Learning Objectives

Chapter 14

1. Define social psychology and describe what topics might be of interest to social psychologists.
2. Identify the three aspects of the self that correspond to a person’s thinking, feeling, and behavior.
3. Explain how people infer the motives and intentions of others through the process of attribution and discuss the three criteria people use to determine whether the causes of a behavior are internal or external.
4. Describe the common attribution biases and errors people make and discuss how they obscure other possible motives and intentions that drive people’s behavior.
5. Define attitude and discuss the three dimensions of an attitude.
6. Discuss how attitudes might predict behavior and how behavior might influence attitudes.
7. List and describe the three factors that might influence the effect of attitudes on behavior.
8. Identify and explain the four components of effective persuasion, discuss how the elaboration-likelihood model might use these and other factors to account for attitudinal change, and compare and contrast central and peripheral routes to attitude change.
9. Explain how factors such as proximity, physical attractiveness, and similarity are related to interpersonal attraction.
10. Discuss the differences between friendship and different types of love, and discuss how Sternberg’s theory of love and intimacy are related to these different types of relationships.
11. Discuss the role of equity and attachment in maintaining interpersonal relationships.
12. Identify and explain how biological, learning, and cognitive factors are related to aggressive behavior, and discuss whether or not aggression can be controlled.
13. Discuss the influence of television and gender on aggressive and prosocial behavior.
14. Define and differentiate between prosocial and altruistic behavior and discuss how the bystander effect may influence an individual’s ability to engage in either of these behaviors in certain situations.
15. Define the concepts of social facilitation, social loafing, group polarization, groupthink, and deindividuation and discuss how these concepts are related to the performance of the individual within the group.
16. Describe the relationship between stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, summarize the four theoretical explanations of the causes of prejudice, and list several ways that people can work toward reducing and eliminating prejudice.
17. Explain how social influence is related to conformity, compliance, and obedience, and evaluate the methods, results and important conclusions of the classic studies by Asch and Milgram.