Test 3 - Final Flashcards
(159 cards)
Social Psychology
-Social psychologists interested in studying how and why people interact
How do interactions with others affect a person’s thoughts, feelings, behaviors?
- Humans have evolved to be social beings
- Social psychology tries to answer this
Social Roles/What position does someone occupy in society?
- They can overlap; people can have more than one role
- Ex: me - student, daughter, sister, caregiver, driver, etc.
Attributions/Why did somebody behave in a particular way? What caused the behavior?
- Two types of attributions:
- Internal (dispositional): (ex: They cut me off because they’re late to something?)
- External (situational): (ex: They cut me off because they’re rude?)
Fundamental Attribution Error
- A tendency to attribute others’ behavior to internal factors
- Ex: Guy cuts you off, and you say, “He’s a bad driver; he’s reckless”
- Ex: Why is woman yelling at her companion? We say it’s she’s mad at him, when that may not even be the case!
Other Attribution Errors?
- We make different attributions for ourselves and others
- Actor-Observer Bias
- Self-Serving Bias
- Don’t forget Fundamental Attribution Error it part of this too!
Actor-Observer Bias?
- Our tendency to attribute others’ actions to internal factors, while attributing our own actions to external factors
- Ex: Guy cut you off, and you say he’s a bad driver, but you cut someone off and you say you’re in a rush
Self-Serving Bias?
- We judge our failures as due to situational factors (they’re out of our hands), but our successes as due to dispositional factors
- Ex: I got an A because I’m so smart, but I got a D because I got a flat tire, and I was worried about that instead
Attitudes
-May include cognitive, affective, and behavioral components
- Cognitive: beliefs, ideas
- ”Gun owners are more likely to shoot a loved one than a criminal”
- Affective: emotions, feelings
- Ex: “Gun’s make me sick”
- Behavioral: actions
- Ex: “I voted for gun-control politicians
Persuasion
-Related to characteristics of the communicator, the message, and the audience (these three factors all matter!)
- Persuasion is more successful when:
- The communicator is attractive/likeable, appears to be credible (seems trustworthy), appears to be an expert
- The message doesn’t seem like an overt attempt to persuade us
- The message appears to present both sides of an issue
- When people are in a negative mood, they are more likely to be critical and less trusting
- May not even want to listen to what you have to say
Cognitive Dissonance. Can this state be solved?
- An uncomfortable state that occurs when behavior and attitudes do not match
- Ex: Someone who exercises, also smokes
- Ex: Think of teens performing risky behavior, and then feeling bad about doing it because it’s not how they were raised
- This state can be solved, but it isn’t easy
Stereotyping
- A simplified set of traits that are associated with group membership
- Tend to be negative
- Doesn’t just have to be racial
- Ex: Her dad’s a professor, and they say she’s a nerd and likes school
Prejudice
- A preconceived opinion or attitude about an issue, person, or group
- It’s an IDEA
Discrimination
- The biased treatment of people based on their membership in a particular group or category
- Treating someone in a biased or unfair way simply because they belong to certain group
- Overlaps with prejudice and stereotypes
- It’s an ACTION
Reducing Prejudice
- Increase contact in cooperative activities
- Especially with kids, this is important!
- Interacting with different groups
- Ex: doing group work
Conformity
-Behaving in ways that increase the likelihood of gaining a group’s approval and avoiding rejection
Who created conformity experiment, and what was it about?
- Solomon Asch
- The line experiment thing!
Compliance
- Agreeing to do something simply because we have been asked
- Compliance and obedience line can get blurry
Obedience
- Complying with instructions given by an authority figure
- More serious than compliance because it’s given by an authoritative figure
Who did an obedience experiment?
- Dr. Stanley Milgram
- Shock experiment (wanted to study why Holocaust happened)
- Studied only men
Social Facilitation
- Occurs when the presence of other people changes individual performance
- Might do better or worse if family member/crush/friend is there
- Ex: With sports’ drivers exam; at work/ when police is watching you
Social Loafing
- Reduced motivation and effort by individuals who work in a group as opposed to work alone
- Ex: group projects; with teams
Deindividuation
- Immersion of the individual within a group, making the individual relatively anonymous
- Ex: With group, we see someone drop a box, and nobody in the group helps, so you don’t either
- Related to bystander effect
Groupthink
- A type of flawed decision making in which a group does not question its decisions critically
- Group doesn’t analyze situation critically
- Happens a lot within politics
- Ex: horrible bill gets passed, and we don’t understand how it even happened