Psych 10 Exam( Verified A+) with complete solution

Psych 10 Exam Social Psychology - the scientific study of the way that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people What do Social Psychologists study? - social influence, the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior. What do social influences include? - direct attempts to persuade others (e.g., advertisements) as well and more subtle ways in which others have an impact (e.g., the effect of the mere presence of others on behavior) What can Social Psychology impact? - They may impact thoughts and feelings in addition to behavior Social psychology and philosophy - are often concerned with the same questions How does Social psychology differ from philosophy? - because it is empirical (based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic) folk wisdom - Common sense explanations, such as those offered by journalists Folk wisdom may be contradictory - and provides no way of determining correctness. Social psychologists (An Empirical Approach) - test hypotheses, or educated guesses, in well-designed experiments to discern the situations that would result in one outcome or another Advantages of an Empirical approach - are that competing explanations can be tested against each other and that knowledge derived from past research can be used to make reasonable predictions about what will occur in the future Personality psychology - focuses on individual differences in human behavior (those aspects of people's personalities that make them different from other people), while social psychology focuses more on how the social situation affects people similarly. Sociology - is concerned with social class, social structure, and social institutions. Social psychology - joins other social science disciplines in its focus on social behavior. Social psychology differs from personality psychology and sociology - in its level of analysis. For personality psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual. For social psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation. For sociologists, the level of analysis is the group or institution. Table 1.1 (page 9) - depicts comparisons between social psychology and closely-related fields of personality psychology and sociology. (Fundamental Attribution Error) Social psychologists face barriers - to convincing people that their behavior is greatly influenced by the environment. People tend to explain behavior - entirely in terms of personality traits and thus underestimate the power of social influence. This is called the fundamental attribution error. In a demonstration of the fundamental attribution error - Ross and Samuels (1993) found that college students' personalities, The fundamental attribution error can lead to a false sense of security—we assume problematic behavior could never happen to us and thus we do not guard against its occurrence. Social influence is powerful - as rated by the resident assistants in their dormitories, did not determine how cooperative or competitive they were in a laboratory game. The name of the game—whether it was called the Wall Street Game or the Community Game—did, however, make a tremendous difference Behaviorism - is a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment (how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviors). Behaviorists - tried to define social situations objectively, focusing on the reinforcements received in response to behavior. Because behaviorism does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling - this approach has overlooked the importance of how people interpret their environments. Self-esteem - is people's evaluation of their own self-worth, or the extent to which people see themselves as good, competent, and decent. Most people have a strong need to maintain high self-esteem. This need can clash with the need for accuracy, leading people to distort their perceptions of the world. In order to preserve self-esteem - people may distort their perceptions of reality (e.g., by explaining their personal deficiencies in more positive ways). Such distortions are more "spins" on the facts than they are total delusions. Social psychological research demonstrates - that when people volunteer to undergo a painful or embarrassing initiation in order to join a group (e.g., a fraternity hazing), they need to justify the experience in order to avoid feeling foolish. One way they do this is to decide that the initiation was worth it because the group is so wonderful. Under certain conditions, then, the need for self-justification can lead people - to do surprising or paradoxical things (e.g., preferring things for which they have suffered to those which are associated with ease and pleasure). Although people may bend the facts to serve their self-esteem needs - they by and large do not distort reality. In fact, human reasoning skills are extraordinary. Social cognition - is the study of how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information. (The Social Cognition Motive: The Need to Be Accurate) This approach views - people as amateur sleuths seeking to understand and predict their social world. Coming up with an accurate picture of the social world may be difficult because there are many relevant facts and we have only limited time. Our expectations can sometimes - get in the way of accurately perceiving the world. In the self-fulfilling prophecy, - our expectations about another person's behavior result (via the mechanism of influencing our behavior toward the target) in changing the target's behavior. While social psychologists are often motivated by simple curiosity to study social behavior, - they are also frequently motivated by the desire to help resolve social problems, such as increasing conservation of natural resources, increasing the practice of safe sex, understanding the relationship between viewing television violence and aggressive behavior, developing effective negotiation strategies for the reduction of international conflict, finding ways to reduce racial prejudice, and helping people adjust to life changes. Empirical research - allows us to test the validity of personal observations. Findings from social psychological research may appear obvious - because they deal with familiar topics: social behavior and social influence. Due to hindsight bias - findings that appear obvious in retrospect may not have been predictable before the experiment was conducted. How do researchers develop hypotheses and theories? - Researchers make observations in order to describe and measure behavior. After observing certain events repeatedly, researchers come up with a theory that explains these observations. After psychologists do their research and make sure it's replicable, they develop a theory and translate the theory into a precise hypothesis. Formulating Hypotheses and Theories - -Inspiration from Earlier Theories and Research -Studies often stem from researchers' dissatisfaction with existing explanations. -Social psychologists engage in a continual process of theory refinement: developing theories, testing hypotheses, revising theory and forming new hypotheses. -Hypotheses Based on Personal Observations -Personal experience, current events, and literature can serve as sources of hypotheses to test (e.g., Kitty Genovese and Latane & Darley's work on the diffusion of responsibility).Research Designs -Social psychologists use three types of research designs: observational, correlational, and