1. Attitudes, Actions, and Attributions
Social Psychology
Attitudes, Actions, and Attributions

2. Attitudes, Actions, and Attributions
Bell Ringer
Agenda
What does social psychology mean to you?
Attitudes, Actions, and Attributions notes
Create Your Own
Stanford Prison Experiment

3. Unit Objectives Define Social Thinking Analyze Social Influence
Attributing behaviors to persons or situations
Attitudes and Actions
Analyze Social Influence
Conformity and Obedience
The Power of Individuals
Group Influence

4. What is Social Psychology? “We can not live for ourselves alone.”
Herman Melville
Scientifically study how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

5. Social Thinking
Social thinking involves thinking about others, especially when they engage in doing things that are unexpected.

6. Think and Discuss
Does a person’s absenteeism signify illness, laziness, or a stressful work atmosphere?

7. Think and Discuss
Was the horror of 9/11 the work of crazy, evil people or ordinary people corrupted by lives events?

8. Attribution Theory Fritz Heider (1958)
suggested that we have a tendency to give causal explanations for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.
Dispositions are enduring personality traits.

9. Attribution Theory Cont.
Ex. 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).
Ex. If Bob is a shy and introverted with his friends and family, he will likely be shy and introverted in many or all social situations

10. Fundamental Attribution Error
The 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.
Ex. You have a strict teacher and assume she is mean, then you see her in public laughing with friends are you’re shocked?

11. Effects and Attribution
How we explain someone’s behavior affects how we react to it.

12. How Attitudes and Actions Impact Behavior
A belief and feeling that predisposes a person to respond in a particular way to objects, other people, and events.
Ex. If we believe a person is mean, we may feel dislike or distain for the person and act in an unfriendly manner.

13. Outside Influences on our behavior
External situations can influence behavior.
Not only do people stand for what they believe in (attitude), they start believing in what they stand for.
Can be positive and negative
Ex. A new student starts at your school and you’re told she is a mean person and believe it, even though you’ve met her and she seemed really nice

14. Brainwashing Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon
The tendency for a person who has originally agreed to small tasks to comply when asked for bigger errands.
Ex. During the Korean War, Chinese communists were able to get U.S. Army poisoners to cooperate by asking them to carry out small errands. By complying to small errands they were likely to comply to larger ones.

15. Why do actions affect attitudes?
Cognitive Dissonance
One explanation is that when our attitudes and actions are opposed, we experience tension.
To relieve ourselves of this tension we bring our attitudes closer to our actions.
Festinger, 1957

16. Cognitive Dissonance

17. Create your own Cognitive Dissonance
Use the previous example and examples from your book and create a scenario for Cognitive Dissonance
Be ready to share
3 minutes

18. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment
Role Playing Affects Attitude
Zimbardo 1972
assigned the roles of guards and prisoners to random students and found that guards and prisoners developed role- appropriate attitudes.

19. Dr. Zimbardo Video
Documentary

20. Experiment Partner with a classmate you don’t know or don’t know well.
Assign one partner the Quizmaster and one partner the Contestant.
The Quizmaster will then ask questions to the Contestant and let them know if their answer is correct or incorrect.

21. Evaluation
Take out a sheet of paper and at the top say if you were the Quizmaster or the Contestant
Then rate your partner as follows
1. Less general knowledge than I have
2. Slightly less general knowledge than I have
3. About the same level of general knowledge that I have
4. Slightly more general knowledge than I have
5. More general knowledge than I have

22. Results
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