Psychology chapter 16 Test Notes Social Psychology Altruistic Behavior - helping behavior that is not linked to personal gain; recognition and reward are not expected Attitude - relatively stable organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavior tendencies directed toward something or someone the attitude object; can include facts, opinions, and general knowledge about the object Attribution Theory - theory that addresses the question of how people make judgments about the causes of behavior; theorist Heider argued that a given behavior is attributed to either internal or external causes, but not both Authoritarian Personality - source of prejudice; bigoted personality or persons who are rigidly conventional, tradition abiding, and exhibit hostility towards those who defy norms Bystander Effect - situational variable; as the number of passive bystanders increases, the likelihood that any one of them will help someone in trouble decreases; used to explain the death of Kitty Genovese Cognitive Dissonance - perceived inconsistency between two thoughts; when a person has 2 contradictory or opposite thoughts at the same time; Cognitive Misers - Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor; idea that human thinkers are stingy with our mental efforts; Example: we keep our first impressions of despite evidence to the contrary Compliance - change of behavior in response to an explicit request from another person or group; techniques to ensure include foot- in- the- door effect, lowball procedure, door- in- the- face effect Foot- in- the- Door Effect - technique to ensure conformity; strategy that states once a person grants a small request, they are more likely to comply with a larger one; Example: once a sales pitch begins the odds of the sale increase because the individual is listening to the request Lowball Procedure - technique to ensure conformity; strategy to induce a person to agree to something by enticing the individual with a low
'cost' and then add- on to the original product; Example: buy a car with no options, but when you add- on the options you have paid more money Door- in- the- Face Effect - technique to ensure conformity; strategy where the individual feels guilty because the first request was refused and therefore, agrees to the second request; Example: Mom can I have a thousand dollars? No, then can I have $20? Conformity - voluntarily yielding to social norms, even at the expense of one's own preferences; necessary for social groups to function effectively; studies by Solomon Asch Contingency Theory - Fiedler; personal characteristics are important to the success of a leader: task- oriented, relationship- oriented Cultural Norm - shared idea or expectation on how to behave; strengthened by habit; folkways- social norms that are acceptable by society (covering mouth when you cough), mores- norms taught by family and community with a religious or moral basis (obey your mother and father, do not kill), and laws- enforced by government (speeding, murder) Cultural Truism - belief that most members of society accept as true; "normal" or "right ways" to behave; typically learned through modeling, imitation, and conditioning; Example: norms, folkways, mores, and laws Culture - tangible goods and the values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that are passed from one generation to another Defensive Attribution - tendency to attribute our successes to our own efforts or qualities and our failures to external factors; motivation to present ourselves well; Example: self- serving bias or just- world hypothesis Deindividuation - loss of personal sense of reasonability of a group; the more anonymous a person feels in a group, the less responsible s/he feels as an individual; used to explain mob behavior; can be influenced by the snowball effect Discrimination - a behavior; an act or series of acts that denies opportunities and social esteem to an entire group of people or individual members of a group; to treat a group as less than equal
Exchange - factor that shows how closely linked people are; concept that relationships are based on trading rewards with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction Frustration- Aggression Theory - a source of prejudice; result of the frustrations experienced by the prejudiced group; people who exploited and oppressed often cannot vent their anger against an identifiable or proper target so they displace their hostility onto persons lower on the social scale than themselves Fundamental Attribution Error - tendency to attribute the behavior of others to causes within themselves; overemphasizes personal causes for other people's behaviors and to underemphasize personal causes for their own behavior; part of the actor- observer effect Great Person Theory - are leaders extraordinary people who assume positions of influence and then shape the events around them or do the event produce great leaders? Hawthorne Effect - principle that people will alter their behavior because of researchers' attention and not necessarily because of manipulations of the setting; study of the relationship between productivity and working conditions at an electric plant, productivity increased because of the researchers presence and not because of the change in lighting effects Industrial/Organization Psychology - field that is concerned with the application of principles to the problems of human organizations, especially at work In- group bias - members see themselves not just as different but also as superior to members of out- groups Intimacy - factor that shows how closely linked people are; the quality of genuine closeness and trust achieved in communication with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction Just- World Hypothesis - an attribution error; based on the assumption that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people; jumping to conclusions than give full weight to the situational factors that may have been responsible
