IB Psychology 2

Social Psychology

An attribution is essentially a:

explanation

An attribution has two types:

Situational and Dispositional

The actor/observer discrepancy is the idea that

people make different attributions depending on whether we are observing or performing/experiencing.

Gunther listens to the politician apologize for his bad behavior. He assumes that the man is good and humble. Gunther fails to consider that the man may be trying to save his career and is not contrite at all. This would be the fundamental attribution error.

True

Every time Lulu gets an “A” she congratulates herself for her grit and determination. Everytime she gets a “C” she attributes it to the teacher, her parents or the distractions in her life. She is showing the Fundamental Attribution Error.

False, Self-Serving Bias

Kashima and Triandi’s study of American and Japanese grad students demonstrated one cultural difference in attributional styles. What kind of bias did the Japanese students have?

Japanese students showed the modesty bias

Seligman’s study of optimism and pessimism identified three attributional styles related to these constructs. If you believe that your grades will never improve you are making a 

Permanent attribution

Seligman’s study of optimism and pessimism identified three attributional styles related to these constructs. If you believe that your intelligence and charisma have earned you the positive regard of your math teacher, you have made a

Personal attribution

Seligman’s study of optimism and pessimism identified three related attributional styles. Gunther burns the casserole and realizes that he was distracted by the house guests.

situation attribution which accounts for external factors.

Seligman’s study of optimism and pessimism identified three attributional styles related to these constructs.They are

Personal - “I’m great” or “I suck”

Permanent - “It’s always a great day” or “I always fail”

Pervasive - “Everything is bad”

An attitude has two parts,

emotion and behavior

 Attitudes drive behavior- not the other way around

False, goes both ways

What can help explain why attitudes shift to justify past behavior?

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

In Festiger’s early study of doomsday cults they observed that people ________ after the prophecy did not come true

Some became more committed to the cult

 Cognitive dissonance is

a bad feeling a person gets when two thoughts or an action and a thought are contradictory

 In Festinger and Carlsmith’s famous study of Cognitive Dissonance, subjects were paid ($1 vs $20) to

lie about enjoying a boring task, leading to varying levels of attitude change.

To make dissonance go away one can

• change thoughts, attitudes or memories  to bring them into line with the other thoughts or actions

• think of justifications for the contradictions between thoughts and/or actions

• one can employ denial

In Festinger and Carlsmith’s famous study of Cognitive Dissonance, subjects rated how enjoyable it was

to do the boring task

In Festinger and Carlsmith’s famous study of Cognitive Dissonance, Those paid $20 gave the highest ratings.

False it was equal to the control group

 In their explanation of the results, Festinger and Carlsmith propose that

sufficient payment can provide justification and eliminate dissonance

In the Aronsen and Mills study subjects thought they were joining a group that would discuss

the psychology of sexuality

 In the Aronsen and Mills study the IV was

experienced levels of discomfort

  In the Aronsen and Mills study ALL subjects listened to and rated (DV)

 a group discussion on the psychology of sex where the other participants spoke on very boring topics of sex

Results of the Aronsen and Mills study suggest that the women needed to

increase the value of the activity in order to justify their suffering and eliminate the cognitive dissonance.

The Aronsen and Mills study could apply to

fraternity hazing rituals, boot camp in the military and loyalty to abusive people in relationships (family, friends, romance, teachers, etc).

ike Sherif (who did the Robber’s Cave studies), Stanley Milgram was

worried about genocide and WWII.

  In Milgram’s experiment shocks started out mild and increased to a deadly level

False no shocks were given

 In Milgram’s experiment the “teacher” is the only one who received a shock

True

Milgram decided who would be the “teacher” and “learner” by?

having the “learner” lied about his slip of paper

 Around ___ of people went all the way to the end in the version of the experiment where the learner was in another room but could be heard through the wall

65%

What helped things keep everything the same between subjects in Milgram’s study

Milgram used recordings of “learner” responses and the authority figure had a limited set of simple responses to give to the teacher.

Other versions of his experiments showed that proximity/salience of authority or victim was irrelevant.

False

In Social Cognitive theory, observational learning

 Observational learning is simply learning

attitudes and new behaviors by watching models

Observers may

imitate behaviors and consequences due to observation

Bandura’s research on observational leaning refuted some core ideas of

behaviorism, demonstrating the importance of cognitive processes in learning.

IVs in Bandura’s research was

• gender of child

• gender of model

• Behavior (agression type: mallet, verbal, or regular aggression) of model

Bandura found that children were affected by the gender of the model.

True (both M vs F and as well as matched vs not matched)   

In Nagel’s study in the partial model (PM) condition the rake

starts edge down.

In the full model (FM) condition the rake starts

teeth down, model flips the rake and then pulls the rake.

The starting position of the subject’s rake was

teeth down

 If you copied the behavior of the partial model you would

simply pull the rake

If you copied the behavior of the full model you would

 flip your rake.Then pull the rake.

 The chimps imitated the model faithfully

False

The chimps learned from the model that the rake was useful.

True

The  children learned from the model the behavior of the model- To pull the rake or to flip and pull the rake. Was it helpful

Who was more successful the chimps or the children? And why?

Chimps because they often flipped the rake in the partial model condition, whereas the children did not.

What does Nagels research suggest?

 it may be better for a human child to imitate a model’s behavior than to learn about an object because performing the model’s behaviors integrate you into a social group

Why does Nagel’s research suggest that?

the group contains vast memory and skills and will teach you what you need to know and will feed and protect you. For humans, objects are not often used practically but instead are used symbolically. This learning of symbolic gestures and actions may be the basis of complex language and culture unique to homosapien primates.