Intro to Social Psych
What is social psychology
The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others
What is hindsight bias?
the tendency to believe we could have predicted an outcome after it occurred
Define Schema
mental structures used to organize knowledge about the social world
Define the actor/observer difference
The tendency to see others' behaviour as dispositionally caused, while focusing more on the role of situational factors when explaining one's own behaviour
When people's self esteem is threatened, they make _____ such as: a tendency to take credit for one's own successes (internal) a tendency to blame others or the situation for one's own failures (external)
self-serving attributions
The tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational ones
The three types of methods used to study social problems
observational, correlational, experimental
Define counterfactual reasoning
mentally changing the past to imagine "what might have been"
Define perceptual salience
The information that is the focus of people's attention
what are the three points in the Covariation principle
consensus information, consistency information, distinctiveness information
What are the two basic human motives
The need to be accurate about ourselves and our social world, and the need to feel good about ourselves
what does the Correlational method do
assess the relation between variables
People can inadvertently make their schemas come true by the way they treat others
What are the 6 facial expressions of emotion
anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness
What is the two-step process of making attributions
1. Internal attribution. (safer)
2. situation (requires cognitive effort/motivation)
What kind of science is Social Psychology
Empirical Science
Define Operational definition
the precise specifications of how variables are measured and manipulated
the mental shortcut where people judge based on how easily something comes to mind
what are the three points in the Covariation principle
consensus information, consistency information, distinctiveness information
Define Augmentation principle
We increase in the perceived role of a particular cause if other factors are present that would work against the behaviour (increase other)
Define Construal
How people perceive, comprehend, and interpret their social world
Define Ethnography
A method of research where researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside
Overconfidence barrier
people tend to have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements, they aren't as correct as they think they are
implicit personality theory
When we make inferences about someone's personality based on what we already know about some characteristics, we are using an
Correspondent Inference Theory
Behaviour is more likely to be reflective of an internal, stable trait if it is
*freely chosen
*differs from expectations (social norms)