SAFMEDs Chapter 24: Social Cognition and Influence Flashcards
Social psychology
- a branch of psychology that uses a scientific approach to understand how and why social groups influence individual behavior and attitudes
- how individual attitudes and behaviors affect social groups
Social cognition
-how we think about ourselves and others in social situations
Social Influence
-how we are influenced by others in a social situation
Social behavior
-how we behave in social situations
Schema
-a cognitive filter through which we view the world and interpret information
Self-schema
-a construct about yourself and your experiences
Possible selves
-aspects of ourselves that we either aspire to be or could conceivably be
Self-Serving Biases
- most people like to think of themselves as being good, moral individuals
- the tendency to perceive ourselves in a positive light
Attribution
-the way in which we explain the cause or causes of behavior
Internal attribution
-an assumption that behavior is driven internal characteristics as traits or feelings
External attribution
-an assumption that behavior is driven by external characteristics as traits or feelings
Stable Attributions
- stable qualities within a given individual
- ex: internal stable (dispositional) -smartness
Unstable attribution
-attributing performance to an unstable factor
Attribution theory
- Fritz Heider
- an investigative tool to determine the causes of behavior
- internal vs external
- stable vs unstable
Actor-observer bias
- the tendency to attribute internal, stable explanations of behavior when we observe other people’s behaviors
- attributing external or temporary explanations of behaviors when we explain our own behaviors
Fundamental attribution error
- the tendency to attribute behaviors of others to dispositional factors
- ignoring external factors
Ultimate attribution error
-applying the fundamental attrivution error to all individuals from a minority or underrecognized group
Attitudes
-how you feel toward various objects
Kurt Lewis
- the father of social psychology
- attitude is social psychology’s most indispensable concept
Richard LaPiere
- study suggests that a very weak link exists between attitudes and behaviors
- took a Chinese couple to restaurants around the US and was only refused service at one
- wrote those same restaurants and many said they would never serve Asians
Cognitive Dissonance
- Leon Festinger
- the discomfort felt when we hold two contradictory views simultaneously
- act in a way that conflicts with our beliefs
Role playing
-an aspect of cognitive dissonance as people assume the characteristics of the roles they play
Philip Zimbardo
- Stanford prison experiment
- prisoner vs guard groups
- implications for modern prison reform
Primacy effect
- explains that information that comes early has greater persuasive power than information that comes late
- all information is presented and a judgement is made later
Recency effect
- information that comes later than information that comes earlier has greater persuasive power
- later information comes just before a judgement is made
Reason vs Emotion
- important distrinction in persuasion
- central vs peripheral route
Central route
- Richard Petty and John Cacioppo
- involves reason and logic
- highly motivated audience that thinks and makes decisions about the topic at hand
- more strongly persuaded for a longer period of time
- controlled processing
- thoughtful evaluation
Peripheral route
- Richard Petty and John Cacioppo
- relies on emotion or other superficial factors
- requires less motivation to think about the topic or make good good decisions
- temporarily convinced by communication
- persuasion is temporary
- can become an automatic process if certain emotions are continually associated with a particular object over an extended period of time
Foot-in-the-door approach
-the idea that if you ask people to do a small thing first, they are more likely to comply with a larger request later
Door-in-the-face approach
- begin by asking someone for a very large request and later ask for a much smaller request
- refusing to comply would challenge their sense of reciprocity
- you adjusted your rejuest so it only seems fair that they should adjust their response
Normative social influence
- When your behavior is influenced by social norms
- manners
Informational social influence
- provides noncoercive information that helps solve a problem or make a decision
- does not have a persuasive purpose
Conformity
-behavior that is in accors with accepted group standards
Solomon Asch
-Polish Gestalt psychologist
-determined to what degree other people influence our opinions or the external expression of our opinions
-social pressure conformity experiments
measured differences in research subjects’ visual judgements
-subjects would originally give the correct answer and then began making mistakes uniformly
Stanley Milgram
- obedience to authority
- shocking experiment
Debrief
-the process by which the researchers explain the goal, aim, and purpose of the study
Social facillitation
-the process by which the researchers explain the goal, aim, and purpose of the study
Social inhibition
-when your performance is poorer when you are watched by others
Social loafing
-the tendency to exert less effort when working in a group if individual effort cannot be measured independently
Deindividuation
-the loss of identity as a result of participation in a larger group, which lessens the sense of person resposibility for one’s actions and can lead to a higher degree of agression
Risky shift
-the tendency to shift from uncertainty about performing a task or not to making a decision with greater risk
Group polarization
-the tendency for people to hold even more extreme views on topics after a group discussion of like-minded people
Groupthink
-the tendency to make bad decisions because of the illusion that the plan of action is a good one and supported by all members of the group
Devil’s advocate method
-An individual is assigned to be the outsider by questioning all group decisions and to consider the alternative view
Dialectical inquiry method
-two subgroups work on different plans of action and the leader of the entire group does not express his/her preference before the plans are presented
Minority influence
-a disproportionate influence of the minority opinion over a majority opinion under certain conditions
