Social Psych Midterm
Social Comparison
Social comparison occurs when we learn about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others
What is the self?
The self concept Who am I? Self complexity and self concept clarity
The Source or the Message
The source is more persuasive if the issue has low personal relevance -The source amplifies the argument quality
Downward Social Comparison
a comparison of the self to another who does less well than or is inferior to us -Downward social comparison occurs when we attempt to create a positive image of ourselves through favorable comparisons with others who are worse off than we are.
Self-evaluation maintenance theory
asserts that our self-esteem can be threatened when someone else outperforms us, particularly if that person is close to us and the performance domain is central to our selfconcept
Social Identity Theory
asserts that we draw part of our sense of identity and self-esteem from the social groups that we belong to
Dispositional Attribution
assuming that another's behavior is due to personality factors, not situational ones -attribution that the behavior was caused primarily by the person
Culture
"A shared way of life of a group of people" -"The collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
Why is Culture Important?
"Culture is like the water surrounding a fish." -Mainstream psychology tends to be culturebound and culture-blind -We are all grounded in particular cultural worlds that may seem so natural to us that we are blind to it
Implicit Attitudes
Unconscious associations between objects and evaluative responses
How do others persuade us to change our attitudes? The Source...
- We're • More persuaded by attractive communicators • More persuaded by people who are similar to us (in terms of values and beliefs) • More persuaded by expert communicators, and those who speak confidently, quickly and in a straightforward way
How Do Others Persuade Us?
-Advertisement is a really successful case of other people changing our attitudes through persuasion -Marketing used both peripheral and central routes to persuade others -Both the source and quality of a message determines how much it will change our attitudes towards the object
Non Verbal Behavior Summary
-An important aspect of interpersonal communication happens through nonverbal behavior -We are pretty good at picking these NVB cues up from minimal exposure (i.e., thin slices of behavior -Nonverbal behavior can signal who is of higher rank, and we base our status judgments on these cues
Reflected Glory
-Participants described their performance using "we" more frequently after personal failure: -This suggests that we can gain self-esteem by perceiving ourselves as members of important and valued groups that make us feel good about ourselves
Cognitive Dissonance
-People are generally motivated to perceive consistency between their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours -When people become aware of inconsistency between how they think and act, they experience dissonance -Motivates attempts to achieve re-alignment -Alignment can be achieved by: 1. Changing behavior so it is consistent with attitudes 2. Change attitudes so they fit behavior
Realistic Conflict Theory
-Realistic conflict theory states that whenever there are two or more groups that are seeking the same limited resources, this will lead to conflict, negative stereotypes and beliefs, and discrimination between the groups. -Ex The collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Studios to share the costs of animated movies (before Disney purchased Pixar in 2006) is an example of a realistic conflict theory in the movie industry.
Social Psychology
-Social psychology involves the use of scientific methods to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others -The scientific study of the reciprocal influence of the individual and his or her social context
Implicit Association Task (IAT)
-The IAT is thought to measure implicit attitudes by examining the automatic associations between various attitude objects and various evaluative attributes -The IAT measures how closely associated any given attitude object (e.g., a candy or an fruit) is with an evaluative attribute (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant words) and assumes that the more closely related the objects and attributes are, the stronger the implicit attitude is
Is our social cognition biased?
