5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition (70 page)

Corporations’ and other enterprises’ persuasive techniques attempt to exploit what is known about attitudes to convince people to alter their attitudes in a specific direction. The
elaboration likelihood model
looks at two ways attitudes can be changed. Using a
central route of persuasion,
the speaker uses facts, figures, and other information to enable listeners to carefully process the information and think about their opinions. Opinions changed using the central route of persuasion tend to be more stable than those formed through the
peripheral route.
Frequently used by advertisers, superficial information is used to distract the audience to win favorable approval of their product, and to increase sales. Supermodels or well-known popular athletes are paired with the product and, through classical conditioning, people transfer their liking for the popular figure to the product. Attitudes changed through the peripheral route are less stable.

Other important issues related to changing attitudes include the communicator and the message. Communicators who are perceived as experts in their fields are especially effective. Others who are deeply admired by the audience and those that are seen as fairly attractive will also have a favorable impact. The message must be geared to the specific audience. If the audience has the same opinion as the speaker, facts are chosen that reinforce that position. However, to gain credibility with audiences whose opinions are not the same, a good speaker will begin with sound arguments supporting the audience’s initial point of view, but then conclude with even stronger evidence for the opposing side. Emotional appeals can be valuable as well in persuasion. A moderate level of fear and information about how to avoid the fearful situation seems to be the most effective combination. If appealing for sympathy and contributions to a charitable cause, moderation is also vitally important for success.

Cognitive dissonance
is yet another factor that causes individuals to change their attitudes. Dissonance is the tension that results from holding conflicting beliefs, attitudes, opinions,
or values or when our actions do not coincide with these cognitions. Leon Festinger thought that we are motivated to keep our cognitions consistent. He conducted an experiment in which students completed boring tasks and then were asked if they would lie and tell other students that the task was actually interesting. He paid some subjects $20 to lie and others only $1. When he asked these subjects 2 weeks later about the task, the subjects paid $20 still believed that the task was boring; however, the students paid only $1 revised their opinion and believed the task to be more interesting than they had at first believed. A difference between their beliefs about themselves being honest and their agreement to lie to others caused them sufficient dissonance to change their opinion. Apparently $1 was not enough justification for having acted the way they had.

Aggression
is defined as an act of delivering an aversive stimulus to an unwilling victim. Psychologists distinguish between two types of aggression—instrumental and hostile.
Instrumental aggression
has as its purpose the satisfaction of some goal behavior or benefit. A mother will “fight” her way through a crowd at Christmas time to get the last of a “must have” toy for her child.
Hostile aggression,
on the other hand, results when a person feels pain, anger, or frustration. The aggression is an attempt to strike out against something or someone seen as the cause of this discomfort. Road rage is a modern example of hostile aggression that may result from a fairly trivial action of another motorist. Freud and Lorenz believed aggression to be a natural human instinct. Other theorists, including cultural anthropologists, note a diversity of more passive and aggressive cultures worldwide, suggesting that aggression is a learned normative behavior. Researchers who have examined the influence of watching television violence conclude that it does lead children and teens to act more aggressively.

Directions:
For each item, choose the letter of the choice that best completes the statement or answers the question.

1.
Mr. Moffatt overheard another teacher describe one of his students as lazy and unmotivated. Though Mr. Moffatt had not previously noted this tendency, he began to see exactly what the other teacher had noted. What might account for this phenomenon?

(A) norms

(B) deindividuation

(C) social loafing

(D) self-fulfilling prophecy

(E) representativeness heuristic

2.
Some difficult cuts needed to be made in the school board budget and everyone on the board knew that there had to be consensus and cooperation. Even though many members disagreed with certain proposals, each one met with unanimous support or defeat. To preserve cooperation, no one offered conflicting viewpoints. Which of the following concepts is best described by this example?

(A) group polarization

(B) fundamental attribution error

(C) groupthink

(D) role schema

(E) reciprocity

3.
A young woman was gunned down at a gas station. A busload of onlookers saw the entire event and no one did anything. The bus driver even stepped over the body to pay for his gas. What social psychological phenomenon best accounts for this behavior?

(A) groupthink

(B) altruism

(C) social impairment

(D) superordinate goals

(E) diffusion of responsibility

4.
You read in the newspaper that survivors in a plane accident in the Andes were discovered to have eaten other survivors during their 32-day ordeal. You will have committed the fundamental attribution error if you

(A) attribute the behavior to dispositional (personal) factors

(B) attribute the behavior to situational factors

(C) think you would have done the same thing if you had been there

(D) consider the behavior as a signal for the moral degradation of our society

(E) decide never to fly in a plane again

5.
Ethnocentrism is the belief that

(A) ethnic foods are all good

(B) human diversity is a positive force

(C) one’s own culture is superior to others

(D) other people are all pretty much alike in their opinions

(E) cultural pluralism is a destructive goal that fosters conflict

6.
The effect of one confederate selecting a different line from the others in the Asch conformity test was

(A) continuing conformity by the participant to avoid looking bad to the others

(B) the participant asking to vote privately on a separate piece of paper

(C) a boost to the self-efficacy of the participant

(D) to release the participant from the conformity effect

(E) to cause the experimenter to release that confederate in the next trial period, thus ensuring continued conformity by the participant

7.
Which of the following factors probably plays the
least
important role in explaining why children often share the same political and economic values as their parents?

