PSYCH 345 Exam 1 Study Guide PDF

Unit 0 Social Psychology vs. other disciplines (philosophy, other social sciences, etc.) - The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people - Social psychologists predict behavior by forming hypot...

Unit 0 Social Psychology vs. other disciplines (philosophy, other social sciences, etc.) - The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people - Social psychologists predict behavior by forming hypotheses and testing them scientifically - V.S. Philosophy - Difference in methodology (social psychology uses more of a scientific method, philosophy does not) - Social psychology explores them scientifically - Other social sciences - Concerned with how broad social, economic, political, and historical factors influence events in a given society - Social psychology - The level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation Construal - How individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them, particularly the behavior or action of others toward themselves - Some people see the exact same situation differently Two central motives - The need to feel good about ourselves - The need to be accurate Unit 1 Hindsight bias - The tendency to exaggerate the prediction of an outcome after knowing that it occurred (I-Knew-it all-along-phenomenon) Know different methods (experimental, correlational, observational, archival) - Experimental - Used to answer causal questions - Two requirements: - Variable manipulation - Random assignment - The researcher randomly assigns people to different conditions - Conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have the causal effect on people’s responses – dependent variable) - - Correlational - Two variables are systematically measured, and the relationship between them – how much you can predict one from the other – is assessed - To describe the relationship between two variables using correlation analysis we need to know: - Direction  - Observational - The researcher observes people and systematically records behavior - Used to describe the behavior - Focuses on the description of one variable - Archival - Researcher examines accumulated documents (archives) Know the differences between positive and negative correlation - Positive correlation = increases in the value of one variable are associated with increases in the other variable - Negative correlation = increases in the value of one variable are associated with decreases in the value of the other variable Directionality problem and third variable problem - Directionality problem - What variable is actually causing what - Don’t necessarily know which way it goes - third variable problem - Find that the two variables are correlated and don't know the directionality - There is a third potential explanation that causes the correlation Know how to identify independent and dependent variables in a study - Know already Different types of experiments - Within-subjects experiments - A type of experimental design in which all participants are exposed to every treatment or condition - E.g. Sample experiences both treatment A and treatment B - Field experiments - Are studys using experimental designs that occur in a natural setting External and Internal validity - Internal validity - Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable - External validity - The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people Ethical consideration in research - Know already Unit 2 Controlled and Automatic thinking - Controlled thinking - Effortful and deliberate  - Carefully selecting the right course of action - Takes effort to analyze, reason, solve complex problems, exercise self-control - Slow but reliable - Automatic thinking - Quick - No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions - Faster but error-prone - Impulses and intuition Schemas - Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social world - Automatic thinking with schemas - The term schema encompasses our knowledge and impression of: - Other people (stereotype) - Ourselves (self-schema) - Social roles (role schema) - Specific events (script) Accessibility and Priming - Accessibility - The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world - Something can become accessible for three reasons: - Chronically accessible due to past experience - Accessible because it is related to a current goal - Temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences - Priming - The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept - E.g. - Watching a scary movie can later make a creaking house sound like an intruder Availability heuristic - Heuristics whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind - But sometimes what's easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions Representativeness heuristic - A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case - The Linda Problem Base rate information - Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population Anchoring and adjustment heuristic  - A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments - Example - Sale (original item was $500 but is on sale for $100 and it seems like a bargain because of the starting price) Self-fulfilling prophecy - The case where people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectation, making the expectations come true Negativity bias - Tendency to pay attention to negative events more than to positive ones Counterfactual reasoning - Mentally changing some aspects of the past and imagining what it might have been - Upward counterfactual - An imagined alternative in which the outcome is better than what actually happened - Among people who have suffered the loss