HANDOUT 1.1A Intuitions About Social Psychology

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Introduction

HANDOUT 1.1a Intuitions About Social Psychology

For each statement, please indicate whether you think it is true or false by printing the letter T or F in the first space in front of it. In the second space in front of each statement, write a number from 1 (not at all confident) to 7 (very confident) to indicate the degree to which you feel confident in your true/false answer for that statement.

1. ______Social psychology is similar to sociology but different from other branches of psychology in that both social psychology and sociology focus on group-level trends rather than individual behavior.

2. ______By conducting a well-designed correlational study, social psychologists can demonstrate cause-and-effect relationships between independent and dependent variables.

3. ______Smiling a lot makes people feel happier.

4. ______Promising, and delivering, rewards to people for doing an enjoyable activity should, in the long run, make them enjoy the activity even more.

5. ______People are more likely to behave consistently with their own standards if they are in front of a mirror.

6. ______Focusing on a person’s voice is a better way to detect whether someone is telling a lie than is focusing on the person’s face.

7. ______People tend to underestimate the extent to which other people share most of their opinions, attributes, and behavior.

8. ______Accident victims are often held more responsible for their fate when the consequences of the accident are more rather than less severe.

9. ______We tend to see the people in our own groups as more diverse and different from each other than we see the people in other groups.

10. ______Seeing a picture of a person from a stereotyped group for only a fraction of a second can trigger thoughts of the stereotype.

11. ______If people tell a lie for money, they are more likely to come to believe the lie if they are paid a small rather than a large amount of money for telling the lie.

12. ______To change people’s behavior for more than a brief period of time, one must change their attitudes first.

13. ______A unanimous group of four giving the same opinion is about as likely to cause an individual to conform publicly to that opinion as is a unanimous group of ten.

14. ______People in West Africa and China are more likely to conform to a group norm than are people in the United States or Canada.

HANDOUT 1.1a Intuitions About Social Psychology (cont.)

15. ______Once people have rejected a large request, they become more likely to agree to a smaller request.

16. ______Once people have agreed to a small request, they become more likely to agree to a larger request.

17. ______When told by an experimenter in a psychology experiment to administer severe, very painful electric shocks to another person, more than 50% of American female and male participants obeyed.

18. ______Group discussions tend to make group members feel less strongly about their initial attitudes, even if most people in the group have similar attitudes at the beginning of the discussion.

19. ______Simply having other people around tends to make individuals perform better on easy tasks.

20. ______The greater the cohesiveness or solidarity of a group, the better its decisions will be.

21. ______Physically attractive individuals are usually seen as less intelligent than physically unattractive individuals.

22. ______Women tend to value and seek economic status in a mate more than men do.

23. ______The more often that people are exposed to a neutral stimulus, the more positively they evaluate that stimulus.

24. ______Women are more willing to reveal intimate facts and feelings to someone else than are men.

25. ______Our ability to know the causes of our own emotions is so limited that when we are aroused because of physical exercise, we may misinterpret that arousal as a sign that we are romantically attracted to someone nearby.

26. ______People in a sad mood are less likely to help others than are people in a neutral mood.

27. ______People in a happy mood are less likely to help others than are people in a neutral mood.

28. ______People are less likely to be aggressive if they recently released their tensions by aggressing than if they did not aggress.

29. ______People are more likely to be aggressive when it’s hot outside than when it’s cool.

30. ______Exposure to aggressive models in the media increases aggressive behavior among viewers of the aggression.

HANDOUT 1.1a Intuitions About Social Psychology (cont.)

31. ______Exposure to mildly arousing nonviolent pornography increases retaliatory aggression against same-sex others.

32. ______Husband-to-wife violence is much more common than wife-to-husband violence.

33. ______Psychologists who are hired to help lawyers select juries can accurately and reliably predict jurors’ preference for the prosecution or defense by examining their clothing, body language, and other nonverbal factors.

34. ______In cases that involve crimes punishable by death, judges often use social psychological research results to select a jury that is most likely to be neutral and unbiased.

35. ______Despite defense lawyers’ fears, pretrial publicity does not tend to bias jurors if the jurors are instructed to base their decisions solely on the evidence.

36. ______The jury foreperson tends to have much more influence on the jury’s verdict than does anyone else in the jury.

37. ______Job interviews in which the interviewer is free to ask the job candidate whatever questions come to mind are more accurate and fair than job interviews in which the interviewer uses a standard set of questions for all candidates.

38. ______When deciding whether or not to continue to invest money into a project that is failing, your decision is most likely to be a wise one if you focus on how much money you have already invested in the project.

39. ______Unrealistic optimism is associated with health and well-being.

40. ______People with few friends tend to live shorter, less healthy lives than people with lots of friends.

HANDOUT 1.1b Intuitions About Social Psychology

For each statement, please indicate whether you think it is true or false by printing the letter T or F in the first space in front of it. In the second space in front of each statement, write a number from 1 (not at all confident) to 7 (very confident) to indicate the degree to which you feel confident in your true/false answer for that statement.

1. ______Social psychology has existed as a field for only about 100 years.

2. ______A well-designed survey that uses only a few thousand people randomly selected from a population of millions can accurately represent the opinions of the general population.

3. ______People are more likely to behave consistently with their own standards if they are in front of a mirror.

