Psych 2600 Midterm 1
Social Psychology came began to be studied in 1945 as a response to the tragedies of World War II.
Social Psychology seeks to explain and predict how the social world influences: Thoughts(Perception, memory, and reasoning)"How to act?"; Feelings(Motivation, emotions, and attitudes) "Motivation to ac"t?; Behavior(Action, communication, and decision-making) "The action"; and the relationship between them(Thoughts are the best behavior to suit feelings).
Social Psychology mostly focuses on the Tim Burgen questions: adaptation and causation.
How we think about the social world
How do we study the social world
How we feel about the social world
Methods
Replicability
Social Cognition
Social Perception
Social Self
Emotion
Methods
Social Cognition: Helps us break down, organize, simplify, and analyze the massive amounts of data that we take in every moment.
Social Perception: The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people
Social Self: Being able to have a concept of ourselves as a continuous being
Emotion
Goal: Describe a variable == Observational Method: Researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behaviors.
Ethnography: Researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside without any preconceived notions they may have
Archival Analysis: Researcher examines accumulated documents of a culture
Goal: Use one or more variables to predict another == Correlational Method Two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed.
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Correlation Coefficient: A statistical technique that assesses how well one variable can predict another. -1 to 1 ; +#s = Variable A has a direct correlation with variable B; higher absolute value means a stronger relationship
Surveys: research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions.
Random Selection: A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected.
Goal: Explain the causal mechanism ==
Experimental method: researchers randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for independent variable.
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Independent Variable: The variable a researcher changes to see if it affects some other variable
Dependent Variable: Variable being measured
Internal Validity: keeping everything besides independent variable the same
Random assignment to condition: Process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition.
P-Value: Probability that value tells likelihood that results occurred by chance or not.
External Validity: Extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to real world and other circumstances.
Ethics of Research
Cross Cultural Research
Research conducted with members of different cultures to see if psychology of interest is in both cultures or specific to one
Informed Consent: Agreement to participate in an experiment granted full awareness of the nature of the experiment in advance.
Deception experiment: misleading participants about the true purpose or events of a study.
Debriefing: explaining to participants at the end of experiment, the true purpose or events. Necessary if using deception
Institutional Review Board(IRB): A group of at least one scientist, one non scientist, and one member affiliated with an institution. Reviews all psychological research and decides if it meets ethical guidelines
Criteria for evaluating research
Validity: Accuracy
Internal Validity: keeping everything besides independent variable the same
External Validity: Extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to real world and other circumstances.
Automatic Thinking
Schemas
Korsakoff's syndrome: cannot form new memories
Accessibility: The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.
Priming: The process by which recent experiments increase the accessibility of a chema.
Self-Fulfilling prophecy(Chapter 1d. 8) : An expectation of one’s own behavior that comes true because of the tendency of the person holding it to act in a way that brings it about.
Self fulfilling prophecy: When a person acts on their schema, causing the object of the forced schema to behave consistently with the schema.
Other
Automatic goal pursuit: In everyday life, there are often competing goals and we usually decide unconsciously which to follow based on what has been recently activated or primed.
Metaphors about the body and mind: your outlook can be based on what you’re feeling or sensing.
Judgemental heuristics: like schemas that they are mental shortcuts to make good decisions in a short time. Can be very faulty sometimes.
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Availability heuristic: a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the case with which they can bring something to mind.
Representativeness heuristic: A mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.
Base rate information: Information about the frequency of members of different categories of the population.
Analytic thinking: type of thinking that focuses on teh properties of objects without considering context Western
Holistic thinking: type of thinking that focuses on the overall context and relationship between objects Eastern
Controlled thinking
Counterfactual thinking: mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.
Planning Fallacy: the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will completat a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past.
Overview of how we make decisions
- Attention: which info you pay attention to
- Memory: What prior info you use. Only what brain decides is helpful
- Reason: how you interpret new information and combine it with existing schema
- Judgement: how you evaluate new information
- Decision-making: how you act on the new information
Reliability: Consistency. Test retest reliability.
Replicability
Problems in psychological experiments: Replicability and reproducibility.
Replicability: Can you recreate the same result from new data but the same study design. Threats: Vague description of method, small sample size, and false positive results.
2011 was a wakeup call for psychology: Famous psychology person put a study showing people could predict the future in the most prestigious journal. Fraud case of made up data. Methodologists show that people can use statistics to create false positives.
Solution for the replicability renaissance is Open Science
Open Data
Open Resources
Open Source
Open Peer Review
Open methods
Open Access
People started replicating studies and only 36% of studies replicated. Not just social psychology.
Reproducibility: Can you recreate the same result with the original data. Threats: Vague description of analysis, poorly-documented data, Errors in original analysis.
