Psych Unit 13

Question 1

Attribution

Answer 1

How we make judgments about causes of behavior
ex: why did someone hold the door for me?
ex: why did someone cut me off in traffic

*looking at causes of behaviors and making judgments based off that

Question 2

Dispositional Attribution

Answer 2

behavior due to internal factors
- personality
- what kind of person they are
- skill level

Question 3

Situational Attribution

Answer 3

behavior due to external factors
- environment
- circumstances (challenges)

Question 4

Correspondence Bias

Answer 4

tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors

ex: tennis team loses in tournament
- think they lost because of dispositional factors
- they didn’t work hard enough
- they aren’t good enough

Question 5

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 5

similar to correspondence bias
- correspondence bias takes some situational factors into account – Fundamental Attribution DOES NOT

• more extreme
• ONLY looks at DISPOSITIONAL FACTORS

Question 6

Actor-Observer Bias

Answer 6

you use dispositional factors to explain a situation

ex: the actor (you) is a tennis player and the observer (other) is tennis player too
- actor thinks the other player didn’t do well because of dispositional factors
- actor think they didn’t do well because of situational factors

Question 7

Self-Serving Bias

Answer 7

we attribute our own success to dispositional factors
ex: I did well on my exam because I’m smart

we attribute our failures to situational factors:
ex: I did badly on my exam because the room was loud

Question 8

Group-Serving Bias

Answer 8

when the group does well it’s because of dispositional factors

when the group does badly, it’s because of situational factors

Question 9

Just-World Belief

Answer 9

Idea that the world is a just place
- good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people

ex: victim blaming – we tell rape victims that they got raped because of how they acted/dressed

Question 10

Attitudes

Answer 10

thinking, beliefs
- how we evaluate people’s behaviors

where do attitudes come from:
- social groups – we share attitudes with group members so we can stay in the group and feel included
- operant conditioning
- genetic influences

Question 11

Cognitive Dissonance

Answer 11

the tension you feel when you have two ideas that contradict each other

ex: smoking is bad for you, but I smoke

• something you believe isn’t matching reality
• can’t stay in cognitive dissonance for very long

Question 12

Dissonance Reduction

Answer 12

• because you can’t stay in cognitive dissonance, you do dissonance reduction
• you want to match your belief to reality

ex: family friend commits a crime
- we change our attitude — we think there’s a lot of good evidence, he must’ve done the crime
- now we think family friend is bad

OR:
- instead we deny reality
- the prosecutors made a mistake

Question 13

Elaboration Likelihood Model

Answer 13

2 routes to change someone’s attitude: central route and peripheral route

• a person’s motivation influences which route they pick

Question 14

Central Route

Answer 14

consider arguments that are being made carefully and thoughtfully

• think through arguments carefully
• looking at quality of argument
• more resistant to other people’s arguments trying to persuade you
• used more when you already are educated on the topic

problem: this method takes too long

Question 15

Peripheral Route

Answer 15

• indirect route
• evaluate what people are telling you
• fewer arguments
• best if the message is given by someone you trust
• less attention required

We can use heuristics (rule of thumb)
- allows us to make judgments quickly without having to think much
- helpful for survival

Ex: having a popular athlete advertise shoes – we want to buy them now

Question 16

Fear Appeals

Answer 16

messages that try to get people scared by talking about potential danger and harm

*fear appeals are NOT effective because they emphasize negative consequences and people don’t care

Question 17

How easily are attitudes changed? Nyhan Study

Answer 17

studied anti-vaxx parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their kids

IV: types of info
- Disease risk
- Autism correction
- Narrative danger
- Disease images

DV: rating how likley would you be to vaccinate a future child

Results - belief perseverance – people cling to their initial belief even though they learned more that contradicted their initial belief

Backfire Effect: rejecting the evidence that contradicts our initial belief – hold our initial belief stronger

Question 18

Prejudice

Answer 18

Prejudice = attitude or prejudgement about others (usually negative)

Question 19

Stereotype

Answer 19

Stereotypes = simplified sets of traits associated with group membership

Question 20

Confirmation Bias effect on Stereotyping

Answer 20

Looking for evidence that confirms our existing beliefs

See this in social media – getting news from Instagram instead of the actual news

The algorithm confirms your existing beliefs about politics, so you only see ideas about politics that you already agree with

