PSYC 102 Midterm 1 Flashcards
Attitudes + 3 Components of Attitudes
Attitudes: positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought (people, products, social issues, groups, institutions)
- Cognitive Component: beliefs, idea
- Affective Component: emotions, feelings
- Behavioral Component: predisposition to act
When are attitudes more likely to predict behavior?
Attitude strength
Attitude accessibility - come to mind easily
Attitude ambivalence
Attitudes don’t always predict behavior: although 90% of American hotels rejected a Chinese couple over the phone revealing their attitude, when they had came in person earlier their behavior contradicted this & they served them
Behavior can shape attitude as well, bidirectional correlation, & is shaped by our subjective perceptions of how others expect us to behave considering situational constraints (ex. Weed with Grandma or friends)
Cognitive Dissonance + Lab
Cognitive Dissonance Theory: cognitive dissonance exists when related cognitions or a behavior are inconsistent/contradictory leads to an attitude change; we alter our attitudes in order to reduce or eliminate the unpleasant state of tension between 2 or more inconsistent cognitive thoughts in 3 ways:
* Change Cognition of A(nice person->bad person) or B(stole something->rumor)
* Introduce a new cognition(was starving)
Festinger & Carlsmith: High dissonance about counter attitudinal behavior causes attitude change as boring task is rated as more enjoyable by the high dissonance subjects=those who had to lie for less $ had less external justification so convinced themselves they enjoyed the task to make telling others it was fun less tension filled
Persuasion + 5 Factors
Persuasion: an attempt to influence a person’s beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviors.
1. Source Factors (who): credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, likability, attractiveness, similarity
2. Characteristics of the Messenger: safeguard against being persuaded by famous attractive, high credibility, similar to us people by distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate authorities
3. Message Factors (what): fear vs logic appeal, 1-sided (pros) vs 2-sided (pros, refute cons, refute other pros) argument, repetition
Channel Factors (by what means): in person, TV, internet, radio (audio), text message/phone call
Receiver Factors (to whom): personality, expectations, existing attitude strength, existing knowledge
5 Persuasion Techniques
- Reciprocity: a mutual exchange of privileges; 1st to give, personalized, unexpected (ex. As mints increase, tip increases as well)
- Foot-in-the-Door: follow a small reasonable request with a larger request (consistency)
- Door-in-the-Face: starting with a large request (that you know won’t likely be granted) and then following with a smaller request
- LowBall: providing an attractive offer then changing the agreement to be something that is not as attractive (but originally intended)
- But-you-are-free: giving them the sense that they’re free to choose whether to perform the act, doubling odds of compliance to a request, so people are convinced that they weren’t pressured & made the choice on their own
Conformity & Why Do People Conform?
Conformity: Occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure, such as fashion, lining up for the bus, etc. tendency of people to alter their behavior as a result of group pressure, go along to get along horizontal group influence from peers
Cultural Influence: Asians (collectivist) & those with low self esteem are more likely conform than Americans (individualist)
Normative Influence: people conform to social norms for fear of negative consequences
Informational Influence: people look to others for guidance about how to behave when in ambiguous situations
One process that can make us more vulnerable to conformity is deindividuation
Solomon Asch Studies
Studied social factors that influence how likely we are to conform, only 1 true participant who thinks everybody is a participant & 7 confederates must estimate which bar is the same in length out of 3 options
Results: people conformed 37% of the time, 13 never conformed, 14 conformed on more than ½ of the trials
Factors Associated:
Group Unanimity: if someone breaks unanimity easier to not conform
Group Size: if group is very small, ie 1 person, easier to not conform
Milgram Study
Background: why would regular German citizens commit atrocious acts, could Americans do the same.
Setup: purpose of lab disguised as studying the effects of punishment on learning, participant is teacher, confederate is student strapped & pushes button to show choice who claims he has a heart condition, and experimenter is authoritative. Paired-associate task, read a long list of word pairs, ex. Strong-arm, then the teacher presents the first word in pair & asks them to select the second word from a list of 4. With each wrong answer, move up one step on shock generator, Slight, Moderate, Danger severe shock, XXX, told they will be painful but cause no tissue damage. Told by experimenter to continue.
Predictions: most would stop at 150V, only 0.1% the pathological fringe would go to 450V, committed the fundamental attribution error, underestimated impact of situation on participant’s behavior
Results: most went up to 150V, over 62% administered lethal shocks when given orders, shifting the responsibility, obedience, despite the suffering of the learner. Some participants showed uncontrollable tics, fits of nervous laughter, some sadistic, asked begged to stop
Enduring Lessons: power of authority figures is greater than almost anyone had imagined, obedience not typically from sadism. Power of the fundamental attribution error, underestimating situational influences.
