Frequently Asked Questions

How to Use This Resource

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Logistical Questions

Conceptual Questions

Logistical Questions

Will PSYB10 be WebOptioned this Fall 2009?

Yes, PSYB10 will be offered as a WebOption course. There is only one official section, an "L01" section, but if you will be taking PSYB10 as a WebOption course, then please do not come to the first lecture, as we will not have enough seats available for everyone. The first lecture will be posted on the "Lectures" section of this website about 6 - 48 hours after the first class. Throughout the course, you will be able to access PSYB10 WebOpton lectures by clicking on the lecture title in the table on the "Lectures" page.

Can I use an older version of the Aronson et al. textbook than the 4th Canadian version, or may I use a textbook written by different authors?

The only textbook that will work for this course is the 4th Canadian Edition Aronson, Wilson, Akert, & Fehr (2007) text. Other versions of the Aronson are outdated by ten years, and a textbook written by another author is an entirely different book. Reading that text would be a waste of your time.

You will have ample alternatives to buying the textbook new, however. There will be 8 copies of the course textbook available through course reserves at the UTSC library, so you will always be able to use the book through the library. In addition, you can purchase an "electronic" version of the 4th Canadian Edition Aronson et al. text for 35% of the price of the new book on this website: http://www.coursesmart.com/0136089739. The electronic version takes the form of either a downloadable program (that can only be used on one computer), or an online version that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

MyPsychLab will not be used in PSYB10, because it is only distributed with a purchase of the new textbook. I don't care if people buy the textbook, which is why I have ensured that there are plenty of copies offered through course reserves and chosen not to use MyPsychLab. However, I do care that we use a high-quality text that describes research that has been conducted since 2000. The Aronson et al. textbook is the most widely used and scientifically-focused social psychology text available on the market.

You will need to take advantage of course reserves or consider purchasing the electronic version if it is not an option to purchase the course text from the bookstore.

On the syllabus, what does it mean for something to be "Optional?"

In the syllabus, there is one set of optional reading (Chapters 1 and 2 assigned under Lecture 1) and one optional lecture (Lecture 9 on 10/9). In both cases, "optional" means exactly that: You do not have to complete the optional reading or attend the optional lecture.

In terms of the optional chapters 1 and 2, only the lecture content from Lecture 1 will be tested. However, the book mirrored some parts of the lecture content (particularly the history of social psychology and research methods), so if you feel that you want more information about content that was covered in Lecture 1, then you should read the optional reading in the book.

Lecture 9 is completely optional, and no information from that lecture will be tested on the midterm. The deal with that lecture is it takes place on the Friday before Thanksgiving. Many students like to spend that day with their families. Some students also like to hear about a professor's research. So, to meet both these desires, Lecture 9 will describe Prof. Page-Gould's research and be a question-and-answer of sorts about graduate school and careers in social psychology.

Anything that says "Optional" means you have the option to do it.

What percentages (approximately) of the exams will be based on the lecture and textbook?

The exams will cover material from both the textbook and lecture. It is hard to give an exact percentage, mainly because I don't really think of the material from each source as being distinct. It might be easiest to think of it this way: In lecture, I will talk about the key concepts from the book, however I will usually not be able to go into as much detail as the book does. The concepts from the book that I discuss in lecture are the ones that you will want to be sure to read about in more detail, because the exam may cover a detail about that concept that was described in the textbook but not referenced in lecture. However, I will be giving a good deal of information in lecture that goes beyond the textbook, so the lecture should be viewed as a supplement to the textbook. Anything said in lecture will be fair game for the exam. Therefore, the best study strategy is to make sure to watch all lectures, and if you have already read the assigned reading, then it will be obvious which concepts from the textbook you should focus on when preparing for the exam.

That being said, the review sheet (found on the Exams page) is a comprehensive list of all topics that are fair game for the exam. If you are wondering if a concept from lecture or the textbook will be on the exam, then look at the review sheet.

