Social Psychology Reading: Ch 14

Social Psychology → broad feild devoted to studying the way people relate each other

Social Cognition → memory and biases, helps explain how people think about themselves and others

• people go through their daily lives like scientists, constantly gathering data and making predictions about what will happen next so they can act accordingly

Attitude → a set of beliefs and feelings

Mere Exposure Effect → the more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it

Centeral Route of Perusasion → deeply processing the content of the message

Peripheral Route of Persuasion → involves other aspects of the message including the characterisitcs of the person imparting the message

Relationship Between Attitudes and Behavior(1934)- Richard LaPiere

• LaPiere traveled through the west coast with an asian couple, visiting hotels and resturants

• during this time prejudice and discrimination against asians was pervasive

• On only one ocassion, the couple was treated poorly because of their race

• When LaPiere called the establishments and asked about their attitudes towards asians:

  • over 90% of establishments said that they would not serve asians

Cognitive Dissonance Theory → based on the idea that people are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviors and when they do not they experience unpleasent mental tension or dissonance

Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith(1950’s)

• participants in the study were told to preform a boring task

• they then had to tell the next participant(confederate) that they enjoyed the task

• In one study, the participants were payed $1 to lie

• In the other study, participants were payed $20 to lie

• subjects who were payed $1 had significantly more postitive attitudes towards the experiment

Foot-In-The-Door Policy → if you can get someone to agree to a small request then they are more likley to agree to a larger request later

Door-In-The-Face Strategy → argues that after people refuse a large request, they will look more favorable upon a follow-up request

Norms of Reciprocity → the tendenciy to think that if someone does something nice for you, then you ought to do something nice in return

Attribution Theory → explains how people determine the cause of what they observe

Person-stable Attribution → when you beleive that someone always does something

Person-unstable Attribution → whn you believe that someone doesn’t usually do somethin

Harold Kelley

• Consistency → how similarly the individuals act in the same situation over time

  • extremley useful when determining whether to make a stable or unstable attribution

• Distinctiveness → how similar this situation is to other situations

• Consensus → consider how others in the same situatio have responded

  • determines wether to make a person or situation attribution

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy → certain ideas or prejudices about other people before you even meet them that can influence the way others behave

Robert Rosenthal & Lenore Jacobson’s(1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom”

• administered a test to elementary school children

  • could identify which children were on the verge of significant academic growth

• standard IQ test

• chose some students from the test and told their teachers that they were ready for intellectual progress

• made kids take another IQ test at the end of the year

  • students that “had higher IQs” had actually outpreformed their peers

Fundemental Attribution Error → when looking at the behavior of others, people tend to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors

• less likley to happen in collectivist cultures than individualistic cultures

Individualistic cultures → the importance and uniqueness of the individual is stressed

Collectivist cultures → a person’s link to various groups such as family or company is stressed

False-Consensus effect → the tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them

Self-Serving Bias → the tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones

Just-world Bias → people evidence bias toward thinking that bad things happent to bad people

Stereotypes → the ideas you hold about other members in different groups and what they are like

• these ideas may influence how you interact with these groups

Prejudice → undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people

Ethnocentrism → the belief that one’s culture is superior to others

Discrimination → a mix of prejudice (attittude) with an action against another or a group

In-Group → members of your own group

Out-Group → members of other groups

Contact Theory → contact betweem hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if the groups are made to work toward a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all

• also known as Superordinate Goals

Muzafer Sherif(1966)

• brought boys to a summer camp and seperated them into 2 groups

• neither group knew about the other and boys got along well

• started participating in competitions to create conflict between groups

• used contact theory to decrease contact

Instrumental Agression → when the aggressive act is intended to secure a particular end

Hostile Aggression → has no clear purpose

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis → feelings of frustration makes agression more likley

Prosocial Behavior → factors that make people more likley to help one another

Bystander Intervention → the conditons under which people nearby are more and less likley to help somoeon in trouble

John Darley and Bibb Latane

Bystander effect → the larger the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likley any one is to intervene

Diffusion of responsibility → the larger the group of people who witness the problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help

Pluralistic Ignorance → people seem to decide what constitutes apporpriate behavior in a situation by looking to others

Similarity → drawn to people who are similar to you

Proximity → nearness

Reciprocal Liking → the person must like you back and share feelings for your own feelings to grow

Self-disclosure → when one shares a piece of personal information with another

• close and intimate relatioships need this to thrive

Social Facilitation → people preform better in front of an audience than they do when they are alone

Social Impairment → when being watched while preforming a difficult task, instead of a simple well-practiced one, it hurts preformance

Conformity → the tendency og people to go along with the views or actions of others

Solomon Asch(1951)

• brought participants into a room and had them do a line test

• the confederates would give an incorrect answer

• the participant would typically feel pressured to go with the group even though they knew they were wrong

Obedience studies

• Stanley Millgram(1974)

  • how far are participants willing to go to follow orders

  • electric shock machine

Social Loafing → phenomenon when individuals do not put as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone

Group Polorization → the tendency for groups to make more extreme decisions then they would make individualy

Groupthink → the tendency for some groups to make bad decisions

• occurs when members supress their reservations about the ideas supported by the group

Deindividualization → occurs when people get swept up in a group and do things that they would never have done on their own

• looting, riots

Phillip Zimbardo’s prison experiment