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Hypothesized a twist to the reciprocity hypotheses known as the gain-loss principle. The principle states that an evaluation that changes will have more of an impact than an evaluation that remains constant.
ex: We will like sojmeone more if their liking for us has increased than someone who has consistentlly like us. |
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| Studied conformity by asking subjects to compare the length of lines. The researchers found a strong tendency for subjects to conformt othe incorrect responses of the confederates. Subjects gave the wrong answer approximately 37 percent of the time. |
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Developed Self-Perception Theory (has also been used to explain forced-compliance dissonance) as an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory. The crux of this theory is that people infer what their attitues are based upon observation of their own behavior.
Unlike Festinger's theory there is no discomfort or dissonance, a person's intitial attitude is irrelevant and there is no discomfort produced by behavior.
Implications of Self-Perception Theory: The overjustification effect; if you reward people for somehting they already like doing, they may stop liking it. |
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| Performed study on doll preferences in African American children; the esults were used in the 1954 Brwon v. the Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court case. |
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| John Darley & Bibb Latane |
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Conducted research in the area of helping behavior, specifically on bystander intervention. Inspired by the Kitty Genovese killing they concluded that in an emergency people decide not to help because of two situational facotors: social influence and diffusion of responsibility.
The term pluralistic ignorance was coined from their social influence experiments; which means leading others to a definition of an event as a non-emergency. |
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| Suggested that gender differences in conformity were not due to gender, per se, but to differeing social roles. |
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Developed cognitive dissonance theory; a consistency theory of attitude change. According to Festinger cognitive dissonance is the conflict that you feel when your attitudes are not in synch with your behaviors.
Festinger also developed the social comparison theory; which suggests taht we are drawn to affiliate because of a tendency to evalutate ourselves in relationship to other people. |
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Suggests that there are cultural norms governing how far away we stand from the person we are speaking with (i.e. proxemics).
In the United States people stand a foot or less away from intimates and several feet from strangers. |
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Developed a consistency theory (inconsistencies are viewed as irritants, and are often resolved by changing attitudes)known as balance theory.
There are three related elements in balance theory: the person of interest, some other person, and a thing, idea or some other person.
Heider is also responsible for attribution theory; which focuses on the tendency for individuals to infer the causes of other people's behavior. He divided the attributions into two categories: Dispositional and situational.
This theory also lead to the development of the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to look for personality flaws instead of situational influences that may have caused a particular behavior. |
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Hovland's model deals with attitude chang as a process of communication. There are three components to this process: the comincator, the communication, and the situation.
Communicator: the more crdible the source is perceived to be, the greater the persuasive impact. However, over time the persuasive impact of the high credibility source decreases while the persuasive impact of the low credibility sourse increased. This is known as the sleeper effect.
In addition, sources can increase their credibility by arguing against their own self-interest. |
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| Janis studied the ways that group decision often go awry. According to Janis judgement fails when decision makers engage in what he called groupthink: the tendency for groups to strive for consensus by not considereing discordant information. |
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| Lerner studied the tendency of individuals to believe in a just world. Basically, in a just world goog things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. A strong belief in a just world increases the likelihood of "blaming the victim: since such a world view denies the possiblity of innocent victims. |
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Lewin conducted reearch to determine the effects of different leadership styles. He came up with three distinct leadership styles.
1.) Laissez-faire: less efficent, less organized, and less satisfying.
2.) Autocratic: more hostile, more aggressive, and more dependent on their leader.
3.) Democratic: more satisfying, more cohesive.
The quantity of work in autocratic groups was greater than in the other groups, but work motivation and interest were stronger in the democratic groups. |
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| Studied how psychological inoculation could help people resit persuasion. In order to test this theory McGuire decided to attack "cultural truisms." By presenting "refuted counterarguments" he demonstrated that inoculated truisms were much less susceptible to attack. |
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| If you don't know this already you should not be taking the GRE's. There is no hope for you. |
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| Conducted an experiment demonstrating the influence of group norms. He found that over time people increasingly accept the norms of their community. |
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Developed the elaboration liklihood model of persuasion. This model suggests that there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and peripheral route.
Basically, the central route comes into play when one truly cares about the issue. In this case one pays close attention to the persuader's arguments by genrating counterarguments. Thus, strong arguements are mroe persuasive than weak messages.
Peropheral route: Don't care much about the issue, distracted, etc. In this case the strength of the arguement is meaningless. All that matters is how, by whom, or in what surroundings the argument is being presented. |
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| Schachter found that greater anxiety typically does lead to greater desire to affiliate. He also found that anxious people prefer the company of other anxious people. |
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Conducted a classic study in cooperation and competition know as the Robber's cave experiment. In this experiment 22 twelve yr. old boys were taken to a camp staffed by confederates.
After the first week of camp the two groups of boys were told of eachother's existence and enrolled in a four-day tournament designed to create hostilities between the groups.
Sherif found that the only way to reduce the hostilities between the group was to foster intergroup cooperation through what he termed superordinate goals (i.e. goals that could only be accomplished if both groups worked together.
