Social Psychology Exam Terms to Know

Psychology - The scientific study of human behavior and emotional and mental processes.
Predicting what makes people behave the way they do. Understanding the processes of the mind-
how we think and feel.

Social Psychology - The scientific research and study of the ways an individual’s behavior,
emotion and mind are influenced by social environments in which he/ she lives, and by the
actual imagined or implied presence of others.

Social Environments – Environments that constantly surround us and have a big influence on us –
Educational, work, family, teams, religion, culture, people (we meet and we don’t meet), social
networks, authority figures, home, media.

Social Cognition - How we think about the social world, our attempts to understand it and our
place in it. Situation where secretary in a hospital is rude to ill patients waiting for the doctor. We
expect a secretary at a hospital to be polite. So in this clip when she’s rude it defies our expectations
– in comedy, producers create unusual social situations.

Selective attention - we attend to messages and select certain ones while we disregard others. The
invincible gorilla - a selective attention test that shows how we cannot take in all the information
around us. If we tried, then cognitively, we would experience information overload.
- Task: count how many times people wearing white throw the ball. What happened was that
half the class missed the fact that a gorilla passed through the people. Why didn’t half of
the people see the gorilla?
▪ People didn’t see the gorilla because they focused on the people wearing white

▪ They may miss the gorilla because he is in black – the mind conditions itself not to see the
black color in order to help people focus on their intended purpose (counting the white
shirts).
o What can we learn from this?

▪ An information overload occurred - refers to a state where the demands on our

cognitive system are greater than its capacity – we miss information around us and
we don’t even know we are missing it

There are two main mechanisms that help us avoid information overload and process social
information around us efficiently
- Information Selection – controlling process selecting what massages attend to and to which
disregard.
- Automatic processing – Find strategies to simplify the process of processing information
around us.

What influences our selective attention?

o Receiver influences

▪ If we are the receivers of the information, we ourselves have different characteristics and
background that influence how we select, interpret and retain messages from our social
world
 ∙ This can explain why some saw the gorilla and some didn’t.

▪ These primarily include our needs and our goals – they motivate us and lead us to
decide which messages to attend to and which to disregard

Low ball procedure – make an offer and then change it. After the change the client still agree to the
deal because he agreed already.

Scarcity – we like things that are unique. If something is scarce and rare we will want it even more.
Hard to get – “I have another options”

Deadline technique – you have until Wednesday to buy this product otherwise the price will be
higher.

Door in the face – start with a big request and finish with the request you wanted.

That’s not all – offer something small inside the deal before the costumer said yes or no.

Social validation – we will accept an offer if we believe that someone that is similar to us would
accept the same offer.

Representativeness heuristics – making judgments on basis of simple rule – stereotype

Magical thinking – believing that crossing finger will bring you luck

Stereotype – believe in characteristics about certain group

Prejudice – positive or negative perception

Directive declarative statements – orders like go to your room

Parental over intrusiveness – when a parent is saying something to his child and after the child is not
responding he is doing what he told him instead of him.

Love withdrawal – silent treatment

Hostile expectation bias – you see violent in the media so you assume that everyone around you are
aggressive and violent

Uncondition simula – what you think about when you see the condition simula

Subliminal condition – when

Secure attachment