Attitudes, Group Processes, & Attraction

Question 1

What is an attitude?

Answer 1

Favorable or unfavorable evaluations of people, objects, and ideas. Exhibited in one’s beliefs, feelings, or intended behaviors.

Question 2

What is an explicit attitude?

Answer 2

Attitudes that we consciously endorse and can easily report.

Question 3

What is an implicit attitude?

Answer 3

Attitudes that are involuntary, uncontrollable, and at times unconscious.

Question 4

What is the implicit association test?

Answer 4

A measure within social psychology designed to detect the strength of a person’s automatic association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory.

Question 5

What are the ABCs of attitudes?

Answer 5

Affect (feelings)
Behaviors processes
Cognition (thoughts)

Theses ABCs of attitudes can be either positive or negative in response to a stimulus.

Question 6

Where do attitudes come from?

Answer 6

Attitudes come from affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes.

• Arise from learning (e.g., associations in classical conditioning, operant conditioning, social learning or expectations)
• Result from genetics (e.g., identical twins raised apart still tend to share attitudes and beliefs)

Question 7

How do we know what our attitudes are?

Answer 7

Cognitively-based attitudes: attitudes based primarily on one’s beliefs about the properties of an attitude object

Affectively-based attitudes: attitudes based more on feelings and values than on cognitions.

Behaviorally-based attitudes: attitudes based on observations of how one behaves towards an attitude object

Question 8

How stable are our attitudes?

Answer 8

Attitudes are very changeable, and usually change in response to social influence and other factors. However, the mutability of our attitudes and the behaviors we express in response to those attitudes can vary depending on what the content is.

Question 9

What is persuasive communication?

Answer 9

Communication advocating a particular side of an issue.

Question 10

Who is most persuadable?

Answer 10

People who are distracted, unengaged, and only thinking peripherally (not centrally; shallow processing).

Question 11

What reduces one’s susceptibility to persuasion?

Answer 11

1. Attitude inoculation - making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by initially exposing them to small does of the arguments against their own original position
2. Being aware of product placement (e.g., products at eye level or nearer to the cash register can persuade people to buy them more effectively)
3. Resisting peer pressure

Question 12

What are the routes that people tend to use to persuade others?

Answer 12

Fear appeal - emphasize harm physical or social consequences. Successful when fear is moderate and information provided on how to reduce fear in the ad.

Foot-in-the-door - agreeing to a small commitment frequently leads us to larger/more significant agreements; works through reciprocity

Question 13

What kind of persuasion strategy is being used in advertisements with scantily clad, sexy young people?

Answer 13

An affectively-based, emotional argument that is attempting to appeal to shallow processing. Causes a temporary attitude change.

Question 14

What kind of persuasive strategy is being used in advertisements that list many objective reasons why one candidate or product is the best?

Answer 14

A cognitively-based, rational argument that is attempting to appeal to deep processing. Causes a longer-lasting attitude change.

Question 15

When are these different routes to persuasion more vs. less successful?

Answer 15

Rational arguments – more successful when an attitude is primarily cognitively-based

Emotional arguments – more successful when an attitude is primarily affectively-based

Question 16

What makes someone more likely to be persuaded?

Answer 16

Personal relevance to the topic

The ability to pay attention to/process complicated or uncomplicated information about the topic

Question 17

What experiment showed how personal relevance of an argument influenced persuasive power?

Answer 17

When students were introduced to arguments (weak or poor) by either a prestigious or a non-expert speaker, they responded more to the argument that seemed both personally relevant and stronger. The prestige of the speaker was not necessarily important; personal relevance was a much better predictor of an argument’s success.

Question 18

What is Reactance Theory?

Answer 18

A motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavior freedoms.

• when freedom is threatened => people reduce reactance by performing behavior
• demonstrated in a study where graffiti was much higher on a wall where they were explicitly ordered not to vandalize it; just being asked “please do not write on this wall” did not garner anywhere near as much graffiti

Question 19

What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model?

