PSYC 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Fundamental Attribution Error, Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford Prison Experiment

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Dan Meegan

Document Summary

How we think about, influence, and relate to one another. Emphasis on situation rather than person: how the same person can act differently in different situations, how different people can act the same in the same situation. Social experimentation putting people into a situation and observing its effect on them. How do we judge the actions of others and ourselves: fundamental attribution error, cognitive dissonance. What is the relationship between attitudes and actions: attribution attempt to explain someone"s behaviour by attributing it to a cause; the two obvious causes in social psychology are: Both of these questions will be answered below. We think we know something about someone"s disposition when we observe them in a particular situation. We have a tendency to: overestimate the influence of disposition, underestimate the influence of situation. When it comes to our own behaviour, we are less likely to blame disposition for bad acts and more likely to credit disposition for good acts.