Deck 11: Section 3: Social Psychology

Question 1

Psychologists use the term implicit cognition to refer to the deliberate, conscious mental processes involved in perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning.

Answer 1

False

Question 2

Social categorization refers to the mental process of classifying people into groups (or categories) on the basis of their shared characteristics.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

In almost any situation we tend to evaluate other people and form impressions of them based on whether their behavior conforms to the social norms in that particular situation.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

The automatic, nonconscious mental processes that influence perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning are called implicit cognition.

Question 5

Your sense of self involves your unique sense of identity that has been influenced by social, cultural, and psychological experiences.

Question 6

The rules, or expectations, for appropriate behavior in a particular social situation are called social norms.

Question 7

The deliberate, conscious mental processes involved in perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning are called explicit cognition.

Question 8

The branch of psychology that studies how a person's thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the presence of other people and by the social and physical environment is called social psychology.

Question 9

Person perception refers to the mental processes we use to form judgments and draw conclusions about the characteristics and motives of other people.

Question 10

To quickly evaluate others we rely on automatic, nonconscious thought processes and rarely, if ever, do we use explicit cognition.

Question 11

Psychologists use the term explicit cognition to refer to the automatic, nonconscious mental processes that influence perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning.

Question 12

An area of social psychology that focuses on the effect that situational factors and other people have on an individual's behavior is called social influence.

Question 13

One of the principles guiding person perception is that our reactions to others are determined not by our perceptions of them, but by who or what those other people really are.

Question 14

In almost any situation, how we perceive ourselves has little or no influence on how we perceive others and form impressions of them.

Question 15

An area of social psychology called social cognition focuses on the effect that situational factors and other people have on an individual's behavior.

Question 16

An implicit personality theory is a network of assumptions or beliefs about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors.

Question 17

Person perception is the conscious mental process of categorizing people into groups or social categories on the basis of their shared characteristics.

Question 18

An area of social psychology that studies the mental processes people use to make sense of their social environment is called social cognition.

Question 19

Social psychologists often use insights from evolutionary psychology, which is based on the assumption that certain psychological processes and behavioral patterns evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, to understand how behavior is adaptive.

Question 20

Schemas are the mental frameworks we hold about traits and behaviors associated with different types of people.

Question 21

Neuroscience research using fMRI brain imaging has shown that making direct eye contact with an attractive person activates a brain area called the ventral striatum.

Question 22

The "what is beautiful is good" myth is an implicit personality theory reflecting the tendency of people to associate beauty with goodness and evil with ugliness.

Question 23

Although many people believe otherwise, physical attractiveness is not correlated with intelligence, happiness, or self-esteem.

Question 24

According to research described in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," both the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala are responsive to the reward value of attractive faces.

Question 25

The automatic, nonconscious mental processes that influence perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning are called schemas.

Question 26

In relation to person perception, relegating someone to a social category on the basis of superficial information is a maladaptive process and often leads to the wrong conclusions about the person.

Question 27

The ability to make rapid judgments about strangers on the basis of very limited information is probably an evolved characteristic that conferred survival value in our evolutionary past.

Question 28

Physical appearance cues play an important role in person perception, and the implicit personality theory that most people have for attractive people is particularly influential.

Question 29

According to the fMRI study described in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," if we see an attractive person a brain area called the ventral striatum is activated, and this is the same brain area that predicts reward.

Question 30

Psychologists use the term attribution to refer to the mental process of explaining or determining the causes of someone's behavior, including our own.

Question 31

As a general rule, we tend to perceive good-looking people as self-centered, less intelligent, and less well-adjusted than most people.

Question 32

According to the fMRI study described in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," if we see an attractive person but cannot make eye contact with the person, there is decreased activity in a brain area called the ventral striatum.

Question 33

When the student in front of her bumped the edge of the doorway and dropped most of her books in the classroom doorway, Vanessa immediately thought to herself, "What a klutz!" Vanessa's response illustrates the fundamental attribution error.

Question 34

From an evolutionary perspective, the process of making rapid judgments about other people on the basis of superficial information would have been maladaptive because our social categorizations would have been wrong in most cases.

Question 35

In the fMRI study discussed in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," researchers found that when we make direct eye contact with an attractive person activity levels in a brain area called the ventral striatum decrease.

Question 36

According to research described in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," there is significantly reduced activity in both the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala when we view attractive faces.

Question 37

Relying on social categories is a natural, adaptive, and efficient cognitive process that may have had survival advantages in our evolutionary past.

Question 38

According to research described in the Focus on Neuroscience box, "Brain Reward When Making Eye Contact with Attractive People," there is significantly increased activity in both the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala when the attractive person's eye gaze is shifted away from the viewer (the non-eye-contact condition).

Question 39

The fundamental attribution error refers to the strong and automatic tendency to attribute the behavior of other people to internal, personal characteristics while ignoring or underestimating the effects of external, situational factors.

Question 40

When it comes to explaining our own behavior we tend to use external, situational attributions, rather than internal, personal attributions.

Question 41

The tendency to take credit for our successes and to distance ourselves from our failures is called the self-effacing bias.

