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Test Bank For Social Psychology, 8th Edition

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    Instructor’s Resource Manual for Aronson, Wilson, and Akert Social Psychology Eighth Edition prepared by Sara Melissa Gorchoff Carleton College

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    Contents Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology 1 Chapter 2 Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research 47 Chapter 3 Social Cognition: How We Think about the Social World 96 Chapter 4 Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People 133 Chapter 5 The Self: Understanding Ourselves in a Social Context 167 Chapter 6 The Need to Justify Our Actions: The Costs and Benefits of Dissonance Reduction 198 Chapter 7 Attitudes and Attitude Change: Influencing Thoughts and Feelings 224 Chapter 8 Conformity: Influencing Behavior 253 Chapter 9 Group Processes: Influence in Social Groups 287 Chapter 10 Interpersonal Attraction: From First Impressions to Close Relationships 323 Chapter 11 Prosocial Behavior: Why Do People Help? 362 Chapter 12 Aggression: Why Do We Hurt Other People? Can We Prevent It? 393 Chapter 13 Prejudice: Causes and Cures 430 SPA 1 Making a Difference with Social Psychology: Attaining a Sustainable Future 475 SPA 2 Social Psychology and Health 487 SPA 3 Social Psychology and the Law 506

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    i Preface I believe that Social Psychology is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding classes to teach. It would be a rare student indeed who wondered how the topics of social psychology apply to “real life.” Instead, students’ own interest in the material motivates them throughout the course as they recognize the many applications of the content to their own lives and gain new appreciation for the science of psychology. What I love about teaching this course is watching the transformation in students as they begin to analyze these real-world experiences just as a social psychologist might. When students arrive to class early, nearly bursting in their desire to discuss a recent news event noting, “This is just like the fundamental attribution error!” I know that they are being changed by the course. I hope you find that the ideas in this instructor’s manual enable you to achieve your goals as an instructor of this exciting course. The objective of this manual is to ease your course preparation by summarizing the text material and key terms, providing additional text, film, and web resources, and suggesting ideas for student projects, in-class demonstrations, and quick assessments. The suggested projects, demonstrations, and assessments are designed to be as complete and user-friendly as possible in order to minimize the need for you to prepare additional handouts. Links to online videos have been added to this edition. These videos are generally brief and entertaining and can be used as jumping off points to stimulate class discussion. All other aspects of the manual have been expanded and updated. At all times, I have tried to make this guide as complete and turn-key as possible to enable you to quickly adopt these ideas for use in your class. Organization of the Manual Each chapter of this manual is organized as detailed below. • Learning Objectives: The objectives provide a means for you to ensure that all relevant issues have been addressed. • Chapter Outline: Included in each chapter is a detailed outline with room for additional notes that may be helpful as you prepare your lecture for each chapter. • Key Terms: Terms defined in the margins within each chapter are listed with corresponding page numbers. • Classroom Response System Rationale: This edition includes questions designed for those wishing to use a classroom response system (commonly called “clickers”). Each chapter contains a variety of questions that can be used to introduce a concept, check student understanding of covered topics, stretch student understanding by asking them to apply concepts to new settings, and begin discussion of key topics.

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    ii • Critical Thinking Topics and Discussion Questions: This section includes a list of questions to use to inspire class discussion. • In Class Exercises and Quick Assessments: This section includes either demonstrations that can easily be conducted within a class session, taking anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, or “Lecture Lead-Ins” that provide useful ways to start lectures. Whenever possible I have provided complete, copy-ready handouts to accompany the demonstrations, homework assignments, or class discussions. Several activities in each chapter also include quick assessments. I’ve designed these assessments to give you an early glimpse into the level of student mastery of the topic covered in the activity and to assess students’ understanding of the connection between the demonstration or activity and the social psychological concept it concerns. • Integrating/Assigning “ Try It! ” Active Learning Exercises: Within the text are “Try It!” active learning exercises located in boxes within each chapter. These exercises are identified by page number and are described. Additional commentary or ideas for discussion are provided. • Student Projects and Research Assignments: These student projects and research assignments can be done outside the class and include extended activities, research projects, and paper assignments. • Suggested Readings: The suggested readings provide both a list of professional resources (concentrating on review articles and collections of edited articles that you may wish to refer to as you prepare your lectures) and supplementary articles for student reading (for example, articles from Psychology Today). • Websites to Explore: This section lists websites associated with each chapter. For the most part, these are student-oriented websites. Many of them have interactive exercises, and several also provide online sources for questionnaires. Some sites talk directly about the topic; others are indirect illustrations. All links are current as of August 2009. • Film and Video Listings: This section includes an updated list of relevant films and videos for each chapter. • Online Video to Explore: This new section includes links to brief video clips that are relevant to the topics covered in each chapter. All links are current as of August 2009.

