Psychology Final
Social Psychology
Attribution (724-726)
1. Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations
a. Attribution theory: suggests how we explain someone’s behavior—by crediting either
the situation or the person’s disposition.
b. Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s
behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact
of personal disposition
c. The Effects of Attribution:
i. Our attributes—to individual’s dispositions or to their situations—have real
consequences
1. Ex: Hurricane Katrina, terrorists, homeless
Lecture (4/6/09)
Apparently women with bigger smiles, smaller noses, are more attractive.
Waste to hip ratio.
The science of sex appeal
When women expose their flesh and move their bodies, testosterone rises
Women who had a steady partner and who were ovulating were sending the most sexual signals
Women dress more provocatively when they are ovulating
During ovulation, women are drawn to different types of men (more masculine faces)
Key variables for women
Waste to hip ratio
Attitudes (726-730)
1. Attitudes and Actions
a. Attitudes: feelings, based on our beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects,
people, and events.
b. Attitudes Can Affect Actions
i. Our attitudes predict our behavior imperfectly because other factors, including
the external situation, also influence behavior.
ii. Attitudes may indeed affect behavior when other influences are minimal, when
the attitude is specific to the behavior, and when we are keenly aware of our
attitudes.
c. Actions Can Affect Attitudes
i. Attitudes follow behavior
1. The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: a tendency for people who agree
to a small action to comply later with a larger one.
a. Ex: Chinese during the Korean War
b. “Doing becomes believing”
2. Role Playing Affects Attitudes: Following the social prescriptions of a
stereotype/role (college student, nurse, etc)
a. The psychologist’s fake jail
b. What we do, we gradually become
3. Cognitive Dissonance: Relief from Tension: We often bring our
attitudes into line with our actions.
a. We become aware that our attitudes and actions don’t
coincide; we experience tension, or cognitive dissonance.
b. Ex: War in Iraq
4. Although we cannot directly control all our feelings, we can influence
them by altering our behavior.
Lecture (4/8/09)
The more faces you put together, the better the composite reaches the statistical average of the
species. “Averaging of faces”
Symmetry: more symmetrical=more attractive
Study done:
Some Characteristics Preferred by Males:
Kindness and Understanding, Intelligence, Physical Attractiveness, Exciting Personality, Good Health,
Adaptability, etc.
Some Characteristics Preferred by Females:
Kindness and understanding, intelligence, exciting personality, good health, adaptability, physical
attractiveness, creativity, etc.
Men are interested in looks much more than women are
Washington and Lincoln were most popular presidents and they were the tallest compared to the
average population
Attractive women tend to make more money
Taller men tend to make more money
Lecture (4/13/09)
When women are ovulating they prefer a more masculine face
Attitudes:
Attitude: tendency to response positively or negatively toward a certain person, object, idea, or
situation.
 Three components of an attitude are the affective (emotional) component, the behavioral
component, and the cognitive component (what you think).
 Attitudes are poor predictors of behavior
Formation of Attitudes
 Direct contact with the person, situation, object, or idea
 Direct instruction from parents or others
 Interacting with other people who hold a certain attitude (Burns study)
 Watching the actions and reactions of other to ideas, people, objects, and situations
Persuasion (Attitude Change)
 The process by which one person tries to change the belief, opinion, position, or course of
action of another person through argument, pleading, or explanation
o Key elements are the source of the message, the message itself, and the target audience
o Prettier more popular people influence more
o Persuaded more with emotional messages (fear)
 Elaboration likelihood model: Model of persuasion stating that people will either elaborate on
the persuasive message or fail to elaborate on it, and that the future actions of those who do
elaborate are more predictable than those who do not
o Central-route processing: type of information processing that involves attending to the
content of the message itself. (When you have a really strong argument)
o Peripheral-route processing: type of information processing that involves attending to
factors not involved in the message, such as the appearance of the source of the
message, to the length of the message, and other non-content factors
Cognitive Dissonance: Sense of discomfort or distress that occurs when a person’s behavior
Lecture (4/15/09)
Cognitive Dissonance: sense of discomfort or distress that occurs when a person’s behavior does not
correspond to that person’s impression formation the forming of the fist knowledge that a person has
concerning another person
 Study done on paid experiments with lying. Two studies gave out $1 and $20. $1 group rated the
experiment as more interesting. $20 group justified lying because it was a large sum of money.
 Lessened by changing the conflicting behavior, changing the conflicting attitude, or forming a
new attitude to justify the behavior
Prejudice and Discrimination
Prejudice: Negative attitude held by a person about the members of a particular social group
Discrimination: Treating people differently because of prejudice toward the social group to which they
belong
 Forms of prejudice include ageism, sexism, racism, and prejudice toward those who are too fat
or too thin.
Stereotype: a generalized (sometimes accurate, but often over generalized) belief about a group of
people.
Lecture (4/20/09)
Psych of Aggression
1. dealing with aversive events
2. learning that aggression is rewarding
3. observing environment
4. acquiring social scrips
Aversive events – studies in which animals and humans experience unpleasant events reveal that those
made miserable often make others miserable
Environment – even environmental temperature can lead to aggressive acts. Murders and rapes
increased with temperature in Houston
Learning Aggression is Rewarding
 when aggression lead to desired outcomes one learns to be aggressive. This is shown in both
animals and humans
 cultures that favor violence breed violence. Scotch-Irish settlers in the South had more violent
tendencies than their Quaker Dutch counterparts in the NE of US
Acquiring Social Scripts - media portrays social scripts and generates mental tapes in the minds of the
viewers. When confronted with new situations individuals may rely on such social scripts. If social scripts
are violent in nature, people may act them out Ex. Jerry Springer
Do Video Games teach or release violence?
