REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY • Feelings and actions toward people are sometimes negative
and sometimes positive
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY ➢ Prejudice
• Science that studies how situations influence us with special ➢ Aggression
attention to how people view and affect one another ➢ Attraction and intimacy
• Scientific study of how people think about, influence, and ➢ Helping
relate to one another • To understand social behavior, we must consider both under-
• Feelings, thoughts, and behavior of individuals in social the-skin (biological) and between-skins (social) influences
situations • We are bio-psycho-social organisms
• An attempt to understand and explain how the thought, ➢ We reflect the interplay of our biological, psychological, and
feeling, and behavior of individual are influenced by actual, social influences
imagined, or implied presence of others
IS SOCIAL PSYHCOLOGY SIMPLY COMMON SENSE?
• Is all about life - your life: beliefs, attitudes, and relationship

BIG IDEAS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY HINDSIGHT BIAS

• I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
SOCIAL THINKING • The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s
• How we perceive ourselves and others ability to have foreseen how something turned out
• What we believe in • One of psychology’s best-established phenomena
• The judgement we make • Conducive to arrogance
• We construct our social reality
➢ Reality is socially constructed RELATED DISCIPLINES
• Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous
➢ Intuition (unconscious) are helpful and dangerous CLINICAL PSYCHOLOY
➢ Intuitions shape fear, impressions, and relationships • Focuses on diagnosis and treatment of psychological
• Attitudes shapes and are shaped by behavior disorders or abnormal behavior
• Judgement and perception • Psychological intervention
• People react differently to situations because we think • psychotherapy
differently
DIFFERENCE WITH SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
SOCIAL INFLUENCE • Social psychology does not diagnose and treat people
• Culture and biology
• Presume to confer SOCIOLOGY
• Persuasion • Focuses on communities and social systems
• Groups of people • Social class, social control, and political influence
• People and environment
• Power of the situation PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
• Personality and attitudes also shape behavior • Tries to understand individual differences that are relatively
• Humans are social animals (Aristotle) stable over time
• Humans long to connect, to belong, and to be well thought of
DIFFERENCE WITH SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• We respond to our immediate contexts
• Social psychology does not address personality directly
• People are, above all, malleable
• Our attitudes and behavior are shaped by external social COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
forces • Focuses on mental processes such as thinking and reasoning,
memory and perception etc.
SOCIAL RELATIONS
• Interpersonal DIFFERENCE WITH SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Social behavior is also biological behavior • Social psychology does focus on thinking processes but mainly as
➢ Social behavior is biologically rooted it affects social behavior
o Our inherited human nature predisposes us to behave in ways that
helped our ancestors survive and reproduce
➢ SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE
oExplores the neural bases of social and emotional processes
and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect
our brain and biology
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH
CORRELATIONAL
Psychological Sociological Social
Social Psychology Psychology • Asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated
• The study of the naturally occurring relationships among
Central focus individual Group or society variables
Research Analyze immediate Analyze societal • Allows us to roughly predict one variable from another, but it
stimuli of variables cannot tell us whether one variable causes another
psychological states • Tends to occur in real-world setting where we can examine
and personality factors such as race, gender, etc.
traits
Research methods Experimentation is Observational and TIME-LAGGED CORRELATION
primary, followed correlational studies • Reveals sequence of events
by correlational, and are primary research
then observational methods followed EXPERIMENTAL
studies by experimentation • Manipulating some factor to see its effect on another
• Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by
Main scientific Journal of Social Psychology manipulating one or more factors while controlling others
journal Personality and Quarterly
Social Psychology RANDOM ASSIGNMENTS
• Eliminates all extraneous factors
FORMING AND TESTING HYPOTHESES
• Process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment
THEORY such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given
• Integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed condition
events
• Scientific INDEPENDENT VARIABLE
• Often means less than fact • The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates
• Ideas that summarize and explain facts
DEPENDENT VARIABLE
• Hypotheses • The variable being measured
➢ Testable predictions
➢ Allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try or falsify it
• May depend on manipulations of the independent variable
➢ Give direction to research
➢ Predictive feature of good theories can also make them practical REPLICATION
• Repeating a research study, often with different participants in
SAMPLING AND QUESTION WORDING different settings, to determine whether a finding could be
SAMPLING reproduced
• Choosing participants
META-ANALYSIS
• A study of studies that statistically summarizes many studies on the
SAMPLE same topic
• Part of the population
ETHICS
RANDOM SAMPLE • Mundane Realism
• One in which every person in the population being studied ➢ Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday
has an equal chance of inclusion situations
• Experimental Realism
➢ Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants
SAMPLE SIZE • Deception
• The number of participants in a study ➢ A strategy by which participants are misinformed or misled about the
study’s methods and purposes
FRAMING • Demand Characteristics
• The way question or an issue is posed ➢ Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is
• Can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinion expected
• Informed Consent
➢ Ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to
enable them to choose whether they wish to participate
• Debriefing
➢ Discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their
understanding and feelings
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 2. Social Representations
➢ Moscovici (1961)
➢ Socially shared ideas about the world
3. Minority Influence Theory
ASIAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Branded as cultural

