Social Psychology Flashcards
What components make up an attitude?
They include: cognition or beliefs, feelings, and behavioral predisposition. “I love Chinese food!” is an example of an attitude. Attitudes are typically expressed in opinion statements.
What do consistency theories state?
People prefer consistency, and will change or resist changing attitudes based on this preference. If a person hates cigarette smoking, but falls in love with a smoker, ther would be an inconsistancy. If the person is aware of this inconsistancy, the person would try to resolve it.
What does Franz Heider’s balance theory state?
This theory is concerned with the way 3 elements are related: the central person (P), some other person (O), and something else symbolized by (X). Balence is when all 3 fit together harmoniously. This is shown as in a triangle. Balence will exist in a triad if there are one or three positives. (pg. 20-21 in Kaplan).
What does Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory state?
It suggests that it is uncomfortable for people to have beliefs that do not match their actions. After making a difficult decision, people are motivated to back their actions up by touting corresponding beliefs. Also, the less the act is justified by circumstance, the more we feel the need to justify it by bringing our attitude in line with the behavior.
What is cognitive dissonance?
The conflict that you feel when your attitudes are not in synch with your behaviors. Engaging in a behavior that conflicts with an attitude may result in changing one’s attitude so that it is consistent with the behavior.
In Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory, when does free-choice dissonance occur?
Occurs in a situation where a person makes a choice between several desirable alternatives.
What is an example of free choice dissonance?
Scott is involved with two women that he is equally fond of, but he feels he needs to choose between them. He selects one woman and tells the other they can’t see each other anymore. After that there will be dissonance because his cognition that he likes the other woman is dissonant with the choice not to go out with her anymore.
What principles of cognitive dissonance theory can be taken from Festinger and Carlsmith’s experiment in 1959? (The experiment with the extremely boring tasks)
- If a person is pressured to say or do something contrary to their privately held attitudes, there will be a tendency for them to change those attitudes
- The greater the pressure to comply, the less this attitude change. Attitude change generally occurs when the behavior is induced with minimum pressure.
In Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory, when does forced-compliance dissonance occur?
Occurs when an individual is forced into behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs or attitudes. Dissonance may occur when a child is forced to eat spinich even though this at odds with her attitude- that she doesn’t like spinich.
What was the result of the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment of 1959?
Students who only recieved $1 reported liking the boring task more than students who recieved $20 for it.
What was another theory used to explain the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment of 1959?
Daryl Bem’s Self-Perception Theory.
What is the basic idea of Bem’s Self-Perception Theory?
When your attitudes about something are weak or ambiguous, you observe your won behavior and attribute an attitude to yourself. People infer what their attitudes are based upon observation of their own behavior.
What is the key difference in Festinger and Carlsmith’s theory and Bem’s theory?
Bem doesn’t hypothesize a state of discomfort or dissonance; a person’s initial attitude is irrelevant in self-perception theory and there is no discomfort produced by behavior.
What is the theory called that if you reward people for something they are already doing, they may stop liking it?
Overjustification effect. This is one implication of self-perception theory.
What did Carl Hovland’s model deal with?
Attitude change as a process of communicating a message with the intent to persuade someone. Credible sources vs. not credible sources as an example.
What does Petty and Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood model of persuasion state?
There are two routes to persuasion: the central and peripheral routes. In the central route, the issue is very important to us and we will carefully evaluate the persuader’s argument. A strong argument may change our mind while a weak argument won’t. In the peripheral route, we don’t really care about the argument or are distracted. The strength of the argument doesn’ matter. What does is how, by whom, or in what surroundings the argument is being presented.
What did William McGuire study?
Resistance to persuasion. Used the analogy of innoculation against a biological disease.
What is a cultural truism?
Beliefs that are sledom attacked. William McGuire used them in his research.
What are refuted counterarguments?
The presentation of an argument against something and then refuting that same argument. For example, if the cultural truism is”It’s a good idea to brush your teeth after every meal if at all possible,” than a refuted counterargument would be that brushing wears away the tooth enamel and then refute it with info that this amount of wear is insignificant.
What did William McGuire find in his study of arguments that were innoculated against attack?
He found that people who were “innoculated” for the cultural truism “It’s a good idea to brush your teeth after every meal if at all possible,” were more able to defend their beliefs about it. Moreso than those who did not receive refuted counterarguments beforehand.
What is it called when people, under certain conditions, hold beliefs even after those beliefs have been shown to be false?
Belief perseverence
What is 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.
According to Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, why are we drawn to affiliate?
Because of a tendency to evaluate ourselves in relationship to other people.
Whose research showed that greater anxiety in people leads to greater desire to affiliate?
Stanley Schachter. Both anxiety and a need to compare oneself with other people may play roles in determining both when and with whom we affiliate.
