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
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 Attitude and Behavior
o 1934  Richard La Piere
 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
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
Doing something nice for someone because they’ve done
something nice for you
 Ex: A charity sends you a calendar
 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”
 Stable attributions (person stable)
 When people infer that an event or behavior is due to
unchanging, permanent factors.
o Ex: Your friend is a Chem whiz and passes all his
exams w/o studying
 Unstable attributions (person unstable)
 infers that an event or behavior is due to unstable,
temporary factors
o Ex: You think your friend studied hard for this
test
 Situation stable attributions
 Ex: assuming your friend’s teacher is easy, hence their
success
 Situation unstable attribution
 Ex: You think a teacher is especially difficult, but
happened to give one easy exam
o Harold Kelley
 Three concepts dominate our making attributions:
 Consistency  how does the person act in the same
situation all the time
o Ex: does your friend always get good grades in
Chem?
o Useful when making stable or unstable
attributions
 Distinctiveness how similar is this situation to other
situations
o Ex: Does your friend also do well in English?
 Consensus  asks the viewer to consider how others in
the same situation have responded
o Ex: Did all Chem test takers also score well?
o Allows the individual to make a person or
situation attribution
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o The self-fulfilling prophecy
 Expectations one has force the individual to act towards the
outcome
 Ex: you are told a person you are to meet is funny, and
upon meeting them, you elicit funny comments.
 Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the
Classroom”
 Administered a test to elementary school children that
would supposedly identify those one the verge of
significant academic growth
 The test was a standard IQ test
 The researchers randomly selected a group of students
and informed their teachers of these kids’ potential for
monumental learning gains
o The students really didn’t vary from the rest of
the population
 At the end of the year, the students who were selected
demonstrated considerable gains on IQ tests as
compared to the others
 RESULT:
o The teachers expectations these students would
bloom made it so
o Attributional Biases
 Fundamental attribution error
 The tendency to overestimate the presence of
dispositional factors, rather than situational factors in a
person:
o Ex: a student is acting out in class and the
teacher assumes its because they are a brat
 In reality, the student may be facing
issues at home
 When explaining our own negative behaviors, we tend
to make situational attributions
 Fundamental attribution errors are more likely to be
made in individualist cultures rather than collectivist
cultures
 The false-consensus effect
 The tendency for people to overestimate the number of
people who agree with them
o Ex: you dislike a particular activity and you
falsely assume those around you agree
 Self-serving bias
 The tendency to take more credit for good rather than
bad outcomes
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
o Ex: A high school baseball coach takes more
credit for his role in his teams wins, rather than
its losses
Just-world bias
 The belief that bad things happen to bad people
o Ex: The woman was raped because she was
“looking” for it
 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
o Stereotypes ideas we have about members from other groups
 Can be positive or negative
 Form the basic schemas we have for groups
o Prejudice an underserved, usually negative attitude toward a group
of people
 Can lead to negative stereotyping
 Ex: “Those people”
o Ethnocentrism the belief one’s culture is superior to the rest
 A specific kind of prejudice
o Discrimination acting on one’s prejudice
 Ex: refusing to hire people from a specific group
o In-group
 Seeing members of one’s group as more diverse than members
of other groups
o Out-group
 Those not part of your group
o Out-group homogeneity
 The tendency to label those in the out group as being the same
o In-group bias
 Favoring members of one’s group
 In groups tend to see themselves as generally good and will
assign similar attributes to those in their group
o Origins of prejudice
 Cognitivists see it as a mere side effect of categorizing into
“same” or “different”
 Social learning theorist say it is a learned behavior
 Parents, and the like model this behavior and it is
followed by the kids
o Combating prejudice
 Contact theory contact between hostile groups will ease
tensions of the groups are made to work towards a
superordinate goal (requiring participation of all)
 Muzafer Sherif (Camp Study) Robber’s Cave
 Illustrates out-group bias and how superordinate goals
could be created
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Divided the campers into 2 groups and arranged for
them to compete in games
The competitiveness created hostility between the
groups
o With the hostility present Sherif staged several
emergencies requiring group cooperation
o Solving superordinate goals brought the groups
closer together
 Aggression and Antisocial Behavior
o Instrumental aggression when the aggressive act is intended to
secure a particular end
 Ex: You want your friend’s bike (end); You beat your friend and
then take his bike
o Hostile aggression aggression w/o any real purpose
 You are annoyed and you kick your dog
o Why are we aggressive?