CONTRIBUTIONS
• Indigenous research
• Culture and social behavior
• Specific topics in social psychology

HO
• Proposed a conceptual framework that he called relational
orientation
➢ Individual is not the measure of all psychological phenomenon
BASIC RESEARCH
• Designed to increase knowledge about social behavior SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN THE PHILIPPINES
• The Philippines imported almost all its psychological
APPLIED RESEARCH knowledge from the First World, and social psychology is no
• Designed to increase the understanding of and solutions to exception
real-world problems by using current sociological knowledge
AMERICAN TRAINED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS
FRAMES • Enriquez, Licuanan, Tan, Gonzales-Intal
• Social psychology began in the late 1800s • UP and Ateneo offers master’s and doctoral degrees in social
psychology
• First experiment on social psychology in 1897 by Normal
Triplett (Indiana University) SIKOLOHIYANG PILIPINO
• The study developed a tradition of research known as social • Bilang disiplina at kilusan
facilitation
NORTH AMERICAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY THE SEARCH FOR FILIPINO PERSONALITY
MYER’S
• Social thinking, social influences, and social relations ENRIQUEZ’ KAPWA MODEL

APAT NA YUGTO (mga hakbang sa pagsasakatuto ng

SEVERAL THEORIES sikolohiya)
1. Social Comparison Theory 1. pag-aangkat (importation)
➢ Festinger (1954) 2. Pag-pupunla (implantation)
➢ We learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing
3. Pagsasakatutubo (indifenization)
ourselves with other people
4. Pagsasarili (autochronization)
2. Cognitive Dissonance
➢ Festinger (1954) ETHICS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
➢ A person may experience psychological discomfort or dissonance,
when there are inconsistencies between one’s cognition, which may
• Informed Consent. Provide adequate information about the
be attitudes, beliefs, or an awareness of one’s behavior
research to potential participants so they can freely decide
EUROPEAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY whether they want to take part
SERGE MOSCOVICI AND HENRI TAJFEL • Be truthful whenever possible. Deception should be justified
• Criticized American social psychology for being too experimental • Allow participants the right to decline
and narrow in focus • Protect participants from both physical and psychological
harm
SEVERAL THEORIES • Ensure confidentiality
1. Social Identity Theory • Debrief participants once they have completed their
➢ Tajfel and Turner (1979) participation
➢ To understand intergroup discrimination
• Provide participants information on the result of the research
if they request it
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
• How we present, perceive, and show/ present SELF-CONCEPT: WHO AM I
ourselves to other people SELF – CONCEPT
• How we think • Everything that pertains to yourself
• Who am I?
THE SELF • Projects one’s values
• What we know and believe about ourselves
SELF
• Source and the object of reflective behavior SCHEMAS
➢ Source – initiates the reflexive behavior • Mental templates by which we organize our worlds
➢ Object – towards whom reflexive behavior is directed • We bolster our self-schema by remembering things better that
• I and me are consistent with it
SPOTLIGHT AND ILLUSIONS SELF-SCHEMAS
• Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of
SPOTLIGHT EFFECT self-relevant information
• Belief that others are paying more attention to one’s • Negative
appearance and behavior than they really are ➢ Action to protect the self
• Seeing ourselves at center stage, thus intuitively • Positive
overestimating the extent to which others’ attention is aimed ➢ How good or appropriate you are
at us DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL SELF
