Introduction to Social Psychology Midterm Exam Prep, Exams of Social Psychology

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PSYB10H3Y Introduction to Social Psychology Midterm exam prep with Prof. Dr. Ravi Thiruchselvam University of Toronto, Scarborough

Social Psychology - --scientific study of feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of individuals in social situation Personality Psychology - --Close to social psychology, but stresses individual differences in behaviour rather than social situation Cognitive Psychology - --Studies how we perceive, think, and remember aspects of the world Sociology - --Study of behaviour of the people in the aggregate Dispositions - --Internal factors (beliefs, values, personalities, abilities) whether real or imagined that guide a bebaviour Fundamental Attribution Error: - --Failure to recognize importance of situational influences on behaviour and in turn overemphasize importance of dispositions on behaviour Channel Factors - --Certain circumstances in the situation that appear unimportant on the surface, but have great consequence on behaviour (facilitating, blocking, or guiding in a particular direction) Construal - --People's interpretation and inference about situations or stimuli they confront Gestalt Psychology - --Perceive objects not by some automatic registering device, but actively (usually unconscious) interpretation of what the object represents as a whole Prisoner's Dilemma - --Involving payoff to two people who must decide whether to cooperate or defect. In the end,, trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection

Schema - --Knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information Natural Selection - --evolutionary processes that molds organism so traits that enhance probability of survival and reproduction are passed onto subsequent generations Theory of Mind - --recognize that other people have beliefs and desires Parental Investment - --evolutionary principle that costs and benefits associated with reproduction and nurturing offspring. Different for males and females, so one sex will invest more in the child than the other sex Naturalistic Fallacy - --claim that things are the way they should be Independent (Individualistic) Cultures - --tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied together by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational membership. But are essentially separate from others and have attributes that exist in absence of any connection to others Interdependent (Collectivist) Cultures - --define themselves as part of a collective, tied to other in their group. Place less importance in individual freedom or personal control over their lives Hindsight Bias - --tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a particular outcome after it has occurred Hypothesis - --Prediction about what will happen in a particular circumstance Theory - --Body of related propositions intended to describe some aspect of the world Participant Observation - --involves observing some phenomenon at close range

Convenience Sample - --not random, and biased in some way Correlational Research - --conduct to see if there is a relationship between certain variables. No random assignment to different groups Experimental Research - --randomly assigned people to different conditions or situations and enables researchers to make strong inference of how they conditions affect behaviour Reverse Correlation - --unknown which variable causes the other Third Variable - --neither variable causes the other, but a third one causes both Self-Selection - --problem arises when participants assign their level on a variable. Brings to their value unknown properties that make causal interpretation of the outcome difficult Longitudinal Study - --conducted over long period of time with same population, which is periodically assessed regarding a particular behaviour Random Assignment - --assign participants to groups by random. Gives great power to experiments and rules out possibility of self-selection bias Control Condition - --comparable to the experiment condition in every way except lacks the one aspect hypothesized to produce the effect on the dependent variable Natural Experiments - --natural phenomena having somewhat different conditions that can be compared with almost same rigor as true experiments

External Validity - --experimental setup closely resembles real-life situations Field Experiment - --a good way to maintain external validity. Set up in real world. Usually participants unaware they are in an experiment Internal Validity - --confidence that only the manipulated variable produced the results Debriefing - --asking straightforward if participants understood. Educate about what was being studied Reliability - --Degree which measurement of variable is likely to yield consistent results Measurement Validity - --correlation between measurement and the outcome the measurement was to predict Statistical Significance - --measure of result's probability given chance Basic Science - --trying to understand basic phenomenon in its own right. Used to build valid theories about nature of the world Applied Science - --concerned with some real-world problem of importance Interventions - --efforts to change a person's behaviour Institutional Review Board (IRB) - --university committee that examines research proposals and makes judgment about ethical appropriateness of the research Individual Self - --beliefs about our unique personal traits and so forth

