Social Psych Flashcards
Solomon Asch
Conducted experiments with lines which proved that people will conform to a group even when the group is wrong.
Normative Social Influence
Conforming to others in order to be liked/accepted
Informative Social Influnce
Conforming to others in an ambiguous situation in order to behave “correctly”
Groupthink
People feel it’s more important to maintain a group’s cohesiveness than to realistically consider facts.
Group Polarization
People in a group tend to take more extreme positions on an issue than they would individually.
Social facilitation
When having a person present as someone else completes a task creates a positive influence on the task’s completion
Social impairment
When having a person present as someone else completes a task creates a negative influence on the task’s completion
Social loafing
Lazy people don’t work well on a task when others are also working on that task, but do work well on their own
Deindividuation
Losing a sense of personal identity when in a group
Compliance
People change their behavior as a result of others directing them to change (think foot-in-the-door/door-in-the-face)
Foot-in-the-door Technique
Asking fora small favor and then asking for a larger favor
Door-in-the-face Technique
Ask for something big, and then downgrade to something smaller/more reasonable
Lowball Technique
Once a commitment is made, the “cost” of the commitment is increased
Obedience
Changing one’s behavior at the direct order of an authority figure
Stanely Milgram
Experiment with administering dangerous shocks showed people’s willingness to obey
Social norms
How you are expected to act (can be something like a written law or more of a general expectation)
Attitude
Tendency to respond a certain way towards certain things
Three components to attitude
Affective (emotion), Behavior (action), Cognitive (thought)
Direct contact
Learning an attitude through interacting with the target of the attitude directly
Direct instruction
Learning an attitude because someone tells you a certain thing is good/bad
Interaction with others
Learning an attitude by being around people with that same attitude
Vicarious conditioning
Learning an attitude by observing someone else’s attitude
Persuasion
When someone tries to change someone else’s attitude through argument, pleading, or explanation
Components of persuasion
Source, message, target audience, and medium
Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion
People will either add details (elaborate) based on what they hear or won’t at all
Central-route processing
When you just take a persuasive message at face value
Peripheral-route processing
When you elaborate on a persuasive message based on peripheral cues and context
Cognitive dissonance
When people find themselves doing something that doesn’t match their attitude about themselves
Daryl Bem’s sef perception theory
People will look at their own behaviors and then form attitudes about themselves
Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith
Conducted a test with a boring task and found that students payed less to lie experienced more cognitive dissonance, and where therefore more convinced that they weren’t lying
Impression formation
Forming the first attitude one person has about another