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    iii Resources for New Teachers An excellent book for new professors is Wilbert McKeachie’s (2005) Teaching tips: Strategies and resources for college and university teachers (12 th ed.) Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. If you are new to teaching and can only read one advice book, make it McKeachie’s. See also the handy book published by the APA and edited by M.P. Zanna, J.M. Darley, and H.L. Roediger (2003) The compleat academic: A career guide. (2 nd ed.) which is chock-full of advice on all aspects of your career. Another excellent book dealing with both teaching and career issues is Robert Boice’s (2000) Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. The Sage Publication Series, Survival Skills for Scholars , also has many books to guide your teaching and career, notably M. Weimer’s (1993) Improving your classroom teaching.. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Barbara Gross Davis’s (1993) Tools for teaching (San Francisco: Jossey Bass) may also be useful particularly for first-time instructors. Finally, Ken Bain’s (2004) What the best college teachers do, published by Harvard University Press, offers ideas and suggestions gleaned from observations of and conversations with recognized outstanding college teachers. For active learning techniques explore M. Silberman’s (1996) Active learning. 101 strategies to teach any subject and the excellent series of books published by Jossey Bass, especially P. Angelo and K. P. Cross (1993) Classroom assessment techniques (2 nd ed.), and J. C. Bean (1996) Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. Sharon Bowman also has a number of books that include ideas for active learning. See especially her (2005) Preventing death by lecture, Glenbrook, NV: Bowperson. Great entries into web resources for social psychology include the Social Psychology Web page maintained by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University. This website can be found at http://www.socialpsychology.org . Through it you can gain access to web pages on specific topic areas, online research projects, organizations devoted to psychology, course information that has been posted on-line, individual social psychologists’ homepages, and so forth. Another fantastic web resource is a compilation of social psychology resources, organized by topic by Jonathan Mueller at North Central College and available at http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/ . Division 2 (The Society for the Teaching of Psychology) of the American Psychological Association maintains a number of outstanding resources for faculty. These include a list-serv, which you can join at http://list.kennesaw.edu/archives/psychteacher.html , and a website with a number of invaluable resources including model syllabi at http://teachpsych.org/otrp/index.php . If you become a member of Division 2, you’ll receive a free copy of the Society’s journal Teaching of Psychology, which often includes topics related to social psychology. APS has published two valuable volumes entitled Lessons learned: Practical advice for the teaching of psychology that are well worth your time. They provide advice from fellow psychologists on the first day of class, building rapport, creating exams, developing effective lectures, leading class discussions, implementing active learning, and grading to maximize student learning. If your institution has a faculty development office, take advantage of the services they offer.

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    iv Many institutions have an associate who will videotape your lectures and provide feedback. Although this is intimidating, this one-on-one process can substantially improve your lecture style.

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    Test Bank for Aronson, Wilson, and Akert Social Psychology Eighth Edition prepared by Deletha P. Hardin University of Tampa PEARSON EDUCATION Upper Saddle River London Singapore Toronto Tokyo Sydney Hong Kong Mexico City

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    © 2013, 2010, 2007 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall, 1 Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. This publication is protected by , and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, 1 Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 www.pearsonhighered.com ISBN 10: 0-205-92927-3 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-92927-6

