PSYC 201 Review Sheet

Chapter 1 An Invitation to Social Psychology To Chapter 7 Emotion

What is theory of mind?

The understanding that others have beliefs and desires.

What is schema?

Generalized knowledge about the physical and social world and how to behave in particular situations and with different kinds of people.

What are situational versus dispositional factors? Examples? What is the channel factor?

Situational factor: Environment Dispositional factor: internal factors, traits.

Channel factors: Certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can have great consequences for behavior, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behavior in a particular direction.

What are the collectivistic versus individualistic cultures?

Individualistic: Cultures in which people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people and having attributes that exist in the absence of any connection to others.

Collectivistic: Cultures in which people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and having relatively little individual freedom or personal control over their lives but not necessarily wanting or needing these things.

What is the naturalistic fallacy?

The claim that the way things are is the way they should be.

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What is the Five-Factor Model of personality? What is the finding of neuroticism?

Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that psychologists believe are the basic building blocks of personality.

Neurotic people are anxious, tense, and emotionally volatile. Neurotic individuals often enjoy less satisfaction in their intimate relations and often struggle with burnout in their work.

What are the research findings regarding trait heritability and the twins study?

The degree to which traits or physical characteristics are determined by genes and hence inherited from parents. Identical twins raised apart typically share many basic personality traits and often have in common many unusual habits and interests.

What is the research finding of birth order?

Siblings develop into quite different people so that they can peacefully occupy different niches within the family environment.

Older siblings are bigger, more powerful, and often act as surrogate parents. They are invested in the status quo. More assertive and dominant and more achievement oriented and conscientious.

Younger siblings are born to rebel, challenge the family status quo. More agreeable, and more open to novel ideas and experiences.

High self-esteem may have a dark side. What is it?

Many people with self-esteem may think they are superior to others and as a result may be especially sensitive to threats, insults, and challenges.

What are the sources of self-esteem? For example, what does the contingency of self-worth account suggest?

Trait self-esteem: The enduring level of confidence and regard that people have for their defining abilities and characteristics across time.

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State self-esteem: The dynamic changeable self-evaluation that are experienced as momentary feelings about the self.

Contingency of self-worth: An account of self-esteem maintaining that self-esteem is contingent on successes and failures in domains on which a person has based his or her self-worth.

Sociometer hypothesis: A hypothesis that maintains that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which we are included or looked on favorably by others.

How do the self-evaluation maintenance model, self-verification theory, and social comparison theory compare and contrast?

Self-evaluation maintenance model: we are motivated to view ourselves in a favorable light and that we do so through two processes: reflection and social comparison.

Self-verification theory: We strive for stable, accurate beliefs about the self because such beliefs give us a sense of coherence.

Social comparison theory: The hypothesis that we compare ourselves to other people in order to evaluate our opinions, abilities and internal states.

What is self-handicapping? Example?

The tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors in order to prevent others from drawing unwanted attributions about the self as a result of poor performance.

What is self-image bias?

The tendency to judge other people’s personalities according to their similarity or dissimilarity to our own personality.

What is self-monitoring?

The tendency for people to monitor their behavior in such a way that it fits the demands of current situation.

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What is self-discrepancy theory about?

Appropriate behavior is motivated by cultural and moral standards regarding the ideal self and the ought self. Violations of those standards produce emotions such as guilt and shame.

What is the explanatory style of attribution? How does it relate to depression?

A person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific. Attributing bad things into internal, stable and global causes may leads to depression.

What is the fundamental error of attribution?

The tendency to believe that a behavior is due to a person’s disposition, even when there are situational forces present that are sufficient to explain the behavior.

What is the covariation principle of causal attribution? Examples?

We should attribute behavior to potential causes that co-occur with the behavior.

Consensus refers to what most people would do in a situation.

Distinctiveness refers to what an individual does in different situations.(unique to 1 situation)

Consistency refers to what an individual does in a given situation on different occasions.

What are the augmentation and discounting principles of causal attribution? Examples of each (e.g., making more internal or more external attribution)?

