Social Psychology Semester 1

Attribution
1. Attribution is: The process of assigning a cause to on event or behaviour
2. Heider believed people are motivated by...
  1. The need to form a coherent view of the world
    1. The need to gain control of the environment acting like naive scientists
3. Types of Attribution
  1. Internal attribution (dispositional)- any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person- e.g. personality, mood, abilities, attitudes
  2. External attribution (situational)- any explanation that locates the cause as being external to the person- e.g. actions of others, social pressure or luck
  3. Stability- the extent to which causes are relatively stable and permanent e.g natural ability, vs temporary/fluctuating (drunk)
  4. Controllability- the extent to which causes can be influenced by others e.g effort, vs. the random e.g. luck.
4. Correspondent inference theory- Jones and Davis (1965)
  1. When making social inferences people try to infer that the action of an actor corresponds to a stable personality characteristic. People prefer internal, dispositional attributions over external, situational ones, because they are more valuable with regard t making predictions about behaviour
  2. Choice
    1. Whether the behaviour was freely chosen or not. An internal attribution n is more likely when the person has freely chosen the behaviour.
  3. Non-common effects
    1. When a behaviour has a unique consequence, rather than having a range of possible other consequences, we can refer to it as having non-common effects. An internal attribution is more likely when there are non-common effects.
  4. social desirability
    1. refers to whether the behaviour observed is consistent with or counter to, social norms. An internal attribution is more likely when socially undesirable behaviours are observed. People have the tendency to follow social norms to fit in.
  5. The theory has declined in popularity due to limitations- model is limited to single instances of behaviour and focuses on internal attributions. Its very easy to think of the many times that we have put someone's behavour down to bad luck or a bad day. People make external attributions as well as internal.
5. Co-variation model- Kelley (1967)
  1. causality is attributed using the co-variation principle- for something to be the cause of a particular behaviour it must be present when the behaviour is present and absent when it is absent. From multiple potential causes we assign causality to the one that co-varies the best
  2. Consistency information
    1. extent to which target person reacts in the same way on different occasions- everyday(internal) vs. just today(external)
  3. Distinctiveness information
    1. extent to which target person reacts in the same way in other social contexts or specific to that context.- e.g at work (external) vs. everywhere (internal)
  4. Consensus information
    1. extent to which other people in the scene react in the same way as the target person. e.g everyone(external) vs. just you(internal)
6. Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)
  1. tendency to over-attribute actions to the person rather than the situation (we make dispositional/internal rather than situational/external attributions
  2. Ross et al
    1. pair of ptps randomly assigned to either play host or contestant in general knowledge quiz game.
      1. Experimental condtion: hosts asked to generate a set of challenging questions from their own topics of interest for contestant to answer (contestant aware)
        Control condition- hosts asked set of questions pre-provided (contestants aware)
        Participants then rated both the hosts and their general knowledge.
        only experimental group rated their own general knowledge as significantly worse than hosts general knowledge. contestants made dispositional attribution about the hosts' knowledge, neglecting the situational explanation for their behaviour
  3. FAE- is it really fundamental? Cultural differences, research is western-centric. When we look at research across cultures for FAE it isn't as strong
    1. Morris and Peng
      1. Chinese and US ptpts watched animated videos of a group of coloured fish, they reported the extent to which they thought the fish's movements were influenced by internal or external factors
        US made significantly higher internal attributions and lower external attributions than chinese ptps.
    2. some theorists believe dispositional judgements may be more accurate in cases- so being biased towards then isn't actually an error.
      1. Gilbert and Malone renamed it 'correspondence bias. there are four main causes
        lack of awareness of situational constraints
        unrealistic expectations
        inflated categorisations of behaviour
        incomplete corrections of dispositional inferences
7. Actor-observer effect/bias
  1. tendency to attribute other's behaviour to dispositional factors, and our own to situational factors.
  2. Nisbett, Caputo, legant & Maracek
    1. ptps asked to write para describing why their friend had chosen their uni course. each reason was coded as an internal or external attribution
      1. ptps attributed their own choice to both internal & external and attributed their friend's choice significantly more internal
