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The task of a psychologist is to try to understand

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human behavior

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What is social psychology?

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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 and even by the entire social situation

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What is social influence?

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the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

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Social influence is also broader than one person's attempts to change another person's behavior. It includes not only our thoughts and feelings but also

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overt acts

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It also takes many forms other than deliberate attempts at persuasion. We are often influenced by

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merely the presence of other people, including perfect strangers who are not interacting with us.

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Do people have to be present to influence us?

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no

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Why?

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we are governed by the imaginary approval or disapproval of others, our parents, friends, and teachers, and by how we expect others to react to us

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How does philosophy play a role in human nature?

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its been a major source of insight and is a part of the foundation of contemporary psychology. Psychologists have looked to philosophers for insights into the nature of consciousness and how people form beliefs about the social world

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Sometimes philosophers disagree. How do we determine who is right?

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social psychologists attempt to look at these questions scientifically

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What are empirical questions?

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questions in which answers can be derived from experimentation and measurement rather than by personal opinion

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To get the answers to questions we have about human behavior, we could just ask someone why they did what they did. Or even ask an observer what they thought. But why is this problematic?

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people are not always aware of the origins of their own responses and feelings

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What about the use of folk wisdom? What is the problem of relying on fold wisdom to explain human behavior?

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more often than not, they disagree with one another and there is no easy way to determine which is correct. For example, folk wisdom says "birds of a feather, flock together." But also folk wisdom says "opposites attract." Which is correct?

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How do we determine which is correct, if either?

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scientific methods to test our assumptions, guesses, and ideas empirically and systematically

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Why is doing experiments in social psychology a challenge?

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because we are attempting to predict human behavior of highly sophisticated organisms in a variety of complex situations.

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What is the first step to doing experiments?

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coming up with a hypothesis, an educated guess

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The social psychologist performs experiments to test these hypotheses, specifically about the social world. The next task is to

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design well controlled experiments sophisticated enough to tease out the situations that would result in one or another outcome

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Well controlled experiments allows us to ___________ once we know the key aspects of the situations

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make accurate predictions

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When using opposite proverbs or folk wisdoms such as birds of a feather flock together or out of sight out of mind, it is the social psychologists job to handle this how?

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do the research that specifies the conditions under which one or another is most likely to be true

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What are individual differences?

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the aspects of people's personalities that make them different from other people

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Asking and trying to answer the questions about people's behavior in terms of their traits is the work of

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personality psychologists

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Personality psychologists generally focus on

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individual differences

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Research on personality increases our understanding of human behavior but social psychologists believe that explaining behavior through personality factors ignores a critical part of the part

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the powerful role played by social influence

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When considering how an individual can behave in one moment shy and in another outgoing, which is true. The answer is neither and both. We are all capable of both in various situations. The question should be

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what factors are different in these two situations that have such a profound affect on behavior.

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Social psych is related to other social sciences

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sociology, political science, and economics

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Why are these social sciences related?

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each of these examines the influence of social factors on human behavior

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What sets social psych apart?

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level of analysis

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For the social psych, the level of analysis is

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the individual in the context of the social situation

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The major differences between sociology and social psychology is

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that sociology rather than focus on the individual looks towards society at large. The level of analysis is the group or institution

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The goal of social psych is to identify

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individual properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influences regardless of class or culture

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Is social psych universal?

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we don't know, it hasn't been tested in other cultures

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Cross culture research is valuable why?

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it sharpens theories by either demonstrating their universality or by leading us to discover additional variables whose incorporations help us to make more accurate predictions of human behavior

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Social psych and sociology share interests in

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the way the situations in the larger society influence behavior

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Social psychologists focus more than sociologists on

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the make up of individuals that renders people susceptible to social influence

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Social psych and personality psych both emphasize the psychology of ______ rather than focusing on _____

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the individual; what makes people different from one another

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Social psych emphasize __________ over personality psych

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psychological processes shared by most people around the world that makes them susceptible to social influences

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When describing the waitress story, the key factor is

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without the important information about the situation, most people will try to explain someone's behavior in terms of personality of the individual, they focus on the fish, not the water the fish lives in

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Why is the focus on the fish and not the water important?