Augmentation principle: we should assign greater weight to a particular cause of behavior if there are other causes present that normally would produce the opposite outcome.

Discounting principle: we should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if there are other plausible causes that might have produced it.

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What factors predict higher counterfactual reasoning?

Emotional amplification: A ratcheting up of an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening.

What is the self-serving bias?

The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances, but to attribute success and other good events to oneself.

What is the just-world hypothesis?

The belief that people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get.

How to reduce student drinking based on the finding of pluralistic ignorance?

Pluralistic ignorance: Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences – actions that reinforce the erroneous group norm.

Solution: Making students realize that they overestimate the drinking norm.

What are the primacy and recency effects of information processing?

Primacy: The disproportionate influence on judgment of information presented first in a body of evidence.

Recency: The disproportionate influence on judgment of information presented last in a body of evidence.

What are top-down and bottom-up processes? When is it most likely for individuals to use each?

Bottom-up processes: Data-driven mental processing, in which one takes in and forms conclusions on the basis of the stimuli encountered in one’s experience. (Learning, negative mood)

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Top-down processes: Theory-driven mental processing, in which one filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations. (Applying, positive mood)

What are the findings of the confirmation bias?

(The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it)

The questions we ask of others often unwittingly shape the answers we get, thereby providing illusory support for what we’re trying to find out.

What are the findings of the planning fallacy?

People tend to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project.

Examples of illusory correlation? How does illusory correlation relate to representativeness and availability heuristics?

(The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not)

(availability heuristic: the process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on the ease with which pertinent instances are brought to mind)

(representativeness heuristic: the process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessment of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect)

Availability heuristic may lead to biased assessments of risk and biased estimates of people’s contribution to joint projects. Representativeness heuristic may result in base-rate neglect and mistaken assessments of cause and effect. When two heuristics operate together, they can lead to an illusory correlation between two variables.

How trustworthy is flashbulb memeory?

(Vivid recollections of the moment one learned some dramatic, emotionally charged news) They are trustworthy for the most times. But it may be wrong in some cases.

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How well does attitude predict behaviors?

Badly.

What are the findings of cognitive dissonance theory? For example, from effort justification, free-choice, and induced compliance?

Inconsistencies between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.

Effort justification: the tendency to reduce dissonance by finding reasons for why we have devoted time, effort, or money to something that has turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.

Induced compliance: subtly compelling individuals to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, which typically leads to dissonance and to a change in their original attitudes or values in order to reduce their dissonance.

Dissonance happens whenever people act in ways that are inconsistent with their core values and beliefs and (1) the behavior was freely chosen, (2) the behavior was not sufficiently justified, (3) the behavior had negative consequences, and (4) the negative consequences were foreseeable.

When does dissonance occur? For example in terms of the $1 and $20 experiment?

If the inducements are too substantial, people will justify their behavior by the inducement ($20), and they will not need to rationalize their behavior by coming to believe in the broader purpose or philosophy behind it. But if the inducements are just barely sufficient ($1), people’s need to rationalize will tend to produce a deep-seated attitude change in line with their behavior.

Self-perception theory and cognitive dissonance theory are trying to explain the same phenomena: the change of attitude. What do they differ critically and when do they apply the best?

(self-perception theory: people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be)

Dissonance theory posits that the inconsistency between behavior and prior attitudes produces an unpleasant physiological state that motivates people to reduce the inconsistency. No arousal, no attitude change. Self-perception theory, in contrast, contends that there is no arousal involved:

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people coolly and rationally infer what their attitudes must be in light of their behavior and the context in which it occurred.

Dissonance theory best explains attitude change for preexisting clear-cut attitudes, whereas self-perception theory best explains attitude change for less clear-cut attitudes.

What does the self-affirmation theory suggest? How does it relate to cognitive dissonance theory’s findings?

Bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity, such as our important values.

If dissonance results from challenges or threats to people’s sense of themselves as rational, competent, and moral, then it follows that they can ward off dissonance not only by dealing directly with the specific threat itself, but also indirectly by taking stock of their other qualities and core values.

