January 24th → Kelman reading

Methodology
- Focus on the individual
  - Measurement unit
  - Methodology
  - Types of questions
- Evident in theorizing
  - Universal
  - Mid-range
Major approaches
- Learning theory
- Cognitive consistency
- Attribution
  - Interested in what causes someone else’s behavior
- Equity/exchange
  - What’s the cost and benefit
Goal of social psychology research is used to gather information, not to solve social problems
Goal- scientific method advance science social problems?
- Special consideration in regard to research in social psychology
  - Like people have strong beliefs about this human behavior
  - Participants are aware that they are being studied
  - Highly relevant to social policy
- Measurement
  - Objective and subjective
    - Subjective is like self-reports → introspection, report on own experience (through an interview, questionnaire, survey)
      - They filter their response through their consciousness
    - Objective is like directly observing behaviors, observation of behavior that is overt (like physiological responses)
    - Things like self-report are not always reliable → can then observe behavior and assess results from something like a survey
    - Most confident in converging data
      - Some subjective and some objective that come together
      - Multiple corroborating measures
    - All measures that have two important characteristics

Reliability
Validity

- - Reliability and validity
    - Reliability: consistent over time, repeatedly and consistently obtained
    - Validity: internal (the measure assesses what its designed to measure) and external (can it be applied to a generalized population, not a natural consequence of reliability
Operational definition is going to tell us about the procedures and units we are going to measure
- Like defining what aggression is (making someone bleed vs making someone cry)
Research design (all ways of gathering information)
- Experiment itself
  - Need a hypothesis
  - Manipulation
  - Independent variable
  - Dependent variable
  - Control group (not exposed to independent variable)
  - Random assignment: any participant has the same possibility of being in any group
  - Set of experimental and control conditions
  - Allow us to make cause and effect types of statements
- Correlational studies
  - No random assignment
  - No manipulation of independent variable
  - Measure variables are they occur in some setting and note how they related to each other
  - Learn about what things go together and how they go together
  - Tell us what goes together (not about directionality or causation)
  - Can’t rule out alternative explanations
  - Considered to be more realistic, true to life, less contrived
  - Way to gather information if an experiment cannot be performed
    - For ethical or other reasons
- Quasi-experimental
  - Not exactly a correlational study or experimental study
    - Parts of each
  - Manipulation of independent variable
  - But no true random assignment
  - Used pretty commonly in social psychology
    - Like looking at the effects of change in social policy
- This is all orthogonal to a lab study vs a field study
  - Lab will be more controlled
  - Field seems more “real”
Consider realism
- Mundane realism: how much is a study like everyday life
  - Milgram shock study is really low mundane realism because no one is going to tell you to shock someone in real life
- Experiential realism: deals with the subjective experience of the individual that’s participating
  - Whether they feel what’s happening is actually real
  - Milgram shock studies really high experimental realism because the subjects thought they were going to be punished if they didn’t shock the other people
Generalizability
- Validity
  - Internal: independent variable manipulates what it's supposed to
  - External: is the finding specific to the particular sample, can it be extended to other people or settings?
- Ability to repeat
  - Exact replication: reproduce exactly someone else’s study
  - Conceptual replication: use same type of conceptual variables but use different procedures or operations to measure it
  - Systematic replication: theoretically extending original work, might add new variables
Concerns
- Experimenter bias
  - Unconsciously influence participant’s behavior
  - Standardize procedures, keep data collector blind to study
- Participant bias
  - Try to figure out purpose/outcome of the study
  - Don’t behave naturally
  - Avoid it by measuring participants without their awareness, using deception (not told the real purpose)
    - Raises ethical concerns

