Social T2

Question 1

attribution theory

Answer 1

the study of how people explain events

Question 2

Availability Heuristic

Answer 2

making decisions based upon how easy it is to bring something to mind likely judging these outcomes as being more common or frequently occurring.

Question 3

Experiments testing correspondent inference theory/FAE?

Answer 3

Jones & Harris 1967

Question 4

familiarity heuristic

Answer 4

people tend to have more favorable opinions of things, people, or places they’ve experienced before as opposed to new ones

Question 5

Hindsight bias

Answer 5

The tendency for people to see an outcome as inevitable once the actual outcome is known.

Question 6

How might Bem’s self-perception theory offer a better explanation

Answer 6

Attitudes may be changed through a self-attributional process when the behaviour falls within a range of personally acceptable conduct. So when someone acts outside of this range of acceptable behaviour cognitive dissonance resolution accont better for attitude change

Question 7

How’s the above-average effect a self-serving bias?

Answer 7

act of attributing behaviour in a distorted way to either enhance or protect our self-esteem (e.g. taking credit for success but explaining away failures). one inflates their own ability or performance in the above-average effect related to one’s self-esteem and self-image that the self-serving bias is protecting/enhancing.

Question 8

Manu watches all the “Jaws” movies, in which sharks attack people at sea. Manu decides she will never swim in the sea again, because she worries about the possibility of getting attacked by a shark-> heuristic?

Answer 8

availability heuristic

Question 9

Optimism Bias

Answer 9

People believing that good things are more likely to happen to them than bad things

Question 10

Representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971)

Answer 10

• compare aspects of the individual incident to other mental examples
• likelihood of an event depends on the similarity/ representativeness of said event -> stereotype

Question 11

Schwartz et al. (1991) conducted a compelling research study to show how a certain heuristic influences an individual’s thinking. Participants were asked to recall 6 or 12 times when they had been assertive or unassertive in their lives. What was the study’s conclusion?

Answer 11

Attributional processes underpin the availability heuristics

Question 12

Study relating FAE and Culture

Answer 12

Miller 1984

Question 13

Study to Illustrate the Implications of the Availability Bias

Answer 13

Schwartz 1991

Question 14

Trial and error heuristic

Answer 14

people use a number of different strategies to solve something until they find what works -> video gaming, driving

Question 15

What are three problems of nudges (Sugden, 2009)?

Answer 15

1. finding out what would make people better off, as judged by themselves.
2. Policies do not correct reasoning failure (quality of decision-making) but use reasoning failure as an attempt to correct the outcomes of that failure.
3. Infringement on autonomy (Refute: simple adjustment of the context in which one can continue to exercise one’s autonomy)

Question 16

What does FAE not help us with?

Answer 16

1. doesn’t help us understand the relative strength of dispositional vs. external factors that lead to observable behaviours
2. we cannot know the true influence of someone’s disposition vs. their situation and to what degree they each played a role in the displayed behaviour. However, we can predict the FAE of others

Question 17

What does the Behavioural theory of rational choice claim?

Answer 17

bounded rationality => limited computational ability + short-term memory and selective perception Homo Sapiens= settle for satisficing methods instead of maximum utility or optimisation

Question 18

What is a bias

Answer 18

They result from heuristics that cause incorrect judgments which we consequently become drawn to under certain circumstances

Question 19

What is a heuristic?

Answer 19

“…a simple procedure (cognitive shortcut) that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.” (Kahneman, 2011)

Question 20

Ultimate Attribution Bias was proposed by?

Answer 20

Pettigrew (1979)

Question 21

What do attribution theories describe?

Answer 21

Describe how we attribute causes to our own or other’s behaviour

Question 22

By whom was Fundamental Attribution Error proposed?

Answer 22

Ross (1977)

Question 23

Who proposed the Actor-Observer Effect, and what is it an extension of?

Answer 23

Jones and Nisbett (1972) proposed it as an extension of correspondence bias

Question 24

By whom was confirmation bias coined?

