Social psyc. Fall 2012

Define social influence 

People are overtly trying to influence you; direct attempts at persuasion (e.g., your friends trying to convince you to go out with them)

What kind of social influence is this?

where just being around other people or thinking about other people can influence you; no direct pressure from those people (e.g., running on a treadmill faster because the person next to you is running fast; thinking about your parents changes whether or not you go out instead of studying)
What Kind of social influence is this ?

Define social psychology 

"We test our ideas about social behavior through research studies"
This makes social psych......

Social psych focuses on construals, which means

How we interpret our social worlds can come from two main basic motives or needs of human nature
What are the 2 sources of construals?

People interpret their social environment based on the need to feel good about themselves or to see themselves favorably
Most people want to maintain a reasonably high SELF-ESTEEM
Which approach is this?

A student fails a class
Reality: student never came to class, didn’t read the book, and didn’t study for exams
Student’s interpretation: failed because the exams were too hard and the professor was unfair
What was the students construal ( interpretation) of this situation?

If you go through a terrible hazing to become a member of a group that you later find to be boring or negative, you will probably feel pretty foolish (I went through all that for nothing)
To avoid feeling like a fool, you will try to justify your decision by distorting your interpretation of the group and put a positive spin on your experiences

The hazing was a small price to pay
Focus on the good things and dismisses the bad stuff
This is called?

What is the social cognition approach ?

Your expectations of other people can inadvertently affect your behavior toward them, which can cause them to behave in a way that confirms that original expectation
E.g., you think professors are mean/unfriendly. You walk by a professor and don’t smile or greet him/her.  The professor then doesn’t smile at you or greet you.  You walk away thinking that the professor was unfriendly.
This is an example of what ?

Other that the self-esteem approach and the social cognition approach being the two main sources of construals, what are other sources?

studies designed to understand the nature of human behavior
E.g., what are the causes of prejudice?
Is what kind of research study ?

studies designed to solve social problems
E.g., can this particular program help reduce prejudice?
Which kind of study is this?

 an explanation or prediction of social behavior that is stated in a way that it can be tested in a research study, is called what?

A study design/method where a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior
Goal: to DESCRIBE human behavior
What type of research design is this ?

Method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing them from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions that they may have 
The participants who are being observed know that they are being watched and recorded
The goal is to understand the richness and complexity of the group by observing it in action
Which type of observational research design is this ?

Observational method in which the researcher interacts with the people being observed but tries not to alter the situation in any way
Researcher interacts with the people that he is studying, but they do not know they are being observed and recorded
E.g., Festinger joined a doomsday cult in order to observe how the participants would react when the world did not end on the predicted day
Which type of observational research design is this ?

A form of observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of the culture (i.e., diaries, novels, magazines, newspapers, etc.)

Not observing people in real-time; studying records of those people
E.g., let’s say you want to do a study investigating how the perceived ideal body type for a woman has changed over the years

You could look at the covers of major magazines over the last 40 years and compare the body shapes and weights of the cover models
You could compare the height weight ratio of the winners of the Miss America pageant over the last 40 years

Which type of research design is this ?

A study design/method where the researcher systematically measures two or more variables and assesses the relation between the variables

Goal: to PREDICT human behavior
Which type of research is this?

To assess the direction (positive, negative) and strength (strong, weak) of a correlation,
Researcher calculate what ?

A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another
Coefficients range from -1.0 to +1.0
The – or + tells the direction of the correlation 
Minus = negative correlation; plus = positive correlation
The number tells the strength
The closer the number is to 1, the stronger the correlation
The closer the number is to 0, the weaker the correlation

This is called what ?

What method  allows you to make causal inferences
Correlation= causation 

A study design/method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people’s responses)

Goal: to establish the CAUSES of human behavior
Is which type of research method ?

Researchers must have ALL of the following criteria in an experiment.....

Making sure nothing but the IV can affect the DV
Essentially, it’s your ability to make a claim that the  IV is the only thing that could have CAUSED a change in the DV

This increases what ?

