PL1101E Social Psychology

• Dispositional attribution


  Internal factors.

  E.g: Attribute your friend flunking a test to being anxious, not smart, lazy (dispositional)
• Situational attribution


  External factors

  E.g: Attribute your friend flunking a test to breaking up with a long-term relationship/teacher brutal exams (situational)
• Correspondence bias


  Expect people’s behavior to correspond to theirdispositions, ignoring situation.e.g: Tend to think someone is not smart if flunked a test rather than teacher is tough
• Stability of personality traits

  Personality traits seem to be stable over time. It is important that are definitions determine whether personality is unchangeable or continuous. Change can be found in personality in childhood, but is very stable in middle age. Pattern: people become more agreeable in later age, less risk-taking. Changes to biological make-up, eg. brain injury, can change personality.
• Actor-observer bias


  The tendency to blame our actions on the situation and blame the actions of others on their personalities (Disposition).
• Self-serving bias


  The tendency for people to take personal credit for success but blame failure on external factors.

  E.g: A+ I am smart F F* ck the teacher
• What contributes to the correspondence bias?

  - A lack of awareness of the power of the situation

  - Unrealistic beliefs about how situations should affect people
• Fundamental attribution error


  According to this view, people do not just underestimate situational variables as proposed by correspondence bias, but insteadcompletely fail to consider situational variableswhile making attributions.*However, research evidence for a complete neglect of situational variables is lacking.
• Defensive attributions


  Actor-observer bias and self-serving bias, or just-word belief
• Why cultural values in Chinese or Asian countries are more collectivist?

  They raise farms, especially rice, so requires more labour and collaboration, leading to morals, lessons and values that highly depends on communal sense and family.

  e.g: Han Chinese farmed rice, scored higher on not likely to divorce.
• Just-word belief


  People assume that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

  E.g: Strong just-world beliefs have been positively correlated with negative attitudes toward the poor, people with hiV/AidS, the elderly, and the unemployed.
• Members of collectivistic cultures tend to place ... emphasis on


  situationthan mem-bers of individualistic cultures domore
• Attitude


  A positive or negative evalua-tion that predisposes behavior toward an object, person, or situation.
• Benefits of attitude


  Make decision faster, simpler, and less stressful
• Can voting behavior be predicted by attitudes on abortion?

  Not always
• What is ABCs?


  Affect, Behavior, Cognition
• How do we form attitudes?

  By personal experienceorabsorb attitudes from people around. We also prefer tostay on the "winning side"based on howfrequentlywe hear an opinion.
• if a song is popular at a happy time of your life, it is likely that your subsequent attitude toward the song will be positive too. What is this

  specific type of conditioning?Classical conditioning
• Children who are exposed to particular attitudes in their homes, communities, and media duplicate them, especially if they observe the person expressing the attitude being rewarded. What is this conditioning?

  Observational learning
• Cognitive Dissonance


  The uncomfortable state that occurs when behavior and attitudes do not match and that can be resolved through attitude change.

  
  

  Conflict between attitude and behavior
• For attitude change to occur


  as result of cognitive dissonance, we mustattribute our actions to ...Free will
• Production of cognitive dissonance

  e.g: Rejecting a school you like is mind-boggling, so u become a "superfan" of the school you choose to compensate for this.

  
  

  e.g2: Dating a person with so many red-flags is self-detrimental, so u blind urself to the red flags this person has.

  
  

  e.g3: Choosing a political party
• How is cognitive dissonance resolved?

  By devaluing the option that was not chosen.
• Other word for cognitive dissonance

  Accomodate attitude to match with behavior
• Persuasion


  A change in attitude in re-sponse to information provided by another person.
• Elaboration likelihood model (ELM)


  A model that predicts responses to persuasive messages by distinguishing be-tween the central and the peripheral route to persuasion.
• Central route to persuasion


  A person considerspersuasive argumentscarefully and thoughtfully, moreenduring, more resistant to counter-persuasion.
• Peripheral route to persuasion

  A person responds toperipheral cueswithout considering the quality of the argument carefully. Heuristics.
• Peripheral cues


  Images or words that attempt to grab attention by making the receiver think about something that they have a positive schema for: for example, core values, personal benefits or, more simply, a popular celebrity.

  e.g: The number of arguments, the manner in which it is presented, characteristic of the speaker.
• Why do we have two routes

  A thorough evaluation of all the messages that we perceive is not practical
• When do we use central route?

  Have the time, have the knowledge, have care about it
• What is the most effective in persuading smokers to quit?

  it is fine to scare smokers to death about the appearance of their lungs, so long as you include a message that tells them where to get help to quit smoking.Having a sense of control over their responsewill reduce the fear and make the message more persuasive.
• Prejudice


  A prejudgment, usually negative, of another person on the basis of membership in a group.
• Steoreotype


  A simplified set of traits as-sociated with membership in a group or category.
• Discrimination


  Unfair behavior based on stereotyping and prejudice.
• How could situational attribution contributes to prejudice/stereotype?


  if you see an exception to your stereotype (perhaps a female who is running faster than her male friend), you might view her success as the result of situational variables. Perhaps the man is letting her win to be nice. This type of thinking allows us to maintain a "women are weaker" stereotype.
• How does social identity contribute to prejudice/stereotype?

  - Categorization

  - Adopt the identities of their groups (both behaviors and emotion)

  - Group comparisions
• What could be the root cause of human prejudice?

  Evolutionary past
• When study participants viewed faces from their own racial group, activity in the ... was lower than when they viewed faces from another racial group

  amylgada
• Amylgada is correlated with ...

  assessments/threat