Social Psychology Quiz

Social Psychology and Human Behavior

• Subjects in a dark room estimated the distance a light moved, and their estimates converged on a common value, establishing a group norm.
• Informational Social Influence: People look to others for information on how to behave in novel or ambiguous situations, driven by the desire to be right.
• Normative Social Influence: People conform to be liked and approved, driven by the desire to be accepted.
• Milgram's obedience experiment involved delivering painful electric shocks to a fellow participant under the influence of an authority figure.
• Adolf Eichmann supervised the deportation of 6,000,000 Jews to Nazi gas chambers, raising questions about the nature of evil and social obedience to authority.
• Stanley Milgram's experiment involved males aged 20-50 as subjects, an authority figure as the experimenter, and a victim as the learner.
• Obedience was highest in the presence of an authority figure and when the victim was depersonalized, with over 60% of subjects fully obedient.
• Factors influencing obedience included the proximity of the person giving orders and the depersonalization of the victim.
• Altruism refers to voluntary self-sacrificing behavior intended to benefit others without expectation of reward, influenced by situational power and the presence of others.
• Social cognition involves forming impressions of others based on physical appearance and stereotypes, often leading to distorted impressions.
• Thin-slicing refers to the unconscious ability to find patterns in behavior based on narrow slices of experience, showcasing the power of implicit processes.
• Bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility illustrate how ethics can be a luxury in modern society, impacting social behavior.

Social Cognition: Understanding Human Behavior

• The halo effect influences how individuals form impressions, where first impressions tend to be lasting.
• Asch's study showed that the order of information presentation can significantly impact how a person is perceived.
• Simplification strategies, such as expectations and dispositional inferences, are used to conserve mental effort in the information-rich social world.
• Schemas are cognitive structures that organize our knowledge about the world and influence what we pay attention to.
• The use of screens during auditions accounted for a significant increase in the number of female musicians in orchestras.
• Automatic vigilance leads individuals to pay more attention to negative information about others, which is a consequence of human evolution.
• Social perceptions and impressions are resistant to change, and attribution is the process by which people infer the causes of others' behavior.
• The fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to underestimate situational factors and overestimate dispositional factors in explaining others' behavior.
• The just-world hypothesis and fallacy lead to blaming the victim and shield individuals from believing they will suffer similar misfortunes, fueling stereotypes and prejudice.
• The actor-observer effect suggests that individuals tend to attribute others' behavior to dispositional factors but attribute their own behavior to situational factors.
• Situational attributions require more effort and are often overlooked in favor of blaming the individual.
• Individuals tend to make different attributions about others' behavior than they do about their own, highlighting the complexity of human behavior and perception.