PSYC 2600 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12-13: Social Learning Theory, Information Processing, Walter Mischel
19 Jun 2018
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Week 8 Readings
Chapter 12: Cognitive Topics in Personality
Personalizing Cognition: when the environment prompts you to recall a similar event from your
own life
Objectifying Cognition: when the environment prompts you to recall objective facts
Cognition: refers to awareness and thinking as well as specific, mental acts such as perceiving,
attending to, interpreting, remembering, believing, judging, deciding and anticipating
Information processing: the transformation of sensory input into mental representations and
the manipulation of such representations
Perception: the process of imposing order on the information our sense organs take in
- People differ in how they perceive situations
Interpretation: making sense of or explaining various events in the world
- Giving meaning to events
Conscious Goals: the standards that people develop for evaluating themselves and others
- People develop specific beliefs about what is important in life and which tasks are
appropriate to pursue
Personality Revealed Through Perception
Field Dependence
Witkin
- Some people rely on cues from the environment surrounding the object to make a
judgment about orientation
- Some people rely more on bodily cues to tell them that they are upright and therefore it
must be that the object is tilted
Rod and Frame Test:
- The participant sits in a dark room and looks at a glowing rod surrounded by a glowing
frame
- The participant has to position the rod upright
- Field Dependent people: adjust the rod so that it is leaning in the direction of the tilted
frame
- Field Independent people: disregard external cues and use information from their
bodies in adjusting the rod upright, they rely on their own sensations, not the
perception of the field to make their judgement
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- Another way to measure is finding little images inside of a larger, complex image- FD
people have a harder time finding the smaller images than FI people
Field Dependence/Independence and Life Choices
- FI people choose careers in natural sciences, math, and engineering
- FD people favour the social sciences and education
- FD people rely on social information and frequently ask other people for their opinions,
they are oriented towards other people
- FI people display more impersonal or detached orientation towards others, they prefer
non-social situations
Current Research on Field Dependence/Independence
- FI people are better at ignoring distracting information and focusing on the important
details of the event
Applies to a study with police officers
- FI people prefer web-based instruction involving multiple media formats
- FI people can learn a second language more easily
Pain Tolerance and Sensation Reducing/Augmenting
- People differentiate in their level of pain tolerance
Petrie’s Research
- People with low pain tolerance have an augmented nervous system
- People with high pain tolerance have a reduced nervous system
Reducer/Augmenter Theory: the dimension along which people differ in their reaction to
sensory stimulation
- Reducers drink more coffee, smoke more and have a lower threshold for boredom, do
more drugs, listen to music louder
Personality Revealed Through Interpretation
Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
Constructs: a word that summarizes a set of observations and conveys the meaning of those
observations
Personal Constructs: the constructs a person routinely uses to interpret and predict events
- People have a few key constructs they sue to interpret the word, this is why everyone
has a unique interpretation of the world
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Postmodernism: an intellectual position grounded in the notion that reality is constructed, that
every person and every culture has a version of reality that is unique and that no single version
of reality is any more privileged than another
- People with similar personal constructs get along well
Anxiety: the result of our personal constructs failing to make sense of our circumstances
- People get anxious when they don’t understand what’s happening to them and when
events are unpredictable and when they feel like they don’t have control
Locus of Control
Locus of Control: a concept that describes a person’s perception of responsibility for the events
in his or her life
- Refers to whether people tend to locate responsibility internally, within themselves, or
externally, in fate, luck, or chance
The Expectancy of Reinforcement: refers to characteristics that distinguish specific individuals
- General expectancies: a person’s expectations for reinforcement hold across a variety of
situations
External Locus of Control: an expectancy that events are outside of one’s control
Internal Locus of Control: the expectancy that reinforcing events are under one’s control and
that one is responsible for the major outcomes in life
- Internal locus of control results in higher well-being
- Less obesity, complete degrees more timely, higher credit ratings
Specific Expectancies: the emphasis is on locus of control in discrete areas of life
- Example: locus of control expectations for health and whether people believe that their
health depends on their own actions
Learned Helplessness
Study:
- Dogs who were shocked with no escape learned to accept the shocks and did not try to
escape in new situations where they could escape
- Dogs who could escape learned to quickly escape in new situations
Learned Helplessness: can result whenever people are stuck in an unpleasant situation outside
of their control
Personality Revealed Through Goals
Personal Projects Analysis
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