Practice Questions: Exam I

Intro and History of Social Psychology

Define social psychology, and name and explain the tripartite (three-way division) of
variables in the field. What are some developing topic areas in the field.

What is it called, and why do I value an object more if I own it and it is “mine” than if I do
not own it and it is offered for sale? Give one example of how a company might use this
to increase purchasing or decrease returns.

Explain the first scientific study in Social Psychology and name the person who
conducted that study. What is social facilitation, and how did this scientific study show
social facilitation?

Doing Social Psychology Research

Name and briefly define the steps in the scientific method in social psychology.

If a scientist is interested in studying teens and their texting behaviors while driving,
name one pro and one con to each way of measuring this: asking the teens to give a
self-report this behavior, or set up a video camera in the car to directly observe this
behavior? If you had to choose one, which would you pick and why? Name and
explain what kind of validity this relates to.

We often say “correlation is not causation” give an explanation for one reason this is the
case. Now give a real-world example that illustrates this reason. If correlation is not
causation, what is required for a scientist to draw confident causal conclusion?

If a consumer products researcher is really interested in what percentage of Howard

students are (still) planning to buy Telfar bags, what kind of research is this, descriptive,
correlational, or experimental? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each kind of
research?

What is construct validity? Measures can be observational/behavioral, physiological, or

self-reported. Describe two measures of how interested people are in Trefar bags, one
observational/behavioral, and one self-reported. Which of your two measures has
better construct validity and why do you say that?

Beyond construct validity, what are two other validities we use to evaluate scientific
studies? What validity is most important for descriptive research, and why? What
validity is most important for experimental research, and why?

What is random assignment? Is it more relevant to internal or external validity and

explain why.
What three aspects of a study design need to be present for the study to produce
confident causal conclusions?
Estimate the correlation coefficient for the scatterplot below. Now in one sentence,
interpret the meaning of that correlation coefficient.

The Social Self

What are the three components of the self and how do they relate to the tri-part division
of variables in social psychology?

Name and explain one measure of the self-concept, and one measure of self-esteem.

What members of the animal kingdom have a self-concept, and how do we measure if
other animals, and young infants, have a self-concept? They can’t exactly tell us, “I
exist!”

A study conducted on university students in the United States, and on a number of

different groups in Kenya showed striking differences in the self-concept between
different groups. Were the differences based on nationality (US vs. Kenya) or were they
based on other aspects of life circumstances? What differences were observed?

If you Strongly Agree with the statement, “I take a positive attitude toward myself”, what
would that indicate about your self? Which component of the self would this most
directly indicate (self-esteem, self-concept, or self-biases/behaviors)?
Describe what you see in this graph in terms of levels of self-esteem for different
racial/ethnic groups. Is there something strange about how White people are
portrayed? What does this seem to imply about the level of self-esteem in other
groups? How would you fix this graph?
Think back on challenging performance situations in your past (a test, an athletic
competition, or in the performing arts), and think of a time you engaged in self-
handicapping ahead of that performance, even though you probably didn’t realize it at
the time. This could be procrastination, or some other form of self-handicapping. Now
describe what happened and why it is a good example of self-handicapping. What
impact did your self-handicapping have on the quality of your performance, how about
what impact it might have on your self-esteem.

For each of the following self-biases or self-behaviors, explain what it is, give an
example, and be clear about how it results in higher self-esteem: BIRGing, self-
handicapping, downward comparisons, self-biases in memory.
The graph above shows how well (or poorly) students remember different letter grades
from courses they took in school. Describe the pattern of results. What would you
conclude from this and how does this help to maintain high self-esteem?

Perceiving Persons: Social Cognition

Name and explain two things that make perceiving a person (your professor) and an
object (a chair) different.

Give three examples, one of a self-schema, one of a person schema, and one of an
script/event schema. Make sure to include the overall concept of the schema (professor
social role) and the elements that are part of the schema (traits linked to professor, such
as absentminded, intelligent, clueless on pop culture). Pick one of your schemas and
show how it might influence your perceptions, attention, or memory.

When I showed the image below to the class, there were 5 people in the class that both
(a) initially didn’t see anything emerge, and (b) saw something as soon as I told them
there was a bird in the photo. This evidence that what?________________________.

If your attention is drawn to particularly ripe fruit (rather than leaves or unripe fruit) or to
predators, explain how this relates to the role of schemas in helping us survive, in an
evolutionary sense.

Heuristic is a fancy word, what does it mean? Use an example of either availability
heuristic or representativeness heuristic to help you illustrate what makes something a
heuristic. In your example, what information is the person ignoring that would be a less
biased basis for their decision than using a heuristic?

If you compare the ability to read written words now, as compared to when you were
learning how to read, which is an automatic process and which is a controlled process?
Use this example to explain what makes an automatic process automatic and what
makes a controlled process controlled.

If priming is the term to describe how recently used ideas, in your mind, can influence
interpretation of objects we encounter, our judgments and our behaviors, then provide
an example from class or the book of how priming had an influence. Make sure to
explain what makes this an example of priming.

Summarize one experimental study that shows that priming a concept can change
people’s actual behavior. Make sure to show how this can happen even outside
someone’s awareness.

Perceiving Persons: Attribution

According to Heider, what are the two general categories of explanations people have
for behavior (attributions)?

Imagine the following behavior: Your professor comes in on the first day of class and
yells at students and is short and dismissive with them. If you decide (a) it is because
class is during the lunch hour and the professor is hangry (hungry + angry), what kind of
attribution is that? If you decide (b) that the professor hates his job and enjoys yelling,
what kind of attribution is that? How might your attribution determine your behavior?

Describe a behavior a person you did not know engaged in that you witnessed. Now
come up with a situational attribution and a personal attribution for that behavior.

According to the Correspondent Inference Theory, name and explain the three
questions a person asks themselves that determine whether you attribute a behavior to
the situation or the person themselves? Provide one example of a behavior that would
lead to a situational attribution and explain how you would reach that conclusion based
on your judgment of each of those three things.

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)? Use the Quizmaster Study to explain
how it operates. How does Gilbert and Malone’s Automatic and Controlled processing
model explain how FAE happens?
Identify what portion of this graph shows the fundamental attribution error. Now explain
how this result shows that FAE depends on the culture you were socialized into. That
is, FAE isn’t so fundamental after all.