Social Psychology - Level 5

Question 1

What is social influence?

Answer 1

Process whereby attitudes and behaviour are influenced by the real or implied presence of other people.

Question 2

What are norms?

Answer 2

Attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups.

Question 3

Describe what compliance is briefly?

Answer 3

Superficial, public and transitory change in behaviour and expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion or group pressure.

Question 4

What is a reference group?

Answer 4

Kelley’s term for a group that is psychologically significant for our behaviour and attitudes.

Question 5

How would you briefly describe social power?

Answer 5

John French and Bert Raven (1959) identified five bases of social power, and later Raven (1965, 1993) expanded this to six: reward power, coercive power, informational power, expert power, legitimate power and referent power.

Question 6

Name the three factors that influence obedience?

Answer 6

Immediacy of the victim, Immediacy of the authority figure, Level of authority.

Question 7

What are the three main components of ethics?

Answer 7

Participation must be based on fully informed consent.

Participants must be explicitly informed that they can withdraw, without penalty, at any stage of the study.

Participants must be fully and honestly debriefed at the end of the study.

Question 8

Name and describe two types of influence?

Answer 8

Frame of reference.

Yielding to majority group pressure.

Question 9

What is social identity theory?

Answer 9

Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self- categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.

Question 10

What is the conversion effect?

Answer 10

When minority influence brings about a sudden and dramatic internal and private change in the attitudes of a majority.

Question 11

What is social facilitation?

Answer 11

An improvement in the performance of well- learnt/
easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learnt/ difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species.

Question 12

What is the audience effect?

Answer 12

Impact on individual task performance of the presence of others.

Question 13

Who described Drive theory and what is it?

Answer 13

Zajonc’s theory that the physical presence of members of the same species instinctively causes arousal that motivates the performance of habitual behaviour patterns.

Question 14

What is the free rider effect and name someone who might take advantage of it?

Answer 14

Gaining the benefits of group membership by avoiding costly obligations of membership and by allowing other members to incur those costs.

Question 15

What is social impact and how does it work?

Answer 15

The effect that other people have on our attitudes and behaviour, usually as a consequence of factors such as group size, and temporal and physical immediacy.

Question 16

What is cohesiveness?

Answer 16

The property of a group that affectively binds people,

as group members, to one another and to the group as a whole, giving the group a sense of solidarity and oneness.

Question 17

Please describe cognitive dissonance?

Answer 17

State of psychological tension, produced by simultaneously having two opposing cognitions. People are motivated to reduce the tension, often by changing or rejecting one of the cognitions. Festinger proposed that we seek harmony in our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, and try to reduce tension from inconsistency among these elements.

Question 18

What is de-individuation?

Answer 18

Process whereby people lose their sense of socialised

individual identity and engage in unsocialised, often antisocial, behaviours.

Question 19

How would you describe catharsis?

Answer 19

A dramatic release of pent‑up feelings: the idea
that aggressive motivation is ‘drained’ by acting against
a frustrating object (or substitute), or by a vicarious
experience.

Question 20

What is an A type personality?

Answer 20

The ‘coronary-prone’ personality – a behavioural

correlate of heart disease characterised by striving to achieve, time urgency, competitiveness and hostility.

Question 21

What is social learning theory?

Answer 21

The view championed by Bandura that human social
behaviour is not innate but learnt from appropriate
models.

Question 22

What is a just world hypothesis, and who described it?

Answer 22

According to Lerner and Miller, people need to
believe that the world is a just place where they
get what they deserve. As evidence of undeserved
suffering undermines this belief, people may conclude
that victims deserve their fate.

Question 23

Why do norms matter?

Answer 23

Cultural norms play a key role in developing and sustaining prosocial behaviour – they provide a background influence on human behaviour and are quintessentially learnt rather than innate. A
norm is a standard of action that specifies what is expected, ‘normal’ or proper.

Question 24

What is the recopricity principle?

Answer 24

The law of ‘doing unto others as they do to you’.
It can refer to an attempt to gain compliance by first
doing someone a favour, or to mutual aggression or
mutual attraction.

Question 25

Give four situational factors impact aggression?

Answer 25

Temperature, Crowding, Alcohol,

Question 26

What can weaken the conformity effect?

Answer 26

Decreasing group pressure, reducing uncertainty

Question 27

Name one author of the minority influence studies?

Answer 27

Moscovici and Faucheux

Question 28

Social influence depends on which three factors?

Answer 28

Conformity
Normalisation
Innovation

Question 29

What are the three principles of being a naive psychologist?

Answer 29

Rational
scientific-like
cause-effect analyses to understand the world.

Question 30

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 30

Bias in attributing another’s behaviour more to internal than to situational causes.

Question 31

Name two fundamental Attribution Errors?

Answer 31

1. The fundamental attribution error, originally identified by Ross (1977), refers to a tendency for people to make dispositional attributions for others’ behaviour, even when there are clear external/ environmental causes.
2. Pettigrew (1979) has suggested that the fundamental attribution error may emerge in a slightly different form in intergroup contexts where groups are making attributions about ingroup and outgroup behaviour – he calls this the ultimate attribution error.

Question 32

What is an anchoring heuristic?

Answer 32

Anchoring and adjustment is a heuristic
that ties inferences to initial standards. So, for example, inferences about other people are
often anchored in beliefs about ourselves: we decide how intelligent, artistic or kind someone
else is with reference to our own self-schema.

Question 33

What is the cognitive miser?

Answer 33

A model of social cognition that characterises people

as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviours.

Question 34

Why do people use the cognitive miser strategy?

Answer 34

it is assumed that people have a limited capacity to process information and are cognitive misers who take all sorts of cognitive short-cuts; or they are motivated tacticians who choose, on the basis of their goals, motives and needs, among an array of cognitive
strategies.

Question 35

What is the point of studying excuses?

Answer 35

Understand the concept of Self-handicapping: Explaining away your failure.

Question 36

What is a meta-analysis?

Answer 36

Statistical procedure that combines data from different studies to measure the overall reliability and strength of specific effects.

Question 37

What is social loafing?

Answer 37

A reduction in individual effort when working on a
collective task (one in which our outputs are pooled
with those of other group members) compared with working either alone or coactively (our outputs are not pooled).

Question 38

What is the social compensation effect?

Answer 38

Increased effort on a collective task to compensate for other group members’ actual, perceived or anticipated lack of effort or ability.

Question 39

What is a stereotype?

Answer 39

Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members.

Question 40

What is ethnomethodology?

Answer 40

Method devised by Garfinkel, involving the violation of hidden norms to reveal their presence.

Question 41

What is the mere exposure effect?

Answer 41

Repeated exposure to an object results in greater attraction to that object.

Question 42

What have we learned from the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments?

Answer 42

Zimbardo (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks and Jaffe,
1982) found that students who were deindividuated by being dressed as guards were extremely brutal to other students who were deindividuated as prisoners.

“Milgram: Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace. “

Question 43

How can the actor/observor effect be practically used?

Answer 43

Tendency to attribute our own behaviours

externally and others’ behaviours internally.

Question 44

What is the door-in-the-face tactic?

Answer 44

Here a person is asked a large favour first and a small request second.

Multiple-request technique to gain compliance, in which the focal request is preceded by a larger request that is bound to be refused.

Question 45

What is the low-ball tactic?

Answer 45

Technique for inducing compliance in which a
person who agrees to a request still feels committed
after finding that there are hidden costs.