chapter 13: social psychology 1

Question 1

social psychology

Answer 1

the subfield of psychology that deals most explicitly with how we view one another and are influenced by one another

Question 2

person perception

Answer 2

the process by which we perceive and understand one another and ourselves + attitudes + evaluative beliefs that we have about our social world and the entities within in + effects that those perceptions and beliefs have on our emotions and actions

Question 3

what did fritz heider say

Answer 3

that human beings are natural psychologists - naturally come to understand the psychological world, make remarkably accurate observations and judgements about other people’s behavior

Question 4

why are social psychologists interested in biases

Answer 4

clues about mental processes that contribute to accurate and inaccurate perceptions and judgements (analogous to interest in visual illusions), can promote social justice by helping people understand psychological tendencies that contribute to prejudice and unfair treatment of other people

Question 5

attribution

Answer 5

any claim about the cause of somebody’s behavior

Question 6

person bias in attribution

Answer 6

Heider - people tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situation

Question 7

person bias in students experiment

Answer 7

college students listened to a student who was assigned to read a political statement written by someone else - even when they see that the reader chosen at random, observers rated the reader as politically liberal/conservative based on the text

Question 8

how does a person’s social role have undue effects on the attributions that others make about that person

Answer 8

when we observe a police officer, nurse, teacher - accord with the person bias, attribute the action to the individual’s personality and ignore the constraints that the role places

Question 9

manager/clerk experiment

Answer 9

volunteers randomly assigned to clerk/manager - managers got interesting tasks, clerks given routine boring tasks - those in manager roles judged more positively, higher in leadership, intelligence, assertiveness, supportiveness, and likelihood future success
the bias didn’t hold when subjects rated themselves

Question 10

fundamental attribution error

Answer 10

by the mid 1970s, the person bias was called fundamental attribution by Lee Ross - underlies other psychology phenomena

Question 11

when are person more likely to show the person bias

Answer 11

people much more likely to make errors if their minds are occupied by other tasks or if they’re tired, research subjects who’re told that their task is to judge someone’s personality are much more likely to exhibit the person bias than those who’re told to explain the observed behavior in whatever terms

Question 12

when did social psychologists stop just studying the West

Answer 12

1980s

Question 13

US vs India person bias

Answer 13

think of an action by someone they knew and then explain why the person acted in that way - Americans made more attributions to personality and fewer to the situation, the difference greater for adults

Question 14

explanations for cultural differences in person bias

Answer 14

language, genes but most likely explanation is social orientation - Western cultures emphasize personal independence, Eastern cultures emphasize greater interdependence

Question 15

the two most researched biases in facial features

Answer 15

attractiveness bias and the baby face bias

Question 16

attractiveness bias

Answer 16

physically attractive people are commonly judged as more intelligent, competent, sociable and moral

Question 17

attractiveness bias in teachers

Answer 17

fifth-grade teachers were given report cards and photos of children and asked to rate each child’s intelligence and achievement - rated physically attractive children as more intelligent when the grades are the same

Question 18

attractiveness bias in judges

Answer 18

much less likely to give longer prison sentences to more attractive people

Question 19

are East Asians susceptible to the attractiveness bias

Answer 19

less than westerners

Question 20

longitudinal studies attractiveness bias

Answer 20

archival photos and IQ scores of people born between 1920 and 1929 and asked people to rate attractiveness and IQ - photos taken at 5 different times in the life span:childhood, puberty, adolescence, mid-adulthood, later adulthood - correlation between perceived attractiveness 0.57 with actual IQ 0.21

Question 21

“good genes” theory

Answer 21

attractiveness signals good genes, people have evolved to judge attractive people as high-quality potential mates (but it accounts only for 4% of individual differences in IQ)

Question 22

how is facial attractiveness related to symmetry and prenatal experiences

Answer 22

the more problems a fetus experiences, the less symmetrical their body will be, the less fit overall they can be expected to be

Question 23

facial features that resemble those of a baby

Answer 23

a round head, a forehead protruding forward, large eyes, small jawbone

Question 24

does baby face bias affect both east and west

Answer 24

yes (us and Korea) - perceived as more naive, honest, helpless, kind and warm

Question 25

court cases baby faced bias

Answer 25

baby-faced defendants were much more frequently found innocent in cases involving intentional wrongdoing - difficult to think of them causing harm on purpose

Question 26

facial features play a role in determining the results of US congress elections

Answer 26

photos of two top candidates for each 95 senate races and 600 House of Representatives races between 200 and 2004 - showed each pair of photos 1 second - predicted the winner of 72% Senate races and 67% of the House races