Answer 19

1. Central Route – thoughtful w/ deep processing = lasting attitude change

• Must have both motivation and ability to actually process info
• High cognitive effort

2. Peripheral Route – thoughtless w/ shallow processing = temporary attitude change

• Used when we are distracted or uninvolved
• Low cognitive effort
• Focuses on surface cues like attractiveness and heuristic tactics

Question 20

Does subliminal priming “work”?

Answer 20

In general, no. Subliminal priming is only successful under the following conditions:

1. The room must be at a certain illumination
2. Viewer must be seated at a certain distance from the screen
3. There must be no distractors

Question 21

How do we measure people’s attitudes?

Answer 21

We assess their ABC attitudes.

• Look at affect (e.g., physiological responses like heart rate = fear)
• Look at behavior that result from affect (e.g., avoidance = fearful)
• Look at cognitions that results from a combination of affect and behavior (e.g., assuming that a snake is “dangerous!” = confirmation that affect/behavior is caused by fear)

Question 22

Do attitudes predict behaviors?

Answer 22

Despite intuitive beliefs that attitudes determine behavior, research indicates that attitudes are a poor predictor of behaviors.

• Correlations b/w attitudes and behaviors are rarely higher than r = 0.30
• Correlations b/w attitudes and behaviors are usually about r = 0.15

Question 23

When do attitudes correspond most strongly with behaviors?

Answer 23

Real vs. Expressed Attitudes – if people feel they have to show their true or hidden/implicit attitudes, they are more truthful. (Or: people’s expressed attitudes are about social acceptance or conformity, and thus not accurate.)

One instance vs. Aggregate – if the attitude/behavior pair is actively expressed through many areas of a person’s life, then it will be more accurate.

When attitudes are made salient – reminding people of their supposed beliefs makes them more aware of their attitudes.

When attitudes are specific to the behavior – if the question being asked is more accurate/related to the behavior itself, then there is better correspondence.

Question 24

What is attitude accessibility?

Answer 24

The strength of the association b/w an attitude object and a person’s evaluation of that object; measured by speed that they can report how they feel about the object

Question 25

What is the Theory of Planned Behavior?

Answer 25

Attitudes toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, together shape an individual’s behavioral intentions and behaviors.

1. Attitudes toward behavior/evaluations of behavior are based on their beliefs - must be SPECIFIC attitudes about SPECIFIC behaviors
2. Norms are perceptions on whether people are expected by their friends, family and the society to perform the recommended behavior
3. Perceived behavioral control - an individual’s perceived ease or difficulty of performing the particular behavior

Question 26

What is a group?

Answer 26

A group is 2 or more people who interact and are interdependent in the sense that their needs and goals cause them to influence each other. Includes the following aspects:

1. Interactions among group members
2. Independence
3. Group Identity
4. Group Structure

Question 27

Are two people a group?

Answer 27

Only if they both interact and are independent (i.e., influence needs, goals, and choices).

Question 28

Is a class a group?

Answer 28

No. Needs interdependency, interaction, shared identity, and influence.

Question 29

Is a sports team a group?

Answer 29

Yes.

Question 30

Is humanity a group?

Answer 30

No.

Question 31

What are some of the most important characteristics of groups?

Answer 31

1. Similarity – people are attracted to similar others
2. Group Cohesiveness – the more cohesive, the more likely group members will stay
3. Social Norms – violating norms results in pressure to conform
4. Social Roles – shared expectations in a group about how people are supposed to behave; roles are helpful but they have costs

Question 32

Why do people join groups?

Answer 32

People join groups for the following 3 reasons:

1. Provide information
   - Satisfy the need for accuracy (based on other’s people)
   - Informational social influence
2. Help us define our identity
   - Social Identity Theory
   - Need to feel good
   - Normative social influence
3. To get things done
   - Divides labor among members

Question 33

What makes groups more vs. less cohesive?

Answer 33

1. In social groups, they will are more cohesive if they have similar interests.
   Ex : homogenous group
2. In military or office settings, doing well on a task makes groups more cohesive.