ILLUSION OF TRANSPARENCY THE ROLES WE PLAY
• Illusion that our concealed emotion leak out and can be easily • New roles begin as play-actions that become reality
read by others • As we play these roles, we begin to believe them (self-
➢ Not factual perception theory)
• What you feel is being noticed by others
• Reflection of what you feel SOCIAL COMPARISON
• Evaluating one’s opinions and abilities by comparing oneself
OTHER INTERPLAYS BETWEEN OUR SENSE OF with others
SELF AND OUR SOCIAL WORLDS • We compare ourselves with others and consider how we
• Social surrounding affect our self-awareness differ
➢ We notice how we differ and how others are reacting to our ➢ Tend to compare upwards
difference ➢ Who is your referent group?
• Self-interest colors our social judgement ➢ Can diminish satisfaction
➢ Self- serving bias • Success and failure
o We attribute favorable outcomes to internal causes (self)
▪ Can cause narcissism because everything is towards the self
➢ Daily experiences cause us to have empowerment or self-
o We attribute unfavorable outcomes to external causes (no sense of esteem
ownership)
• Self-concern motivates our social behavior LOOKING GLASS SELF (COOLEY)
➢ We monitor our own behavior as well as others’ • Mirrors one’s reflection
• Social relationships help define our sense of self SELF AND CULTURE
➢ How we think of ourselves is linked to the person we’re with at
the moment INDIVIDUALISM
➢ In our varied relationships, we have varying selves • Concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group
goals
• Our sense of self organizes our thoughts, • Defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather
feelings, and actions than group identification
• It enables us to remember our past, assess our • Independent self
➢ Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self
present, and project our future – thus to behave ➢ One’s identity as a unique individual with particular abilities,
adaptively traits, values, and dreams
• Western cultures
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
COLLECTIVISM ➢ Automatic implicit attitudes regarding someone or something
• Giving priority to the goals of one’s group often differ from consciously controlled explicit attitudes
• Defining one’s identity accordingly ➢ Self-reports are untrustworthy – no guarantee of their validity
• Interdependent self
MOTIVATING POWER OF SELF-ESTEEM
• Asian, African, Central and South American cultures
SELF-ESTEEM
CULTURE AND COGNITION • Our overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth
• The Geography of Thought (2003) ➢ What are your domains of self-esteem?
➢ Richard Nisbett ➢ Bottom up view
➢ Contends that collectivism results in different ways of thinking ➢ Feedback is best when it is true and specific
o Asians tend to think more in relationships than Americans o Leads to high self-efficacy
▪ Concluded that East Asians tend to think more holistically o “you can do anything you want”
o Americans see choices as expressions of themselves ▪ Lead to unrealistic optimism

CULTURE AND SELF ESTEEM SELF-ESTEEM MOTIVATION

• Collectivist culture • Self-esteem maintenance
➢ Self-concept is context-specific rather than stable ➢ What level is best to have?
➢ Conflict takes place between groups • Self-esteem threats occur among friends whose successes can
➢ Persist more when failing be more threatening than that of strangers (referent others)
• Individualistic culture • Terror management theory
➢ Self-esteem is more personal and less rational ➢ Humans must find ways to manage their fear of death
➢ Persist more when winning ➢ Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and
➢ Conflict takes place between individuals (crime/divorce) cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of their
SELF-KNOWLEDGE morality