 Freud Thanatos, the death instinct
 Sociobiologists see it as adaptive under certain
circumstances
 The frustration-aggression hypothesis  holds that the feeling
of frustration makes aggression more likely
 Prosocial Behavior
o The term attached to helping
o Bystander intervention
 The conditions under which people nearby are more and less
likely to help someone in trouble
 Kitty Genovese  Kew Gardens, NY
o Was raped and murdered
o At least 38 people witnessed the crime; no one
helped
 John Darley and Bibb Latane  explored how people
decided whether or not to help those in distress
o Findings:
 The bystander effect  the larger the
number of people witness an emergency
the less likely they are to intervene
 Diffusion of responsibility  the larger
the group, the less one feels personally
responsible to help
 Pluralistic ignorance the assumption
someone else will do it
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 Attraction
o Similarity  we are attracted to people who are similar to us
o Proximity we are attracted to those near us
o Reciprocal liking we are more likely to like those who like us
o Physical attractiveness attracted to those who look good
 Research show good looking people are assigned positive
characteristics
o Self-disclosure part of liking and loving
 We tend to feel closer to those willing to disclose and open up
 We feel the need to reciprocate
 The Influence of Others on an Individuals Behavior
o Social facilitation the presence of others improves one’s task
performance
o Social impairment (inhibition) performance of a task when in the
presence of others is diminished
o Conformity  the tendency of people to go along with the views or
actions of others
 Solomon Asch (1951)
 Brought in participants into a room of confederates
(those in on the study)
 Asked the group to make a series of simple perceptual
judgments
 The participants were shown 3 vertical lines of varying
sizes and asked to determine which line was the same
as the target line
 The confederates spoke first and the participant always
gave his answer last
 On some trials the confederates gave an obviously
wrong answer
 Findings:
o In 1/3 of the cases the participants conformed to
an obviously wrong answer
o 70% of the participants conformed at least once
o conformity is more likely to happen when the
group is unanimous
o groups larger than 3 did not increase the
likelihood of conformity
o Obedience studies following the orders of another
 Stanley Milgram (1974)
 His participants were told they’d be taking part in a
study on teaching and learning
 The confederates were ALWAYS the learner and the
participants were ALWAYS the teacher
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The participant (teacher) was to give the learner a
“shock” after each incorrect word pair
The shocks ranged from 15 volts to over 450
No shocks were delivered as the confederate pretended
to be shocked
As the level of the shocks increased the learner
complained of chest pains and heart problems and
eventually fell silent
If questioned the experimenter replied “please
continue”
Findings:
o Over 60% of all participants delivered the
highest shocks
The study was repeated with slight modifications:
o Participants who could see the learner delivered
less shocks
o The lowest shocks were delivered when the
teacher was asked to physically place the
learner’s hand on a shock plate
o When the experimenter left and was replaced by
an assistant the number of shocks also
diminished
o When paired with confederate teachers who left
½ way through, those who quit skyrocketed
 Group Dynamics
o Norms  rules as to how the group should act
o Roles the job/responsibility each member has in the group
o Social loafing the larger the group the less each person feels
responsible for accomplishing
o Group polarization  the tendency of a group to make more extreme
decisions than the group members would make individually after
having some discussion
 Ex: a group of people is somewhat keen on the idea of capital
punishment. After discussion the group is very in favor of
capital punishment
o Groupthink coined by Irving Janis the tendency for some groups
to make bad decisions
 Occurs when members of the group suppress their
reservations about an idea the group generally supports
 False unanimity is encouraged
 Highly cohesive groups making risky decisions seem to be at
risk for groupthink
 Ex: the Bay of Pigs Invasion
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o Deindividuation the loss of ones self-restraint as a result of being in
a group
 Phillip Zimbardo’s Prison Study
 Assigned a group of Stanford students to either prisoner
or guard
 All were dressed in their appropriate uniforms
 The prisoners were locked up and given prison
numbers
 The prisoners became submissive and the guards,
sadistic
 The experiment was terminated early
Major Social Psychology Experiments
Researcher
Topic
Findings
La Piere
Attitudes
Attitudes don’t always
predict behavior.
Establishments that had
previously served Chinese
patrons later said they’d
refuse
Festinger and Carlsmith
Cognitive Dissonance
Changing ones behavior
can lead to a change in
ones attitude. People who
were paid $1 to say a task
was interesting later
reported it was, when
compared to those paid
$20 to tell the same lie.
Rosenthal and Jacobson
Self-fulfilling prophecy
One persons attitude can
elicit a change in another
persons behavior.
Teachers positive
expectations led to higher
IQ scores for students.
Sherif
Superordinate goals
Intergroup prejudice can
be reduced through
working at superordinate
goals
Darley and Latane
Bystander effect
The more people present
to witness an emergency
the less likely any one
person is to help. One
study in which college
students thought they
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Asch
Conformity
Milgram
Obedience
Zimbardo
Roles; deindividuation
were the only ones to
overhear a peer having a
seizure were more likely
to help.
People do not like to
contradict the opinions of
a group. 70% conformed
at least once
People tend to conform to
authority figures. 60% of
participants delivered the
maximum shocks.
Roles are powerful and
can lead to
deindividuation. College
students acting as guards
and prisoners acted in
negative and hostile ways
towards each other.
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