Social Psychology

98 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Conformity, obedience, groupthink, prejudice, persuasion, and the bystander effect, each with its replication status attached. Milgram held up, the Stanford Prison Experiment did not, and the cards say which is which.

What is social psychology?
The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
The tendency to overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational causes when explaining other people's behavior.
What is the actor-observer bias?
Explaining your own behavior situationally while explaining others' behavior dispositionally.
What is the self-serving bias?
Attributing your successes to internal factors and your failures to external ones.
What is Kelley's covariation model?
A model of how people assign causes using consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information.
What is the just-world hypothesis?
The belief that people generally get what they deserve, which can lead to blaming victims of misfortune.
What is the false consensus effect?
Overestimating how many other people share your beliefs, preferences, and behaviors.
What is pluralistic ignorance?
A situation where most members of a group privately reject a norm but wrongly assume most others accept it, so no one objects.
What is the spotlight effect?
Overestimating how much other people notice your appearance and behavior.
What is the illusion of transparency?
Overestimating how well others can read your internal states.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
An expectation that changes behavior in a way that makes the expectation come true.
What is the halo effect?
The tendency for an overall positive impression of a person to color judgments of their specific unrelated traits.
What is cognitive dissonance?
The discomfort felt when holding inconsistent cognitions or acting against a belief, which motivates a change in attitude or behavior.
What did the Festinger and Carlsmith one dollar experiment show?
Participants paid one dollar to say a dull task was interesting later rated it as more enjoyable than those paid twenty dollars, because the small payment left them with insufficient external justification.
What is effort justification?
The tendency to value an outcome more highly when it required greater effort or suffering to obtain.
What is the foot-in-the-door technique?
Getting compliance with a small request first to increase the chance of agreement to a larger one.
What is the door-in-the-face technique?
Making a large request expected to be refused, then following it with the smaller target request.
What is the low-ball technique?
Securing agreement to a deal and then increasing the cost after commitment has been made.
What are Cialdini's six principles of influence?
Reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.
What is the elaboration likelihood model?
A dual-process model of persuasion with a central route based on careful argument processing and a peripheral route based on cues such as attractiveness or source.
What is the sleeper effect?
A delayed increase in the persuasive impact of a message from a low-credibility source, as the message is remembered but the discounting cue is forgotten.
What is inoculation theory?
Exposing people to a weakened counterargument in advance builds resistance to later persuasion attempts.
What is the mere exposure effect?
Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it, even without conscious recognition.
What is conformity?
Changing behavior or belief to match a group standard, whether from a desire to be right or a desire to be accepted.
What did Asch's line judgment studies find?
When confederates unanimously gave an obviously wrong answer, about 75 percent of participants conformed at least once, and roughly a third of all critical trials produced conformity.
What conditions reduce conformity in the Asch paradigm?
A single dissenting ally, private rather than public responses, and a larger perceived competence gap in the participant's favor.
What is the difference between informational and normative social influence?
Informational influence is conforming because you believe others are right; normative influence is conforming to gain acceptance or avoid rejection.
What did Sherif's autokinetic effect study show?
In an ambiguous perceptual task, individuals converged on a shared group norm for how far a stationary light appeared to move, and kept it when tested alone later.
What is compliance, compared to conformity and obedience?
Compliance is agreeing to a direct request; conformity follows a group norm without a request; obedience follows an order from an authority.
What did Milgram's obedience experiments find?
In the baseline condition, about 65 percent of participants continued administering what they believed were increasingly severe shocks up to the maximum 450 volts when instructed by an experimenter.