January 31st → ch. 2 and G & S reading

Goal of social cognition is to determine how people select, interpret, and use information
What information is available, noticed, not noticed, how it’s used, and what is ignored
Social cognition
- Information
- Accurate impression of the world → a goal of social cognition
- Types of processing
  - Automatic: don’t stop to pause and think through all available options → implicit knowledge
    - Do not consider whether the assumptions are correct
    - Comes from the amygdala
    - Use a schema (using what’s already known to understand the situation)
  - Controlled: involves careful consideration and deliberation as many of the facts as possible
    - Much more cognitive effort
    - Careful attention to the details of the situation
  - Both are important to social cognition
Automatic processing
- Utilize already known schema
  - Schemas are mental structures to organize information about the world
  - Can be applied to be specific to person or place
  - Framework for the thinking you’re going to do
  - Social schemas don’t always have clear cut boundaries
  - Dynamic mental categories based on prior knowledge or experience used to perceive or remember information
  - Primary function is to help categorize information
  - Most often evoked when a situation involves some sort of ambiguity
  - Important part of remembering information
  - New information can be seen as consistent, inconsistent, or irrelevant
- Seeks to understand new situations by relating them to something you already know or have experienced
- Types
  - Taylor and Crocker
    - Social schemas have 3 types
    - Person schema → used for describing a specific individual
      - Like Dr. Strock is annoying
    - Roll schema → deal with larger social groups
      - B school kids are scary and snakes
    - Event schema → standard characteristic of a social event
      - Script will tell you acceptable behavior and restricted behavior of a social event
      - You don’t act crazy in church
- How they provide structure
  - Reduce ambiguity
    - Kelley → college setting, guest lecturer coming in, people are given a brief biography of lecturer, line was different by describing as nice vs mean, then students rate the lecturer
      - Hypothesized that students would use information in biography as a schema for reviewing the lecturer
      - Information consistent with the schema is more likely to be recalled
    - Works well, but not all the time
  - Influence memory
    - Information mation consistent with a schema is more readily remembered than something that is inconsistent
    - Cohen → research on role schema on memory, half were told woman is a waitress in a bar and other half were told she was a librarian
      - What you think is consistent is what you remember
    - Hastie → sometimes we have good memory for inconsistent information
      - Sometimes you will think about inconsistent information and try to explain it to fit a more consistent schema
      - Essential memory is reconstructive
      - Fill in blanks with things we find consistent
    - Carli → read a story about a couple and their relationship, for half the story says he proposes, other half says he rapes her
      - Schema consistent information becomes stronger and resistant to change over time
      - Memory not concise, but reconstructed
Which schema?
- Accessibility → extent to which the schema and its related concepts are at the front of your brain
  - Chronic → due to past experience, consistently active, ready to be used to interpret any ambiguous situation
  - Temporary → not always accessible might be primed or prompted by thinking about/doing something before you encounter the event
  - Priming → accessible and applicable before it can be used as a prime
- Perseverance
  - Beliefs and ideas can stay after someone was told to dismiss it
  - People’s beliefs created by schemas tend to persist even if evidence is not good
Heuristics
- “To discover”
- Make a judgment quickly but maybe not accurately
  - Used a lot because they are highly functional
- Apply specific rules and shortcuts
  - Can be useful, but can lead to erroneous conclusions
- Mental shortcuts
- 3 types
  - Availability
    - how easily does something come to mind. ex.- base your judgment of how assertive you are, based on how easy it comes to mind. but things that easily come to mind may also be atypical and that’s why you remembered it. things more vivid and unusual, typically come to mind. most medical diagnoses are done based off availability heuristic.
  - Representativeness
    - judging by resemblance, how similar is this to that
      
      -base rate information- frequency with which given events of categories occur in the total populationpeople use representativeness judgment much more than they use base rate info
    - ex. Guy goes to Wisconsin state school, weaving in and out burger shirt, likes to surf, has tan, says dude. Representativeness- we would say he is from Cali. Base rate- we would say he is from Wisconsin
  - Anchoring
    - taking things at face value
      
      - involves the tendency to deal with uncertainty in many situations by using something we do know as a starting point (the anchor) and then making adjustments to it
      
      -selectively retrieve info that is selective to certain values
      
      -even if you know anchor is wrong, you don’t make sufficient judgments
-controlled processes:

-thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful, requires motivation

-ability to turn on or off this type of processing to think more deeply

-fully aware of what you are thinking about

-requires mental energy, can only think about one thing at a time

-controlled processing serves as checks and balancing for automatic processing

-requires time and energy – used in high stakes, or when you care for the outcome

-automatic believing/ controlled unbelieving:

-two process system

-when people see or learn something people take it at face value and accept it is true

-once the truth is accepted- people go through the effort of figuring out if it actually is true

-Gilbertà says that people have a predisposition for everyone to believe the first thing they hear- automatic, seeing is believing.

-Social cognition is a two process system

-controlled unbelieving does not always follow- must have motivation and effort

-counterfactual reasoning:

-mentally undoing some event that has happened in the past in order to reach a more positive outcome

-a tremendous influence on emotional events

-easier it is to think of how to mentally undo some event, the stronger the emotion you felt at that moment

-losing a race and coming in second place – thinking about how that happened. Ex- could’ve had a better start, had a better stride

what we need to change about social cognition:

-improve thinking

-more humble about abilities

-overconfidence barrier – we forget that we are bad thinkers. Predictable errors we make in thinking

Next up

Previous

ch 6- prejudice

Description