AP Psychology
Name:
“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to
cross it when pressured by situational forces.” Philip Zimbardo
Gray Ch. 13: Social Perception and Attitudes
Read pages 465 – 474
1. Define attribution, person bias, fundamental attribution error, actor-observer
discrepancy, and attractiveness bias.
2. Why do first impressions often resist change?
3. What evidence suggests that strangers who meet on the Internet like each other more than do
strangers who meet in person? How might this phenomenon be explained?
Read pages 475 - 489
4. What is the “looking glass”? What is the Pygmalion effect?
5. What is the self-serving attributional bias? What are three means by which people build
and maintain inflated views of themselves?
6. How evidence suggests that East Asians show less self-enhancement than Westerners do?
7. What is the distinction among public, private, and implicit stereotypes? What are two
means by which researchers identify implicit stereotypes?
8. How have researchers shown that implicit stereotypes can lead to prejudice behavior
even in the absence of conscious prejudice?
9. What evidence suggests that implicit prejudice can cause police officers to shoot at black
suspects more readily than at white suspects?
10. What sorts of learning experiences are most effective in reducing explicit and implicit prejudice?
Read pages 490 – 498
11. How do advertisers use classical conditioning to influence people’s attitudes?
12. Define cognitive dissonance. How does it explain people’s attraction to some
information and avoidance of other information?
13. How does cognitive dissonance theory explain why people are more confident of a
decision just after they have made it than just before?
14. Explain the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment and how it supports the insufficientjustification effect.
15. What early evidence and reasoning led some psychologists to suggest that attitudes
have little effect on behavior?