History of social psych Flashcards
(190 cards)
what are some assumptions of social psych?
1) humans are innately social
2) environment has a large affect on socialisation
3) interactions with others shapes behaviour
what is more predictive environment or personality?
- personality = stable traits overtime
- one is not more predictive than the other as it depends on the situation to determine which has most influence
what are social processes?
our thoughts, feeling, and behaviours are influenced by the people around us, the group to which we belong, the teaching of our parents
what were some early breakthroughs in social psych?
- Wilhem Wundt 1900-1920
- Norman Triplett - social facilitation experiment in 1897
- Floyd Henry Allport 1924 - emphasised importance of experimentation, argued the best way to understand groups was to study the individual not the group
how did WW2 affect the progression of psych
- Hitler’s rise caused many psychologists to flee to the US
- this led to a shift in focus of research being conducted in the US as Gestalt and anti-behaviourist psychologists emphasised cognition
- an example is Kurt Lewin, looked at behaviour as a function of individual and environment. also trained many notable psychologists
what were some key experiments which emerged after WW2?
- emphasis on how groups impact individual differences
- social influence and conformity
- bean estimation experiment - confident in own answer until spoke in a group
- Auto-kinetic effect experiment - if in a group would say a clock moved when it did not
- line study - Asch
- Milgram
- Stanford prison experiment
what is the scientific method?
a systematic way of creating knowledge by observing, forming a hypothesis, testing a hypothesis, and interpreting the results
what is the replication crisis?
- decades of research based on old research which cannot be replicated
- due to data manipulation, false positives
- under powered designs
- stopped collecting data when the hypothesis was met
- dropped conditions if they didnt work
- dropped DV is not consistent with predictions
Qualitative vs quantitative
- numbers vs words
cross-sectional vs longitudinal
- CS = different participants of different ages at the same time
- longitudinal = same participants at different ages at different times
experimental vs quasi experiments (plus issues)
- experimental groups created by experimenter
- quasi = naturally occurring groups
issues - lack of control of comparison group, potentially unreliable
- certain predispositions or individual differences
what is a meta-analysis?
use of statistics to combine results of several individual studies addressing similar Qs into a single pooled measure of an effect size
what are two issues with social experiments?
- ecological validity = modelling social phenomena in controlled lab environment isn’t always an accurate representation of normal contexts
- use of confederates = who play the role of someone in the study, not always convincing
what are explicit operationalisations?
conscious and deliberate, self-report
what are implicit operationalisations
- unconscious and autonomic
- gut reactions or impulsive decisions
- behavioural tasks, natural observations, facial expressions
what is the IAT
- Implicit associations test
- captures associations in memory
- interpreted as implicit preferences or attitudes
- when two concepts are associated it is easy to respond quickly and correctly when categorising
- ease of responding measures association between two concepts
what are controlled process of social cognition?
- deliberate and intentional processes
- goal-dependent –> requires awareness of behaviour, often captured by explicit measures
what are autonomic processes of social cognition?
- uncontrolled or unconscious processes
- captured by implicit measures
- influenced by priming, facial cues, and environment
Describe Gilbert and Hixon’s study on social cognition
- exposed individuals to a person who was either Asian or white
- then asked to fill in gaps with words
- more likely to answer with stereotyped words when exposed to a person who was asian
describe Payne’s study into social cognition
- Weapons identification task
- sort guns vs tools and primed with white vs black faces
- incongruent pairings harder to categorise (black-tool, white-gun)
describe the shooter bias task
- participants are presented with scenes
- some contain people
–> black vs white
–> holding either a gun or other object - make choice whether to shoot target
- also been done with different contexts
what are cues which impact perceptions?
- facial features, gaze and eye contact, inferred personality traits - maturity, trustworthiness, dominance, aggression
- environment, dictating correct behaviour for environment, environment altering other perceptions
what is a self-schema?
- provides frame work for organising and storing info about our personality
self-reference effect
easy remembering of self-referent words as they processed through self-schema