ch.14

• social psychology - the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another
• attribution theory - the theory that we explain someone's behaviour by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition
• Fritz Heider - proposed the attribution theory
• fundamental attribution error - the tendency for observers, when analyzing others' behaviour, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition
• causes of fundamental attribution error

  • just-world phenomenon
  • saliency bias
• fundamental attribution error - car cuts you off example

  • dispositional attribution - credit behaviour to a person's stable, enduring traits --> "crazy driver!"
  • situational attribution - credit behaviour to the situation --> "maybe that driver is ill"
• attitude - feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events
• peripheral route to persuasion - occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness
• central route persuasion - occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favourable thoughts
• compliance techniques

  • foot in the door
  • door in the face
  • lowballing
  • reciprocity
• foot in the door phenomenon - the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request
• role - a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave
• Philip Zimbardo - created the Stanford Prison simulation in which he randomly assigned college students to fulfill a prisoner/guard role
• cognitive dissonance - the awareness that our attitudes and actions don't coincide; experience mental tension
• Leon Festinger - formed the cognitive dissonance theory; $1 or $20 study where participants in the $1 experimental condition revised their belief to say that the task was interesting to reduce their cognitive dissonance
• cognitive dissonance theory - the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent; eg. when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes
• norms - understood rules of accepted and expected behaviour; prescribe "proper" behaviour
• conformity - adjusting our behaviour or thinking to coincide with a group standard
• Solomon Asch - devised his Line test where approximately 70% of the participants conformed to the group's wrong answer at least once
• normative social influence - influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval; conform to belong
• informational social influence - influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality; conform to look at others for an answer that you don't know
• Stanley Milgram - his Shock Study revealed our obedience to authority; in response to a demand from an authority figure, 65% of the participants obeyed and administered what they believed was the maximum shock level to the learner
• the power of an individual comes from social control (the power of the situation) and personal control (the power of the individual)
• social facilitation - improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others
• social loafing - the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable; most applicable when individual efforts are not obvious
• deindividuation - the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity
• group polarization - the enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group, creating more extreme opinions/decisions
• groupthink - the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives
• culture - the enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next
• prejudice - an unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members; generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action
• stereotype - a generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people
• discrimination - unjustifiable negative behaviour toward a group and its members
• prejudice is an attitude while discrimination is an action
• ethnocentrism - the tendency to consider other cultures, customs, and values as inferior to one's own
• just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get
• ingroup - "us"; people with whom we share a common identity
• outgroup - "them"; those perceived as different or apart from our ingroup
• ingroup bias - the tendency to favour our own group
• scapegoat theory - the theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame; form of victim-blaming
• other-race effect - the tendency to recall faces of one's own race more accurately than faces of other races; aka cross-race effect and the own-race bias