Social Psychology

Question 1

Fritz Heider

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Attribution theory

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Attribution Bias

Answer 3

Using ‘gut feeling’ or instinct rather than systematic deductions (consensus, consistency, distinctiveness)`

Question 4

Fundamental Attribution (FA) Bias

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Actor-observer bias

Answer 5

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)

Question 6

Self-serving bias

Answer 6

attribution made in a way that makes us feel GOOD

- ex: attributing success to hard work and failure to bad luck

Question 7

Availability heuristic

Answer 7

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

Question 8

False consensus effect

Answer 8

People believe that most others agree with them

Question 9

Social priming (2 studies)

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Script

Answer 10

Learned set of behaviours that are both necessary and acceptable in specific social contexts
e.g. going to the movie theatre

Question 11

Schema

Answer 11

Items brought to mind as a result of a basic categorization process
- Known as STEREOTYPES when these related to groups of people

Question 12

Mere exposure effect

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Staats’ Associative Learning

Answer 13

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)

Question 14

Self-perception theory

Answer 14

People reflect on own behaviour when UNSURE of their attitude (weak attitude)
Helps to construct a mental model of their world

Question 15

Cognitive Dissonance

Answer 15

People have a STRONG attitude but behave in opposition

Attitude change helps them to modify their mental model to maintain its predictive utility

Question 16

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

Answer 16

a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes.

Cacioppo and Petty

Question 17

ELM Central Route

Answer 17

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

Question 18

ELM Peripheral Route

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Which ELM Route is more predictive of behaviour?

Answer 19

Central route
- employs more critical processing than peripheral route; attitudes formed through this route are more resistant to change

Question 20

Musaf Sherif Informational Influence Study

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Solomon Asch Normative Influence Study

Answer 21

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)

Question 22

Normative Influence

Answer 22

• Asch Line Length Study
• Changes PUBLIC attitudes (not private attitudes)
• aka Compliance
• Increasing # of people present increases normative influence (to an extent)

Question 23

Informational Influence

Answer 23

• 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

Question 24

Minority Influence

Answer 24

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”?

Question 25

3 Styles of Leadership

Answer 25

1) Autocratic
2) Democratic (best)!
3) Laissez-faire

Question 26

Leader-member exchange theory

Answer 26

Leader effectiveness depends on the relationships developed b/w leaders and followers

Question 27

Social identity theory

Answer 27

Good relations encourage followers to “depersonalize” and see themselves less as individuals and more as group members

Question 28

Social Facilitation

Answer 28

Norman Tripplett (one founder of soc. psych)
- Children turned reels faster in pairs than when alone

Question 29

Evaluation-Apprehension (E-A)

Answer 29

E-A increases physiological arousal –> body performs SIMPLE tasks more quickly
- Blindfolded audiences don’t clap as loud b/c less aware of evaluation by others

Animals, however, DO experience social facilitation and don’t care about judgment/evaluation

Question 30

Social inhibition

Answer 30

Prescence of others can increase speed of simple tasks
but DECREASE speed on complex tasks
- People perform math worse in groups
- Experts (w/ well-trained behavioural patterns) perform BETTER w/an audience

Question 31

Social Loafing

Answer 31

Bibb Latané

• Reduction in individual performance when effects of a group are pooled so cannot be judged individually
• people told to shout were loader when they thought they were alone vs. when they thought they were in a group
• due to DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

Question 32

Bystander apathy effect

Answer 32

Outcome of social loafing

• Kitty Genovese
• Increasing number of “non-acting” people in a room will decrease likelihood of someone to take action
• e.g. smoke-filled room experiments, epileptic seizure experiment
• Another type of normative/informational influence