Thought Questions- Jot down your thoughts!

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Thought Questions-Jot down your thoughts!

• Why do you obey some rules and disobey others at
  school?
• Have you ever been convinced by friends to do
  something you knew was wrong? To do something you
  knew was right?
• Do you consider yourself a conformist or a
  nonconformist? Why?

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Unit 12 Social Pyschology

• Essential Task 12-1Apply attribution theory to
  explain the behavior of others with specific
  attention to the fundamental attribution error,
  self-serving bias, just-world hypothesis and
  differences between collectivistic and
  individualistic cultures

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Social Psychology

• The 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

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Social Cognition How you think about people?

• Impression Formation how do you construct your
  social cognition?
• Primacy effect
• Early information about someone weighs more than
  later information in forming impressions
• We are cognitive misers
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• A persons expectations about another elicits
  behavior from the other person that confirms the
  expectations
• Hostile partners continued to be more hostile

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Impression Formation

• Schemata
• Ready-made categories
• Allow us to make inferences about others (good
  for cognitive misers)
• Also plays a major role in how we interpret and
  remember information
• We will remember characteristics of our schema
  that werent there

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Impression Formation

• Stereotypes
• A set of characteristics believed to be shared
  by all members of a social category
• It is usually unfair
• Most often applied to sex, race, occupation,
  physical appearance, place of residence,
  membership in a group or organization
• Can become the basis for self-fulfilling
  prophecies

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Attribution

• Attribution Theory tries to explain how people
  make judgments about the causes of other peoples
  behavior
• Three criteria used to judge behavior
• Distinctiveness Is this how the person treats
  everyone or are you different?
• Consistency Has the person always treated you
  this way or is this different?
• Consensus Do other people do this same thing or
  is this really different?

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Attribution Why did he do that? Example

• Bob walks past you without saying hi.
• Distinctiveness Your explanation as to why Bob
  did this will be different if he does this to
  everyone in the hall or just you
• Consistency Your explanation as to why Bob did
  this will be different if he always says hi to
  you or if you dont really know each other.
• Consensus Whether youre in New York vs. a
  college of 600 will change how you explain Bobs
  behavior.

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Biases in Attribution The errors to which your
guesses will succumb

• Actor-Observer Effect attribute actions of
  others to internal factors and the actions of
  yourself to external factors
• Fundamental attribution error the tendency to
  overemphasize personal causes for others
  behavior and underemphasize personal causes for
  our own behavior
• Defensive attribution
• Self-Serving Bias Tendency to attribute our
  successes to our own efforts and our failures to
  external factors
• Just-world hypothesis Assumption bad things
  happen to bad people and good things happen to
  good people
• Attribution across cultures varies dramatically

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Effects of Attribution

• How we explain someones behavior affects how we
  react to it.

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Attitudes feelings, often influenced by our
beliefs, that predispose our reactions to
objects, people, and events

• The Nature of Attitudes
• Relatively stable
• Beliefs facts and general knowledge
• Feelings love, hate, like, dislike
• Behaviors inclination to approach, avoid, buy
• Self-monitoring
• High self-monitors look for cues about how they
  are expected to behave
• Makes using attitudes to predict behavior
  difficult
• Low self-monitors express and act on their
  attitudes consistently making prediction easier

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Attitude Development

• Many factors contribute to the development of
  attitudes
• Imitation
• Reward
• Teachers
• Peers
• Mass media

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Attitudes Can Affect Action

• Our attitudes predict our behaviors imperfectly
  because other factors, including the external
  situation, also influence behavior.

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Attitude Change

• Process of persuasion
• Must get and maintain the persons attention
• Must comprehend the message
• Comprehension leads to acceptance

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Attitude Change

• How the message gets comprehended and then
  accepted is by these things
• Source (credibility is key)
• Message itself (more effective when it
  acknowledges other arguments and then gives novel
  ones a little fear is good)
• Medium of communication (writing good for
  complex, media better for audience with a gist,
  face-to-face is the best)
• Audiences characteristics

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Routes a Message Can Take to Persuade You

• Central Route to Persuasion
• when the attitude of the audience, or
  individual, is changed as a result of thoughtful
  consideration of the message.
• Peripheral Route to Persuasion occurs when
  positive or negative cues (such as images,
  sounds, or language) are associated with the
  object of the message.
• An advertisement featuring a song that the
  audience member likes, or a person whom the
  audience member sees as appealing might cause a
  person to have positive feelings toward the
  brand, without that person ever thinking deeply
  about the message.

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Other techniques

• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
• Low-ball technique
• Brainwashing
• Write-it-down technique
• Fifty-words-or-less technique

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Cognitive Dissonance Theory

• (Leon Festinger 1957)
• Occurs whenever a person has two contradictory
  cognitions or beliefs at the same time. They are
  dissonant, each one implies the opposite of the
  other.
• The less coerced and more responsible we feel for
  an action the more dissonance. The more
  dissonance the more likely we are to change our
  attitude
• It creates an unpleasant cognitive tension and
  the person tries to resolve in the following
  ways (see next slide)

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Audience Characteristics

• Most difficult to change if
• Strong commitment to present attitude
• Attitude is shared by others
• The attitude has been held since early childhood
• Up to a point the larger the difference between
  message and audience the more likely attitudinal
  change will occur
• Low self-esteem more likely to change

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Resolution of Cognitive Dissoance

• 1. Sometimes changing your attitude is the
  easiest way to solve this.
• Example I am a loyal friend, but yesterday I
  gossiped about my friend Chris . . . Well I cant
  change my action . . . but I dont want to change
  my view of myself, so my attitude about Chris
  must be wrong. He is more of an acquaintance
  than a friend.
• 2. Increase the number of consonant elements
  the number of thoughts that back one side.
• It was awesome gossip
• Reduce the importance of one or both of the sides
• The person I gossiped with wont really tell that
  many people.