PSY 221
Planted 02022-08-25
Social Psychology
Introduction
Social psychology is the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
Textbook: Social Psychology by Gilovish, Keitner, Chen, Nisbett
Exam 1
Week 1
Moderation: When the relationship between 2 variables relies on a third variable
Individualistic culture: self-sufficiency, uniqueness, autonomy, independence
Collectivistic culture: social rules focus on promoting selflessness, working as a group, doing what’s best for society, families and communities have central role
Construal: Interpretations or inferences about the people, places, and events we confront
Independent variable: The predictor variable manipulated by the researcher
Dependent variable: The outcome variable measured by the researcher
Internal validity: experimental/situational control (random assignment)
External validity: extent to which the results of the study can be generalized to other people and places.
B = f(P, E) represents: Behavior is a function of person and environment
How personality and situations interact to predict thoughts, feelings, and behavior:
Construct vs operationalized variables:
Strengths and weaknesses of different types (e.g., self-report, behavioral) measures:
Why correlation does not equal causation:
Week 2
Self-concept: the sum total of an individual’s beliefs and attitudes about his or her personal attributes
Self-complexity: Some people see themselves in an endless number of highly specific categories. Some people see themselves in a small number of broad categories.
Self-concept clarity: The extent to which the self is clearly and confidently defined and internally consistent
Interdependent vs. Independent self-concept: Interdependent self-concept: Defined primarily in relation to other people and groups. Independent Defined primarily by unique characteristics, abilities, thoughts, and feelings.
Downward vs. Upward social comparison: Downward = Comparing to worse than you (preferred), Upward = Comparing to people better than you (best if just slightly better)
Self-esteem: A person’s evaluation of their own self-worth
Self-enhancement: Self-serving attributions for success and failure
BIRG-ing and CORF-ing: Basking In Reflected Glory and Cutting Off Reflected Failure
Self-verification theory: Accuracy of self-views is desirable because people rely on them to guide behavior and predict others perception of them.
Self-affirmation:
Self-handicapping: when people anticipate failure by engaging in behaviors to make failure more likely
Self-monitoring: the extent to which you look to the situation to guide your behavior
Self-regulation: Processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior to pursue goals.
self-concepts that vary in complexity and clarity: low-complexity = outgoing/reserved/mature/mature , high-complexity = creative/adventurous/individualistic/artistic
when we are more vs less accurate about our traits: more accurate about our internal traits (e.g., emotions, cognitive traits), observers are more accurate about external traits (e.g., social behaviors, social traits (extraversion))
psychological consequences of having an independent vs interdependent self-concept:
when people engage in different forms of social comparison and the resulting effects:
who will have higher vs. lower self-esteem based on demographic and social factors:
how self-verification and self-esteem influence social interactions:
Identify domains where we see self-enhancement effects:
how self-handicapping contributes to positive self-presentation:
strategies to improve self-control:
Week 3
Emotion: A brief, specific response, both psychological and physiological, that helps people meet goals, including social goals
Mood: last hours or days, are more positive vs. negative
Affect: are more positive vs. negative
Empathic accuracy: Accurately judging other people’s emotions
Social intuitionist model of moral judgments: The idea that people first have fast, emotional reactions to morally relevant events and then rely on reason to arrive at a judgment of right or wrong
Affective forecasting: Predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness or anger or sadness, and for how long (e.g., how happy or unhappy we’d be after a romantic breakup)
Immune neglect: People underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events (e.g., Painful, difficult experiences are often less upsetting than we expect them to be)
Focalism: A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of associated factors or other events (e.g., a happy wedding day doesn’t guarantee a satisfying marriage)
Eudemonic vs hedonic well-being: Eudemonic well-being:
- Feel your life is meaningful
- Feel you have a purpose
- Experience self- actualization
Hedonic well-being:
- Experience pleasure
- Avoid pain
- Lots of enjoyable experiences
Emotion regulation: The processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions
Situation selection: Choose to avoid situations that elicit negative affect
Situation modification: Change a situation so it no longer elicits a particular emotion
Attention deployment: distraction moves attention and negative emotion away all together,
Cognitive change: Reappraisal:
- Negative reappraisal: View a negative event less negatively
- Positive reappraisal: View a negative event more positively
Response modulation: Directly influencing physiological, experiential, or behavioral responding
Suppression: Restrict emotional experience and expression
5 components of emotion with examples:
- Appraisal process
- Physiological responses
- Expressive behavior
- Subjective feelings
- Action tendencies
basic universal emotions:
when empathic accuracy will be higher vs lower based on target and perceiver characteristics:
historical (e.g., evolutionary, cultural) and current (e.g., relationship, group, informational) functions of emotions:
five major moral domains:
biases in affective forecasting:
positive outcomes associated with happiness and well-being:
strategies for increasing happiness:
which stages in emotion regulation are targeted by different strategies:
- situation selection
- situation modification: situation
- attentional deployment: attention
- cognitive change: appraisal
- response modulation: response
effectiveness and consequences of reappraisal versus suppression:
Week 4
Internal attribution: Caused by something about the person
External attribution: Caused by something about the situation
Covariation principle: People explain events in terms of things that are present when the event occurs but absent when it does not
Fundamental attribution error: The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, and the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior.