3 Key Factors with Obedience to Authority in Milgram Study
- Psychological distance between teacher & experimenter, greater distance less obedience (ex. Orders through telephone)
- Psychological/physical distance between teacher & learner, greater distance less obedience (ex. Directing orders to someone else)
- The credibility of the lab & experimenter, greater credibility greater obedience
Obedience
Following orders from a vertical group influence from our leaders, essential for society to run smoothly but has consequences when people stop asking questions about why they’re behaving as others want them to
Stanford Prison Experiment
Studying if dehumanizing conditions of prisons stem from people’s personalities or the roles they’re required to adopt, prisoner vs guard carry powerful expectations that may generate self-fulfilling prophecies, 1-2 weeks, randomly assigned 24 male undergraduates, prescreened for normal adjustment using personality tests
High realism: complete jail cells, actual officers arrested students from their residences, forced to dress according to their roles, prisoners only referred by numbers
Day 1: guards began to treat prisoners cruelly & subject them to harsh/humiliating punishments
Day 2: prisoner rebellion quashed, guards became increasingly sadistic, prisoners displayed signs of emotional disturbance, 2 released as they appeared on verge of a psychological breakdown, 1 hunger strike
Day 6: ended study 8 days early, prisoners relieved, guards disappointed
Conclusion: once assigned roles that de-emphasized their individuality, they adopted their designed roles more easily
Deindividuation
Losing one’s sense of personal identity in a group, the tendency of people to engage in atypical behavior when stripped of their usual identities, we become
* More vulnerable to social influences
* More like a member of a group less an individual
* Increases anonymity, arousal & antisocial behavior
* Decreases responsibility
* Outward focused, less inward focused
* Uniforms enhance group identity → incr. anonymity & decr. responsibility
Diener Halloween Study
27 homes have a bowl of candy & money, told to only take 1
* ½ Anonymous - left alone immediately after instructions: alone 21, group 57, model stole 83, honest model 11
* ½ Non-Anonymous - asked for identity: alone 7.5, group 21, model stole 67, honest model 9
Conclusion: the power of anonymity, deinviduation in a group & conforming to the model’s behavior
Groupthink
An emphasis on group unanimity at the expense of critical thinking, relying on common knowledge, info group members share, rather than unique knowledge → no net gain in new info
Stereotypes vs Prejudice vs Discrimination
Stereotypes: a generalization about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members, seeds for prejudice to grow, misleads, unwilling to modify in the light of disconfirming evidence/confirmation bias, spread misinformation, affects split-second interpretations of ambiguous stimuli
Prejudice: a hostile or negative attitude (affective) toward people in a distinguishable group based solely on their membership in that group before evaluating all the evidence
Discrimination: unjustified negative or harmful action/treatment toward a member of a group simply because of his/her membership in that group, can be subtle yet powerful
3 Causes of Prejudice
Causes:
* Social Categorization: Us vs Them: May be a evolutionary adaptation for disease avoidance by reducing exposure to new diseases, different regions have different customs related to disease transmission
* In Group Bias: tendency to evaluate in-group members more positively than out-group members may be reinforced by our tendency to turn off compassion toward out-group members (ex. Olympics, own country has better athletes)
* * In-Group: a social group to which a person belongs & psychologically identifies as being a member
* * Out-Group: a social group with which an individual does not identify
- Studies: empathy linked strongly to race, willing to put own’s group above the other at the expense of all, priming→identifying more positive acts
- Social Identity: stronger identification with a group, the strong in-group bias, stronger out-group discrimination
- Self Esteem: control groups allowed to discriminate all groups saw no changes in self-esteem opposed to other teams who could only discriminate the opposite team, medical conditions
* Out-Group Homogeneity: tendency to view all people outside of our group as highly similar
5 Factors of Prejudice
- Adaptive Conservatism: evolutionary principle that creates a predisposition toward distrusting anything or anyone unfamiliar or different
- Scapegoat Hypothesis: need to blame other groups for our misfortunes, competition over scarce resources.
- Just-World Hypothesis “Blaming the Victim”: deep-seated need to perceive the world as fair, leads us to place blame on groups that are in a one-down position that they are responsible for their plights.
- Conformity to social norms for social approval
- Individual Differences: authoritarian personality traits, strong need to pigeon-hole, extrinsic religiosity (religion as a means to an end) are prone to high levels of prejudice
Effects of Prejudice, Stereotypes & Discrimination
Psychological Consequences: perceptions of discrimination related to symptoms of depression
Behavioural Consequences:
Self Fulfilling Prophecy: I think A is stupid → I treat A as stupid → A perceives my behavior → Stress from perception makes A speak less intelligently → My beliefs are concerned → I think A is stupid…
Ex. behaviors of interviewer having biggest impact on participant
Stereotype Threat: the apprehension or fear by members of a minority group that they might behave in a manner that confirms an existing stereotype.
