Psych 340 Exam #1
Which of the following best illustrates the theme "inner processes serve interpersonal functions"?
A man recognizes that he is feeling angry.
Most social psychological research has been conducted in the U.S. and a few very similar nations. According to the textbook, how well do findings generalize to other cultures?
Because not enough research has been replicated cross-culturally, it is not well understood what will or will not generalize.
Why are collectivist cultures found in places where there tend to be many pathogens?
Cultures that develop in places with more pathogens put more pressure on people to conform in order to reduce the risk for disease.
Research suggests that ____ tend to have more interdependent self-construals, whereas ____ tend to have more independent self-construals.
Easterners; Westerners
What is the LEAST likely explanation for one's motivation to work in pursuit of money?
Money is an innate need ingrained in human nature since its existence.
According to the text, which of the following best describes "change" in the traits of living things?
Nature produces changes in living things that are essentially random.
You notice a headline that proclaims that over 68% of convicted male rapists viewed pornography before the age of 17. What can you conclude from this?
Nothing can be concluded without a comparison.
____ tends to make people more aware of positive, culturally desirable standards and tends to make them try harder to behave in positive, culturally desirable ways.
Self-awareness
Dr. Pow is interested in whether exposure to TV advertisements has a different impact on girls' self-image than it does on boys' self-image. To examine this question, she conducts a quasi-experiment. Why doesn't Dr. Pow conduct a true experiment instead?
She cannot conduct a true experiment, because people cannot be randomly assigned to be "girls" or "boys."
What do we best call the field that combines the interests of social and biological psychology?
Social neuroscience
Which statement about survival is most accurate?
Survival depends in part on both individual fitness and on environmental circumstance.
In the duplex mind, what is one way in which the automatic system differs from the deliberate system?
The automatic system is faster.
According to your text, which of the following makes us most human?
The degree to which our life is enmeshed with culture
Seahorses show a reversal of the usual sex roles; male seahorses invest more time and energy into offspring than female seahorses do. What would an evolutionary psychologist be MOST likely to say about this?
The males are probably less interested (than the males of other species) in having multiple sex partners
Natural selection is best summed up by which phrase?
The most advantageous genes will survive to subsequent generations.
What is the main advantage of an experiment over a correlational study?
The researcher is better able to draw conclusions about cause and effect.
Which statement is true regarding division of labor and the exchange of goods and services?
These concepts are, by and large, unique to humans.
What is the most accurate statement regarding psychological processes?
They are based on a complex interaction between nature and culture throughout a person's life.
How does the modern notion of the automatic system relate to the Freudian idea of the unconscious mind?
They both address the same part of the mind, but differ in their view of how this part functions.
How are social psychologists generally similar to behaviorists?
They both tend to favor experiments and the scientific method.
When Wanda thinks about her childhood, she tends to remember herself as a sickly child. She recalls that she was at home with a cold at least six or seven times a year. However, if we were able to go back in time and see for ourselves, we would probably find that ____.
Wanda was not actually sick that often.
With regard to roles, human beings tend to ____.
adopt and drop roles as the situation calls for it
Which "self" involves decision-making?
agent self
Research on cross-cultural differences in sexuality has found that sex manuals written thousands of years ago in China covered ____ techniques that one would find in a sex manual today.
almost exactly the same
When social psychologist Kurt Lewin said that "there is nothing so practical as a good theory," he meant that ____.
although they may seem impractical, theories can be very important in helping to stimulate practical ideas and practical research
For most people, going to college requires sacrificing immediate comforts and pleasures for the sake of a better future life. That is, for most people, college is ____.
an exercise in delay of gratification
Humans are different from other animals in several different ways. For example, unlike other animals, humans ____.
are able to form groups with multiple roles
Suppose that you are in the market for a new car, and are having trouble deciding between two different models. If you ultimately decide to make your purchase based on the evaluations you read in Consumer Reports, then you are making a decision ____.
based on the deliberate system (rather than the automatic system)
Research suggests that the most effective way to change the self-concept is by ____.
changing the social environment
The idea that nature and culture changed together and shaped each other is known as ____.
co-evolution
The scientific method used by social psychologists is ____.
conceptually the same as the scientific method used by clinical psychologists, biologists, and chemists
Most social psychologists perform research by ____.
conducting experiments
A(n) ____ is someone who works for a researcher by serving as an "actor" in the research (e.g., pretending to be another research participant, and being mean to other research participants in order to see how participants respond to meanness).
confederate
When the effects of two variables cannot be separated, ____ has been said to occur.
confounding
Self-presentation is best defined as any behavior that is ____ intended to make ____ impression on others.