Self-serving attribution bias: The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances, and to attribute success and other good events to oneself
Entity theorists: People who tend to see personal characteristics (e.g., intelligence, personality) as stable
Incremental theorists: People who tend to see personal characteristics as unstable and changeable.
Just world theory: People are motivated to believe that others get what they deserve.
Counterfactual thinking: Thoughts of what might have been, could have or should have happened “if only” something had occurred differently
how combinations of levels of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency promote internal vs external attributions for behavior:
situations where someone is making the fundamental attribution error:
differences in how we make attributions about our behavior versus the behavior of others:
why the self-serving attributional bias preserves self-esteem:
a pessimistic attributional style and describe outcomes associated with it:
how cultural factors predict attributional styles: people from collectivistic cultures…
the causes of the fundamental attribution error:
when counterfactual thinking will amplify emotional responses to events:
Themes and Methods
Norman Triplett
Dynamogenic Factors in Pacemaking Competition: found people behaved differently when observed. Behavior was more than reflex, stimulus, and response. Bike riders:
- against time: slow
- with pacer: faster
- competition against pacer: fastest
Kurt Lewin
Founded “social psychology” and argued human behavior is explained by complex dynamic forces acting on an individual—like physical forces shaping the movement of objects.
Competing needs cause tension, and the satisfaction of the need reduces the tension.
function behavior(person, environment) {}
Interpretation & subconscious
Perceptions are subject to interpretation. People are lazy.
Construal is the interpretations or inferences about the people, places, and events we confront.
Social cognition is shortcuts for processing information and making decisions.
Priming is environment cues that guide our interpretation.
Implicit attitudes predict behavior above and beyond explicit attitudes.
Scientific process
- Research question: What brings people together in romantic relationships?
- Theory: An explanation for how and why variables are related to each other.
- Hypothesis: A specific prediction that derives from the theory.
- Research: A process of making observations to test hypotheses.
Variables:
- variable: Any event, situation, behavior, or individual characteristic that can have more than one possible value.
- construct: Abstract ideas that form the basis of a research hypothesis.
- Operational variables: the definition of an abstract concept used by a researcher to measure or manipulate the concept in a research study.
Operational variables
There are many operational variables for the same concept. For example, stress:
- Stress self-report rating on some scale
- Heartbeats per minute
- Facial tension, frowning/grimacing, fidgeting
- Number of daily events experienced
Self-report
- Checklist of objective events
- Likert-type scales
Strengths:
- easy to collect
- get perceptions, judgements, motivations, memories,
- variation along a scale
Weaknesses:
- people know what you’re measuring
- participant burden
- inaccurate
Behavioral design
Strengths:
- direct behavior
- potentially unobtrusive
Weaknesses:
- complicated to collect
- cannot get motivation behind behaviors
- behaviors may be one-time
- need clear definitions of behavior
Correlational designs
Look at links between two or more variables as they naturally exist in the world.
Example:
- Correlation between self-esteem and talking in class
- Correlation between average income in a county and number of charitable organizations in a county Links between gender and importance of physical attractiveness
Correlation does not equal causation
Did x cause y to happen?
Experimental method
Internal validity: experimental/situational control (random assignment)
External validity: extent to which the results of the study can be generalized to other people and places.
Strengths:
- test causality
- control
Limitations:
- complicated
- internal and external validity tradeoffs
The Self
Self-concept is the sum total of an individual’s beliefs and attitudes about his or her personal attributes.
Self-schema (Markus, 1977): A cognitive structure derived from past experience that represents a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self.
William James (1980): The social me refers to the parts of self-knowledge that are derived from social relationships
Looking-glass self (Cooley, 1902): People can only learn about the “self” when they receive feedback from other people. The self cannot develop in isolation!
Self-complexity: co-existing archetypes
Working self-concept: the aspect of the self that is active in your mind at any particular time.
