Social Psychology: Understanding Human Interactions

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Questions and Answers

Automatic Processing can be defined as thinking that is ____.

effortless

What are the six major emotional expressions?

anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness

Automatic Believing and Controlled Unbelieving are opposites.

True

What are the two processes involved in thought suppression?

Monitoring Process Signup and view all the answers

What is a schema?

A cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Signup and view all the answers

Event schemas help individuals to understand and navigate through various experiences by providing a mental framework.

True Signup and view all the answers

What is the belief perseverance effect?

The tendency to cling to an initial belief even after evidence contradictions. Signup and view all the answers

In biased sampling, generalizing is based on information from others that are known to be ____.This can lead to misleading conclusions.

biased Signup and view all the answers

What is psychological reactance?

The emotional and cognitive response when someone perceives a threat to their freedom Signup and view all the answers

According to Leon Festinger, attitudes always predict behavior.

False Signup and view all the answers

What is the defensive attribution theory based on?

belief in a just world Signup and view all the answers

What does situational attribution focus on attributing behavior to? External factors or ______ influences.

situational Signup and view all the answers

What is the basis of our ability to interpret the six major emotions and to feel empathy?

Mirror neurons Signup and view all the answers

Which theory suggests that women are better at encoding and decoding nonverbal cues?

Social role theory Signup and view all the answers

Affect blends occur when a person reveals only one emotion at a time.

False Signup and view all the answers

Implicit personality theory is composed of our general notions about which personality traits go together in one person, also known as _____ personality theory.

implicit Signup and view all the answers

Match the theory with its description:

Fundamental Attribution Theory = Explains how people tend to attribute others' behavior to internal factors Defensive Attributions = Explanations of behaviors that defend an individual's preferred beliefs Self-serving Attribution = Explains how individuals attribute their successes to internal factors and failures to external factors Attribution Theory = Deals with how people explain events and make causal attributions Signup and view all the answers

What is the role of mirror neurons in our ability to understand emotions?

Mirror neurons fire automatically and involuntarily when we see someone else perform an action or display an emotion, helping us empathize and interpret emotions. Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Actively constructs understanding through the interpretation of experiences and interactions
Process involved in perceiving other people and learning about them
Study of mental processes involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to other people in our social world

Schemas

Cognitive frameworks or concepts that help organize and interpret information
Allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information available in our environment
Examples: Person Schemas (mental representations of individuals), Social Schemas (schemas about social groups or categories), Event Schemas (schemas about specific events or situations)

Develops in childhood and adolescence
Children become more aware of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives, as well as those of others
Learn how to respond in social situations, engage in prosocial behaviors, and take the perspective of others

Important cultural differences in social cognition exist
Same social behavior can have different meanings and interpretations in different cultures
Collective cultural influences can affect how people interpret social situations

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Theory of how a child's thinking develops
Believes that a child's thinking develops through stages
Important for understanding how children develop social cognition

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently
Examples: Availability Heuristic (judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind), Representative Heuristic (classifying something based on how similar it is to a typical case), Anchoring (being influenced by the first bit of information)

Biased Sampling and Belief Perseverance

Biased Sampling: generalizing based on information from others that is known to be biased
Belief Perseverance: clinging to an initial belief even after receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms it

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A person has expectations about another person, which influences how they act towards them, causing the person to act and behave according to the original expectations

Heuristic Approach and Algorithmic Approach

Heuristic Approach: using mental shortcuts or rules of thumb to make decisions and judgments
Algorithmic Approach: using a specific, step-by-step procedure or set of rules to reach a solution

Motivated Tacticians and Cognitive Misers

Motivated Tacticians: those who have a larger arsenal of mental rules and strategies and choose wisely among them depending on their needs and goals
Cognitive Misers: those who are motivated to minimize cognitive load and maximize efficiency by avoiding extensive processing of information### Monitoring Process
Thought suppression is a less effortful mental process, where a person makes a mental note to wait and see if an uninvited thought recurs.
Social Perception and Behaviors: it's a study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.
We rely on our impressions and personal theories to form conclusions about others, but we shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

Correcting Reasoning Skills

Be humble about reasoning, and avoid overconfidence in judgments.
Correcting reasoning skills requires understanding the limitations of our judgments.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal cues can communicate volumes, and all humans can encode or express emotions in the same way.
Facial expressions of emotion are universal, with six major emotions: anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness.
Mirror neurons are the basis of our ability to feel empathy, and they respond when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform the same action.

Decoding Facial Expressions

Decoding facial expressions accurately is more complicated than we think, due to three reasons:
- Affect blends occur when a person reveals two or more emotions simultaneously.
- Nonverbal cues can actually contradict spoken words.
- Culture affects the interpretation of facial expressions.

Emblems

Emblems are nonverbal gestures with well-understood definitions within a given culture, but they are not universal.
Each culture has its own emblems, which may not be understandable to people from other cultures.

Implicit Personality Theory

Implicit Personality Theory suggests that people's beliefs about certain attributes influence their perceptions about people upon first meeting.
This theory was developed by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

Priming Effect

Priming is the psychological phenomenon where the exposure of stimuli influences the behavior of an individual without them even realizing it.
Priming can be affected by tiny cues and stimuli, such as words, images, sounds, smells, tastes, or physical movements.

Social role theory of sex differences suggests that women have learned different skills, including being polite and overlooking lying.
This theory, developed by Alice Eagly, suggests that most societies have a division of labor based on gender.

Correspondent Inference Theory

Correspondent inference, also known as correspondent trait inference, is a judgment that a person's personality matches or corresponds to their behavior.
This theory, developed by Solomon Asch, examines how people form impressions of each other.

Attribution Theory

Attribution theory deals with how people use information to arrive at causal explanations for events.
It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment.
Examples of attribution theory include:
- Dispositional attribution: attributing behavior to internal characteristics, traits, or personal qualities.
- Situational attribution: attributing behavior to external factors or situational influences.
- Self-serving attribution: attributions that serve to defend an individual's preferred beliefs about self, others, and the world.
- Defensive attributions: attributions that serve to defend an individual's preferred beliefs about self, others, and the world.
- Fundamental attribution error: underestimating situational factors and overestimating dispositional influences.

Attitude and Behavior

Attitudes are often the result of experience or upbringing, and they can have a powerful influence over behavior.
Cognitively based attitudes are based on people's beliefs about the properties of the attitude object.
Behaviorally based attitudes are based on people's actions toward the attitude object.
Affectively based attitudes are based on people's emotions and values.
Two main ideas of attribution theory:
- Dispositional vs. situational attribution.
- Ways on how our attitudes change.

Reactance Theory

Reactance theory suggests that when people feel their freedom of choice is threatened, they experience a psychological reactance, which motivates them to resist or restore their sense of freedom.
This theory arises from the innate need for autonomy and the desire to maintain control over one's choices and behaviors.

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Description

Explore how social cognition shapes our understanding of the world and people around us. Learn about cultural influences and social phenomena like extended families and child marriage.