social Psych Flashcards
(35 cards)
Discuss the differing roles of automatic and deliberate thinking
Deliberate thinking; involves us to pay attention and to deliberately think about something (e.g. Think about and process about what is going on. E.g. Learning how to ride a bike we paid attention to how we stop, pedal and start the bike)
Automatic thinking; you do not have to pay attention and deliberately think about something. For example, habits or something you have already learned how to do like riding a bike, you don’t think about every step of riding a bike like you did when you were learning
Kahneman (2011)
The two systems that drive the way we think
System 1; fast, intuitive and emotional (automatic)
System 2; slower, more deliberative and more logical (deliberate)
Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities - and also the faults and biases - of fast thinking and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behaviour. The impact of loss aversion (people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains e.g. It is better not to lose 5 dollars than to gain 5) and overconfidence on corporate strategies (the way businesses work together to reach goals), the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work or at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation - each of three can be understood only by knowing the two systems shape our judgements and decisions.
Evaluate how biases and schémas affect our interactions with others
Schémas; a cognitive structure ore mental representation compromising pre-digested information or knowledge about objects or people from specific categories, our expectancies about objects or groups and what defines them
Attitude; a knowledge representation that includes information about a person or group (e.g. Our knowledge that Joe is a friendly guy or that Italians are romantic)
Therefore…the way we interact with others is based on how we have previously encountered them
ABC; affect (feelings), Behaviour (interactions) and Cognition (thought)
^in order to effectively maintain and enhance our own lives through successful interaction with others
Evaluate the role cognition plays in our social thinking
Social cognition involves the processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about the people and in the world around us
For example, imagine you are getting ready to go on a blind date. Not only do you worry about the impression and signals that you are sending to the other person, you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by the other individual
^develops across the lifespan
Influenced by principles of reciprocal altruism and social exchange
Solomon Asch 1951
Conformity; conducted an experiment to investigate the extent in which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform (follow what everyone else is doing because it is important to fit in with society). He conducted a simple and obvious line experiment where there were stooges in a panel of people (find the equivalent line to the one given where given 3 options) who were choosing the wrong options and it was to see if the participant were to choose the wrong answer based on what the others said. Found that 75% of participants conformed st least once over the course of the 3 trials
Potential problems; dated experiment, just male participants, same age group (lacks population validity), using artificial task to measure conformity (low ecological validity and results can’t be generalised)
Perrin and Spencer 1980)
Replication of Asch study; suggested that it was a “child of its time”.
Used participants on engineering, maths and chemistry courses
Only one out of 369 trials an observer joined the erroneous majority
Argue that a cultural change has taken place in the value placed on conformity and obedience and in the position of students
America in 1950s students were unobtrusive members of society whereas now they occupy a free questioning role
Can’t compare studies because very different participants are used, these participants might be more expected to be independent because of the degree they are doing
Milgram 1963
Obedience; wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the nazi killings. He selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in his study of learning at Yale.
The procedure= the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, the learner was one of milgrams confederates (pretending to be a real participant)
The learner was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts to 375 volts to 450 volts.
Aim: how far people would go in obeying instruction
40 males ages between 20 and 50 who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional
65% of participants contributed to the highest level of 450 volts, all participants continued to 300 volts
Did more than one experiment-Carried out 18 variations of this study
Conc; people tend to follow orders by an authority figure even to kill an innocent human being.
Critiques; conducted in labs, what about real life situations? Orné and holland (1968) accused milgrams study of lacking experimental realism, the sample was biased as all male, sample was self selected, deception, exposed to seriously stressful situations, discouraged participants to stop if wanted to (you must continue)
Zajonc 1965
Deindividuation; loss of self awareness in groups, although this is a matter of contention.
Zimbardo (1973)
Social roles; the Stanford prison experiment.
Finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to sadistic personalities (dispositional) of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment (situational)
Procedure; he converted a basement of Stanford uni into a mock prison. He advertised asking for volunteers. 75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse
24 men came out of this^
Participants were randomly assigned the role of guard or prisoner
Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes.
Stripped naked, deloused and had all their personal belongings taken off of them, issued with a uniform and referred to as their number only
Guards wore same uniform with weapons and sunglasses making eye contact impossible
Findings; within a short period of time, both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easy. Guards began to harass prisoners, doing random checks early in the morning. The prisoners adopted prisoner like behaviour, talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. Prisoners taunted with petty orders, generally dehumanised.