There are some lectures that are not assigned any readings. How do we prepare for those lectures?

When there are no assigned readings, it means that I will be teaching you something that the book doesn't cover. So, the material from those weeks will be contained entirely in lecture. The best way to prepare is to print out the notes and read them over before lecture, make notes in lecture, and then review your notes and possibly re-watch the lecture online when studying for the test.

I've noticed that you post links to material-related websites at the end of your lecture notes. Are these for our own interest or are we responsible for visiting the sites for exams?

Those links are just for your own interest. You are not responsible for visiting the sites unless you are personally interested in the lecture topic or are looking for a way to kill time. They will in no way be covered by the exams.

For the Extra Credit Assignmnet, you mentioned that we must submit a reflective piece of writting before the next showing. Therefore, will there be a formal day of the week you would like it due?

Any time up until the next airing is a valid submission time for your analysis email. So, that would mean anytime before the following 8pm Sunday airtime of the next show.

For the Extra Credit's weekly analysis, how much should we write?

There isn't really a "how much" for the analysis (a few sentences is fine), it has more to do with the content. So, you want to make sure to mention one concept that you've learned in class, and relate that to one thing that happened that week on the show. If you can make a clear connection between the class and that week's show in 2 - 3 sentences, then that will be all you will need!

In the text book and lecture, there are many experiments described and their outcomes. For the midterm, do we have to know all of the studies from the textbook and the ones you talked about in lectures?

Yes, you are responsible for all the studies described in both the assigned reading and lecture. All the same, I won't try to trick you by asking you some random detail of the study, such as the researchers' names or the year in which the study was published. Rather, I care that you understand how the study demonstrated the concept it was supposed to demonstrate, and to remember the outcome of the study (as in, how did people behave). So, think these studies in two main ways:

  1. How does the study demonstrate/provide evidence for the overall concept for which it is being used as an example? I may ask you to tell me why this study demonstrates the concept.
  2. Think about if you were an average participant in these studies, and how you would then act. I might ask you to imagine yourself as a participant in these studies, and ask how you would act.

The text book always describes cultural differences with each concept. Are we responsible for these differences or shoud we just read them to facilitate understanding?

For right now, those parts of the reading are mostly to facilitate understanding (and they will definitely help for that). I actually really like the way the book interweaves culture throughout all the chapters, but I will be doing a lecture solely on culture later in the semester. This decision was a bit of a toss-up for me, because obviously culture is a ubiquitous form of influence over social processes (which is why Aronson et al discuss it throughout the book), but "cultural psychology" is also considered a distinct -- and highly influential -- subfield of social psychology, which is why I decided it should have its own lecture. As such, you're going to hear a lot of the stuff that you get from those sections of the chapters that have been assigned already. So, pay attention to them, but I won't be talking about cultural stuff until later in the course.

Conceptual Questions

What is the simulation heuristic?

The simulation heuristic describes people's tendency to think that events that are easy to imagine (or mentally simulate) are more likely. For example, if someone missed winning the lottery by just one number they would probably be more upset than someone who didn't have any of the winning numbers. The simulation heuristic explains this discrepancy by suggesting that it would be very easy for the person who "just missed" winning to imagine events being different so that they did win (i.e., to imagine the last number matching their number). As a result, the possibility of them winning seems much more likely and thus the fact that they lost much more disappointing.

Can you clarify the difference (if any) between counterfactual thinking and the simulation heuristic? They seem to go hand in hand, as both describe undoing the situation in your mind.

There is no real difference between counterfactual thinking and the simulation heuristic, although some people think of the simulation heuristic as the more basic process. In a way, counterfactual thinking is an outcome of the simulation heuristic. Still, I would not ask you to make this distinction, so you can think of them as the same thing.

What is the difference between expectancy confirmation (topic covered in social interaction) and the self-fulfilling prophecy? I am a little confused because the descriptions for both topics seem similar to me.

