Social Psych Exam III

Cognitive dissonance: discomfort when two cognitions or attitudes and actions don’t align

Three ways to reduce dissonance: change behavior, change attitude, add new cognition

Post decision dissonance: dissonance aroused after a decision is made, typically reduced by enhancing attractive qualities of chosen option and exaggerating negatives of rejected option

Justification of effort: tendency of individuals to like something more after they’ve worked hard to attain it

Counterattitudinal behavior: behaving in a way that counters one’s beliefs

External justification: explaining counterattitudinal behavior with situation or environment

Internal justification: reducing dissonance felt with counterattitudinal behavior by changing something about oneself

Ben franklin effect/ justification of kindness: asking people who don’t like us to do something for us, causing dissonance for them and leading to better attitudes towards us

Insufficient punishment: dissonance aroused when individuals lack sufficient external justification for resisting temptations, leading to devaluation of temptation

Hypocrisy induction: creating dissonance by having students aware of a certain behavior, then of their conflicting attitude, to create change in behavior

Self affirmation theory: idea that people can reduce threats to self esteem with certain topics by reassuring themselves in other areas

Self evaluation maintenance theory: people experience dissonance in a relationship if we are close to the person, they are outperforming us, and the task is central to our self esteem

Narcissism: excessive self love and lack of empathy towards others

Terror management theory: those with high self esteem are less frightened by thoughts of own mortality

Informational social influence: need to know what’s “right”

Autokinetic effect: light appears to move when in the dark because there isn’t any fixed point for the light to stay on

Private acceptance: people conforming because they believe others are genuinely right

Public compliance: conforming without necessarily believing what the others think

When people conform to informational social influence: situation is ambiguous, crisis, or other people are experts

Normative social influence: influence of others leads us to conform in order to be liked and accepted

Social norm: explicit or implicit rules for groups for acceptable behaviors

Resisters of normative influence: first experience increased engagement, then complete exile

Social impact theory: idea that conforming to normative influence depends on group’s importance, immediacy, and number of people in the group

Idiosyncracy credits: conforming to group norms over time allows an individual to deviate from the norm from time to time

Minority influence: when minority in a group influence the majority

Injunctive norms: what we perceive other people’s attitudes towards something will be

Descriptive norms: our perceptions of the way people actually behave in a situation

“Boomerang effect”: there are individuals who perform behaviors above average and those who perform behaviors below average; those who receive messages and are below average might be tempted to engage in behavior MORE

Foot in the door technique: asking a small request leads to agreeing to a larger request

Door in the face technique: saying no to a larger request leads to a concession of a smaller request

Propaganda: deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions and manipulate cognitions

Obedience: change in behavior due to direct influence from an authority figure

Consonant cognitions: come up with rationalizations, often easiest route

Low balling: after committing to a behavior, cost can be raised higher than individual would have agreed to

Illusory irrevocability: having the effects of permanence on dissonance reduction without the behavior actually being permanent

Compliance: behavior change as a result of direct request

Reciprocity: if someone does something nice for you, it creates an expectation that you will do something nice for them

Principle of reciprocal concessions: with negotiations, concessions from one party should be met with concessions from the other party

Agentic state: state in which individual places responsibility on authority