We often use short-cuts when we think Availability heuristics Anchoring heuristics
How We Feel About Ourselves Summary
-We have a self-concept that includes knowledge about who we are (as a person, in our relationships, and in public). It is layered, multifaceted and context dependent (it even changes across cultures) -We learn about who we are through direct access to other self-concept (both in terms of inner private and public self) -We have different strategies to maintain positive selfviews when faces with negative feedback (e.g. downward comparison, basking in reflected glory)
Detecting Deception
-Why is difficult to detect liars? • we expect people to tell the truth, and we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt (Buller, et al., 1996; Gilbert, et al., 1990) • people are pretty good liars, the cues that liars give off are quite faint, particularly when the lies that they are telling are not all that important (DePaulo et al., 2003) • difficult for us to detect liars is that we tend to think we are better at catching lies than we actually are
Implicit Attitudes
-attitudes often exist outside of conscious awareness and control -shape people's automatic reactions to attitude objects and to thereby shape their subsequent interactions with them
The Message
-persuasion is particularly effective when people are happy or when it makes people happy -fearful messages can be persuasive as emotional aspects of the ads make them salient and lead us to attend to and remember them -fearful messages may create a lot of anxiety and therefore turn people off to the message -Although laboratory studies generally find that fearful messages are effective in persuasion, they may be less useful in real-world advertising campaigns -The message is more persuasive if the issue has high personal relevance
Self Enhancement vs. Self Verification
-states that people often seek confirmation of their self-concept, whether it is positive or negative (Swann, 1983) -When we are seeking out close relationships, we more often form them with others who verify our self-views. We also tend to feel more satisfied with interactions with self-verifying partners than those who are always positive toward us
ABC of Attitudes
Affect:, Behavioral, and Cognitive
Dissonance & Culture
After receiving negative feedback, Canadians show the strongest post-decisional dissonanc
Social Comparison Experiment
But they trusted in their skill to win $10 in particular when knowing they were better than average (Social comparison) Participants used both absolute (own ability) and relative (social comparison) when judging their ability:
Post Decisional Dissonance
AKA Buyers Remorse -the feeling of regret that may occur after we make an important decision -The principles of dissonance predict that once we make the decision—and regardless of which product we choose—we will convince yourself that you made the right choice -• We think more about the positive aspects of the choice that we have and at the same time you will likely downplay the values of the smaller car. -Post-decisional dissonance occurs when we reduce our attitudes for non-chosen items
Attitudes
An attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour
Cognitive Dissonance Definition
An internal state that results when individuals notice inconsistency between two or more attitudes or between their attitudes and their behaviour -The more dissonance participants experienced (small payment), the more they changed their attitude and behavioral intentio
Upward Social Comparison
a comparison of the self to another who does better than or is superior to us
Attitudes Shape Behavior
Attitudes are made up of affective, behavioral, and cognitive components • Attitudes influence behavior through intentions • Intention plans can help to increase our perceived behavioral control
Attitudes and Behavior
Attitudes really do affect behavior but the strength of this link is determined by: -situational constraints do permit us to overtly express our attitudes • attitude extremity, i.e., when we have a vested interest in the issue • attitude clarity, i.e. when attitudes are clear and experienced as correct • personal experience with the attitude object or perceive it as relevant to our important values
Attributions Summary
Attributions can be made to dispositional or situational causes • A fundamental attribution error occurs when we attribute behavior to internal causes and overlook the impact of the situation • The fundamental attribution error is more prevalent in Western than East Asian cultures, perhaps because the latter pay more holistic attention
Glass Ceiling
Barriers based on attitudinal or organizational bias that prevent qualified females from advancing to top-level positions -when women violate stereotypic expectancies concerning warmth and nurturance, and instead act according to the prototype of a leader, particularly in masculine domains, they are likely to face hostility and rejection (Bowles, 2013; Glick & Rudman, 2010) • violations of stereotype-based expectancies by women in the workplace appear to evoke threat in some men, particularly among those inclined to sexually harass
The Sociogram Task
Comparing relative size of the self-circle to the average size of the friend circles • Larger self-circle greater cognitive salience • Americans' self-circle were greater than Western Europeans' (British and Germans), which were greater than Japanese • Independent self's motive for self-inflation
Explicit Attitudes
Consciously accessible attitudes that are controllable and easy to report
Covariation Theory
Consistency, Distinctiveness, Consensus
Attributions
Causal, Dispositional, Situational
Glass Cliff
Choosing women for leadership positions that are risky, precarious, or when the outcome is more likely to result in failure -Women are more likely to gain admittance to valued leadership positions when a crisis has occurred
Discrimination
Glass Ceiling, Glass Cliff
Thinking Unconsciously
Immediate decision: all five posters appeared on the screen simultaneously and participants were requested to indicate which one they liked most. Conscious thought: each poster appeared on the screen individually for 90 s. Participants look at each poster again carefully, and to list reasons for why they liked or disliked each poster and to carefully analyze their preferences. Unconscious thought: participants solved anagrams for 450 s, after which all posters appeared on the screen simultaneously again and participants were asked to indicate which one they liked most.
Impression Formation
Impression formation is the process through which we form impressions of others -Infants prefer to look at faces of people more than they do other visual patterns, and children quickly learn to identify people and their emotional expressions -Adults identify and remember a potentially unlimited number of people -We form impressions of those others quickly and without much effort, and our first impressions are, at least in some cases, remarkably accurate (
Who we are depends on our culture
In fact, bi-cultural individuals emphasise different things depending on what language they use to answer the question
Pathogen Prevalence Hypothesis
In regions with high pathogen prevalence, collectivistic attitudes and behaviours may serve an anti-pathogen defence function
Culture and Attribution
Individuals from East Asian / South Asian cultures make less dispositional but more situational attributions:
Theory of Planned Behavior
Key variables that affect the attitude-behavior link: (a) the attitude toward the behavior (the stronger the better) (b) subjective norms (the support of those we value) (c) perceived behavioral control (the extent to which we believe we can actually perform the behavior)
The Process Model of Stereotype Threat
Members of any group can be vulnerable to performing less favorably when a salient comparison group is expected to perform better at a task. -Stereotype threat can undermine performance in dominant group members as well, when they fear a negative comparison with members of another group that is expected to outperform them. -Stereotype threat research reveals how our group memberships can affect our self-concepts and performance on tasks we care deeply about.