What is balance theory?

People try to maintain balance among their beliefs, cognitions and sentiments. (two friends, like each other vs don’t like each other)

What are the primary and secondary appraisal stages?

Primary: An initial, automatic positive or negative evaluation of ongoing events based on whether they are congruent or incongruent with our goals.

Secondary: A subsequent evaluation in which we determine why we feel the way we do about an event, possible ways of responding to the event, and future consequences of different courses of action.

How is emotion being explained? Comparing James’s emotion-specificity theory and Schachter and Singer’s two-factory theory of emotion?

Emotion-specific: An emotionally exciting stimulus generates a physiological response, the perception of which is the experience of emotion.

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Two-factor: There are two components to emotional experience: undifferentiated physiological arousal and a person’s construal of that state of undifferentiated arousal.

What are the findings of affective forecasting and immune neglect?

Affective forecasting: predicting our future emotions.

Immune neglect: the tendency to underestimate our capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events, which leads us to overestimate the extent to which life’s difficulties will reduce our personal well-being.

(focalism: a tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting to consider the impact of ancillary aspects of the event or the impact of other events)

What role does oxytocin play in close relationship?

Oxytocin is a source of trust, and facilitates love.

What is broaden-and-build hypothesis?

Positive emotions broaden thought and action repertoires, helping us build social resources (emotional and intellectual resources such as empathy or the acquisition of knowledge).

Chapter 8 Social Influence

What are the relationships among normative influence, informational influence, private acceptance, and public compliance?

Normative influence: the influence of other people that comes from the desire to avoid their disapproval, harsh judgments, and other social sanctions.

Informational influence: the influence of other people that results from taking their comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct, proper, or effective.

Internalization/Private acceptance: Private acceptance of a proposition, orientation, or ideology.

Public compliance: Agreeing with someone or advancing a position in public, even if we continue to believe something else in private.

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Informational social influence, by influencing how we come to see the issues or stimuli before us, tends to influence private acceptance of the position advanced by the majority. We don’t just ape a particular response, we adopt the group’s perspective. Normative social influence, in contrast, often has a greater impact on public compliance than on private acceptance. To avoid disapproval, we sometimes do or say one thing but continue to believe another.

When are people most likely to mimic others?

People who have an empathic orientation toward others or who have a need to affiliate with others.

Reasons: 1, ideomotor action: merely thinking about a behavior makes its actual performance more likely. 2, Preparing for interaction with others, interaction that is likely to go more smoothly if we establish some rapport.

What happened in Sherif and Asch’s conformity experiments? How are they compared and contrasted?

Sherif’s conformity experiment uses autokinetic illusion to test how informational social influence work in ambiguous situation.

Asch’s conformity experiment on the other hand test how normative social influence work in clear situation, that is whether participants conform to the opinions expressed by the majority even when they know the majority is incorrect.

What is ideomotor action?

The phenomenon whereby merely thinking about a behavior makes its actual performance more likely.

What is Milgram’s experiment about? Why people obey (e.g., gradual escalation)? How to decrease obedience?

Using a “shock generator” that looked real but was actually just a prop, Milgram studied whether participants would continue to obey instructions and shock a learner even after believing that the learner was in grave distress as a result of the shocks.

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Why obey: 1, Release from responsibility: “the person taking responsibility was perceived to be a legitimate authority.” 2, Step-by-step involvement

How to decrease obedience: 1, Tuning in the learner (through proximity or even touch proximity). 2, Tuning out the experimenter (through absence of experimenter, ordinary person experimenter or contradictory experimenters).

What are the compliance techniques? Why did they work? Examples?

1, Reciprocal concessions, or the Door-in-the-face technique: Asking someone for a very large favor that he or she will certainly refuse and then flowing that request with one for a more modest favor (which tends to be seen as a concession that the target will feel compelled to honor).