* A form of self-fulfilling prophecy with larger effect when minority status is more salient
Ex. White vs Black results when told it is an IQ test vs Psyc test
Stereotype Boost/Lift: the expectation by members of a minority group that they should behave in a manner that confirms an existing stereotype
Research Evidence of Covert Discrimination in Canada
Canadian Teacher Candidates prejudice for the capabilities of Aboriginal, ESL vs white students based on last names. Grade 7 records compared to recommendations for advanced, standard & remedial academic programs.
Creating Discrimination using Minimal Intergroup Paradigm: creating groups based on arbitrary differences. Ex. Blue eye vs brown eye, one group become arrogant & condescending, the other submissive & insecure
Health discrimination in looking for housing. Housing vacancies decrease when health conditions are mentioned.
4 Attributions
Causal Attributions: how one explains the behaviors/circumstances of another person (or group)
* Dispositional Influences: enduring characteristics of the person, more prone when explaining others’ behavior
* Situational Influences: contextual, environmental, more prone when explaining our own behavior
Just-World Attributions: the world is a fair place, thus the behaviors/circumstances of a person/group is their fault & what they deserve
Fundamental Attribution Error: tendency to overestimate the dispositional causes of other people’s behavior, underestimate situational influences
* Less likely to occur if we have been in the situation ourselves or encouraged to feel empathy
* Associated to cultural factors, less for Japanese & Chinese when viewing behaviors within a context, more for American
Ultimate Attribution Error: when in-group members attribute:
* Negative outgroup behavior to dispositional causes
* Positive outgroup behavior to situational factors, special case, luck
3 Remedies to Prejudice
Robbers Cave Study - engage prejudiced groups in activities that require cooperation to achieve an overarching goal lowers hostility → encourage people to work toward a shared higher purpose so no longer feel as members of separate groups, but a larger inclusive group
Jigsaw Classrooms: students cooperate to assemble the pieces into an integrated lesson significantly decreases racial prejudice
Ideal Conditions: groups should cooperate toward shared goals, contact should be enjoyable, groups should be of roughly equal status, group members should disconfirm the other group’s negative stereotypes, have potential to become friends
Cross-Sectional Design vs Longitudinal Design
Cross-sectional Design: researchers examine people of different ages at a single point in time
* Cons: don’t control cohort effects: effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period, cohorts, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period. Aging may not have any effects, but everything to do with effects of the era in which they grew up
* Best used when comparing changes in smaller age differences
Longitudinal Design: research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time
* Cons: costly, time consuming, attrition (participants or researchers dropping out), selective attrition (dropout is not random, disproportionately from definable group)
* Best used for comparing changes in longer periods of time for multiple cohorts (eliminates cohort effect), shorter periods would be problematic as tests could be remembered affecting results & not experimental designs/no cause-&-effect relationships
Post Hoc Fallacy & Direction of Human Development Influences
Post Hoc Fallacy: false assumption that because one event occurred before another event, it must have caused that event
Human developmental influences are bidirectional, keep in mind of unidirectional explanations (<->)
* Children’s experiences influence their development & their development also influences their experiences
* Parent’s influence their child’s behavior, feeds back to influences their parents, the older the more active role in altering/selecting their environments
Nature, Nurture or Both?
Confounding Variables: genetic, environmental & social variables can confound (ex. Parents who speak a lot to children produce children with large vocabularies which could be a product of the environment or parental genetics)
Gene-Environment Interaction: situation in which the effects of genes depend on the environment in which they’re expressed (ex. Although participants all had a gene prone to committing violence, only those who were exposed to a specific environmental factor exhibited this behavior)
Nature via Nurture: tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out & create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions (ex. Genetically fearful kids seek safer environments can be seen as safe environment making kids more fearful)
Gene Expression: activation or deactivation of games by environmental experiences throughout development (ex. Genetic predisposition to anxiety active when in stressful events)
Imprinting
Forging strong bonds with those who tend to them shortly after birth during sensitive periods
Harlow’s Study
Assumption that infant bond to those who provide them with milk & food through reinforcement
Harlow’s Study of Attachment: Rhesus monkey’s separated from mothers from birth & milked from angular Wire Mom & round warm lit Terry Cloth Mom. Spent most of its time with terry cloth mom & when exposed to scary stimulus, toy robot playing a drum, more likely to run to cloth mother & cling for reassurance.
Results: love is not only based on providing physical needs, tactile comfort & other non-physical needs for attachment
**Contact Comfort: **positive emotions afforded by touch
