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Chapter 1 Objectives

After covering this chapter you should:

1. Know how social psychology differs from other disciplines such as personality psychology, cognitive psychology, or sociology.

2. Understand how the distal influences of culture and evolution help us understand social behavior.

3. Be familiar with the common themes in social psychology:

a. power of the situation

b. the role of construal (interpreting reality)

c. automatic vs. controlled processes

4. Understand the naturalistic fallacy

5. Understand why psychologists use scientific methodology, not common sense to understand social behavior

a. Common sense isn’t so common – conflicting predictions

b. Human beings are not perfect observers/interpreters of events

1) Cognitive biases

a) 20/20 hindsight bias

b) Confirmation bias

6. Understand why a correlation between two variables does not guarantee two variables are causally connected (the third variable possibility).

7. Understand and be able to correctly interpret correlation coefficients.

8. Know the different types of methods researchers use to scientifically understand human behavior.

9. Know the advantages and disadvantages associated with experimental and correlational research methods.

10. Understand independent, dependent, and extraneous variables in the context of an experiment.

11. Understand the concept of confounding and the steps researchers can take to minimize it.

Chapter 9 Objectives

After covering this chapter you should:

12. Understand the factors that comprise explanatory style (e.g., internal/external, global/specific, stable/unstable) and how explanatory style is related to behavior (e.g., health, career success, etc.).

13. Be able to explain how information about people’s inner states is communicated through the five basic channels of nonverbal communication. Why is this information often times more accurate than verbal communication?

14. Be able to describe the six basic emotions expressed in unique facial expressions.

15. Be able to describe how body language can communicate emotion.

16. Compare our reaction when someone smiles presenting information versus our reaction when someone frowns while presenting the same information. Explain the differences in reaction in terms of the cognitive tuning model.

17. Understand Jones and Davis’s theory of correspondent inference and the three circumstances that lead us to infer one’s behavior reflects underlying traits.

a. Free choice

b. Noncommon effects

c. Social desirability (Unusual)

18. Distinguish between internal and external causes of behavior and be familiar with the three key concepts of Kelley’ covariation theory.

a. Consensus

b. Consistency

c. Distinctiveness

19. Compare attributions when consensus is low, distinctiveness is low, and consistency is high with attributions when consensus is high, distinctiveness is high, and consistency is high.

20. Be able to explain the processes of discounting and augmenting as they apply to the attribution process.

21. Describe the fundamental attribution error, explain why it occurs, and describe how it is influenced by culture.

22. Describe the actor-observer effect and explain why it occurs.

23. Describe the self-serving bias

24. Examine the cultural differences in susceptibility to self-serving bias.

25. Describe the self-defeating attributional pattern that often underlies depression.

26. Describe how Asch’s early work in which subjects formed impressions of others based on a list of traits support his assertion that forming impressions involves more than simply adding together individual traits.

a. Central traits

b. Primacy effects

27. Know that factors that increase the likelihood our judgments will be influenced by counterfactual thinking

a. psychological closeness

b. going against the norm

c. temporal sequence

28. Understand how counterfactual thinking influences our attributions

Chapter 10 Objectives

After covering this chapter you should be able to:

29. Know the factors that can bias firsthand information

a. pluralistic ignorance

b. memory

30. Know what sharpening and leveling are and how they influence information we receive secondhand.

31. Understand how framing influences our judgments.

a. spin framing

b. gains and losses

32. Define the concept of schema and give an example illustrating person schemas, role schemas, and event schemas.

33. Understand how schemas influence attention, encoding, and retrieval of information.

34. Explain how Rosenthal and Jacobson showed how schemas held by teachers can produce self-fulfilling effects in a classroom.

35. Describe the basic nature of heuristics, indicating how they allow us to remain reasonably accurate while reducing cognitive effort and avoiding information overload.

36. Describe the representativeness heuristic and indicate how use of this heuristic sometimes leads us to commit the base-rate fallacy.

37. Summarize research on the planning fallacy, noting subject’s thinking mode during planning, their attributions concerning past failures, and the role of task motivation.

38. Describe various forms of magical thinking:

a. the law of contagion

b. the law of similarity.

39. Describe the process by which thoughts are suppressed and describe the rebound effect that occurs when individuals lack sufficient resources to successfully suppress.

Chapter 11 Objectives

After covering this chapter you should:

1. Be able to define prejudice and discrimination.

2. Be familiar with the social and cognitive sources of prejudice.

a. Social sources

i) Unequal Status

1) Realistic conflict theory

2) Frustration-aggression hypothesis

ii) Social Identity

1) In-group bias

b. Cognitive sources

i) Stereotypes

1) Understand how stereotypes influence our thinking about members of out-groups.

ii) Out-group homogeneity

iii) In-group differentiation

iv) Illusory correlations

3. Understand the various methods by which we can reduce prejudice.

a. Social learning

b. Increased intergroup contact – be familiar with the conditions that must be present for intergroup contact to reduce prejudice.

i) contact must involve cooperation and interdependence

ii) norms favoring group equality must exist

iii) focus on individual-based (vs. category) processing

c. Extended contact hypothesis

d. Superordinate goals

e. Recategorization

f. Attribute driven processing

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