Psychology 202 Chapter 15

Interpersonal attraction

Refers to positive feelings toward another person. -Encompasses a variety of experiences, including liking, friendship, admiration, lust, and love.

Group cohesiveness

Refers to the strength of the liking relationships linking group members to each other and to the group itself.

Anxious-ambivalent adults

Reported a preoccupation with love accompanied by expectations of rejection, and they described their love relations as volatile and marked by jealousy.

Attitude strength

Strong attitudes generally viewed as ones that are firmly held (resistant to change), that are durable over time, and that have a powerful impact on behavior.

Robert Sternberg

Suggests that love has three facets rather than just two; subdivides companionate love into intimacy and commitment. -Intimacy refers to warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship. Commitment is an intent to maintain a relationship in spite of the difficulties and costs that may arise. -Sternberg argues that passionate love reaches its peak in the early phases of love and then erodes.

Central route

Taken when people carefully ponder the content and logic of persuasive messages. Ex: thoughtfully researched speeches.

Peripheral route

Taken when persuasion depends on nonmessage factors, such as the attractivenss and credibility of the source. -Ex: A politician who depends on marching bands, flag waving, and celebrity endorsements.

Social psychology

The branch of psychology concerned with the way individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others.

Social loafing

A reduction in effort by individuals when they work in groups as compared to when they work by themselves.

Six broad topics

-Person perception -Attribution processes -Interpersonal attraction -Attitudes -Conformity and obedience -Behavior in groups

Receiver factors

-Personality of the person. -Expectations (e.g. forewarning) -Initial attitude on an issue -Strength of preexisting attitudes -Stronger attitudes more resistant to change.

Message factors

-Two sided arguments more effective than one-sided ones. -Messages intended to induce fear generally do so.

Passionate love

A complete absorption in another that includes tender sexual feelings and the agony and ecstasy of intense emotion.

Obedience

A form of compliance that occurs when people follow direct commands, usually from someone in a position of authority.

Ingroup

A group that one belongs to and identifies with. -Members tend to be viewed in a favorable light.

Outgroup

A group that one does not belong to or identify with. -Members tend to be viewed in terms of various negative stereotypes.

Facial symmetry

A key element of attractiveness in highly diverse cultures; thought to be valued because a variety of environmental insults and developmental abnormalities are associated with physical asymmetries, which may serve as markers of relatively poor genes or health.

Simpson, Fletcher, and Campbell (2001)

According to them, people routinely evaluate how close their intimate partners come to matching these ideal standards and these evaluations influence how relationships progress.

Trustworthiness

Another thing that gives a source high credibility - Many people tend to accept messages from trustworthy sources with little scrutiny.

Baumrind (1964)

Argued that Milgram's results wouldn't generalize to the real world, asserted that subjects who agree to participate in a scientific study expect to obey orders from an experimenter.

Harry Triandis

Argued that cultural differences in individualism versus collectivism influence attributional tendencies as well as other aspects of social behavior.

Diffusion of responsibility

As group size increases, the responsibility for getting a job done is divided among more people, and many group members ease up because their individual contribution is less recognizable.

Internal attributions

Ascribe the causes of behavior to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings.

External attributions

Ascribe the causes of behavior to situational demands and environmental constraints.

Willis and Todorov (2006)

Asked subjects to assess traits such as competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness based on brief exposures to facial photographs - found that instant judgments were highly correlated with the leisurely judgments which other subjects made.

Leon Festinger's dissonance theory

Assumes that inconsistency among attitudes propels people in the direction of attitude change.

Excessive reassurance seeking

Attachment anxiety promotes this, the tendency to persistently ask for assurances from partners that one is worthy of love.

Three components of attitudes

Cognitive component - Made up of the beliefs that people hold about the object of an attitude. Affective component - Consists of the emotional feelings stimulated by an object of thought. Behavioral component - Consists of predispositions to act in certain ways toward an attitude object.