You are correct that the self-fulfilling prophecy and expectancy confirmation go hand-in-hand, but they are distinct concepts all the same. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a process by which your expectations for a social situation actually change the social environment to create what you expected. As with the teachers who expected some students to be "bloomers" (an example discussed in the textbook), those kids who were randomly assigned to be bloomers had significant increases in cognitive and achievement-oriented functioning at the end of the year. The teachers' expectations had changed the social world. In the case of expectancy confirmation, it's all about guiding your attention. Specifically, it is the process such that you only seek out information that will confirm you expectations, and selectively ignore information that would disconfirm your expectations.

In short, the self-fulfilling prophecy involves your expectations shaping the social environment, whereas expectancy confirmation involves your expectations shaping what information you *seek* or look for in your social environment. Naturally, these two processes play off of each other, but the former is about actually changing what happens, and the latter is more about information gathering.

Could you please explain Situation Selection?

Situation selection is an emotion regulation strategy that is actually much like its name: you control your emotions by not even entering situations that you expect will elicit emotions. That is, if you expect that your neighbour will go off on some rant about the Liberals every time you see her (and let's say that makes you feel upset), then if you hear her exiting her door, you will wait until she's gone before you leave. That way, you have "selected" not to have the "situation" where she would talk to you and potentially upset you. This is an "antecedent-focused" coping strategy, because you take action to regulate your emotions BEFORE you feel the emotion.

Could you give an example of reappraisal with regards to an emotional fight in a relationship? (Is it like guy blames PMS?)

Reappraisal is also an antecedent-focused coping strategy (see Situation Selection FAQ), so you prepare yourself mentally for a situation by thinking about it in a way that won't upset you as much. If you know that your girlfriend is in "that time of the month," then you might say to yourself "she's going to be a bit wacky because of PMS." Then, if she starts crying for no reason, you won't feel as upset because you expected that she would, but more importantly you have an explanation for her behaviour that is relatively benign -> You don't think she's crying because she is unhappy with your relationship and wants to break up with you, but rather that there is a biological explanation for her behaviour. So, you don't feel as upset about her crying, because you know it doesn't have anything to do with you.

It seems like Fundamental Attribution Error is the same as Perceptual salience. Is there a difference or do we use the two terms interchangeably?

You are definitely on the right track, but the two concepts cannot be used interchangeably. Perceptual salience is the underlying process that causes the Fundamental Attribution Error, but this still means they are distinct concepts (one concept is the psychological cause and the other is psychological outcome). With the Fundamental Attribution Error, we overestimate internal/dispositional causes for other people's behaviour, and underestimate external causes for their behaviour. Perceptual Salience explains this effect through attention: we attend to social objects more than non-social aspects of the environment. The flip side of the Fundamental Attribution Error is that we overestimate external/situational causes for our own behaviour, and underestimate internal causes for our behaviour. Perceptual Salience explains this effect also through attention: We look out through our own eyes, and thus what we mostly perceive are situational, external features. So, the two concepts are certainly wed to each other, but they cannot be used interchangeably.

What is the Difference between Accessibility, Availability Heuristic and the Anchoring Heuristic? -- they all seem to be the result of "the 1st thing that comes to mind."

Accessibility is the basic concept that allows for the Availability Heuristic and, to some extent, the Anchoring Heuristic. Accessibility is a feature of your semantic network: A concept is said to be "accessible" when it is currently in your working memory. Other concepts that related to the accessible concept also become more accessible, and concepts that are unrelated to an accessible concept become inhibited. This is an efficient process that is the reason that we can think so quickly.

The Availability Heuristic relies on accessibility, but is a distinct concept. The availability heuristic applies in the specific case of when you try to make frequency estimates. You base your estimates on how many examples you can bring to mind. Naturally, the number of examples that come into mind are directly dictated by how accessible these examples are. So, according to accessibility, if I first prime you with the concept of "Doctor," other related concepts like "nurse," "orthopaedist," and "surgeon" would become more accessible to you. Then, I ask you, "What percentage of Canadians are in the medical field?" You will use the availability heuristic to answer my question. Since doctor was already accessible, you will probably give a higher estimate than someone whom I had just primed with an unrelated word (like "turtle").