consciously or unconsciously; some sort of
Reliability is to ____ as validity is to ____.
consistency; measuring what something claims to measure
Joe is from a Baptist background. Sarah is from a Lutheran background. They are arguing about whether or not it is "right" to baptize infants into the Christian faith. Even though they disagree on infant baptism, their argument is based on their common belief that the Christian faith is truth. This feature that underlies their argument illustrates what element of culture?
culture as shared ideas
The relative age effect best illustrates ____.
culture interacting with nature
Dr. Puni does not want the participants in his study to be aware of his hypothesis. What will he strive to reduce in his study?
demand characteristics
Sally lives in a middle class neighborhood. It really isn't anything special, but most of Sally's friends live in smaller homes in lower class neighborhoods, so Sally thinks of herself as well-off. When Sally compares her home to the homes of her friends, she is making a(n) ____.
downward social comparison
The social psychological theory known as "social exchange theory" is based MOST obviously on which of the following other social sciences?
economics
Dr. Khanmohamed is conducting a research project with young children to examine the effect of the exposure to different cultural groups on the development of empathy. The independent variable in this research is ____.
exposure to different cultural groups
When researchers have studied delay of gratification using simple tasks with food rewards, they have found that chimpanzees are ____.
far worse at it than humans
The sociometer theory of self-esteem suggests that personal self-esteem ____.
functions as an indicator of how socially acceptable or unacceptable we are
People who are clinically depressed tend to ____.
have an accurate view of who likes them and who doesn't
Suppose that you are a research participant in a laboratory study that is looking at fear and social support. The researcher shows you an extremely scary movie and then asks you whether you feel like talking to anyone (and if so, who) once the movie is over. Although you are in a laboratory setting the whole time, which does not resemble "real life" at all, you become engrossed in the procedures of the study and almost forget that you are in a study. Thus, in your experience, this study is ____.
high in experimental realism and low in mundane realism
Social psychology is best defined as the study of ____.
how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by other people
In the context of research, an operational definition of a variable is a precise description of ____.
how the variable will be manipulated or measured
Your textbook and the study of social psychology is based on the assumption that ____.
human nature has some basic, universal features
"An idea or explanation for something that is based on known facts but not yet proven" is known as a(n) ____.
hypothesis
In speeches about political policies, politicians tend to ____.
ignore trade-offs when they are running for office
According to evolutionary theory, the main reason that males and females have different approaches when it comes to dating and mating is because ____.
males can have many more offspring than females in their lifetimes, with minimal investments of time and energy per offspring
Sarah is taking an African American history class, and she is the only white person in her class (everyone else is African American). Research suggests that, because she is the only white person, she will be ____.
more aware than usual of her whiteness (because it will stand out), and may well perform worse in the class than she would otherwise
The textbook discusses the "self-correcting nature of science" as it applies to social psychology. The idea here is that, over time, erroneous conclusions are revised appropriately, because ____.
most research in social psychology builds off of prior research relatively slowly and systematically
Psychologists who study the automatic versus deliberate systems have recently begun to conclude that the automatic mind does ____ than previously thought and is probably ____ than the conscious mind.
much more; much bigger
The fact that collectivist cultures tend to spring up in places with abundant pathogens but individualist cultures tend to flourish in places with few pathogens best illustrates ____.
nature influencing culture
The automatic system is to ____ as the deliberate system is to ____.
nature; culture
Suppose that Ted and Ed are both very high in public self-awareness. This means that they tend to ____.
pay a lot of attention to how they are perceived by others, and what others might think of them
The overjustification effect occurs when ____.
people are extrinsically rewarded for something they intrinsically enjoy doing
According to your text's analysis of revising self-knowledge, changing the way you think about yourself is difficult because ____.
people around us see us as having stable traits and that exerts pressure to not change
In describing general patterns in human nature, the textbook discusses the notion of "putting people first." This is the idea that most of the time, ____.
people look to other people (rather than the environment) for information
You want to ask your friend Maya to help you with your sorority's float for the competition in the homecoming parade next week. Maya is extremely reliable and trustworthy, but she is totally swamped with her internship and upcoming midterm exams. You decide not to ask her since she might be too busy to follow through. According to Kurt Lewin's analysis of human behavior, knowing that Maya is reliable is an example of "____" information, and knowing she is busy is an example of "____" information.
person; situation
In recent years, the line between social psychology and ____ has become especially blurred.
personality psychology
Johnna is examining how attitudes predict voting behavior. Her research will MOST likely involve an intersection of social psychology and what other social science?
