Chapter 1 Flashcards
An interdisciplinary subfield that focuses on how psychology - particularly social and cognitive psychology - relates to economic decision making.
Behavioural economics
A subfield of psychology that examines the role of genetic factors in behavior.
Behavioral genetics.
Research designed to compare and contrast people of different cultures.
Cross-cultural research
A system of enduring meaninigns, beliefs, values, assumptions, institutions, and practices shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Culture
A subfiled of psychology that uses the principles of evolution to understand human social behavior.
Evolutionary Psychology.
An emphasis on how both an individuals personality and environmental characteristics influence behavior.
Interactionist perspective.
Research designed to examine racial and ethnic groups within cultures.
Multicultural research.
A movement to make research materials, methods, hypotheses and data more transparent, accessible and easily shared with researchers from other labs.
Open science.
The study of how people perceive, remember, and interpret information about themselves and others.
Social cognition.
The study of the relationship between neural and social processes.
Social neuroscience.
The scientific study of how individuals think, feels, and behave in a social context.
Social Psychology.
Define social psychology.
The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context.
Provide two questions from your daily life that social psychologists are trying to answer.
- Why do we often like what we suffer for?
- How do salespeople sometimes trick us into buying things we never really wanted?
How is social psychology different from other social sciences such as sociology?
Social psychology is the study of how individuals relate to and try to function within broader society, whereas sociology looks at the ways entire groups function within society.
Provide several examples of common-sense sayings about human behaviours in social situations.
- Beauty and brains don’t mix.
- People will like an activity more if you offer a large reward for doing it, causing them to associate the actvitiyy with psotive reinforcment.
- People think that htey’re more unique than they really are.
- Playing contact sports of violent video games releases aggression and makes people less likely to vent their anger in violent ways.
Describe how social-psychological findings may be distinguished from common-sense or traditional folk wisdom.
Social psychology, unlike common sense, uses the scientific method to put its theories to the test.
List the major periods in the history of social psychology.
The birth and infancy of social psychology - 1880 to 1920’s
A call to action 1930-1950’s
Confidence and crisis - 1960’s to mid 1970’s.
An era of pluralism - mid 1970’s to 2000’s
Briefly describe the birth and infancy of social psychology. Who are considered to be the founders of social psychology? When did the field of social psychology become a distinct field of psychology?
Some credit Normal Triplett for having published the first research article in social psychology at the end of the nineteenth century for having published the first research article in social psychology.
Max Ringlemann who studied the effects of individuals performing worse on simple tasks such as pulling rope when they performed the task with other people. (Social loafing).
Social psychology became a distinct field of study when William Macdougall, Edward Ross, and Floyd Allport published the first textbook on social psychology.
What was the main focus of social-psychological research from the 1930s to the 1950s?
The primary study was the investigation of how to protect soldiers from the propoganda of the enemy, how to persuade citizens to support the war effort, how to select officers for various positions, and other practical issues. During and after the war, social psychologists sought to understand the prejudice, aggression, and conformity the war had brought to light.
Describe Kurt Lewin’s contributions to social psychology.
Interactionist perspective: An emphasis on how both and individuals personality and environmental characteristics influence behaviour.
Lewin established the interactionist perspective, which emphasized a dynamic interplay between that of internal and external factors, and it marked a sharp contrast from other major psychological paradigms during his lifetime: psychoanalysis, with its empahsis on internal motives and fantasies, and behaviorism, with its focus on external rewards and punishments.
Explain why the 1960s to the mid-1970s was a period of confidence and crisis for social psychology.
Social psychology entered a period of expansion and enthusiasm. The sheer range of investigations was staggering. The field as a whole was a great time of productivity.
However, the laboratory experiment was one of heated debate. Many critics of this method asserted that certain practice were unethical, the experimenters expectation influenced their participants behavior, and that the theories being tested in the laboratory were historically and culturally limited.
How was the crisis in social psychology resolved in the mid-1970s to the 1990s?
More rigourous ethical standards for research were instituted, more stringent procedures to guard against bias were adopted, and more attention was paid to possible cross cultural differences in behavior.
Laboratory experiments did however get some company. A pluralistic approach emerged as a wider range of research techniques and questions became established.
Describe how emotion, motivation, and cognition perspectives are integrated in social-psychology research today.
Social cognition research in the 1970’s and 1980’s was “cold” as it emphasized the role of conigition and deemphasized emotiona and motivation in explaining social psychological issues. This was contrasted with the “hot” perspective, focusing on emotiona and motivation as determinants of our thoughts and actions.
Today, there is a growing interest in integrating both “hot” and “cold” perspectives.”
Describe the genetic and the evolutionary perspectives in social-psychological research.
Behavioural genetics is a subfield of psychology that examines the effects of genes on behavior; this has triggered new research to investigate such matters as the extent to which political attitudes are at least partially inherited and the roles that genes play in individual sexual orientation or identity.
Evolutionary psychology uses the principle of evolution to understand human behavior. Evolutionary psychological theories can then be used to explain and predict gender difference in attraction, the situational factors most likely to trigger jealousy, and so on.