* general consensus on violent video games is that to some extent they breed violence especially
impressionable upon young children. Adolescents view the world as hostile when they get into
arguments and receive bad grades after playing such games- stronger affects than any other media
Lecture (4/22/09)
Altruism: Pro-social behavior that is done with no expectations of reward and may involve the risk of
harm to oneself
Pro-social Behavior: socially desirable behavior that benefits others.
Bystander Effect: referring to the effect that the presence of other people has on the decision to help or
not help, with help becoming less likely as the number of bystanders increases
Diffusion of responsibility: occurring when a person fails to take responsibility for actions or for inaction
because of the presence of other people who are seen to share the responsibility
 Researched Latane and Darley found that people who were alone were more likely to help in an
emergency than people who were with others
o One bystander cannot diffuse responsibility
5 Steps in Making a Decision to Help
1. Noticing
2. Defining an emergency
3. Taking responsibility
4. Planning a course of action
5. Taking action
Lecture (4/24/09) Nocrum designed experiment?
Watched a video on a psych experiment
Teacher gives the other experimenter a shock
Ex: Putting
Lecture (4/27/09)
Social Influence- the process through which the real or implied presence of others can directly or
indirectly influence the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of an individual
Conformity- changing one’s own behavior to match that of other people (ex: clothes)
Compliance- changing one’s behavior as a result of other people directing or asking for the change
Obedience- altering behavior in response to a direct order (authority figure).
Milgrum study (video)
Asch’s Study of Conformity
Shows 1 line then shows a series of 3 other lines (varying in length)… and then asks which one is
equivalent in length to the first line? There were complaints who would state the wrong answer
consistently and others would conform.
Reasons for conformity:
Normative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid
rejection
Informative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to be correct.
Factors that Strengthen Conformity
1. One is made to feel incompetent or insecure
2. The group has at least three people
3. The group is unanimous
4. One admires the group’s status and attractiveness
Four ways to Gain Compliance
1. Foot in the Door technique: asking for a small commitment and, after gaining compliance, asking for a
bigger commitment
2. Door in the face technique: asking for a large commitment and being refused, and then asking for a
smaller commitment
Norm of reciprocity: assumption that if someone does something for a person, that person
should do something for the other in return
3. Lowball technique- getting a commitment from a person and then raising the cost of that
commitment
4. That’s not all technique- a sales technique in which the persuader makes an offer and then adds
something extra to make the offer look better before the target person can make a decision
Lecture (4/29/09)
Milgrum Study: revolutionized behavioral psychology
Less than 1% of psychologists thought the person would go all the way through to the top volts
Study suggests everyone is capable of doing horrible things
“You are just hours away from doing things you never thought you would do”
 Changed the way we do research
 Consent forms are direct result of Milgrum study
 Deception in the study:
o Voice recording (patients screaming)
o They were told they had an equal chance of being the teacher/learner
o The learner was an actor
o Told them the study was about “learning” but in fact it was really about how people
“obey authority”
Social Thinking
1. Does his absenteeism signify illness, laziness, or a stressful work atmosphere?
2. Was the horror of 9/11 the work of crazed evil people or ordinary people corrupted by life events.
Social thinking involves thinking about others, especially when they engage in doing things that are
unexpected
Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations
Attribution Theory: Fritz Heider (1958) suggested that we have a tendency to give casual explanations
for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the disposition
 A teacher may wonder whether a child’s hostility reflects an aggressive personality (dispositional
attribution) or is a reaction to stress or abuse (a situational attribution)
Person vs. Situation Attributions
 Have to decide whether behavior is due to something about personality, or whether anyone
would do same thing in that situation
 Kelley’s 3 questions in making an attribution
o Does this person regularly behave this way in this situation?
o Do others regularly behave this way in this situation?
o Does this person behave this way in many other situations?
o Example: Susan is angry while driving in a traffic jam
 Is it because Susan Is an angry person?

Does Susan Regularly
Do many other
Does Susan get
get angry in traffic
people get angry in
angry in many other
jams?
traffic jams?
situations?
No personality or
situational
attribution
Situational
attribution: traffic
jams make people
mad
Personality
attribution, general
Personality
attribution,
particular
Fundamental Attribution Error
Tendency to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of the
situations in analyzing the behaviors of others leads to the fundamental attribution error.
We see Joe as quiet, shy, and introverted most of the time, but with friends he is very talkative, loud,
and extroverted.
Cross-Cultural differences
Western culture: People are in charge of own destinies, more attributions to personality
Eastern culture: fate in charge of destiny, more attributions to situation.
Actor-Observer Discrepancy
Attribute personality causes of behavior when evaluation someone else’s behavior
Attribute situational when evaluation our own behavior
Why?
 Hypothesis 1: We know our behavior changes from situation to situation, but we don’t know
this about others
 Hypothesis 2: When we see others perform an action, we concentrate on actor, not situation—
when we perform an action, we see environment, not person.
Self Serving Bias
We tend to make internal attributions for our success and external for our failure
Lecture (5/1/09)
Group Influence
How do groups affect our behavior? Social psychologists study various groups:
1. One person affecting another
2. Families
3. Teams
4. Committees
Social Loafing
The tendency of an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal than when
tested individually (Latane, 1981)
Deindividuation
The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity
(Mob behavior, costume parties)
Effects of Group Interaction
Group Polarization: enhances a group’s prevailing attitudes through a discussion. If a group is likeminded, discussion strengthens its prevailing opinions and attitudes.
Groupthink
A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides the
realistic appraisal of alternatives
Attack on Pearl Harbor
Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs
Watergate Cover-up
Chernobyl Reactor Accident