PSY QUIZ 2 Introspection is a good source of information about the self but the reasons for your thoughts and feelings will often escape you information about one or more other people relative to the self Ch 4 Social comparison involves acquiring thinking about and reacting to Some aspects of the self are shaped through the hidden influence of culture o Individualistic culture independent self revolves around personal o Collectivist culture interdependent self revolves around their o American reliance on traits emphasizes the unity and stability of the autonomy relationships with others including groups to which they belong independent self Self serving bias a pervasive tendency to attribute our success to internal Self discrepancy theory you compare your actual self who you are at a Cognitive dissonance theory people like to think of themselves as causes like effort or ability and our failure to external causes beyond our control given time to two standards consistent and will take steps to reduce the negative emotions and physiological arousal caused by the perception of inconsistency response to situational demands Self monitoring the extent to which people monitor their behavior in o High self monitor highly sensitive to situational cues and adjust o Low self monitor guided primarily by more internal standards for their behavior to fit the situation behavior and are less willing to make situational adjustments to their behavior Implicit egotism o The unconscious effects of people s positive feelings about themselves on their feelings about almost anything that they associate with the self o Ex mere ownership affect Beggan 1992 than a non owner Hypothesis objects would be rated more favorably by an owner People given a number of objects to inspect Key object cold drink insulator Half of subjects were told that it was a gift Objects rated on 7 point scales Results people rated drink insulator more positively when they owned it M 5 55 vs M 4 50 o Ex name letter effect o Implicit egotism and marriage People favorably evaluate letters from their own names Holds for all letters but even more for initials Replicated in many countries Pelham Jones Mirenberg and Cavallo 2002 Marriage records in Florida and Georgie close to 15 000 Hypothesis people would be more likely than would be Georgia 6 56 matches expected by chance but 7 51 Florida 6 86 matches expected by chance but 8 70 marriages overall expected by chance to marry another person when that person s last name began with the same letter as their own actually a significant difference actually an even more significant difference 26 more than would be expected by chance Alternative explanation Jon Goldman married Sarah Goldfarb George Chung married Lily Chu more likely to marry someone in your ethnic group Second study run to control for this Among Latinos only 8 26 matches expected by chance but 13 45 actually tested within an ethnic group o Where should I live Hypothesis people are disproportionately likely to live in places People with either first or last names that matched the name of Possible explanation people name child after city they live in whose names resemble their own first or last name a Saint city were over represented in those cities ex St Louis name kid Louis The Mere exposure effect repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to more favorable evaluations of that stimulus awareness of the stimulus is not necessary for this to work o Typically are much stronger when people are unaware of the number of times they have been exposed to stimuli and stronger when people can t recognize the stimuli at all Indirect assessment of attitude o After a certain point continued exposure will reduce liking o Bogus pipeline a technique for encouraging people to report o Galvanic skin response based on the fact that when people have a socially unacceptable attitudes by convincing them that a machine can tell whether or not they are lying difficult to pull off strong emotional response their sweat glands become active limitation is that is can t reveal the direction of an attitude whether it s positive or negative unfavorable responses with the contraction of different facial muscles o Facial electromyographic activity associates favorable and o fMRI allows researchers to identify within a few millimeters the regions of the brain that become active in response to specific tasks or stimuli o Tripartite model of attitudes what people think and say about an object how they feel about it in its presence and how they behave toward it Theory of reasoned action that behavior behavior and subjective social norms o The best predictor of a behavior is a person s intention to engage in o Two important variables affect our intentions our attitude toward the False consensus effect the tendency for people to exaggerate the extent Explicit attitudes may be useful for predicting behavior that is conscious to which others share their attitudes and under your control Implicit attitudes may be more predictive of a spontaneous less deliberate and less consciously directed actions can serve as hidden influences on our behavior Ch 5 Selective construction of memory and biased reconstruction of past events ex memory distortion o We have self concepts and want to protect them We control what goes in and what comes out of our memory personal experiences self relevant thoughts long term memory recall of experiences self relevant thoughts o The self and motivated memory distortions Mnemic neglect people generally remember good feedback better than bad feedback to a great extent due to selective attention WE CONTROL WHAT GOES INTO MEMORY People remember more positive than negative information People do NOT remember more positive than negative about themselves information about you and sometimes the opposite is true Motivated retrieval of flattering or comforting information WE Constructing a biased memory and especially reporting a CONTROL WHAT COMES OUT OF MEMORY biased memory to others makes it harder to later retrieve an unbiased memory Snowballing bias Introspection reduces attitude behavior consistency because prolonged introspection causes people to focus on aspects of an attitude they ordinarily would not consider important and that typically would not come to mind in dealing with that attitude object Variables determining relationship between attitudes and behavior how specific is the attitude what kind of attitude what kind of person what kind of context