4.1: Attribution, Locus of Control, Person Perception
The tendency to blame someone’s personality for their actions while ignoring the situation.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
The mental tension felt when your actions (like smoking) don't match your beliefs.
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
This route to persuasion uses "incidental cues" like celebrity endorsements or catchy music.
What is the Peripheral Route?
The belief that your own culture is the "standard" or superior to all others.
What is Ethnocentrism?
The biological principle often summarized as "neurons that fire together, wire together."
What is Hebb’s Law?
A belief that leads to its own fulfillment, such as a teacher expecting a student to fail.
What is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
Liking a song or a brand simply because you have seen or heard it many times.
What is the Mere Exposure Effect?
This persuasion tactic involves starting with a small request to gain a larger one later.
What is the Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon?
The tendency to see members of another group as being "all the same."
What is Out-group Homogeneity Bias?
The social expectation that people will respond to each other in kind—returning benefits for benefits and responding with similar courtesy to those who have helped them. This is often exploited by marketers who give "free" samples to trigger a feeling of obligation to buy.
What are Norms of Reciprocity?
The tendency to credit our successes to ourselves but blame our failures on the situation.
What is the Self-Serving Bias?
This component of the "ABC Model" involves the emotions or feelings toward an object.
What is the Affective component?
This route to persuasion is most likely to result in durable, long-lasting attitude change.
What is the Central Route?
The feeling of dissatisfaction when comparing yourself to those who have more.
What is Relative Deprivation?
A cognitive shortcut or "functional schema" the brain uses to process social info quickly.
What is a Stereotype?
The belief that the world is fair and that people generally get what they deserve.
What is the Just-World Phenomenon?
A person who believes they control their own fate possesses this.
What is an Internal Locus of Control?
This phenomenon explains why we hold onto a belief even after the evidence for it is proven false.
What is Belief Perseverance?
This bias leads us to favor people who belong to our "circle," even if it was formed randomly.
What is In-group Bias?
The tendency to overestimate how much other people agree with our own opinions.
What is the False Consensus Effect?
The bias where we explain our own behavior situationally but others' behavior dispositionally.
What is the Actor-Observer Bias?
This specific explanatory style involves attributing failures to factors that are internal, stable, and global (e.g., "I'm just bad at everything").
What is a Pessimistic Explanatory Style?
This model determines which persuasion route you take based on your motivation and ability.
What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model?
This specific type of comparison is often used as a tool to protect or boost self-esteem.
What is Downward Social Comparison?
The biological basis for empathy and observational learning, these specialized brain cells fire both when an individual performs an action and when they witness someone else perform that same action.
What are Mirror Neurons?