PSYC 2600 EXAM 1 QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026

PSYC 2600 EXAM 1 QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026 Social Psychology - Answers The scientific study of how the people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others Social Influence - Answers The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of others have on an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors What separates social psychology from other disciplines like economics or clinical psychology? - Answers The level of analysis and goal What is the level of analysis in social psychology? - Answers The individual in the context of a social situation How does social psychology differ from sociology? - Answers The level of analysis: in sociology it's the group, institution, or society at large while in social psychology it's THE INDIVIDUAL in the context of a social situation What is the goal of social psychology? - Answers To find what properties of human nature make the individual susceptible to social influence (even across social class or culture) Fundamental Attribution Error - Answers The tendency we have to overestimate how much people's behaviors is due to internal/dispositional characteristics rather than situational factors; When we blame the fish instead of the water it swims in Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) - Answers Prisoner's Dilemma experiment; Had RAs rate their kids and then broke them up and told them it was either the "Wall Street Game" or the "Communtiy Game"; name of game had bigger impact than RA's assessment Behaviorism - Answers School of psychology that says to understand human behavior you only need to understand the reinforcing aspects of their environment (nothing internal - only external factors) What is a major weakness of behaviorism? - Answers They overlook the importance of how people interpret their environment Construal - Answers The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world Gestalt Psychology - Answers School of psychology that stresses the importance of studying the subjective way an object appears in an individual's mind rather than the objective/physical attributes of the object Kurt Lewin - Answers Father of experimental social psychology; had the weird quote about the ceiling Naive Realism - Answers The belief we perceive things the way they are What two central motives to social psychologists emphasize? - Answers (1) The need to feel good about ourselves (2) The need to be accurate Who found these central motives? - Answers Leon Festinger Self-Esteem - Answers People's evaluation of their own self-worth; the extent to which they see themselves as good, competent, and decent Social Cognition - Answers How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Answers An expectation that causes you to act in ways that make that expectation come true Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) - Answers "Bloomers" self-fulfilling prophecy study Hindsight Bias - Answers The tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing something that occurred, how much they could have predicted it before it occurred What phenomenon did Latane and Darley in response to Kitty Genovese? - Answers Diffusion of responsibility Diffusion of responsibility - Answers The idea that the more people who witness an incident, the less likely an individual is to act The three research methods of social psychology - Answers 1) Observational Method 2) Correlational Method 3) Experimental Method What is the focus of the observational method? - Answers Description What is the focus of the correlational method? - Answers Prediction What is the focus of the experimental method? - Answers Causality What question does the observational method answer? - Answers What is the nature of the phenomenon? What question does the correlational method answer? - Answers From knowing X, can we predict Y? What question does the experimental method answer? - Answers Is variable X a cause of variable Y? Observational Method - Answers Technique where the researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior Ethnography - Answers Kind of observational learning; researchers try to understand a group or culture by studying it from the inside without imposing any preconceived notions Interjudge Reliability - Answers Interrater reliability Archival Analysis - Answers Kind of observational method; Researcher studies the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture Limit of Observational Method - Answers Does not tell you why Correlational Method - Answers Technique where two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed Correlation Coefficient - Answers A statistical technique to assess how well you can predict one variable from another Surveys - Answers Research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes and behaviors` Experimental Method - Answers Method where researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the IV How many participants helped with no bystanders in seizure study? - Answers 85% How many participants helped with two bystanders in seizure study? - Answers 62% How many participants helped with four bystanders in seizure study? - Answers 31% Internal Validity - Answers Making sure that nothing besides the IV can affect the DV; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions Probability Level (P-value) - Answers A number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because the IV; in social psych results are significant (trustworthy) if the probability level is less than 5 out of 100 Donnerstein and Berkowitz (1981) - Answers 3 conditions: violent porn, nonviolent porn, and talkshow Found that it isn't viewing porn that led to higher electric shock, it's the violence External Validity - Answers The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people Psychological Realism - Answers The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life