5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition - Laura Lincoln Maitland [173]
Cognitive Dissonance
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/Antisocial Behavior
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.
Review Questions
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.