Sherif also is known for his study of conformity and the autokinetic effect (i.e. when you stare at a point of light in dark room the light will appear to move.) He found that individuals conformed previous estimations of light movement when brought into a group. |
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Mere exposure hypothesis: This states that mere repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to enhanced liking for it. In other words the more you see something the more you like it.
Social Facilitation effect: Suggests that the presence of others enhance the emission of dominant responses and impairs the emission of nondominant responses. |
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People are more likely to commit antisocial acts when they feel anonymous within a social environment.
In his now famous prison simulation average college students experienced deindividuation: a loss of self-awareness and of personal identity. Basically, their sense of self was overwhelmed by the roles they were playing, and they began acting out those roles, forgetting that they were actually university students participating in an experiment. |
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| Published (1898)what is thought to be the first study of social psychology: he investigated the effect of competition on performance. He found that people perform better on familiar tasks when in the preence of others than when alone. |
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| William McDougall & E.H. Ross |
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| In 1908 respectively published the first textbooks in social psychology. |
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| Suggeted that soical approbal influences behavior. In his study, he showed that the course of a converstaion chanages dramatically based upon the feedback (approval) from others. Helped to establish reinforcement theory as an important perspective in studying social behvior. |
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| Role theory: The perspective that people are aware of the social roles they are expected to fill, and much of their observable behavior can be attributed to adopting those roles. |
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| Types of cognitive dissonance |
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Free-choice dissonance: occurs when a person makes a choice between several desirable alternatives. In this case, the dissonance occurs after the choice (post-decisional dissonance) because the cognition that one likes something is dissonant with the choice not to select that 'something.'
In order to reduce dossonance one can engage in the spreadingof alternatives, meaning the realtive worth of the two alternatives is spread apart.
Forced-compliance dissonance: occurs when an individual is forced into behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs or attitudes. |
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| Main Principles of Cognitive Dissonance Theory |
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1. If a person is pressured to say or do something contrary to his or her privately held attitudes, there will be a tendency to change those attitudes.
2. the greater the pressure to comply, the less this attitude change. Ultimately, attitude change generally occurs when the behavior is induced with minimum pressure.
- Minimal Justification Effect: When behvior can be justified by means of external inducements (e.g. $20), there is no need to change internal cognition. However, when external justification is minimal, you will reduce your dissonance by changing internal cognitions. |
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| Implication of Daryl Bem's self-perception theory. Basically, if you reward people for something they already like doing, they may stop liking it. |
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| If you are induced to believe a statement and then provide your own explanation for it, you will tend to continue to believe the ststement, even when the statement is shown to be false, |
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| If you try too hard to persuade someone of somjething, that person will coose to believe the opposite of your position. |
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| We tend to like people who indicatge that hey like us. Inversely, we tend to dislike those who dislike us. Essentially, we don't only decide whether or not we like a person based on their qualities, etc. but on their evaluation of us. |
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| Assumes that a person wighs the rewards and costs of interacting with aotehr. The more the rewards otweigh the sosts, the greater the attraction to the other person. Basically, people attempt to maximize rewards and minimize costs. |
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| Not only do we weigh our own costs and rewards in an interaction, but we way the the costs and rewards of the other person. We prefer that our ration of costs to reweards be equal to the other person's ration. |
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| Claims that people choose relatioships so that htey mutually satisy each other's needs. |
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| Attractiveness Stereotype |
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| The tendency to attribute positive qualities and desirable characteristics to attractive people. |
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| A factor in attraction, people will generally develop a greater liking for someone who lives within a few blocks than for someone who lives in a different neighborhood. |
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| Batson's empathy-altruism model |
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According to this model, when fadced with ituations in which others may need help, people might feel distress (mental pain or anguish), and/or they might feel empathy.
Some psychologists diagree fundamentally, and instead, believe that helping behavior occurs only when there is some befit to the individual offering help. |
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| Compliance with a small request inceases the likelihood of compliance with a larger request. |
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| People who refuse a large initial request are more likely to agree to a later smaller request. |
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| The tendency to allow a general impression about a person to influence other, more specific evaluations about a person. |
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| Is a group phenomenon referring to the tendency for people to put forth less effort when part of a group effort than when acting individually. |
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| Refers to the finding that group decisions are riskier than the average of the individual choices. One explanation is the value hypothesis, which suggests that the risky shitt occurs in situations in which riskiness is culturaly valued. |
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| Presented controversial situations to couples in order to examine risky shift. He found a shift towards caution instead of risk when he presented couples with a choice between allowing a pregnancy that would endanger the mother's life to continue and terminating that pregnancy. |
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| Group decisions tend to be more extreme, but not necessarily more risky than the decions of individuals. Basically, group discussion tends to enhance the group's initial tendencies towards riskiness or caution. |
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| Social Psychology is concerned with the ways people influence each other's attitudes and behavior, the impact that individuals have on one another, the impact that social groups have on individual group members, the impact that individual group members have upon the social gorup, and the impact that social groups have on other social groups. |
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