There was a rebellion
Took part in experiment himself
Conc; people will readily conform to the social roles that they are expected to play. Deindividuation has a role to play (the state where you lose your sense of identity because so immersed in norms of group)
Critiques; most of the guards later claimed they were simply acting, may not effect in real life (can’t be generalised), lack population validity, prisoners didn’t consent to being arrested at home
Evaluate the role of attribution theory in our social understanding
Attribution theory; a process in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behaviour (what will he do next? We are predicting from experience) Interpersonal attribution; when telling a story to a group of friends or acquaintances, you are likely to tell the sorry in a way that places you in the best possible light Predictive attribution; we also tend to attribute things in ways that allow us to make future predictions. If your car was vandalised, you might attribute to the crime to the fact that you parked in a particular parking garage. As a result, you will avoid the parking garage in the future in order to avoid future vandalism Explanatory attribution; help us make sense of the world around us. Some people have an optimistic explanatory style, while others would tend to be more pessimistic. Optimistic style; attribute positive events to be stable, internal and global causes (pessimist think opposite) Internal attribution (person); any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person (mood, personality) External (situation) attribution; locates cause of being external to the person (action of others)
Heider (1958)
“Common sense” theory; people observe others, analyse their behaviour, and come up with their own common sense explanations for such actions. Said that people are motivated by two primary needs 1. A need to form a coherent view of the world and 2. The need to gain control over the environment. He grouped these explanations into external and internal attributions.
E.g. The transition from primary school to secondary school, have an older sibling who went through similar transition therefore have an idea what it could be like
Fincham and O’Leary (1983)
Showing the importance of the internal/external dichotomy
In a happy marriage= positive behaviour means internal attribution (it is the person/personal effects the person that causes a behaviour rather than a situation)
Aim: to investigate causal inferences made by maritally non & distressed couples regarding their positive and negative behaviour
Participants: 16 couples, married an average of 9 years
Method: used marital adjustment test to see marital satisfaction p, all completed attribution questionnaire with positive (e.g. My spouse compliments my looks) and negative behaviours
Results: found that in distressed marriages spouses more likely to attribute positive behaviour to external attribution and negative behaviour to internal attribution, and vise Versa with happy marriages
Weiner 1985
Attribution theory; why people do what they do
It assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do, interpret causes to an event or behaviour. A 3 stage process underlies an attribution
1. Behaviour must be observed/perceived
2. Behaviour must be determined to be intentional
3. Behaviour attributed to internal or external causes
Attributions are classified along 3 causal dimensions;
1. Locus of control (two poles: internal vs external)
2. Stability (do causes change over time or not?)
3. Controllability (causes one can control such as skills vs causes one can’t control such as luck and others actions)
Jones and Davis 1965
Correspondent inference theory; people pay particular attention to intentional behaviour as opposed to accidental or unthinking behaviour
See a correspondence between motive and behaviour (e.g. See someone being friendly and them begin a friendly person)
So what leads to us make a correspondent inference?
1. Choice= if a behaviour is freely chosen it is believed to be due to internal (dispositional) factors
2. Accidental vs intentional behaviour= behaviour that is intentional is likely to be attributed to the persons personality, and behaviour which is accidental is likely to be attributed to situation/external causes
3. Social desirability= behaviours low in sociable desirability (non conforming) lead us to make (internal) dispositional inferences more than socially undesirable behaviours. For example, if you observe a person getting on a bus and sitting on the floor instead of the seats. This behaviour has low social desirability (non conforming) and is likely to correspond to the personality of the individual
4. Hedonistic relevance= if the other persons behaviour appears to be directly intended to benefit or harm us
5. Personalism= if the other persons behaviour appears to be intended to have an impact on us, we assume that it is “personal”, and not just a by-product of the situation we are both in
Kelley (1967)
The co-variation model;a logical model for judging whether a particular action should be attributed to some characteristic (dispositional) of the person (if they are consistent in doing the same behaviour) or the environment (situational) (distinctiveness)
Person has info for multiple observations at different times and situations and can perceive the covariation of an observed effect and its causes
Take into account of 3 kinds of evidence (cues)
1. Consensus; the extent to which other people behave in the same way in a similar situation. E.g. Alison smoke a cigarette when she goes out for a meal with her friend. If her friend smokes, her behaviour is high in consensus. If only Alison smokes, it is low.
2. Distinctiveness; the extent to which the person behaves the same way in similar situations. If Alison only smokes when she is out with her friends, her behaviour is high in distinctiveness. If she smokes any time and any place, distinctiveness is low.
3. Consistency; the extent to which the person behaves like this every time this situation occurs. If Alison only smokes when she is out with her friends, consistency is high. If she only smokes on one special occasion, consistency is low.
Ross 1977
The fundamental attribution error (the correspondence bias); the tendency for people to over emphasise dispositions , or personality based explanations for behaviour observed in others while under-emphasising situational explanations.
In other words, people have a cognitive bias to assume that a persons actions depend on what kind of person that is rather than in the social and environmental forces that influence the person.
