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Social ThinkingModule 43

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Social Psychology

Social Thinking Overview Attributing Behavior to

Persons or to Situations

Attitudes and Action

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Focuses in Social Psychology

Social psychology scientifically studies how we think about, influence, and

relate to one another.

“We cannot live for ourselves alone.”

Herman Melville

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Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations

Attribution Theory: Fritz Heider (1958)

suggested that we have a tendency to give

causal explanations for someone’s behavior,

often by crediting either the situation or

the person’s disposition.

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Fritz Heider

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Attributing Behavior to Personalities or to SituationsA teacher may wonder whether a child’s

hostility reflects an aggressive personality (dispositional attribution) or is a reaction to stress or abuse (a situational attribution).

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Fundamental Attribution Error

Fundamental Attribution Error. The tendency to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of the situations in analyzing

the behaviors of others.

People Hate this guy…he is an ACTOR!!!

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Actress or spawn of hell?

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Effects of AttributionHow we explain someone’s

behavior affects how we react to it.

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Attitudes & ActionsAttitude: A belief that predisposes a

person to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

If we believe a person is mean, we may feel dislike for the person and act in an

unfriendly manner.

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Actions Can Affect Attitudes

Not only do people stand for what they believe in (attitude), they start

believing in what they stand for.

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Small Request – Large Request

In the Korean War, Chinese communists solicited cooperation from US army

prisoners by asking them to carry out small errands. By complying to small errands they

were likely to comply to larger ones.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small

request to comply later with a larger request.

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Roles Affects Attitudes: the Prison Experiment

Zimbardo (1972) assigned the roles of guards and prisoners to random students and found

that guards and prisoners developed role- appropriate attitudes. Link BBC 3:45 Link 29:01

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According to the Experts

• "Any deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us to do under the right or wrong situational pressures.”

• Dr. Phil Zimbardo

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Actions Can Affect Attitudes

Why do actions affect attitudes? One explanation is that when our attitudes and

actions are opposed, we experience tension. This is called cognitive dissonance.

Link 4:54

To relieve ourselves of this tension we bring our attitudes closer to our actions (Festinger, 1957).

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Attitude: "I am going on a diet and will avoid high fat food"

Behavior: Eating a doughnut or some other high fat food

• 1. Change behavior/cognition (Ex: Stop eating the doughnut)

• 2. Justify behavior/cognition by changing the conflicting cognition (Ex: "I'm allowed to cheat every once in a while")

• 3. Justify behavior/cognition by adding new cognitions (Ex: "I'll spend 30 extra minutes at the gym to work it off")

• 4. Ignore/Deny any information that conflicts with existing beliefs (Ex: "I did not eat that donut. I always eat healthy.") 22

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Cognitive Dissonance

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Self-fulfilling Prophecy

• When, without our awareness, schemas cause us to subtly lead people to behave in line with our expectations.

• Ex. If teachers expect particular students to do poorly in mathematics, those students may sense this expectation, exert less effort, and perform below their ability level.

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