We’re not good at introspection:
- We are constantly mentally processing information, so we often don’t have the capacity to understand our own thoughts, feelings and behavior
- Multiple other forces, unconscious processes
- Lies
We are more accurate about our internal traits:
- Emotions
- Cognitive traits (e.g., reflectiveness, pessimism)
Observers more accurate about external traits:
- Social behaviors
- Social traits (e.g., extraversion)
Gender
Gender:
- Women more interdependent than men
- Socialization: Girls typically raised to focus more on emotions and empathy, playing cooperative games
- Biology: Women in more nurturing, child-rearing roles
Socioeconomic status
- Low SES associated with more interdependence
- Greater sensitivity to social context More interdependence
- Higher SES associated with greater focus on achievement
Festinger’s (1954) Theory of Social Comparison:
- People want to know where they stand
- Prefer objective standards of comparison
- No objective standard available, use a social standard
- Typically compare ourselves to similar others
More commonly compare to people worse than self: downward social comparison
Self-esteem
Self-esteem: A person’s evaluation of their own self-worth
Sociometer Theory (Leary): Self-esteem is an evolutionary metric for how we’re doing socially:
- System monitors social inclusion, activates social pain if inclusion is low, motivates restoration of inclusion
- Evidence: Self-esteem is particularly sensitive to rejection (Cyberball Task)
Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model (Tesser): Others’ successes can threaten our self-esteem (or not)
When people think success in a given domain is important, they believe the most important traits to succeed are those that they possess (Dunning, Leuenberger, & Sherman, 1995)—Egocentric perceptions of desirable traits
People over-estimate the extent to which their romantic partners conform to their ideal partners (and are happier for it) – Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996
BIRG: Basking In Reflected Glory
CORF: Cutting Off Reflected Failure
People are motivated to self-verify more than they strive for self-enhancement (Swann, 1997)
People with low self-esteem:
- When choosing interaction partners, prefer to interact with people who have negative impressions of them
- When interacting with another person, prefer negative feedback
- When recalling previous interactions, are more likely to remember negative feedback
Emotion
A brief, specific response, both psychological and physiological, that helps people meet goals, including social goals.
Emotions last seconds or minutes. Moods last hours or days.
Five components of emotions:
- Appraisal process
- Physiological responses
- Expressive behavior
- Subjective feelings
- Action tendencies
Paul Ekman basic emotions:
- Happiness
- Surprise
- Sadness
- Anger
- Disgust
- Fear
Cultural variation
Affect Valuation Theory: Cultures place value on certain goals; emotions aligning with those goals are more valued as well.
Display rules: How, when, and to whom it is appropriate to express emotions
Moral foundations theory: A theory proposing that there are five evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgments:
- Care/harm: suffering of others
- Fairness/cheating: justice
- Loyalty/betrayal: commitments
- Authority/subversion: hierarchy
- Purity/degradation: avoid disease
Affective forecasting
Affective forecasting: Predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness or anger or sadness, and for how long.
Immune neglect: People underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events.
- Overestimate the extent to which life’s problems will reduce their personal well-being
- Painful, difficult experiences are often less upsetting than we expect them to be
Eudemonic VS. Hedonic
Eudemonic well-being:
- Feel your life is meaningful
- Feel you have a purpose
- Experience self- actualization
Hedonic well-being:
- Experience pleasure
- Avoid pain
- Lots of enjoyable experiences
What makes people happy
- Helping others
- Social relationships
- Appreciating how others help us, or expressing gratitude
- Exercise
Emotional regulation
Attitude
Attitude: a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken 1993)
psychological tendency: an internal state lasts for a period of time
entity: target of evaluation includes people, things, policies, places, etc. the attitude object
Attitude: affect, cognition, behavior
Functions of attitudes:
- Utility: Promote pleasure and avoid pain
- Value-expressive: Attitudes based on moral judgments and values
- Social-adjustive: Attitudes that help one fit in or gain social standing
- Ego-defensive: Protect one’s self-esteem from threats
- Knowledge: Understand the world around us, know things beyond those immediately relevant to our needs
Attitudes are strongest when . . .
- They are internally consistent
- We have a lot of knowledge (experience) about the object
- They are important to us
- Impact our self-interest and outcomes
- Impact important others (friends, family, ingroups)
Complex attitudes contain elements that are both:
- highly differentiated: Number of different dimensions
- highly integrated: Connections between dimensions
Social Cognition
The three main goals of thinking:
- Accuracy
- Confidence
- Efficiency
Exam 2
How to reduce cognitive dissonance:
- Change attitude to reduce inconsistency
- Change behavior to reduce inconsistency
- Add new thoughts reduce inconsistency
Yale Attitude Change approach: “Who says what to whom?”
