Chapter 14 Flashcards
Social psychology
Scientific study of how peoples thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others
Persuasion
Changing attitudes
Attitudes
Evaluations of a person, behavior, belief,or concept
Central route processing
Occurs when a persuasive message is evaluated by thoughtful consideration of the issues and arguments used to persuade
Peripheral route processing
Occurs when a persuasive message is evaluated on the basis of irrelevant or extraneous factors
Cognitive dissonance
The mental conflict that occurs when a person holds two contradictory attitudes or thoughts
Festinger’s (1957) classic cognitive dissonance study: the boring task
explains how people are motivated to change their behaviors when they experience conflict between their thoughts or actions
Social cognition
The cognitive process by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves
Schemas
Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences
Impression formation
Process by which an individual organizes information about another person to form an overall impression of that person
Central traits
Major traits considered in forming impressions of others
Attribution processes
Understanding the causes of behavior
Attribution theory
Considers how we decide, what the specific causes of that behavior are
Situational causes of behavior
Causes of behavior that are external to a person
Dispositional causes of behavior
Causes of behavior brought about by a person’s traits or personality characteristics
Halo effect
Phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a person has positive traits is used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics
Assumed-similarity bias
Tendency to think of people as being similar to oneself even when meeting them for the first time
Self-Serving bias
Tendency to attribute success to personal factors and failure to factors outside oneself
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to over attribute others behavior and minimize the importance of situational causes
Behavioral economics
How individuals’ biases and irrationality affect economic
decisions
Social influence
Social groups and individuals exert pressure on an individual, either
deliberately or unintentionally
Conformity
A change in behavior or attitudes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or
standards of other people
Social supporter
Group member whose dissenting views make nonconformity to the
group easier
Group think
Type of thinking in which group members share such a strong motivation to achieve consensus
that they lose the ability to critically evaluate alternative points of view
Entrapment
Circumstance in which commitments to a failing point of view or course of
action are increased to justify investments in time and energy that have already been
made
Philip Zimbardo
Guards vs Prisoners experiment
Compliance
Submitting to Direct Social Pressure
Industrial/organizational psychology
Focuses on work- and job-related issues
Obedience
A change in behavior in response to the commands of others
Stereotype
Set of generalized beliefs and expectations about a specific group and its members
Prejudice
Negative (or positive) evaluation of a group and its members
Discrimination
Behavior directed toward individuals on the basis of their membership in a
particular group
Self-fulfilling prophecy:
expectations about the occurrence of a future event or behavior that act
to increase the likelihood the event or behavior will occur
Ethnocentric
Viewing the world from their own perspective and judging others in terms
of their group membership
Social neuroscience
Seeks to identify the neural basis of social behavior
Amygdala
Amygdala: Highly responsive to threatening, unusual, or highly arousing stimuli
The Implicit Association Test
Measure of prejudice that permits a more accurate assessment of people’s discrimination
between members of different groups
