1. Thought Questions- Jot down your thoughts!
Why do you obey some rules and disobey others at school?
Have you ever been convinced by friends to do something you knew was wrong? To do something you knew was right?
Do you consider yourself a conformist or a nonconformist? Why?

2. Unit 14: Social Pyschology
CHS AP Psychology
Unit 14: Social Pyschology
Essential Task 12-1:Apply attribution theory to explain the behavior of others with specific attention to the fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, just-world hypothesis and differences between collectivistic and individualistic cultures
Logo Green is R=8 G=138 B= Blue is R= 0 G=110 B=184
Border Grey is R=74 G=69 B=64

3. Social Psychology
The scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of one individual are influenced by the real, imagined, or inferred behavior or characteristics of other people

4. Social Cognition: How you think about people?
Impression Formation – how do you construct your social cognition?
Primacy effect
Early information about someone weighs more than later information in forming impressions
We are “cognitive misers”
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A person’s expectations about another elicits behavior from the other person that confirms the expectations
“Hostile” partners continued to be more hostile

5. Impression Formation Schemata Ready-made categories
Allow us to make inferences about others (good for cognitive misers)
Also plays a major role in how we interpret and remember information
We will remember characteristics of our schema that weren’t there

6. Impression Formation Stereotypes
A set of characteristics believed to be shared by all members of a social category
It is usually unfair
Most often applied to sex, race, occupation, physical appearance, place of residence, membership in a group or organization
Can become the basis for self-fulfilling prophecies

7. Attribution
Attribution Theory: tries to explain how people make judgments about the causes of other people’s behavior
Three criteria used to judge behavior
Distinctiveness: Is this how the person treats everyone or are you different?
Consistency: Has the person always treated you this way or is this different?
Consensus: Do other people do this same thing or is this really different?

8. Attribution: Why did he do that? Example
Bob walks past you without saying hi.
Distinctiveness: Your explanation as to why Bob did this will be different if he does this to everyone in the hall or just you
Consistency: Your explanation as to why Bob did this will be different if he always says hi to you or if you don’t really know each other.
Consensus: Whether you’re in New York vs. a college of 600 will change how you explain Bob’s behavior.
ACTIVITY

9. Biases in Attribution: The errors to which your guesses will succumb
Actor-Observer Effect: attribute actions of others to internal factors and the actions of yourself to external factors
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overemphasize personal causes for others’ behavior and underemphasize personal causes for our own behavior
Defensive attribution
Self-Serving Bias: Tendency to attribute our successes to our own efforts and our failures to external factors
Just-world hypothesis: Assumption bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people
Attribution across cultures varies dramatically

10. Effects of Attribution
How we explain someone’s behavior affects how we react to it.

11. Attitudes: feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects, people, and events
The Nature of Attitudes
Relatively stable
Beliefs – facts and general knowledge
Feelings – love, hate, like, dislike
Behaviors – inclination to approach, avoid, buy
Self-monitoring
High self-monitors look for cues about how they are expected to behave
Makes using attitudes to predict behavior difficult
Low self-monitors express and act on their attitudes consistently making prediction easier

12. Attitude Development
Many factors contribute to the development of attitudes
Imitation
Reward
Teachers
Peers
Mass media

13. Attitudes Can Affect Action
Our attitudes predict our behaviors imperfectly because other factors, including the external situation, also influence behavior.
OBJECTIVE 4| Describe the conditions under which attitudes can affect actions.

14. Attitude Change Process of persuasion
Must get and maintain the person’s attention
Must comprehend the message
Comprehension leads to acceptance

15. Attitude Change
How the message gets comprehended and then accepted is by these things:
Source (credibility is key)
Message itself (more effective when it acknowledges other arguments and then gives novel ones – a little fear is good)
Medium of communication (writing good for complex, media better for audience with a gist, face-to-face is the best)
Audience’s characteristics

16. Routes a Message Can Take to Persuade You
Central Route to Persuasion
when the attitude of the audience, or individual, is changed as a result of thoughtful consideration of the message.
Peripheral Route to Persuasion occurs when positive or negative cues (such as images, sounds, or language) are associated with the object of the message.
An advertisement featuring a song that the audience member likes, or a person whom the audience member sees as appealing might cause a person to have positive feelings toward the brand, without that person ever thinking deeply about the message.

17. Other techniques Foot-in-the-door phenomenon Low-ball technique
Brainwashing
Write-it-down technique
Fifty-words-or-less technique
Look at textbook under Teaching Tip pg 646 Myers 9th edition

18. Cognitive Dissonance Theory
(Leon Festinger 1957)
Occurs whenever a person has two contradictory cognitions or beliefs at the same time. They are dissonant, each one implies the opposite of the other.
The less coerced and more responsible we feel for an action the more dissonance. The more dissonance the more likely we are to change our attitude
It creates an unpleasant cognitive tension and the person tries to resolve in the following ways: (see next slide)

19. Audience Characteristics
Most difficult to change if
Strong commitment to present attitude
Attitude is shared by others
The attitude has been held since early childhood
Up to a point the larger the difference between message and audience the more likely attitudinal change will occur
Low self-esteem more likely to change

20. Resolution of Cognitive Dissonance
1. Sometimes changing your attitude is the easiest way to solve this.
Example: I am a loyal friend, but yesterday I gossiped about my friend Chris Well I can’t change my action but I don’t want to change my view of myself, so my attitude about Chris must be wrong. He is more of an acquaintance than a friend.
2. Increase the number of consonant elements – the number of thoughts that back one side.
It was awesome gossip
Reduce the importance of one or both of the sides
The person I gossiped with won’t really tell that many people.