EXPLAINING OUR BEHAVIOR THE DARK SIDE OF SELF-ESTEEM

• Do we know what affects our mood? • Narcissism
➢ Inflated sense of self
PREDICTING OUR BEHAVIOR ➢ Delroy and Williams (2002)
• Planning fallacy ➢ “The Dark Triad” of negative traits
o Narcissism
➢ Tendency to understand how long it will take to complete a task
o Machiavellianism (manipulativeness)
➢ Underestimating how long it will take to complete a task
• Over time college students
➢ What are the implications for goal setting
➢ Narcissism
➢ Empathy
PREDICTING OUR FEELINGS
➢ Need for autonomy/ competence/ relationship
• Affective forecasting
➢ Reveal people have the greatest difficulty predicting the PERCEIVED SELF-CONTROL
intensity and duration of their future emotions • Effortful self-control depletes our limited willpower reserves
o We underestimate the effects of situational cues
➢ Impact bias
controlling emotions during upsetting film resulted in:
o We overestimate the enduring impact of emotion causing events ➢ Showing more aggression and fighting with their partner
➢ Immune neglect ➢ Became less restrained in sexual thoughts and behavior
o Tendency to neglect the speed and strength of the psychological • Our brain’s central executive consumes available blood sugar
immune system, which enables emotional recovery and resilience when engaged in self-control
after bad things happen
LOCUS OF CONTROL
THE WISDOM AND ILLUSIONS OF SELF-ANALYSIS • Extent to which people perceive outcomes as internally
• We often aren’t aware of how thinking brought an “aha” controllable by their own efforts and actions or as externally
experience controlled by chance our outside forces
• Dual Attitude System
➢ Differing implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same object SELF-EFFICACY
➢ Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and • Albert Bandura
persuasion • A sense that one is competent and effective , distinguished
➢ Implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new from self-esteem
habits • How competent we feel on a task
➢ Mental processes that control our behavior are distinct from ➢ Lead us to set challenging goals and to persist
those we use to explain our behavior ➢ Competency + persistence = accomplishment / self-confidence
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS • Maladaptive
• Helplessness and resignation learned when a human or ➢ Group serving bias
animal perceives no control over repeated bad events
• Martin Seligma HOW DO PEOPLE MANAGE THEIR SELF-PRESENTATION

SELF-DETERMINATION SELF-PRESENTATION
• Development of self-discipline in one area of your life may • Wanting to present a desired image both to an external
cause self-control in other areas as well audience and to an internal audience
• Edward Deci SELF-HANDICAPPING
SELF-SERVING BIAS SELF-HANDICAPPING
• Fear of failure
SELF-SERVING BIAS • Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a
• Tendency to perceive oneself favorably handy excuse for later failure
EXPLAINING POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EVENTS • People sabotage their chances for success by creating
impediments that make success less likely
SELF-SERVING ATTRIBUTIONS
• Tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
negative outcomes to other factors SELF-PRESENTATION
• A form of self-serving bias • The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed
• One of the most potent of human biases to create a favorable impression or an impression that
• Activates brain areas associated with reward and pleasure corresponds to one’s ideals
CAN WE ALL BE BETTER THAN AVERAGE? • We work at managing the impressions we create
• We excuse, justify, or apologize as necessary to shore up our
LAKE WOBEGON EFFECT
self-esteem and verify our self-images
• All the children are above average
• Most people see themselves as better than the average person
SELF-MONITORING
on the following dimensions
• Tendency to act like social chameleons
➢ Subjective
➢ Socially desirable • Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social
➢ Common dimensions situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the
desired impression
UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM
UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM THE POSSIBLE SELF
• Predisposes a positive approach in life
• On the rise
• Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability
• Defensive pessimism
➢ Adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s
anxiety to motivate effective action
FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT
FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT
• Tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions
and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behavior

FALSE UNIQUENESS EFFECT

• Tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities
and one’s desirable or successful behavior
EXPLAINING SELF-SERVING BIAS
SELF-SERVING BIAS
• By-product of how we process and remember information
about ourselves
• Adaptive
➢ Protects people from depression
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGEMENTS
SOCIAL COGNITION HOW DO WE JUDGE OUR SOCIAL WORLDS?

SOCIAL COGNITION TWO BRAIN SYSTEMS

• How we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information • System 1
about the social world ➢ The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking
➢ Automatic processing
HOW DO WE THINK?
➢ Occurs offscreen
• We process information serially and in parallel • System 2
• We rely on effortful and effortless thinking ➢ The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of
thinking
DUAL PROCESS MODELS OF COGNITION ➢ Controlled processing
• Theories of social cognition which propose that people
PRIMING
employ two broad cognition strategies to understand and
respond to social stimuli, one involving effortless thinking PRIMING
and the other involving effortful thinking • The process by which recent exposure to certain stimuli or
events increase the accessibility of certain memories,
EXPLICIT COGNITION categories, or schemas
• Deliberate evaluations • Awakening or activating of certain associations
• Effortful • Priming effects
➢ Occur even when the stimuli are presented subliminally
IMPLICIT COGNITION
• automatic evaluations • Unnoticed events can also subtly prime our thinking and
• Effortless behavior