Obedience - compliance with a demand, especially when it comes from an authority figure; Study by Milgram- shock experiment Polarization - phenomena where individuals become more extreme in their attitudes as a result of group discussion; Example: jury Prejudice - an attitude; intolerant, unfavorable, and rigid view of a group of people; assumption that all members of a group share certain negative qualities; unable to see members of a group as individuals; ignore information that disproves beliefs; theories such as frustration- aggression theory and racism often account for prejudice; expression of suspicious, mistrusting approach to life Primacy Effect - Theory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one's impression of that person; Proximity - factor that shows how closely linked people are; how close two people live to each other Racism - belief that members of certain racial or ethnic groups are innately inferior; belief that intelligence, industry, morality, and other valued traits are biologically determined and therefore cannot be change; when prejudice and discrimination are directed at a particular racial or ethnic group Risky Shift - phenomenon where a group will take larger risks than if an individual was making the decision Schema - (plural: schemata) a set of beliefs or expectations about something based on past experience; mental representation of an event, object, situation, person, process, or relationship stored in memory that leads one to expect an experience to be a certain way; Example: if you are in a room with a chalkboard and desks, schema leads you to believe that you are in a classroom of a school Self- fulfilling Prophecy - process in which a person's expectation about another elicits behavior from the second person that confirms the expectation; evidenced in a study by Rosenthal and Jacobsen at an elementary school where students performed to the teacher's expectation, AKA Pygmalion Effect
Self- Monitoring - part of attitude; tendency for an individual to observe the situation for cues about how to react; do you match your actions to your attitude or do you override your attitude in order to behave properly in a given situation; high self- monitors look at the situation for cues on how to react whereas low self- monitors express and act their attitudes with consistency regardless to situational cues Similarity - factor that shows how closely linked people are; complementary traits of attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds, and beliefs; part of the reward theory of attraction Social Influence - process by which others (individually or collectively) affect our perceptions, attitudes, and actions; includes cultural influence, cultural assimilators, conformity, compliance, and obedience Social Loafing - phenomena where people exert less effort when working in groups than they would if working individually because they assume that other group members will do the work Social Psychology - Scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of one individual are influenced by the real, imagined, or inferred behavior or characteristics of other people; Stereotype - A set of characteristics believed to be shared by all members of that social category; stereotype is a special type of schema; inference based on social category and ignores facts about the individual's traits Asch s research on conformity many people will sacrifice their own beliefs rather than risk rejection by their peers, most people conform at least part of the time Zimbardo s prison experiment our behavior is influenced b y social influences and the environment; this research was a naturalistic experiment Sleeper effect the persuasiveness of a speaker, even though they have low credibility
Fear inducing communication the emotional appeal is strong, listeners believe the fear outcome to be true, the message includes a way to avoid the fearful outcome Milgram s research on obedience the willingness of participants to deliver shocks decreased when the prestige of the experimenter was reduced; the experimenter gave instructions by telephone; the participant was in the presence of other participants who refused to deliver shocks. Fastinger s research cognitive dissonance results in attitudes shifting to become more consistent with behavior Fichten s research able bodied students viewed students with physical challenges as being insecure Negative information tends to leave a stronger impression regarding your perception of a person Harmful stereotype effects stereotypes take away our ability to treat each member of a group as an individual; stereotypes lead to faulty attribution Oxytocin chemical released in the brain by closeness and physical touch Physical attraction men place more emphasis on this factor than any other when considering women as a friend Equity theory partners will be comfortable in a relationship when the ratio between their perceived contributions and benefits are equal