Non Verbal Behacior NBV
Nonverbal Behavior is any type of communication that does not involve speaking Basic Channels of Nonverbal Communication - Facial expressions - Eye contact - Voice Pattern - Body language - Touching - Interpersonal Distance
The Self Concept
Our sense of personal identity and who we are as individuals -The self-concept is a knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals
Ingroup Favoritism
Participants preferred to maximize the gains of the boys in their own group in comparison with the boys in the outgroup, even if doing so meant giving their own group members fewer points than they could otherwise have received. -This is especially the case in the perception of inequalities between dominant and privileged and non-privileged social groups (Wellman et al. 2016) • white Americans underestimate how much discrimination and racial inequality they perceive to be present in employment wages (Miron et al., 2011). • whites perceive less racism in many everyday events than do blacks
Downward Social Comparison Experiment
Participants' self-esteem increased when they engaged in downward comparison: -Asian Canadians made more upward social comparisons than did European Canadians, particularly following failures and when the opportunity to self-improve was made salient -Older adults tend to make more downward comparisons than do younger adults, which is part of the reason why their self-esteem is typically higher -Older adults also use more downward social comparisons to cope with feelings of regret than do younger adults
Person Perception
Person perception is the process of learning about other people
The Twenty Statements Test
Physical characteristics (e.g., attractive, overweight, blond) • Personality Traits (e.g., friendly, persistent, hard-working) • Social Identities (e.g., husband, scientist) • Social Categories (e.g., French, Jewish)
Prejudice Summary
Prejudice is the unjustified negative attitude toward an individual based solely on that individual's membership in a group • We develop prejudice when we compete with another group over scarce resources • Creating minimal groups is sufficient to create prejudice and discrimination
Economic Subsistence
Rice Farming-requires intense labour and cooperation -> greater collectivism Wheat farming doesn't require as much cooperation -> greater individualism
Two Modes of Processing
Some theories classify processing strictly as either controlled or automatic, while other theories regard it as a gradual transition between the two
Stereotype Summary
Stereotypes are positive or negative beliefs that we hold about the characteristics of social group (knowledge structure) • Stereotype Content Model illustrates how we describe groups along the dimensions of warmth and competence • Stereotype Threat impedes our performance when we are the targets of stereotypes
Cultural Differences are habitual ways of thinking and acting
Structure and culture afford different form of habitual forms of cognition and behavior adapted to people's immediate environments (institutions, organisations, ecologies) Contemporary explanations of the origin of cultural differences include: • Pathogen Prevalence Hypothesis • Economic Subsistence Hypothesis • Voluntary Settlement Hypothesis • Historical-philosophical Tradition
Distinctiveness
The extent to which an individual responds in the same manner to different stimuli or events. ("I only cry at weddings but not at any other time, including funerals")
Consistency
The extent to which an individual responds to a given stimulus or situation in the same way on different occasions (e.g., "For instance, if I always start to cry at weddings, then it seems as if the wedding is the cause of my crying."
Consensus
The extent to which other people react to some stimulus or event in the same manner as the person we are considering (e.g., "many people cry at weddings"
IAT Process
The faster you respond, the more positive association you have: Individuals who respond more quickly when pleasant and fruit are paired on the same response key than when pleasant and candy are paired together are said to have more positive associations toward fruit than toward candy.
Attitude Strength
The importance of an attitude, as assessed by how quickly it comes to mind -strong attitudes may guide our actions completely out of our awareness (Ferguson, et al. 2005) • attitudes become stronger when we have direct positive or negative experiences with the attitude object (Fazio, et al. 1983) • after people think about their attitudes, talk about them, or just say them out loud, the attitudes they have expressed become stronger (Tesser, et al., 1995)
Independent Self Concept
The independent view of the self derives its identity from inner attributes with the following characteristics: • Distinct from their relationships • Stable across situations • Unique, self-contained, and coherent • Fluid between ingroups and outgroup Relationships can be formed and dissolved relatively more easily, with less impact on selfidentity. • People are more willing to form new social connections and maintain larger networks. • They are also less distressed when relationships fade over time. • The ingroup-outgroup boundary is more fluid and permeable.
