Social Psychology in Summary

Attitudes: Your set of beliefs

• Mere Exposure Effect: just being around something makes you like (or hate) it. (ex) You grew up eating curry, so you love it.
• Cognitive Dissonance: when your actions don’t match up with your attitude, you get uncomfortable and usually change one or the other. (ex) you think smoking is bad, but you start smoking, so you say, “well it’s not THAT bad.”

Compliance Strategies: How to get people to do what you want

• Foot in Door: You ask for a little, then increase what you want when they agree to the first thing.
• Door in Face: You ask for way too much, then ask for something that seems reasonable in comparison.
• Norms of Reciprocity: Give-and-take. They give you something, and hope you’ll return the favor.

Attribution Errors:

• Fundamental Attribution Error: There are always dispositional and situational aspects, but in other people, you’ll blame disposition (he’s lazy) but in yourself or people you know and like, you’ll blame the situation (bad day, there was traffic)
• False Consensus Effect: You overestimate how much others agree with you when you feel strongly about something
• Self-Serving Bias: You take more credit for good outcomes, while avoiding blame for bad ones.
• Just World Belief: You assume that people get what’s coming to them. “He’s homeless because he didn’t work hard enough”

Social Influence:

• Social Facilitation: You do better at a task you are capable of when there are others watching. 
• Social Impairment: If you’re nervous or unprepared, having an audience will make you do poorly.

Conformity and Obedience:

• Solomon Asche’s Line Experiment (Conformity)
• Stanley Milgram’s Shock Experiment (Obedience)
• Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment

Group Dynamics

• Social Loafing: during a group task, you’ll slack off and assume someone else will pick up the slack
• Group Polarization: When you’re with people who agree with you, your opinion will become more and more radical. Basically, everything everywhere will devolve into a circlejerk.
• Deindividuation: When you’re in a group, you’ll do things you normally would not. (ex) There’s a riot, and you’re a nice person, but you’re smashing windows and tipping cars with everyone else.
• Groupthink: Groups tend to make bad choices.
• Stereotypes: ideas, positive or negative, about a group of people.
• Prejudice: undeserved negative attitudes about people.
• Discrimination: acting on prejudice, treating people differently.
• Out-of-group Homogeneity: You think that everyone outside your group is all the same. (ex) You’re a running enthusiast. Everyone who bikes is weird. People who don’t exercise are boring.
• In-Group Bias: You prefer people in your own group
• Contact Theory: Putting together a diverse group of people helps resolve their differences if you give them a superordinate goal that they must work together to achieve

Aggression

• Instrumental Aggression: aggressive acts to achieve a specific end. (ex) Tackle someone to get the ball. Push people to get in line.
• Hostile Aggression: Just bein’ a dick.
• Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: We take our anger out on others because it relieves our own frustrations.
• If not Frustration, some believe in social learning, a la Albert Bandura: We see people act aggressively, so we model that behavior.

Prosocial Behavior

• Bystander Effect: When multiple people witness a tragic event, no one will do anything because of the diffusion of responsibility. (ex) Kitty Genevese case- a NY woman was brutally stabbed to death outside an apartment complex. There were 40 witnesses, and no one did anything

Attraction is influenced by:

• Similarity
• **Proximity**
• Reciprocal Liking

Good luck to you AP Chem, AP Enviro, and AP Psych kids tomorrow! We believe in you!

remember guise, PORN

proactive > old before new

retroactive > new before old