PSYC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Murder Of Kitty Genovese, Fundamental Attribution Error, Cognitive Dissonance
SP18 PSYC 1: 1
Lecture 22: Social Psych pt. 2 05-25-2018
Social Psychology
Kitty Genovese
Attribution
Attitudes
How beliefs get
formed
• Why ight studets speak up i lass, or hesitate to speak?
• Personality psychologist: study TRAITS of ONE person who is more likely to speak
• Social psychologist: study classroom SITUATION that would influence ANY
studet’s deisio to speak
• Loudly killed in the middle of the night
• 38 people heard her, but no one helped
• Bystander effect – the more people around for an emergency, the decrease in
likelihood of individual action
• Pluralistic ignorance – if other people in a group do not take action, individual
assume the situation is not that bad
• Diffusion of responsibility – decreased individual responsibility and increase
responsibility of others in the group
• Attribution – a conclusion about the cause of an observed behavior/event
• Attribution theory- explai others’ ehaiors ith to types of attriutio:
o Situational – factors outside the person doing the action (eg. peer
pressure)
o Dispositional – perso’s stale, edurig traits, persoality, ability,
emotions
• Fundamental Attribution Error – tend to blame person rather than situation
o Eg. you see new guy at work trip → thik hat a lusy guy → the next
day you walk the same path and slip on the rug → thik this rug is ot
flat! istead of laig o lusiess
o When we explain own behaviors, we take personal claim to success and
blame situation for failures
• We tend to overemphasize the dispositional traits and underemphasize the
situational factors
• Attitude – feelings, ideas, and beliefs that affect how we approach and react to
other people, objects, and events
• Attitudes affect actions → actions can influence attitudes
• Cognitive dissonance – when actions are unaligned with attitudes
• Cognitive dissonance theory – observation that we tend to resolve this
dissonance by changing attitudes to fit actions
o Eg. Two groups of people are tasked to do a boring task for an hour. One
group is paid $20 and the other $1.
o $1 people reported enjoying the task → had to justify waste of time by
saying task was fun
• During Korean War
o Koreans believed in hard, physical punishment
o Chiese allies used leiet poliy
▪ Made American POW write good points about communism and
sign their names
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