Social Psychology (Psychology Subject) Flashcards
(87 cards)
Social psychology
*the study of how people relate to and influence each other
- uses experimental method to study individuals
Norman Triplett
- conducted the first official social psychology type experiment in 1897 on social facilitation
— cyclists performed better paced by others than alone
Kurt Lewin
- founder of the field of social psychology
- Gestalt ideas to social behavior
- conceived field theory
— the total of influences upon individual behavior - a person’s life space
— the collection of forces upon the individual - valence, vector, and barrier are forces in the life space
Fritz Heider
- attribution theory
— the study of how people infer the causes of others’ behavior; people attribute intentions/emotions to anything - balance theory
— the study of how people make their feelings/actions consistent to preserve psychological homeostasis
Actor-observer attributional divergence
*the tendency for the person performing the behavior to have a different perspective on the situation than the person watching the behavior
Self-serving attributional bias
*interpreting one’s own actions and motives in a positive way
- blaming situations for failures and taking credit for successes
- “better than average” mentality
Illusory correlation
*assuming that two unrelated things have a relationship
Slippery slope
*logical fallacy that says a small, insignificant first step in one direction will lead to greater steps that will eventually have a significant impact
Hindsight bias
*believing after the fact that you knew all along
Halo effect
*thinking that if someone has one good quality then he has only good qualities
Self-fulfilling prophecy
*when one’s expectations somehow draw out, or cause, the very behavior that’s expected
False consensus bias
*assuming most other people think as you do
Lee Ross
- studied subjects who were first made to believe a statement and then later told it was false
- subjects continued to believe the statement if they had processed it and devised their own logical explanation
Richard Nisbett
- showed that we lack awareness for why we do what we do
Base-rate fallacy
*overestimating the general frequency of things we’re most familiar with
M. J. Lerner’s just world bias
*the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people
- uncomfortable for people to accept that bad things happen to good people, so they blame the victim
Ellen Langer
- studied the illusion of control
— belief that you can control things you actually have no influence on - the driving force behind manipulating the lottery, gambling, and superstition
Oversimplification
*the tendency to make simple explanations for complex events
- people hold onto original ideas about cause even when new factors emerge
Representativeness heuristic
*using shortcut about typical assumptions to guess at an answer rather than relying on logic
Availability heuristic
*people think there is a higher proportion of one thing in a group than there really is because examples of that one thing comes to mind more easily
Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory
- it’s uncomfortable for people to have beliefs that don’t match their actions
- after making difficult decision, people are motivated to back their actions up by touting corresponding beliefs
- the less the act is justified by circumstance, the more we feel the need to justify it by bringing our attitude in line with the behavior
Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory
- alternative explanation to cognitive dissonance
- when people are unsure of their beliefs, they take their cues from their own behavior
Overjustification effect
- tendency to assume that we must not want to do things that we’re paid/compensated to do
Gain-loss theory
- people act in order to obtain gain and avoid loss
- people favor situations that start out negatively but end positively