Midterm 1 Review Flashcards
Social Psych
Defined as the study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people
Construals
It is not the objective properties of the social environment, but rather how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret their social world
These subjective interpretations of social phenomena are referred to as construals
Differences in Personality vs Social Psych
- Both share an emphasis on individuals & the reasons for their behaviour
- Social psychs emphasize the psychological processes shared by most people that make them susceptible to social influence
- Personality psych’s focus on individuals differences or the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from others
Five Hypotheses (Liberman et al. 2004)
- Situations are powerful (influence how a person will react)
- We often don’t know why people do what they do (underestimate environmental factors)
- We often don’t know what we don’t know (we make mistakes and assumptions)
- It’s amazing that we are as accurate as we are about people
- People are influenced by two social motivations (a need to belong/feel like and a need to feel authentic)
Fundamental Attribution Error
We often misjudge the thoughts, feelings, personalities of people
The Self-Esteem Approach
-Self-esteem is an evaluation of one’s self-worth
-need to maintain a positive view of ourselves
(often sacrifice the need to be accurate in order to protect self-esteem)
Self-Justification
- May alter recollections of past actions that are unhappy, upset, or ashamed, to feel good about our past actions and decisions
- May modify attitude about painful situations, to justify participation
Identity
Who you are, the way you think about yourself, the way you are viewed by the world and the characteristics that define you
Ideology
A set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, it is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it
The Social Cognition Approach
Social Cognition - refers to how people think about themselves & their social world (select, interpret, remember and use social info)
The incorporation of human cognitive abilities into theories of social behaviour (Reasoning abilities, decision-making, judgements about others)
Social Problems
Social psychological research has attempted to understand human social behaviour & to find solutions to social problems
- Reducing hostility & prejudice
- Examining the effects of violent TV on behaviour
- Discouraging unhealthy behaviours
Schema theory
Through schema activation, judgments are formed that go beyond the information actually available; when we see or think of a concept, a mental representation or “schema” is activated that brings to mind other related information, usually unconsciously
Cultural Differences in Social Cognition
Western social cognition is thought to be more analytical, while Eastern social cognition is thought to be more holistic
Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the social world – how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions
Automatic Thinking
Low-effort thinking
Thinking that is generally unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
Helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences (assimilation & accommodation)
Relies on schemas for this information
Schemas
mental structures people use to organize the knowledge about the social world, influence the info we notice, think about and remember
The Function & Application of Schemas
- organize, and make sense of world, fill in the gaps of knowledge
- Help us to have continuity and to relate new experiences to our past
- Help us know what to do in ambiguous or confusing situations (Quick judgement)
Accessibility
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world.
- Chronically accessible (past experience)
- Temporarily accessible (related to current goal)
- Temporarily accessible (a result of priming - recent experience)
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
- Inadvertently make their schemas come true by the way they treat others
- When peoples’ expectations about another person influences their behaviour towards that person, causing the person’s behaviour to become consistent with the original expectation
Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) Experiment
Teachers’ (manipulated) expectation of their students’ potential influenced the students actual performance
Told some students were ‘late bloomers’: those students saw greater score improvements
Embodied Cognition
Form of automatic thinking whereby bodily sensations activate mental structures such as schemas
Heuristics
Too many schemas or not enough - use mental shortcuts, called judgemental heuristics
Not always accurate but useful
Availability Heuristic
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
Representativeness Heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
Base Rate Information
Info about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
Cultural Determinants of Schemas
The content of our schemas is influenced by our culture
We pay most attention to and best remember info that is important in our culture
Analytic thinking style
they focus on the properties of objects/people without considering the surrounding context
Western cultures
Holistic thinking style
they focus on the whole picture, i.e. the person/object and the surrounding context
East Asian cultures
Phineas Gage
Damage to his frontal lobe with a tamping iron changed his social behaviour, leading psychologists to believe that there were neural aspects of behaviour
Neurotypical Behaviour
People w/ autism, psychosis, antisocial personality disorder, and other disorders show differences in social behaviour compared to their neurotypical peers
Controlled thinking
High-effort thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful (requiring mental energy)
Provides checks and balances for automatic thinking
Controlled Thinking & Free Will
Sometimes an unconscious desire can lead to a conscious thought, leading us to believe we are exerting more conscious control over events than we really are
Counterfactual Reasoning
Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
Usually conscious and effortful, but not always voluntary and intentional
( imagine having avoided a negative event )
Overconfidence barrier
people tend to have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements- not usually as correct as they think they are
Dong Seon-Chang
As soon as you see someone you automatically and pretty instantly perceive:
- Age, gender, and ethnicity
- Attire and dress style
- Posture and gestures
- Actions and intentions
Social Perception
Defined as the study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about them
Nonverbal Communication
the way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words
Non-verbal cues
- Facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, body position & movement, use of touch, and eye gaze
- Facial expressions are the most significant channel of nonverbal communication
Primary uses of Nonverbal Communication
Expressing emotion and eliciting empathy
Conveying attitudes
Communicating personalities
Substitutions for verbal messages
Encode (NVC)
to express or emit nonverbal communication such as smiling or patting someone on the back
Decode (NVC)
to interpret the meaning of nonverbal communication expressed by others
Ex. deciding the pat on the back is an expression of condescension not kindness
NVC Research
Both context and culture influence how facial expressions are interpreted
Cross-cultural research support the universality of at least six facial expressions of emotions
Some researchers question the universal recognition of the basic facial expressions of emotion
American vs Japanese Emotion Interpretation
The Japanese participants were more influenced by the expressions of group members surrounding the target figure than were the Americans
Another study found that in cultures where emotional control is the standard, focus is placed on the eyes to interpret emotions; in cultures where expression is accepted, focus is on the mouth
Affect blends
where one part of a person’s face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion
-makes decoding difficult