Areas Flashcards
(21 cards)
Which studies are part of the Social Area?
Milgram, Bocchiaro, Piliavin, Levine
What is the Social Area?
The social area is concerned with the interactions between people; looks for explanations of behaviour in terms of social communication, judgements and relationships.
What are the key concepts in the social area?
- Self perception
- Social perception
- Social interaction
- Social influence
What is self-perception?
How we see ourselves (assessed by self report). One problem with these is that the participant wants to be seen by others and not direct information on how they see themselves.
What is social perception?
People have different perceptions on how why things happened the way they did, as they have different thought-processes and experiences leading them to perceive this way.
What is social interaction?
Looks to understand people in the context of their interactions with others. This is difficult to investigate as there are many things happening between people in any interaction (hard to pick out the most important factor)
What is social influence?
The idea that individuals adapt their opinion, beliefs, behaviour as a result of social interactions. This can raise ethical problems in research as it looks to ‘change’ behaviours without them knowing
Which other area is the social area similar to?
The developmental area
Which other area is the social area similar to and why?
The developmental area as they both:
- Share methods and approaches to the study of people
- Try to build up models of social behaviour
- Focus on the whole person; their cognition, emotion and behaviour
Which other areas are different to the social area and why?
The Biological and Cognitive area, as they use traditional science techniques such as biology and chemistry
What are strengths of the social area?
- Well-controlled research can be conducted (eg. Bocchiaro), meaning valid conclusions can be drawn as extraneous variables are controlled
- Social phenomena are important to our everyday lives- other people have powerful effects on our behaviour. They provide insights to our behaviour towards others and influence
What are weaknesses of the social area?
- Tightly controlled studies may not reflect human interactions because they are affected by some many variables at the same time. Unfamiliar natures may reduce validity
- Conclusions may be ethnocentric as this is inevitable in social research as it is social
Which studies are part of the cognitive area?
Loftus and Palmer, Grant, Moray, Simons and Chabris
What are the key concepts in the cognitive area?
- The computer metaphor
- Matching with the results from neuroscience
- Experimentation
- Relevance to everyday life
What is the computer metaphor?
The idea that we can study the human mind by comparing it to the processes of machines.
What is matching with the results from neuroscience?
Based on models of how we think and perceive the world, which are commonly shown as diagrams of boxes in the head.
What is relevance to everyday life?
The tasks in the studies of cognitive area mainly deals with abstract tasks in unreal situations. This decreases the validity of the study because of low mundane realism as it is artificial and not applicable to daily life
Which other area/perspectives in the cognitive area similar to?
Biological area
Which other area/perspectives in the cognitive area similar to and why?
The biological area as they both:
— Consider what is going on inside the brain rather than just looking at behaviour
What are the strengths of the cognitive area?
— Single variables can be isolated and tested through manipulation of the variable, therefore enabling conclusions of cause and effect links to be drawn
— Well controlled research, creating high internal validity. Procedures are standardised enabling easy replication to confirm results
What are the weaknesses of the cognitive area?
— Often lacks mundane realism as tasks are contrived. Lacks emotional involvement as tasks are not real
— Can be mechanistic as human thinking is represented by behaviour of a machine
