AP Psychology Chapter 18 Objectives

Contrast overt and subtle forms of prejudice, and give examples of each.

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Describe the conditions in which the presence of others is likely to result in social facilitation, social loafing, or deindividuation.

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Discuss how group interaction can facilitate group polarization and groupthink.

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Discuss the social factors that contribute to prejudice.

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Explain how the conformity and obedience studies can help us understand our susceptibility to social influence.

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Identify the characteristic common to minority positions that sway majorities.

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Identify the three components of prejudice.

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Define attitude.

Attitudes are positive, negative, or mixed feelings, based on our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Describe Milgram's experiments on obedience, and outline the conditions in which obedience was highest.

In Stanley Milgram's experiments, people torn between obeying an experimenter and responding to another's pleas to stop the shocks usually chose to obey orders, even though obedience supposedly meant harming the other person. People were most likely to obey when the person giving orders was nearby and was perceived as a legitimate authority figure; when the person giving orders was supported by a prestigious institution; when the victim was depersonalized or at a distance; and when no other person modeled defiance by disobeying.

Describe the conditions under which attitudes can affect actions.

Our attitudes are most likely to affect our behavior when social influences are minimal, the attitude is specific to the behavior, and we are very aware of the attitude.

Describe the three main focuses of social psychology.

Social psychology focuses on three broad topics: how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.

Discuss Asch's experiments on conformity, and distinguish between normative and informational social influence.

Solomon Asch found that people will conform to a group's judgment even when it is clearly incorrect. Conformity increases when we feel incompetent or insecure, admire the group's status and attractiveness, have made no prior commitment to a response, are being observed by members of the group, come from a culture that strongly encourages respect for group standards, and are in a group with at least three members, all unanimous in their decision. We may conform either to gain social approval (normative social influence) or because we welcome the information that others provide (informational social influence). We are most open to informational social influence if we are unsure of what is right and being right matters.

Describe the chameleon effect, and give an example of it.

The chameleon effect is our tendency to unconsciously mimic those around us, as when we yawn when others yawn, or pickup the mood of a happy or sad person. Automatic mimicry is an ingredient in the ability to empathize with others.

Explain how the foot-in-the-door phenomenon, role playing, and cognitive dissonance illustrate the influence of actions on attitudes.

The foot-in-the-door phenomenon describes people's willingness to agree to a large request after having agreed to a related small request. In role-playing studies, such as Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment, people who behaved in certain ways in scripted scenarios have adopted attitudes in keeping with those roles. Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory proposes that we feel uncomfortable when we act in ways that conflict with our feelings and beliefs, and we reduce this discomfort by revising our attitudes to align them more closely with our behavior. In all three instances, attitudes adapt to behavior, rather than drive it.

Contrast dispositional and situational attributions, and explain how the fundamental attribution error can affect our analyses of behavior.

We usually rely on situational attributions, stressing the influence of external events, to explain our own behavior (and often the behavior of those we know well and see in many different contexts). But in explaining the actions of people we do not know well, we often resort to dispositional attributions, assuming they behave as they do because of their personal traits. This fundamental attribution error (overestimating the influence of personal factors and underestimating the effect of context) can introduce inaccuracies into judgments we make about others.