Review Session for Exam 1
Agenda
¬ Themes
¬ Methods
¬ Schemas vs Heuristics
¬ Nonverbal Communication
¬ Non-Common Effects
¬ Accessibility
¬ Attribution
¬ Automatic versus Controlled Thinking
¬ Coursepack Articles
Themes
¬Construals: how we perceive the world
¬Gestalt
Psychology: stresses studying the
subjective way people think about things (i.e. how people CONSTRUE things)
Methods
¬ Three research methods
Observational Studies describes
phenomenon
Archival analysis (Lau
and Russell an example of archival analysis)
Participant observation
researcher interacts with the people being observed, but tries not to alter
the situation (think of Star Trek and the non-interference command)
Limitations: limited to one time, place, etc. Hard to generalize findings.
Methods
¬ Correlational Method
Two variables
systematically measured (Hastorf and Cantril article)
Prediction
Examples:
Surveys
Calculate correlation
coefficient to decide relationship
Varies from 1 to 1
Can be positive or
negative
Random Selection
Limitations
Only tells us if two
variables are related
Problem of confounding
variables
Cannot determine if A
caused B or if B caused A
Methods
¬Experimental
Method
Randomly
assigns participants
Manipulates
IV (ex. Bargh et al article)
Only thing
to differ between control and experimental group is IV
Allows
experimenter to make causal inferences
Limitations: lack of external validity
Methods
¬Internal
Validity:
Making sure
that the IV is the only thing that influences the DV
Done by
CONTROLLING all extraneous variables
And by
Random Assignment
Methods
¬External
Validity
Extent to
which the results can be generalized to other situations
Mundane
realism similar to real life situations
Extent to
which we can generalize to other groups of people
Psychological
realism the extent to which the experiment triggers psychological processes
that occur in everyday life
Methods
¬P-Value
Use this in
statistics to determine if something is significant or not
If p=.05 or
less, then researchers conclude that the finding is significant (there is only
a 5% chance that the finding was due to chance and not the experiment or
intervention, etc).
Schemas Versus Heuristics
¬Schemas
are a broad definition of how we organize our world and our knowledge
Mental
structures
Influence
our construals (how we perceive things)
Help reduce
ambiguity
Can distort
what we see (think of the Hastorf and Cantril article)
Schemas versus Heuristics
¬Heuristics
Mental
shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and effectively
If this
. Than that
Tells you
what to do with the information at hand
Is
procedural
Related to Schemas and Heuristics
¬Primacy
effect our first impression of someone influences our later impressions of
him/her.
¬Perseverance Effect peoples beliefs persist even when
they are discredited
¬Independent
vs Dependent self-schemas
Heuristics
¬Availability
how easy can you bring it to mind?
¬Counterfactual
thinking what if????
¬Representativeness
how similar is X to a typical X???
¬Anchoring
and Adjustment have a starting point and then adjust their answer away from
the anchor
Nonverbal Communication
¬ Can affect our schemas of other cultures
Westerners might think
that if someone avoids eye contact they are sketchy or are hiding something
¬ Gender (men v women)
Women better at encoding
and decoding
Men better at detecting
deception
May be due to
social-role theory (women should be more polite and thus not say anything when
they know someone is lying)
Noncommon Effects
¬Effects
produced by a particular course of action that could not be produced by an
alternative course of action
¬Relates
to Correspondent Inference Theory
We make
internal attributions about someone when there are few noncommon effects and
when the behavior is unexpected
Noncommon Effects
¬Example
Noah gets offered two opportunities:
1.
Go to Hollywood and star on ER.
Get paid lots of $$. Have lots
of girlfriends,etc.
2.
Go to New York and work on Broadway.
Get paid lots of $$ and have lots of girlfriends.
Only one noncommon effect location.
Must be that Noah likes the West coast better than NYC.
Accessibility
¬Temporary
versus Chronic
Temporary
occurs when access arises from recent activation of a schema (e.g. priming
the Tide demonstration)
Chronic is
access arising from frequent past activation of schema (e.g. someone in your
family was an alcoholic so when you see someone behaving erratically you
decide it is due to alcohol and not to anything else).
Attribution
¬Covariation
Model
Why would
external attribution be high in consistency?
Example
Why did your
friend lie to her mother
If internal
you would surmise that she is your only friend that lies to her mother, she
lies to everyone, and she lies to her mom every time she speaks to her.
If external
you have other friends that lie to their mothers too, your friend never lies
to anyone else, and your friend lies to her mom every time she speaks to her.
Fundamental Attribution Error
¬ People do things because of the type of people they
are, not because of the situation they are in.
¬ FAE vs. Actor-Observer Bias while we are likely to
rely on dispositional reasons for others behavior (FAE) we tend to discount
that in ourselves and rely on the situational reasons for behavior.
Why? Perceptual salience we notice our
situation more than others situations.
Information Availability
we have more information about our situation than we have of others
situations.
Automatic vs. Controlled
¬ Mindless versus Mindful thinking
¬ Controlled thinking requires motivation and the time
to devote to it
¬ Why is it that the more motivated people are to form
unbiased judgments, the more likely they are to do exactly that?
This is the case when
the cognitive load is too much. The persons automatic thinking kicks in and
those things that he/she is trying to suppress is primed and readily
accessible.
Coursepack Articles
¬Hastorff
and Cantril
What is the
main point of the article?
¬Bargh
et al.
What is the
main point of the article?
¬Lau
and Russell
What is the
main point of the article?