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PSY 252 CAL POLY EXAM 1 Questions
With Correct And Revised Answers.
Operant conditioning (instrumental conditioning) - answer✔✔Skinner
Social Psychology - answer✔✔the scientific study of how we feel about, and behave toward the
people around us and how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are influenced by those people
Kurt Lewin - answer✔✔Father of Social Psychology, developed many ideas like dynamic
interactions
Leon Festinger - answer✔✔Edited "Research Methods in Behavioral Sciences"; Introduced the
use of deception in experiments
John Darley and Bibb Latane - answer✔✔Altruism; when people do and don't help others
Leonard Berkowitz - answer✔✔pioneered the study of human aggression
Irving Janis - answer✔✔Focused on group behavior and group think; why can groups of
intelligent people make disastrous decisions when grouped together
Gordon Allport and Muzafir Sherif - answer✔✔Focused on intergroup relations, why
stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination
Social Cognition - answer✔✔an understanding of how our knowledge about our social worlds
develops through experience and the influence of these knowledge structures on memory,
information processing, attitudes, and judgement
Why is human decision flawed? - answer✔✔cognitive and motivational processes
Social neuroscience - answer✔✔the study of how our social behavior both influences and is
influenced by the activities of our brain
Social situation - answer✔✔the people with whom we interact every day - family, friends,
religious groups, as well as people we see on TV, or interact with on web, people we think about,
remember, or imagine
The social situation is usually more influential than a person's characteristics
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Social psychologists believe that human behavior is caused by - answer✔✔a person's
characteristics and social situation
Social influence - answer✔✔the process through which other people change our thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors through which we change theirs
Person-situation interaction - answer✔✔Kurt Lewin: Behavior= f(person, social situation)
function of (depends on) person's characteristics and influence of a social situation
evolutionary adaptation - answer✔✔The assumption that human nature, including much of our
social behavior, is determined largely by our evolutionary past
fitness - answer✔✔the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual
organism to survive and to reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who
do not have the characteristic.
Fitter organisms pass on... - answer✔✔Their genes more successfully to later generations,
making the characteristics that produce fitness more likely to become part of the organisms'
nature than are characteristics that do not produce fitness
genes provide us.. - answer✔✔with our human characteristics, and these characteristics give us
the tendency to behave in a "human" way.
self-concern - answer✔✔the motivation to protect and enhance the self and the people who are
psychologically close to us
other-concern - answer✔✔the motivation to affiliate with, accept, and be accepted by others
The most basic tendency of all living organisms, and the focus of the first human motivation, is -
answer✔✔the desire to protect and enhance our own life and the lives of the people who are
close to us
Kin selection - answer✔✔strategies that favor the reproductive success of one's relatives,
sometimes even at a cost to the individual's own survival
kin selection occurs because - answer✔✔behaviors that enhance the fitness of relatives, even if
they lower the fitness of the individual himself or herself, may nevertheless increase the survival
of the group as a whole.
Ingroup - answer✔✔those we view as being similar and important to us and with whom we share
close social connections, even if those people do not actually share our genes
other-concern - answer✔✔desire to connect with and be accepted by other people more generall
When people are asked to indicate the things they value the most... - answer✔✔they usually
mention their social situation—that is, their relationships with other people
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Social norms - answer✔✔the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group
members and perceived by them as appropriate
Culture - answer✔✔a group of people, normally living within a given geographical region, who
share a common set of social norms, including religious and family values and moral beliefs
individualism - answer✔✔cultural norms, common in Western societies, that focus primarily on
self-enhancement and independence
collectivism - answer✔✔these norms indicate that people should be more fundamentally
connected with others and thus are more oriented toward interdependence
The history of social psychology includes - answer✔✔the study of attitudes, group behavior,
altruism and aggression, culture, prejudice, and many other topics.
Social psychologists study - answer✔✔real-world problems using a scientific approach.
Thinking about your own interpersonal interactions from the point of view of social psychology
can help you - answer✔✔better understand and respond to them
Social psychologists study the person-situation interaction: - answer✔✔how characteristics of
the person and characteristics of the social situation interact to determine behavior.
Many human social behaviors have been selected by - answer✔✔evolutionary adaptation
The social situation creates social norms - answer✔✔shared ways of thinking, feeling, and
behaving.
Cultural differences—for instance, in individualistic versus collectivistic orientations—guide our
everyday behavior. - answer✔✔guide our everyday behavior.
ABCs - answer✔✔Affect: feelings
Behavior: interactions
Cognition: thought
Cerebral Cortex - answer✔✔the part of the brain that is involved in thinking. Humans are highly
intelligent, and they use cognition in every part of their social lives
social cognition - answer✔✔cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us
understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and others
schema - answer✔✔knowledge representation that includes information about a person or group
attitude - answer✔✔a knowledge representation that includes primarily our liking or disliking of
a person, thing, or group
