PY 372 Exam 1

• the self is the capacity that gives rise to the experience of knowing who we 'are,' (e.g., our worth, self-concept, social identity, and so on.
• reflected appraisals are our perception of how others perceive and evaluate us.
• sources of self-knowledge include reflected appraisals, direct feedback, social comparison, and our own behavior.
• direct feedback refers to the verbal info received from others about our traits and abilities.
• social comparison is the act of comparing our traits and abilities with the traits and abilities of others.
• upward social comparison can be aspirational or detrimental (depressing).
• downward social comparison can be positive, or cause complacency.
• self-esteem is the global or overall evaluation that one has of oneself on the dimension of worth.

  • DISTINCT from narcissism.
  • can fluctuate
  • correlated with physical/mental health and aggression
• the self is motivated to protect self-worth.
• self-serving attribution bias refers to the tendency to attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors.
• comparative optimism is the tendency to believe that we are less likely than others to experience negative events and more likely than others to experience positive events.
• false-consensus effect refers to the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
• false-uniqueness effect refers to the tendency to under-estimate the commonality of one's desirable traits or behaviors.
• self-handicapping refers to imposing real roadblocks to your own performance to make attributions for your potential failure unclear.
• the terror-management perspective of self esteem says that self-esteem is a byproduct of the desire to feel impermanent.

  • culture won't go anywhere; achieve "symbolic immortality"
• the sociometer theory of self esteem says that self-esteem serves an evolutionary purpose in that it protects us against isolation; self-esteem is a byproduct of wanting social acceptance and avoiding rejection.

  • measures how well we fit in
• the self-affirmation theory of self-esteem says that self esteem is a buffer against daily stress and keeps us progressing towards our goals.
• social cognition is the study of how people think to make sense of events, others, themselves, and their environment.
• assimilation refers to interpreting new info in terms of existing beliefs and goals.

  • Darley and Gross (1983): perception of intelligence study, sometimes we see what we expect to see.
• confirmation bias refers to the tendency to search for information that confirms our ideas and neglects what disconfirms them.
• behavioral confirmation bias refers to our expectations of others' behavior, causing confirmation of our expectations.

  • i.e., treat someone like they are mean, and they will be mean to you
• belief perseverance is the persistence of one's initial beliefs, even in the face of discrediting evidence.
• the overconfidence phenomenon is the tendency to be more confident than we should be in our judgements.
• illusory correlations refers to how we are prone to seeing a relation between variables when no relation actually exists.

  • i.e., superstitions
• regression towards the mean is the tendency for a person to not take into account the tendency for extreme behavior to return towards one's average.

  • the madden jinx, wherein if a player is put on the cover of a madden NFL game, their next season will be bad
• base-rate fallacy is the tendency to ignore probabilities when making decisions.
• heuristics are mental shortcuts that often produce good decisions.
• representativeness heuristic is when things are placed into categories based on their resemblance to typical category members.

  • i.e., if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck
• attribution is how people go about explaining the behavior of others and themselves.
• fundamental attribution error refers to how we have a tendency to underestimate situational (external) influences, and overestimate dispositional (internal) influence on behavior.

  • i.e., oscar the grouch being widely disliked for being so grouchy when he's likely grouchy because he lives in a literal trash can.
• an attitude is a judgement of liking or disliking an entity (person, place, object) that is represented in our feelings, behaviors, and thoughts towards that entity.

  • Affect (feelings)
  • Behavior
  • Cognition (thoughts)
• the theory of reasoned action suggests that the two main predictors of behavior are personal attitudes towards the behavior and the subjective norms that surround it.

  • both of these result in people making a behavioral intention (to do or not to do something) which is the BEST predictor of behavior.
• ambivalent attitudes are poor predictors of behavior.

  • i.e., attitude towards a love interest.
  • COGNITIVE: is he right for me? no.
  • AFFECTIVE: am I attracted to him? yes.
  • BEHAVIOR: do I date him?
• the endowment effect suggests that owning something increases the liking for the owned thing.

  • helping somebody causes you to like them more.
  • being hazed makes somebody like a group more (ironically)
• cognitive dissonance theory says that people have a need to avoid inconsistency in their attitudes/beliefs and behaviors. we change our attitudes towards bad choices to make them seem good in retrospect.

  • i.e., michael convincing himself that buying a condo was a good idea when he knew previously that it was very financially unwise.
• self-presentation theory says that we want to APPEAR consistent and rational to others, hence the need to maintain self image.

  • avoid undesirable labels like hypocritical, flaky, dishonest, or uncertain
• self-affirmation refers to the need to assert our own adequacy, because inadequacy makes us feel foolish.
• the self-perception theory of consistency says that we observe our own behaviors to learn our attitudes.

  • "if I behaved this way towards this entity in this circumstance, how must I feel about it?"
  • if you pay people to do a task they enjoy, they will enjoy it less.
• conformity is a change in behavior or beliefs to agree with others.

  • i.e., fashion trends, agreeing with people
• compliance is yielding to a request for certain behaviors.

  • i.e., being quiet when somebody asks you to