Individualistic cultures vs. collectivist cultures

Collectivist cultures place a higher priority on shared values and resources, cooperation, mutual interdependence, and concern for how one's actions will affect other group members. -In childrearing, collectivist cultures emphasize the importance of obedience, reliability, and proper behavior. Individualistic cultures emphasize the development of independence, self-esteem, and self-reliance. -People from collectivist societies appear to be less susceptible to the fundamental attribution error than those from individualistic societies. -Increases in a culture's affluence, education, urbanization, and social mobility tend to foster more individualism. -Self-serving bias may be particularly prevalent in individualistic, Western societies, where an emphasis on competition and high self-esteem motivates people to try to impress others. -In contrast, collectivist societies exhibit a self-effacing bias in explain success, attributing their successes to help they receive from others or the ease of the task.

Bernard Weiner

Concluded that people often focus on the stability of the causes underlying behavior. According to Weiner, the stable-unstable dimension in attribution cuts across the internal-external dimension, creating four types of attributions for success and failure. Ex: Contemplating why you didn't get a job, internal-stable (lack of ability), internal-unstable (inadequate effort to put together an eye-catching resume), external-stable (too much competition), external-unstable (bad luck).

The Stanford Prison Simulation

Conducted by Philip Zimbardo, intended to investigate why prisons tend to become abusive, degrading violent environments. Chose 24 students and a coin flip determined which were going to be "guards" and who would be the "prisoners." -Guards could do whatever they want, aside from physical abuse. Study designed for two weeks but ended prematurely after just six days because of the rapid progression of abuse and degradation of the prisoners.

Ambivalent attitudes

Conflicted evaluations that include both positive and negative feelings about an object of thought - when ambivalence is high, an attitude tends to be less predictive of behavior and more pliable in the face of persuasion.

Group

Consists of two or more individuals who interact and are interdependent.

Jerry Burger (2009)

Crafted a very cautious, partial replication that incorporated a variety of additional safeguards to protect the welfare of the participants. -Screened patients with greater care, emphasized repeatedly that participants could withdraw from the study at any time, etc.

2004 Abu Ghraib prison

In Iraq - renewed interest in the Stanford Prison Simulation sparked American military personnel with little or no experience in running prisons to engage in sadistic, cruel treatment of their Iraqi prisoners.

Solomon Asch (1951)

In his classic experiment, tested male undergraduates and the pressures of conforming with a study of visual perception. -Subjects were asked to match a standard line with one of three other lines displayed on another card, and accomplices consistently choose the wrong one but agrees with the accomplices, conforming to the norm of the situation. -Found that conformity increased rapidly as group size went from 2 to 4.

John Darley and Bibb Latane (1968)

In this study, students in individual cubicles connected by an intercom participated in discussion groups of three sizes. -The tendency to seek help for an accomplice that faked a seizure tended to decline with increasing group size.

Latane and Nida (1981)

Estimated that participants who were alone provided help 75% of the time, whereas participants in the presence of others provided help only 53% of the time.

Cognitive dissonance

Exists when related attitudes or beliefs are inconsistent - that is, when they contradict each other, explaining why the high-dissonance subjects rated the task as being more enjoyable.

Sprecher and Duck (1994)

Experiment to measure the importance of physical attractiveness - found that the quality of communication during a set-up date did have some effect on females' interest in friendship, but the key determinant of romantic attraction for both sexes was the physical attractiveness of the other person.

Irving Janis

First described groupthink in his effort to explain how President John F. Kennedy and his advisers could have miscalculated so badly in deciding to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

Fritz Heider (1958)

First to describe how people make attributions. -Asserted that people tend to locate the cause of behavior either within a person, attributing it to personal factors, or outside a person, attributing it to environmental factors.

Avoidant adults

Found it difficult to get close to others and described their love relations as lacking intimacy and trust.

Secure adults

Found it relatively easy to get close to others and described their love relations as trusting.

Davis and Rusbult (2001)

Found that dating partners gradually modify their attitudes in ways that make them more congruent, a phenomenon they called attitude alignment.