Anchoring is not directly related, but it is somewhat related. The Anchoring and Adjustment heuristic is the process through which you make a guess about a value. When you try to guess a value of something (like "What is the gestational period of an African Elephant?"), you start with an anchor that either you generate or someone else does. In some ways that is because the anchor is accessible, but the question itself could make the anchor accessible. So, when trying to guess the gestational period of an elephant, you will start by thinking, "Well, what's the gestational period for a human?" and so your anchor will be "9 months." The adjustment part of all of this is that then you decide to adjust away from your anchor, but you typically don't adjust far enough. So, you say to yourself, "Well, elephants are much bigger than humans, so they must have longer gestational periods ... perhaps it is 13 months." In truth, an African Elephant is pregnant for 22 months. You may not have been thinking about the 9-month pregnancy period for humans before I asked the question, though, so you aren't necessarily relying on accessibility when you generate your anchor.

I didn't quite get the "temporo" (i.e. the importance of time) part of the temporospatially proximal of the group to the individual in terms of comformity. What does this mean?

"Temporospatially proximal" means that there is greater conformity when the group is close to you in both space and time. So, if a group did something a long time ago, they have less influence over you than if they just did the same thing. Similarly, if the group is halfway around the world they will have less influence over you than if you are in the same room.

In the slide of facial action muscles in the Emotion Lecture, you spoke about "Zygomaticus Major" (i.e. muscles in cheeks responsible for smiling). However, I do not see any thing like this labelled on that diagram. Are you referring to "Masseter" instead?

Unfortunately, it seems like I forgot to label the zygomaticus major on the diagram. No, it's not the Masseter, although that's a good guess, because it is the cheek muscle. However, the zygomaticus is a long thin muscle that runs just under your cheek bone, connecting the orbicularis oris to the side of your face. It is the muscle that makes you smile. The picture from Gray's Anatomy to the right shows the zygomaticus major in red.

In the experiment to test 2-Factor Theory of Emotion where one group is given the placebo pill and the other is given heart rate increasing pill, I see how it portrays the idea that different arousal levels result in different intensities of emotion, but what is the "appraisal" aspect of this theory that is a part of this experiment?

The appraisal part of that experiment is that, after receiving a heart-rate increasing pill to make them aroused, the participants needed an explanation FOR their arousal. The actor who got angry provided that explanation. So, if you are in the experiment and you have eaten a pill that increases your heart rate (which you have been told was just a vitamin), you think, "Why is my heart pounding?" Then, you see someone else get angry, and you say, "Oh, my heart rate is up, because this is an anger-inducing survey." The flip side of this is if you are in the same experiment, but you have been given the sugar pill. In this case, you are not aroused. So, when you see the other person act angry, you just think they're a freak. In this latter case, you have no arousal that you need to appraise as emotion, so you do not get emotional. In the first case, you were aroused, so you needed an explanation for that, and the actor's angry behaviour provided you with an appraisal for your arousal.

About implicit social influence which is one of the ways of how conformity operates, why is the depth of conformity "private acceptance?"

In the case of implicit social influence, it operates through "private acceptance," because people's behaviour is changed without them even being aware of it. Thus, they have privately encoded the influence on their behaviour. It is more straight-forward to think of it in contrast to public compliance, where you change your behaviour only as a show to other people. Private acceptance is when the social influence affects you at a deeper level, and actually changes how you approach something, not just what you think your outward behaviour should be. Therefore, when the elderly individuals were primed with the elderly stereotype, it indeed made the elderly aspect of their identity more salient, which is why they walked more slowly. But, they didn't walk slowly just to please the researchers; they did it because they were currently internalizing the stereotypes of old people.

I have a question regarding the lecture on morality. How does the social contract orientation apply to Heinz?

