Social Psych

Which of the following statements best represents the concept of psychologism?

• Men don’t make more money than women; in my family all of the women make more than the men.

• Psychology helps explain the social situation of many Americans.

• Despite declining racist attitudes, racial segregation is increasing in American schools

• Psychology is superior to psychiatry because it is more accessible to the general population.

Symbolic Interactionists explain people’s different appetites for beetle burritos and burnt cow muscle by:

• Measuring within a cultural group, the individuals tolerance for other cultures

• Noting the assumptions people make within social groups regarding which foods are desirable

• Showing that people's tastes usually lead them to act in ways contradictory to their beliefs

• Asking people directly to say why they like the foods they choose to eat

According to Markus and Nurius, which of the following will enhance your possibility of becoming a lawyer?

• Imagining yourself as a lawyer

• Watching legal dramas on TV

• Reading legal fiction

• Reading news accountys of court cases

Western cultural ideals  of the self include All of the below EXCEPT

• Our various social positions relative to socio-political arrangements

• Self-reliance

• Mentalism or control of life by positive thinking

• Perseverance

Becker suggests that culturally-specific contours or shapes of life organize the meanings people use to guide themselves. One central Western ‘shape’ of life is

• Life is a linear order of progress –achieved by strength of will

• Life is determined by a series of good and bad fortune

• Life happens

• Life is largely determined by political arrangements outside of personal choice

Cooley's notion of the looking glass self requires us to

• Groom impeccably

• Consider our goals in life

• Develop an original theory

• Imagine how others see us

According to Zimbardo, in the Lucifer Effect, dehumanization occurs when

• People give in to their evil side

• Situational factors and systemic legitimation of the non-membership of others normalizes practices of evil

• People are compelled to follow orders

• Groups are dominated by strong personalities

What do symbolic interactionists mean when they say that knowledge is subjective?

• It is a human, not natural, product of the context in which it is constructed.

• It results from applying the correct categories to phenomena.

• It is a set of truths which has always existed for people to discover over time.

• It is a body of facts apprehended by humans when they use the scientific method.

The process of learning the gestures, cues, and expectations that enable us to engage in successful impression management is called:

• Situated identity

• Socialization

• Self-concept

• Identity performance

Personal or self coherence is achieved by

• College education

• Ongoing struggles to grasp one'e true identity

• Participation in cultural narratives that connect personal experience and social interpretations

• Modeling the decisions of high status individuals

Phrases such as, “speaking as a Christian…” or “…as a Democrat” or “…as a sociologist,” indicate that the speaker is imagining herself as a representative of:

• An elite organization

• A reference group

• A role support team

• A situated identity

Feeling and expression norms

• Determine adolescent girls' affect and behavior

• Serve as an important cultural resource

• All of these

• Are learned through media sources

• Come directly from adults

When you learn the skills and attitudes associated with a new job, you experience:

• Situated identity

• Front-stage

• Self-concept

• Identity performance

• Our self

• Significant others

• All of these

• Reference groups

• Routinized social practices

The process of routinization accounts for the way:

• An identity becomes a self

• Significant others engage in social control

• Deception infiltrates relationships

• Humans seek self-improvement

According to the text, reality is

• A codified set of facts and possibilities

• Something produced and reproduced through ongoing human activity

• A codified set of rules and expectations

• Something passed down intact through generations

Culture is both a medium for making meanings and social practices and a context for how the prospects and demands for meanings and practices are arranged. As a result

• Culture and persons are in general opposition

• Culture and persons are interdependent and involved in bi-directional change and constraint

• Power is obtained by avoiding cultural influences

• Culture and persons are in general harmony

Intersubjectivity means that

• People learn to know what others are thinking

• Social realities exist and are maintained and changed between people

• People are freed from physical facts by mental powers

• Everything is relative to what anyone thinks

According to Becker, major disruptions of self usually involve trouble with meanings of our bodies because

• Bodies are frail

• Narratives or stories are how embodied experiences are mediated

• Disruption causes regression to childhood events

• Understanding medical jargon confuses our assumptions

According to Babbie, the basis of truth is:

• Reality

• Experience

• Agreement

• Confusion

• Inspirations to make something of ourselves

• Cultural artifacts that articulate the experiences of some groups and silence others

• Reflections of who we really are

• Determined by the best ordinary heroes.

Conformity is

• Submitting to group pressures despite knowing better

• An ongoing negotiation of meaning and social activit relative to contexts and capabilities

• The enforcement of social norms

• Loss of self

The public health model of social justice, referred to by Zimbardo, in the Lucifer Effect, involves

• Improving the surveillance of dangerous social groups

• Addressing social structures of power by preventive, counter-practices that work to alter social inequities and personal capabilities

• Using psychiatry and other medical services to treat bad apples

• Establishing better regulations in schools and other organizations

According to the text, Data has not achieved “humanness” yet because he:

• Cannot manipulate symbols the way true humans can.

• Cannot comprehend the situated meaning of social interaction.

