Social Psych

Question 1

Consistency Theories

Answer 1

• hold that people prefer consistency and will change or resist changing attitudes based upon this preference
• Examples:
  
  • Fritz Heider’s BALANCE THEORY: concerned with the way three elements (P = person, O = other person, X = thing / belief / other person) relate to one another. Balance in triads occurs with 1 or 3 positive signs; Imbalance occurs with 0 or 2 positive signs
  • Leon Festinger’s COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY: cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt when your behavior and your attitudes are not in sync. Greater the dissonance, greater the pressure to reduce dissonance.
  • Two Dissonant Situations: FREE CHOICE and FORCED COMPLIANCE

Question 2

Fritz Heider’s Balance Theory

Answer 2

• concerned with the way three elements (P = person, O = other person, X = thing / belief / other person) relate to one another. Balance in triads occurs with 1 or 3 positive signs; Imbalance occurs with 0 or 2 positive signs
• theory is very simplistic and has been modified, but that is not within the scope of this exam

Question 3

Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Answer 3

• Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt when your behavior and your attitudes are not in sync.
• Greater the dissonance, greater the pressure to reduce dissonance.
• Two Dissonant Situations: Free Choice and Forced Compliance
  
  • FREE CHOICE: occurs when a person has to make a choice between several desirable alternatives
    - EX: Choosing between two people you are seeing that you are equally fond of. Dissonance = telling one you can’t see them even though you are fond of them.
    - Post-decisional Dissonance: dissonance that emerges after your choice
    - Spreading of Alternatives: spreading apart the relative worth of two alternatives by accentuating the positives of one or the negatives of another
  • FORCED COMPLIANCE: occurs when a person is forced to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes
    
    • Force: usually either an anticipated punishment or reward
    • EX: Little kid is forced to eat broccoli even though they do not like it because parent’s say they can only have ice cream if they finish their veggies
• TWO MAIN PRINCIPLES OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY:
  1) If a person is pressured to say or do something contrary to their privately held attitudes, there will be the tendency for them to change those attitudes
  2) The greater the pressure to comply, the less the person’s attitude will change. Ultimately, attitude change generally occurs when the behavior is induced with minimum pressure.
  - MINIMAL JUSTIFICATION EFFECT: when behavior can be justified by means of external inducements, there is no need to change cognitions but when the external justification is minimal, you will resolve your dissonance by changing internal cognitions.

Question 4

Festinger and Carlsmith Experiment (1959)

Answer 4

• Procedure: subjects were asked to perform a super boring task for an hour and then either given $1 or $20 to tell the “next participant” (actually a confederate) that the experiment was exciting. Then, they were asked to rate their enjoyment of the experiment.
• Results: $1 subjects rated their enjoyment of the experiment higher on average than the $20 subjects
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory Explanation: Minimal Justification Effect (when behavior can be justified by means of external inducements (ex: $20), there is no need to change cognitions but when the external justification is minimal (ex: $1), you will resolve your dissonance by changing internal cognitions.
• Self-Perception Theory Explanation: $20 subject attributes his or her behavior to monetary compensation whereas $1 subject acknowledges that $1 is not enough for them to lie about their enjoyment to the “next participant” (aka confederate) so they attribute their behavior to liking the experiment themselves

Question 5

Daryl Bem’s Self Perception Theory

Answer 5

• when attitudes towards something are weak or ambiguous, people infer what their attitudes are based upon their observation of their own behaviors (ex: I guess like rye bread because I eat it a lot)
• difference between this and cognitive dissonance theory: doesn’t hypothesize that there is a state of discomfort or dissonance produced by a behavior, one’s initial attitude towards the behavior is irrelevant
• OVER-JUSTIFICATION EFFECT: if you reward people for doing something they already enjoy doing, they may stop liking it. This is because they could mistakenly attribute the behavior to external causes rather than to their own liking of the behavior.
  
