Social Psychology Midterm #1

• Affect
• Behavior
• Cognition

Contact Hypothesis

Focus on contact hypothesis, British

• Attribution
• Experiment: Information given to students influenced their opinions about instructor as well as behavior (Warm cold variable)
• Theory of Covariation: People try to see if a particular effect and a particular cause go together across different situations.
• Information Processing

• On limited info we make up something a lot bigger and draw conclusions that influence our behavior
• Drawing conclusions on little evidence, falsifies reality

The way people think, feel, relate to others and how it influences their behavior

A shortcut for problem solving that reduces complex or ambiguous information to more simple judgmental operations

• Won Nobel Prize for Heuristics and its application to economics
• Implications: HEURISTICS Cognition is influenced by culture, values, and beliefs that can influence a person's decisions, areas of diversity makes it harder to predict a person's actions

Realistic Empathy, cold war

Locus & control, 1st scale

• Locus of control DOES NOT EQUAL locus & control
• Perception of reason for attribution is important
• People attribute reinforcement differently which can affect interpersonal relationships

Vicarious reinforcement and learning

Balance Theory (Locus & control) --> Attribution Theory --> Reinforcement

• ATTRIBUTION
• Situational v. Dispositional Factors that influence behavior
• Intentionality --> Conflict Resolution

• Happens when you judge behavior of someone else, actor-observer
• Tend to attribute things dispositionally with other, and situationally with ourselves

• Houston & Pettigrew
• Actor-observer discrepancy, except make the error when judge people in conflict or when there is an in-group or outgroup

• Motivational Theorist
• Then began focusing on the consequences of internal v. external, controllable v. uncontrollable, dispositional v. situational.
• ATTRIBUTION THEORY: Stability of attribution springs the expectancy of change

Behavior is motivated by value (how important is goal to you) and expectancy (if you expect to fail, you will and it will affect your drive)

• Realized the only way to explain behavior of depressed people was to realize that attribute things to uncontrollable, stable, and internal causes
• Globality --> Attribution theory

• Helping Behaviors:
• Adopting perspective of another person induces experience of empathic feeling --> responsible for making people help

Those who experienced distress with empathic feeling only help if there's no way for them to get away

• Glasman & Alberacin
• Amount of information
• Rehearsing and practicing strengthens attitudes
• Having direct personal experiences
• Vested Interest
• Relevance
• Salience
• Stability
• Accessibility

Attribution Theory: The principles that determine how causal attributions are made and what effects they have. Heuristics

Balance Theory: earliest consistency theory. Imbalanced configurations tend to change toward balanced ones.Imbalanced systems produce pressures toward attitude change until there is balanceBalance Theory uses a least effort principle to predict direction of change

• Learning Theory
• Approach that assumes that a person's attitudes are based on principles of reinforcement, association, imitation, and punishment

Theory of Recent Action

• Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• Inconsistency between two cognitive elements proudces pressure to make elements consistent
• Three ways of reducing dissonance: change our behavior in some way, rationalize the dissonance, changing the attitude

• Insufficient Justification
• Threats
• Choice
• Irrevocable Commitment
• Forseeable Consequences
• Responsibility for Consequences
• Effort
• Self-Relevance

People overestimate how much a person's action are due to dispositions such as personality

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Power of the situation
• Zimbardo

• Tend to emphasize homogeneity of outgroup
• Minimize intergroup differences (Outgroup homogeneity effect)
• Intergroup favoritism reinforcement
• Can lead to prejudice and discrimination

• Asche: Are the lines the same length
• Sherif: Robber's Cave

Moorehead, Janice

• Look at attitudes towards women
• 1st female scientist

• Availability
• Biases based on retrievability
• Biases due to effectiveness of a search set
• Biases of imaginability
• Representativeness
• Misconceptions of Chance and probability
• Insensitivity to sample size, regression, previous probability outcomes