Social Psychology Test 1

• Scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in individuals in social situations
• it's a science - emphasis on using objective evidence
• Focus on the social world and how it filters through the individual
• covers all domains of people's lives

We are not concerned with the characteristics of the person -we are concerned with how the characteristics of the situation shape behavior (how different situations bring out different things)

• Culture - your values, how to behave, difference between cultures
• Social Roles - your friends influence on you
• Relationships
• Group Norms

Power of the situation! when situations overpower personal factors (bullying, Miligram experiments)

• BOTH are important. Interactionism - both influence each other
• Person factors - personality, genes, goals, beliefs
• Situatio - culture, social roles, relationship, group norms

Internalization: Social activation, when situation factors affect the person factors.

Niche picking/construal: person can influence the situations they experience (choose environments, their outlook can affect the way you perceive a situation)

• situations can influence personal behavior
• often overlooked, underestimated, unappreciated

• Interpretation of the situation is subjective - if situations are ambiguous individuals may have different interpretations
• To understand social influence we must also understand the characteristics of the person that shape construal processes

• Confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see and overlooking the rest
• Hindsight bias: "I knew it all along"
• These biases show that a lot of our intuitions are inaccurate - must use scientific method!

experimentation - experimenter manipulates something

• independent: what is manipulated, causally important, the subject has no control over it
• dependent: the effect variables, controlled by the subject

• experiment: get causal inferences,
• correlation: may be impossible to manipulate the variable, greater realism, can create ethical problems,

• lab: control, artificial
• field: less control, more realistic

are changes in dependent variable caused by changes in the independent variable --> more likely in laboratory, controlled

do the results hold in other situations, for other people, at other times?

can the results be generalized? -

kinda hard in lab research

faulty introspetion, reactivity, ethical dilemmas,

people often are mistaken or unaware of the true reasons for their behavior - can't just ask them why they do things - makes research much harder

• tendency for people to behave differently because they are being observed by a researcher
• demand effect, social desirability bias

• Part of reactivity - problem in research
• demand: if people think they know what the research is about, they tend to go along with it
• Social desirabilty: people want to present themselves in a positive way

harm (they use informed consent), deception (debrief afterward if deception used), invasion of privacy (they look at groups, not individuals)

• How we define ourselves is important in shaping our social behavior.
• And the interactions with the social world also shape how we define ourselves.
• Sense of self cannot exist without the social world

• varies across species - humans have the most developed
• varies across situations - mirror = more self-aware
• varies across persons - some people are very self aware some just go with teh flow

introspection, self-perception, social comparisons, reflected appraisals --> its a social thing, we need others there too to define ourselves!!

look into ourselves - we report a theory about ourselves - can often be wrong tho

we can't introspect, we dont have access to inner workings of the brain --> inner self can only be inferred from observable data (the same way we form impressions of others)

• yes -
• situational manipulations can alter self-perceptions
• changes in self-perception impact behavior

if we introspected we wouldn't be able to manipulate the sense of self - it woudl be stable

what people tell us we are like

• helpless - just give up, assume performance is because of lack of ability (Entity Theory - you are a fixed entity that doesn't change, can't change abilities)
• Mastery Oriented - think failure is due to insufficient effort (incremental theory - you can change, develop the skill)

yes - beneficial to think you have control over a situation - buffers the sting of failure, prvides motivation to improve

attitude/evaluation of yourself (affectively charged - emotion behind it, can exist at different levels at unconscious and conscious level)

• explicit: the kind you tell about
• implicit: the most immediate emotional reactions, can be different than explicit, measured indirectly

external feedback - peers, performance outcomes, social comparison, social acceptance, effect of parental feedback

• self-enhancement mechanisms (downward social comparisons, self-serving cognitions - the way we interpret our situations in which we flatter ourselves)
• protects more our explicit self-esteem than implicit

works better with people who already have a high self-esteem

successes attributed to internal qualities, failures attributed to external things

High SE kids are more likely to be aggressive especially in frustrating situations

• high explicit SE, low implicit SE
• take negative feedback really hard, prone to destructive self-enhancement
• violence, unstable!

moderately positive SE = the best especiall if backed up by real competence (stable, not defensive)

• Individualistic - emphasize independence, personal self, uniqueness
• Collectivist - emphasize interdependent, social self, value not standing out, value how they fit in

• Explicit - people in USA tend to test higher but thats b/c the questionnaires focus on personal, individual self esteem not your collective self-esteem, and modesty norms
• Implicit - no difference

appearance/behavior --> trait inferences --> global impression

• averageness effect - average faces more preferable
• symmetry effect - facial symmetry = marker for health/genetic fitness

• Baby face effect - larger lips/smaller nose, larger forehead, smaller chin, larger eyes
• competence -
• power - competence, dominance, maturity
• warmth - trustworthiness, likeability

