Social Inference
Explain a cultural difference between Western and East Asian cultures in regards to self-serving biases
People from East Asian cultures tend to not have as strong self-serving biases.
For example, when asked to explain success, East Asian athletes and students are more likely to highlight situational or relational factors, such as teamwork, good coaching, or favorable conditions, rather than innate skill. Likewise, when they fail, they may be more inclined to accept personal responsibility.
What is the Smoke-filled Room study an example of?
Pluralistic ignorance
Yuna is a researcher studying affective neuroscience. Before running her study on fear and the brain, she publically reports the number of participants she aims to collect, the study design, and the statistical analyses she will run before she acquires the data. What is this called?
Preregistration! BONUS: what bias does it protect against?
At least two findings of Zhu et al. (2007)’s study of ACC and mPFC activation using the Kelley et al. Self, Mother, Other paradigm.
Answers will vary: Self activates both ACC and mPFC more than Other in both Chinese and Western participants.
Mother activates only the ACC in Western participants but activates both ACC and mPFC in Chinese participants.
Self and mother activation is the same in the ACC and mPFC of Chinese participants, but differs in the mPFC and ACC of Western participants
Describe the Fundamental Attribution Error.
People over-attribute others’ behavior to their dispositions (personalities) while underweighting situational constraints.
Is altruistic behavior ever constrained by social factors? BONUS: give a study as an example
Yes! EX: Bystander effect: tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present
Anita chooses to exclude an outlier in her study because it feels like it will bring about the results she thinks will be impactful. What is this an example of?
Motivated cognition
Finding of Parkinson et al. (2018)’s study on neural responses and friendship. Predict the outcomes of friendships where the participants had similar and differing neural responses.
Participants who had highly correlated fMRI responses to video stimuli were often closer in the social network
More similar neural responses = friends grow closer
More dissimilar responses = friends grow apart
A driver swerves in front of you on a turn, almost hitting you. Everyone swerves at this turn. This driver does not typically swerve in front of people like this. Describe the levels of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency, and name the attribution.
High consensus, high distinctiveness, high consistency. Situational attribution.
What was the main result of the Good Samaritan Study, where priests were presented with a human in need on their way to a sermon? IV: time pressure, sermon content
When helping threatens one’s goals, time, or safety, people are far less likely to intervene, even when their values would otherwise motivate compassion. Priests in a rush were unlikely to engage in helping behaviors regardless of sermon content.
Bargh et al (1996) studied the effects of social priming, supposedly showing how subtle manipulations activating stereotypes can affect behavior. What were the independent and dependent variables of this study?
IV: exposure to stereotypes
DV: walking speed
BONUS: were they studying automatic or conscious behavior?
The neural impacts of social exclusion and rejection.
Social rejection activates dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and insula (sensory and affective areas).
Caleb is in a huge rush. When making an attribution about someone who cut him off, what sort of judgment might he make?
A quick judgment! He's a cognitive miser (in this scenario) BONUS: what's a model might he use if he had all the time in the world to make an attribution?
Explain the difference between intuitive scientists and cognitive misers
Intuitive scientist = Kelley’s covariation model, people logically look through all the evidence to come to conclusions about the character of others
Cognitive Miser = Fundamental attribution error, people take shortcuts and use heuristics to determine character (do not often fully compute and do not consider all of the possible evidence)
Dylan is a part of a company trying to get consumers to give them money. If Dylan wants to run an advertisement that is MOST likely to get people to donate to a cause, what might be his strategy?
Empathy powerfully mobilizes help for salient, individual cases. Answers will vary, but capitalizing on the identifiable victim effect is one strategy!
Name two reasons as to how the Reproducibility Crisis emerged and two possible solutions to those problems? BONUS: which one(s) are relevant in the elder-walking study?
Reasons: small sample sizes, questionable research practices, publication bias, and the ease with which subtle experimenter expectations or analytic decisions could influence results
Solutions: larger samples, preregistration, data sharing, open methods, and stronger statistical standards
The cyberball experiment used this substance in their study on social pain. What were they able to claim from this?
Tylenol; Causal evidence for the relationship between social and physical pain
When participants feel high compassion in the Elaine Study, were participants more likely to help when ease of escape was low or high?
Both! When participants felt high compassion—believing they were similar to Elaine—they helped at high rates regardless of the ease of escape. BONUS: what would be an example scenario (in this study) of egoistic helping?
Nancy finds significant results in study where participants predict images depicting which prosocial behavior will be next. She knows precognition is basically impossible... why might these results have come about?
Scientists have many research degrees of freedom, which can lead to errors introduced into the data (p-hacking, QRPs especially)
Describe the findings of the Implicit Association Test when participants were in the fMRI machine & their importance for prejudice and social neuroscience research as a whole.
People who showed higher levels of implicit bias on the IAT had more amygdala response when seeing photos of people from a negatively stereotyped outgroup.
Automatic, affective fear response cultivated for certain faces
Social neuroscience can verify and strengthen findings of classic social psychology findings/paradigms, especially those subject to demand effects.