it is a part of life and it needs to be studied in order to prevent it. It is okay to produce distress if the benefits associated with the study outweigh the risks and if there is a plan to assist a person who is distressed by the study.
2. What are three things that make social psychology research challenging?
They study invisible theoretical constructs that are impossible to objectively measure. People are aware and capable of thinking about and responding to how you study them. Psychology experiments could cause participants distress and long-term problems.
22. Why do social psychologists use deception, and what makes it OK to use?
They use deception because knowing the true purpose of the experiment can bias how the participants respond. Deception is okay to use when the findings may provide a benefit that outweighs the risks involved.
1. Why do social psychologists love talking about methodology?
They use the scientific method to study people and research is the foundation of their field. They are always concerned about whether they are using effective research methods because studying people is difficult.
25. What did Wegner (1994) do and what did he find?
Thought suppression is avoiding thinking about something we want to forget, when the process breaks down the thought becomes even more accessible, trying not to think about something makes you much more likely to think about it
8. What did Kelley (1950) do and what did he find?
Two groups of students observe the same lecture but are given different descriptions of the speaker before his talk (He's a cold person or he is a warm person) Found that there was a variety of ratings of him and his presentation, the expectations biased interpretation of info that's open to interpretation
10. What is observational research, and what kinds of questions does it answer?
Used to describe the nature of the phenomenon. What is the nature of the phenomenon?
11. Are we biased or unbiased perceivers? How did Hastorf and Cantril (1954) demonstrate this?
We are biased perceivers. They showed a tape of a rough football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in which the Princeton quarterback was injured and Princeton students were likely to report that Dartmouth instigated the rough game play.
13. How did Gilbert approach attribution theory?
We are people who make mistakes, we commit FAE but we can correct our attributions, people go through 3 stages when making behavioral attributions
11. What is spreading activation?
When activation of one thought activates related thoughts
7. How did Kelley approach attribution theory?
When trying to understand the cause of some effect, we observe its covariation with various potential causes and attribute the effect to the cause with which it most closely varies
13. What is correlational research, and what kinds of questions does it answer?
When two or more variables are systematically measured and the relation between them is assessed. Are X and Y related? Does X cause Y?
15. What is the accuracy motive?
When we try to gain accurate understanding of the world so we can make effective judgements and decisions. Most of the time we act on the basis of incomplete and inaccurately interpreted info.
22. How did Weiner approach attribution theory?
When you explain why you succeed or failure, your explanation can be rated on three dimensions, locus, stability, controllability
18. What did Crocker et al (1991) do and what did they find?
Women participated in an experiment and received negative feedback from an experimenter who they were told was or was not prejudiced found that women who got negative feedback from a prejudiced person reported less depressed affect than those who got the same feedback from a non prejudiced person
24. How does your attribution for success or failure influence your motivation?
You will be more motivated to keep trying if you blame not doing enough an knowing you can do better less motivated if you blame yourself
6. What is correspondent inference theory, and what are free choice, expectedness of the behavior, and effects of the behavior in the theory? How do they influence attributions?
is a theory about how people should make attributions if they were being good intuitive scientist free choice- if you choose to do something without any pressure that tells us something about you Expectedness of behavior- if theres an expectation that you should preform the behavior, it foes not tell us anything about you Effects of behavior- when someone does something that has lots of positive outcomes, we can't be sure why they did it You are likely to make a dispositional attribution for behavior when choice is high, expectedness is low, and there are few positive effects of the behavior
5. How did Jones approach attribution theory?
proposed a theory about how people should make attributions if they were being good intuitive scientists, focuses on when people make dispositional attributions
25. What is explanatory style? What are optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles?
the idea that people have a charateristic way of making attributions for good and bad events optimistic- bad events are unstable and controllable Pessimistic- bad events are stable and uncontrollable