TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
TEST BANK for Social
Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom
Gilovich, Dacher Keltner,
Serena Chen, Richard Nisbett
Test Bank Page 1
,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY NOTES
CHAPTER 1 TERMS AND EXAMPLES:
Social Psychology
-The scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in social situations
-Related to cognitive psychology
Social Psychologists
-Seek to understand how individuals act in relation to others in social situations and why
Hannah Arendt
-Are we all capable of acts of brutality?
-People are just “obeying orders” or “doing their job”? – Ex: Adolf Eichmann, the architect of
Hitler‟s plan was not as perverse and brutal as everyone thought he might be, he was rather more
boring and obeyed orders from the hierarchy.
Situational Forces vs. Person’s Own Behavior
-They are used together
The Milgram Experiment
-Experiment on social influence
-Participants were told it was a study of the effects of punishment on learning
-Learner and Teacher
-The Learner was a fake, and the volunteer always became the teacher
-The Teacher was told to administer shocks of 15 to 450 volts to the learner if they did not
answer the questions correctly
-Most “teachers” became more concerned as the shocking increased with the damage that would
be done to the “learners”
-They were told by the man in the white coat, the experimenter, to “please continue as it is vital
for us to get the results”
-80% of participants continued past the 150 volt level, 62.5% went all the way to 450 volts
-The question is: what made these participants continue despite their knowledge that they might
Test Bank Page 2
,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
be harming another person to the point of incredibly damage?
The Power of the Situation and Helping:
-The likelihood that an individual will help another person in need depends heavily on situational
factors, such as being in a hurry
-The mundane fact that people are in a hurry is such a powerful situational factor that it overrides
people‟s helpful tendencies
Ex: People dropping books, who will stop to help?
Dispositions
-Internal factors such as beliefs, values, personality traits or abilities that guide a person‟s
behavior
The Fundamental Attribution Error
-The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, with the tendency
to overemphasize the importance of dispositions/traits on behavior
Ex: people who look at situational factors before assuming the person has dispositions that match
the behavior
Channel Factors
-Certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but can have great
consequences for behavior, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behavior in a particular
direction
-something that facilitates behavior, something that you do that makes you want to get there
ex: students shown a map and getting somewhere
The Role of Construal
-People‟s interpretation and inference about the stimuli or situations they confront
-Often unconscious attitudes that we think about things or situations
-Our perceptions about people or things, change or drive our behavior toward them
Test Bank Page 3
,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
Gestalt Principles and Perception
-German word meaning figure or form
-Many people perceive objects not by means of some automatic registering device but by active,
usually unconscious interpretation, of what the object represents as a whole
Ex: The white triangle on page 14 isn‟t actually there, it is what we perceive from the holes in
the other triangle, our mind finishes the drawing for us
Prisoner’s Dilemma Game
-How construal can operate to define a situation and dictate behavior
-A game that involves 2 people who must decide whether to “cooperate” or to “defect” - In the
end, trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection
-If both participants cooperate (deny the crime), they make money
-If both participants defect (admit the crime), they don‟t get anything
-If one participant defects and the other doesn‟t, the defector wins a lot of money and the
cooperator loses a small amount
-In a study at Stanford University, the students were put into two categories for this game. One
called “The Wall Street game” and the other “the Community game.” The majority of students
playing the “Wall Street game” played in a competitive fashion, whereas the students in the
“Community game” played in a more cooperative fashion.
-The terminology and wording of the game names seemed to construe dispositions and exert its
influence of people playing
-the effect of priming
Schema
-A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
-Commonly encountered situations
-Generalized knowledge about the physical and social world
-Capture the regularities of life and lead of us to have certain expectations we can rely on so that
we don‟t have to invent anew all the time
Ex: Our schema of a pizza shop leads us to order at the counter, wait for the pizza and then leave,
whereas our schema of a restaurant leads us to sit down, order from the menu, eat, relax and then
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,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
leave
Schema guides you, stereotypes guide others
Stereotypes
-We tend to judge people by the schemas that we know and have knowledge of in our brains
-Describing different types of people
-They can be wrong and misjudged, most of the time
-Based on nationality, gender, sex, occupation, religion, neighborhood, etc
-Schema about people
Automatic Processing
-unconscious, often based on emotional factors
-reacting quickly to situations to save us from danger, if necessary
-Implicit attitudes
Ex: person at an airport, carrying a large backpack and sweating profusely = Our automatic
processes allow us to think he might be a terrorist
Ex: In a study where students look at a screen, words mentioned were words of the elderly like
“Florida” and “hot”. When they were walking to an elevator afterwards, they tended to walk
more slowly.
