Advances in social psychology

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what are the 2 influential approaches to social psychology?
social cognition and social identity theory (SIT)
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what is social cognition?
focus on individual thought processes - social perceivers respond to social stimuli - defined by how people store and think such info - use heuristics when encountering others and perceivers viewed as info processors
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what is SIT?
focus on group (intergroup behaviour driven by shared identities with others) - father of theory Henri Tajfel (20th century) - he rejected excess of cognitive theory and believed in importance of social context
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what did neanderthals trade for good visual perception?
poorer social cognitive abilities for communication
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what evidence is there in neanderthal skulls for this?
large eye sockets - adaptation for poor lighting conditions (required larger visual cortices in brain) - more brain dedicated to visual system - also showed higher bun (bump at front of head) suggesting highly developed visual cortex
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who are two most influential social thinkers?
Allport and Festinger
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what did Allport say?
social psychology should focus on the individual
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what did festinger say?
we organise social thinking by comparing the self to others (upward comparisons and downward comparisons)
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what is the self-concept?
set of beliefs or knowledge person has about oneself - multidimensional construct (self-schema)
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what is Tajfel and Turner's theory?
SIT - personal and social identities - influential in self and identity research
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what is Bem's theory?
self perception theory - we make attributions about our behaviour
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what is Festinger's theory?
social comparison theory - we compare ourselves to others
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what are the 3 competing core motives that influence how we search for our knowledge about the self?
self-assessment (to seek accurate info about the self), self-verification (to seek info that we are correct), and self-enhancement (to promote oneself)
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what is self esteem?
evaluation of your self-concept as generally positive/negative
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what do self esteem theorists believe?
we seek to boost self-esteem by thinking positively about our individual and group selves
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what is social inference?
the way we process social info to form impressions of and make judgements
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what is social inference based on?
systematic processing of info (when have time and motivation - naive scientists), simple heuristics (take shortcuts - cognitive misers), and motivated tactician view (choose between systematic processing and heuristics when necc)
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what are attribution theories?
theories we construct to explain/predict how people will behave
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what are the 3 dimensions of causality of succeeding/failing a task?
locus (cause is internal/external), stability (cause unstable/stable), controllability (whether further performance is under actor's control/or not)
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what is representative heuristic?
how similar a particular target is to a typical member of that category
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what is availability heuristic?
associations coming readily to mind considered to be more common/prevalent than they really are
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what can heuristics lead to?
attribution biases
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what is a fundamental attribution error?
tendency for people to attribute behaviour to stable personality
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what is actor-observer effect?
internal attributions (e.g. personality) about others' behaviour and external causes for our own (e.g. situation)
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what was the issue with attribution theories?
they became unwieldy and overly complex - we dont think like naive scientists much of the time and heuristics are often used instead
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what is a stereotype?
a collection of traits held by typical members of particular groups (pictures we carry in our head - Lippmann) - can be viewed as a heuristic and lead to generalisations and categorisations
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what are categorisations?
McGarty - process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to and what it is different from - allows fast and efficient impressions, create coherence (flexible definition)
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categorisation vs. individuation?
we cant categorise when heuristic processing is difficult (when ppl dont fit category) - individuation is differentiating between group members based on individual attributes (more effortful than categorisation)
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how are impressions formed on a continuum? (Fiske & Neuberg 1990)
categroisation --> individuation - lie at the extremes of a continuum - re-categroisation lies between the two extremes
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what is multiple categorisation?
members of multiple social categories
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what creates perceptual conflict?
activated social categories fit poorly
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how can this conflict be resolved?
inconsistency resolution resulting in emergent attributes - form of individuation - emergent attributes smooth the impression formation and results in coherance
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disadvantages of categorical thinking?
generalised impressions/stereotypes are often inaccurate - bias (librarian/waitress vs. beer/wearing glasses) - pos info about ingroups and neg info about outgroups
