Chapter 13 Study Guide1. Social cognition: how we interpret or reason about social information-aboutourselves and other people. How people go about trying to make sense or reason about social information. 2. Kurt Lewin: refugee of nazi Germany. Possible to translate socially signif. Issues like the power of leaders into hypotheses and test them in experiments. Beginning of modern social psych. Did research in natural settings, local communitites, and the military. Addressed real world problemsAction Research: involves the use of scientisic knowledge and scientific methods to address problems/issues in the real world outside labsWhat questions did action research study?: race relations, wartime morale, propaganda, civilian contributions3. Flawed scientist: we may not go about research in the best way. But we are all curious and rely in the right data to evaluate the world we want to be accurate!What does a flawed scientist value?: accuracy being rational and reasonable and testing our assumptions. We want to learn and understandCognitive miser: invest as little effort to gain an understanding of the world.What does a cognitive miser value?: value ease and efficiency even if it means we are less accurate4. What type of info do we use in social cognition?: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus.Consistency: info about how consistently a given actor behaves in a given wayDistinctiveness: how distinctive is an actors behavior in a given situation. Dothey only act this way in response to a given stimulus, or do they act this way all the time?Consensus: a question that addresses how do other people respond to this stimulus?5. Fundamental Attribution Error: tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on other people’s behavior. One shot behavior.How does this affect how we explain other people’s behavior?: we explain them using personality traits and characteristics rather than their experiences and surrounding influence. Why?: We tend to look past their environmental influences because we don’t know them, but we can easily judge their personality by their decisions.Difference between situational factors and dispositional factors: Dispositional: personality, attitude, and intelligence. Situational: things going on around them. 6. Actor-observer Bias: when we are asked to be observers and explain the behavior we explain their personality, but when we are asked to be the actor and explain ourselves we tend to explain our experiences as an explanationWhen are we likely to attribute an outcome to our personal characteristics?: when we evaluate othersWhen will we attribute an outcome to the situation?: when we evaluate ourselves7. Two questions that affect social cognition:What characterizes automatic processing?: investing minimal resources inreasoning. Nonconscious. Effortless.What characterizes controlled processing?: takes effort. It is intentional. We must voluntarily decide to invest effort.How does motivation affect which one of these we use?: accuracy, or feeling good about ourselves8. How do unintended thoughts and thought suppression affect behavior?: the harder you try to stop yourself from doing something the more you will tend to do it because it is harder to change our actions. It takes a lot of effort. Monitoring is a lot of work on our cognitive resources. This eventually gets exhausted and we cant monitor it any longer. What is situated social cognition?: it can be beneficial to be biased as far as our own adjustment and sense of control.9. What is direct vs. indirect social influence?: direct: making conscious efforts to influence someone. Indirect: mere presence of others such as the bystander effect or small vs large classes.What is the difference between persuasion and compliance?: persuasions requires an attitude change while compliance requires a behavior change. 10.What is the “foot-in-the-door” technique?: making a small request before making a bigger requestWhat is the “door-in-the-face” technique?: making an unreasonably large request before making a small request that you hope to have granted.What is “lowballing”?: the seller of a product starts by quoting a low sales price and then mentions all of the add-on costs once the customer has agreedto purchase the product.11. What is social facilitation?: enhancement of performance brought out by the presence of othersDescribe the findings of Zajonc’s cockroach study: He had two groups of cockroaches. One ran a maze alone and the other ran a maze while being observed by a group of cockroaches in a spectator box and the cockroaches being observed ran the maze significantly faster and with less errors. How does social facilitation affect the performance of tasks that are simple or well practiced?: we perform better than if we weren’t being watched.How does the presence of others affect a task that is difficult or not well practiced?: social disruption occurs. Or we perform worse than we would if we weren’t being observed.What is other evidence of social facilitation?: the presence of others enhanced the performance of skilled pool players and cyclists.12. How did Asch study conformity and describe his findings.: He had participants come in to participate in a study that they did not believe was on conformity. They were sat at a table with 7 other test subjects who(unbeknowns to them) were actually in the “in crowd” and were not test subjects at all. The task was to look at three lines in comparison to a standardline and tell which of the three lines was the same length as the standard line.The test subject was always put 5th in line to answer and everyone voiced their answers out loud. Even when the people before the test subject picked aline that was clearly wrong, the test subject would conform to their wrong answer about 37% of the time because of the sole fact that they were unsure and didn’t want to be wrong or stick out. What variables influence whether or not people conform?: uniformity of agreement: if everyone gave the same wrong answer you were more likely to agree. Difference in the wrong answer: if one other person went against the norm then you were more likely to diverge as well. Size: size of the majority makes a difference.13.Obedience: adherence to instructions from those of higher authority.Conformity: the coming together of common people in a groupDifference: you do not have to obey a higher power to conform14.How Milgram studied obedience: the