- who: the source; halo effect, certainty, credibility, sleeper effect
- what: vividness, fear
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM):
- Central route processing: systematic
- Peripheral route processing: unmotivated audience, influenced by irrelevant characteristics
Six weapons of influence:
- Liking: mimesis, people like us
- Authority: trust by default
- Scarcity: sapiens, Streisand, Status
- Reciprocity: mimesis, people like us
- Consistency: cognitive dissonance
- Social proof: mimesis, people like us
- Unity: mimesis, people like us
Descriptive norms: what people do
Injuctive norms: what people think people do
Predictors of Attraction:
- Mere exposure
- Halo effects
- Proximity
- Misattribution of attraction (fear)
- Physical attractiveness
- Similarity
- Attitudes (likes and dislikes)
- Values
- Background
Mate values:
- Intelligence
- Humor
- Honesty
- Kindness
- Good looks
- Face attractiveness
- Values
- Communication skills
- Dependability
- Partner age
Attractiveness:
- Proportional
- High levels of symmetry
-
Need for investment (offspring)
- Men focus on partner attractiveness and use faster strategies
- Women focus on partner resources and use slower strategies
Female attractiveness:
- Baby-faced features
- Big eyes
- Small nose and chin
- Full lips
- Signs of maturity
- Prominent cheekbones
- Narrow cheeks
- Broad smile
- 0.7 Waist to hip ratio
Male attractiveness (either):
- Either
- Very dominant, masculinized
- Slightly feminized baby faces
- 0.9 Waist to hip ratio
- Broad shoulders and muscles
Exam 3
- Attraction and Relationships
- Groups
- Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination
- Aggression
- Prosocial behavior
Attraction and Relationships
Situational and personal predictors of attraction
Features considered physically attractive across time and cultures for men and women
good genes (physical attractiveness) vs good investments (resources)
differences in reproductive pressures in humans compared to other animals (e.g., rabbits, frogs)
When and what kinds of sex differences will emerge in attraction and mating behavior
Why we prefer to be in relationships with similar others
How self-disclosure and responsive behavior build closeness
Three facets of responsive behavior to self-disclosure
Name and describe conflict tactics that fall into the four quadrants of the EVLN model
Potential costs and benefits of social support
Different attachment orientations based on descriptions of a person’s behavior
Name the three predictors of commitment from the investment model, and describe whether each predictor is positively or negatively associated with commitment
How commitment promotes higher relationship quality
Groups
Situations when social facilitation should improve vs. impair performance
Why the presence of others is arousing
Groupthink
Strategies for reducing social loafing
Recognize groups that are likely to engage in groupthink
Describe the motivations behind groupthink
strategies to reduce groupthink
Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination
How stereotypes serve as schemas for groups
Who is likely to be aware of, activate, and apply stereotypes to targets
Identify individuals who are likely to experience stereotype threat in a given situation
Classify stereotypes on the two dimensions of the stereotype content model
Aggression
Classify aggressive acts based on the directness, purpose, and form dimensions
Identify the biological and psychological effects of ostracism
Describe gender differences in different forms of aggression
Recognize situations which are likely to promote aggression
Explain how people learn about aggression from a social learning theory perspective
Evaluate the evidence that exposure to violent media (videogames, TV shows) results in violent behavior
Predict how individuals from a culture of honor will react to perceived slights
Strategies for effectively reducing aggression
Prosocial behavior
Prosocial vs Altruistic behavior
Predict who will be more likely to engage in different forms of prosocial behavior based on demographic factors
Prosocial differences:
- Male vs female: men more likely to help in emergencies; women more likely to help long term
- Social class: lower societal-economic score associated with greater prosocial behavior
- Religion: higher religion tend to have greater prosocial behavior
- Urban vs. rural: population size negatively correlated with prosocial behavior
Emotions/moods that promote prosocial behavior:
- Gratitude (others doing something for you)
- Elevation (others exceeding standards of moral virtue)
Informational Social Influence: Ambiguous situations tend to be socially defined.
Steps required for someone to decide to help in an emergency:
- Notice event
- See it as an emergency
- Take responsibility
- Know how to help
- Help
Self-centered motives for prosocial behavior (e.g., reciprocity, affiliation, mood)
- values, understanding, enhancement, career, social, protective
Identify emotional, cognitive, and motivational forms of empathy
Evaluate the evidence supporting the negative state relief model versus the empathy-altruism hypothesis
Describe evolutionary pressures that promoted prosocial behavior
Predict who is most likely receive different forms of help based on their relationship to the helper
Recognize individuals more or less likely to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma game
Understand connections between stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and prosocial behavior