experimental What are the strengths and weaknesses of various research designs that social psychologists use? - Each type of observation has its own strengths and weaknesses. Researchers might prefer using observational methods in a lab in order to gain greater control over possible extraneous variables, while they might prefer using naturalistic observation in order to obtain greater ecological validity. However, lab observations tend to be more costly and difficult to implement than naturalistic observations. The Observational Method: Describing Social Behavior - Researcher observes people and records measurements or impressions of their behavior. Ethnography - is a type of observational method in which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have. This often involves participant observation, a form of the observational method whereby the observer interacts with the people being observed, but tries not to change the situation in any way. Other times, researchers use observational methods to test a specific hypothesis. - These studies use trained observers who code behavior according to a prearranged set of criteria to establish interjudge reliability. Archival analysis - is a form of the observational method whereby the researcher observes social behavior by examining accumulated documents of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers). Archival analysis can tell us a great deal about a society's values and beliefs. - For example, researchers analyzed credit card records of subscriptions to pornography websites and found no differences between red states and blue states (Edelman, 2009). Limits of the Observational Method - -Certain kinds of behavior are difficult to observe because they occur rarely or in private. -Archival analysis is limited by the content of the original material, whose authors may have had other aims in compiling the material. -Social psychologists typically want to do more than describe behavior but also predict and explain behavior. A second goal of social science - is to understand relationships between variables and to be able to predict when different kinds of social behavior will occur. The correlational method - involves systematically measuring two variables and the relationship between them. The correlation coefficient - is a statistical technique for calculating the degree of association between two variables. Positive correlations indicate that an increase in one variable is associated with an increase in the other, and negative correlations indicate that an increase in one variable is associated with a decrease in the other. Surveys - in which a sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behavior are often used in correlational studies and when the variable of interest is not easily observable. The validity of survey data - depends on using samples of people that are representative of the population being studied. Random selection can ensure that a sample is representative. Sampling errors (e.g., the 1936 presidential poll error) - can be a problem with surveys. Survey questions that ask people to predict or explain their own behavior - may be inaccurate, as people often do not know the answer but believe that they do. The major problem with the survey method is - that it identifies only whether two variables are associated, and not why they are. An association might mean that A causes B, that B causes A, or that some third variable C causes both A and B, which are not causally linked. Confusion of correlation and causality - may turn up in media reports (e.g., birth control method and incidence of STDs). There is evidence showing a relationship between watching pornography and sexual violence in men, - but this does not necessarily mean that watching pornography causes men to be sexually violent. The "Try It!" exercise on pages 33 and 34 - asks students to consider alternative explanations for a variety of correlations. The Experimental Method: Answering Causal Questions - -Only the experimental method, in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable, can determine causality. -The experimental method always involves a direct intervention from the researcher. The independent variable - is the variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable. The dependent variable - is the one measured by the researcher to see if changes depend on the level of the independent variable. Experiments can determine whether or not one variable is in fact a cause; - however, this does not mean that such a variable is the only cause. An experiment - has high internal validity when everything is the same in the different levels of the independent variable, except for the independent variable: the one factor of concern. Internal validity is established by - controlling all extraneous variables and by using random assignment to condition. In random assignment to condition, each participant has an equal probability of being assigned to any of the experimental conditions. Random assignment helps ensure that the participants in the two groups are unlikely to differ in any systematic way. Even with random assignment, - there is a small probability that different characteristics of people are distributed differently across conditions. To guard against misinterpreting the results in such an event, scientists calculate the probability level (p-value), a number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that their experimental results would occur by chance. By convention, a p-value of less than or equal to 5 chances in 100 that an event would occur by chance is considered to be statistically significant. For example, - to determine the effect of pornography on aggression, researchers need to conduct an experiment in which they manipulate exposure to pornography and then measure subsequent aggression (e.g., Donnerstein & Berkowitz, 1981). External Validity in Experiments - The advantages of tight control over conditions in the experimental method may produce a situation that is somewhat artificial and distant from real life. External validity - is the extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people. Psychological realism often depends upon - the creation of an effective cover story, or false description of the purpose of the study. Cover stories are used because if participants are forewarned about the true purpose of the study, they will plan their response, and we will not know how they would act in the real world. The only way to be certain that the results of an experiment represent the behavior of a certain population is to randomly select from that population. - However, this may be impractical and expensive. Social psychologists often assume that the psychological processes studied are basic components of human nature and thus similar across different populations. To be truly certain of this, however, studies should be replicated with samples from different populations. External validity can be increased by conducting field experiments, - experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the laboratory. There is often a trade-off between internal and external validity. - Being able to randomly assign people to conditions and ensuring that no extraneous variables are influencing the results increases internal validity, whereas conducting field experiments makes random assignment to condition and tightly controlling the independent variable impossible but increases external validity.