Psyc 3315 - Ch.1

• Social Psychology - science that studies the influences of our situation with how we view and affect one another - studies our thinking, influences and relationships
• Our social relation is shaped by our beliefs and values
• Our social intuitions shapes our impersonations and fears
• Our Social influence shapes our behavior
• Social neuroscience explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors
• Culture: the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared and passed on by a large group of people
• Social representation: a society’s widely held ideas and values
• Hindsight bias, or the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon: the

  tendency to exaggerate one’s ability to have foreseen how

  something turned out.
• Elements of social psychology research:

  • Forming and testing hypotheses

  • Sampling

  • Surveys and questionnaires

  • Correlational research

  • Experimental research

  • Generalizing from laboratory to life
• Hypothesis: a testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events
• Random sample: one in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion
• Framing: the way a question or an issue is posed
• Field research is everyday situations—it is done in natural,real-life settings outside the laboratory
• Correlational research: the study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables—asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated
• Experimental research: studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating some factor to see its effect on another
• Debriefing: a full post experimental explanation of the study to participants
• Informed consent: research participants must be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate
• Deception: when, in research, participants are misinformed or misled about the study’s methods and purposes
• Demand characteristics: the cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected
• Mundane realism: the experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations
• Experimental realism: the experiment absorbs and involves its participants
• Independent variable: the experimental factor that a researcher manipulates
• Dependent variable: the variable being measured, so called because it depends on manipulations of the independent variable
• Replication: repeating a research study, often with different participants in different settings, to determine whether a finding could be reproduced

  
  

  Multiple Studies = Confirmation
• Random assignment: the process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition
• Random sample – obtaining a representative group, one in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion
• Unrepresentative Samples – the importance that the sample represents the population under study matters greatly for accuracy of results
• Order of questions – the order of questions in a survey also produces bias
• Response options – the dramatic effects of response questions (focusing on a specific option versus giving a lot of options in a question)
• Wording of questions – survey wording is a delicate matter, subtle changes in the tone of a question can have marked effects on the results
• Demand characteristics – cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected
• Social psychology is the scientific study of social intuition, social influence, and social relations.
• theory - a set of integrated ideas that explain a phenomenon or a body of knowledge