(A) exposure to mass media

(B) operant conditioning

(C) they have never questioned these beliefs and do not really understand them

(D) modeling

(E) mere exposure effect

8.
Of the following, which would be a good example of a self-serving bias?

(A) Carlos, who feels that everyone should strive to help themselves as well as others

(B) Antoine, who says that he has bombed a test even though he always gets an A

(C) Mai, who works harder for teachers who compliment her on her efforts

(D) Lina, who overestimates the degree to which people agree with her opinions

(E) Betty, who believes that she works harder than others and is underappreciated

9.
In a jigsaw classroom,

(A) students are dependent upon each other to learn all parts of a lesson

(B) learning is enhanced by simulations and lectures run by teachers

(C) competition encourages kids to achieve their full potential

(D) outcome research has shown limited success beyond the elementary school level

(E) individualism is encouraged to foster self-esteem

10.
Although Graham has not yet met his future college roommate, he learned that the roommate is a football player. He is anxious and unhappy about sharing his room with a football player because he expects that his roommate will be a “party animal” who makes studying in his room difficult. Graham’s attitude can be classified as

(A) stereotype threat

(B) prejudice

(C) discrimination

(D) scapegoating

(E) fully justified

11.
When asked what they would do if they could be totally invisible and there would be no recrimination, most people answered that they would commit an antisocial act. Which of the following social phenomena might best be able to explain this response?

(A) reciprocity

(B) group polarization

(C) social loafing

(D) deindividuation

(E) self-fulfilling prophecy

12.
Which of the following social psychological experiments has been considered the most unethical and led to sweeping reforms in the APA ethical guidelines?

(A) Bandura’s Bobo study of TV aggression

(B) Asch’s line test for conformity

(C) Milgram’s obedience to authority study

(D) Sherif’s boys’ camp study

(E) Jane Eliot’s brown-eyed/blue-eyed study of prejudice

13.
Donald believes himself to be a patriotic citizen, but he also does not believe in attacking countries that are technologically no match for the United States. If the United States was to go to war and Donald were to be drafted, dissonance theory predicts that

(A) he would have no conflict in going off to war

(B) he might have to change one of his attitudes to feel less tension

(C) justification of the military position would have to be internalized by him

(D) morally, he would have to become a conscientious objector

(E) morally, he must fight and defend his country

14.
A charity sends you some greeting cards and you feel that you should send them a small contribution. This feeling comes from the persuasion technique called

(A) foot-in-the-door

(B) reciprocity

(C) door-in-the-face technique

(D) low-ball technique

(E) central route

15.
Which of the following is
not
a key determinant of whether or not two people will become friends?

(A) similarity of interests and social backgrounds

(B) proximity

(C) physical attractiveness

(D) utilitarian value

(E) opposing views on key social issues

1. D—
Self-fulfilling prophecy studies show there is a tendency to elicit behaviors from others that conform to our individual expectations. After hearing the other teacher’s attribution of the student behavior, Mr. Moffatt’s behavior toward the student probably changed even unintentionally, which affected the student’s behavior. (Note: this is the
result
of the incident—not its cause.)

2. C—
Groupthink is a tendency to self-censor in group decision to preserve the harmony of the group.

3. E—
Diffusion of responsibility is the bystander rule that, as the size of the group increases, the assumption of responsibility of any group member decreases.

4. A—
When judging the behavior of others, people often make the fundamental attribution error of overemphasizing personal or dispositional factors and underestimating situational factors.

5. C—
Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own group—ethic, political, religious, etc.—is superior to others.

6. D—
Although one-third of the participants conformed some of the time in the Asch conformity trials, when only one of the confederates selected a different line from the others, the participant was released from the conformity effect.

7. A—
Children tend to adopt the attitudes of their parents through all of the other methods, but exposure to mass media offers them a diverse set of opinions, which may cause them to carefully reconsider some of their parents’ basic beliefs.

8. E—
A self-serving bias causes us to overestimate the contribution we make to successful group projects, thereby preserving our feelings of self-worth and efficacy.

9. A—
The jigsaw classroom was an effort to increase cooperation between diverse groups and build esteem and achievement of minority students. The original expert groups learn one part of a lesson. The students then regroup into jigsaw groups and are dependent upon others to learn the complete lesson. Diverse groups working cooperatively together come into contact with each other and lose some of their prejudiced beliefs.

10. B—
Prejudice is an unjustified attitude, while discrimination is the unjustified behavior that might result from holding these attitudes.

11. D—
In studies on deindividuation, anonymity of group members often excuses them to act in antisocial ways. The wording of this question often leads people to consider personal gain through criminal acts since they “won’t face punishment.”

12. C—
Milgram’s “shocking” experiment put individuals under extreme psychological distress and, even though 98% stated they were glad to have participated in the experiment, a similar experiment would not be allowed today because of the ethical problems.