What does the reciprocity hypothesis state?
We tend to like people who indicate they like us and we tend to dislike people who dislike us
Who proposed the gain-loss principle?
Aronson and Linder
What does the gain-loss principle state?
An evaluation that changes will have more of an impact than an evaluation that remains constant. Therefore we will like someone more if their liking for us has increased (gained) than someone who has consistently liked us.
What is the theory that assumes a person weighs the rewards and costs of interacting with one another?
Social exchange theory. The more the rewards outweigh the costs, the greater the attraction to the other person.
What theory proposes that we consider not only our own costs and rewards, but the costs and rewards of the other person?
Equity theory. If one person feels that he or she is getting less, or more, out of the relationship than the other, there’ll be an instability due to the perceived inequality.
What have researchers found about individual characteristics as they concern affiliation and attraction?
Certain individual characteristics such as similarity in intelligence, attitudes, education, age, religion, etc. are positively correlated with feelings of affiliation and similarity in others.
What does need complementarity suggest?
Opposites attract.
What is the tendency to attribute positive qualities and desirable characteristics to attractive people called?
Attractiveness stereotype
True or False:
Spatial proximity plays a role in attraction.
True.
What is the mere exposure hypothesis?
The idea that mere repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to enhanced liking for it.
Who primarily researched the mere-exposure hypothesis?
Robert Zajonc.
What did John Darley and Bibb Latane famously research?
Bystander intervention.
What is social influence?
The notion that the presence of other people affects an individual’s judgment about an event.
What is it called when a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but falsely assume that most others accect it?
Pluralistic ignorance. A bias about a social group, held by a social group.
What is diffusion of responsibility?
The phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present. If they are alone, they know 100% of the responsibility/blame/guilt will be put on them. Not the case if others are present. This is what happened at Kew Gardens).
What does the Batson Empathy-Altruism model state?
When faced with situations in which others may need help, people might feel distress and/or they might feel empathy. Both of these staes are important since either can determine helping behavior. Shock study.
What perspective states that when people are furstrated, they act aggressively?
Frustration-Aggression hypothesis. Researchers have found that the strength of the frustration experienced is correlated with the level of aggression observed.
What does Bandura’s social learning theory state?
Bandura holds that aggression is learned through modeling and reinforcement. Performed famous “Bobo” doll study where children aged 3-5 observed an adult playing with toys or hitting a Bobo doll. Those children who were frustrated by the experiment and saw the adult hitting the doll, were more likely to hit the doll.
What is the autokinetic effect?
The phenomenon whereby if you stare at a point of light in a room that is otherwise completely dark, the light will appear to move.
What did Muzafer Sherif find in his conformity study?
Individuals conform to the group; judgements converge on a group norm. Sherif had subjects estimate the amoun of movement of a point of light in an otherwise dark room (due to the autokinetic effect, every “movement” is an illusion). He brought the subjects together and had them estimate the amount of movement together. He found people changed their answers to fit the group consensus.
What did Solomon Asch’s study articulate?
Conformity may be defined as yielding to group pressure when no explicit demand has been made to do so. His study had to do with college students and judging the length of lines. Students
What did Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience study show?
In this study, the experimenter prods the subject to give electric shocks to another person. Subjects shocked the other person and the majority continued shocking up to maximum voltage as a result of the experimenter in a lab coat ordering them to do so.
What is it called when compliance with a small request increases the likelihood of compliance with a larger request?
The Foot-in the Door Effect.
What is the door-in-the-face effect?
People who refuse a large initial request are more likely to agree to a later smaller request.
What did study did Clark and Clark perform?
The famous doll preference study in which children were given a choice of a black or white barbie. The majority of girls indicated that they prefered the white doll. Used as evidence for the dangers of racism and school segregation.
What is primacy effect?
Those occasions when first impressions are more important than subsequent impressions.
What is the effect called when most recent information we have about an individual is most important in forming our impressions?
Recency effect
Who is the founding father for Attribution theory?
Fritz Heider.
In Attribution theory, what is a type of cause that relate to the features of the person whose behavior is being considered?
Dispositional. These features include beliefs, attitudes, and personality characteristics of the individual.
What is a situational cause? Who came up with the distinction between situational and dispositional causes?
Situational causes are external and are those that relate to features of their surroundings. Examples are upbringing, threats, money, social norms, and peer pressure.
Fritz Heider created this distinction.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
When inferring the causes of others’ behaviors, there is a general bias toward making dispositional attributions rather than situational attributions.
What is the tendency to allow a general impression about a person (“I like Jill in general”) to influence other, more specific evaluations about a person (“Jill is a good writer, Jill is trustworty, Jill can do no wrong”)?
