SOCIAL PSYCH 216

• sociology vs social psychology

  sociology looks at community as a whole

  
  

  social psychology looks at individuals
• causes of human behavior


  instincts, unconscious drive, environment
• social cognition


  the way an individual understands their own social work
• social cognition perspective


  a view focused on how people perceive, remember, and interpret events and individuals
• 5 key perspectives in social psychology


  cognitive, evolutionary, cultural, existential, neuroscience
• 4 core assumptions of social psych


  1. behavior is a joint product of the person and the situation

  2. the best way to understand social behavior is to use the scientific method

  3. behavior depends on a socially constructed view of reality

  4. behavior is strongly influence by our social cognition
• attribution theory


  people act as intuitive scientists when they observe other people's behavior and infer explanations as to why those people acted the way they did
• casual attributions


  explanations of why an individual engaged in a particular action
• cultural knowledge


  vast store of info, accumulated within a culture, that explains how the world works and why things happen as they do
• cycle of theory and research in social psych

  
• stereotype threat theory


  conditions that bring a stereotype to mind contribute to poor performance among members of various stigmatized groups (steele & aronson)
• confirmation bias


  we tend to seek out and evaluate new info so that it confirms what we already believe or feel
• cognitive misers


  the tendency of people to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and more effortful ways, regardless of intelligence
• correlational research on stereotype threat


  Pinel and colleagues measured stigma consciousness and GPAs of academically stigmatized and nonacademically stigmatized students
• experimentation research on stereotype threat


  Steele and Aronson measured the scores of 2 groups of students, one who were primed to indicate their race before the test and the other were not primed
• theories


  questions that lead to hypotheses that are then tested
• hypothesis


  a testable prediction, usually an if, then statement
• criteria used to evaluate a theory


  - well organized facts/observations

  - clear

  - logical and coherent explanations

  - inspired direction for research

  - generation of new questions

  - practical application that contribute to solutions for solving real world problems
• the goal of correlational research


  to assess the relationships between and among two or more variables
• the goal of experimental research


  to establish the existence of a cause and effect relationship between two variables
• independent variable


  variable that is manipulated/changed by the experimenter
• dependent variable


  the outcome that is being recorded/measured
• IV and DV identified

  In the Steele and Aronson experiment:

  IV was whether or not students were primed to their race

  DV was their performance/grade
• field research


  research that occurs outside the lab
• quasi-experimental research


  groups of participants are compared on some dependent variable but, for practical or ethical reasons, the groups are not formed on the basis of random assignment
• ethical considerations


  harm and/or deception
• deception


  used only when knowledge of the research purpose may likely affect participant response
• internal validity


  extent to which you can be confident that a cause-and-effect relationship established in a study cannot be explained by other factors
• confound


  alternative explanations based off things that are confused in the data
• demand characteristic


  when participants respond in a certain way because they know it's what the researchers are looking for
• experimenter bias


  unintentional influence of the experimenter's expectations, beliefs, or preconceived notions on the outcomes of a study or research experiment (deception should be used to avoid this)
• the lay theory of episomology


  3 motives influence our choices and how we perceive things:

  - the need for actual knowledge

  - the need for closure

  - the need to confirm what we already believe
• cognitive system


  our conscious, rational, and actively controlled system
• experiential system


  our unconscious, intuitive, and automatic system of thinking
• heuristic


  mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that are used to make quick judgements and decisions
• dual process theory


  that there are 2 systems that help us process things on a daily basis, our cognitive and experiential systems
• framing


  people are more likely to choose something framed positively vs if its framed negatively even if the statistic is exactly the same
• explicit attitude


  attitudes people are consciously aware of that they have while
• implicit attitude


  automatic associations that people unconsciously have
• do implicit and explicit attitudes always match?

  no, because it is possible for people to say something they don't actually agree with and people can be unaware of what their actual implicit thoughts are