AP Psych Unit 4

Attribution Theory & Person Perception 

• Attribution - the process of explaining the causes of one’s behavior

  • Internal - personal/dispositional

  • External - situational 

• Explanatory style - predictable patterns of how people explain good/bad events 

• Three steps of attribution

  • Antecedent - prejudge people or events on what we know or think about them

  • Attribution - give reasons for an individual’s behavior based on the antecedent, comes from personal experience and/or schemas

  • Consequence - the real reason for the behavior

Biases in Attribution

• Fundamental attribution error - tendency to attribute behavior of others to internal factors

• Actor/observer bias - tendency to attribute others’ behavior to internal causes while attributing our own behavior to external causes

• Self serving bias - tendency to take personal credit for positive outcomes, but blame external causes for failures

• Confirmation bias - we only remember information that confirms our bias, and forget information that does not

  Person Perception 

• Person perception - mental processes we use to form impressions of people

• Mere exposure effect - all else being equal, attitudes toward object/person become more positive the more frequently exposed to it

  • Central route to persuasion - content of message is more important than characteristics of communicator 

  • Peripheral route - little attention to central content of message, affected by persuasion cues that surround it

• Persuasion techniques 

  • Foot in door technique - get person to agree to a small request and gradually present larger requests 

  • Door in face technique - request favor likely to be denied, then concede to lesser request

Cognitive Dissonance

• People want attitudes and behaviors to be consistent 

• Dissonance - is inconsistency b/w attitudes and behaviors

  • Causes tension and anxiety that motivates change

• It is easier to change attitudes than behavior 

• Leon Festinger 

  • Asked people to do a dull task and later asked them to persuade another person to do it saying it was exciting and fun for $1 or $20

  • People who got $1 reported a more positive experience bc the $1 group changed attitude to create consistency and the $20 had adequate justification

Social Influences 

• Deindividuation - phenomenon when a person becomes submerged in a group and loses sense of individuality

  • Tend to do things would normally not do when alone

• Norman Triplett (1897) - noticed bicycle races trended to go faster when others were present 

  • Race alone against clock

  • With another cyclist not competing - fastest 

  • With another cyclist competing - fastest 

• Robert Zajonc - social facilitation vs social impairment

  • Presence of others increase general level of arousal

  • Arousal increases tendency to perform behaviors that are most dominant 

    • Improves performance for familiar tasks only

• Social loafing - exerting less effort when performing a group task than when performing same task alone

• Group polarization - interaction and discussion of individuals in a group with similar beliefs/attitudes tends to make them more extreme 

• False consensus effect - tendency to overestimate how much others agree with oneself 

• Conformity - changing one's behavior of beliefs to match those of others generally as a result of real or imagined through unspoken group pressure 

  • Asch’s conformity study 

Milgram Obedience Studies

• 40 male subjects, variety of backgrounds who were told the experiment was to study effects of punishment on learning/memory

• Teacher (subject)  is to increasingly shock learner for wrong answers and learner is strapped into chair, electrodes attached to arms 

• When teacher would question continuing, experimenter told him he must continue 

• 26/40 people went to lethal voltage 

1. Altruism and helping behaviour 

   1. Altruism =an unselfish concern for another's welfare 

      1. Helping behavior does not seem to come naturally 

         1. Pick up learning / environment 

      2. The kitty genovese story 

         1. NYC (kew gardens)- march 13,1964 

         2. 330 28 yo woman going from car to apt 

         3. Man attracted, stabbed and raped her - she screamed and came to window - attacker left scene– however nobody came to help or called police - then he stabbed her again and raped her again - she died on the way to the hospital 

         4. Public appalled that nobody took action 

         5. Some neighbors didn't want to get involved 

            1. Later found out one individual called the police but police took their time getting there

   2. Bystander effect - a phenomenon where chances someone will help decrease as number of people present increases 

   3. Why do we help

      1. Social exchange theory

         1. We help when the costs of helping are outweighed by the benefits  

Factors contributing to prejudice and discrimination

• Just world phenomenon - tendency for people to believe the world is just and people get what they deserve, allows people to rationalize away injustice and blame the victim 

• Scapegoat theory - tendency to blame someone else for our own problems, allows us to explain our hardship or failure while maintaining our self image

Attraction 

• Proximity - we like people who are close by, proximity between two people predicts liking, applies to communication rather than physical proximity

  • Interactions  seeing and interacting with people

  • Anticipation of interaction - prefer those we expect to meet and interact with

  • Familiarity 

• Physical attractiveness - we are attracted to what we consider beautiful 

  • Matching hypothesis - people often pair with others who are about as attractive as they are 

  • Costs of beauty - what is beautiful is not good in all way 

• Similarity - we like people who are similar to us like personality, behaviors, activities 

• Reciprocity - we tend to like those who like us

  • Reward theory of attraction - attracted to those whose behavior is rewarding to us 

    • Direct rewards - positive consequences we experience as a result of other person’s presence 

    • Indirect rewards - positive consequences that we experience in the other person’s presence

Motivation and Emotions

• Motivation - process that initiates, guides, or maintains behavior

• Evolutionary theories 

  • Based on instincts - common behaviors common across a species and unlearned

• Biological theories

  • Drive reduction theory - physiological needs create a tense state called a drive that motivates the organism to find a way to satisfy the drive

    • Homeostasis focused 

  • Optimal arousal theory - we are motivated to maintain a certain level of arousal, each person has a different level of sensation seeking that satisfies them

  • Yerkes dodson law - performance improves with optimal arousal up to a certain point then performance decreases

• Cognitive and behavioral theories 

  • Incentive theories - pulled toward what motivates us through incentives

  • Intrinsic motivation - driven by an interest or enjoyment in a task or internal positive feelings