People put more emphasis on internal explanations rather than situations
E.g. May blame victim for his or her own suffering “he deserved it”
Jones and Harris 1967
The attribution of attitudes; hypothesised that people would attribute apparently freely-chosen behaviours to disposition (personality) and apparently chance-directed behaviours to situation. The hypothesis was confounded by the fundamental attribution error
Participants listened to pro and anti Fidel Castro speeches. Participants were asked to rate the pro-Castro attitudes if the speakers. When the subjects believed that the speakers freely chose the positions they took (for or against Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favour of Castro as having a more positive attitude toward Castro.
However, contradicting their original hypothesis, when the participants were told that the speakers positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated the speakers who spoke in favour of Castro as having on average a more positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him.
In other words, the participants were unable to see the speakers as mere debaters coldly performing a task chosen for them by circumstance; they could not refrain from attributing some disposition of sincerity to the speakers
Miller 1984
Fundamental attribution bias may not be universal across cultures.
Studied 40 middle class Hindu adults and Hindu children and 30 middle class American adults and children
Were asked to narrate two pro social behaviours and 2 deviant behaviours and to explain why the behaviours were undertaken.
Results; at older ages, Americans make greater reference to general dispositions and less reference to contextual factors in explanation. Showed that there were cross-cultural and developmental differences related to contrasting cultural conceptions of Ss acquired over development in the two cultures rather than from cognitive, experiential and informational differences between attributors.
In other words, American children were found as they grow older, to place increasing reliance on disposition as an explanation of events observed , the hindu children of India by contrast based their explanations more on situations
Jones and Nisbett (1972)
The tendency for people to attribute their own behaviour to external causes but that of others to external factors. For eg what a doctor tells someone that their cholesterol levels are elevated, the patient might blame factors that are outside of their control such as genetic or environmental influences. But what about when someone else finds out their cholesterol levels are too high? In such situations, people attribute to things such as a poor diet and lack of exercise, in other words when it’s happening to us it is outside of our control but when it’s happening to someone else is all their fault
Storms 1973
The actor-observer difference; proposed that differences between actors and observers attributions depend partly on their different physical points of view: actors attention is typically directed outwards towards the situation (including other actors), whereas the observers attention usually focuses on the observed person (i.e. The actor).
Thirty groups of 4 male participants (two members of each group randomly assigned roles)
Results; observers emphasised dispositional factors when explaining actors behaviour. Perceptual salience= actors attention is away from themselves (external), observers attention is in actor (internal). The actor-observer bias was reserved when participants were shown video tapes of themselves before making attributions, actors saw own faces and made an internal attribution.
It is criticised that this study is that the usual actor-observer difference was not demonstrated (Gilbert and Malone 1995); analysis of the original ratings (separately assessing disposition all and situational attributions) rather than the difference scores used by Storms shows that actors were rated in equally disposition all terms by themselves and their observers across all conditions.
Neumann 2000
Motor influences on affect and evaluation; tested whether guilt (the presupposes that the cause of a negative event is located within the individual - an internal attribution) could be elicited experimentally in contrast to anger (that presupposes the cause of a negative event is located external to the individual - an external attribution)
Evaluate current research in attribution through face, voice and human movement
Often used signals are; facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body positions (e.g. Standing in a powerful way to show authority), the use of touch, eye gaze
^these are often used for expressing emotion, conveying attitudes (e.g. If I say a phrase I love you in different tones of voices they would have different meanings)
Non-verbal communication is multi channelled but in research they are dealt with individually to avoid confounding variables
Expressions;
humans need to decode facial expressions and sometimes this can be difficult
The feelings can be beyond the facial expression e.g. Voices and movement
ENCODE; express or emit nonverbal behaviour e.g. Smiling, patting someone on the back
DECODE; interpret the meaning of nonverbal behaviour e.g. Deciding oat in the back was an expression of condescension not kindness
Darwin; believed that everyone had universal expressions and that people from different cultures would understand them (biological predisposition; they are not something our social world would give us)
Susskind et al., 2008
It has been predisposed that facial expression production originates in sensory regulation.
A statistical model of expression appearance revealed that fear and disgust expressions have opposite shape and surface reflectance features.
They hypothesised that this reflects a fundamental antagonism serving to augment versus diminish sensory exposure.
When subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localisation and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration. The opposite pattern was found for disgust. Fear may therefore work to enhance perception, whereas disgust dampens it.
Supports Darwin
Hansen and Hansen 1988
Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect
Subjects were given the task of surveying crowds for the present of a discrepancy face. They were exposed to photographs of 108 crowds consisting of 9 faces. On 54 trials, all nine faces displayed the same emotional gesture. On the remaining 54 trials, one of the faces displayed a different emotion than the other eight.
Results; in crowds in which no discrepant face was present, subjects made more errors when surveying angry crowds than when surveying happy or neutral crowds.
^angry face jumps out
^Darwin; such facial expressions acquired evolutionary significance; being able to communicate in such emotional states had survival value for the developing species