Relational Self - --beliefs about our identities in specific relationships Collective Self - --beliefs about our identities as members of social groups we belong to Reflected Self-Appraisals - --beliefs about what others think of our social selves Working Self-Concept - --subset of self-knowledge brought to mind in a particular context. Most relevant and appropriate to our current situation Social Comparison - --hypothesis that people compare themselves to others in order to obtain accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states Self-Schema - --cognitive structures derived from past experiences that represent beliefs and feelings about the self in particular domains Self-Reference Effects - --tendency for information related to the self to be more thoroughly processed and integrated with existing self-knowledge. Makes it more memorable Self-Complexity - --tendency to define the self by multiple domains that are relative distinct from one another in content Self-Esteem - --positive or negative overall evaluation a person has to themselves Trait Self-Esteem - --enduring level of self-regard across time. Fairly stable State Self-Esteem - --dynamic self-evaluations in momentary feelings of the self

Contingencies of Self-Worth - --inventories that self-esteem depends on Sociometer Hypothesis - --self-esteem is internal, subjective marker of the extent a person is included or looked favourably upon by others Self-Enhancement - --people are motivated to view themselves positively. This process influences numerous processes related to self-evaluation Better-Than-Average Effect - --most people think they are above average on various traits Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) Model - --people are motivated to view themselves in favourable light. Occurs by reflection and comparison Self-Verification Theory - --people strive for stable, subjectively accurate beliefs about themselves because it gives them a sense of coherence Self-Regulation - --process people use to initiate, alter, and control behaviour in the pursuit of goals. Includes ability to resist short-term awards that thwart getting long-term ones Possible Selves - --Hypothetical Selves a person aspires to be in the future Self-Discrepancy Theory - --behaviour that is motivated by situations reflecting the ideal and ought self. Falling short of these ideals creates specific emotions Actual Self - --self people believe they are Ideal Self - --what people would like to be

Ought Self - --what people think they should be Promotion Focus - --regulate behaviour with respect to ideal self standards (attaining positive outcomes) Prevention Focus - --regulating behaviour with respect to ought self standards (avoiding negative outcomes) Ego Depletion - --state produced by self-control where people lack energy to engage in further acts of self control Self-Presentation - --presenting the person that we would like others to believe we are Face - --public image of ourselves we want others to believe Self-Monitoring - --tendency for people to monitor their behaviour so it fits demand of the current situation Self-Handicapping - --tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviour in order to have a ready excuse shold they perform poorly or fail On-Record Communication - --statements made that are intended to be taken literally Off-Record Communication - --indirect and ambiguous. Allows us to hint at ideas that aren't explicit in words we utter Social Cognition - --study of how people think about social world and arrive at judgments to help interpret past, understand present, and predict future

Pluralistic Ignorance - --misperception of a group norm; from observing people acting at variance of private beliefs, in concern for social norm. Can reinforce error group norms Primacy Effect - --disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented first Recency Effect - --disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented last Framing Effect - --influence on judgment by way information is presented (order of word) Spin Framing - --less pure, varies content, not just order of what is presented Construal Level Theory - --outlines relationships between psychological distance and concreteness of various abstractions of thought. Psychologically distant actions and events are thought of abstractly, events close at hand are thought about concretely Confirmation Bias - --tendency to test propositions by searching for supportive evidence Bottom-up - --"data driven" where a conclusion is formed based on stimuli encountered Top-Down - --"theory driven" where new information is filtered and interpreted in light of pre-existing knowledge and expectations Priming - --momentary activate a concept and make it available Subliminal - --below threshold of conscious awareness

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies - --tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing that they expect to happen Intuitive System - --quickly and semantically operates based on associations (simultaneous processing) Rational System - --slower and controlled, based on deduction. Serial processing Heuristic - --intuitive mental operation, allows for variety of quick effective judgments Availability Heuristic - --judge frequency of probability of event based on how readily persistent they come to mind Representativeness Heuristic - --try to categorize something based on how similar it is to our concept of the typical member of the category Fluency - --feeling of ease associated with processing information Base-Rate Information - --information about relative frequency of events or of members in different categories of the population Base-Rate Neglect - --tendency for people to ignore or underutilize base-rate information when assessing if something belongs in a particular category Planning Fallacy - --tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project Illusory Correlation - --belief that two variables are related when they aren't