Controlled Processing
-conscious, systematic, and more likely to be controlled by careful thought
-Explicit attitudes
Two Types of Mental Processing
1) Automatic Mental Processing
-“Skill Acquisition”
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,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
-Unconscious processes
-Over-learned skills
ex: driving a car and realizing you haven‟t a clue what you‟ve been doing the past few minutes
-Fast, operates in parallel
2) Conscious Processing
-Cognitive and conscious processes
-we are aware of what is going on
Ex: solving a math problem, or writing an English paper
-Generally more slow and can only run serially (one step at a time)
Evolution and Human Behavior (How we are all the same)
-Humans live in family groups, assign roles to people, etc
-Darwin‟s theory of evolution: based on natural selection
Natural Selection
-For animals and plants: traits that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction are
passed on to subsequent generations
-The ones with the better genes will survive and reproduce, whereas the ones that die off faster
had bad genes
-Ex: team captains choosing other students to be on their teams (they will most likely choose the
ones with the better genes, more capable of winning - aka surviving - the competition)
Human Universals
-Many human behaviors are universal and adapted throughout the entire world, and are also
shared with many animals (chimpanzees, for example)
-Ex: food sharing, group norms, family, facial expressions, dominance and submission, etc
Theory Of Mind
-The understanding that other people have beliefs and desires
-Ex: people with autism do not have the ability to comprehend the beliefs or desires of others
Test Bank Page 6
,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
Parental Investment
-Costs and benefits are associated with reproduction and nurturing of the offspring
-These costs/benefits are different for males and females, normally one sex will invest more in
each child than will the other sex
-The mother will give more to her children
Naturalistic Fallacy
-The claim that the way things ARE is the way they SHOULD be
-We are predisposed to many traits that we can overcome, so this is an illogical foundation
Independent (Individualistic) cultures
-Cultures where people think of themselves as individual entities, tied to one another by
voluntary bonds of affections and memberships, but essentially separate
-Canada, Australia, USA, New Zealand
-Middle Class people
-See Dick Run (individual boy running rather than with others)
Interdependent (Collectivistic) cultures
-Cultures where people define themselves as part of a collective, tied to groups and placing less
importance on individual freedom or personal control
-Working class people
-Ex: Little Brother Loves Big Brother (children‟s book in a group rather than individually)
Pre-dominant roles in gender relations
-The male‟s role was the hunt, the female‟s role was the gather plants
-Gender roles are different all over the world
Test Bank Page 7
,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY NOTES
CHAPTER 2 TEXTBOOK NOTES
Hindsight Bias
-People‟s tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a
given outcome
-ex: Thinking you already know what will happen before you make a prediction
because you are bias about that thing
Hypothesis
-A prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances (specific)
Theory
-A body of related propositions intended to describe some aspect of the world
(generalized)
Observational Research
-Looking at a type of phenomenon in a systematic way with a view to
understanding what is going on and coming up with hypotheses about why things
are happening as they are
ex: Looking at a group of people in their natural environment
-longitudinal studies is a type of observational research
Archival Research
-Researchers look to find evidence through books, archives, libraries, etc
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,TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
Surveys
-Simply asking people questions through either interviews or written
questionnaires
-random sample
-interview
Population
-Group you want to know about
Test Bank Page 9
, TEST BANK for Social Psychology, 5th Edition By Tom Gilovich, Dacher Keltner, Serena Chen, Richard
Nisbett
Random Sample
-Taken at random from the population
Ex: giving every student an equal chance
Convenience Sample
-Taken from some available subgroup in the population
ex: Students questioned as they come into the Student Union
-Not random, may be biased in some ways
Correlational Research
-Research that does not involve random assignment to different situations
-Psychologists conduct this just to see whether there is a relationship between the
variables
-Investigators can look at only the degree of relationship between two or more
variables
-Strength can range from 0 (no relationship) and 1 (perfect)
-Scatterplots
-Sometimes these can be very helpful when an experimental study would be
difficult or unethical
Experimental Research
-Research that randomly assigns people to different situations
-Enables researchers to make strong inferences about how these different situations
affect people‟s behaviours
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