Review Session
Exam Two

• Chapter 5: Self-Knowledge

• Chapter 6: Self-Justification

• Chapter 7: Attitudes and Attitude Change

• Chapter 8: Conformity

• Coursepack Articles

– Linville

– Osherow

Chapter 5: Self

• Self perception theory: when we look to our behavior to infer our attitudes and feelings

– Occurs when the situation is ambiguous or uncertain

– e.g. You’re not sure you think Jerry Seinfeld is funny. After watch an old rerun of Seinfeld and laughing the entire time, you conclude you must think he is funny because you laughed so much.

• Self Awareness theory: when we focus our attention on ourselves we evaluate and compare our behavior to our internal standards and values.

– e.g. Last night when you spoke to your mother on the phone, you lied. As soon as you got off the phone, you walked by your mirror and realized that your behavior did not match your internal set of values.

The Self

• Discounting: when you underestimate the reason for performing a behavior because another reason seems more obvious.

• Intrinsic motivation: you do something because you enjoy it not because others are making you do it or because you are getting a reward for it.

– If you love to play the piano for enjoyment you are doing so for intrinsic reasons. If your parents decide to give you money for continuing the lessons, you might begin to DISCOUNT your intrinsic reason for playing the piano and look to extrinsic reasons (thus using the overjustification effect).

Chapter 6: Self-Justification

• Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)

– Study on counter-attitudinal advocacy: the process that occurs when a person states an opinion or attitude that runs counter to his or her private belief or attitude

– Experiment:

• Subjects completed a boring, tedious task

• Half the subjects were paid $20 to tell the next “subject” (who was actually a confederate) that the task was exciting and fun

• Half the subjects were paid $1 to tell the same lie

– Results: Those participants who were paid $20 maintained that the task was boring because they had sufficient external justification for telling the lie. Those participants who were paid $1 rated the task significantly more enjoyable. The convinced themselves that what they said was closer to the truth.

Chapter 7: Attitudes

• Persuasion – Central versus Peripheral

– What are the conditions that people use the central route instead of peripheral?

• Key is whether people have the motivation and ability to pay attention to the facts.

• Depends on the personal relevance of the issue (See figure 7.4 – there is a slight interaction between the two but for the most part, people are MOST persuaded by the strength of the argument rather than the source – when it is highly relevant to them).

HSM vs ELM

• Basically saying the same thing using different wording.

• HSM: systematically process information or use heuristics to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

• ELM: two routes to persuasion: central route (equivalent to systematic processing) and peripheral route (equivalent to using heuristics)

Attitude Inoculation

• You can make people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position.

– Example: Politics.

Theory of Planned Behavior

• Why does perceived behavioral control link to both behavioral intention and behavior?

– Perceived behavioral control is the ease at which people believe they can perform the behavior.

– If people see the behavior as something that is difficult it will be likely that they will not form a strong intention to do so.

– This in turn will lead to no behavioral change. Thus the link between both the behavioral intention and the behavior itself.

Theory of Planned Behavior

• Constructs: subjective norms, attitude toward the behavior and perceived behavioral control

• Subjective norms: what do others around you think about the behavior? Is it positive or negative? How will they react when you change the behavior? (e.g. smoking)

• Attitude toward behavior: this has to be SPECIFIC to the behavior (e.g. Davidson and Jaccard – birth control pill example)

Reactance Theory (Brehm)

• People do not like to feel that their freedom is threatened

• This threatened feeling leads to an unpleasant state that Brehm called reactance

• In order to reduce this feeling, people will perform the threatened behavior

• Example: Darla’s parents tell her that she cannot see Jay under ANY circumstances. Darla feels that her personal freedom has been threatened, and so in defiance (reactance) sees Jay.

Hypocrisy Interventions

• Point of these interventions is to create cognitive dissonance in the person that you want to change behaviors

• Since one of the three ways to reduce dissonance is to change the behavior to match the cognition, you hope that the person will choose this as a way to reduce their dissonance.

• e.g. Dickerson et al – shower and water conservation.

Chapter 8: Conformity

• Mass Psychogenic Illness

– Definition: the occurance, in a group of people, of similar physical symptoms with no known physical cause

– Take home point: the media plays a powerful role in dissemination and also in squelching the contagion.

Linville

• Self-Complexity and Greater Extremity

– What does this mean? Self-complexity is defined as a joint function of the number of aspects and their degree of independence.

– What are the assumptions of the model?

– What was the hypothesis? the less complex a person’s cognitive representation of the self, the more extreme will be the person’s affect and self-appraisal.

– What were the results of the study?

• Those lower in self-complexity experienced greater swings in affect and self-appraisal following a failure or success experience

• Those lower in self complexity experienced greater variability in affect over a 2-week period

– What are the implications?

Osherow

• What type of social psychological theories apply to Jonestown?

• How did Jim Jones gain the trust and dedication of his followers?

• Who did Jim Jones recruit into his organization and why?

• What was Jim Jones’ promises to his followers?