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Study Guide: Exam 1
What is social psychology? |
The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. |
How does social psychology differ from sociology? |
Social psychology is distinct from sociology primarily because it is concerned not so much with social situations in any objective sense, but rather how people are influenced by their interpretation, or construal, of their social environment. |
Internal validity |
Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions. |
Accessibility |
The extent to which schemas & concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world. |
External validity |
The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people. |
Generalizabilty across situations and people |
(1) the extent to which we can generalize from the situation constructed by an experimenter to real-life situations (generalizability across SITUATIONS)
(2) & the extent to which we can generalize from the people who participated in the experiment to people in general (generalizability across PEOPLE) |
Priming |
The process by which recent experiences increase the concept of a schema, trait, or concept |
Mental strategies and shortcuts |
Many decisions and judgments we make in everyday life do not require a thorough search of every option - instead we use mental strategies and shortcuts to make decision-making easier..."judgmental heurisitics" are mostly functional & serve us well |
Availability heuristic |
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind. |
Representative heuristic |
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. |
Improving human thinking |
Controlled thinking is purposeful for providing checks and balances for automatic thinking. while a captain can turn off automatic pilot and take control of the plane when trouble occurs., in just the same way controlled thinking takes over when unusual events occur. |
Overconfidence barrier |
The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments. |
The email dilemma : communicating without nonverbal cues |
Without nonverbal cues to give additional meaning, words alone remain. stripped away from emotion, are potentially open to misinterpretation. message senders believe they're able to communicate sarcasm, humor, sadness, seriousness, yet they fail to communicate emotions through email, whether sent to a friend or stranger. |
Belief in a just world |
A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people. |
Effect of culture on the fundamental attribution error *("correspondence bias") |
People from individualisitic and collectivistic cultures both demonstrate "correspondence bias"; yet collectivistic cultures' members' are more sensitive to situational causes of behavior and are more likely to rely on situational explanations, as long as situational variables are salient. reliance on holistic vs. analytic styles of thinking underlies this effect. |
Self-fulfilling prophecy |
Phenomenon in which our expectations about someone (even if initially untrue) come true |
Correlational study |
Two variables are systematically measured, and the relationship between them - how much you can predict one from the other - is assessed....BUT correlation does not imply causation |
Experimental method |
Method in which researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people's responses)... |
Schema |
Expectations we have about how events are going to unfold (stereotypes) |
Attribution |
People's explanations for why they did what they did. either INTERNAL, stable-dispositional / unstable- others internal causes, or EXTERNAL / SITUATIONAL: its something about the situation |