Answer 24

Trope & Thompson, 1997

Question 25

What did Jones and Harris (1967) find?

Answer 25

Question 26

What are the dimensions in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?

Answer 26

Whether Control or Lack of control are internal/external and stable/unstable

Question 27

In Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution/ Attributional Theory (1979), what happens if someone deems something permanently within their control?

Answer 27

They show typical effort towards it

Question 28

In Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution/ Attributional Theory (1979), what happens if someone deems something changing and outside their control?

Answer 28

They rely on luck

Question 29

Ultimate Attribution Bias proposes that

Answer 29

negative outgroup behaviour is dispositionally attributed, while positive outgroup behaviour is externally attributed to the preservation of an outgroup image.

Question 30

What are the seven main theories of attribution?

Answer 30

1. Naive Psychology Theory
2. Correspondent Inference
3. Attributional Style
4. Covariation Theory
5. Self-Perception Theory
6. Attributional Theory
7. Intergroup Attribution

Question 31

Who’s the theorist behind Intergroup Attribution and what do they propose?

Answer 31

Deschamp (1983) suggests that we assign cause of one’s own or others’ behaviour to group membership

Question 32

Who’s the theorist behind Attributional Theory and what do they propose?

Answer 32

Weiner (1979,1985) proposes that attribution is based on how well people perform on a task

Question 33

Who’s the theorist behind Self-Perception Theory and what do they propose?

Answer 33

Daryl Bem (1967, 1972) suggests we make self-attributions to gain knowledge about ourselves

Question 34

Who’s the theorist behind Covariation Theory and what do they propose?

Answer 34

Harold Kelley (1967) suggests that assigning a cause to behaviour depends on the factor that seemingly covaries the most, to make an internal/dispositional or external/environmental attribution (consistency, distinctiveness, consensus)

Question 35

Who’s the theorist behind Attributional Style and what do they propose?

Answer 35

Rotter (1966) claims the existence of personal pre-dispositions to make a certain type of attribution (Internal vs. External) -> locus of control}}

Question 36

Who’s the theorist behind Correspondence Inference and what do they propose?

Answer 36

Jones and Davis (1965) propose the idea that behaviour corresponds with personality traits, which is how we can infer about it so we can maintain the idea of control and a predictable world

Question 37

Who’s the theorist behind Naive Psychology Theory and what do they propose?

Answer 37

Heider (1958) suggests people use cause-effect analyses in order to understand the world

Question 38

What does fundamental attribution error describe?

Answer 38

tendency to attribute more internally dispositional causes to other’s behaviour than externally situational causes in others

Question 39

What is fundamental attributon error the basis for?

Answer 39

Ultimate Attribution Bias Pettigrew (1979) focused on outgroup behaviour

Question 40

What does the Covariation model describe?

Answer 40

Question 41

What does the Actor-Observer Effect describe?

Answer 41

tendency to attribute others’ behaviour internally to dispositional factors (observer) and one’s own to external factors (actor)

Question 42

What is the role of perceptual focus in the Actor-Observer Effect?

Answer 42

Actors can’t see themselves behaving

Question 43

What is the role of informational difference in the Actor-Observer Effect?

Answer 43

actors tend to have a wealth of information enabling them to make external attributions

Question 44

What are biases (Fiske & Taylor 2013)?

Answer 44

systematic errors in our rational thinking, perception and attitudes

Question 45

What is a different way to define biases?

Answer 45

adaptive characteristics of ordinary, everyday social perception

Question 46

What is confirmation bias?

Answer 46

the tendency to seek, interpret, create information that confirms existing ideas, explanations for the cause of an event

Question 47

What does stability mean in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?

Answer 47

is the internal/external cause stable/unstable?

Question 48

What does locus mean in Weiner’s Task Performance Attribution (1979)?

Answer 48

performance is caused (internally) by the actor or (externally) by the situation