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Jong Moon Study Guide Midterm 3 book only central topics in bold Reminder You are responsible for material covered in lecture media and reading assignments I Social Influence a Attitudes and actions Fundamental attribution error o We overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of situations o Our attributions to someone s disposition or to the situation have real consequences How do they influence one another cognitive dissonance o When we become aware of a mismatch between our attitudes and actions we experience mental discomfort or cognitive dissonance o Cognitive dissonance theory The theory that we act to reduce our discomfort we feel when two of o To reduce cognitive dissonance an individual will often change attitudes to bring them into alignment our thoughts clash with behaviors Power of role playing Stanford Prison Experiments o 24 out of 75 men were selected as being normal mentally physically healthy and were randomly assigned to either prisoner or guard roles o Gave guards uniforms clubs and whistles and instructed them to enforce certain rules o Others became prisoners locked in cells and forced to wear humiliating outfits o For a day or two the volunteers self consciously played their role o Those assigned to the guard role soon degraded the prisoners Became too real many guards developed bad attitudes o Prisoners broke down o Some people gave into the situation while some did not o Main theme Person and situation interact b Conformity Conformity Adjusting our behavior or thinking toward some group standard Ash s line perception test o You take a test with five other people o Experimenters asks group to state one by one which of the 3 comparison lines is identical to a standard line o First two trials go by easy Third trial everyone else says the wrong answer and you know what the answer is and you feel discomfort o Now you re in conflict with your own answer and everyone else s o More than 1 3 conform to the group s answer Factors that influence conformity o Normative Social influence Influence resulting from a person s desire to gain approval or avoid rejection A person may respect normative behavior because there may be a severe price to pay if not respected o Informational Social Influence The group may provide valuable information Conditions that strengthen conformity o One is made to feel incompetent or insecure o The group has at least three people o The group is unanimous o One admires the group s status and attractiveness o One has no prior commitment to a response o The group observes one s behavior o One s culture strongly encourages respect for a social standard c Obedience Milgram Studies o There s a learner who is tested on a list of word pairs by teacher The teacher has to shock the learner every time they get it wrong With each succeeding error the teacher moves onto the next level of shock o As learners are administered with more pain teachers become reluctant to shock them o Milgram asked before the experiment if they would follow an experimenter s to shock someone and at what point they would refuse to obey o Most people answered they would stop at first sign of pain o Actual results Men aged 20 50 60 of them fully complied until last switch Factors that influence obedience o Presumed authority knowledge of the person or entity giving orders o Victim depersonalized or at a distance o No role model for defiance II Social Relations a Prejudice Prejudice unjustifiable and usually negative attitude towards a group Components of prejudice o Beliefs stereotypes Emotions Potential to act Act Conscious and subconscious influences o Prejudice works at both conscious and unconscious level o Can be not only subtle but also automatic and unconscious Social roots of prejudice o Just world phenomenon Assumes that good is rewarded and evil is punished o We define who we are in terms of our groups o Through our social identities we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with o Ingroup Us people who share a common identity o Outgroup Them those perceived as different apart from our group o Ingroup bias a favoring of our own group Cognitive roots of prejudice o One way we simplify our world is to categorize We categorize people into groups by stereotyping the o Other race effect Tendency to recall faces of one s own race more accurately than faces of other others m races o Vivid cases are readily available to our memory and feeds to our stereotypes Such as 9 11 putting stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists b Altruism Altruism Unselfish concern for the welfare of others The bystander effect The tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present c Laws of Social Attraction Proximity Geographic nearness is friendship s most powerful predictor Three ingredients for attraction proximity physical attractiveness and similarity Mere exposure effect the phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them Negative things you say far outweigh the positive ones Physical attractiveness Symmetry and childlike features Similarity Similar views among individuals cause the bond of attraction to strengthen III Motivation a Four Perspectives on Motivation Motivation is a need or desire that energizes behavior and directs it toward a goal Instinct Theory replaced by the evolutionary perspective o Instincts are complex behaviors that have fixed patterns throughout different species and are not o Problems with this theory Complied over 5 759 instincts Don t really explain the behaviors they Drive Reduction Theory drives incentives o Drive A physiological need creates an aroused tension state a drive that motivates an organism to o When our needs push incentives positive or negative environmental stimuli pull us in reducing our learned just name them satisfy the need drives o When there is both a need and an incentive we feel strongly driven Arousal Theory Yerkes Dodson law o Humans are motivated to seek optimum levels of arousal not to eliminate it o Young monkeys as well as children are known to explore the environment in the absence of a need based drive o Yerkes Dodson law Suggests that there is a relationship between performance and arousal Increased arousal can help improve performance but only up to a certain point At the point when arousal becomes excessive performance diminishes Hierarchy of Motives o Maslow s pyramid of human needs Basic needs must be


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UW PSYCH 101 - Social Influence

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