4. ______People tend to focus more on personality characteristics than on situational factors when explaining their own behavior.

5. ______Negative information about a person weighs more heavily in others’ overall impressions of him or her than does positive information.

6. ______When people are divided into two groups on the basis of obviously arbitrary criteria, such as the flip of a coin, they will favor members of their own group over members of the other group.

7. ______People tend to see the members of other groups as more different from each other than they see the members of their own groups.

8. ______The persuasive impact of a message given by a credible communicator tends to increase over time, whereas the persuasive impact of a message given by a non-credible communicator tends to decrease over time.

9. ______If they are very sure of the correct answer to a question, almost no Americans but more than half of Germans would often give the wrong answer just because the people around them all gave the same wrong answer.

10. ______When told by an experimenter in a psychology experiment to administer severe, very painful electric shocks to another person, more than 50% of American women and men obeyed.

11. ______People usually work harder when working together on a task with others than they do when working alone.

12. ______The loneliest people in the United States are adolescents and young adults.

13. ______“Opposites attract” is more accurate than “Birds of a feather flock together.”

HANDOUT 1.1b Intuitions About Social Psychology (cont.)

14. ______When someone is in an accident or otherwise needs help, he or she has a better chance of getting help if only one other person is present than if several are present.

15. ______Seeing a weapon increases aggression among people who are in a neutral mood.

16. ______Watching a very violent film or television show allows people to release their aggressions in a safe way, making them less likely to aggress themselves.

17. ______Jurors tend to underestimate the degree to which an eyewitness’s confidence in his or her testimony is related to the accuracy of the testimony.

18. ______Eyewitnesses are better able to accurately identify a criminal if they saw a weapon at the scene of the crime than if they did not.

19. ______Leaders who are primarily concerned with the feelings of and relations among employees are more effective than leaders who are primarily task-oriented and focused on the job itself.

20. ______People with few friends tend to live shorter, less healthy lives than people with lots of friends.

HANDOUT 1.2 Distinguishing Social Psychology from Personality Psychology

Below are brief descriptions of the behaviors of four different individuals in the same set of four situations.

Bob. When Bob sees an acquaintance as he is walking down Main Street, he waves hello. When he returns to his dorm, he reads in the newspaper some very troubling information about the economy, and he yells at his roommate about something. The next day, as he is waiting to take a midterm exam, he reads a sports magazine. In another class later that day, he hears a sudden, very loud but unidentifiable noise, and he looks at the other people in the class.

Karen. When Karen sees an acquaintance as she is walking down Main Street, she crosses the street and converses with her. When she returns to her dorm, she reads in the newspaper some very troubling information about the economy, and she rants and raves about politicians. The next day, as she is waiting to take a midterm exam, she talks to her friends at length about how she is worried about failing (even though she always gets good grades). In another class later that day, she hears a sudden, very loud but unidentifiable noise, and she looks at the other people in the class.

Jessica. When Jessica sees an acquaintance as she is walking down Main Street, she ignores this person. When she returns to her dorm, she reads in the newspaper some very troubling information about the economy, curses “those foreigners,” and gets rather angry. The next day, as she is waiting to take a midterm exam, she quietly reads her notes, not engaging in conversation. In another class later that day, she hears a sudden, very loud but unidentifiable noise, and she looks at the other people in the class.

Arnold. When Arnold sees an acquaintance as he is walking down Main Street, he thinks of four different ways he could kill him from where he is standing. When he returns to his dorm, he reads in the newspaper some very troubling information about the economy, and he begins to make plans to start a bloody revolution. The next day, as he is waiting to take a midterm exam, he sharpens his hunting knife. In another class later that day, he hears a sudden, very loud but unidentifiable noise, and he jumps up, says “Hasta la vista, baby; I’ll be back,” and runs out of the room.

HANDOUT 1.4 Keeping a Journal for the Day

Chapter 1 of your textbook introduces you to the field of social psychology, and to the kinds of questions that social psychologists ask. Chapter 1 defines social psychology as “the scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in regard to other people and how individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by other people.”

The purpose of this particular assignment is to challenge yourself to begin to think like a social psychologist, to look at the world around you and ask yourself how social psychological analyses have the potential to help you better understand what you observe.

For the period specified by your instructor, keep a journal in which you are to record any and all observations of other people’s behaviors, apparent attitudes, and apparent feelings, and your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and explain how these observations are relevant to social psychology. That is, what social psychological questions can you ask as you observe or participate in a particular activity or behavior?

For example, you might go to a cafeteria or restaurant for lunch and take note of which people sit with which other people. In a college cafeteria or dining hall, are all the players on a particular team sitting together, are tables segregated by race or gender, or do people’s seating choices seem to be random? Are physically attractive individuals surrounded by apparent admirers, by similarly attractive friends, etc.? Also, you might observe in your next class whether the men talk (or interrupt) more or less than the women, and whether it depends on the topic that is being discussed. You might observe interesting group dynamics or leadership skills during your athletic team’s practice, your theater group’s rehearsal, or your part-time or full-time job. You might observe a friend behaving inconsistently with his or her attitude, or you might realize that you yourself have been rationalizing and justifying your own behavior to yourself. You might go to a party and note people’s attempts at affiliation and intimacy, or observe the effects of alcohol on people’s aggressiveness or deviant behavior.