political science
The tendencies for people to overestimate their positive qualities, to see themselves as having more control over external events than they really do, and to have an unrealistically optimistic outlook on life are known as ____.
positive illusions
The term praxis best describes ____.
practical ways of doing things
When people make self-enhancing claims about themselves, they will ____.
present themselves in the best light that they think will reasonably be believed
According to the textbook, the key distinction between philosophy and psychology is the fact that psychology ____.
primarily relies on the scientific method
One of the things that sets culture apart, and is one of its major advantages, is ____.
progress—the ability to store and build upon the knowledge and achievements of previous generations
Social psychologists generally refer to two types of self-awareness: ____.
public self-awareness and private self-awareness
According to the text, the three main parts of the self are ____.
self-knowledge, the agent self, and the interpersonal self
When Jason starts college, he comes from a very conservative religious background. He strongly feels that homosexuality is "wrong" and "immoral," although he has never actually met anyone who is a homosexual. At college, he meets lots of new friends, a few of whom are homosexual. He really enjoys them, and as he spends more time with them he decides, "I must not really think homosexuality is wrong. After all, several of my best friends are gay and I don't think they are immoral." Which theory can BEST explain Jason's change in attitude about homosexuality?
self-perception theory
In the three-part structure of the self, the interpersonal self involves ____.
self-presentation, social roles, and self as relationship partner
The process by which one monitors, controls, and modifies the self is known as ____.
self-regulation
Compared to people with high self-esteem, people with low self-esteem have ____.
similar life goals, but less confidence in themselves
Compared to people with low self-esteem, people with high self-esteem tend to think that they are ____.
smarter and earn better academic grades, but have the same IQ scores
In general, it would be most accurate to say that humans are ____, while other animals are ____.
social and cultural; just social
Jetta wonders how she is doing in her class. At first, she thinks she is doing well because she is getting a "B." Then she finds out that nearly every other person in the class is getting an "A" and she feels less happy. The theory of ____ explains why Jetta feels less happy once she finds out how others are doing in the class, too.
social comparison
Which field is BEST defined as "the study of human societies and the groups that form those societies"?
sociology
Suppose that you are conducting an experiment to see whether receiving negative feedback from an authority figure will increase eating behavior. After writing an essay, half of your research participants are given negative feedback from a professor, and half are given encouraging feedback. All participants are then placed in a room with a large container of cookies and their eating behavior is observed. In this study, an operational definition for the dependent variable might be ____.
the number of cookies each participant ate
The tendency for people to take credit for their successes but blame failures on other people or on outside circumstances is known as ____.
the self-serving bias
In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Norman Triplett built a "competition machine," in which children wind up a fishing reel. He found that the children were able to wind more quickly when ____.
they worked as a group side by side than when they worked alone
Unlike virtually all other animals, humans ____.
will eat or not eat certain foods because of ideas
Based on early research by Norman Triplett, we should expect that children who work on math problems alone will ____ than children who work on math problems side by side with their classmates.
work more slowly
Which of the following is a cultural act (rather than just a social act)?
A group of citizens obeying the state's laws about littering
Who is MOST likely to go vote in an election?
A person who has thought about the importance of being a voter
When are narcissists MOST likely to be aggressive?
After they find out they didn't get a job they really wanted
Ed just stole $50 from his parents. In assessing Ed's motives, which of the following questions would a social psychologist be MOST likely to ask?
Does Ed have friends or other role models who are also stealing?
Suppose that you are conducting a research project for a social psychology class. Due to the fact that you have no budget for the research, you are forced to rely on a college student population. How big of a problem is this in terms of your ability to later generalize your findings to other groups of people?
It is generally not a very serious problem unless you are studying certain topics.
Which statement is MOST accurate?
It would be impossible to function effectively in society without both the deliberate system and the automatic system.
When attempting to explain a person's behavior, what do social psychologists tend to assess first?
The person's situation
What is the best example of praxis in American culture?
The practice of children sleeping in separate rooms from their parents
Which statement is true regarding the phrase "survival of the fittest"?
The term "survival" refers to survival of genes in a population's gene pool.
How has the textbook described the historical relationship between clinical psychology and social psychology?
The two fields have historically exchanged ideas and viewpoints.
Suppose that you want your brother to remember the word "conniving." Would he remember the word better if you asked him if he was ever conniving?
Yes, because of the self-reference effect; regardless of how he answered, your brother would probably remember the word better after associating it with himself.