Question 42

Psychological studies have shown that when people have extreme attitudes about a particular issue, they are less likely to behave in accordance with those attitudes.

Question 43

An attitude is a learned tendency to evaluate some object, person, or issue in a particular way, and such evaluations may be positive, negative, or ambivalent.

Question 44

A study comparing news articles about the same mass murder found that Chinese reporters were more sympathetic to the plight of the victims, while American reporters were more likely to blame the victims, stressing how their actions had contributed to the tragedy.

Question 45

The tendency to overestimate one's ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome of an event is called the self-serving bias.

Question 46

The fundamental attribution error, hindsight bias, and the just-world hypothesis are biases that contribute to a common explanatory pattern called blaming the victim.

Question 47

After being held captive for over nine months by a drifter and his female companion, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was finally rescued by the police. When details of her captivity were widely publicized, some observers publicly questioned why the girl never tried to escape or get the attention of the police. Such responses illustrate an attributional pattern called diffusion of responsibility.

Question 48

Blaming the victim is caused by the tendency to overestimate one's ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome of an event.

Question 49

"We get what we deserve, and we deserve what we get" reflects a belief called the just-world hypothesis.

Question 50

Collectivistic cultures often demonstrate the self-effacing bias.

Question 51

In most cases people only form attitudes toward objects, ideas, or political ideologies.

Question 52

Attitudes may have cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components.

Question 53

The self-serving bias refers to our tendency to blame ourselves for our failures and to downplay our successes by attributing them to external, situational causes.

Question 54

We have a tendency to take credit for our successes and a tendency to distance ourselves from our failures. This is called the self-serving bias.

Question 55

A study comparing news articles about the same mass murders found that Chinese reporters tended to explain the killers' behavior by emphasizing situational and social factors. In contrast, American reporters tended to explain the killers' behavior by emphasizing personal, internal factors.

Question 56

While American students have a tendency to blame academic failure on personal factors, Japanese and Chinese students are more likely to blame their academic failure on situational factors.

Question 57

Marco has been complaining to his friends about the weight he has gained over the past year. He points out that because his work hours are so long, he rarely has time to go grocery shopping and, instead, eats fast food for most meals. This example illustrates the cognitive component of attitudes.

Question 58

In response to Marco's complaints about gaining weight, Lori says, "I hate fast food. It's greasy, makes you feel sluggish, and is terrible for your body. The advertisements also make me angry-they make it seem like the food is healthy and fresh. You couldn't pay me to eat fast food." This example illustrates the behavioral component of attitudes.

Question 59

The tendency to blame ourselves for our failures and to downplay our successes by attributing them to external, situational causes is called the self-effacing bias.

Question 60

Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one's ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome of an event.

Question 61

The most significant factor in attraction is physical appearance.

Question 62

Although the two DVD players were almost identical in price and features, once Noah had selected the SuperSonic DVD player he increased his positive evaluation of that player and decreased his evaluation of the other DVD player he had been considering. This is an example of cognitive dissonance.

Question 63

Right up until the time she walked into the voting booth, Brianna had mixed feelings about both candidates. But after she voted, she expressed much more positive sentiments about the candidate she voted for and seemed sharper in her negative comments about the candidate she rejected. This is an example of the self-serving bias.

Question 64

Cross-cultural research has shown that men in societies where food and resources are in short supply tend to prefer thinner women, whereas men in societies where food and resources are abundant tend to prefer heavier women.

Question 65

Being aware that your social group is associated with a particular stereotype can negatively impact your performance on tests or tasks that measure abilities thought to be associated with that stereotype, a phenomenon called the stereotype threat.

Question 66

There is a strong psychological tendency to see the members of our in-group as being very similar to one another.

Question 67

Studies of online dating have shown that women tend to prefer men who are taller than average, whereas men tend to prefer women who are short or of average height.

Question 68

There is a cognitive and emotional basis to prejudice, and when prejudice is displayed behaviorally it is called discrimination.

Question 69

Although your attitudes can influence your behavior, your behavior can't influence your attitudes.

Question 70

Psychological studies have shown that people are less likely to behave in accordance with their attitudes when they stand to gain or lose something on a particular issue.

Question 71

Half the female participants in an experiment were told that males typically do better than females on the math test they were about to take, and the other half were told that the test did not produce gender differences. Because of the stereotype threat, the first group of females will score much higher on the test than the second group.

Question 72

Similarity is a powerful predictor of attraction in most Western cultures.

Question 73

Prejudice can be defined as a negative attitude toward people who belong to a specific social group.

Question 74

Phillip Zimbardo is most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Question 75

A stereotype is a cluster of characteristics that are associated with all members of a specific social group, often including qualities that are unrelated to the objective criteria that define the group.

Question 76

People are often prejudiced against groups that are perceived as threatening their in-group's norms and values.

Question 77

Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension or arousal that occurs when two thoughts or perceptions are inconsistent.

Question 78

In-group bias refers to the tendency to see members of out-groups as very similar to one another.

Question 79

Large eyes, a wide smile, and full lips are considered attractive in cultures across the world.

Question 80

Research has shown that people will quickly change their stereotyped way of thinking when they are confronted with evidence that contradicts the stereotype that they had believed to be true.