2, That’s-not-all technique: Adding something to an original offer, which is likely to create some pressure to reciprocate. (add-ons strike people as something of a gift from the sotre or the salesperson, creating some pressure to reciprocate)

3, Foot-in-the-door technique: One makes an initial small request to which nearly everyone complies, followed by a large request involving the real behavior of interest. (the initial agreement to the small request will lead to a change in the individual’s self-image as someone who does this sort of thing or who contributes to such causes. The person then has a reason for agreeing to the subsequent larger request.)

What is reactance theory? How is it related to compliance?

The idea that people reassert their prerogatives in response to the unpleasant state of arousal they experience when they believe their freedoms are threatened. It can help resisting social influence. Example: if your parents tell you that you cannot dye your hair, is your desire to have it dyed diminished or increased? Reactance theory predicts that the moment you feel your freedom is being taken away, it becomes more precious, and your desire to maintain it is increased.

What is the negative state relief hypothesis?

The idea that people engage in certain actions, such as agreeing to a request, in order to relieve negative feelings and to feel better about themselves.

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Chapter 9 Persuasion

What functions do attitudes serve?

1. Utilitarian function: An attitudinal function that serves to alert us to rewarding objects and situations we should approach and costly or punishing objects or situations we should void.

2. Ego-defensive function: An attitudinal function that enables us to maintain cherished beliefs about ourselves by protecting us from awareness of our negative attributes and impulses or from facts that contradict our cherished beliefs or desires. (terror management theory.) (our fear of dying leads us to adopt death-denying attitudes -- for example, the adoption of religious beliefs, more positive evaluations of our own group, greater patriotism, increased religious conviction, greater conformity to cultural standards, and a greater inclination to punish moral transgressors.)

3. Value-expressive function: An attitudinal function whereby attitudes help us express our most cherished values—usually in groups in which they can be supported and reinforced.

4. Knowledge function: An attitudinal function whereby attitudes help organize our understanding of the world, guiding how we attend to, store, and retrieve information.

According to the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), when would people follow the central route or the peripheral route? Persuasion examples for each condition?

ELM: there are two different routes of persuasions: the central route and the peripheral route.

Central (systematic) route: A persuasive route wherein people think carefully and deliberately about the content of a message, attending to its logic, cogency, and arguments, as well as to related evidence and principles.

Peripheral (heuristic) route: A persuasive route wherein people attend to relatively simple, superficial cues related to the message, such as the length of the message or the expertise or attractiveness of the communicator.

Determinants: 1, our motivation to devote time and energy to a message. 2, our ability to process the message in depth.

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3 factors trigger central route to persuasion: 1, the personal relevance of the message; 2, our knowledge about the issue; 3, feel responsible for some action or outcome.

2 factors trigger peripheral route: 1, reduce our motivation; 2, interfere with our ability to attend to the message carefully.

In terms of ELM, why fear plus instruction is more effective than fear or instruction alone?

On the one hand, intense fear could disrupt the careful, thoughtful processing of the message, thus reducing the chances of persuasion. On the other hand, the right kind of fear might heighten the participant’s motivation to attend to the message, thus increasing the likelihood of attitude change.

What are the findings on message receiver characteristics and persuasion? For example, need for cognition?

Need for cognition: the degree to which people like to think deeply about things. People high in the need for cognition like to think, to puzzle, to ponder, and to consider multiple perspectives on issues, and are more persuaded by high-quality arguments and are relatively unmoved by peripheral cues of persuasion.

Mood: Persuasion is more likely when the mood of the message matches the mood of the receiver.

Age: Younger people are more susceptible to persuasive messages than are adults or the elderly.

What is identifiable victim effect?

The tendency to be more moved by the plight of a single, vivid individual than by a more abstract aggregate of individuals.

What is sleeper effect?

An effect that occurs when messages from unreliable sources initially exert little influence but later cause in individuals’ attitudes to shift.

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What is the thought polarization hypothesis?

The hypothesis that more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce more extreme, entrenched attitudes. (public commitments increase our resistance to persuasive communications)

Preexisting attitudes may resist change. What are the research findings (e.g., the female caffeine users)?