• have richer social life, more people initiated contact with them
• are seen as more trustworthy, but not experts (can influence people differently then)
• occupation outcomes also depend on domain - if job for leadership at disadvantage but if job for warmth are at advantage
• advantageous in crimes of mallice (how can a baby be malicious!)

strongest accuracy was in domain of extroversion, no correlation for a lot of other personality traits

• different body types = different personalities
• endomorph - heavy
• mesomorph - athletic
• ectomorph - skinny

you canot predict personality based on body type but people have sterotypes based on it

strong impact for first impressions - seems like a valid signal because you choose your clothes but the accuracy is questionable

• minimal samples of behavior (less than a minute)
• accuracy was above chance
• for intelligence, racial prejudice, sexual orientation

• meaningful unit of behavior - richer behavioral evidence
• correspondent inference theory

• do someone's behaviors correspond to their inner qualities?
• look for situational contrainsts on the behavior (free choice, intention, norms, role requirements)
• look for noncommon effects (consequences of choosing that behavior that would not have emerged if didn't do the behavior) to deduce the reasons for the behavior

no evidence for this!!

• we don't think that elaborately/rationally!
• Castro essay thing
• perceptions of intelligence in questioner, contestants, and audiences (perceive teh questioner to be really smart, questioner knows they aren't)

• problem for the correspondent inference theory
• we assume that someones behavior reflects their true personality regardless if there are other reasons for it, situations, contraints
• assume that behavior corresponds with inner traits

• 2 stages to forming impressions
• automatic - inferences spontaneously - effortless, efficient, correlate behaviors with inner personality
• corrective deliberation - adjustments made for situations, effortful, mental resources required

• proximal - factors that exist in the here and now (power of the situation, dispositions, role of construal)
• distal - are more removed in time from a given context (evolution/culture)

situational circumstances that appear unimportant but can have consequence for behavior (either helping it, blocking it, etc.

interpretation and inference about the stimuli/situations we confront

generalized knowledge about the physical/social world and how to behave in particular situations

automatic - unconscious, implicit attitudes and beliefs, skill acquisition, production of beliefs w/o our awareness to cognitive processes that generated them

controlled - conscious, results in explicit attitudes/beliefs of which we are aware

looking at phenomenon in reasonably systematic way

what correlational research suffers from, the participant, not the researcher gets to select his level on each variable (not manipulated)

• reliability: the degree to which teh particular way we measure a given variable is likely to yield consistent results
• measurement validity: the correlation between some measure and some outcome that the measure is supposed to predict

• traits (openness, conscientiousness, extroverted, agreeableness, neuroic)
• have been shaped by evolution, biologically based too, diversification also

our social self shifts according to the situation (OCEAN is usually constant however)

we identify what makes us unique in each context and we highlight that in our self-definition

social comparison, social narratives, self-assessment

tendency to elaborate on and recall info that is integrated into our self-knowledge

• knowledge based summaries of our feelings/actions and how we understand others views about the self
• we are attuned to info that maps to our self-schema

tendency to judge other people's personalities according to their similarity/dissimilarity to our own personality

• there are three selves (actual, ideal, and ought)
• ideal - primed by promotion focus - what we want to be
• ought - primed by prevention focus - what we ought to be

self-reference effect, self-schemas, motivates behavior, affects how we judge others, illusions/biases of the self

• trait: teh enduring level of regard people have for their abilities/characteristics over time
• state: dynamic, changing evaluations, momentary feelings about the self

self-esteem is contingent on successes/failures in domains in which their self-worth is based

self-esteem is an internal, subjective marker of the extent to which we are included/rearded favorably by others

• we are motivated to see ourselves in a favorable light (by reflection and social comparison)
• we associate with others that are successful (not in our domain tho)

• we strive for stable, accurate beliefs abotu the self -- they give coherence
• attend to/recall info that is consistent with our views
• we create self-confirmary social environments through our behavior

moitor our behavior so it fits the demands of the situation

tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors in order to hae an explanation for poor performance

• on record - statements intended to be taken literally (honest, direct)
• off-record - when we need to deliver a message that threatens our public self/friends (indirect, ambiguous, hinting, like flirting or teasing)

set of theoretical accounts of how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects that people's causal assessments have (how people understand the causes of events)

how we understand others - if an outcome a product of something internal to the person or a reflection of the circumstances?

