Social Behaviour I (Ch 14)

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

-the way in which we think about our social work

Question 2

Attributions

Answer 2

-inferences we make about the causes of behaviour, and they shape how we feel about others

Question 3

Internal/dispositional attributions

Answer 3

-ascribe other peoples behaviour to something within them, such as their personality, motives or attitudes

Question 4

External/situational attributions

Answer 4

-when they think that something outside the person, such as nature of the situation, is the cause of his or her behaviour

Question 5

Self-serving bias

Answer 5

-tendency to make situational attributions for our failures but dispositional attributions for our successes

Question 6

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 6

-people tend to explain other peoples behaviour in terms of dispositional attributions rather than situational

Question 7

Blaming the victim

Answer 7

• an attributional bias that explain the cause of hardship by placing the blame on the victim rather than the situation
• used to blame victims rather than perpetrators of sexual assaults

Question 8

Belief in a just world

Answer 8

-believing that the world is a fair place with good people being rewarded and bad things only happening to bad people

Question 9

Schemas

Answer 9

• people develop models/schemas about the social world, which function like lenses through which we filter our perceptions
• ways of knowing that affect how we view our social world

Question 10

Stereotypes

Answer 10

• schemas of how people are likely to behave based simply on the groups to which they below
• we form conclusions about people before we interact with them just because they are part of a certain ethnicity or live in a certain place

Question 11

Attitudes

Answer 11

• a persons favourable or unfavourable feelings, beliefs, or actions toward an object, idea or person
• have affective, cognitive, and behavioural components
• affective component: includes feelings or emotions associated with belief
• cognitive component: motive to act in a particular way toward the person or object of the attitude

Question 12

Cognitive dissonance

Answer 12

• one explanation for how and why we change our attitudes
• the feeling of discomfort caused by information that is at odds with ones conception of oneself as a reasonable and sensible person
• 3 options for decreasing discomfort created by dissonance:
  
  1. We can change our behaviour to make it consistent with dissonant cognition
  2. We can attempt to justify our behaviour by changing one of the cognition to make it more consistent with our behaviour
  3. We can add new cognition that are consistent with the behaviour and that therefore support it

Question 13

Persuasion

Answer 13

• an attempt by a person or group to change our opinions, beliefs, or choices by explaining or arguing their position
• more likely to trust experts, attractive/likeable people
• messages addressing both sides of issue are more persuasive
• the more people know before hand the less likely they are to be persuaded otherwise

Question 14

Central route to persuasion

Answer 14

• attitude change results from a person paying attention to the content of a message, carefully scrutinizing the merits of the message points or arguments
• the person is engaging in effortful thinking to make a decision