Unit 9 Flashcards
Social Psychology
The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.
Personality psychologists ask: why do different people act differently in the same situation?
Social psychologists ask: why does the same person act differently in different situations?
Attribution Theory
The theory that we explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition in others.
(We are more likely to say that someone did something bad because they are a bad person not because they are having a bad day).
More common in individualistic cultures than collectivistic.
When we explain our own behavior, we are sensitive to how our behavior changes with the situation (but not when talking about our self in the past).
Self-Serving Bias
We tend to attribute our successes to ourselves (dispositional factors) and failures to external factors (situational factors).
Why is the Fundamental Attribution Error important?
The way we explain others’ actions, attributing them to the person or the situation, can have important real-life effects.
- Voting, serving on a jury, trust a new friend, deciding whether or not to forgive a loved one.
- Can lead to bias i.e. those who are poor are poor because they are lazy.
Attitudes
Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.
- Our attitudes affect our actions and our actions affect our attitudes.
We stand up for what we believe (attitudes are more likely to affect behavior) when:
- External influences are minimal.
- When the attitude is stable, specific to the behavior, and easily recalled.
