01:830:101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Groupthink, Sonnets From The Portuguese, David Buss

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: 01:830:101
• Professor: Carl Persing

Document Summary

Social psychology: the area of psychology that focuses on how people think about other people and interact in relationships and groups. Social cognition: the ways that people perceive the social world and how they attend to, store, remember, and use information about other people and the social world. Attitude: an overall evaluation of some aspect of the world. Our attitudes guide us as we evaluate information; generally, we find information that is contrary to our attitudes to be unconvincing, and we may even try to disprove the information. An attitude is more likely to shape behavior when it is: strong, relatively stable, directly relevant to the behavior, important, easily accessed from memory. Repeatedly asserting an attitude can make the attitude stronger. Cognitive dissonance: the uncomfortable state the arises from a discrepancy between two attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. Cognitive dissonance is accompanied by heightened arousal and people are motivated to reduce this dissonance by resolving the conflict. (i. e.