Question 34

How we decide what groups to join?

Answer 34

Joining a groups satisfies the following 3 areas:

1. Provide information - satisfies need for accuracy based on informational social influence
2. Help us define our identity - social identity theory, satisfies need to feel good based on normative social influence
3. To get things done - divides the labor

Question 35

What do groups do to our attitudes?

Answer 35

Groups that are important to us can serve as sources of information about what is the right or wrong attitude. People will tend to follow attitudes/info/etc that reflects those that their group also identifies with.

• “Party-over-policy” Effect: when Democratic and Republican participants read descriptions of a policy in a news article (that was the same policy, but framed as proposed from their own vs. opposite party), they selected their own.
• In addition, they endorsed their own party’s view and devalued the opposite irrespective of what the policy was.

Question 36

When groups of people hold similar attitudes, what happens when they discuss that attitude?

Answer 36

Their views become more extreme. If in a group, attitudes become more polarized and move farther away from the opinion of their opponents.

Question 37

Are (more than) two heads better than one?

Answer 37

Performance in group settings varies according to the type of task. If the group causes more or less arousal, it can massively impact performance. For example:

1. Easy/well-learned task -> dominant response is correct and we do better
2. Difficult task -> dominant response is often wrong and we do worse

Social facilitation strengths the dominant/most likely response in the presence of others. As a result, we are more likely to perform the dominant response if we are in a group setting. This is because of 3 factors:

1. Alertness (more aware of ourselves/group)
2. Evaluation Apprehension (more awareness that we will be evaluated poorly)
3. Distraction-Conflict (distracted by more people around us)

Question 38

Are groups wiser than individuals?

Answer 38

Only under certain conditions are groups wiser than individuals. Those conditions are:

1. The group relies on the person w/ the most expertise to guide them
2. The group is motivated to search for the answer that is best for the entire group and not just for themselves
3. The individuals in the group make independent errors (or errors are distributed to average out; some members will overestimate about why to make a decision and others will overestimate, but the decision itself should reflect the whole group)

Question 39

What is the independence of errors?

Answer 39

If you ask people to provide their estimate of some outcome:

Some will overestimate
Some will underestimate
If averaged across all these different estimates, the result should be close to the actual outcome

Question 40

What do groups do to individual performance?

Answer 40

Groups can cause individual performance to decrease or increase in response to the type of task and the context of the group actions.

1. Simple task -> impairs performance
2. Complex task -> enhances performance

Question 41

When do groups improve individual performance?

Answer 41

Evaluation by group - Social facilitation → Arousal → Enhanced performance on simple tasks

Question 42

When do groups harm individual performance?

Answer 42

No evaluation by group - Social Loafing → Relaxation → Impaired performance on simple tasks

Question 43

Do some groups of people tend to slack off more in group settings? Who?

Answer 43

Yes. These people are called social loafers.

Question 44

What is social loafing?

Answer 44

The tendency for people to relax in group settings and when their individual performance is not being or cannot be evaluated.

• will do worse on simple tasks but BETTER on more complex tasks

Question 45

Why do groups affect individual performance?

Answer 45

The more people in a group causes evaluation apprehension, or the fear of being evaluated poorly by others.

Question 46

What is social facilitation?

Answer 46

A theory that the presence of others strengths the dominant (i.e., more likely) response.

1. Simple task -> dominant response is correct and we do better
2. Difficult task -> dominant response is wrong and we do worse

• Arousal activates the dominant response
• We are more aroused in the presence of others
• As a result, our performance is more task-sensitive

Question 47

What is process loss?

Answer 47

Any aspect of group interaction that inhibits good problem-solving.

Question 48

How is process loss avoided?

Answer 48

1. Assign each person different responsibilities

2. Take time to discuss unshared ideas

Question 49

What is transactive memory?

Answer 49

The combined memory of two people that is more efficient than the memory of either individual alone.

Question 50

What happens when group members fails to share unique info?

