Social psychology

Question 1

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 1

The tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else’s behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation’s external factors

Question 2

Correspondence bias

Answer 2

Same as Fundamental attribution error

Question 3

Attribution effect

Answer 3

Same as Fundamental attribution error

Question 4

Self-serving bias

Answer 4

The common human tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal characteristics, and one’s failures to factors beyond one’s control. The reason people tend to personalize success is because it helps their self-esteem levels.

Question 5

Actor-observer effects

Answer 5

The tendency to attribute our own behavior mainly to situational causes but the behavior of others mainly to internal (dispositional) causes.

Actor-observer bias is a type of attribution bias.

Question 6

Dispositional attribution

Answer 6

A tendency to attribute people’s behaviors to their dispositions; that is, to their personality, character, and ability.

For example, when a normally pleasant waiter is being rude to his/her customer, the customer may assume he/she has a bad temper. The customer, just by looking at the attitude that the waiter is giving him/her, instantly decides that the waiter is a bad person. The customer oversimplifies the situation by not taking into account all the unfortunate events that might have happened to the waiter which made him/her become rude at that moment

Question 7

The defensive attribution hypothesis

Answer 7

Victim-blaming

It is a social psychological term referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending themselves from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap.

Question 8

Perceptual salience

Answer 8

When people try to make attributions about another’s behavior, their information focuses on the individual. Their perception of that individual is lacking most of the external factors which might affect the individual.

The gaps tend to be skipped over and the attribution is made based on the perception information most salient. The most salient perceptual information dominates a person’s perception of the situation.

Question 9

False-consensus effect/ False-consensus bias

Answer 9

In psychology, the is a cognitive bias whereby a person tends to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and that others also think the same way that they do.

Question 10

Barnum effect

Answer 10

The tendency to accept certain information as true, such as character assessments or horoscopes, even when the information is so vague as to be worthless.

Question 11

Kelman’s (1961) social influence

Answer 11

Compliance, Identification, Internalization

Compliance: occurs when a consumer accepts influence from the provider or other consumers because she/he wants to obtain a reward or avoid punishment.

Identification: a consumer cooperates because he believes his behavior is relevant to and required by a reciprocal-role relationship in which he is a participant. Like compliance, identification toes not depend on the consumer’s adopting a behavior because she/he believes it is intrinsically satisfying.

Internalization: occurs when the consumer agrees to cooperate with the provider because this behavior fits in with an existing value system or is intrinsically satisfying.

Question 12

4 attribution errors

Answer 12

Ultimate attribution error: Ultimate attribution error is the tendency to internally attribute negative outgroup and positive ingroup behavior and to externally attribute positive outgroup and negative ingroup behavior.

The fundamental attribution error: refers to a bias in explaining others’ behaviors. According to this error, when we make attributions about another person’s actions, we are likely to overemphasize the role of dispositional factors, while minimizing the influence of situational factors.

The actor-observer bias (actor–observer asymmetry): in addition to over-valuing dispositional explanations of others’ behaviors (fundamental attribution error), we tend to under-value dispositional explanations and over-value situational explanations of our own behavior.

Hostile attribution bias (HAB): interpretive bias wherein individuals exhibit a tendency to interpret others’ ambiguous behaviors as hostile, rather than benign.

Question 13

Hind sight bias

Answer 13

known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it.

Question 14

ABSOLUTE TECHNIQUES (CRITICAL INCIDENT TECHNIQUE, FORCED-CHOICE RATING SCALE, BARS)

Answer 14

Absolute techniques are methods of subjective performance assessment that indicate a ratee’s performance in absolute terms (i.e., not in terms of the performance of other employees). The critical incident technique involves using a checklist of critical incidents (descriptions of successful and unsuccessful job behaviors) to rate each employee. Each item in a forced-choice rating scale consists of two to four alternatives that are considered to be about equal in terms of desirability, and the rater selects the alternative that best or least describes the ratee. BARS is a graphic rating scale that requires the rater to choose the one behavior for each dimension of job performance that best describes the employee.

Question 15

ADA

Answer 15

The ADA requires companies with 15 or more employees to avoid using procedures that discriminate against people with physical or mental disabilities.

It also requires that, when a disabled person is able to perform the essential functions of a job, an employer must consider the person qualified and make “reasonable accommodations” that help the person perform the job as long as the accommodations do not result in undue hardship for the employer

Question 16

Personality trait found to be the best predictor of job performance across different jobs, job settings, and criterion measures

Answer 16

Conscientiousness

Question 17

Attitude Inoculation

Answer 17

Attitude inoculation is a technique used to make people immune to attempts to change their attitude by first exposing them to small arguments against their position. It is so named because it works just like medical inoculation, which exposes a person’s body to a weak version of a virus. The weakened virus triggers the production of antibodies in response, but it is not strong enough to overwhelm the body’s resistance. Later, when exposed to the full virus, the body knows what to expect and is better able to resist than it would have been before the inoculation.

Attitude inoculation, then, exposes a person to a weak logical argument that is contrary to their preexisting attitude. This triggers the creation of counterarguments in response. Later, when exposed to a strong persuasion technique that attempts to change their preexisting attitude through logic, the individual already has arguments to use in defense.

Question 18

Balance theory

Answer 18

Applies to the person (P), other person (O), or a third entity (X). The theory states that people need consistency in their lives and this theory shows how people motivate themselves to work and adjust inconsistent measures. There are three steps to this theory:

People expect consistency.
Inconsistencies create a state of dissonance
Dissonance drives us to restore consistency.

Question 19

Who used autokinetic effect (a perceptual phenomenon in which a stationary point of light appears to move in a darkened room) to study conformity to group norms.

Answer 19

Sherif (1935)

Psychologists had previously discovered that a small, unmoving light in a dark room often appeared to be moving. This was labeled the autokinetic effect. The autokinetic effect is an illusion because the light does not actually move. However, people almost always believe that it does.

Why did Sherif study the autokinetic effect?
Realizing that an experience that is completely “in people’s heads” might be readily influenced by suggestion, Sherif decided to study how people were influenced by other people’s opinions, in their perception of the autokinetic effect.

First Sherif studied how subjects reacted to the autokinetic effect when they were in a room by themselves. He found that they soon established their own individual norms for the judgment—usually 2 to 6 inches. In other words, when given many opportunities (trials) to judge the movement of the light, they settled on a distance of 2-6 inches and became consistent in making this judgment from trial to trial.

What happened when people judged the autokinetic effect by themselves?
What happened when people were put into groups?
In the next phase of the experiment, groups of subjects were put in the dark room, 2 or 3 at a time, and asked to agree on a judgment. Now Sherif noted a tendency to compromise. People who usually made an estimate like 6 inches soon made smaller judgments like 4 inches. Those who saw less movement, such as 2 inches, soon increased their judgments to about 4 inches. People changed to more resemble the others in the group.