Social and Behavioral Psychology Flashcards
7 cards from real BAPSY practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Social and Behavioral Psychology flashcards as text
Which classical conditioning phenomenon occurs when a conditioned response is elicited by stimuli similar but not identical to the original conditioned stimulus?
Answer: Stimulus generalization
Stimulus generalization allows organisms to respond to novel but similar stimuli, which has adaptive survival value.
Bandura's Bobo doll experiments primarily demonstrated which behavioral principle?
Answer: Observational learning can occur without direct reinforcement
Children who watched adults aggress toward the Bobo doll later imitated those behaviors, showing that reinforcement is not required for learning.
The 'foot-in-the-door' compliance technique works primarily through which psychological mechanism?
Answer: Commitment and consistency
Once people agree to a small request, they feel motivated to remain consistent with their self-image as helpful, making larger requests more likely to succeed.
In operant conditioning, a negative reinforcer is best defined as:
Answer: A stimulus whose removal increases the likelihood of a behavior
Negative reinforcement strengthens behavior by removing an aversive stimulus, such as taking aspirin to relieve a headache.
Which attribution error involves overestimating the role of external situational factors when explaining one's own failures?
Answer: Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias leads people to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to external circumstances to protect self-esteem.
The bystander effect is best explained by which two psychological processes identified by Latané and Darley?
Answer: Diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance
Bystanders fail to help because they assume others will act (diffusion of responsibility) and misread others' calm as a sign there is no emergency (pluralistic ignorance).
Which schedule of reinforcement produces the highest and most persistent rate of responding?
Answer: Variable ratio
Variable ratio schedules are unpredictable, keeping the organism consistently responding because reinforcement could come at any time.