Chapter 14: Social Psychology - Module 44: Attitudes and Social Cognition

Question 1

What do you call an “evaluation of a particular person, belief, or concept”?

Answer 1

Attitude. (p. 516)

Question 2

What are three factors that determine the ease at which a change in attitude happens?

Answer 2

1. Message source (eg. coming from a expert)
2. Characteristics of the message. (eg. Two-sided messages usually more effective).
3. Characteristics of the target. Eg. Intelligent people are more resistant to persuasion. (p. 517)

Question 3

What is cognitive dissonance?

Answer 3

When people hold two contradictory cognitions (thoughts or attitudes).

eg. a smoker believes smoking is bad for you.
(p. 517; diagram of methods of dissonance on p. 518)

Question 4

What do we call the way people understand and make sense of others and ourselves?

Answer 4

Social cognition. (p. 518)

Question 5

What is a schema?

Answer 5

Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences. (p. 518)

Eg. schema for “teacher” or “extravert” (p. 519)
[I tend to see Jungian archetypes as schemas]

Question 6

What are central traits?

Answer 6

Unusually important traits that help form an overall impression of someone. (p. 519)

Question 7

T/F: Our schemas are susceptible to errors.

Answer 7

True. Eg. Mood (p. 519)

Question 8

What does attribution theory seek to explain?

Answer 8

How we decide on a basis of a sample of a person’s behaviour, what the specific causes of that person’s behaviour are. (p. 520)

[that process I’m obsessed with, working backwards from just a limited knowledge of a person’s behaviour and trying to figure out what may be behind it, whether internal or external.]

Question 9

What is situational versus dispositional cause of behaviour?

Answer 9

Situational: Those brought about by something int he environment.
Dispositional: prompted by a person’s disposition r internal traits or personality. (p. 521)

Question 10

What is the halo effect attribution bias?

Answer 10

Initial understanding of a person that a persona has positive traits leads to infer other uniformly positive characteristics. (p. 521)

Question 11

What is assumed similarity attribution bias?

Answer 11

We assume someone is like us, even when we first meet them. Eg. an honest person is shocked when someone lies to them. (p. 521)

Question 12

What is the self-serving attribution bias?

Answer 12

Tendency to attribute successes to personal factors, and failures to factors outside our control. (p. 522)

Question 13

What is the fundamental attribution error/correspondence bias?

Answer 13

Tendency to over-attribute others’ behaviour to dispositional causes, and fail to recognize the significance of situational ones. (p. 522)