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    Contents _____________________________________________________________________ Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology Chapter 2 Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research Chapter 3 Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World Chapter 4 Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People Chapter 5 The Self: Understanding Ourselves in a Social Context Chapter 6 The Need to Justify Our Actions: The Costs and Benefits of Dissonance Reduction Chapter 7 Attitudes and Attitude Change: Influencing Thoughts And Feelings Chapter 8 Conformity: Influencing Behavior Chapter 9 Group Processes: Influence in Social Groups Chapter 10 Interpersonal Attraction: From First Impressions to Close Relationships Chapter 11 Prosocial Behavior: Why Do People Help? Chapter 12 Aggression: Why Do We Hurt Other People? Can We Prevent It? Chapter 13 Prejudice: Cause, Consequences, and Cures SPA 1 Making a Difference with Social Psychology: Attaining a Sustainable Future SPA 2 Social Psychology and Health SPA 3 Social Psychology and the Law

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    CHAPTER 1 Introducing Social Psychology Contents Learning Objectives Chapter Outline Key Terms Classroom Response System Rationale Critical Thinking and Discussion Questions In-Class Exercises and Quick Assessments Integrating “Try It” Active Learning Exercises Student Projects and Research Assignments Suggested Readings Websites to Explore Film and Video Listings Online Videos to Explore 1

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    LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1.1 Define social psychology. Define social influence and state why it is of interest to social psychologists. 1.2 Explain how social psychologists go about finding the answers to life’s important questions including how this differs from the approach of philosophers and social commentators. Describe why the social psychological approach may lead to more accurate predictions about human behavior compared to the other approaches. 1.3 Define individual differences. Identify the goals of personality psychology compared to those of social psychology. 1.4 Identify the goals of sociology compared to those of social psychology. 1.5 Compare and contrast how sociology, personality psychology, and social psychology attempt to understand and predict human behavior. 1.6 Define fundamental attribution error. Identify the consequences of making this error and underestimating the power of social influence. 1.7 Define the basic approach of behaviorism and explain how social psychology builds on this approach. 1.8 Define construals. Indicate why social psychologists study construals rather than simply the objective environments of people. 1.9 Explain how social psychology is influenced by Gestalt psychology. 1.10 Identify the two basic motives that underlie the origins of people’s construals. Describe what happens when the two basic human motives conflict. 1.11 Identify the approaches associated with the two basic human motives. Describe the assumptions of each approach. 1.12 Understand and apply the self-esteem approach. 1.13 Understand and apply the social cognition approach. 1.14 Identify some social problems that social psychologists research and attempt to remedy.  Return to Table of Contents 2

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    CHAPTER OUTLINE I. What is Social Psychology? A. Defining Social Psychology • Social psychology is defined as the scientific study of the way that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. • Social psychologists study social influence, the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior. • Social influence includes direct attempts to persuade others (e.g., advertisements) as well and more subtle ways in which others have an impact (e.g., the effect of the mere presence of others on behavior). • Social influence may impact thoughts and feelings in addition to behavior. B. Social Psychology, Science, and Common Sense 1. Philosophy • Social psychology and philosophy are often concerned with the same questions. • Social psychology differs from philosophy because it is empirical. 2. Common Sense and Folk Wisdom • Common sense explanations, such as those offered by journalists, are known as folk wisdom. • Folk wisdom may be contradictory and provides no way of determining correctness. 3. An Empirical Approach • Social psychologists test hypotheses, or educated guesses, in well-designed experiments to discern the situations that would result in one outcome or another. • The advantages of an empirical approach are that competing explanations can be tested against each other and that knowledge derived from past research can be used to make reasonable predictions about what will occur in the future. C. How Social Psychology Differs from Its Closest Cousins • Personality psychology focuses on individual differences in human behavior (those aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people), while social psychology focuses more on how the social situation affects people similarly. • Sociology is concerned with social class, social structure, and social institutions. • Social psychology joins other social science disciplines in its focus on social behavior. • Social psychology differs from personality psychology and sociology in its level of analysis. For personality psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual. For social psychologists, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation. For sociologists, the level of analysis is the group or institution. 3