1. People are inclined to attend selectively to information that confirms their original attitudes.

2. People also selectively evaluate the information we take in. We are prone to look favorably upon information that supports our attitudes and critically upon information that contradicts our attitudes.

(female high-caffeine users found an article about the dangers of caffeine use for women less convincing than did men or women who don’t drink a lot of coffee)

What is reference group and what is the research finding regarding college students’ becoming more liberal?

Reference groups: Groups whose opinions matter to us and that affect our opinions and beliefs.

Liberal students tended to garner greater respect from their Bennington peers and to be better integrated into college groups than the conservative students. The conservative students in contrast were less likely to be leaders in the eyes of their peers, and they felt more alienated at the college and were likely to spend more time at home.

What are the findings of terror management theory?

A theory that to ward off the anxiety we fell when contemplating our own demise, we cling to cultural worldviews and strongly held values out of a belief that by doing so part of us will survive death.

Findings (repeated): our fear of dying leads us to adopt death-denying attitudes -- for example, the adoption of religious beliefs, more positive evaluations of our own group, greater patriotism, increased religious conviction, greater conformity to cultural standards, and a greater inclination to punish moral transgressors.

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Chapter 10 Attraction

How does proximity or propinquity influence attraction? Why? What is the mere exposure effect? Examples?

3 reasons: 1, availability, or simple contact; 2, our tendency to be nice to those with whom we expect to have frequent encounter; 3 the comfort created by repeated exposure to a person.

Mere exposure effect: the finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to greater liking of the stimulus.

Comparing functional distance and physical distance, which one has a stronger effect on building friendship and why?

Functional distance (the architectural layout’s tendency to encourage or inhibit certain activities, like contact between people). it encourages contact.

How does similarity influence attraction? Examples? Why? What is the complementarity hypothesis?

People tend to like other people who are similar to themselves.

Reasons: 1, similar others validate our beliefs and orientations; 2, similarity facilitate smooth interactions; 3, we expect similar others to like us; 4, similar others have qualities we like.

Complementarity hypothesis: the tendency for people to seek out others with characteristics that are different from and that complement their own.

How does physical attractiveness influence attraction? Why? What is the halo effect? How does evolutionary theory account for this relationship? What features are associated with reproductive fitness? What is the finding from researching women’s menstrual cycle and men’s being symmetrical?

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Attractive people have an advantage in winning other people’s attention and affection.

Halo effect: the common belief accurate or not—that attractive individuals possess a host of positive qualities beyond their physical appearance.

We have evolved to have a preference for people possessing physical features that signify health or, more generally, reproductive fitness. (judgment about whether a person is attractive could be inherited and shaped by evolution) And to a significant extent, the more average a face is, the more attractive it is. Finally, according to evolutionary theory, individuals who are bilaterally symmetrical should be sought out by potential mates. Disease resistance is obviously an advantageous trait, and so organisms that possess it should be in demand. More specifically, for human, facial attractiveness is correlated with the degree of bilateral symmetry.

The T-shirt of the symmetrical men were judged to have a better aroma than those of less symmetrical men—but only by those women who were close to the ovulation phase of their menstrual cycle.

What is parental investment hypothesis and what does it suggest about being selective in choosing mate(s)?

Women tend to invest much more, a difference in investment that starts even before the child’s conception. Men contribute infinitesimally small sperm, which contain little more than genetic material for the potential zygote; women provide a much larger ovum, which contains both genetic material and nutrients the zygote needs in the initial stages of life. And thus, the burden of bringing a child into the world is not equally shared.

Women ought to be more selective in their choice of mates, or, stated the other way, men should be more indiscriminate than women. Women should be attracted to men who either possess material resources or possess characteristics associated with acquiring them in our ancestral past—physical strength, industriousness, and social status.

In general, men ought to be more interested than women in finding mates who are physically attractive and who have a youthful appearance. In contrast, women should be more interested than men in finding mates who can and will provide material resources.

How do reward theory and social exchange theory explain attraction?

Reward theory: people tend to like those who provide them with rewards, and we tend to like those who make us feel good.