Interdependent View of the Self
The interdependent view of the self is a relational entity that is fundamentally connected to important relationships with the following characteristics: • Defined by social relationships and roles • Flexible across situations and roles • Not bounded or separate from others and context • Clear ingroup-outgroup distinction Ingroup-outgroup distinctions are crucial to determining to whom people have obligations. • It is difficult to get into a person's ingroup. • It is rare for ingroup member to lose status and fall into the outgroup. • Ingroup-outgroup boundaries are stable.
Thin slices of NVB
Thin Slices are small amounts of information about others we use to form first impressions of them -first impressions are reasonably accurate
Or is our thinking efficiently attuned to social contexts?
Two modes of processing The benefits of thinking unconsciously Cultures are habitual ways of thinking and acting
Hofstede's Value Dimensions
Values: what you think is desirable or important in life -Hofstede collected data from over 100,000 IBM employees in over 50 countries in the 1960s and 70s -4 cross-cultural value dimensions: • Individualism vs collectivism • power distance • uncertainty avoidance • masculinity vs femininity -Individualism vs. Collectivism
Stereotypes, Prejudice, & Discrimination Summary
We all hold positive or negative beliefs about each other's social groups, which can be more or less accurate (stereotypes) • Being divided into groups (in particular under conditions of intergroup competition) can provoke negative attitudes and discriminating actions toward an individual based on that individual's group membership • It is important to think about why, under certain conditions, minority group members are suddenly granted access to leadership positions (cf class cliff, tokenism)
Social Perception Summary
We are pretty good at forming quick, effortless, and mostly accurate first impressions of others to understand who they are • An important aspect of interpersonal communication happens through nonverbal behavior; they help us understand who another person is • We base our judgments of who another person is on attributions focusing on either dispositional or situational causes, and sometimes we commit a fundamental attribution error
Both internal and External
We attribute another's behaviour to both internal and external where pattern of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness does not fall into either of these two options
Impression Formation
We can change First Impressions if we search for new information:
When do we change our attitudes
We experience cognitive dissonance if 2 attitudes or attitude/behavior are inconsistent • It's easier to change our attitude than behavior (e.g., post-decisional dissonance) • Westerners experience more cognitive dissonance than East Asians (and in particular after threats to their self-steem)
Self Concept Summary
We have a self-concept that includes knowledge about who we are (as a person, in our relationships, and in public) • The self is layered, multifaceted and context dependent (it even changes across cultures) • Both self-complexity and self-concept clarity are beneficial, but they can pull us in opposing directions
Knowing who we are summary
We learn about who we are through direct access to other self-concept (both in terms of inner private and public self) • When made self-aware, we are more selfcritical and norm-abiding • We learn about who we are from comparing ourselves to others (looking-glass self)
Correspondence Bias
When we attribute behaviors to people's internal characteristics, even in heavily constrained situations
Fundamental Attribution Error
When we tend to overestimate the role of person factors and overlook the impact of situations
Who am I?
Who we are also depends on the social context... • aspects of the self might be especially relevant to a particular social context • features of the context can make one aspect of the self highly distinctive, with that aspect of identity forming the basis of self-perception • other people, including how they refer to us linguistically, can cue us to think of ourselves in personal-versus-social identity terms
The Self Concept
William James (1890) -"I" and "Me"
Pre-giving technique
a charitable organization might mail you a small, unsolicited gift, followed by a request for a monetary donation
Anchoring Heuristics
a heuristic that involves the tendency to use a number of values as a starting point to which we then make adjustments Portion Size Effect: The tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than if a smaller portion is received. Portion size acts as a starting point (anchor) for how much food is perceived to be appropriate to eat
Correlational/ Cross Sectional Method
a method of research in which a scientist systematically observes/measures two or more variables to determine whether changes in one are accompanied by changes in the other
Longitudinal Method
a method of research in which a scientist systematically observes/measures two or more variables to determine whether changes in one precede accompanied changes in the other
Observation
a method of research in which behavior is systematically observed and recorded
Experimentation
a method of research in which one or more factors are systematically changed to determine whether such variations affect one or more outcome variables/measures
Availability Heuristics
a strategy for making judgments on the basis of how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind -Example Participants judged themselves as more assertive when the recall of assertive behavior was easy (i.e., 6 examples)
Prejudice
an unjustifiable negative attitude toward an outgroup or toward the members of that outgroup. e.g., "I dislike the Germans" (also anger, fear, or hatred)
Situational Attribution
attributing behavior to the environment -attribution that the behavior was caused primarily by the situation
We infer internal causes of behavior
consensus and distinctiveness are low, but consistency is high.