Question 27

reagen vs kennedy experiment

Answer 27

when altered to increase their baby-facedness, perceived leadership qualities declined

Question 28

why is the baby face bias useful

Answer 28

immature facial features may provide adults with cues regarding a child's health and overall maturity level that influence the amount of time and resources devoted to a child

Question 29

how is the correlation between internet use and sociability and emotional well being

Answer 29

positive

Question 30

ex: college students meet on internet

Answer 30

the degree of liking between those who first met online increased more face-to-face, those who met in person liked each other less initially, second meeting didn't do anything

Question 31

how are meetings over the internet

Answer 31

more intimate, more revealing of what each person considers to be their true self - reduced social anxiety + biasing effects of attractiveness are absent (communication isn't shut down by early negative judgements based on physical features)

Question 32

identity

Answer 32

the aspect of the self that is accessible and salient in a particular context and that interacts with the environment

Question 33

identity experiments

Answer 33

pretending to be somebody they're not

Question 34

idenitity experiments experiment

Answer 34

half of the adolescents admitted to pretending to be somebody else online, with it being more frequent in young er adolescents (9 to 12: 72%, 13 to 14: 53%, 15 to 18: 28%) boys exaggerating their masculinity, girls pretending to be prettier and older

Question 35

self concept

Answer 35

the way a person defines themselves, a fundamentally social product (to become aware of yourself you must first become aware of others of your species and then become aware you're one of them)

Question 36

"looking glass metaphor"

Answer 36

we all naturally infer what others think of us from their reactions, use them to build our own self-concepts

Question 37

what supports the looking glass metaphor

Answer 37

people's opinions and attitudes about themselves are very much affected by the opinions and attitudes of others

Question 38

self fulfilling prophecies (pygmalion effect)

Answer 38

the beliefs and expectations that others have of a person can to some degree create reality

Question 39

pygmalion in the classroom effect

Answer 39

elementary teachers led to believe that a special test predicted that some students would show a spurt in intellectual growth - 8 months later the "spurter students" showed a much higher IQ and academic performance - teachers became warmer, gave them more time to answer difficult questions, gave them more challenging work, noticed and reinforced their self-initiated efforts (created a better learning environment) + those children started believing in themselves more

Question 40

pygmalion effect with adults

Answer 40

supervisors led to believe that some subordinates have "special promise" - extra attention and encouragement + self concepts

Question 41

self-esteem

Answer 41

one's feeling of approval, acceptance and liking of oneself, measured with questionnaires in which people rate the degree to which they agree or disagree with statements

Question 42

sociometer theory

Answer 42

self esteem derives primarily from our perceptions of others' attitudes toward us - it's a meter to inform us of the degree to which we're likely to be accepted or rejected

Question 43

evidence for sociometer theory

Answer 43

individual differences in self-esteem correlate with differences in degree to which people believe they're accepted, people's self-esteem increases after praise social acceptance or other satisfying social experiences + feedback about a test had greater effect if the person was lead to believe that others would hear

Question 44

evolutionary explanation sociometer theory

Answer 44

our survival depended on others' acceptance of us and willingness to cooperate - it motivates us to act in ways that promote our acceptance by others (a decline in self-esteem may lead us to change our ways to become more accepted or seek another social group)

Question 45

social comparison

Answer 45

the process of comparing ourselves in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate abilities

Question 46

reference group

Answer 46

the group against whom the comparison is made

Question 47

social comparison experiment

Answer 47

children's self-descriptions were found to focus on traits that most distinguished them from others in the group (kids in homogeneous classrooms rarely mentioned race)

Question 48

big fish in small pond effect

Answer 48

academically able students at nonselective schools have higher academic self-concepts than do equally able students at very selective schools

Question 49

how many college instructors said they're better than average

Answer 49

94%

Question 50

positive illusory bias

Answer 50

adults' overestimation of their abilities, associated with short term greater psychological well-being

Question 51

self-serving attributional bias

Answer 51

tendency to attribute our successes to our own inner qualities and our failures to external circumstances

Question 52

self-serving bias example

Answer 52

students who performed well on an exam attributed that to their own ability and hard work, those that didn't attributed it to bad luck, unfairness on the test + college professors who were asked why their paper has been accepted/rejected

Question 53

self-serving attributional bias, memory

Answer 53

better long-term memory for positive events and successes in their lives (not for other people) + strong in elders

Question 54

maladaptive of self-serving attributional bias

Answer 54

when one's self-concept is far in excess of accomplishments - US teenagers are slightly below the average in maths, first in math self-concept