Why do controlled lab experiments decrease external validity?

extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situation and to other people
Is what ?

What are the two main types of generalizability

The extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real-life situations
Because social psych research is criticized for being too artificial and not generalizable, social psychologists try to make their studies are realistic as possible

Is which type of generalizabilty?

The extent to which an experiment is similar to real-life situations
Is which type of realism?

The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life
Is which type a realism

The extent to which we can generalize from people who participated in the experiment to people in general

Is which type of generalizability ?

A statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independant variable is reliable, is what ?

How people select, use, remember, and interpret information to make judgments and decisions
Is what?

Thinking that is non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

E.g., saying the 1-10 in numerical order
Is which type of thinking?

What are two forms of automatic thinking?

Mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world (often around themes or subjects) and can influence the information we notice, think about, and remember
- if you go into a new fast food restaurant, you know what to do even if you’ve never been to that restaurant before because you have a general schema for fast food places


Is which type of automatic thinking ?

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world

Is what ?

Which type of accessibility is this ?
This means that these particular schemas are constantly active and ready to use to interpret ambiguous situations
Always on the forefront of your mind

Which type of accessibility is this ?
This means that a particular schema or trait is not always accessible but happened to be primed by something people have been thinking or doing before encountering an event

The finding that people’s beliefs (schemas) about themselves and the social world persist even after the evidence supporting these beliefs is discredited
Also, self-fulfilling prophecies can end up strengthening our schemas
Which type of effect is this ?

Mental shortcuts or rules people often use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
What is this called ?

More people are afraid of flying than driving, even though you are more like to be in a fatal car accident than a plane crash
Is an example of?

Like thinking a pretty, friendly young woman is more representative of a secretarial-type staff member when she could really be a computer programmer


Is an example of what ?

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful
Which type of thinking is this?

whom asserts that people are programmed to believe automatically everything they hear and see
Example What color is this white board
A: white 

What are the 3 steps of gilberts model 

The attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget
E.g., not thinking about junk food when you’re on a diet

Is an example of what ?

Successful thought suppression depends on the interaction of which two processes?

If the operating process falls through ......What occurs?
(insert word)  (unwanted) thoughts occurring at a high frequency
The monitoring process keeps finding instances of the topic or thoughts to be avoided
But now the operating process isn’t distracting you from these thoughts, so these thoughts are constantly intruding your consciousness unchecked

 mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
This type of thinking usually comes about when people have a “close call”
Ex: missing an A in a course by just one point – if only I had gotten one more question on just one of the exams correct or if only I had done one more extra credit research study

Is an example of which type of thinking ?

The study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about their behavior
Is what ?

A facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotions while another part of the face registers a different emotion
E.g., surprised eyes with a happy smile
Is an example of ?

tThe study of how we infer the causes of other people’s behavior
Or, a description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior 

Is which type of thoery ?

inferring that a person behaved in a certain way because of something about the person (e.g., attitude, character, or personality)

E.g., you see a man kick a dog.  If you’re making an ______ ______, you might think that he’s kicking a dog because he’s a cruel and abusive person

Is an example of which type of attribution

Inferring that a person behaved in a certain way because of something about the situation he/she is in

The assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that same situation
E.g., you might think the man kicked the dog because the dog bit him, so the man was just reacting from the dog attacking him and kicked the dog to get away (we might have done the same thing)

Is an example of which type of attribution?

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors
Is what ?

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which our actions and appearance are salient to others
We think people judge us more harshly than they really are
As a result, we are more embarrassed or concerned about our inadequacies than we need to be
Is known as ?

The tendency to see other people’s behavior as dispositionally caused but focusing more on the role of situational factors when explaining one’s own behavior
This is called what ?

If you score an A on a paper, it’s because you’re smart and a hard-worker, but if you fail the paper, it’s because the assignment was unfair
 This is an example of what ?

What are some reasons for making self-serving attributions?