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if the water (environment) is murky, contaminated, or full of predators, the fish is going to be stressed to the max

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Social psychologists are up against something called the fundamental attribution error that often acts as a barrier. It is the

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tendency to explain our own, and other peoples, behavior entirely in terms of personality traits and to underestimate the power of social influences

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Explaining behavior this way often gives us what kind of feeling

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false security

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How?

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it is easy to blame people who have done terrible things, such as the suicide bombers or Jonestown suiciders, it is comforting to write off these individuals as flawed human beings and it couldn't happen to us

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Why is this ironic?

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Thinking this way increases our vulnerability to possibly destructive social influences by making us unaware of our own susceptibility to social psychological processes

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What else is problematic about thinking this way?

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* we oversimplify the problem which decreases our understanding of many human actions * this causes us to blame the victim in situations where the victim has been overpowered by social situations

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What was important about the competitive game?

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even though they got both competitive and cooperative students to play the game, the students "personalities" were affected by the social situation. Half the students played the "community game," and half played "Wall Street" game. The name of the game was more influential than the students personalities of competitive and cooperative.

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What is the school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment

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behaviorism

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Behaviorists believe that when behavior is followed by a reward, what happens

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the behavior is reinforced and likely to continue

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Behaviorists believe that when behavior is followed by a punishment, what happens

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it is likely to be extinguished, or it stops

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One of the most important behaviorists mentioned in the book

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B. F. Skinner

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Skinner believed that all behavior could be understood by examining

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the rewards and punishments in the organisms environment

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Although behaviorists have many strengths, what are their weaknesses

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they chose not to deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling

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Why did behaviorists leave these ideas out?

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they considered these ideas too vague and mentalistic and not sufficiently anchored to observable

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What else did they leave out

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how people interpret their environment

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For social psychologists, the relationship between the social environment and the individual is

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a two way street

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What does this mean?

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not only does the situation influence people's behavior, peoples behavior also depends on their interpretation, or construal, of their social environment

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What does construal mean?

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the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

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Social psychologists believe that it is often more important to understand how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world than it is to understand

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its objective properties

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Which psychological approach does the emphasis on construal have its roots?

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Gestalt psychology

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What is Gestalt?

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a school psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people's minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

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Gestalt was first proposed as what kind of theory

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how people perceive the physical world

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Gestalt psych holds that we should study the subjective way in which an object appears _________ rather than ___________________

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in people's minds; the way in which the objective, physical attributes of the object combine

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The Gestalt approach was created by

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Koftka, Kohler, and Werheimer

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These psychologists went to America, why?

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fled Nazi Germany

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One particular psychologist who fled Nazi Germany was Kurt Lewin, who was considered the founding father of

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modern experimental social psych

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What did Kurt Lewin bring to America with him?

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Lewin experienced the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. The experiences profoundly affected his thinking, and once he moved to the US, he helped shape American social psych, directing it toward a deep interest in exploring the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping.

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What did Lewin do with Gestalt principles?

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He applied Gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to social perception: how people perceive other people and their motives, intentions, and behaviors.

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Lewin was the first scientist to fully realize the importance of

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taking the perspective of the people in any situation

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What is naive realism?

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a special kind of construal termed by Lee Ross...the conviction that all of us share that we perceive things "as they really are."

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According to naive realism, if other people see the same things differently it must be because they are

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biased.

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An example: Israeli and Palestinian negotiations frequently run aground because of naive realism; each side assumes that the other reasonable people see things the same way they do. Even when each side recognizes that the other side perceives the issues differently. Each thinks that the other side is _____ while they themselves are _____

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biased; objective and that their own perceptions of reality should provide the basis for settlement.

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When this happens, both sides do what?

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resist compromise fearing that their biased opponent will benefit more than they will

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In an experiment, the researcher Lee Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiates, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. What did the Israeli's think?

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The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians.

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What did Ross say about this?

