PSY 252 CAL POLY EXAM 1
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 behaviour 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 the
web, people we think about, remember, or imagine
The social situation is usually more influential than a person's characteristics
,Social psychologists believe that human behaviour 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 behaviours 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
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.