• a person's habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed with internal/external, stable/unstable, global/specific
• pessimistic = global, stable, internal

• we should attribute behavior to potential causes that co-occur with teh behavior
• consensus (what do most people do), distinctiveness (what an individual does in different situations), consistency (what an individual does in a certain situation at different times)
• can determine if situational or dispositional from this

• discounting: we should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behaior if there are other plausible causes
• augmentation: we should assign greater weight to a particular cause of behavior if there are other causes present that normally would produce the opposite outcome

thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened if only something had been done differently

the pain/joy we get from an events tends to be proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening

attribute failure to external things, attribute succes to oneself (a motivational bias)

people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get

• just world hypothesis (dispositional inferences can be comforting)
• elements that catch our attention are more likely to be seen as causes (usually people not backgrounds stand out) (perceptive salience)
• only after characterizing the person do we weigh in situational input

• actors: focus on situation, situational attributions
• observer: focus on teh person, who they are dealing with

misperception of a group norm that results form oberving people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs because of a concern for the social consequences (like when no one asks questions in class)

• sharpening: when telling a story, emphasze important/interesting elements
• leveling: leaving out less important details when telling a story

we are more attentive to negative info than positive b/c teh negative info has more implications for our well-being

• the order in which items are presented can have a powerful impact on judgment
• primacy and recency effects

the influence on judgment resulting from teh way info is presented --> order effects are a type of framing effect

• tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that woudl support it --> false beliefs b/c we can find evidence for anything
• when we want a given proposition to be true so we seek out confirming evidence and discount contradictory evidence

• bottom up - data driven, basis of stimuli
• top down - theory driven, interprets new info in light of preexisting knowledge/expectations

organized body of prior knowledge, like a knowledge structure

coherent configurations in which related informatino is stored

attention, influence and construal (info in the brain can be primed), memory (advantage in recall if the info fits an expectation)

• affect on recall, on encoding, on retrieval,
• more of an effect on encoding than retrieval

• feature matching
• expectations
• recent activation

• Whether a schema will be activated in interpreting new info depends on
• the degree of similarity or fit between critical features of the schema and the
• incoming stimulus

• intuition - quick, automatic, simultaneously
• reason - slower, more controlled, serially

intuitive mental short cuts that allow us to make a variety of judgments quickly and efficiently

• we judge the frequency/probability of some event by the readiness with which similar events come to mind
• it is the ease of generating examples, not the number of examples that guides people's judgements

• teh feeling of ease associated with processing information
• if presented disfluently to you, you take a more, slow, careful approach

• we try to categorize something by judging how similar it is to our conception of the typical member of the category
• similarity = likelihood
• but sometimes blinds us from base-rate info

info about the relative frequency of event or of members of different categories in the population (could be ignored with strong stense of representativeness)

• tendency to be unrealistically optimistic abotu how long a project will take
• b/c of tendency to approach the problem form the inside (no outside perspective, such as how often do i get things done on time usually)

illusory correlation

• joint effect of representative and availability heuristics
• the belief that two variables are correlated when they are not

• the naive belief that we have a realistic objective view of the world
• in actuality because of our past experience/knowledge we are very subjective and biased
• these biases are unknown to us

• efficient, unintentional, uncontrollable, and without awareness
• this is the way that impression formation typically occurs
• it happens so fast that we fail to realize that we are making the conclusions that we are

• a storehouse of past experiences and knowledge - they get triggered when you encounter people/places
• they get triggered automatically

• from our own experiences, what we have learned
• from culture
• from our own experiences
• innately born - like aversion to incest

Recency Principle and CHronicity principle

if there is a recently used association that is readily available it will have more power to influence what we do/think in the future

the associations you use chronically will also be at the ready to be used

• tendency to perceive others behaviors as being hostile even though the actual behavior was ambiguous
• connection to chroicity principle

• Motivation - extent to which we are motivated to have the perfect interpretation
• but a lot of times we are not optimizers (dot need the best) but we are satisfiers (solve problem in adequate way)
• Capacity - working memory has limited capacity, we can't think in a detailed, analytical way unless we have a bunch of time/luxury

• unless the stakes are really high, we don't want to use up our mental resources to accurately interpret the world around us
• therefore we come up with mental short cuts like heuristics

• process evidence selectively (like anchoring)
• rely on metacognition (feelings about our own mental processes) to make our best guess (like availabiilty heuristic, fluency effects)

• an example of anchoring on initial information only (process evidence selectively)
• anchor on first evidence and we dont' adjust sufficiently for whatever we can learn afterwards

• an example of relying on metacognition (cognitive feelings)
• make judgments based upon the first information you can retrieve from your memory
• if easier retrieval - think its more common
• to judge frequency
• salience bias

• correlated with availability heuristic
• salient information is easily available in memory - think its a common occurence

• salience bias
• false consensus effect

• tendency we have to think that our opinions are the most common opinions
• the belief that most people agree with our attitudes
• due to teh fact that we associate with people who have similar attitudes

• how easy you can process info affects many kinds of judgments
• The Truth Effect (repitition based, rhyme based, perceptual fluency)

• fluent information is more likely to be viewed as true
• if repeated more
• if rhymes
• if easier to read at visual level

• if we rely solely on heuristics (dont' go beyond automaticity)
• confirmation iases
• sympathetic magic

• biggest flaw in human reasoning
• tendency to think that the world confirms your expectations -- cause many biases on how people see evidence/the world in general

• superstitious thinking
• law of contagion - once in contact always in contact
• law of similarity - image = object, we can't distinguish between the thing itself and its image