of a spouse or child - Imagining more ways to avert tragedy was associated with greater distress - Downward Counterfactual - An imagined alternative in which the outcome is worse than what actually happened Ways to improve thinking - Make people more humble - Ask people to consider the point of view opposite to their own - Teach basic statistical principles - Facilitates application of principles to everyday life Unit 3 Nonverbal communication - How people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words - Facial expressions - Tone of voice - Gestures - Body position - Movement - Use of touch - Gaze Six universal emotions - Anger - Happiness - Surprise - Fear  - Disgust - Sadness Display rules - Dictate what kinds of emotional expressions people are supposed to show - Are culture-specific Emblems - Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture - Usually have direct verbal translations, like the “OK” sign - Emblems are not universal Thin-slicing - Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior Primacy effect - The tendency for facts, impressions, or items that are presented first to be better learned or remembered than the material presented later in the sequence Belief perseverance - The tendency to stick with our initial judgement even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider Internal and External attributions - Internal attributions - Infer a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person (e.g. attitude, character, personality) - External attributions - Inter a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about a situation - Assume most people would respond the same way in that situation - All about the situation makes this person behave (not the person itself) Fundamental attribution error - Tend to make internal attributions to other people’s behavior and underestimate the role of social behavior Self-serving bias - Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors, and explanations for one's failures that blame the external, situational factors - You favor yourself over other factors that might be at play Belief in a just world - The assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get - Type of defensive attribution - Advantage - Allows people to deal with feelings of vulnerability, mortality - Disadvantage - Blaming the victim Bias blind spot - Believe other people are more susceptible to attributional biases compared to self - People think they are less vulnerable to bias than other people  Analytic and Holistic thinking - Analytic thinking style - Focus on subjects without considering the surrounding context - Associated with Western cultures - Holistic thinking style - Focus on the overall context, relation between objects - Associated with Eastern Cultures Unit 4 Self-concept and how it develops through life - Self-concept - The overall set of beliefs that people have about their personal attributes Origins of the self - Rudimentary self-concept - Awareness of self outside of what is going on inside our heads - Some primates - Humans 18-24 months Self-concept - Child’s self-concept - Concrete - References to characteristics like age, sex, neighborhood, and hobbies - Mature self-concept - Less emphasis on physical characteristics - More emphasis on psychological states and how other people judge us - Like morals and values Key attributes of true self - elf -knowledge - The way we understand who we are and organize this information - Self-control - The way we make plans and execute decisions - Impression management - The way we present ourselves to others and get them to see us the way we want to be seen - Self-esteem - The way we maintain positive views of ourselves Independent vs Interdependent view of self - Independent view of the self - Self = internal thoughts, feelings, and actions - Independence and uniqueness - Western cultures - Interdependent view of the self  - Self = relationships with other people - Connectedness and interdependence - Asian and non-Western cultures - Collectivistic cultures - The squeaky wheel gets the grease - American proverb - The nail that stands out gets pounded down - Japanese proverb Self-awareness theory - The idea that when people focus their attention on themselves, they evaluate and compare their behavior to their internal standards and values - Self-focus can remind you of your sense of right and wrong Self-perception theory - The theory that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our own behavior and the situation in which it occurs - Infer inner feelings from our own behavior - Only when we are not sure how we feel Two-factor theory of emotion - We experience emotions in a two-step self-perception process - 1. Experience physiological arousal - 2. Seek an appropriate explanation for it - Implications - Emotions are somewhat arbitrary - Emotions depend on explanations for arousal Misattribution of arousal - Making mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do Intrinsic vs Extrinsic motivation - Extrinsic motivation - Doing an activity for the sake of some external outcome - Initiated externally - Reward is separate - Focus on the reward - Intrinsic motivation - Doing an activity for the sake of that activity itself - Initiated internally - Activity is the reward - Focus on the activity Overjustification effect - The tendency of people to view their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic reasons, making them underestimate the extent to which it was caused by intrinsic reasons Growth and fixed mindset Social comparison theory  Upward and downward comparisons Better than average effect Self-control Impression management Ingratiation Self-handicapping