Midterm Flashcards
What is social psychology?
The study of individuals (thoughts, feelings, actions) in environments
What are the common approaches to social psychology?
Often empirical (observational) and experimental - Ex: manipulate aspects of social environment and see how this affects thoughts, feelings, or behaviour, on average
What happened in 1900?
First experiment done by Triplett
- Observed people cycle faster in a race than by themselves
- Context shaping our behaviours without our knowledge (even when trying our hardest)
What were the first textbooks?
- McDougall 1908
- Ross 1908
- Allport 1924- in particular stressed interactions between individuals and social context and focus on experiments
What was significant about the 1930s-40s?
Hitler
- Many fled to the states to study at university; many immigrants and refugees
- Desire to study a bunch of stuff that happened in WWII
- Milgram (obedience/conformity)
- Allport (intergroup bias)
- Festinger (cognitive dissonance)
- Basically, trying to determine how humans could do such things to other humans
Research progressed normally until what?
The replication crisis
What is the goal of science?
To slowly accumulate evidence in support of (or refuting) theories about the world
• Impossible to “prove” a theory, the evidence in support of it just becomes overwhelming
• The “evidence” is studies that people do testing aspects of theories
Explain the importance of replication?
- For evidence to be considered evidence, important that independent labs can run the same experiment, and get similar results, over and over again (this is replication)
- When a paper is published, it has been reviewed by other experts on various things, to make it likely that it is replicable. And we all (used to) assume it is a real thing
- If other people tried to replicate and couldn’t we would question it
What sparked the replication crisis?
• Feeling the future
- Published by JPSP, very high prestige psychology journal
- 9 experiments finding evidence, work was considered generally well-done
- But, no one believed this was a thing
- Goes in the face of physics/biology/everything we know about the world
What was the replicability project?
Big group tried to replicate 100 studies: 36% replicated
How did researchers start investigating how researchers investigate?
- Institutional pressures: “publish or perish”
- Flashy and significant effects needed to publish: publication bias
- Lots of ways to analyze data: garden of forking paths, P-hacking, intentional and unintentional
What are solutions to the replication crisis?
• Establishing best (statistical and methodological) practices to avoid p-hacking
• Revisiting established effects and support for replicating what we thought of as real things
• Psychological science accelerator: 100 different labs run the same study
- “ManyLabs” replication projects
- Registered reports
- Pre-registration of hypotheses (forcing people to be honest)
- Open data, open code, methods
What is clinical psychology?
Seek to understand and treat people with psychological difficulties or disorders
What is personality psychology?
Seeks to understand stable differences between individuals
What is cognitive psychology?
Study mental processes such as thinking, learning, remembering, and reasoning
Who is Norman Triplett?
Credited with having published the first research article in social psychology
- studied why cyclists raced faster when racing against others
Who is Max Ringelmann?
Noted that individuals often performed worse on simple tasks when they performed them with other people
Which people were credited for establishing social psychology as a distinct field of study?
William McDougall, Edward Ross, and Floyd Allport
When was the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues formed?
1936
What is the interactionist perspective?
An emphasis on how both an individual’s personality and environmental characteristics influence behaviour
- established by Kurt Lewin, who argued for social psych theories to be applied to important, practical issues
What is P hacking?
Describes the conscious or subconscious manipulation of data in a way that produces a desired p-value
What was the significance of Stanley Milgram’s research?
- His early research in the middle 1960s linked the post-world war II era with the coming era of social evolution
- His experiments demonstrated individual’s vulnerability to the destructive commands of authority
What was the leading research method of the day in the 1960s-mid 1970s?
The laboratory experiment
- caused a lot of controversy
What was significant about the mid 1970s to the 2000s?
More rigorous 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 behaviour