Attribution Theory - --umbrella term describing theoretical accounts of how people assign causes to events around them and effects that people's causal assessments have Causal Attribution - --process to explain both their own and other people's behaviour by linking and event to a cause. Inferring a personality that was responsible for the behaviour Explanatory Style - --habitual way of explaining events, usually along three dimensions (Internal, stability, and globality) Covariation Principle - --idea hat behaviours should be attributed to potential causes that co-occur with the behaviour Consensus - --what most would do in a given situation. If they would behave the same way Distinctiveness - --what an individual does in different situations. Whether a behaviour is unique to a particular situation or occurs in all of them Consistency - --what an individual does in a situation in different occasions. Whether they act the same under the same circumstances Discounting Principle - --idea that people should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behaviour if other plausible causes might have produced it Augmentation Principle - --idea that should assign greater weight to a certain cause of a behaviour if other plausible causes are present that would normally produce opposite outcome Counterfactual Thinking - --thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened if only something was done slightly different

Emotional Amplification - --increasing of an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening Self-Serving Attribution Bias - --tendency to attribute features and other bad events to external circumstances and attribute successes and other good events to oneself Just World Hypothesis - --believing people get what they deserve and deserve what they get Actor-Observer Differences - --different in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment. Actor (more disposed to making situational attribution) or observer (more disposed to making disposition attribution) Social Class - --amount of wealth, education, and occupational prestige a persona and their family shares Emotions - --brief and specific psychological and physiological responses that help humans meet goals, many of which are social Appraisal Process - --ways people evaluate events and objects in the environment Core-Relational Themes - --distant things that define the core of an emotion Primary Appraisal Stage - --initial automatic positive or negative evaluation of event based on whether they are congruent or incongruent with an individual's goals Secondary Appraisal Stage - --subsequent evaluations where people determine why they feel the way they do about an event. Consider possible ways of responding and weigh future consequences of different courses of action

Principle of Serviceable Habits - --emotional expression are remnants of full-blown behaviours that help predecessors meet important goals Emotional Accents - --culturally specific ways that people express particular emotions Focal Emotions - --emotions that are especially common with a particular culture Hypercognize - --represent a particular emotion with numerous words and concepts Display Rules - --specific culture rules of how, when, and to who people express emotions Affective Displays - --emotional expressions seen as universal Emblems - --nonverbal gestures that translate directly into a word Illustrators - --nonverbal behaviour to make speech vivid, engaging, or easy to visualize Regulators - --nonverbal expressions used to coordinate conversation Self-Adapters - --nervous, seemingly random behaviour people engage in when tense as if to release nervous energy Infrahumanization - --tendency to be reluctant to attribute complex emotions, such as pride or compassion to outgroup members. This can also emotionally divide groups

Feeling as Information Perspective - --theory that since many judgments are too complex to review all relevant evidence thoroughly, people rely on their emotions to provide with rapid reliable information about events and conditions within social environments Self-Critical Emotions - --(shame, embarrassment, guilt) arise when we have violated social norms and moral codes for ideas about virtue and character Other-Praising Emotions - --(gratitude, elevation, awe) signal approval of others' morality Harm-Related Emotions - --(sympathy, concern, compassion) motivate pro-social behaviour towards those who suffer or are vulnerable Other-Condemning Emotions - --(anger, disgust) response to others' immoral acts Processing Style Perspective - --different emotions leads to reasoning in different ways Broaden-and-Build Hypothesis - --positive emotions broaden thought and action repertoires, helping people build social resources Peak Moment - --pleasure associated with particular event. Strongly predicts how much pleasure you will associate with that event Feel at the end - --predicts overall report of pleasure Duration Neglect - --event length is unrelated to overall emotional judgment of event Affective Forecasting - --predicting emotions following a current event

