psych 4.1-4.3
4.1
Attribution Theory: In order to explain others' behavior, we attribute the causes of their behavior to one of two things:
Situational Attributions: We attribute someone's behavior to situational factors.
ex) A girl is late to class, and the teacher thinks “She’s late, that may be a family issue.
Dispositional Attributions: We attribute someone's behavior to being due to who they are, (their internal and stable traits).
ex) A girl is late to class, and the teacher thinks “She’s late, she must be a lazy bum!”.
Fundamental Attribution Error: We mistakenly overestimate the effect of dispositional factors on someone's behavior. We mistakenly attribute things to who someone is more often than we attribute things to someone's situation.
Self-Serving Bias: We attribute our success to ourselves, but our failures to others.
Actor-observer bias: When a person blames another person as being the sole cause of their behavior, but then commits the same error themselves and blames outside forces (being a hypocrite).
Optimism: Believing you have the power over your life, and seeing a glass as half full.
Pessimism: Expecting things to be bad, and seeing a glass as half empty.
Mere-Exposure effect: The more we are exposed to a stimulus (could be a person) the more likely we are to like it.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: A person's expectations influence their actions and make their expectations more likely to come true. This is because their thoughts become their subconscious behaviors.
Upward Social Comparison: Comparing yourself to someone who you think is better than you.
Downward Social Comparison: Comparing yourself to someone who you think is worse than you.
Relative Deprivation Theory: When we feel something is unfair by comparison to others.
Just world Phenomenon: Belief that people get what they deserve.
4.2
Prejudice is a negative attitude towards a group of people.
Discrimination is a negative behavior (action) towards a group of people.
Stereotype: Generalized belief about a group.
Explicit Attitudes/Bias: Obvious and clear racism, sexism, etc.
ex) Someone says “I hate black people”
Implicit Attitudes/Bias: A quick response taught by society.
ex) Someone crosses the street to get away from a black guy
Ingroup: Groups we are a part of, and see as better than others.
Outgroup: Groups that we are not a part of and see as not as good as us.
Ethnocentrism: Judging others’ cultures as “weird” when compared to our own.
Belief Perseverance: Keeping a belief despite new information that contradicts it.
Confirmation Bias: Interpreting information as being in agreement with a belief you already hold even though the information might not be in agreement with it.
Cognitive Dissonance: A mental discomfort that occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs and attitudes within themselves
Cognitive Consistency: A theory that humans are motivated by inconsistencies and contradictions in their own beliefs and actions and are motivated to change them.
ex) taking accountability
Both are intrapersonal
4.3
Social norms: The rules of society that everyone is expected to know and follow, even though the rules are not explicitly stated.
Social influence has two types:
Normative: Influence from a person’s desire to want approval or to avoid disapproval.
Informational: This is when you accept someone else’s opinion and it then influences you.
There are two main routes to persuasion:
Peripheral Route: Persuasion with emotion.
Central Route: Persuasion with logic and statistics.
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: When we get someone to agree to something small, and then ask for something bigger.
Door-in-the-face phenomenon: When we get someone to agree to something big (which they will most likely say no to) and then ask for something smaller.
Halo effect: When we think people are better than they are.
Asch Conformity Experiment:
Involved lines/strings
The whole group lied about the correct answer (when asked about the size of a line)
Showed conformity
An individual was more likely to conform to a false statement the group stated, since all members of the group were involved.
Conformity: Adjusting our behavior or thinking to go along with group standards.
Milgram Experiment:
Delt with participants falsely thinking that they electrically shocked someone (no real electric shock was involved).
A authoritative figure told them to deliver a increasingly higher level of electric shock
Participants went on to deliver high voltages, some delivering lethal shocks.
Showed obedience/authority.
People are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even if that means killing someone else.
Stanford (Zimbardo) Prison Experiment:
Randomly assigned participants who signed up for the experiment as either a guard or prisoner, the guards abused their power, and the prisoners acted like prisoners.
Individualistic Cultures: Where society focuses on a single person and their personal traits.
Collectivist Cultures: Where society looks at the situation and the bigger picture around an individual.
Multiculturalism: The belief that minority groups deserve acknowledgment of their differences.
Group polarization: When a group of individuals talks about an issue, each member disagrees with the other, so each individual leaves the group more strong in the belief that caused them to disagree over the issue.
Groupthink: When we agree with the overall view of a group instead of thinking about it ourselves and sharing our own opinion.
Social loafing: When people give less effort when working in a group than when working alone.
Deindividuation: The loss of someone's identity when they are in a group/crowd (acting like your group, when your group causes you to do things that you wouldn’t do natively).
Diffusion of responsibility (also called the bystander effect): When people are less likely to take responsibility for their actions when others are present.
To avoid the bystander effect, point out someone specific.
Kitty Genovese was an example of the bystander effect, as she was a murder victim that nobody helped.
Social facilitation: When we perform better because people are watching us.
False Consensus Effect: Someone's tendency to overestimate how much people agree with them on a situation.
Superordinate goals: Goals that are worth achieving but require coordination between two or more social groups to achieve.
Social trap: A situation where we do things for immediate rewards but the action has negative long-term consequences.
Altruism: An extremely high level of selflessness, where we put other people before ourselves and give away what we have for others (an individual does not perform an action for personal gain either).
Social Responsibility: When we feel a responsibility to do things that benefit society.
Social reciprocity norm: The belief that when we help others, we should have the expectation of return in the future.
The original intention does not include the reward