Level 5 of Kohlberg's stages of moral development (social contract) refers to a morality based on the idea that all humans are intimately connected. An example of how the social contract could be applied to the Heinz Dilemma is if someone said it is OK for Heinz to steal the medicine, because the Pharmacist was bound by his profession and his humanity to help those in need. Since the Pharmacist broke the social contract that all humans share, then it is right for Heinz to steal the medicine to save his wife.

When Utilitarian process (UP) wins over the emotional process (EP) we see activity in the dPFC. And when there is conflict between the UP and the EP we see hieghtened activity in the ACC. When EP wins over UP you said in the lecture that we see hieghtened activity in the ACC -- but i thought activity increases in ACC ONLY due to conflict between the two processes or is does it increase in activity because of conflict and emotion?

Whenever there is a strong conflict between emotional processes and utilitarian processes, we see activity in the ACC. However, some people also show heightened activity in the dPFC during these types of moral decisions, and if they show MORE dPFC activity than ACC activity, then they are likely to make a utilitarian moral choice. If the level of activity in the ACC is greater than the dPFC, they will typically make an emotion-based moral choice. The nuance here is that you always see ACC activity in these types of moral reasoning tasks, but what you don't always see is much dPFC activity, which is probably why most people choose the emotion-based response.

I have question regarding the lecture 12 - Morality. I didn't understand the slides where you were talking about jews and protestants perspectives. I didn't understand that whether Protestants were right or Jews were right about Mr.K.'s condition?

It's not about being right or wrong, it's about the concept that religions are cultural frames through which we approach morality. In Judaism, an immoral thought does not equal an immoral deed, whereas in the Protestant Christian religion, an immoral thought is just as bad as an immoral deed. The quotes from the scriptures/holy books for Jews and Christians illustrate these ideals. Given these differing approaches to morality, Jews and Christians interpreted the "immoral thoughts" of Mr. K differently (i.e., the Jewish participants didn't think it was wrong for Mr. K to dislike his parents but treat them well to their face, whereas the Christian participants thought it was). As I pointed out verbally and through the lecture notes, religions are just viewed as different cultural frameworks for approaching reasoning about what is immoral or moral. No one can be more "right" about moral reasoning -> moral reasoning is simply too subjective to decide what's right or wrong objectively.

In the textbook it talks about informational social influence as being both private acceptance and public acceptance. However, it then goes on saying how Sherif's dot Study casted doubts on it being public acceptance because after the partcipants were exposed to other participants answers it altered their response even when they were alone. So, for clarification: Is informational social influence only a private acceptance or both private and public acceptance?

The book is pointing out that informational social influence can affect people at both levels of conformity, but that doesn't mean every form of informational social influence operates through both private acceptance and public compliance, just that it CAN operate through both. In the case of Sherif's dots, we generally assume people weren't just trying to get the group to like them, because the dots weren't actually moving, so they had no objective basis to want to give an estimate that was different from the group (and with public compliance, you have to know that you are conforming). Therefore, they were most likely thinking that the other people were better at guessing the distance, since the others were agreeing on lower estimates.

In the textbook, pg. 241, it says: "It is not the mere presence of others but the presence of others who are evaluating us that causes arousal and subsequent social facilitation". Q: Are our behaviours altered if people are watching us BUT are not evaluating? Would this be the same as social loafing?

The presence of others does affect us if we are not being individually evaluated -> this is what leads to social loafing. But remember the nuance introduced both in the book and lecture that behaviour is enhanced with social loafing in the cases where it is a difficult task that is done in the presence of others when your performance is not being individually evaluated. Definitely check out the book's diagram regarding when social facilitation versus social loafing occurs, which I also adapted into my lecture slides, because it provides a flow chart for when behaviour will be enhanced or inhibited based on individual evaluation.

During the emotions lecture you described facial action muscles. Should we know all of them, or just the specific ones you talked about in class?