Most social psychologists today view self-presentation as ____.
a basic and important aspect of human social life, used to gain social acceptance
The Literary Digest poll that predicted Alf Landon would resoundingly win the presidential election when, in fact, Franklin Roosevelt won, was flawed by ____.
a non-random sample
In social psychology, the "ABC triad" consists of ____.
affects, behaviors and cognition
When it comes to conflict, social animals tend to use ____ to resolve conflict.
aggression
Suppose someone has given you $1000 to spend. In general, you will get the most enjoyment if you spend it on ____.
an experience you share with others
Frances has just scheduled an appointment with a personal trainer. She knows she is not in perfect shape, and wants to get a thorough assessment of her strengths and weaknesses. Frances is apparently driven by a strong ____.
appraisal motive
Increasing self-awareness tends to make people ____.
behave in ways that are more consistent with their attitudes
In terms of getting along with other people, compared to people with low self-esteem, people with high self-esteem ____. In fact ____.
believe they are well-liked, people with high and low self-esteem are perceived about equally favorably
A study is said to have internal validity if the researcher can be relatively confident that ____.
changes in the independent variable caused changes in the dependent variable
In one well-known social psychological study, research participants were asked to make very easy perceptual judgments ("Is Line A longer than Line B?"). The catch was that they were asked to do this while sitting around a table with people who continually gave incorrect responses—people who appeared to be other regular research participants. In reality, however, the other people at the table were not real participants at all; they were actually actors who were working for the experimenter and just posing as participants. The question in this research was whether or not the real research participant would conform to the group's opinion (even though the group's opinion was obviously wrong) or whether the real participant would stick to the right answer. In psychological jargon, the "actors" in this study would be referred to as ____.
confederates
What makes humans most unique from other animals is ____.
culture
Compared to other animals' sensory organs, humans' sensory organs are especially good at ____.
distinguishing the faces of two very similar-looking people
Compared to the consistency motive and the appraisal motive, the self-enhancement motive has a more ____ appeal.
emotional
Suppose that a child who was born a biological female were raised as boy (given a male name, dressed in male clothes, etc.). Based on similar cases that have occurred in the past, it would be reasonable to expect that the child would ____.
feel and act "different" from childhood on
Applied researchers are BEST defined as social scientists who ____.
focus on concrete problems—such as how to boost literacy rates or how to increase water conservation
The human brain evolved to be larger than other animals' brains because it allowed humans to ____.
have rich and complex interpersonal relationships
Social psychologists typically derive ____ based on ____.
hypotheses; theories
Vegetarianism is best described as an example of ____.
ideas, or culture, impacting human behavior
Research on self-esteem indicates that ____.
if anything, self-esteem in the U.S. (for everyone) is unrealistically high
If a study is high in internal validity, then the researcher can be fairly certain that changes in the ____ were indeed due to changes in the ____.
independent variable; dependent variable
In general, social psychologists believe that natural selection happens at a(n) ____.
individual level rather than a group level
Probably the best account of the origins of selfhood is that the self comes into being at the interface between ____ and ____.
inner biological processes; a sociocultural network
Jeff is 64 and facing mandatory retirement. As he considers his future, he thinks about how he has mentored new co-workers the way he was once mentored and how co-workers often come to him for advice and to share their triumphs. He thinks about how his work friendships have often become mutually supportive personal friendships and he wonders how those relationships will change when he retires. Jeff has a(n) ____ self-construal.
interdependent
Suppose that a cereal manufacturer tried out a new cereal box design for a few months, and—during the same time period—notices that its sales have tripled. One of the cereal executives, Mr. Correl, boasts that the new cereal box must have sparked the increase in sales. But another executive, Mr. Scien, points out that the increase could be due to the new advertising campaign that the company is using, or to new distribution practices that have taken hold, or to the fact that more and more people are eating cereal these days. That is, Mr. Scien suggests that the company's "test" of the new cereal box design is low in ____.
internal validity
Dr. Tsuei is studying the effects of sleep deprivation on interpersonal skills. He is testing the interpersonal skills of 20-25 year-old males who have been sleep deprived for 24 hours, 36 hours, or 48 hours. In this study, the dependent variable is the ____.
interpersonal skills of the research participants
Marisol is pretty equal in terms of taking the blame for failures and crediting herself for successes. She is also pretty accurate when it comes to judging how much control she has over events in her life. And she has a fairly accurate idea of how much different people like her. Based on this information, it would appear that Marisol ____.
is clinically depressed
How does the self-concept relate to others' perceptions? Research suggests that the self-concept ____.
is very much in line with how people think others regard them, but is very different from how others actually do regard them
Research suggests that pursuing self-esteem as an end in itself tends to ____.
lead to a variety of negative consequences
If an experiment does NOT get participants psychologically involved and engaged, even though the setting of the experiment closely resembles the real world physically, then the experiment would be said to be ____.