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    • Table 1.1 (page 7) depicts comparisons between social psychology and closely- related fields of personality psychology and sociology. NOTES: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ II. The Power of the Situation A. Fundamental Attribution Error • Social psychologists face barriers to convincing people that their behavior is greatly influenced by the environment. • People tend to explain behavior entirely in terms of personality traits and thus underestimate the power of social influence. This is called the fundamental attribution error. B. Underestimating the Power of Social Influence • The fundamental attribution error can lead to a false sense of security—we assume problematic behavior could never happen to us and thus we do not guard against its occurrence. • In a demonstration of the fundamental attribution error, Ross and Samuels (1993) found that college students’ personalities, as rated by the resident assistants in their dormitories, did not determine how cooperative or competitive they were in a laboratory game. The name of the game—whether it was called the Wall Street Game or the Community Game—did, however, make a tremendous difference (see Figure 1.1 on pg. 12). III. The Power of Social Interpretation A. Behaviorism • Behaviorism is a school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment (how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviors). Behaviorists tried to define social situations objectively, focusing on the reinforcements received in response to behavior. • Because behaviorism does not deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling, this approach has overlooked the importance of how people interpret their environments. B. Construal and Gestalt Psychology • Social psychology focuses on construal, the way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world. • This emphasis on construal has its roots in Gestalt psychology, a school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an 4

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    object appears in people’s minds, rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object. • Kurt Lewin, the founding father of modern experimental social psychology, was the first to apply Gestalt principles from the study of the perception of objects to social perception. NOTES: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ IV. Where Construals Come From: Basic Human Motives • Social psychologists have found that two motives are of primary importance in determining our thoughts and behavior: the need to be accurate and the need to feel good about ourselves. • Sometimes both these motives pull us in the same direction, but noted theorist Leon Festinger realized that it is when these two motives pull us in opposite directions that we can learn the most about psychological processes. A. The Self-Esteem Approach: The Need to Feel Good About Ourselves • Self-esteem is people’s evaluation of their own self-worth, or the extent to which people see themselves as good, competent, and decent. Most people have a strong need to maintain high self-esteem. This need can clash with the need for accuracy, leading people to distort their perceptions of the world. 1. Justifying Past Behavior • In order to preserve self-esteem, people may distort their perceptions of reality (e.g., by explaining their personal deficiencies in more positive ways). Such distortions are more “spins” on the facts than they are total delusions. 2. Suffering and Self-Justification • Social psychological research demonstrates that when people volunteer to undergo a painful or embarrassing initiation in order to join a group (e.g., a fraternity hazing), they need to justify the experience in order to avoid feeling foolish. One way they do this is to decide that the initiation was worth it because the group is so wonderful. • Under certain conditions, then, the need for self-justification can lead people to do surprising or paradoxical things (e.g., preferring things for which they have suffered to those which are associated with ease and pleasure). B. The Social Cognition Approach: The Need to Be Accurate • Although people may bend the facts to serve their self-esteem needs, they by and large do not distort reality. In fact, human reasoning skills are extraordinary. 1. Social cognition • Social cognition is the study of how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information. 5

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    • This approach views people as amateur sleuths seeking to understand and predict their social world. Coming up with an accurate picture of the social world may be difficult because there are many relevant facts and we have only limited time. 2. Expectations about the Social World • Our expectations can sometimes get in the way of accurately perceiving the world. • In the self-fulfilling prophecy, our expectations about another person’s behavior result (via the mechanism of influencing our behavior toward the target) in changing the target’s behavior. NOTES: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ V. Social Psychology and Social Problems • While social psychologists are often motivated by simple curiosity to study social behavior, they are also frequently motivated by the desire to help resolve social problems, such as increasing conservation of natural resources, increasing the practice of safe sex, understanding the relationship between viewing television violence and aggressive behavior, developing effective negotiation strategies for the reduction of international conflict, finding ways to reduce racial prejudice, and helping people adjust to life changes. • Social psychologists helped the government change an ad campaign to promote safe sex that was based on increasing fear of contracting AIDS, noting that fear promotes denial and flies in the face of the need to preserve self-esteem. NOTES: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________  Return to Table of Contents KEY TERMS • Social Psychology: (pg. 2) The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people • Social Influence: (pg. 2) The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior • Individual Differences: (pg. 6) The aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people • Fundamental Attribution Error: (pg. 8) The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of 6

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