AP PSYCH REVIEW
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
2013-2014
(8 – 10 %)
 Overview
o Social psychology studies the way people relate to others
 Attitude formation
 Attributions
 Antisocial v. prosocial behavior
o Social Cognition
 The idea that our biases can affect our attitudes and
attributions
 Basic premise  people go through their daily lives acting like
scientists, gathering data and making predictions
 Attitude Formation and Change
o Attitude
 A set of beliefs and feelings
 Are evaluative in nature  we generally have positive or
negative feelings towards situations
o Changing Our Attitudes
 Mere exposure effect
 The more one is exposed to something, the more one
will come to like it
o Ex: you buy something because it is heavily
advertised
 Central route to persuasion
 Deeply processing the content of the message
o Ex: what really this product better than the rest?
 Peripheral route to persuasion
 Involves other aspects of the message
 Has more to do with what the communicator (person
endorsing the item) has to say
o Ex: why buy Jordan’s?
 The Role of the Communicator
 Attractive people, famous people, and experts
o Excellent uses as persuasive communicators
 What really gives?
 More educated people are less likely to be persuaded
 Uniformed audiences are more easily swayed by a one
sided argument
 An informed group is better persuaded by refuting all
opposing arguments
 Attitude and Behavior
o 1934  Richard La Piere
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traveled through the US West Coast with an Asian couple to see
how they’d be treated
 only once were they mistreated
 LaPiere called all the establishments they visited asking if
they’d serve Asians
 90% reported they wouldn’t
 Finding attitudes don’t always predict
 Behavior
o Cognitive Dissonance Theory
 Based on the idea that people are motivated to have consistent
attitudes and behaviors
 Tension is experienced in the form of dissonance
o Ex: Jack thinks drinking is bad, but goes to a
party and drinks
 The behavior cannot be altered (after the
fact)
 Jack decides drinking is not necessarily
bad
 This change happens w/o conscious
awareness
 Festinger and Carlsmith  the classic Cognitive Dissonance
experiment
 Asked their participants to perform a bring task and lie
to the next subject and tell them it was not boring
 In one condition the subjects were paid $1 to lie
 In others they were paid $20 to lie
 Those paid $1 more easily changed their attitudes than
those who were paid $20
o Why?
 Those who were paid $1 did not have
sufficient external motivation to lie
 They lied to reduce dissonance
 Compliance Strategies
o Foot in the door technique
 Suggests that if you get people to a small request first, they are
more likely to agree to a larger request later
o Door in the face
 Argues that after people refuse a large request they will look
upon a smaller request more favorably
 Ex: Ask a friend for $100  get denied
o Ask for $20  get the money
o Norms of reciprocity
 Doing something nice for someone because they’ve done
something nice for you
 Ex: A charity sends you a calendar

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 You feel obliged to send something in return
 Attribution Theory
o Tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe
 Dispositional (personal attribution)  the person is the cause
 Ex: Your friend passes an exam and you attribute that to
their intelligence
 Situational attribution  the situation is the cause
 Ex: Your friend passes an exam and you say “easy test”

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