Recitation Sections Learning Objectives

Recitation Section #12 (Social Psychology) – May 10-11th

Homework #11 (homework questions are highlighted)
1. What is an attribution? What is the difference between a situational attribution
and a dispositional attribution? What is the fundamental attribution error? How
can the fundamental attribution error affect our analyses of behavior?

2. What is an attitude? What does it mean to say that attitudes follow behavior?
Under what conditions can attitudes affect actions? Explain how the Abu Ghraib
Prison fiasco might be an example of how role-playing affects attitudes.

3. What is the chameleon effect? Give two examples from everyday life.

4. What is conformity? What happened in Asch’s experiments on conformity?

Under what conditions is conformity the highest? What is the difference between
normative social influence and informational social influence?

5. What is obedience? What is deindividuation? Describe what happened in

Milgram’s classic study on obedience. Under what conditions are obedience the
highest? How did his obedience studies help in understanding our susceptibility
to social influence?

6. Driving to school one wintry day, Marco narrowly misses a car that slides through
a red light. “Slow down! What a terrible driver,” he thinks to himself. Moments
later, Marco himself slips through an intersection and yelps, “Wow! These roads
are awful. The city snow plows need to get out here.” What social psychology
principle has Marco just demonstrated? Explain.

7. Why didn’t anybody help Kitty Genovese? What social relations principle did this
incident illustrate?

8. Describe the influence of proximity, physical attractiveness, and similarity on

interpersonal attraction. What is the mere exposure effect? Give one example of
this effect in your own life.

9. What is the difference between passionate love and compassionate love? How
does physical arousal influence passionate love? What are two ingredients needed
to maintain compassionate love? Explain them.

10. What is altruism? What is the bystander effect? What does diffusion of
responsibility mean? What conditions make altruism more likely to happen?
11. What is group polarization? What is groupthink? Describe how groupthink
worked during the lead up to the Iraq war. How does group interaction facilitate
group polarization and groupthink?

12. What is cognitive dissonance? How do we relieve cognitive dissonance?

Describe how cognitive dissonance may have been operating in people who
believed that the reason for going to war in Iraq was to stop the threat of weapons
of mass destruction.