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Social exchange theory: a theory based on the fact that there are costs and rewards in all relationships and that how people feel about a relationship depends on their assessments of its cost and rewards and the costs and rewards available to them in other relationships.

How does equity influence attraction?

A theory that maintains that people are motivated to pursue fairness, or equity, in their relationships, with rewards and costs shared roughly equally among individuals.

What role does fluency play in attraction?

Fluency: the experience of ease associated with perceiving and thinking.

People find it easier to perceive and cognitively process familiar stimuli—the processing of familiar stimuli is more “fluent”. And because people find the experience of fluency inherently pleasurable, those positive feelings make the stimuli more appealing.

Chapter 11 Relationships

What do we learn from Harlow’s monkeys? What do we learn from feral children?

Infant monkeys will prefer and form an attachment to a surrogate mother that provides warmth and comfort over a wire surrogate mother that provides nutrients.

Relationships are central to human functioning, and help create human nature.

What is the working model of relationship? Example?

A conceptual model of relationships with our current partners—including their availability, warmth, and ability to provide security—as derived from our childhood experience with how available and warm our parents were.

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What are the three attachment styles about? What are the findings regarding parent-child attachment? What are the findings regarding adult attachment? How are early experience (e.g., divorce) influencing attachment styles?

Secure attachment style: An attachment style characterized by feelings of security in relationships. Individuals with this style are comfortable with intimacy and want to be close to others during times of threat and uncertainty.

Avoidant: An attachment style characterized by feelings of insecurity in relationships. Individuals with this style exhibit compulsive self-reliance, prefer distance from others, and are dismissive and detached during times of threat and uncertainty.

Anxious: An attachment style characterized by feelings of insecurity in relationships. Individuals with this style compulsively seek closeness, express continual worries about relationships, and excessively try to get closer to others during times of threat and uncertainty.

These attachment styles are stable across life. The attachments you form early in life shape how you relate as an adult to your romantic partners, your children, and your friends.

Secure attachment style would predict more positive life outcomes. Secure individuals report the greatest relationship satisfaction, are less likely to have experienced a romantic breakup, and are more trusting in relationships in general.

Anxiously attached individuals are more likely to interpret life events in pessimistic threatening fashion, which increases the chances of depression, and are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, maladaptive drinking, and substance abuse to reduce their distress and anxiety.

Caregivers who were not so reliable in their responses to their infants tended to have infants who showed anxious attachment. Caregivers who rejected their infants frequently tended to produce children with avoidant attachment.

What are the findings based on the approach/inhibition theory of power? What emotion(s) are expressed by those high in power more (see Chapter 7)?

Approach/inhibition theory: Higher-power individuals are inclined to go after their goals and make quick judgments, whereas low-power individuals are more likely to constrain their behavior and attend to others carefully.

Anger signals power within groups, embarrassment signals submissiveness.

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What are exchange and communal relationships? What are the principles operating in each type?

Communal relationships: Relationships in which the individuals feel a special responsibility for one another and give and receive according to the principle of need; such relationships are often long-term.

Exchange relationships: Relationships in which the individuals feel little responsibility toward one another and in which giving and receiving are governed by concerns about equity and reciprocity; such relationships are often short-term.

What is the investment model of interpersonal relationships?

Three things make partners more committed to each other: rewards, few alternative partners, and investments in the relationship. (rewarding + few alternative + hug investment in the past = high commitment relationship)

What is the triangular theory of love?

There are three components of love—passion, intimacy and commitment—which can be combined in different ways.

With increasing time together, this kind of passion diminishes and a second element of the romantic relationship emerges—a deep sense of intimacy. As their intimacy deepens, partners develop a sense of commitment to each other.

What is strange situation?

An experimental situation designed to assess an infant’s attachment to the caregiver. An infant’s reactions are observed after her caregiver has left her alone in an unfamiliar room with a stranger and then when the caregiver returns to the room.

What is the relational self theory?

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A theory that examines how prior relationships shape our current beliefs, feelings and interactions about people who remind us of significant others from our past.