• Continues to make cognitive mistakes in processing information on human activities

• Tries to be too emotional in his interactions with human beings

Symbolic interactionism has four basic premises, including all the below EXCEPT

• Symbols are what explains social order

• Persons act on the basis of meanings

• Meanings are continuously made and remade in multiple contexts

• Meanings are simultaneously political and personal

When symbolic interactionists discuss internal conversation in reference to the self, they are referring to:

• The internal debate on personal consistency

• the ability to treat the self as an object that we observe and reflect on

• The identification of in-born traits that direct our activities

• The tendency of actors toward imagining conversations with others before actually confronting them

The social worlds we are born into and make our own ‘act back’. This means that

• Careful attention to forgetting the past is needed to get ahead

• Nothing really changes from one generation to the next

• Cultural artifacts and practices have multiple effects that are refracted over lifetimes

• There is always payback

According to Babbie, if you can’t be sure what your mind tells you is true, how can you gain some confidence in that regard?

• Different subjects report the same thing

• Different subjects report different things

• Authorities confirm your view

• Authorities reject your view

According to Mead, which of the following form the basis of what we think of as our core self?

• Repeated performance

• Self-observation

• Internal conversations

• Ideal scripts for behavior

• The interdependence and linkages of lives

• The submission of persons to established narratives

• Historicity of events and intergenerational change

• The context of biographies

Ideologies are

• Various political positions about social issues

• Distortions of the truth experienced during life disruptions

• Plausible meanings in the service of prevailing arrangements of life

• What other people have

Normalcy describes

• The true purpose of life

• Universal stages people experience

• General reasons for why social reality is as it is

• The internal guidelines behind impression management

• Locate the self outside of politics

• Connect past, present and future

• Give purpose to change

• Organize personal and cultural meanings into plots

According to Zerubavel, when we lump together all those whose income falls below a certain “poverty line” as an undifferentiated lot – the poor, we establish:

• Symbolic meaning

• Perceptual significance

• Background activities

• Social clusters

Which of the following is considered by Howard Becker to account for the use of marijuana?

• Psychological traits

• Predispositional characteristics

• Childhood trauma

• Social experiences

The emphasis on US willpower is 

• Evidence how freedom transcends social divisions

• An illustration how thomas the train engine story is true

• Part of the dominant cultural myth of rational control

• A reason why americans are comparitvely healthy

• The mass media

• Parental scripts

• Emplotments

• Dehumanization

What do the authors mean by the “Myth of Individualism”?

• The depiction of John Wayne and James Dean as rugged individuals is a myth.

• In reality, there is no such thing as individualism

• Individualism is a product of socialization and a culturally valued idea in American society.

• It is almost impossible for human beings to overcome the restrictions placed on them by society.

From a symbolic interactionist perspective, what did Einstein mean when he said, “It is the theory that decides what we can observe”?

• Society forces its members to view the world in socially acceptable ways.

• Social norms and values often prevent humans from seeing reality as it truly exists.

• Truth is relative to the social context, and reality does not exist outside of our ability to give it meaning.

• Facts rarely need to be interpreted and really do “speak for themselves.”

We are most likely to incorporate a performance into our own self-concept when which of the following happen?

• Repeated performance

• Role support from significant others

• Neither a nor b

• Both a and b

Before interaction can proceed successfully, the actors must go through a process of identity negotiation. In this process:

• An actor must choose which identity to present before entering a new situation, and disentangle that identity from its previous uses

• The actors must come to an agreement about what sort of situation they are in and what sort of role each is playing

• be considered a competent adult in interaction, humans must have a firm sense of their own personal identity

• All of the above

Those people whose opinions and influence are particularly important in an individual’s self-assessment are called:

• Possible selves

• Situated identities

• Routinized identities

• Significant others

Because experience is mediated by meanings and arrangements of power and practices, social life is

• A distortion of what really exists

• A series of deceptions countered by science

• A conflict between what we are supposed to know and truth

• Participatory in ways of being in relationship with multiple ways of knowing and doing.

The ideals of being oneself are

• Aspects of natural self-fulfillment

• Based on one's nature and influenced by environment

• Usually difficult because common sense distorts knowing oneself

• Governed by common sense or the plausibility of being a recognizable self

When we observe and evaluate our own performances, we are engaging in:

• Situated identity

• Identity performance

• Role support

• Impression management

Individualization which emphasizes self-control and self-knowledge is

• Evidence of how history tends to liberate people from social control

• An indicator that modern life is less dependent on others

• A form of social control that has accompanied industrialization and urbanization

• A way to discover what our real needs are

Which of the following statements best defines reification? Reification happens when:

• One is aware of how one’s beliefs affect one’s construction of reality.

• One thinks critically about the real meaning of the IQ test.

• Something real is objectified as a concept.

• A concept is treated as if it was real.

Symbolic Interactionism shares all of the following assumptions with the other social psychological traditions EXCEPT the idea that: 

• Humans act to alter their environment to suit their needs and desires.

• What people choose to value and what motivates them come from their interpretations of their situations.

• Humans would act on nothing but impulses except that we are controlled by internal conversations with a “self.”

• Social context is more important than individual psychology when trying to understand human action.