For the slide that shows a human face with all the facial muscles, you only need to know the muscles that I verbally listed during the Emotions Lecture.

Can you clarify the time span of an emotion. You said it could last a couple seconds or a couple minutes. Is that accurate enough?

I was a little vague on the timespan of an emotion, because it is a rather hotly debated issue. My understanding is that currently emotions researchers say a true emotion must appear within 1 second (1000 milliseconds) - any emotion that is displayed greater than 1 second after someone has attended to a stimulus is considered to be a "masking emotion," or essentially a fake one. The length of an emotion is much more debated, so much so that I definitely wouldn't require you to know the time limit for the exam. The important thing to glean is that if someone has an emotional experience that persists greater than just a few minutes, then it is either reclassified as a "mood," or it is being "rehearsed" by the person thinking about the emotion-provoking stimulus over and over in their head.

What is the difference between group polarization and group think?

Group think is a more extreme form of group polarization, which simply means that it is a special case of group polarization that requires the antecedents, symptoms, and consequences that I list after discussing the Challenger explosion. So, you can have instances of group polarization that do not qualify as group think (e.g. a group comes to a more conservative decision than the individual group members would have on their own), but every instance of group think can also be called group polarization.

What is the difference between shame and guilt?

Guilt is when you feel bad about something you've done; you wish you wouldn't have done that thing. Shame does not have to be based on an action (although it could be), but is more about feeling that something is wrong with you. You wish you were not the way you are (either based on a specific characteristic or just a broader lack of self-worth).

Cognitive framing: A perceptual framework through which you view the world. What is meant by perceptual framework here?

You can think of "perceptual framework" as a schema that is specific to perception. That is, culture provides us with a schema that guides what information we pay attention to (encode), and how we interpret events. So, people from two different cultures can view the same event, but interpret it in systematically different ways.

"Beware of your friends, not your enemies". Why is this statement dialectical? What does one look for in deciding if the statement is dialectical or not?

First of all, I want to state that I will not ask you to evaluate different proverbs and label them as dialectical or not. That being said, the statement you listed is dialectical, because it represents an apparent contradiction (one of the three principles of dialecticism). It is contradictory to say that you should beware of your friends (who, theoretically, you should trust) more than you beware of your enemies.

You enlisted 3 principles of dialectical thinking i.e. Change, contradiction, wholism. Why are they important to the definition of dialectical thinking, in other words, what is their practical importance when talking about dialectical thinking?

These three principles of dialectical thinking are what differentiate it as a cognitive style. For example, linear thinkers view contradictory assertions as indicating that one of the two assertions is incorrect. Dialectical thinkers believe two seemingly-contradictory statements can both be true at the same time.

Its about bicultural identity integration (BII). Participants who were low in BII, after priming them with Chinese cultural primes, why did they make more internal attributions? Or is this statement incorrect?

This statement is definitely not incorrect. The "surprising" finding of that research is that biculturals who are low in BII use the perceptual framework of the OPPOSITE culture of which they are primed. So, Chinese Americans who are high in BII and are primed with the Chinese aspect of their identity interpret events like Chinese monoculturals do. But Chinese Americans who are LOW in BII behave like Americans when they are primed with Chinese cultural symbols, and behave like Chinese individuals when primed with American cultural icons. The theory behind this is that low BIIs have not integrated their two cultural identities at all, and thus, from a social cognitive perspective, these two identities oppose each other in individuals low in BII.

Could you please explain what you mean by "normalize" and "standardize" in regards to coping with response biases (Lec 16, slide 22)?

These terms (standardizing/normalizing) are names of a statistical procedure that makes each participant's response relative to responses from other people within their culture.  If you've taken stats, then this is just turning participants' responses into z-scores using the culture's mean as the "0" point and the culture's standard deviation as the sigma.  For the purposes of PSYB10, you need to know that a statistical transformation called "standardizing"/"normalizing" is a remedy for cultural response bias issues.  If you are curious about the details of statistical standardization, the wikipedia page on it is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score