📚 Quick Study Guide: Social Psychology Essentials
- 🤔 Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
- 👥 Core areas include social cognition (how we process social information), social influence (how others affect us), and social relations (how we interact).
- ⚖️ Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger) explains psychological discomfort arising from conflicting beliefs or behaviors, motivating us to reduce it.
- 🤝 Conformity (Asch) demonstrates how individuals adjust their behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard, even when incorrect.
- 👮 Obedience to Authority (Milgram) revealed the extent to which people would follow orders from an authority figure, even if it meant harming others.
- 👀 The Bystander Effect states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.
- 🧠 Attribution Theory explores how people explain the causes of behavior and events, often distinguishing between dispositional (internal) and situational (external) attributions.
- 💡 Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
🧠 Practice Quiz: Test Your Social Psychology Smarts!
1. What is the term for adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard?
A) Obedience
B) Conformity
C) Compliance
D) Cohesion
2. Which experiment famously demonstrated the power of obedience to authority figures?
A) Asch Conformity Experiment
B) Stanford Prison Experiment
C) Milgram Obedience Experiment
D) Bobo Doll Experiment
3. The psychological discomfort experienced when holding two or more conflicting cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, values) is known as:
A) Groupthink
B) Social Loafing
C) Cognitive Dissonance
D) Deindividuation
4. The tendency for people to be less likely to help a victim when others are present is called the:
A) Social Facilitation Effect
B) Bystander Effect
C) Diffusion of Responsibility
D) Group Polarization
5. When explaining someone else's behavior, we tend to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of the situation. This is known as:
A) Self-serving bias
B) Actor-observer bias
C) Fundamental attribution error
D) Just-world hypothesis
6. A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members is called:
A) Discrimination
B) Stereotype
C) Prejudice
D) Bias
7. Which concept describes the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable?
A) Social Facilitation
B) Group Polarization
C) Social Loafing
D) Group Cohesion
Click to see Answers
1. B) Conformity
2. C) Milgram Obedience Experiment
3. C) Cognitive Dissonance
4. B) Bystander Effect
5. C) Fundamental attribution error
6. C) Prejudice
7. C) Social Loafing