Social Psychology Flashcards
What is an attitude?
A relatively stable and enduring evaluation of things and people.
What is social cognition?
The way in which people perceive and interpret themselves and others in their social world.
What is the ABC model of attitude?
Attitude as an interaction between 3 components: affective, behavioural, cognitive.
How does a child develop their attitudes?
Through socialization.
How do attitudes change?
Through cognitive dissonance or self-perception attitude change.
What is cognitive dissonance?
When we hold two contradictory beliefs or when a belief contradicts behaviour, we experience a state of emotional discomfort which we must resolve.
What is self-perception theory?
A theory suggesting that when people are uncertain of their attitudes, they infer what the attitudes are by observing their own behaviour.
When does an attitude predict behaviour?
The more specific or powerful an attitude, the more likely it is to predict a behaviour.
What are two factors which may cause people to misrepresent their attitudes?
The social desirability factor, and their implicit attitudes.
What are the main features of the social identity theory in explaining prejudice?
Interplay between social categorization, social identity, and social comparison.
What is realistic conflict theory?
The amount of actual conflict between particular in-groups determines the degree of prejudice or discrimination between those groups.
What is broadly deemed to be the main source of prejudice?
Human’s ability to identify with a group.
What is the central route of persuasion?
The content of the message using factual information and logical arguments.
What is the peripheral route to persuasion?
Superficial information.
What source factors increase persuasion?
If the source is credible & likeable.
What message factors increase persuasion?
Two-side appeal or fear-based messaging
What channel factor increases persuasion?
The closer the source-receiver, the more persuasive the message.
What two specific techniques work well for persuasion?
Foot-in-door and door-in-face
What are the barriers to persuasion?
Forewarning an audience
What are the two types of attributions?
Dispositional/internal and situational/external
What is the fundamental attribution error?
The tendency to use dispositional attributions to explain the behaviour of other people.
What is the actor-observer effect?
The discrepancy between how we explain other people’s behaviour (dispositionally) and how we explain our behaviour (situationally)
What is the self-serving bias?
The tendency to attribute our positive behaviour to dispositional reasons and negative behaviours to situational ones.
What are the two categories of norms?
Descriptive: what members of a group do.
Injunctive: what members of a group ought to do.