Chapter 12 Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination

What are stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination? What are the three concepts related? Examples?

Stereotype: beliefs that certain attribute are characteristic of members of particular groups.

Prejudice: a negative attitude or affective response toward a certain group and its individual members.

Discrimination: Unfair treatment of members of a particular group based on their membership in that group.

Stereotype: 美国人都是 SB; Prejudice: 不喜欢美国人; Discrimination: 不雇佣美国人.

What is implicit attitude?

Attitude and belief that people simply do not have conscious access to.

What is the implicit association theory (IAT)? What is it important? How does it relate to modern racism?

A technique for revealing nonconscious prejudices toward particular groups.

Since so many forms of prejudice are ambivalent, uncertain, or hidden—even from the self—they are not likely to be revealed through self-report. Therefore social psychologist develop IAT.

IAT assessed an important component of their attitudes that participants were unable or unwilling to articulate. Subtle and largely unconscious prejudices toward members of different groups can therefore be uncovered with this paradigm.

(modern racism: prejudice directed at other racial groups that exists alongside rejection of explicitly racist beliefs.)

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What is the realistic group conflict theory about? What does it predict? How was the intergroup conflict solved in the Robbers Cave experiment?

Realistic group conflict theory: A theory that group conflict, prejudice, and discrimination are likely to arise over competition between groups for limited resources.

The theory predicts (correctly) that prejudice and discrimination should increase under conditions of economic difficulty, and they should be strongest among groups that stand to lose the most from another group’s economic advance.

Intergroup conflict was reduced through superordinate goals (goals that transcend the interests of one individual group and that can be achieved more readily by two or more groups working together).

What is social identity theory?

A person’s self-concept and self-esteem not only derive from personal identity and accomplishments, but from the status and accomplishments, of the various groups to which the person belongs.

What is the minimal group paradigm? Why do researchers use it? Examples?

An experimental paradigm in which researchers create groups based on arbitrary and seemingly meaningless criteria and then examine how the members of these “minimal groups” are inclined to behave toward one another.

To test whether people are motivated to view in-groups (whatever in-group it is), researchers use the minimal group paradigm.

According to the cognitive perspective of prejudice, what function would stereotyping serve?

Stereotypes are a natural result of the way our brains are wired to store and process information. We are particularly inclined to use them when we are overloaded, tired, or mentally taxed in some way—that is, when we are in need of a shortcut.

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What is the out-group homogeneity effect?

The tendency to assume that within-group similarity is much stronger for outgroups than for ingroups. “They all think, act, and look alike. We don’t.”

What is the self-fulfilling prophecy? What are the findings?

Acting in a way that tends to produce the very behavior we expected in the first place, as when we act toward members of certain groups in ways that encourage the very behavior we expect from them. (e.g. thinking that members of a particular group are hostile, we may act toward them in a guarded manner, thereby eliciting a coldness that we see as proof of their hostility.)

Members of stigmatized groups may experience attributional ambiguity. What is it about?

Members of stigmatized groups quite literally live in a less certain world, not knowing whether to attribute positive feedback to their own skill or to others’ condescension and not knowing whether to attribute negative feedback to their won error or to others’ prejudice.

What is stereotype threat? What are the findings?

The fear that we will confirm the stereotypes that others have regarding some salient group of which we are a member.

Suffering from stereotype threat, people performs worse because they are afraid of affirming some stereotype that exists about their group.

What and why is the shooter’s effect?

Related to automatic processes: Process that occur outside of our awareness, without conscious control.

What is basking in reflected glory?

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The tendency to take pride in the accomplishments of those with whom we are in some way associated (even if it is only weakly), as when fans identify with a winning team.

Chapter 13 Helping, Hurting, and Cooperating

Compare hostile, instrumental, and relational aggression

Hostile aggression: behavior intended to harm another, either physically or psychologically, and motivated by feelings of anger and hostility.

