Psych Test 2

1. From the point of view of Heider’s (1958) “naïve,” or “commonsense,” how are people viewed.

2. In Heider’s attribution theory, attributions are dichotomous—that is, there are two possible attributions a person can make about another’s behavior. Identify what they are and describe both of these types of attributions.

3. Identify and describe the three types of information included in the covariation model of attribution? How do they combine to yield internal, external, and peculiar circumstance attributions? What does research suggest about the relative degree people rely on different types of covariation information when making attributions?

4. What is the fundamental attribution error? What is the other name for it? How is this illustrated by the findings of the Castro study (Jones & Harris, 1967)? What did Taylor and Fiske (1975) find in their perceptual salience study?

5. Describe the two-step process of making attributions.What attribution do people tend to initially make, and when would individuals proceed past the initial step?

6. What is belief in a just world? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this type of attribution?

7. In a study by Masuda et al. (2008), how did cultural differences in thinking styles affect how participants interpreted the facial expression of a central character in a crowd?

8. What cultures are most prone to the fundamental attribution error?

CHAPTER 5- The Self

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9. What is the “Who am I?” test intended to measure?

10. What species can pass the mirror mark test? At what age are humans able to do so? What does passing the mark test indicate?

11. Contrast an independent view of the self with an interdependent view of the self. With which cultures are each associated? When asked to finish a sentence beginning “I am…,” what kind of self-descriptions would respondents from Asian countries be most likely to provide?

12. What are the tenets of self-awareness theory?

13. According to the idea of “telling more than we can know,” why might introspection sometimes not be an accurate way to learn about oneself? What are causal theories? Where do they often come from?

14. What does self-perception theory say?

15. What are the two steps in Schacter’s two-factor theory of emotion?

16. What is misattribution of arousal? What happened in the bridge study (Dutton & Aron, 1974).

17. Contrast intrinsic with extrinsic motivation. How do these ideas relate to the overjustification effect?

18. Contrast task-contingent with performance-contingent rewards. What are the two ways to avoid overjustification when using rewards?

19. Describe what a fixed versus a growth mindset is? Which mindset is more likely to lead to subsequent success after a failure experience? Why?

20. What is social comparison theory? When do you engage in social comparison and with whom do you compare yourself? What’s the upside and downside to upward social comparisons? How do upward social comparisons on social media make us feel worse?

21. What is self-promotion? What happens if it is overdone? How is narcissism related to self-promotion behaviors online?

22. What is self-handicapping?

CHAPTER 6

23. What is cognitive dissonance? Know and be able to apply the three basic ways to reduce dissonance.

24. What is postdecision dissonance? How is it reduced (consumer product study; [Brehm, 1956])? Under what conditions is postdecisional dissonance reduction the greatest (race track bettors study [Knox & Inkster, 1968])?

25. What is the justification of effort? How is this demonstrated in the group initiation study (Aronson & Mills, 1959).

26. What is the IKEA effect? How is it like justification of effort?

27. Contrast external justification with internal justification? What is counterattitudinal behavior? When does counterattitudinal behavior lead to attitude change (lying experiment [Festinger and Carlsmith’s, 1959])?

28. What is the choosing to suffer effect? Why did 80% of the participants in the worm-eating experiment (Comer & Laird, 1975) who initially agreed not back out later when given the opportunity? What did the forbidden toy experiment (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959) reveal about the effects of mild vs. severe threats of punishment?

29. How is the amount of reward and punishment related to extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation and the duration of resulting change (Figure 6.5)?

30. What is self-affirmation theory? How can self-affirmation be used to reduce dissonance?

CHAPTER 7

31. What are attitudes? Why are they important?

32. How is it possible that some attitudes may be linked to our genes?

33. Know what the three components of attitudes are, and how they apply.

34. Distinguish among cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally based attitudes.

35. Explain how affectively based attitudes might develop through processes of both classical and operant conditioning? In what ways are affectively based attitudes all similar?

36. Under what conditions do people form behaviorally based attitudes?

37. Contrast explicit with implicit attitudes. What is the most widely used measure of implicit attitudes called? According to Rudman et al. (2007), what kind of experiences do each tend to be based on?

38. What is attitude accessibility? When does this have to do with when attitudes predict spontaneous behavior?

39. According to the theory of planned behavior, what is the best predictor of deliberative behavior? What are the three things that go into determining this? Why is it important to measure people’s specific (vs. general) attitude toward the behavior in question?

40. What is the Yale attitude change approach? Identify and describe the three components it focuses on. What is the problem with the Yale attitude change approach?

41. Contrast the central route with the peripheral route. Be able to pick out aspects of central route vs. peripheral route aspects in advertising. When are you more likely to follow the central route vs. peripheral route? What did Petty et al. (1981) find in their persuasion experiment? Which way leads to longer lasting attitude change?

42. Under what conditions are fear-arousing communications maximally effective? Why is it important not to go overboard with fear? What did the smoking study (Leventhal et al1968) find?

43. For what kind of products (and with which types of attitudes) is it better for advertisements to use emotional appeals vs. logical appeals

44. What do most people think about the effectiveness of advertising?

45. Under what conditions is a logical, fact-based approach in advertisements most effective?

46. In what ways are infomercials effective?

47. What are subliminal messages? What do people believe about subliminal messages? Do they work in everyday life? Can they work in laboratory studies? In Karremans et al. (2006) study of how subliminal messages can affect our product choices, what determined whether the subliminal prime affected behavior?

CHAPTER 8

48. What informational social influence? Contrast private acceptance and public compliance. Which of these two things is likely to result from informational social influence?

49. Why did Muzafer Sherif choose the autokinetic effect to study social conformity? In Sherif’s (1936) autokinetic experiment, why did participants’ estimates converge when placed in a group?

50. Know the situations that are the most likely to produce conformity because of informational social influence and be able to apply what you know here to an example.

51. What is normative social influence? Does normative social influence usually result in private acceptance or just public compliance without private acceptance?

52. What did Asch (1951, 1956) find in his line study?

53. What did Baron et al. (1996) find in the eyewitness conformity study?

54. Identify and describe the three variables in social impact theory that affect normative social influence. Be prepared to apply these ideas. How does group size operate differently than the other two?

55. What are idiosyncrasy credits?

56. What is minority influence? What is key if minority influence is to be successful? Do minorities vs. majorities tend to rely on informational or normative social influence? Contrast minority vs. majority influence in terms of whether it results in private acceptance or usually public compliance without private acceptance.

57. What two things are typically necessary for a minority to influence a majority? How do majority influence and minority influence relate to the concepts of public compliance and private acceptance?

58. Which of the variations of Milgram’s variations of the original obedience experiment that we talked about provides the best evidence for the role of normative and informational social influence in obedience? What were the other factors we discussed that contributed to obedience?

59. What modifications did Burger (2009) make to Milgram’s procedure in order to make it compliant with current ethics standards? How did the level of obedience he observed compare to the original?