Social pysch test 1

• free will 
• sociality
• independence and dependence
• moral behavior

observable actions to stem from direct/indirect influence of others

conscious thoughts and feelings as well as non-conscious processes (brain activity, hormone regulation, etc.)

• The scientific study of individuals' social experiences and behaviors
• focuses on individuals rather than groups

• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Bio/physiological psychology
• Cognitive psychology 
• Clinical psychology 
• Personality psychology

Presence of others decreases their behavior (they try less)

presence of others increases individuals behavior while competing

studied external cause of behavior

Behavior is a product of the environment and the person

Social comparison and cognitive dissonance theory

When one person holds two contradictory beliefs

• Evolutionary factors 
• Contextual factors
• Individual factors

• evolution leads us to interact the way that we do 
• developed brain for social interactions over time

• Study of the relationship between the brain and social psychology
• Can be neural, hormonal, genetic and cellular 
• Maps particular functions to specific areas of the brain

Influence of social class, religion, race on social interactions

Social behavior as an effect of one's experiences, learning history, and mental processes

• Classical conditioning
• Instrumental conditioning
• Social learning

Mental processes including perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of oneself

• Purposive
• Caused by dispositional and situational influences
• Influenced by how people construe or interpret situations 
• Cultural

People believing that, if they had known the outcome of a situation before it happened, they would have been able to accurately predict the same outcome

• Description
• Prediction
• Explanation

A set of interrelated statements that explains and predicts patterns of observable events

• a change in ones variable is associated with a change in the other variable
• + correlation- both variables change in the same direction
• - correlation- both variables change in opposite directions

A change in one variable predicts the change in another variable

Principle that the mind operates independently of the body

Where you are and how you feel influence how you think and what you think about

Increasingly large social networks produced pressures that selected for more sophisticated thinking and larger brains

Reptilian, mammalian and neomammalian

Diet and other nonsocial factors explain brain evolution

Social factors explain brain evolution

• Attention, learning, reward and motivation 
• Inhibitory and excitatory

• Eating, aggression, sleep/wake, mood
• inhibitory

• Mood, arousal, memory
• Excitatory

general nervous system inhibitory

• Motor activity, arousal, attention, memory
• excitatory

Temporal, parietal, occipital, frontal

Behavior, sleeping, arousal, feeding, regulation of body temperature, expression of emotion

• Central role in taste and pain 
• Also moral disgust

memory recall and formation, spacial awareness and navigation

• Response of fear and threats
• Fight or flight response

Execution of the nervous system, performs higher level tasks

• electromyography
• measures electrical activity by detecting muscle movement

Measures levels of excitement, anxiety, and arousal

New neural networks can be rewired after damage

Consistent over time and use

Accurately measures what it should be measuring

• When the only thing acting on the DV is the IV
• (Removal of external stimuli)

How well you can apply your findings in a sample to the population

• Emotion based
• Level of motivation impacts your decision-making and attitude

• Perception
• Attention
• Remembering
• Thinking about 
• Making sense of ourselves and other people

• Engage in accurate thinking
• Conserve cognitive resources
• Self-enhancement motives guide social cognitive processing

• 1. initial comprehension and accepting
• 2. Rejecting the claim- can only be done when there is enough mental resources to make the extra effort

• Believing is a default process
• Occurs upon comprehension

• Ancient adaptation 
• Shared with other species
• Largely reflexive

• Recent adaptation
• Mostly limited to humans
• More thoughtful

• Rapid
• Capable of parallel processing 
• Intuitive
• Instinctive behaviors
• Limited to narrowly defined problems
• Relies on implicit memory and learning

• Amygdala
• basil ganglia
• lateral temporal
• ventromedial prefrontal
• dorsal anterior cingulate cortexes

• Slow and sequential
• Capable of abstract thinking 
• Able to tackle complex problems 
• relies on central working memory

• Lateral prefrontal
• Posterior parietal
• hippocampus
• Medial temporal lobe

Extent to which a behavioral or mental process is completely automatic

• It is unintentional
• Occurs without conscious awareness
• Accomplished efficiently 
• Cannot be controlled once it has begun

• Concepts that were initially explicitly learned that became automatic
• Concepts that have been learned implicitly affect subsequent behavior
• Priming

• Occurs when a concept or other knowledge structure is automatically triggered by an environmental stimulus
• Affects subsequent behaviors, thoughts and feelings

The activation of a single concept leads to the activation of related concepts in the mental system

making a judgement about the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily it comes to mind

When we categorize a particular instance based on how similar it is to a typical member of that category

Occurs when we ignore the underlying probabilities and instead focus on unusual or atypical instances

To rely on readily avaliable information on which to base estimation

Strategy for overcoming belief perseverance by encouraging people to imagine how the opposite of a preposition can be true

A mental approach that is sufficient in solving problems, decision making, etc. that may not be perfect but works for the time it is needed

Focuses on how people store, apply and process information about people and social situations