Answer 50

1. Groups focus on the info they share and ignore facts known only to some members of the group
2. This makes them more blindsighted to outside info
3. In one study, group members who all received the same info packet about a potential political candidate all selected the same person. Under a second condition, a group was exposed to different packets that covered many different types of info about the candidate, which made them better able to evaluate them.

Question 51

What is groupthink?

Answer 51

A kind of thinking in which maintaining group cohesiveness and solidarity is more important than considering the facts in a realistic manner. Caused by:

• Highly cohesive group
• Group isolation
• High stress situation
• Poor decision-making procedures in place
• A directive leader

Question 52

How do we avoid groupthink?

Answer 52

Remain impartial
Seek outside opinions
Create subgroups
Seek anonymous opinions

Question 53

When do groups perpetrate evil?

Answer 53

When members experience deindividuation, or the loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people can’t be identified. Deindividuation is likely to occur when:

1. There is physical anonymity
2. When the group size is large
3. When there are historical similarities among members
4. When there is diminished self-awareness
5. When there is no personal accountability
6. There is increased obedience to group norms

Question 54

Why do people sometimes do things when they are in a group setting that they wouldn’t do when they are alone?

Answer 54

1. The group they belong to seems highly cohesive
2. Group Isolation or no outside influences impact the group’s ideas
3. Situation is high stress
4. There are poor decision-making procedures in place
5. Leader is directive (giving strict and inflexible orders)

Question 55

Why do people who perpetrate atrocities wear masks / hoods?

Answer 55

Wearing a mask or hood increases the sense of deindividuation, and inspires feelings of less personal accountability and greater obedience to a group norm as opposed to a person belief/attitude/etc.

Question 56

What is deindividuation?

Answer 56

The loosening of normal constraints on behavior when people can’t be identified.

Question 57

How do we choose who to date?

Answer 57

We use the following factors:

1. Physical attractiveness
2. Proximity
3. Familiarity
4. Similarity
5. Reciprocity
6. Secrecy

Question 58

What are the theories involved in how we choose to date?

Answer 58

1. Marketplace theory (women value status, men value attraction)
2. Evolutionary theory [ female reproductive success depends on a good provider (status = more resources), male reproductive success depends on having frequent pairings (youth=health) ]
3. Interdependence theory (based on rewards and costs, people try to max rewards and minimize costs; for long term relationships it includes investment factor as well)
4. Equity theory (determined by the ratio of benefits to contributions; both distressed when under or over-benefited)

Question 59

What makes us attracted to other people?

Answer 59

Large Eyes 
Small Nose 
Small chin
Prominent cheekbones 
High eyebrows 
Large pupils 
Big smile
Baby-face look - large head, large curved forehead, low facial features, round cheeks, small chin

Question 60

What is the mere exposure effect?

Answer 60

The finding that the more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more apt we are to like it. Drives the propinquity/proximity effect.

Question 61

What study showed the propinquity effect?

Answer 61

When graduate students were asked to assess how many friends they had in their graduate building, they were more likely to have friends and other close relationships if they lived neared to others. The farther away they lived, the less likely they were to have friends.

Question 62

How do we form close relationships?

Answer 62

We base it on our prior attachments to our caregivers, as well as other relationships we created since then. These prior relationships affect communication in a relationship, and secure is the most common type at 56% of the population. (Avoidant = 25%, Anxious = 19%)

• Research says attachment style is flexible and can change over time
• Attachment type is also continuous and a person can show more than one type in different contexts

In addition, we also judge the quality of our close relationships using social exchange/interdependence theory. This is based on the assumption that partners exchange rewards and costs, and that they try to maximize rewards and minimize costs.

Question 63

What is the evolutionary approach to mate selection?

Answer 63

A theory that men and women are attracted to different characteristics in each other.

Men - attracted to physical appearance; threatened by sexual infidelity
Women - attracted to men’s resources; threatened by emotional infidelity

Question 64

What is attachment theory?