Ex: all teens are bad drivers

Question 21

Why we stereotype

Answer 21

Comes from our tendency to categorizing and generalizing

7-11 years old we start to categorize things (collecting cars or stamps)

Categories contain accurate information but become inaccurate by holding this info (confirmation bias comes in here)

Question 22

In-Group Favoritism

Answer 22

In-group favoritism:
- We tend to favor people in our own group
- We tend to view people outside of the group as negative
- Evolutionary bias (us vs. them)

Robert’s Cave Experiment:
- Assigned boys to two groups at summer camp: either Rattlers or Eagles
- Groups were separated - no informed consent was given
- Spent time doing group bonding activities
- Then given competitive events between groups
- Integrated them again to do activities
- The biases only stopped when they had to come together to help –required all of them to help get the bus started again

Question 23

Implicit Association Test

Answer 23

Some tests are unconscious attitudes
- Avoids social desirability effects
- They can influence how we interact with particular groups
- If you have a subconscious bias, you will be quicker at pairing up stereotypes
- Quicker at pairing up female with kids, cooking, cleaning

Question 24

Hidden Prejudice Video

Answer 24

Took an IAT
Clicks an option as fast as he can (about the time it takes to make the association)
- The point of the test is to see if you have a hidden bias based on associations with men and career and women and family

Looking to see if it takes more time to associate female with career
**Conscious belief still matters – he believes that he has implicit biases but won’t let him rule what he consciously believes

***people have a subconscious bias, which is why their test results showed that they had a bias even when they consciously didn’t want to (or when they avoided it)

Question 25

Stereotype Threat

Answer 25

The feeling of being at risk of conforming to stereotypes about your social group
- This is where people conform to a stereotype about them

Ex: women aren’t good at math — a lot of women believe this stereotype

• Find that stereotype is true – prevents people from doing their best
• You may feel some sense of threat that you will be seen as the stereotype – women may feel threatened that they are bad at math

**stereotypes affect performance because they can make someone believe they are bad at something, which causes them to perform poorly

Question 26

Social Norms

Answer 26

Rules that we follow in social setting

Different social norms in different places

Explicit social norms: said, “no smoking indoors”, putting a shirt on before you go into a store (no shirt, no shoes, no service sticker– stating what the policy is)

Implicit social norms: no one says these things, you just do them - “bless you” when someone sneezes

Question 27

Conformity

Answer 27

Matching behavior to go along with perceived social norms

Teenage years – we try to be different or stand out by copying our friends

Question 28

Ash Conformity

Answer 28

He had participants come into lab and sit at last seat of the table

• The participant is the only one who doesn’t know what’s happening
• Participants are looking to compare the target line segment to the other line segments
• The researchers say the right line judgments – then the researchers start giving the wrong judgments

Result: So the participant (last one to give their judgment) continued to give the wrong line judgment, even though it was obviously incorrect (the participant conformed)

The participant went along with the group for different reasons (he genuinely believed that the group was correct)

Question 29

Zimbardo Conformity: Prison Study

Answer 29

• He recruited people to look at the effects of prison life on guards and prisoners
• Randomly assigned people to guards and prisoners
• Prisoners revolted against the guards by day 2
• The guards became more abusive as the days went on (humiliation, chores, lack of privacy)

Question 30

Why people conform

Answer 30

• Social pressure
• Being told by the researchers that it’s okay to conform
• When someone is in a new situation and they don’t know how to behave – turning to the group might tell them what to do
• Less likely to be socially rejected

Question 31

Compliance

Answer 31

going along with the request of someone who doesn’t have authority
- Agreeing to requests to someone who doesn’t have authority

Foot-in-the-door: smaller request (yes), then larger request
- Make a small request at first, than a larger request
Ex: asking to smoke from you, than asking for money
- Idea is if you say yes to smaller request, you’re more likely to say yes to the bigger request

Door-in-the-face: larger request first, than a moderate request after
- First make a huge/ridiculous request that we know won’t be granted, then making a moderate request
Ex: asking parents for a new car (they say no), then asking to borrow the car (they say yes because it’s more reasonable)

Question 32

Obedience

Answer 32

going along with other authority figures

• Compliance but you’re doing something because an authority figure requested something

Ex: taking a detour because police tell you to

Ex: putting your phone away because teacher tells you to

Question 33

Milgram Study

Answer 33

Inspired by Adolf Eichman – he said he killed people “to follow orders”

