Social Psychology Flashcards
Fritz Heider
Believed we engage in social cognition for 2 reasons:
1) a need to understand the world around us
2) Need to control the world around us
Human behaviour therefore driven by need to PREDICT and CONTROL
Attribution theory
Kelley 3 Types of information used for us to arrive at internal and external attributions of observed behaviour 1) Consensus 2) Consistency 3) Distinctiveness
Systematic way (+ time consuming) of making conclusions
Attribution Bias
Using ‘gut feeling’ or instinct rather than systematic deductions (consensus, consistency, distinctiveness)`
Fundamental Attribution (FA) Bias
Tendency to make dispositional (internal) attribution to someone rather than a situational (external) attribution
Ex. Jones & Harris Castro Narrative study; people thought that writer’s were pro-Castro even when told that they had no choice in writing an argument
Actor-observer bias
People tend to make FA Bias about OTHER, but make situational attributions about themselves
- Perceptual salience explains this
- Reversed when one puts a mirror in front of themselves (start making situational attributions for themselves)
Self-serving bias
attribution made in a way that makes us feel GOOD
- ex: attributing success to hard work and failure to bad luck
Availability heuristic
Judgments are made by what is most attention-grabbing in the context @ hand
Ex. people flew less after 9/11 despite air travel being safer than ground transport
Based on phenomena like the FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT
False consensus effect
People believe that most others agree with them
Social priming (2 studies)
- Affects attributions & behaviour
Asch study:
lists about a person contained same words scrambled such that List 1: “intelligent, …, envious”; List 2: “envious, … intelligent”
- People w/ list 1 ranked person more positively than people w/ list 2
Bargh study:
People who unscrambled “polite” sentences interacted more politely with experimenters than those who unscrambled “rude” sentences
Script
Learned set of behaviours that are both necessary and acceptable in specific social contexts
e.g. going to the movie theatre
Schema
Items brought to mind as a result of a basic categorization process
- Known as STEREOTYPES when these related to groups of people
Mere exposure effect
Robert Zajonc (SCIENCE)
- The more we see something, the more familiar it is, the more we like it
- Zajonc showed participants made up characters for various durations – they preferred the ones that they had seen for longer durations
We don’t like photos of ourselves because we’re unfamiliar with this orientation – we prefer our mirror image
Staats’ Associative Learning
Paired the words “Dutch” and “Swedish” with either -ve or +ve words; participants rated the nationalities based on whichever words were associated
- Works best with non-sense words (reduced prior knowledge)
Self-perception theory
People reflect on own behaviour when UNSURE of their attitude (weak attitude)
Helps to construct a mental model of their world
Cognitive Dissonance
People have a STRONG attitude but behave in opposition
Attitude change helps them to modify their mental model to maintain its predictive utility
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes.
Cacioppo and Petty
ELM Central Route
persuasion will likely result from a person’s careful and thoughtful consideration of the true merits of the information presented in support of an advocacy
- involves a high level of message elaboration in which a great amount of cognition about the arguments are generated by the individual receiving the message.
- The results of attitude change will be relatively enduring, resistant, and predictive of behavior
- Minority dissent encourages CENTRAL route processing; steers people away from heuristics and encourages conversion rather than compliance
ELM Peripheral Route
persuasion results from a person’s association with positive or negative cues in the stimulus or making a simple inference about the merits of the advocated position
- The cues received by the individual under the peripheral route are generally unrelated to the logical quality of the stimulus.
- These cues will involve factors such as the credibility or attractiveness or speech prosody of the sources of the message, or the production quality of the message
- The likelihood of elaboration will be determined by an individual’s motivation and ability to evaluate the argument being presented
Which ELM Route is more predictive of behaviour?
Central route
- employs more critical processing than peripheral route; attitudes formed through this route are more resistant to change
Musaf Sherif Informational Influence Study
Participants estimated oscillation range of autokinetic effect illusion (looks like movement but is actually stationary)
- Judgments CONVERGED when made in a group vs. when made alone
- Opposite of false consensus effect; increasing uncertainty led to participants looking to others’ judgments as a guide
Solomon Asch Normative Influence Study
Participants judged line length (vs. 2 other lines) in a room full of confederates
– very obvious judgment, but when confederates started to agree on a clearly wrong length, participants too began to give the wrong response 37% of the time (vs. 1% when alone)
Normative Influence
- Asch Line Length Study
- Changes PUBLIC attitudes (not private attitudes)
- aka Compliance
- Increasing # of people present increases normative influence (to an extent)
Informational Influence
- Musaf Sherif autokinetic effect study
- Changes public AND private attitudes
- aka Conversion
- Increasing informational influence (uncertainty) will increase conformity
- Uncertainty = increased desire to fit in
Minority Influence
Moscovi Colour Hue Study
- 4 patients and 2 confederates had to report “hue” of a colour
- Majority group changed responses if and only if the minority (confederates) were consistent w/ their dissent
- Majority must engage in an attributional process to try ot figure out WHY minority is behaving as it does (by IGNORING informational influence)
- Are they “just mad” or are they “confident”?
