Understanding Self-Concept, Perception, and Social Influence
Understanding Self-Concept and Social Psychology
Self-Concept: Beliefs about yourself; who you are (e.g., student, sibling, athlete). Introspection is the process of looking inward and reporting thoughts, sensations, and perceptions. Limitations: data obtained through introspection is open-ended rather than objective. Introspection was important because it showed that humans could be studied scientifically.
Overjustification Effect: The effect of promising a reward for doing what one already likes to do. The person may now see the reward, rather than intrinsic interest, as the motivation for performing the task.
Self-Perception Theory: Proposes that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be. People come to understand themselves and their attitudes in the same way that they come to understand others and their attitudes.
Sociometer Theory: A theory of self-esteem from an evolutionary psychological perspective that proposes that state self-esteem is a gauge (or sociometer) of interpersonal relationships.
Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model (SEM): A person typically only makes social comparisons when this will improve their self-evaluation.
Social Comparison: The idea that people will evaluate how they are doing using subjective standards when objective standards are not available (e.g., evaluating how fast you ran a mile by your opinion alone, instead of actually timing yourself).
Self-Serving Attribution Bias: Taking credit for one’s successes but blaming outside factors for one’s failures (e.g., feeling good when you succeed, and feeling good when you fail because it wasn’t your fault).
Better-Than-Average Effect: Judging that one is above average on most desirable characteristics.
False Uniqueness Effect: Holding incorrect beliefs about how different one is from others.
False Consensus Effect: Believing that one’s opinions or behaviors are more common than they actually are.
Counterfactual Thinking: Imagining what COULD have happened (but didn’t).
Self-Esteem: One’s overall assessment of one’s worth as a person.
Self-Presentation Theory: Assumes that our behavior aims to create a desired impression. We want people to see us in a particular way. For control: it gives us control over how people see us. Construct a self-image. Self-perception helps us manage how we see ourselves. Facilitate smooth social interactions: others know what to expect from you, and you know what to expect from them.
Self-Handicapping: Putting obstacles in the way of success to provide an excuse for poor performance. Discount negative implications of failure and augment the positive implications of success.
Bottom-Up Processing: Involves processing information by starting with the individual elements of a visual stimulus and gradually building up a final representation and interpretation.
Top-Down Processing: Involves using psychological factors such as motivation, knowledge from past experience, and the setting or context to interpret and assign meaning to a visual stimulus.
Human Deception Accuracy: Human deception accuracy is approximately 60%, due to a lack of overlap between objective dues and subjective cues.
Illusion of Control: The tendency of human beings to believe that they can control or at least influence outcomes when they cannot.
Gambler’s Fallacy: The belief that odds of a chance event increase if the event hasn’t occurred recently.
Hot Hand Fallacy: The mistaken belief that chance is autocorrelating. For example, players being “hot” during a game, so people think that they are more likely to make a shot; however, their average while “hot” is the same as their actual shooting percentage.
Illusory Correlation: Perception of a relationship where none actually exists (e.g., parents give you money for the mall, and you find nothing).
Fundamental Attribution Error: When we go too far in assuming that a person’s behavior is caused by personality. We think a behavior demonstrates a trait and tend to overemphasize dispositional attribution and underemphasize the situational attribution.
Normative Social Influence: The result of wanting to be liked and be part of a group (by following social norms, views revert back).
Informative Social Influence: The result of wanting to be right and looking to others for the right answer when the situation is ambiguous.