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Psych 10 Exam #1 Questions With Correct
Answers
Social Psychology - answer✔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? - answer✔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? - answer✔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? - answer✔They may impact thoughts and feelings in addition to
behavior
Social psychology and philosophy - answer✔are often concerned with the same questions
How does Social psychology differ from philosophy? - answer✔because it is empirical (based on,
concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic)
folk wisdom - answer✔Common sense explanations, such as those offered by journalists
Folk wisdom may be contradictory - answer✔and provides no way of determining correctness.
Social psychologists (An Empirical Approach) - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔is concerned with social class, social structure, and social institutions.
Social psychology - answer✔joins other social science disciplines in its focus on social behavior.
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Social psychology differs from personality psychology and sociology - answer✔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) - answer✔depicts comparisons between social psychology and closely-related fields
of personality psychology and sociology.
(Fundamental Attribution Error)
Social psychologists face barriers - answer✔to convincing people that their behavior is greatly
influenced by the environment.
People tend to explain behavior - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔this approach has
overlooked the importance of how people interpret their environments.
Self-esteem - answer✔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 - answer✔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.
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Social psychological research demonstrates - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔they by and large do not
distort reality. In fact, human reasoning skills are extraordinary.
Social cognition - answer✔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 - answer✔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 - answer✔get in the way of accurately perceiving the world.
In the self-fulfilling prophecy, - answer✔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, -
answer✔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 - answer✔allows us to test the validity of personal observations.
Findings from social psychological research may appear obvious - answer✔because they deal with
familiar topics: social behavior and social influence.
Due to hindsight bias - answer✔findings that appear obvious in retrospect may not have been
predictable before the experiment was conducted.
How do researchers develop hypotheses and theories? - answer✔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 - answer✔-Inspiration from Earlier Theories and Research