Question 55

attitude

Answer 55

any belief or opinion that has an evaluative component (judgement or feeling that something is good/bad, likable/unlikable, moral/immoral)

Question 56

types of attitudes

Answer 56

explicit, implit

Question 57

explicit attitudes

Answer 57

conscious, verbally stated evaluations (measured by traditional attitude tests)

Question 58

implicit attitudes

Answer 58

manifested in automatic mental associations - gut level attitudes, the less we think about what we're doing the more they influence

Question 59

how are implicit attitudes measured

Answer 59

implicit association test (people can classify two concepts together more quickly if they're strongly associated in their mind)

Question 60

implicit/explicit example

Answer 60

vegan who used to eat meat - explicit negative attitudes have to override implicit positive ones

Question 61

fMRI implicit/explicit attitudes

Answer 61

implicit - limbic system (emotions drives), explicit - prefrontal cortex (conscious control) - subcortical areas respond immediately to the stimuli, but the prefrontal cortex may dampen the response

Question 62

Freud irrational people

Answer 62

reason is most often a rationalization designed to calm our anxieties and boost self-esteem

Question 63

cognitive dissonance theory +who/when

Answer 63

1950s, Festinger - we have a mechanism built into the workings of our mind that creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, lack of harmony, when we sense some inconsistency among the various explicit attitudes, beliefs, and items of knowledge that consistute our mental store

Question 64

cognitive disonance example

Answer 64

favorable attitude about sunbathing, learn that it leads to cancer - cognitive dissonance - change attitude or introduce a third condition (sunbathing is safe if I use a sunscreen lotion)

Question 65

people avoiding dissonant info example

Answer 65

senate Watergate hearings - Nixon - his supporters avoided, people who hated him sought out info, only influenced those who were undecided

Question 66

what happens after a person makes a decision

Answer 66

sets their doubts aside even in the absence of new information - bettors at a horse race more confident that their horse would win if asked just after placing their bet + voters leaving the polling place more positively than people entering

Question 67

insufficient-justification effect when

Answer 67

if people have no obvious high incentive for performing a counter-attiduinal action, done at their free will

Question 68

insufficient-justification effect experiment

Answer 68

students given a very boring task, told to tell students that the task was exciting - some got one dollar some got 20 - the 1 dollar students later recalled it as enjoyable (couldn't justify the lie)

Question 69

free choice in the insufficient-justification effect experiment

Answer 69

students asked to write essays in support for a bill in the state legislature that they don't support, some told they had to do it, some not - those who didn't have to - started favoring the bill

Question 70

personal identity

Answer 70

self-descriptions that pertain to the person as a separate individual

Question 71

social identity

Answer 71

those that pertain to the social categories of groups to which the person belongs to

Question 72

out-groups

Answer 72

groups we don't belong to

Question 73

in-groups

Answer 73

groups we belong to

Question 74

stereotype

Answer 74

organized set of knowledge or beliefs that we carry in our heads about any group of people

Question 75

how do we gain stereotypes

Answer 75

from the ways our culture depicts and describes each social category

Question 76

types of stereotypes

Answer 76

public, private, implicit

Question 77

public stereotypes

Answer 77

what we say to others about a group

Question 78

private stereotypes

Answer 78

what we consciously believe but don't say to others

Question 79

implicit stereotypes

Answer 79

sets of mental associations that operate automatically to guide our judgements and actions toward members of the group in question, even if they run counter to our conscious beliefs

Question 80

implicit association test (stereotypes example)

Answer 80

more quick when sorting male/violent and female/nonviolent than male/nonviolent and female/violent

Question 81

implicit association test stereotypes experiment

Answer 81

photographs of white and black faces, along with good and bad words - white uni students take 200 milliseconds longer per key press on average when doing black/good white us children as young as 6 perform similarly to adults - same-race bias in Japanese children

Question 82

stereotypes priming experiment

Answer 82

white people categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects after being primed with white/black faces - faster decisions and fewer errors categorizing threatening objects when primed with black faces even in 5 year old children

Question 83

stereotypes police officers

Answer 83

determine if they would shoot, people's faces +guns/wallets - in the first 80 trials shot unarmed black people much more + but with practice during which they got immediate feedback they overcame it

Question 84

diversity courses

Answer 84

reduction in both explicit and implicit prejudice toward black people - but two reductions not strongly correlated most enlightened and greatest conscious desire to overcome prejudice - declines in explicit prejudice those who made new black friends or liked the black professor - implicit prejudice