External Causes of behavior
consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness are all high.
Self Concept Clarity
higher self-concept clarity is positively related to self-esteem (Campbell et al., 1996) • higher self-concept clarity mediates the relationship between stress and well-being (Ritchie et al., 2011) • higher self-concept clarity predicts greater understanding and satisfaction in romantic relationships (Lewandowski et al., 2010)
Implicit Culture
intangible, unobservable aspects that can often be inferred from selfreport measures • Exist inside the mind of individuals
Collectivism
interests of the in-group are more important than personal interests
The "Me"
is the knowledge I have about myself, or the self-concept (self as object)
Causal Attribution
linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for a behavior -the process of trying to determine the causes of people's behavior
Semantic task condition
memory processing method in which one determines if the word was a synonym of another word
Phonemic task condition
memory processing method in which one determines whether or not the word rhymed with another given word
Self-reference task condition
memory processing method in which one indicates whether or not the given adjective was or was not true of oneself
Structural Task Condition
memory processing method in which one judges whether the word was printed in uppercase or lowercase letters
Stereotype Threat
occurs when people believe they might be judged in light of a negative stereotype about their social identity and that they may inadvertently act in some way to confirm a negative stereotype of their group -Ex: African American verbal test scores were reduced when being reminded of their ethnic group membership: -Women math test scores were reduced when being reminder of the test assessing gender differences:
Moderation Model
occurs when the relationship between two variables depends on a third variable. The third variable is referred to as the moderator variable
The Looking Glass Self
part of how we see ourselves comes from our perception of how others see us (Cooley, 1902) -Our self concept is shaped in important ways by other people: -> How we imagine ourselves in their eyes -> What we think they see -> How they treat us -The self is both inside-out and outside-in
Mediation Model
seeks to identify and explain the mechanism or process that underlies an observed relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable via the inclusion of a third variable, known as a mediator variable
Indivisualism
personal interests are more important than group interests
The "I"
refers to the fact that I can be reflexively aware of myself (self as subject)
Public self-consciousness
refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and the extent to which we are meeting the standards set by others
Private self consciousness
refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings
Explicit Culture
tangible, concrete, observable aspects of culture • Exist outside the individual
Self Reference Effect
tendency to better remember information relevant to ourselves
Field Independence
tendency to separate objects from the background, which is more prevalent amongst individuals with a Western cultural background
Field Dependence
tendency to view objects as bound to the background, which is more prevalent amongst individuals with an East Asian cultural background
Self Complexity
the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves -people higher in self-complexity tend to experience more positive outcomes, including higher levels of self-esteem (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002) • people higher in self-complexity tend to experience lower levels of stress and illness (Kalthoff & Neimeyer, 1993) • people higher in self-complexity tend to experience a greater tolerance for frustration (Gramzow, et al 2000)
Self Awareness
the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept (
Halo Effect
the influence of a global positive evaluation of a person on perceptions of their specific traits
Self Esteem
the positive (high self-esteem) or negative (low self- esteem) feelings that we have about ourselves - We experience the positive feelings of high self-esteem when we believe that we are good and worthy and that others view us positively -We experience the negative feelings of low self-esteem when we believe that we are inadequate and less worthy than others -Self-esteem is in part a trait that is stable over time, with some people having relatively high self-esteem and others having lower self-esteem. But self-esteem is also a state that varies day to day and even hour to hour
Stereotype
the positive or negative beliefs that we hold about the characteristics of social group (knowledge structure) e.g., "French people are romantic" -pictures in the head -an exaggerated belief associated with a category
Recency Effect
the tendency for information that comes later to be given more weight
Primacy Effect
the tendency for information that we learn first to be weighted more heavily than information that we learn later
Dependent Variable
the variable that is measured in an experiment
Independent Variable
the variable that is systematically changed (varied) in an experiment
Stereotypes are more than just traits:
they include physical appearance, abilities, behaviors Stereotypes can be: • positive/negative • accurate/inaccurate • agreed/rejected by group members who are stereotyped • must be agreed on by some majority of the people (i.e., socially shared)
Discrimination
unjustified negative behaviors toward members of outgroups based on their group membership. e.g., "I am not going to hire 'Mohammed'"
Hypothesis
unverified prediction concerning some aspect of social behaviour or thought
Foot in the Door Technique (persuasion)
we first get the target to accept a rather minor request, and then we ask for a larger request.
Bait-and-switch technique
which occurs when someone advertises a product at a very low price. When you visit the store to buy the product, however, you learn that the product you wanted at the low price has been sold out