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why do people stereotype?
makes life easy - simplifies info processing and reduced cognitive load
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what did Mccrae et al (1994) find?
pps allowed to stereotype had more cognitive resources left over to simultaneously monitor an audio track
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what does system justification theory say?
stereotypes help us justify existing social hierarchies - Jost & Kay (2005) demonstrated even ingroup members engage in social justification
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what are the 4 key criteria of automatic processes in social cognition? (Bargh's 4 horsemen)
awareness (lack of awareness of process operation/its effects), intention (initiated without deliberate intention), control (uncontrollable), efficiency (spare our cognitive resources)
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what is behavioural priming?
exposure to concepts can change behaviour automatically
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Bargh's two behavioural priming studies?
found when priming politeness they were less likely to interrupt an experimenter, relative to pps primed with rudeness - primed with stereotypes of elderly took longer to exit the experiment, than when primed with neutral words
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how many friends can the human brain cope with?
150
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what basis do we categorise on?
features encountered first (temporal primacy), when differences are salient (perceptual salience), and when we are used to classifying using particular categories (chronic accessibility)
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what words do people attribute more to women?
****, caring, kind, pretty, intelligent, vain, self-conscious
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what words do people attribute more to men?
confident, lazy, strong, humorous, arrogant, hairy, attractive
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when is categorisation not used?
when cant apply a heuristic (poor fit between person and category - e.g. male midwife)
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what would be done instead?
re-categorised as subtype of original category or be individuated
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what is poor compositional compatibility?
forming an impression, cant use the stereotype to do this - leading us to causal reasoning (complex reasoning and causal reasoning same thing)
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what is dual processing?
when categorising is difficult so we re-categorise or individuate - actively switch processing styles when forming impressions
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what is the key aspect of Fiske & Neuberg's continuum model?
allocation of attention - useful to turn to a model from cog psych where attention is key component (WM)
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what is the central executive function?
directs attention to particular stimuli and processes/uses info from 2 slave systems - concerned with co-cordinating direction/operations of WM - associated with frontal lobes (prefrontal cortex is cortical region)
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what is the social brain hypothesis (Dunbar 1998)?
human intelligence (EF) didnt evolve exclusively originally to solve/process factual info about the world in the environment - it evolved as a means of living in large/complex social groups
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difference between humans and neanderthals and PFC?
humans have larger PFC, neanderthals was smaller so explains why they lived in smaller groups - need PFC to understand social cognition/planning complex cog behaviours/expression of personality/appropriate social behaviour
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what are the 5 widely used methods to test executive processing?
1. dual tasking (concurrent/cognitive load - task and list attributes, if task interferes), 2. populations with involvement, 3. ageing populations, 4. substances, 5. brain neuroimaging techniques
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who studied dual tasking?
Hutter and Crisp (2006) - list traits to describe oxford educated bricklayer under high or low cognitive load and found 2 types of attributes: emergent attributes and constituent attributes
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what are emergent attributes?
(combinations that dont fit the stereotypes) those mentioned for combinations but not constituents - interference in high cog load, so RGN tasks interfer with generation of emergent attributes cus reliant on executive functioning
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what is a constituent?
e.g. oxford and bricklayer attributes - stereotypes
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what are constituent attributes?
stereotypical attributes - those mentioned for constituents and combinations - similar number of attributes in both high/low cognitive load, so it isnt interfering with executive functioning
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why might young people use more emergent attributes?
better executive ability - when get older categorisation gets less flexible
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use of brain neuroimaging techniques?
fMRI: magnetic field and blood flow associated with activation - looking for differences in categorisation and individuation and neural correlated
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what did Mason & McCrae (2004) find?
judging a targets sex was associated with the left fusiform gyrus and prefrontal cortex (associated with face recognition and categorisation)
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what is social cognition?

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focus on individual thought processes - social perceivers respond to social stimuli - defined by how people store and think such info - use heuristics when encountering others and perceivers viewed as info processors

Card 3

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what is SIT?

Back

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Card 4

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what did neanderthals trade for good visual perception?

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Card 5

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what evidence is there in neanderthal skulls for this?

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