  • Extrinsic motivation - driven by a desire for external factors 

• Humanistic theories

  • Maslow hierarchy of needs - physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, self esteem, self actualization 

• Hunger and motivation

  • Lateral hypothalamus motivates us to feel hungry

  • Ventromedial hypothalamus motivates us to feel full 

  • Hunger is influenced by insulin, leptin, orexin, ghrelin, obestin 

Theories of Emotion

• Have various components

  • Physiological arousal 

  • Expressive behaviors

  • Consciously experienced thoughts and feelings  

• Emotion - a temporary experience with positive, negative, or mixed qualities, experienced with varying intensity as happening to self 

• James lange theory - stimulus arousal physiological response and emotion comes from our awareness of this response 

  • Physiological arousal and experience of emotion happen at the same time

  • Brain’s cortex and sympathetic nervous system are simultaneously activated 

• Schachter two factor theory - current theory, emotion comes from cognitive interpretation of our physiological arousal 

  • Expecting arousal - little emotion, told would do nothing, similar emotions to others around them 

Stress

• Occurs anytime we adapt and adjust to our environment

• Distress - stress that stems from acute anxiety or pressure

• Eustress - positive stress which results from striving toward a challenge 

• Hassles - minor, day to day stressors

• Uplifts - an activity or situation that makes a person feel good, protects a person from stress

• Approach approach conflicts - choose between 2 attractive options 

• Avoidance avoidance conflicts - choose between two disagreeable options 

• Approach avoidance - you find yourself in a situation that has both enjoyable and disagreeable consequences

• Double approach avoidance - choose between multiple alternatives, each has pleasurable and disagreeable aspects 

• General adaptation syndrome - hans style 3 stages

  • 1. Alarm - prepares body to react

  • 2. Resistance - does what it takes to get through the time or event

  • 3. Exhaustion - stress is gone and body can relax, depletes immune system 

• Tend and befriend - response to stress by reaching out to seek and give support, caused by different hormones and neurotransmitters released under stress in women so they tend to do this approach more

• Factors that enhance stress - unpredictability, pressure

• SRRS scale - measures stress 

• Coping - stressful attitudes have to do with the type of person you are

  • Type a 

  • Type b - easygoing 

  • Optimistic personality type - events are temporary, it's not your fault, will not have broader effects

  • Pessimistic - events as a direct implication about you, events having catastrophic events 

• Problem focused coping - deals directly with the root of the stress and tries to fix it for the future

• Emotion focused coping - helps to control your own emotions or negative feelings about the stressor 

• Maladaptive coping techniques - can come from any positive coping technique 

• Psychodynamic theory - freudian theory that tells what shaped our personalities 

  • Ego - executive mediator conscious mind 

  • Superego - internalized ideals preconscious mind

  • Id - unconscious psychic energy unconscious mind

Projective Tests

• Rorschach inkblot test - series of inkblot images in which the respondent is asked to identify what they see

• Thematic Apperception test (TAT) - series of ambiguous and vague pictures to which the respondent needs to add a story or information

• Strengths - open ended questions allow for interpretation and further discussion

• Weaknesses - interpretations may vary, less empirical and data driven than objective tests, less reliable 

Neo- Freudians

• Neo freudians agree with freud that: personality structure of id ego and superego, importance of unconscious, importance of childhood, anxiety and defense mechanisms 

  • Place more emphasis on the conscious mind in interpreting and coping and less of an emphasis on sex and aggression 

• Alfred Adler - personality rooted in inferiority complex which is cased by need to control own lives

  • Believed people wanted to move from inferiority to superiority

• Carl jung - early follower of freud, didn’t identify specific stages like freud did, split unconscious mind into personal and collective unconscious 

• Karen horney - first feminist personality psychologist, claimed men have womb envy, stronger emphasis on power of cultural factors on personality rather than instincts 

Humanistic perspective 

• Abraham maslow & hierarchy of needs 

  • Actualization is a need not a capacity 

  • Deficiency and growth orientation 

• Personality develops through an actualizing tendency that unfolds with each persons unique perception of the world

Cognitive Perspective

• Albert ellis - believed our personality is formed by the way we respond to situations and event, called his ABCs: Activating Event, Belief about that event, consequence of the event 

• Aaron beck - thought patterns lead to a feeling of learned helplessness

  • Focus on internal or external locus of control

Social Cognitive Theory

• Suggests behavior patterns are created by the interaction of our thoughts and what we learn through observation and conditioning, emphasizes how personality interacts with environment

• Assumed our traits interact with social context to produce our behavior which is predicted by behavior in past similar situations

• Albert bandura (bobo doll) - reciprocal determinism, behavior personal factors and environment contribute to self efficiency and self esteem

  • Self concept - how we view ourselves in relation to others

  • Self efficiency - our sense of competence and effectiveness

  • Self esteem - our feelings of high or low self worth

Sociocultural Perspective 

• Individualist - people concerned about own well beings 

• Collectivist - people concerned about well being of group 

• Trait perspective - focused on what traits are and patterns of predictable behavior 

  • Gordon allport - describe behavior in terms of fundamental traits which are made up of a person's characteristic behaviors and conscious motives 

    • Cardinal traits - dominate whole life

    • Central traits 

• Isabel briggs meyers and katherine briggs wrote meyers briggs personality inventory 

• Major trait personality inventories - objective tests, forces answer choices based on normed and standardized data to analyze results, more reliable than projective tests

Personality Tests 

• Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory - MMPI, objective tests, 567 true false questions, indications of habits strengths fears and mental problems 

• Big five personality test - extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability