revision social psych

Question 1

What does social psych include?

Answer 1

• Social thinking (the self, social beliefs and judgements, attitudes and behaviors)
• Social influence (persuasion, conformity and obedience)
• Social relations (aggression, attraction and intimacy, helping)
• Groups and identities (small group processes, social categorization and social identity, prejudice, intergroup relations, and conflict)
• How are we attracted to people and why?

Question 2

what is gestalt psych?

Answer 2

• A holistic theory of mind and brain focusing on how these actively structure our perceptions and impressions. It emphasizes that one needs to look at the comprehensive situation to fully understand the human conscious experience “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”
• K. Koffka
• W. Kohler
• K. Lewin

Question 3

what is wolerpsychologie? also known as folk psychology

Answer 3

• Sometimes called mass psychology, folk psychology, or “the psychology of the people”. It claims that people who belong to the same social group tend to think in the same way, holding collective beliefs, norms and values
• W. Wundt
• Those mental products which are created by a quality of human life are therefore explicable: we cannot understand them in the terms of individuals
• Three objects we must consider: two people and the relationship between them

Question 4

what is positivism?

Answer 4

• Comte is best known for his claim that social phenomena can be studied by the same methods as those used in natural science since there are general laws existing in all sciences, and the aim for the researchers is to reveal them by “positivistic” methods
• Positivism posits that true knowledge can be achieved only through sense perceptions and empirical investigations
• This is the view that believes scientific knowledge is the only authentic knowledge

Question 5

what are the 4 main types of positivism?

Answer 5

1. Social positivism – reform the society to prevent moral and political anarchy through understanding the natural laws
2. Evolutionary positivism – evolution is the general principle that can unify all fields of knowledge
3. Critical positivism – the distinction between things and concepts (mental images of things) is ill founded, and in pure experience the things are not distinguishable from their mental image
4. Logical positivism – reform of education, university, philosophy, and art. The final goals was the construction of a “constitutive system” in which every statement is reduced to the concepts of lower level

Question 6

what was the first social experiment?

Answer 6

• N. Triplett
• Social facilitation: people in social settings perform better than when by themselves
• 40 children playing a simple game in pairs and alone, they were asked to wind the reel on a small fishing wheel as quickly as possible 150 times and they were timed accordingly. He wanted to test if performance would be enhanced in the presence of other people doing the same task
• Results: those who worked in pairs turned the wheel 1% faster
• was regarded as controversial

Question 7

what is behaviorism?

Answer 7

• Stimulus > response
• Watson and Skinner
• How we can study humans based on the connections between the stimulus and response without understanding whatever is in between “black box” (interior processes)

Question 8

what was the crisis in social psych?

Answer 8

• Late 1960s and 70s, serious questions were being asked about the direction of the discipline and how well it reflected and acknowledged the social, historical, cultural and political concerns and values of the people it sought to study.
• 2 main criticisms:
  1. Over reliance on experimental methods at the expense of more naturalistic approaches such as observation and interviewing
  2. Excessive emphasis on individuals as individuals rather than as parts of more complex social, historical, cultural, and political contexts
• “there is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals” (G. Allport, 1924)

Question 9

what is cognitivism?

Answer 9

• U. Neisser
• 1967, cognitive psychology
• 1976, cognition and reality

Question 10

what are the levels of explanation? (Doise, 1976)

Answer 10

1. Intrapersonal – individual
2. Interpersonal – what happens between an individual and another (relationship with others)
3. Intragroup – within groups (you behave differently in different groups based on the role you have in the group)
4. Intergroup (ideological) – what happens between groups, we can see cultural differences (individualism vs collectivism)

Question 11

what is the social identity theory?

Answer 11

• H. Tajfel used experiments to investigate how identity and behavior are influenced by the social groups to which one belongs
• How we behave in social situations and how we differ to things we may do individually
• He suggests that groups are part of our identity and self-esteem
• Group membership
  i) In-group: people within our social group
  ii) Out-group: people or groups outside of our group
• Social categorization: where we sort similar people and objects so that we are able to understand and identify them – leads to prejudice
• social identification: this is where people modify their behavior, attitudes and beliefs to match the group that they belong to
• social comparison: where we compare our in-group with other groups to affirm our identity – helps maintain self esteem

Question 12

what is critical social psych?

Answer 12

• A movement promoting a social psychology that:
  i) Recognizes its own political, social and historical situatedness, and that of its researchers and participants
  ii) Pursues social change and reform

Question 13

Social psychology and human values

Answer 13

• Choice of research topics
• As the object of social psychological analysis
• Psychological concepts contain values
• The subjective aspects of science
• Implicit values are NOT bad, they are natural and inevitable
• “scientific approach” means to make efforts to:
  a) Recognize our values
  b) Make them explicit
  c) Use systematic observation, empirical data, and experimentation to check our ideas against reality

Question 14

Invariant and culturally-specific aspects of social processes

Answer 14

• The norm of trust

- The norm of truth

Question 15

what is the hindsight bias?

Answer 15

• The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen it
• The “I knew it all along” phenomenon
• Common sense usually is right: after the fact. We therefore easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we know and knew more than we do and did

Question 16

Approaches to doing research

Answer 16

• Quantitative: aimed at studying the relationships between variables. Variables are expressed numerically and their relationships are explored via statistical analysis. Pursues the systematic measurement of phenomena, often in controlled lab settings, more predictions about the outcome of research, aims to establish general laws and principles about types of phenomena. Inductive method, positivism and the idea that psychological variables can be reliably measured
• Qualitative: based on the interpretation of qualitative data, not statistical analysis of numerical data (the use of words, text, observation. Focus on the interpretation of phenomena as emerged in naturalistic, unconstrained situation, aims to provide a thorough description and understanding of the specific phenomena under investigation. Often lacks hypotheses. Constructivism. The Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965)
• Mixed methods research integrates the quantitative and qualitative approaches into single studies: difficult method and complicated to publish

Question 17

Main stages in the quantitative approach to research:

Answer 17

Research question > theory > hypothesis > method

Question 18

Research methods:

Answer 18

Theory > hypothesis > correlational (ex. survey) and experimental research (ex. Milgram’s experiments on obedience)

Question 19

Correlational research: exploring associations

Answer 19

• The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables
• Questionnaires are the most used measurement instruments
• Considerations for questionnaire design:
  i) Nature of sample: is it representative?
  ii) Order of questions: may produce bias
  iii) Response options: may guide responses
  iv) Wording of questions
  v) Validity and reliability of measures we use (psychometrics)

Question 20

Sampling strategies

Answer 20

• Random sampling
• Systematic sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Opportunity/convenience sampling
• Snowball sampling
• Theoretical/ principled/ purpose sampling

Question 21

Association vs causation

Answer 21

• Associations indicate a relationship

- They cannot necessarily tell us whether changing one variable will cause changes in another

Question 22

Huesmann et al (2003). Longitudinal relations between children’s exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent behavior in young adulthood

Answer 22

• What is the research outcome of interest? To see if children become aggressive and violent in adulthood from the influence of violent tv shows in their childhood
• What were the variables that researchers expected to be associated w the outcome? The extent to which the children viewed those characters as realistic
• How did the researchers address the alternative explanation? Being aggressive in early childhood has no effect on increasing males’ exposure to media violence as adults and only a small effect for females
• Can we argue for a causal relationship among the variables? No, we cannot be sure if its causal because there may be alternative explanations and other variables. We did not have an experimental research to control (manipulate variables ex. Time) or place random assignment. This study is correlational

Question 23

Experimental research

Answer 23

• Independent variable: the experimental factors that a researcher manipulates
• Dependent variable: the variable expected to be dependent on the manipulation or change in the independent variable(s)
• Control: manipulating variables
• Random assignment: this will lead to ruling out any confounding factor, we need large samples for this to function effectively
• Experiments: in the health field, these are called Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs)
• Quasi-experiments: natural experiments – the researcher does not directly manipulate the independent variable for practical or ethical reasons. Field experiments – the researcher can manipulate the independent variable, but no random assignment and no full control of confounding variables
• The blind man experiment

Question 24

Qualitative research

Answer 24

• Research question formed in a way that allows a free exploration of the issues
• Purposive or theoretical sampling
• Researcher has an active role in interacting with participants
• Data collection: interview, focus groups, observation, text (newspapers, diaries, transcripts, the internet)

Question 25

Qualitative data analysis

Answer 25

• Grounded theory
• Discourse analysis
• Critical discourse analysis
• Interpretive phenomenological analysis

Question 26

Research ethics:

Answer 26

• Milgram’s experiment

- Stanford prison experiment

Question 27

The sense of self

Answer 27

• Develops in children within the second year of age (unable to recognize themselves in the mirror)
• Universal characteristics: uniqueness, continuity, distinction between I and me

Question 28

The self and the social world

Answer 28

• Spotlight effect
• Illusion of transparency
• Social surroundings affect our self-awareness
• Self-concern motivates our social behavior
• Social relationships help define our self

Question 29

Self-concept: who am I?

Answer 29

• Self schemas: beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information
• Self-reference: the tendency to process efficiently and remember well information related to oneself, richer elaboration of memories and better organization of memories
• Possible selves: images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future
• Self-discrepancy theories (Higgins, 1987). When there is discrepancy between self-concept and own ought self usually leads to feeling guilty, shame, or anxiety. Discrepancy between self-concept and own ideal self may generate disappointment, lack of pride
• Self-domains: actual self, ideal self, ought self
• Standpoints on the self: your own and a significant other’s (ex. Mother etc.)
• Combining self-domains with standpoints will define six basic types of self-state representations
• Individualism vs collectivism
• Self-knowledge: Johari window. The mental processes that control our social behavior are distinct from the mental processes through which we explain it

Question 30

Determinants of the self

Answer 30

• Roles
• Social identities
• Comparisons with others
• Successes and failures
• Others’ judgements
• Surrounding culture
• experiences

Question 31

Couple social comparisons

Answer 31

• People with high couple perceived superiority were significantly more satisfied with their couple relationship than people with low CPS

Question 32

Self-construal as independent or interdependent

Answer 32

• Independent: self acknowledges relationships with others
• Interdependent: more deeply embedded in others
• (Markus and Kitayama 1991)

Question 33

Self-esteem

Answer 33

• A person’s overall negative or positive self-evaluation or sense of self-worth
• Self-esteem motivation: we are highly motivated to maintain our self-esteem
• The “dark side” of self-esteem: when you feel your self-esteem is threatened and often react by putting others down, sometimes with violence
• Narcissism: uncontrolled, compulsive self-love, depends on external cues and can be easily threatened
• Secure self-esteem: confidence that leads to less defensiveness, less judgement towards others and more wellbeing

Question 34

Perceived self-control

Answer 34

• Self-efficacy: one’s sense of competence and ability to handle different situations and produce an intended result
• Locus of control: a person’s belief about who or what is responsible for what happens. Can either be internal or external
• Learned helplessness vs self-determination
• Learned helplessness is the hopelessness and resignation learned when one perceives no control over repeated bad events
• Uncontrollable bad events > perceived lack of control > learned helplessness
• The costs of excess choice: an excess of freedom (Schwartz, 2000, 2004) causes decreased life satisfaction and increase clinical depression, too many choices can lead to paralysis or “the tyranny of freedom”

Question 35

Systems promoting personal control promoting health and happiness:

Answer 35

• Prisons
• Workplaces
• Residential care
• Homeless shelters

Question 36

How self-serving bias works

Answer 36

• Ex. Attributing one’s success to ability and effort, failure to luck and things external > I got the A in history because I studied hard, I got the D in sociology because the examinations were unfair

Question 37

Perceiving our social world

Answer 37

• Priming: activating particular associations in memory, example associating towel, shower, and shampoo > so_p (soap)
• Categorical thinking: when we perceive someone in terms of their social belongings and memberships
• Belief perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions, as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives
• Constructing memories of ourselves and our worlds: misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it. Reconstructing our past attitudes and past behavior

Question 38

Cruel or kind?

Answer 38

• Myron Rothbart and Pamela Birrell (1977) had university students assess the facial expression of a man
• Some were told he was a leader responsible for barbaric medical experiments on concentration camp inmates dure the second world war > judged him as cruel
• Those who were told he was a leader in the anti-nazi underground movement > judged him as kind

Question 39

Judging our social world

Answer 39

• Intuitive judgements: controlled processing: mental activities that require conscious, deliberate and reflective thinking (little of our behavior is controlled by this), automatic processing: mental activities happening with little or no conscious awareness. These two systems allow us to move and behave in the world efficiently, controlled processing is inefficient because it requires a lot of attention
• Social schema theory: self/person/role/event schemas, the limits of intuition
• Social encoding: the process of getting social information into memory. Comprises initially attending to and perceiving social information, understanding it and making connections with information already in memory
• Person traits vary in their “centrality” and therefore in the influence they exert on person impression: Asher’s person perception
• We tend to construe a coherent image of the person thereby attributing more or less “dominance” to contradictory traits
• The social context can influence encoding
• Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for information that confirms, rather than disconfirms, one’s preconceptions
• Overconfidence: the tendency to be more confident than needed: to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
• Heuristics: mental shortcuts: a thinking strategy and problem-solving methods that enables quick and easy judgements and search procedures
• Representativeness heuristic: the tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member

Question 40

attitude

Answer 40

a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (often rooted in one’s beliefs, and exhibited in one’s feelings and intended behavior)

Question 41

Components of attitudes: The ABC model

Answer 41

• Affect (feelings), Behavior tendency and Cognition (thoughts)

Question 42

The ABC model: critiques

Answer 42

1. Issue on stability: assumes that attitudes are enduring across time and space, they don’t vary after time or following certain experience. Others argue that attitudes are constructed in the moment and are tailored for a specific context
2. Issue on relation to behavior: it assumes that attitudes are linked to behavior
   - In 1934 LaPiere demonstrated that attitudes do not necessarily predict behavior
   - Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance (1964)

Question 43

LaPiere experiment

Answer 43

• Attitudes do not necessarily predict behavior
• He was travelling with a Chinese couple
• First part of experiment was visiting hotels etc. and he was never denied entry
• LaPiere sent out letters to these hotels where the Chinese couple slept over night and received a much higher refusal rate
• ‘would you have a Chinese couple in your hotel?’ 92% refusal rate

Question 44

Formation of attitude - Behaviorism:

Answer 44

• Classical conditioning: a learned response which results from the repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus with a conditioned stimulus
• Instrumental learning (operant conditioning): when behavior is modified on the basis of consequences (rewards or punishments)

Question 45

Social learning theory:

Answer 45

• Modelling (Bandura 1973): the acquisition of behavior on the basis of observing that of others
• Social comparison: we base our attitudes on those of other people that we consider to be similar to ourselves
• Self-perception (Bem’s theory): we also look at our own behavior and from that deduce what our attitudes must be. His theory is that behavior can have an affect on others’ attitudes

Question 46

Cognitive theories:

Answer 46

• As we acquire experience of objects in the social world we develop attitudes about them
• Balance theory: people will avoid having contradicting attitudes and evaluations of one object
• The issue of cognitive consistency is the cornerstone of Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: states that people are motivated to keep their attitudes, beliefs and behavior consistent

Question 47

Function of attitudes

Answer 47

• Katz (1960) suggested that attitudes have four main functions:
  1. Knowledge: provide a sense of structure and order, helping us to explain and understand the world (linked to heuristics)
  2. Instrumental: allow us to maximize our chances of receiving rewards and minimizing the likelihood of negative outcomes (help us understand good vs. bad)
  3. Ego defensive: protect threats to our sense of self by projecting insecurities about our self onto others
  4. Expression of values: allow us to express and reinforce our sense of self and identity by displaying those attitudes we consider important

Question 48

Measuring attitudes

Answer 48

• Likert scale (Likert, 1932): rating from 1 to 7 something the individual is told
• Osgood’s Semantic differential scale: rating people’s feelings over topics or objects
• Social distance scale (Bogardus, 1925)
• Implicit association tests (Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz, 1998)

Question 49

Issues of attitude scales

Answer 49

• Restricting people’s responses to a narrow range of options + acquiescence bias (just saying yes)
• Social desirability: socially desirable attitudes rather than their true attitudes
• Implicit attitudes: people are often unaware of their attitudes

Question 50

Measures of implicit attitudes

Answer 50

• Social distance scale: social/physical distance reflects underlying attitudes towards social groups
• Implicit association tests: measure attitudes we hold unconsciously based on automatic associations between concepts/objects, example: implicit race bias. The faster the reaction, the stronger the association

Question 51

When attitudes predict behavior

Answer 51

• When external influences on what we say are minimal (eg. Nobody is observing us or there are no environmental constraint)
• When attitudes specific to the behavior are examined (attitudes towards health fitness-jogging)
• When attitudes are strong

Question 52

The theory of planned behavior

Answer 52

• Attitude towards the behavior “I’m for physical fitness”
• Subjective norms “my friends seem to be jogging and going to the gym”
• Perceived control “I could easily do this”
• This all leads to > behavioral intention “I’m going to start next week” > behavior

Question 53

Dual-process models of health risk decision making

Answer 53

• The majority of research has been guided by expectancy value approaches that focus on deliberative processes in decision making about risk behaviors
• The TPB is a good example
• Recent theoretical approaches recognize the less deliberative modes of decision making
• Dual-process models: analytic +

Question 54

Prototype willingness model of risk behavior (gerrard et al, 2008)

Answer 54

• Attitude toward the behavior
• Subjective norms
• Perceived control
• Leading to behavioral intention and then behavior
• The above is known as the reasoned path
• The below is known as the social reaction path
• Prototype of smoker, drinker etc. > behavioral willingness > behavior

Question 55

Measures

Answer 55

• Past PES use
• Subjective norms: perceived prevalence and approval of PES use by fellow athletes, coach etc.
• Prototype perceptions of PES user/non user: how favorable and how similar to them
• Attitudes: performance enhancement attitude scale, which is a 17-item questionnaire
• Outcome expectancies: 14 items related to potential positive and negative outcomes associated with the use of PES
• Social desirability: item example: “I never lie”

Question 56

Outcome variable

Answer 56

• Willingness to dope based on 10 scenarios
• Ex. You suffer a dip in performance and your contract/funding is under threat or you want to recover fast after an injury

Question 57

Key results

Answer 57

• After accounting for levels of social desirability, past PES use, more positive attitudes toward PES, greater perceptions of others’ use/approval, more favorable/similar prototype positively associated with willingness to use PES

Question 58

Examples of self-persuasion

Answer 58

• Role playing: role: a set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave. With time, attitudes attached to roles become natural
• When saying becomes believing: people tend to adjust their messages to their listeners and often believe the altered message. Higgins’ experiment: students adopted their message to the listener (like/dislike) and later remember the message accordingly
• Evil and moral acts: evils acts may result from gradually escalating commitments (reducing moral sensitivity, finding reasons to support such acts, disliking the victim). Examples: Zimbardo and Milgram’s experiments

Question 59

Common reactions to feelings of cognitive dissonance

Answer 59

• Attempting to rationalize the behavior
• Ignoring the truth or being in denial
• Reducing the importance of their belief

Question 60

Three theories on how our behavior may affect our attitudes

Answer 60

• Self-presentation theory
• Theory of cognitive dissonance
• Self-perception theory

Question 61

Self-presentation theory

Answer 61

• Impression management: for strategic reasons we express attitudes that make us appear consistent
• No one wants to look inconsistent and be taken as a fool
• We express attitudes that match our actions
• To appear consistent, we may pretend those attitudes

Question 62

Theory of cognitive dissonance

Answer 62

• Self-justification
• Our attitudes change because we are motivated to get rid of the arousal (feeling upset) which is determined when people realize there is an inconsistency between two simultaneous thoughts/beliefs
• We feel tension (dissonance) ^
• To reduce this unpleasant arousal, we often adjust our thinking/attitude
• Rationalizing, minimizing, avoiding to think about

Question 63

Insufficient justification elicits dissonance and change in attitudes

Answer 63

• When our actions are not fully explained by external rewards or coercion, we will experience dissonance which we can reduce by believing in what we have done

Question 64

Practical implications of cognitive dissonance

Answer 64

• Education and authoritarian leadership: big rewards and punishments do not contribute to internalized behaviors, authority is present
• Dissonance after decisions: after making important decisions, we usually reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and downgrading the unchosen option
• Group identity and dissonance: what happens when our groups adopt behaviors or attitudes that differ from those we personally believe? people may psychologically distance themselves from those groups (reduce identification) or attempt to change the norms of the group

Question 65

Self-perception theory

Answer 65

• Self-observation
• When our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, we are in the position of someone observing us from the outside (attribution theory)
• This is especially so when I can’t easily attribute my behavior to external constraints (nobody forced me to smoke!)
• The acts we freely commit are self-revealing of our attitudes
• Examples: people find cartoons funnier while holding a pen with their teeth (using a smiling muscle) than while holding it with their lips (using muscles incompatible with smiling) (Strack et al, 1988)
• Facial expressions and non-verbal behavior influence attitudes

Question 66

Over-justification effect

Answer 66

• Excessively rewarding people for doing what they already enjoy may lead them to attribute their action to the reward
• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Question 67

Can attitude change take place without feeling any dissonance?

Answer 67

• No, according to the theory of cognitive dissonance: Steele et al 1981 experiment with alcohol used to suppress dissonance/arousal: attitude adjustment
• Yes, according to the theory of self-perception, but only when our attitudes are not clearly defined and therefore there is no dissonance involved: attitude formation

Question 68

Recent critiques

Answer 68

• Potter and Wetherell (1987) questioned some of the claims made by social psychologists
• Attitudes as cognitive entities: involve more components, involve communication and are context-dependent
• Attitudes predict behavior: attitudes are behavior or social action
• Attitudes can be measured quantitatively: ratings are too context dependent
• Attitudes are formed towards pre-defined objects in the environment: what we have attitudes about is rhetorical construction (i.e. attitudes are produced by language)

Question 69

The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors

Answer 69

• Happens over time
• There is a sender, message, and receiver
• Induces change: it is another form of social influence
• Persuasion targets beliefs and attitudes to ultimately change someone’s behavior
• Can be good or bad, example of bad is propaganda, good is known as education

Question 70

‘Mundane’ persuasion

Answer 70

• Something that happens in any casual place where people interact
• When we engage in dialogue with one another we are involved in rhetorical discourse (Aristotle)

Question 71

Approaches to research on persuasion

Answer 71

• Experimental social psycho
• Discursive social psych
• Caveats by Billig (1996):
• Persuasion is inextricably linked to local and broader social context and as this varies across time and space, from individual to individual, group to group
• What ‘works’ in one case may not work in another
• Beware of abstract, generalizable list of factors of persuasion as you will always come across the exception to the rule

Question 72

What paths lead to persuasion

Hovland’s work during WW11 depicted key steps of the persuasion process

Answer 72

• Pay attention to the message > comprehension > believing it > remembering > behaving accordingly > action
• The elaboration likelihood (ELM) model:
• The central route: occurs when after careful consideration of the content of a message, people find the argument persuasive. When the receiver can carefully understand the content of the message > persuasion
• The peripheral route: occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues (such as the speaker’s attractiveness) and find the argument persuasive, rather than by careful consideration of the argument’s validity. When people do not pay much attention to the message and so therefore are more influenced by incidental cues: things that are not at the core of the message > persuasion because he/she is using heuristics to judge the content of the message rather than carefully analyzing the validity of what is said
• Chaiken (1980) proposed the heuristic-systematic model: the central route is the systematic route and peripheral is the heuristic route

Question 73

Persuasion’s goal: behavior change

Answer 73

• The central route is more likely to lead to attitude and behavior changes that ‘stick’ whereas the peripheral route may lead merely to superficial and temporary attitude change
• The advertiser wants us to buy his product
  One or two routes?
  Critiques to dual process models of persuasion:
• In the real world, messages contain a variety of content and cues in order to achieve their rhetorical effects
• Both work towards persuading the receiver
• The central/peripheral and systematic/heuristic path can be integrated into a unimodel of persuasion

Question 74

The elements of persuasion:

Answer 74

• The communicator
• The message
• How the message is communicated
• The audience
• Who says what, by what method, to whom

Question 75

The communicator: who is credible?

Answer 75

• Credibility: a credible communicator is perceived as both expert and trustworthy
• Culture/context depending categories of individuals carry with them implicit knowledge about what such people know (category entitlements) and how they ought to behave (category bound activities)

Question 76

Perceived expertise:

Answer 76

• Clark et al 2012:
• Compared to non-experts, expert sources elicit more processing of persuasive messages because of expectations that the information is likely to be valid or accurate
• The message is not scrutinized if the audience agrees
• When messages are counter attitudinal (we disagree), experts motivate greater processing because of expectations that they strong arguments to support their claims > more likely to promote shift of attitudes from an unfavorable stance to a favorable one

Question 77

The communicator

Answer 77

• Attractiveness and liking: we tend to like and pay more attention to an appealing communicator (often someone similar to the audience)
• Our liking may open us up to the communicator’s arguments (central route persuasion), or it may trigger positive associations when we see the product later (peripheral route persuasion)
• Similarity: we tend to like people that are part of our in group and tend to be influenced by them

Question 78

message content: reason vs emotion

how scary?

Answer 78

• Message has to be scary enough to motivate, yet realistic
• Example drink and drive
• People have to believe it could affect them, and therefore have to believe that the recommended actions will reduce the threat
• These tactics have been found to have little effect
• If you scare people too much, they will shut down into helplessness

Question 79

Reason vs emotion: the effect of good feelings

Answer 79

• Exposing students with different sorts of advertisements
• Assigning people to watching these whilst having snacks or without it
• They demonstrated that those who were snacking during the advertisements made more impulsive decisions > peripheral cues > they were more easily influenced

Question 80

Discrepancy – discomfort – persuasion

Answer 80

• Latitude of acceptance and latitude of non-commitment > social judgement theory: opinion change is possible only when the message is in the “acceptability” or “non-commitment” range
• Latitude of rejection > no chance at all?
• A credible source would elicit the most opinion change when advocating a position greatly discrepant from the recipient’s
• The students were proposed an essay in two different situations
• One was a credible source and one was not
• This demonstrated that credible sources are more likely to influence students

Question 81

The channel of communication:

Answer 81

the way the message is delivered – whether face to face, in writing, on film or in some other way

Question 82

Active experience or passive reception?

Answer 82

The major influence on us is not the media but our contact with people example: viral marketing

Question 83

Experimental evidence:

Answer 83

behavior change is most effective when face-to-face influence is fostered. An experiment was conducted in three counties in California, three or more years. They observed the difference in the outcome that they were trying to achieve in terms of coronary risks comparing the three strategies used in each of these counties. In Watsonville they used a media campaign and face to face, Gilroy based on mass media, and Tracy used control. Watsonville had the most effect.

Question 84

Media influence

Answer 84

• Two-step flow of communication: the process by which media influence often occurs through opinion leaders who in turn influence others (influencers)

Question 85

Comparing media

Answer 85

• The more lifelike the medium, the more persuasive its message
• The order of persuasiveness seems to be: live (face to face), videotaped, audiotaped and written
• Messages are best comprehended and recalled when written
• The difficulty of the message interacts with the medium to determine persuasiveness

Question 86

Audience

Answer 86

• People’s personality traits often don’t predict their responses to social influence
• Self-esteem: people with moderate self-esteem are the easiest to influence
• Age: teens and early twenties are important years when people develop attitudes and habits

Question 87

Need for cognition

Answer 87

• The individual motivation to think and analyze
• Those with a low need for cognition > quicker to respond to peripheral cues such as the communicator’s attractiveness and the pleasantness of the surroundings
• Research finding: stimulating thinking makes strong messages more persuasive and (because of counter-arguing) weak messages less persuasive

Question 88

Ways to stimulate people’s thinking

Answer 88

• Rhetorical questions
• Multiple speakers saying the same thing
• Making people feel responsible for evaluating or passing along thethe message
• Repeating the message
• Getting people’s undistracted attention

Question 89

Extreme persuasion: how do cults indoctrinate?

Answer 89

• Cult is a group typically characterized by: 1. Distinctive ritual and beliefs related to its devotion to a god or a person 2. Isolation from the surrounding, ‘evil’ culture 3. A charismatic leader
• A sect by contrast is a spin off from a major religion

Question 90

Attitudes follow behavior: manipulative techniques

Answer 90

• The foot-in-the-door phenomenon: getting people to first agree to a small request increases the chances that they will later comply with a larger request
• The door-in-the-face: facilitating the likelihood of a second less-demanding request being accepted by presenting a more demanding request first
• Low-balling: getting someone to agree to an attractive, often cheap, deal, and then raising the charge for it

Question 91

who says?
what?
how?
to whom?

Answer 91

• Communicator: credibility, expertise, trust, attractiveness
• Message content: reason vs emotion, discrepancy, one sided vs two sided, primacy vs recency
• Channel: active vs passive, personal vs media
• Audience: analytical or image-conscious, age

Question 92

Group effects

Answer 92

• Social implosion:
• Individuals get isolated from social support systems
• Cultists replace such systems (new social identity)
• Cut off from families and former friends, novices lose access to counter-arguments
• The group’s social isolation facilitates more bizarre thinking
• In extreme cases, intimidation and violence make the rest
• These techniques do not however have unlimited power

Question 93

Need to belong:

Answer 93

the motivation to bond with others in relationships that provide ongoing, positive interactions

• For our ancestors, mutual attachments enabled group survival and reproduction
• For children and caregivers, social attachments make life easier and more pleasant, and enhance survival
• Feeling accepted and belonging to a primary group such as a family make us stronger, safe, and more relaxed
• Fulfilling and satisfying relationships are important goals in people’s lives
• Isolation, loneliness, or loss of social bonds lead to pain and negative outcomes

Question 94

What leads to friendship and attraction?

Answer 94

• Proximity:
• How often people’s paths cross
• Nearness
• Reasons why proximity feeds liking: availability and mere exposure
• Mere-exposure effect: tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them
• Physical attractiveness
• The matching phenomenon: the tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a ‘good match’ in attractiveness and other traits
• The physical-attractiveness stereotype: presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: what is beautiful is good (halo effect)
• Standards of beauty differ across cultures
• For cultures with scarce resources and poor people, plumpness seems attractive
• For cultures and individuals with abundant resources, beauty more often equals to slimness (Nelson and Morrison, 2005)
• Similarity vs complementarity: similar attitudes and values help bring couples together and predict their satisfaction (Luo and Klohnen, 2005), perceive similarity is even more important than actual, partners and friends actually tend to become more similar over time
• Do opposites attract? In general, dissimilar attitudes depress liking more than similar attitudes enhance it (Singh et al, 2000), as we tend to be suspicious of differences
• Liking those who like us
• Reciprocity principle: human tendency to give something back when something is received
• Sprecher (1998) found reciprocal liking to be one of the major determinants of interpersonal attraction
• Lehr and Geher (2006) found the reciprocity principle to be a stronger force for attraction than shared attitudes
• Sensitivity to criticism
• We often perceive criticism to be more sincere than praise (Coleman et al 1987)
• The use of strategies such as flattery by which people seek to gaining another’s favor, is culturally sanctioned (in western cultures)
• Low self-esteem individuals tend to undererstimate how much their partner appreciates them, have less generous views of their partner and feel less happy with the relationship (Murray et all 2000)
• After being deprived of approval, others’ compliments and appreciation is particularly rewarding
• The best liked person is often the one whose comments begin negatively but become increasingly positive (Sharma and Kaur 1996): the loss-gain hypothesis
• Evaluative conditioning: how we can come to like or dislike something through an association with something we already like or dislike
• Liking is not just a matter of the other’s traits and behaviors but also the situation in which we interact (example: geographical area)

Question 95

What is love?

Answer 95

• Sternberg’s (1998) triangular theory of love
• Intimacy (liking), companionate love (intimacy + commitment), decision/commitment (empty love), fatuous love (passion + commitment), passion (infatuation), romantic love (intimacy + passion)