Attributions

Inferences that people draw about the causes of events, others' behavior, and their own behavior. -Ex: If you conclude that a friend turned down your invitation because she's overworked, you've made an attribution about the cause of her behavior.

Reciprocity

Involves liking those who show that they like you.

Collectivism

Involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one's identity in terms of the groups one belongs to (such as one's family, tribe, work group, social class, caste, etc.)

Individualism

Involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships.

Cohen (1981)

Lead an experimenter in which subjects watched a videotape of a woman, described as either a waitress or a librarian, who engaged in a variety of activities, including listening to classical music, drinking beer, and watching tv. -Participants talked about qualities that were consistent with their stereotypes of librarians and waitresses.

Donn Byrne

Lead laboratory experiments on attitude similarity, suggesting that similarity between partners does cause liking.

Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987)

Looked not at the types of love but at similarities between adult love and attachment relationships in infancy. -Romantic love is an attachment process, and people's intimate relationships in adulthood follow the same form as their attachments in infancy. Ex: a person who had an anxious-ambivalent attachment in infancy will tend to have romantic relations marked by anxiety and ambivalence in adulthood.

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)

Male college students randomly assigned to experimental and control groups - experimental group were paid $1 for saying that the task was fun (high dissonance) versus control group, who were paid $20 for saying that the task was fun (low dissonance). -Dull task ended up being rated more enjoyable by the high-dissonance subjects.

Group polarization

Occurs when group discussion strengthens a group's dominant point of view and produces a shift toward a more extreme decision in that direction.

Groupthink

Occurs when members of a cohesive group emphasize concurrence at the expense of critical thinking in arriving at a decision.

Illusory correlation

Occurs when people estimate that they have encountered more confirmations of an association between social traits than they have actually seen. -Individuals often selectively recall facts that fit with their schemas and stereotypes.

Conformity

Occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure.

Expertise

One of the things that gives a source high credibility - tends to be more influenced when an argument is ambiguous or when the receiver is not motivated to pay close attention to the argument.

Bystander effect

People are less likely to provide needed help when they are in groups than when they are alone.

Evolutionary perspective

Person perception is swayed by physical attractiveness because attractiveness was associated with reproductive potential in women and with health, vigor, and the accumulation of material resources in men.

Attitudes

Positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought. -May include thoughts on social issues, institutions, consumer products, and people.

Elaboration likelihood model of attitude change

Proposed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo (1986) asserts that there are two basic "routes" to persuasion.

Matching hypothesis

Proposes that males and females of approximately equal physical attractiveness are likely to select each other as partners.

Accessibility

Refers to how often one thinks about it and how quickly it comes to mind. -Highly accessible attitudes are quickly and readily available. -Correlated with attitude strength but the concepts are distinct and there is no one-to-one correspondence.

Fundamental attribution error

Refers to observers' bias in favor of internal attributions in explaining others' behavior, as opposed to any situational factors that could be taken under consideration. -Actors favor external attributions for their behavior, while observers are more likely to explain the same behavior with internal attributions.

Receiver

The person to whom the message is sent.

Source

The person who sends a communication.

Person perception

The process of forming impressions of others.

Self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute one's successes to personal factors and one's failures to situational factors. -People tend to take progressively more credit for their successes and less blame for their failures.

Murray, Holmes, and Griffin

This study determined that most participants favored their partners more favorably than the partners viewed themselves.

Stanley Milgram

Troubled by how readily the citizens of Germany followed the orders of dictator Adolf Hitler - his experiment included a diverse collection of 40 men from the local community, Conducted a study on obedience when he had a subject shock a patient to the extent that they would be seriously injuring the patient. -Situational pressures can lead normal people to engage in acts of treachery and violence.

Companionate love

Warm, trusting, tolerant affection for another whose life is deeply intertwined with one's own.

Effort justification

When people turn attitude somersaults to justify efforts that haven't panned out.

Stereotypes

Widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership in a particular group. -Most common stereotypes include those based on gender and on membership in ethnic or occupational groups.

Social roles

Widely shared expectations about how people in certain positions are supposed to behave.