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If your own proposal isn't going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side's proposal is going to be attractive when it comes from the other side? Also read the example of the high school student on the bottom of page 11

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Social psychologists seek to understand the fundamental laws of

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human nature

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These fundamental laws of human nature are common to all and explain

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why we construe the social world the way we do

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Human beings are complex. At any given moment, various motives underlie our thoughts and behaviors, such as

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hunger, thirst, fear, a desire for control, and the promise of love, favors, and others

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Two motives are of primary importance

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1) the need to feel good about ourselves 2) the need to be accurate

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Motives pull us in what directions

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sometimes in the same direction and sometimes in the opposite direction

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When we are tugged in the opposite direction, what is this about?

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where to perceive the world accurately requires us to face up to the fact that we have behaved foolishly or immorally

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What did Leon Festinger, one of social psychology's most innovative theorists realize about being pulled into opposite directions

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when we are pulled in opposite directions by two motives, we can gain our most valuable insights into the workings of the human mind - example of president on pag 12

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The examples of the presidents on pg 12 and 13 show us what about the need to feel good about decisions vs. the need to feel accurage

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the need to feel good about our decisions can fly in the face of the need to be accurate

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When given the choice between distorting the world to feel good about themselves and representing the world accurately, people often

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distort the world to feel good about themselves

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Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high

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self esteem

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Acknowledging major deficiencies in ourselves is very difficult, even when the cost is seeing the world inaccurately. The consequence of this distortion is

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learning from experience becomes very unlikely. Example of marriage on pg 13

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What is self esteem

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people's evaluation of their own self worth - that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

question

How does the case of the fraternity get explained by Oscar, personality psychologists, and social psychologists

answer

The father, Oscar believes maybe the fraternity just doesn't attract the wonderful people like it used to. Personality psychologists might suggest father and son differ in their degree of extroversion or other traits. Social psychologists would suspect that it may be more about hazing.

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Why do social psychs think hazing has something to do with Oscar and Sam's vision of the fraternity

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Hazing probably was a factor in Oscar's liking of his fraternity experience and his brothers.

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What about behaviorism in this example?

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principles of behaviorism show that rewards, not punishments, make us like things. However, social psych have discovered that this formulation is too simple to account for human thinking and motivation

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Human beings have a need to ______________, and this need leads them to do many things that a behaviorist could not explain

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justify their past behavior

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Explain why Oscar might feel the need to justify his liking of his fraternity

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if he goes through hazing and then dislikes his fraternity, he may feel like a fool. In order to avoid feeling like a fool, he attempts to justify his decision to undergo hazing by distorting his interpretations of his fraternity experience. He tries to put a positive spin on his experiences. Even if he feels negatively about a lot of the aspects of fraternity life, he is motivated to see them differently and focuses on the good parts of living in the fraternity, and he distorts or dismisses the bad parts

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So does this explain why Sam may feel differently?

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Yes, Sam didn't undergo the hazing, he has no need to justify his behavior and thus no need to see his fraternity experiences in a positive light.

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How do we know that hazing is the explanation?

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in a series of well controlled lab experiments, social psychologists investigated hazing: the experimenters held constant everything in the situation, including the precise behavior of the fraternity members, the only thing varied was the severity of the hazing. The results demonstrated conclusively that the more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to get into the group, the better they liked the group - even though, objectively, the group members were the same people behaving the same way for everyone.

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What did we learn about the hazing experiments?

answer

Human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behavior, and that under certain specifiable conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glace might seem surprising or paradoxical. They might prefer people and things for whom they have suffered to people and things they associate with ease and pleasure

question

What is social cognition

answer

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

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Social psychologists take into account social cognition when considering

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the way human beings think about the world

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Researchers who attempt to understand social behavior from the perspective of social cognition begin with what assumption

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that all people try to view the world as accurately as possible. They regard human beings as amateur sleuths who are doing their best to understand and predict their social world

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We often make mistakes in an effort to understand and predict, why?