Answer 64

Attachment theory is a concept in developmental psychology that concerns the importance of “attachment” in regards to personal development. Specifically, it makes the claim that the ability for an individual to form an emotional and physical “attachment” to another person gives a sense of stability and security necessary to take risks, branch out, and grow and develop as a personality.

Question 65

What are the common attachment styles?

Answer 65

Secure - easy to get close to others, no worrying about abandonment

a. Happy, friendly, trusting relationships
b. Coping strategy: talk to partners to resolve conflict
c. Consistent/responsive caregiver

Avoidant - uncomfortable getting close, fear of intimacy

a. Relatively brief sexual encounters
b. Coping strategy: distancing
c. Negligent caregiver

Anxious/Ambivalent - seek intimacy but worry that others won’t reciprocate or stay

a. Obsession, jealousy, love at first sight
b. Coping strategy: rumination
c. Erratic caregiver

Question 66

How do our attachment styles affect our relationships?

Answer 66

They affect the strength/kind of communication we adopt, as well as how much we communicate. They also express themselves in how comfortable we feel with being close to others.

Question 67

Do opposites attract?

Answer 67

Opposites attract in one-night stands, but there is no evidence that this applies to long-lasting romantic attraction.

Question 68

What is love?

Answer 68

Love is divided into 2 broad categories:

Companionate Love - intimacy and affection, but not passion or arousal
Passionate Love - longing and arousal; more romantic in nature

Question 69

What are the types of love?

Answer 69

1. Romantic - Intimacy + passion
2. Consummate - Intimacy + passion + commitment
3. Companionate - Intimacy + Commitment

Question 70

What does the research tell us about romantic break-ups?

Answer 70

1. American divorce rate is around 50%
2. Some estimate that nearly ⅔ of all current first marriages will end
3. Other romantic relationships (over 99%) also end

Question 71

What are the main reasons relationships fail?

Answer 71

There are 2 dimensions:

Active vs. Passive
Constructive vs. Destructive

There are 4 types of behaviors in troubled relationships:

1. Exit - harming or terminating relationship
2. Voice - trying to improve conditions
3. Loyalty - optimistically waiting for improvement
4. Neglect - Allowing conditions to deteriorate

Question 72

What is social exchange theory?

Answer 72

Also called interdependence theory. Rewards and costs that partners exchange; assumes that people try to maximize rewards and minimize costs.

• Relationship satisfaction is determined by rewards and costs, comparison levels, and comparisons levels for alternatives to the relationship.
• Comparison: the quality of outcomes a person believes he or she believes; reflects past relationships and our own beliefs about what constitutes an acceptable relationship
• Comparison Level for Alternatives: assessing how our relationship compares to others than are available

Question 73

What is the investment model of relationships?

Answer 73

An expanded interdependence theory that includes long-lasting relationships, or greater possible investments. Commitment is affected by satisfaction, potential alternatives, and investment.

Satisfaction results from:

• Costs
• Rewards
• Comparison Level (CL): varies among individuals, perception of rewards/costs you deserve in a relationship

Key areas are:

• Commitment to relationship
• Quality alternatives
• Investment size (how long w/ the partner, how much money spent on partner, etc.)
• Satisfaction

Question 74

What is equity theory?

Answer 74

Relationship satisfaction is determined by the ratio of benefits to contributions. Contributions can be positive or negative. There are two types:

1. Exchange relationships - relationships governed by the need for equity
2. Communal relationships - relationships were the primary concern being responsive to the other person’s needs

Question 75

Describe equitable vs. inequitable relationship makeup.

Answer 75

Your benefits / your contributions = Partner’s benefits / partner’s contributions

50/100 = 50/100
70/700 = 30/100
30/100 = 70/100

Both under-benefited and over-benefited individuals feel distress in a relationship.

Question 76

How has social media and technology (e.g., online dating) affected the way we develop and maintain relationships?

Answer 76

1. Basic determinants of attraction such as propinquity, similarity, and familiarity manifest differently when using technologies
2. Technology expands the dating pool and the amount of potential mates
3. Risks include unproven compatibility algorithms and deceptive profiles/photos