  • EX: kid likes doing the dishes so mom starts paying him allowance to do so, kid grows to dislike the dishes because he associates doing the dishes as a chore he HAS to do to get money rather than something he initially enjoyed doing

Question 6

Carl Hovland’s Model

Answer 6

• attitude changes as a process of communicating a message with the intent to persuade someone
• three components: communicator (person doing the persuading), communication (their argument), and situation (the context in which the argument is being presented)
• if someone is arguing in a manner that seems to be against their own self-interest, they tend to have a greater persuasive impact (ex: policemen arguing to defund the police)
• overall, the more credible a source is PERCEIVED to be, the greater persuasive impact
• Hovland and Weiss’s Experiment (1952): studied source credibility
  
  • gave an article to American participants about controversial topic, one written by Oppenheimer (physicist) and one written by Pravda (Russian newspaper).
  • Immediately after reading, Oppenheimer (perceived as more credible) was successful in changing 36% of subject’s opinions while Pravda (perceived as less credible) changed 0
  • SLEEPER EFFECT: over time, persuasive impact of high credibility source decreased while that of the lower credibility source increased
• TWO-SIDED MESSAGES: contain arguments both for and against a position
  
  • seen as balanced communication so can be helpful in persuasion
  • News reporting has frequent instances of two-sided messages (or at least is supposed to)

Question 7

Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion

Answer 7

• two routes to persuasion: central and peripheral
  
  • CENTRAL: issue is really important to us, so we tend to follow arguments closely and come up with counterarguments of our own. Therefore, strong arguments will change our minds more often than weak ones.
  • PERIPHERAL: we either don’t care / are distracted or don’t really understand an issue, so strength of the argument doesn’t really matter as much as how / by whom / or in what surroundings the argument is presented

Question 8

Resistance to Persuasion

Answer 8

• ANALOGY OF INOCULATION: William McGuire explained resistance to persuasion through the physiological lens of resistance to disease. CULTURAL TRUISMS (our immune system) can learn how to resist persuasive attacks (viruses) through REFUTED COUNTERARGUMENTS (vaccines). When left untested though (no vaccine), beliefs are vulnerable to attack.
• BELIEF PERSEVERANCE: under certain conditions, people will hold beliefs even after those beliefs have been proven false
• REACTANCE: when social pressure to behave in a particular way becomes so blatant that the person’s sense of freedom is threatened, the person will tend to act in a way to reassert a sense of freedom

Question 9

Analogy of Inoculation

Answer 9

• one explanation of resistance to persuasion (other examples are belief perseverance and reactance)
• WILLIAM MCGUIRE explained resistance to persuasion through the PHYSIOLOGICAL LENS of RESISTANCE TO DISEASE.
  
  • Basically, we are given a vaccine which is a weakened form of an active pathogen, and our body learns how to fight it off. But, if we dont get vaccines, we are vulnerable to bad attacks from things even as common as the flu.
  • Communication Lens: Our beliefs need to be inoculated as well against the attack of persuasive communication. McGuire used CULTURAL TRUISMS (beliefs that are seldom questioned) to test his theory.
    
    • Cultural Truism’s (our immune system) are vulnerable to attack by persuasive communication (virus) if not inoculated because we never have practice defending it (didn’t get a vaccine).
    • REFUTED COUNTERARGUMENTS: these are the vaccines of communication. They are arguments against the cultural truism paired with refutations of said argument. This allows people to practice defending their beliefs and learn how to fight off attacks, so when there is a real attack they are better able to resist it.

Question 10

Belief Perseverance

Answer 10

• one explanation of resistance to persuasion (other examples are the analogy of inoculation and reactance)
• under certain conditions, people will hold beliefs even after those beliefs have been proven false
• if you are induced to believe a statement and then provide your own explanation for it, you will tend to continue to believe that statement even if its proven false
  
  • ex: Someone doesn’t believe in vaccines because they believe that early childhood vaccines gave their child autism, and even though research has come out proving that to be false, they still hold on to the belief.

Question 11

Reactance

Answer 11

• one explanation of resistance to persuasion (other examples are the analogy of inoculation and belief perseverance)
• when social pressure to behave in a particular way becomes so blatant that the person’s sense of freedom is threatened, the person will tend to act in a way to reassert a sense of freedom
  
  • aka: if you try to hard to persuade someone of something, that person will choose to believe the opposite of your position
  • ex: stereotype that super strict parents lead to super chaotic freshmen in college