Chapter 1 Study Questions

What is the definition of “social psychology”? How is this field different than sociology and personality psychology?

What are the central concepts in social psychology?

What does it mean to say that “we construct social reality”? What is “dual processing”? What are the costs and benefits of using intuition?

Is social psychology just common sense? What is the danger in seeing social psychology as what we knew all along from our proverbs and folk wisdom?

Be sure to review research methods:

What is a theory? What is a hypothesis?

What is a positive correlation? What is a negative correlation?

How do we conduct good surveys? Understand random sampling and how the questions themselves affect the results.

What research method allows us to test for cause and effect?

In an experiment, what are the independent and dependent variables? What are the treatment and control conditions?

What is random assignment and why do experimenters use it?

What are some of the ethical principles that social psychologists must follow in doing research on human participants?