Week 2: Navigating Our Social World: Attitudes, Social Cognition, & Attributions

Flashcards covering definitions and key theories of social psychology including attitudes, cognitive dissonance, social cognition biases, and attribution theories of attribution.

Attitudes

Relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies toward social objects, groups, events or symbols.

Cognitive Component (Attitudes)

The element of an attitude consisting of beliefs and information.

Affective/Evaluative Component (Attitudes)

The element of an attitude involving emotions, likes, and dislikes.

Behavioural Component (Attitudes)

The element of an attitude regarding the intention to act in specific ways.

Theory of Reasoned Action

Developed by Azjen and Fisbein, this theory posits that subjective norms and attitude toward behaviour determine behavioural intention, which leads to behaviour.

Subjective Norm

A perception of what other people think is right regarding a specific behaviour.

Theory of Planned Behavior

An extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action that adds perceived behavioural control as a factor influencing intention and behaviour.

Attitude Accessibility

The ease with which an attitude can be recalled from memory.

Attitude Strength

Attitudes that come to mind more readily and have a stronger influence on behaviour; often related to having a vested interest in an issue.

Balance Theory

Heider's theory that people feel comfortable when relationships between themselves ($P$), other people ($O$), and objects ($X$) are psychologically balanced.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Festinger's ($1957$) theory describing an aversive motivational state resulting from inconsistencies between behaviour and attitudes, or between multiple cognitions.

Hypocrisy Condition (Dickerson et al., 1992)

A high dissonance state created by combining commitment (signing a flyer) and mindfulness (reminding participants of past wasteful behaviour) to motivate water conservation.

Social Cognition

A particular approach to social psychology focusing on how individuals analyse, process, represent, and use information about social situations.

Gestalt Psychology

A school of thought stating that the human mind naturally perceives objects and experiences as organized wholes rather than separate parts.

Bottom-Up Processing

Information processing that is driven by the specific features of the stimuli.

Top-Down Processing

Processing driven by an individual's past knowledge and experience.

Schemas

Cognitive structures used to make sense of daily social interactions, consisting of attributes and the relations among those attributes.

Central Traits

Asch ($1946$) identified that certain traits, such as "Warm" versus "Cold," have a significantly stronger influence on social inferences than peripheral traits like "Polite" or "Blunt."

Role Priming

The process by which certain schemas are made more salient, increasing the speed and frequency with which they come to mind, often automatically.

Hindsight Bias

The belief that one knew the outcome of an event all along, leading to overestimating the certainty of past beliefs once the outcome is known.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to interpret new information in ways that confirm pre-existing beliefs, often reflecting a selection bias.

Egocentric Bias

The tendency to overstate one's own responsibility for positive or negative events, such as married couples estimating their combined household duties at greater than $100\%$.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to take responsibility for positive outcomes while denying responsibility for failures by blaming luck or the situation.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A phenomenon where a perceiver's expectations lead to actual outcomes, such as teachers' expectations influencing student $IQ$ levels.

Attributions

The process of deciding whether people's actions are caused by internal personal traits or external situational factors.

Naïve Psychology

Heider's ($1958$) concept that laypeople act as intuitive scientists, making causal inferences to create workable explanations of the world.

Correspondent Inference Theory

Jones and Davis's ($1965$) theory that people infer personality traits from behaviors that are freely chosen, intentional, unexpected, or distinctive.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to overestimate dispositional causes of behaviour and underestimate situational influences when observing others.

Discounting Principle

The tendency to reduce the importance of a specific cause for a behavior when another plausible cause, such as flattery for a recruitment attempt, is present.