Immune Neglect - --tendency to underestimate resilience to difficult life events. Leads to overestimating extent which life's difficulties will reduce personal well-being Focalism - --tendency to focus too much on central aspect of an event while neglecting to consider impact of other factors of the event or impact of other events Attitude - --evaluation of an object along a positive-negative dimension. At their core, involve three dimensions (affect, cognition, behaviour) Likert Scale - --numerical scale to assess attitudes. Involves set of possible answers with labelled anchors on each extreme Accessibility - --how readily something comes to mind, thereby guiding thought and behaviour Response Latency - --time it takes an individual to respond to a stimulus Implicit Attitude Measure - --indirect measure of attitude that doesn't involve self-report. When there is reason to believe people may be unwilling or unable to report attitude Cognitive Consistency Theories - --attempts to account for some of the most common sources of rationalization people use to bring their attitudes in line with their actions Balance Theory - --people try to keep a balance among beliefs, cognitions, and sentiments Cognitive Dissonance - --inconsistencies among person's thoughts, sentiments, and actions create and aversive emotional state that leads to efforts to restore consistency Effort Justification - --tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the resources devoted to something that turned out unpleasant or disappointing

Induced (Forced) Compliance - --subtly having people behave in a manner inconsistent with attitudes, thus creating dissonance and thus a change in original attitudes or values Self-Affirmation - --boost self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity Self-Perception Theory - --people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behaviour and context it occurred. Then they infer what attitudes must be Overjustification Effect - --tend to devaluate activities that are done only in order to get something else System Justification Theory - --people are motivated to see existing political and social status quo as desirable, fair, and legitimate Terror Management Theory (TMT) - --people deal with anxiety of knowing their mortality by striving for symbolic immortality through preservation of a valued worldview and conviction that they have lived up to its values and prescriptions Stereotype - --schemas about specific social groups Controlled Processes - --conscious, systematic, and deliberate. Requires more effort Informed Consent - --have sufficient information about procedure to judge participation in the study Deception - --may be used if justified. Mislead people to prevent guessing study's purpose Diversification - --siblings take on different roles to minimize conflict

Social Context - --sense of self may shift a lot depending on whom we're interacting with Self as Narrative - --tells story of how we got to how we are now Social-Self Beliefs - --beliefs about rules and duties we assume in different groups Automatic Self-Control Strategies - --influence behaviour as well as thought. Leads people to approach goals and avoid temptation Public Face - --awareness of what others think of us Private Face - --awareness of our own internal feelings, thoughts, and preferences Internal Attribution - --behaviour that is explained by aspect of the person External Attribution - --behaviour that is explained by aspects of the situation Perceptual Salience - --often attribute something to what appears to be the most obvious case. As actors, situation is salient. As observers, person (actor) is salient Anchoring - --estimates of unknown quantities are easily biased by values they consider The Spotlight Effect - --we think we're more noticeable than we actually are Attitude Projection - --tend to project our own attitudes, beliefs, and experiences onto others

Rationalizing Decisions - --difficult choices can induce dissonance. Aroused by inconsistency of accepting negatives of one choice while rejecting positives of another Principle of Ideomotor Action - --thinking about something increases likelihood of doing it Emotion - --brief, lasting only a couple seconds Autonomic Nervous System - --glands, organs, and blood vessels controlled by brain and spinal cord that regulate bodily responses to the environment (two branches: Sympathetic and Parasympathetic) Two-Factor Theory of Emotion - --emotions are made of two components: unexplained physiological arousal, and cognitive explanation of the arousal Misattribution of Arousal - --when source of arousal is incorrectly attributed to wrong cause Directed Facial Action Task - --participants asked to pose facial expressions by being instructed to activate specific facial muscles Social Intuitionist Model - --people have intuitive judgment, then follow with reasoning Theory of Moral Sentiments - --(Adam Smith) we are bothered when we see someone injured and seem to take on the feelings of it ourselves "Chameleon Effect" - --mimicry leads others to like us