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we almost never know all the facts we need to judge a given situation accurately and even if we could gather all the facts we would lack the time or the stamina to do so

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What does the study on teachers and elementary students on pg 15 teach us

answer

sometimes our expectations about the social world interfere with perceiving it accurately. Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world

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What did Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen find in their investigation of the phenomenon called self-fulfilling prophecy

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you expect that you or another person will behave in some way, so you act in ways to make your prediction come true, see end of pg 15

question

Social psychology can be defined as the scientific study of

answer

social influence

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What is one reason for studying the causes of social behavior

answer

contribute to the solution of social problems; reducing violence and prejudice and increasing altruism and tolerance

question

What are some other ways social psychologists are trying to help

answer

inducing people to conserve water and energy, educating people to practice safer sex, understanding the relationship between viewing violence on tv and the violent behavior of television watchers, developing effective negotiation strategies to resolve international conflict, finding ways to reduce ethnic prejudice and violence in classrooms, raising children's intelligence through environmental interventions and better school programs, and reducing the high school dropout rate of minority students

question

Social psychologists are interested in understanding how and why the social environment shapes

answer

thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

question

Social psychologists develop explanations of social influence through

answer

empirical methods, such as experiements

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The goal of the science of social psych is

answer

to discover universal laws of human behavior

question

What kind of research then becomes essential

answer

cross cultural

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The topic that would most interest a social psychologist is: a) whether people who commit crimes tend to have more aggressive personalities than people who do not b) whether people who commit crimes have different genes from people who do not c) how the level of extroversion of different presidents affected their political decisions d) whether people's decisions about whether to cheat on a test is influenced by how they imagine their friends would react if they found out e) the extent to which people's social class predicts their income

answer

d) whether people's decisions about whether to cheat on a test is influenced by how they imagine their friends would react if they found out

question

How does social psychology differ from personality psychology? a) social psychology focuses on individual differences, whereas personality psychology focuses on how people behave in the different situations b) social psychology focuses on the processes that people have in common with one another that make them susceptible to social influence, whereas personality psychology focuses on individual differences c) social psychology provides general laws and theories about societies, not individuals, whereas personality psychology studies the characteristics that make people unique and different from one another d) social psychology focuses on individual differences, whereas personality psychology provides general laws and theories about societies, not individuals

answer

b) social psychology focuses on the processes that people have in common with one another that make them susceptible to social influence, whereas personality psychology focuses on individual differences

question

A stranger approaches Emily on campus and says he is a professional photographer. He asks if she will spend 15 minutes posing for pictures next to the students union. According to the social psychologist, Emily's decision will depend on which of the following? a) how well dressed the man is b) whether the man offers to pay her c) how Emily construes the situation d) whether the man has a criminal record

answer

c) how Emily construes the situation

question

Researchers who try to understand human behavior from the perspective of social cognition assume that a) people try to view the world as accurately as possible b) people almost always view the world accurately c) people almost always make mistakes in how they view the world d) people distort reality in order to view themselves favorably e) the need for control is the most important motive behind a person's behavior

answer

a) people try to view the world as accurately as possible

question

The fundamental attribution error is best defined as the tendency to a) explain our own and other people's behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, thereby underestimating the power of social influence b) explain our own and other people's behavior in terms of the social situation, thereby underestimating the power of personality factors c) believe the people's group memberships influence their behavior more than their personalities d) believe that people's personalities influence their behavior more than their group memberships

answer

a) explain our own and other people's behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, thereby underestimating the power of social influence

question

Which of the following is the least consistent with the self esteem approach to how people view themselves and the social world? a) After Sara leaves Bob for someone else, Bob decides that he never really liked her very much and that she had several annoying habits b) Students who want to take Professor Lopez's seminar have to apply by writing a 10 page essay. Everyone who is selected ends up loving the class c) Janetta did poorly on the first test in her psych class. She admits to herself that she didn't study very much and vows to study harder for the next test d) Sam has been involved in several minor traffic accidents since getting his drivers license. "There sure are a lot of terrible drivers out there," he says to himself. "People should learn to be good drivers like me."

answer

c) Janetta did poorly on the first test in her psych class. She admits to herself that she didn't study very much and vows to study harder for the next test

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