The halo effect. This explains why people are often inaccurate in evaluations of people that they either believe to be generally good, or hose that they believe to be generally bad.
What is the Belief in a Just World (BJW)? Who studied this?
The tendency of individuals to believe in a just world where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
M.J. Lerner studied this.
What did Theodore Newcomb famously study?
The influence of group norms at a small women’s college. The college atmosphere was liberal and even though most women came from conservative families, as they went further in college, they became more and more liberal. After college, women who married liberal men stayed liberal, but those who married conservative men swayed back to being conservative.
What is the study of how individuals space themselves in relation to others?
Proxemics
Who suggested that there are cultural norms that govern how far away we stand from the people we’re speaking to?
Edward Hall
What did Zajonc argue?
The presence of others increases arousal and consequently enhances the emission of dominant responses.
What is social loafing?
A group phenomenon referring to the tendency for people to put forth less effort when part of a group effort than when acting individually
What did Zimbardo state as being one of the major processes operating within the prison of his famous experiment?
Deindividualization
What is deindividualization?
Deindividualization refers to a loss of self-awareness and of personal identity. In the study, the subjects in the experiment lost their sense of who they were. Their sense of self was overwhelmed by the roles they were playing and they began acting out those roles.
Who studied group decision making and came up with the idea of groupthink?
Irving Janis
What is a groupthink?
The tendency of decision-making groups to strive for consensus by not considering discordant information.
What is the finding that group decisions are riskier than the average of the individual choices?
Risky shift
What did James Stoner study and what did he find?
Stoner studied risky shifts in controversial situations such as a couple choosing allowing a dangerous pregnancy for the mother. Stoner found a shift with group decisions toward caution instead of risk.
What is the value hypothesis?
Risky shift will occur in situations in which riskiness is culturally valued.
What is group polarization?
A tendency for group discussion to enhance the group’s initial tendencies toward riskiness or caution,
What did Kurt Lewin famously study?
He conducted research to determine the effects of different leadership styles. Lewin manipulated the leadership styles used to supervise boys in an after-school program. Each group of boys experienced three different leadership styles: autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.
What is cooperation?
Cooperation occurs when persons act together for their mutual benefit so that all of them can obtain a goal.
What is competition?
In competition, a person acts for his or her individual benefit so that he or she can obtain a goal that has limited availability.
What is the prisoner’s dilemma?
A classic method of investigating people’s choices to compete or cooperate.
Who did the famous study on competition and cooperation involving the Rattlers and Eagles, 2 groups of 12 year old boys in cabins in the woods?
Muzafer Sherif. The two groups, when they thought they were alone, got along fine with those in their own group. When they discovered each other’s existance, the 2 groups became hostile with each other. After spending time solving problems together, however, the 2 groups’ members became friends.
These types of goals are best obtained through intergroup cooperation. What is this type of goal called?
Superordinate goal
Elliot Aronson and Darwyn Linder
Proposed gain-loss principle (an evlauation that changes will have more effect than an evaluation that remains constant.
Sholem Asch
Studied conformity by asking subjects to compare the lengths of lines
Daryl Bem
Developed self-perception theory as an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory
Kenneth and Mamie Clark
Performed study on doll preferences in African-American children; the results were used in the 1954 Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court case.
John Darley and Bibb Latane
Proposed that there were two factors that could lead to non-helping: social influence and diffusion of responsibility.
Alice Eagly
Suggested that gender differences in conformity were not due to gender per se, but to differing social roles.
Leon Festinger
Developed cognitive dissonance theory; also developed social comparison theory.
Edward T. Hall
Studied norms for interpersonal distance in interpersonal interactions
Fritz Heider
Developed balance theory to explain why attitudes change; also developed attribution theory and divided attributions into two categories: dispositional and situational.
Carl Hovalnd
Studied attitude change
Irving Janis
Developed the conecpt of groupthink to explain how group decision-making can sometimes go awry.
Melvin Lerner
Proposed concept of belief in a just world.
Kurt Lewin
Divided leadership styles into thre categories: autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.
William J. McGuire
Studied how psychological inoculation could help people resist persuasion.
Stanley Milgram
Studied obedience by asking subjects to administer electroshock; also proposed stimulus-overload theory to explain differences between city and country dwellers.
Richard Petty and John Cacioppo
Developed elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (central and peripheral routes to persuasion).
Stanley Schachter
Studied relationship between anxiety and the need for affiliation
Muzafer Sherif
Used autokinetic effect to study conformity; also performed Robber’s Cave experiment and found that having superordinate goals increased intergroup cooperation.
Robert Zajonc
Studied the mere exposure effect; also resolved problems with the social facilitation effect by suggesting that the presence of others enhances the emission of dominant responses
Phillip Zimbardo
Performed prison simulation and used concept of deindividuation to explain results.