Instrumental: Behavior intended to harm another in the service of motives other than pure hostility (e.g. to attract attention, to acquire wealth, or to advance political and ideological causes)

Relational aggression, also known as covert aggression or covert bullying, is a type of aggression in which harm is caused through damage to relationships or social status within a group rather than by means actual or threatened physical violence. Relational aggression is more common and more studied among girls than boys.

Why does heat increase aggression?

According to misattribution perspective, people are aroused by the heat, but they are largely unaware of their arousal. When they encounter circumstances that prompt anger—say, a frustrating driver or an irritating romantic partner—they attribute their arousal to that person, and this misattributed arousal gives rise to amplified feelings of anger and aggression.

Another possibility is that heat triggers basic unpleasant feelings of anger, which increase the chances of all kinds of aggressive behavior.

What is neo-associationistic perspective of aggression?

Aggression occurs following aversive events (pain, heat, goals blocked) that make people angry (perceived injustice, thoughts of attack, elevated arousal).

What is frustration-aggression theory? What are the situational construals that lead to higher frustration?

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The determinant of aggression is frustration, the thwarting of an individual’s attempts to achieve some goal.

Aggression increases in direct proportion to: 1, the amount of satisfaction the person anticipates before a goal is blocked; 2, the more completely the person is prevented from achieving the goal; 3, the more frequently the person is blocked from achieving the goal; 4, the closer the individual believes he or she is to achieving the goal.

What is culture of honor?

A culture that is defined by its member’s strong concerns about their own and other’s reputations, leading to sensitivity to slights and insult and willingness to use violence to avenge any perceived wrong or insult.

Why do stepparents are more likely than genetic parents to abuse their children?

Related to inclusive fitness: the evolutionary tendency to look out for ourselves, our offspring and our close relatives together with their offspring so that our genes will survive.

Because stepchildren share no genes with their stepparents.

What are the three motives of helping?

Social rewards: benefits like praise, positive attention, tangible rewards, honors, and gratitude that may be gained from helping others.

Experienced distress: A motive for helping those in distress that may arise from a need to reduce our own distress.

Empathic concern: Identifying with another person—feeling and understanding what that person is experiencing—accompanied by the intention to help the person in need.

What did Kitty Geneovese’s neighbors fail to save her?

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Bystander intervention: Helping a victim of an emergency by those who have observed what is happening. Bystander intervention is generally reduced as the number of observers increases, as each individual feels that someone else will probably help.

Diffusion of responsibility: A reduction of a sense of urgency to help someone involved in an emergency or dangerous situation under the assumption that others who are also observing the situation will help.

What is an example of pluralistic ignorance in emergency helping?

(A form of pluralistic ignorance occurs when people are uncertain about what is happening and assume that nothing is wrong because no one else is responding or appears concerned. When everyone in some potentially dangerous situation is behaving as if nothing is amiss, there will be a tendency for people to mistake each other’s calm demeanor as a sign that no emergency is actually taking place.)

Based on Darley’s research of bystander intervention, what can be done to increase the chances of receiving help?

1. Make your need clear—“I’ve twisted my ankle and I can’t walk; I need help”.

2. Select a specific person—“you there, can you help me?”

By doing so, you overcome the two biggest obstacles to intervention: you prevent people from concluding there is no real emergency (thereby eliminating the effect of pluralistic ignorance), and you prevent them from thinking that someone else will help (thereby overcoming diffusion of responsibility).

What is the prisoner’s dilemma game? How to win big in a single round? How to win big in many rounds?

囚徒困境嘛。單局遊戲中，選擇背叛。有限重複囚徒困境中還是選擇一直背叛。無線重複囚徒困境中選擇一報還一報。

What is the ultimatum game? What culture factor influences the outcome?

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一個人得到 10美元，他可以選擇分給另外一個人一定數額（1-10），另外一個人可以選擇接受或拒絕，若拒絕，則兩個人都分文不得。

Interdependence in culture increases the money given out.

What are kin selection and reciprocal altruism?

The tendency for natural selection to favor behaviors that increase the chaces of survival of genetic relatives.

The tendency to help others with the expectation that they are likely to help us in return at some future time.

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