HOW SHOULD WE THINK OF OURSELVES AS SOCIAL THINKERS
MOTIVATED TACTICIAN MODEL
• An approach to social cognition that conceives of people as
being flexible thinkers who choose among multiple cognitive
strategies based on their current goals, motives, and needs
WE ARE CATEGORIZING CREATURES
• We not only mentally group objects, ideas, or events into
categories, but we also develop theories about those
categories
• We group objects with common properties
SCHEMA
• Organized structure of knowledge about a stimulus that is
built up from experience and that contains casual relations
• Influence three basic processes
➢ Attention
o What is noticed
➢ Encoding
o What is stored in memory
➢ Retrieval
o What is recovered from memory
• Much of our social information is automatic
EMBODIED COGNITION
• The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive
preference and social judgements
THE LIMITS OF INTUITION
• The unconscious may not be as smart as previously believed
• Humans have an incredible capacity for illusion
OVERCONFIDENCE
OVERCONFIDENCE PHENOMENON
• The tendency to be more confident than correct
• To overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
• Automatic system 1 intuitions are sometimes wrong
• Incompetence feeds overconfidence
• It takes competence to recognize competence
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
➢ Ignorance of one’s incompetence
• Overconfident individuals spoke first, talked longer, and used
a more factual tone, making them appear more competent
than they actually were

CATEGORY CONFIRMATION BIAS

• A mental grouping of objects, ideas, or events that share CONFIRMATION BIAS
common properties • A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s
• Concept preconceptions
• We are eager to verify our beliefs but less inclined to seek
SOCIAL CATEGORY evidence that might disprove them
• The process of forming categories of people based on their • System 1 snap judgement
common attributes
• Social characteristics
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGEMENTS
REMEDIES FOR OVERCONFIDENCE • People easily misperceive random events as confirming their
• Prompt feedback beliefs
• Get people to think of one good reason why their judgements • We are more likely to notice and recall confirming instances
might be wrong REGRESSION TOWARD THE AVERAGE
HEURISTICS • The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme
behavior to return toward their average
HEURISTICS
• Mental shortcuts MOODS AND JUDGEMENTS
• Thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgements • Social judgement involves efficient information processing
• Enables us to make routine decisions with minimal effort and feelings
• Lighten the cognitive load of making decisions, but they also
allow for a much greater chance of error HOW DO WE PERCEIVE OUR SOCIAL WORLDS?

REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTICS • Our impressions of one another are more often right than
• The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, wrong
that someone or something belongs to a particular group if • The effects of pre-judgements and expectations are standard
resembling a typical member fare for psychology’s introductory course
• To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental POLITICAL PERCEPTIONS
representation of a category
• Political perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder
• Help us categorize
• People everywhere perceive mediators and media as biased
• We judge the probability of an uncertain event according to:
against their position
1. How obviously it is similar to or representative of the
population from which it is derived BELIEF PERSEVERANCE
2. The degree to which it reflects the salient features of the BELIEF PERSEVERANCE
process by which it is generated • Persistence of one’s initial conceptions such as when the
AVAILABILITY HEURISTICS basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why
• A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms the belief might be true
of their availability in memory • Shows that beliefs can grow their own legs and survive
• The more easily we recall something, the more likely it seems discrediting, especially if there’s any uncertainty about
• Judgement are made on the basis of how easily we can call to what’s true and what’s not
mind what we perceive as relevant instances of a CONSTRUCTING MEMORIES OF OURSELVES AND OUR WORLDS
phenomenon MISINFORMATION EFFECT
• Events more easily remembered are judged as being more • Incorporating misinformation into one’s memory of the event
probable than those less likely remembered after witnessing an event and receiving misleading
• Bases judgements on ease to recall information about it
RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST ATTITUDES
ACHORING-AND-ADJUSTMENT HEURSTICS
• A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor ROSY RETROSPECTION
in making quantitative judgements • Recall mildly pleasant events more favorably than they
• Helps us make estimations experienced them
COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING HOW DO WE EXPLAIN OUR SOCIAL WORLDS?
COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING ATTRIBUTING CAUSALITY
• Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have ATTRIBUTION THEORY
happened, but didn’t • Analyzes how we explain people’s behavior and what we
• Mentally stimulating what might have been infer from it
• Underlies our feeling of luck
• The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense DISPOSITIONAL ATTRIBUTION
the counterfactual thinking • Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits
ILLUSORY THINKING DISPOSITIONAL ATTRIBUTION
ILLUSORY CORRELATION • Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits
• Perception of a relationship where none exists SITUATIONAL ATTRIBUTION
• Perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists • Attributing behavior to the environment
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGEMENTS
MISATTRIBUTION
• Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
• Particularly likely when men are in positions of power
INFERRING TRAITS
SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCE
• An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to
someone’s behavior
• The ease with which we infer traits
THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
• The tendency for observers to underestimate situational
influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon
others’ behavior
WHY DO WE MAKE THE ATTRIBUTION ERROR?
PERSPECTIVE AND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
• We observe others from a different perspective than we
observe ourselves
• Actor-observer difference is often minimal
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
• Cultures also influence attribution error
HOW DO OUR SOCIAL BELIEFS MATTER?
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
• A belief that leads to its own fulfillment
• When our ideas lead us to act in ways that produce their
apparent confirmation