Nonverbal Communication: The way in which people communicate without words.
Cues: Piece of information others can use to predict behavior. Not intended to convey information but has this side effect.The first three cues we notice are Gender Race and Age. Can give way to stereotypes and attributional biases:
Signals: piece of information others can use to predict behavior: purpose of signal is to communicate information
Why do signals exist -- exchange most information possible(Not adaptive to produce that many signals and can be revealing); deception/manipulation and mind-read competition between sender and receiver(people would quickly learn to ignore signals because not a great predictor); influence behavior of recipient.
Key principles of communication: optimize costs and benefits; signals vary in how much information they convey but always convey functionally relevant information
How to describe a signal: Referential(refers to a particular concept/idea/thing); Iconicity vs. Arbitrariness(can the signal’s form tells us what it means); Informational: Correlation to signal and what it predicts. Emotional: reflects emotion.
Confirmational Bias: We pay attention more to what we expect and remember those more, so we reinforce our stereotypes
Self-reinforcing: there doesn't exist opportunities to change your biased assumption in the real world.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: After we make assumptions about people, we treat them in a way to reinforce this behavior.
Thin slicing: drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior
Negativity Bias: We pay attention to and remember more negative things than positive things.
Attributions: How we make first impressions
Attribution theory: a description of the way people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior
Internal attribution: inference that a person is acting a certain way because of something about the person or personality
External attribution: inference that a person is acting a certain way because of something about the situation they are in.
Covarion model: a theory to form an attribution we hnote patterns between the presence of absence of possible causal factors and whether the behavior occurs.
When consistency is low, event is a fluke. When consistency is high and consensus and distinctiveness are low, make an internal attribution. When consistency is high, consensus and distinctiveness are low, make an external attribution.
Consensus information: information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does.
Distinctiveness information: information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.
Consistency information: the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.
fundamental attribution error/ correspondence bias: contribute behavior more to personality and not situation people are in.
Perceptual salience: the seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention
Two step attribution process: first making an automatic internal attribution and only then if even think about possible situational reason for behavior
Why first impressions are imporant:
Primary effect: the first traits we perceive in others influence how we view information that we learn about them later.
Belief perseverance: Tendency to stick with an initial judgement even in face of new information that should force reconsideration.
Cultural Social Perception
Analytic thinking style: focus more on properties of objects, and less attention on teh whole situation western
Holistic thinking style: focus more on the object, situation and relationship between them eastern
Self-knowledge: how we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information.
Self Control: the way we make plans and execute decisions
impression management: how we present ourselves to others and get them to see vs the way we want them to
Self-esteem: how we try to maintain positive views of ourselves.
Introspection: the process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts feeling and motives
Self-awareness theory: when people focus their attention on themselves, they evaluate and compare their behavior to internal standards and values.
Casual theories: theories about the cause of one’s own feelings and behaviors; often we learn such theories from our culture.
two -factor theory of emotion: emotional experience is the result of a two step self perception process in which people first experience physiological arousal nad then seek an appropriate explanation for it.
Misattribution of arousal: people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do.
Attribution of motivation: do people think they are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and does this matter
Self-perception theory: when our attitudes/feelings are ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our own behavior and situation. Same as attribution theory
Implemtation intentions: specific plan about where, when and how to fulfill a goal
Integration: people flatter, praise, and try to make themselves likeable to another person, often of higher status
Self-handicapping: people create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that if they do poorly on a task they can avoid blaming themselves
Behavioral self handicappping: act in ways to make themselves fail so they can blame their created obstacle
Reported self-handicapping: devise ready made excuses incase of failure.
Self esteem also uses the self-handicapping methods to try and preserve self esteem and allow for external attributions
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Self serving attributions: explanations for one’s successes that credit internal factors and explanations for one’s failures that blame external situation factors
Belief in a just world: a form of self-serving attribution where people assume bad thing happen to bad people and good thing to good people
Bias blind spot: tendency to think others are more susceptible to attributional biases than we are.
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Attribution of motivation: do people think they are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and does this matter
Intrinsic motivation: desire to engage in an activity because we enjoy it or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or ressures.
Extrinsic motivation: desire to engage in an activity because external rewards or pressures, not because we enjoy the talk
Overjustification effect: tendency for people to view thei rbehavior as caused by extrinsic reasoning, making them underestimate the affect of intrinsic motivation and may quit
Task contingent rewards: rewards given for performing a task, regardless of quality
Performance-contingent rewards: regards basen on how well a task was performed
Fixed mindset: set amount of ability that cannot change
Growth mindset: abilities are malleable and can be cultivated and grown
Social comparison theory: we learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to others
upward social comparison: compairng to people who are better than we are
Downward social comparison: comparing to people who are worse than we are.