Chapter 13 Flashcards
(75 cards)
social psychology
The study of how people think about, influence, and relate to other people.
2 features of social psychology
- Connection to real life events
- Reliance on experimental methods
Social psychology’s connection to real life events
Emergence occurred after the civil war - topics of racism, prejudice, stereotypes were central topics
WW2 - used to understand the events that led to the war + the rise of the Nazis
Social psychologists are likely to manipulate
an independent variable to draw causal conclusions about its effects on some outcome
bystander effect
The tendency of an individual who observes an emergency to help less when other people are present than when the observer is alone.
Darley and Latane’s 5 steps to helping in an emergency
- Notice the event
- Understand that it is an emergency
- Take responsibility for aiding the victim
- Know how to help
- Help
Why does the bystander effect occur
Presence of other people appears to short circuit the process of aiding in an emergency at some point
- People may use other people as guide for behaviour (if others are not helping, they shouldn’t help either)
- Presence of others have the effect of draining responsibility from the person
Social psychologists often focus on the
Immediate social situation to understand what causes people to behave as they do
social cognition
The area of social psychology that explores how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information.
Person perception
Refers to the processes by which we use social stimuli to form impressions of others
Important social cue
The face - we automatically process information about how trustworthy a person is likely to be
stereotype
A generalization about a group’s characteristics that does not consider any variations from one individual to another
self-fulfilling prophecy
belief or expectation about a person or event leads to behaviors that ultimately make the belief or expectation come true
- Teacher believing a student will fail so they do not provide attention to student, resulting in failure
Why are first impressions so powerful
Primacy effect: the tendency to attend to and remember what they learned first
Attribution
The process by which we come to understand the causes of others’ behaviour and form an impression of them as individuals
- explanation of the causes of behaviour
attribution theory
The view that people are motivated to discover the underlying causes of behaviour as part of their effort to make sense of the behaviour
Attributions vary along three dimensions
Internal/external causes: Internal - person such as their traits and abilities. External - social pressure
Stable/unstable causes: Whether the cause of the behaviour is relatively enduring and permanent or temporary influences attributions - was car honked because person is hostile or if they were in a hurry that day?
Controllable/uncontrollable causes: People have power over some causes but not others
Actor vs observer
Actor: Produces the behaviour to be explained
Observer: Offers a causal explanation of the actor’s behaviour
fundamental attribution error
Observers’ overestimation of the importance of internal traits and underestimation of the importance of external situations when they seek explanations of an actor’s behaviour
representativeness heuristic
The tendency to make judgments about group membership based on physical appearance or the match between a person and one’s stereotype of a group, rather than on available base rate information
One common heuristic
false consensus effect: A person’s overestimation of the degree to which everybody else thinks or acts the way the person does
Individuals with high self esteem often possess a variety of
positive illusions: Favourable views of the self that are not necessarily rooted in reality.
self-serving bias
The tendency to take credit for one’s successes and to deny responsibility for one’s failures
self-objectification
The tendency to see oneself primarily as an object in the eyes of others.