  3. Explanations
    1. Perceptual focus- our attention is drawn by people rather than their situational background, however our attention of ourselves is our situation bc we can't seen ourselves acting
      1. informational differences- we have far more info about how we behave in different situations than we have about other people's situations
8. Self serving attribution bias
  1. Humans are motivated tacticians- we're not at all objective about how we interpret the world, we interpret it in a way that serves our purposes
    1. People are more likely to attribute positive events to themselves- SELF ENHANCEMENT BIAS
      1. but dismiss negative events as attributable to other causes- SELF PROTECTING BIAS
        How universal? Mezulis- meta analysis on the results of 266 studies, large self-serving attribution bias
Impression formation
1. The way in which we form impressions, often first impressions, of others and attribute specific characteristics to them
2. Configural model (Asch 1946)
  1. form an overall consistent impression, rather than a combination of individual traits.
  2. researcher read a list of attributes to the participants. participants gave their impression of the person
    1. 1. warm- generous, happy, sociable, altruistic
      2. Cold- snobbish, unsympathetic, calculating.
  3. Are warm and cold special?
    1. 1. Peripheral traits such as polite and blunt have less influence on the overall impression than central traits. Warm-cold traits are especially influential on overall impression compared to polite and blunt
Personality
1. History of personality
  1. hippocrates believed that traits are embedded in people's bodily fluids and personality depends on the balance of them
  2. Franz Joseph Gall developed Phrenology, a pseudoscience that aimed to predict people's personality by the size, shape and bumps on their skull.
    1. Gall proposed that there were 27 faculties corresponding to different areas on the skull.
2. Personality refers to stable individual differences believed to be presented early in life and are consistent across time and place.
3. Personality is not just common sense- findings indicate common sense is overestimated. Sternberg found only 7% of his sample had high levels of common sense.
4. Barnum effect- whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, that are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people
5. Humanistic
  1. Carl Rogers
    1. Rogers viewed personality as an organism shaped by experiences that form a phenomenal field of perception. the goal of therapy is to restore a trust in our own perception of reality
  2. For the humanists, the unit of analysis is perceived reality. Their view is that people are inherently good with unique attributes for greatness- positive psychology
  3. Person-centered approach to understanding personality
6. Motivational
  1. Henry Murray
    1. developed a theory of personality called personology based on 'need' and 'press'. (need comes from within individual, press comes from environment)
    2. focuses on needs, motives and drives as the forces of behaviour. described needs as internal, abstract constructs,.
    3. emphasised the role of situational factors in the expression of needs.
7. Trait
  1. A trait is a relatively stable aspect of personality that is inferred through behaviour. traits assume characteristics are (relatively) stable over time and across situations
  2. Traits are continuous- people can have more or less of a trait depending on how intensely or frequently they display it
    1. 'Types' are discrete- they categorise people (group/label)
  3. Gordon Allport
    1. acknowledged the limitations of the trait concept. behaviour is influenced by a variety of environment factors too
    2. Traits have physical components in the nervous system
      1. acts/habits that are inconsistent with a trait are not proof it doesn't exist.
    3. Promoted concept of self
    4. Nomothetic approach- people can be described along a single dimension according to their level of a trait.
    5. Idiographic approach- identified the combination of traits that best accounts for personality
      1. Cardinal trait- single dominating trait in personality
8. The Big Three- Hans Eysenck
  1. Three supertraits are heritable (genetic) with physiological substrates
    1. P- psychoticism
      1. E- extroversion
        N- neuroticism
9. Big Five- Allport and Odbert
  1. Lexical approach., used terms from dictionary- reduced by factor analysis to five main personality factors
    1. O- openness
      1. C- Conscientiousness
        E- Extraversion
        A- Agreeableness
        N- Neuroticism
  2. five dimensions cannot possibly capture all of human variation. dimensions are too broad. May not consider cultural variations. less value for predicting specific behaviours
  3. Big Six- Ashton and Lee
    1. each of the 6 dimensions has facets which provide a more fine grained view of personality.
      1. H- Honesty and humility
        E- Emotionality
        X- eXtraversion
        A- Agreeableness
        C- Conscientiousness
        O- Openness to experience

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Social Psychology Semester 1

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