• Participants came in and they looked at the effects of operant conditioning
• Two participants – confederate (fake participant)
• Wanted to see how many people would push the full voltage
• The real participant pushed the actual buttons of voltage – and the fake one was not actually getting shocked
• Result 60% of participants delivered the maximum voltage

Why people complied:
- Proximity of researcher to participants (if the reasearcher was in-person or giving orders over the phone) – found that participant more likely to listen if the researcher was with them in person
- Presence of peer teachers

Question 34

Abu Ghrab Incident

Answer 34

US military people were guarding prsioners in Iraq - military started torturing the prisoners

• US politicians said that only a few soldiers acted this way because if correspondance bias (ppl do bad things bc of dispsitional factors and not situational factors)

*the soldiers justified what they were doing because other soldiers were doing it

**Guards do bad things to show they have power
- They “followed orders”
- Ordinary people can do bad things even when their actions are fundamentally terrible
- People under orders do bad things

Question 35

Deindividuation

Answer 35

seeing the person/group of people not as an individual

• Can create the lost face in the crowd affect
• If you think the group is doing the action, and you are anonymous, you are more likely to do that bad action

Question 36

Dehumanization

Answer 36

depriving a person/group of human qualities – seeing them as less than a human
Ex: slavery

• People thought their actions were okay because they thought the people they were hurting weren’t human

Question 37

Social Facilitation

Answer 37

the presence of others changes individual performance
- Change in performance - usually an increase with the presence of others
Ex: looked at people’s pool playing skills

**Found that when an audience was present, they played better

Familiar tasks = better performance

Unfamiliar tasks = worse performance

Heightened arousal for complex tasks = height arousal can help up to a certain point, but eventually, the heightened arousal would be worse for performance

Question 38

Social Loafing

Answer 38

different members don’t put in the same amount of effort as the rest of the group

• Can increase the complexity of the task to avoid social loafing
• If the task is too simple, people will probably not work as hard

Ex: working on group project
- Less social loafing if the group finds the project intrinsically motivating

Question 39

Group Polarization

Answer 39

in discussion, members take more extreme positions on positions they already had

• Occurs because of conformity (to perceived opinion) – why leaders don’t tell people their political ID
• Like-minded people tend to affiliate with one another

*effects decision making by person making a decision based on what their group is doing

Question 40

First Impressions

Answer 40

• we form first impressions quickly
• first impressions last a long time
• you can change first impressions by being exposed to different behavior

accuracy:
- participants picked the correct candidate of who they thought would win based on first impressions
*usually first impressions are correct

Question 41

Attribution

Answer 41

• people who were used to working individually, picked individual answers
• people who were used to working in groups, picked group answers

US: individualistic
- focus on objects more than on situations

East Asia: Collectivistic culture
- like to work together
- focus on context and situation

Question 42

Persuasive Messages

Answer 42

changing our attitudes/beliefs in response to others giving us new info

Peripheral route:
- number of arguments, the way the message is presented, characteristics of speaker

Emotional appeals: positive and negative emotions enhance persuasion

• more likely to be persuaded by people that are like you
• face-to-face contact is more effective in persuading

Question 43

Reducing Prejudice

Answer 43

• increased contact with the group you hold a prejudice towards

4 positive contact ways: equal standing, common goals, support from authorities, and customs

ex: a group reduced prejudice when they had to work together to fix something

other: expand the in-group
- make the group wider so they can be included

Question 44

Factors Influencing Attraction and Liking

Answer 44

• people who work, live, or like the same things usually end up together
• we like people who are like us
• physical appearance
• facial symmetry

Question 45

mere exposure effect

Answer 45

repeated exposure increases liking
ex: people who heard gibberish words that were said were turkish liked them more as they were repeated

Question 46

Attitude Alignment

Answer 46

being attracted to someone increases similarity

Question 47

Triangular Model of Love

Answer 47

intimacy, passion, commitment

intimacy: closeness to someone

Passion: aroused and romance

Commitment: promise you make to maintain the relationship over time

Question 48

Maintaining Relationships

Answer 48

openness, self-disclosure, participation in joint activities, communication

• spending time together

Question 49

Ending Relationships

Answer 49

sense of unfairness or inequity
- the bad doesn’t outweigh the good
- high levels of conflict
- cheating