EXPERIMENTER BIAS
• Research participants sometimes live up to what they believe
experimenters expect of them
GETTING FROM OTHERS WHAT WE EXPECT
BEHAVIORAL CONFIRMATION
• A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social
expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to
confirm their expectations
• Erroneous beliefs about the social world can induce others to
confirm those beliefs
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDE
DEFINING ATTITUDE • Process
➢ Attention
ATTITUDE ➢ Retention
• tendency to evaluate a person, object, or idea with some ➢ Reproduction
degree of approval or disapproval ➢ Motivation
• An evaluation of a specific stimulus with parts
➢ Affective component HOW WELL DO OUR ATTITUDES PREDICT OUR BEHAVIOR
➢ Behavioral component
➢ Cognitive component MORAL HYPOCRISY
• Can very in tone (positive or negative) and in strength (mild • Appearing moral while avoiding the costs of being so
to passionate) • Disjuncture between attitudes and actions
• Can also be ambivalent • Daniel Batson
ATTITUDE FORMATION WHEN ATTITUDES PREDICT BEHAVIOR
IMPLICIT ATTITUDES ASSESSING ATTITUDES
• Form without our conscious awareness • Sometimes we know a person’s attitudes from their
• May occur almost automatically behaviors, but is not always reliable

EXPLICIT ATTITUDES TECHNIQUES

• An attitude that one recognizes and can control • Self-report (explicit)
➢ Measures questionnaires that ask us to describe our own
FACTORS THAT DETERMINE WHETHER AN attitudes or opinions
ATTITUDE IS IMPLICIT OR EXPLICIT • Observation
• Early experiences ➢ Another way to gauge attitude, but it can also be inaccurate
• Affective experiences • Implicit Association Test
• Cultural biases ➢ Uses a bit of deception to assess implicit attitudes
• Cognitive consistency principles ➢ Can examine attitudes toward such topics as race, religion, and
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING even politics
➢ Some argue that the IAT only measures association and not
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING actual attitudes
• When two stimuli are paired together, they may come to elicit ➢ A computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes.
the same response ➢ Uses reaction times to measure people’s automatic associations
• Ivan Pavlov and his salivating dogs between attitude objects and evaluative words
• Unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response DO ATTITUDES INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR
• Conditioned stimulus and conditioned response
• Optimistic attitudes improve immune functioning
THE NAME-LETTER EFFECT
• The tendency to show a preference for the letters in our own name THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR
and stimuli that contain those letters • Theory that people’s conscious decisions to engage in
specific actions are determined by their attitudes toward the
THE MORE EXPOSURE EFFECT behavior in question, the relevant subjective norms, and their
• Objects/people become better liked with repeated exposure perceived behavioral control
• We like things more when they are familiar to us
FACTORS TO CONSIDER WHEN EVALUATING
OPERANT CONDITIONING BEHAVIOR
• Using reinforcement or punishment to strengthen or weaken a • Strength
particular behavior ➢ The stronger an attitude, the more likely we are to behave in
accordance with that position
Types ➢ Direct experience with an issue makes it more palpable – it can
1. Positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement no longer be ignored
2. Positive punishment or negative punishment • Specificity
➢ Very specific attitudes are more likely to be acted on than
OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING (Albert Bandura)
general attitudes
• Watching others (models) engage in behaviors and then
• Accessibility
repeating those actions ➢ The degree to which a concept is active in our consciousness
• Can explain how we acquire attitudes, fears, opinions, or
specific behavior
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDE
➢ Chronic accessibility • Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two
o Frequent and recent exposure to a concept makes it much more inconsistent cognitions
readily available
o This can serve both positive and negative functions
• Assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to
ourselves