low in experimental realism but high in mundane realism
A literature review that averages together the statistical results from different studies conducted on the same topic is called a ____.
meta-analysis
According to the textbook, "common sense" theories about social psychology are ____.
often misleading or contradictory
Molly was born in September, and the age cutoff for going to kindergarten in her school district is turning 5 by August 1st. Based on the relative age effect, Molly will MOST likely be one of the ____.
oldest in her class and therefore have an advantage
Drug rehabilitation programs often require that their patients discontinue contact with old "using" friends, and maintain friendships with new "clean" friends only. One reason that this makes sense from a social psychological standpoint is that by changing their social networks in this way, ____.
patients will have a better shot at creating new, more positive self-concepts
Recall Solomon Asch's famous line-judging studies. In these studies, research subjects were asked to make judgments about unambiguous stimuli. They were asked to do this while in the presence of confederates who consistently gave incorrect responses. According to the textbook, one of the important conclusions to be drawn from Asch's research is that ____.
people look to one another for information—rather than to the environment
In Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) studies on consumers' awareness of purchasing decisions, ____.
people made choices based on whether they saw the product last, but thought they made the choice based on product color or softness
The top research journals in social psychology have substantial overlap, content-wise, with which of the following?
personality psychology
Humans today still benefit from the famous invention of the Wright brothers (the airplane). Even though they have been dead for generations, their basic technology still lives on, and modern aircrafts have built off of and elaborated upon their invention. What best describes this?
progress through preservation of knowledge
Ted tends to think of himself as a workaholic and perfectionist. When he thinks back on college years, he remembers studying hard for exams and getting good grades (and tends to forget about the time he nearly failed a class, and disregard the many nights he spent partying). The way that Ted thinks about his college years illustrates the fact that people ____.
revise or distort their memories to fit their current self-concepts
Suppose that you are a research participant in a study, and a researcher asks you to work on a puzzle while sitting in front of a mirror. He also mentions that your performance will be videotaped. Given these two pieces of information, you would be wise to suspect that the researcher is trying to increase ____.
self-awareness
Vanessa has an important presentation coming up at work, but she fears that she will do a poor job. The week before the presentation, she claims that she is feeling under the weather; she leaves work early almost every day and barely practices her presentation at all. Even though she may not realize what she is doing, Vanessa is setting herself up so that she will have an "excuse" in case the presentation does not go well. Social psychologists refer to this pattern of behavior as ____.
self-handicapping
A correlation coefficient communicates two pieces of information about the relationship between two variables: The ____ communicates the direction of the relationship, and the ____ communicates the strength of the relationship.
sign; value
In recent years, what has emerged as an important subfield of social psychology that explores the ways in which people think about social situations?
social cognition
Laela is interested in studying how our thoughts and behaviors are influenced by the groups to which we belong. Laela's work will MOST closely intersect with which other social science?
sociology
Most of the time, people tend to ____ when they are successful (e.g., when they win a tennis match) and ____ when they are unsuccessful (e.g., when they lose a tennis match).
take credit; blame someone or something else
Consider the following two American adages, which seem to contradict one another: "Birds of a feather flock together" and "opposites attract." The authors of the textbook would probably say that ____.
the contradiction is not surprising at all, since "common sense" theories are often poorly defined, i.e., most people would probably say that both of these things are true (if you asked them at different times)
In order for humans to function effectively in society, ____.
the deliberate mind often needs to override the automatic system
"Social brain theory" states that ____.
the human brain evolved to enable humans to have rich, complex social lives
According to the text, ____ is/are the most important ingredient(s) for facilitating self-concept change.
the interpersonal context and how other people see you
Automatic egotism refers to ____.
the tendency for the automatic system (in most people) to favor self-enhancing thoughts and actions
When it comes to differences in familial sleeping arrangements across cultures, ____.
there are a variety of different sleeping arrangements across cultures
Research on cultural differences indicates that ____.
they more often reflect differences in degree, such as the extent to which formal education is valued, than opposites
Compared to animals such as birds, humans have ____.
to figure out what others in their species prefer and expect of them
The self-reference effect refers to the tendency for people ____.
to process information about the self more thoroughly and deeply than other types of information
Research on self-esteem and sexuality suggests that, for young women, high self-esteem is related to ____.
underestimating the dangers of risky sexual behaviors
Suppose that you are a terrible athlete, you were born with asthma, and you are a fantastic poker player. Research suggests that, if you have the same tendencies as most people, you would probably think that ____.
your gift for poker is rarer than it really is