WHEN DOES OUR BEHAVIOR INFLUENCE OUR ATTITUDES • Leon Festinger
FRITZ HEIDER: BALANCE THEORY DISSONANT RELATIONSHIP
• People desire cognitive consistency DISSONANT RELATIONSHIP
• We feel comfortable with others who share our attitudes • Requires a third consonant element to reduce the degree of
(balanced state) dissonance
• We feel uncomfortable with people who do not share our • Response to dissonance state:
attitudes (unbalanced state) ➢ Change in attitude
➢ Add a consonant element
ROLE PLAYING ➢ Reduce the importance of the attitude
ROLE DISSONANCE AND SELECTIVE EXPOSURE
• Set of norms that define how people in a given social position SELECTIVE EXPOSURE
ought to behave • The desire to avoid dissonance also creates behaviors that
• Actions expected of those who occupy a particular social reinforce a given attitude
position • Avoiding exposure to contrary attitudes while seeking the
exposure to consistent attitudes
PHILIP ZIMBARDO • In the face of cognitive dissonance, individuals may seek
• Stanford Prison experiment
social support in favor of a given attitude in order to reduce
➢ Ended after only 6 days
• Assigned roles to the participant by flipping a coin the level of dissonance
• Give the assigned guards uniforms • Tendency to seek information and media that agree with
one’s views and to avoid dissonant information
WHEN SAYING BECOMS BELIEVING
POST DISSONANCE
• People often adapt to what they say to please their listeners
POST DISSONANCE
EVIL AND MORAL ACTS • Four step model identifies what is needed for change to occur
• Evil sometimes results from gradually escalating ➢ Recognition that a discrepancy has negative consequences
commitments ➢ Personal responsibility for an action
• A trifling evil act erodes one’s moral sensitivity, making it ➢ Physiological arousal
easy to perform a worst act ➢ Attribution of that arousal to an action
• Actions and attitudes feed each other, sometimes to the point INSUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION
of moral numbness
INSUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION
WHY DOES OUR BHEAVIOR AFFECT OUR ATTITUDES • Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s
behavior when external justification is insufficient
SELF-PRESENTATION THEORY: IMPRESSION
MANAGEMENT DISSONANCE AS AROUSAL
• Assumes that for strategic reasons, we express attitudes that SELF-AFFIRMATION THEORY
make us appear consistent • A theory that people often experience a self-image threat
• We all care about what other people think of us after engaging in an undesirable behavior
• We see making a good impression as a way to gain social and • They can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self
material rewards, to feel better about ourselves, even to be • Threaten people’s self-concept in one domain and they will
come secure in our social identity compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in
• We express attitudes that match our actions some other domain
• Even a little insincerity or hypocrisy can pay off in managing
the impression we are making SELF-AFFIRMING
• Protects and supports our sense of integrity and self-worth
SELF-JUSTIFICATION: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
• When an attitude is in keeping with a behavior then there is a
consonant relationship
• When an attitude is not in keeping with a behavior then there
is a dissonant relationship
 REVIEWER IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDE
SELF-PERCEPTION
• Daryl Bem
• Assumes that we make similar inferences when we observe
our own behavior
• Theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes. We infer
them much as would someone observing us – by looking at
our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs
• Assumes that our actions are self-revealing
EXPRESSION AND ATTITUDES
• Our nonverbal behaviors also influence our attitudes

FACIAL FEEDBACK EFFECT

• The tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding
feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness
OVERJUSTIFICATION AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
OVERJUSTIFICATION EFFECT
• The result of bribing people to do what they already like
doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled
rather than intrinsically appealing
• Occurs when someone offers an unnecessary reward
beforehand in an obvious effort to control behavior