Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

R E C A P / E V A L U A T E / R E T H I N K
R E C A P 
What are attitudes, and how are they formed, maintained, and 
changed?
• Social psychology is the scientifi c study of the ways in 
which people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are af-
fected by others and the nature and causes of individual 
behavior in social situations. (p. 578)
• Attitudes are evaluations of a particular person, behav-
ior, belief, or concept. (p. 579)
• Cognitive dissonance occurs when an individual simul-
taneously holds two cognitions—attitudes or thoughts— 
that contradict each other. To resolve the contradiction, 
the person may modify one cognition, change its impor-
tance, add a cognition, or deny a link between the two 
cognitions—thus bringing about a reduction in disso-
nance. (p. 582)
How do people form impressions of what others are like and 
of the causes of their behavior?
• Social cognition involves the way people understand 
and make sense of others and themselves. People de-
velop schemas that organize information about people 
and social experiences in memory and allow them to in-
terpret and categorize information about others. (p. 583)
• People form impressions of others in part through the 
use of central traits—personality characteristics that re-
ceive unusually heavy emphasis when we form an im-
pression. (p. 584)
• Information-processing approaches have found that we 
tend to average together sets of traits to form an overall 
impression. (p. 585)
• Attribution theory tries to explain how we understand 
the causes of behavior, particularly with respect to situa-
tional or dispositional factors. (p. 585)
What are the biases that infl uence the ways in which people 
view others’ behavior?
• Even though logical processes are involved, attribution 
is prone to error. For instance, people are susceptible to 
the halo effect, assumed-similarity bias, self-serving bias, 
and fundamental attribution error (the tendency to over-
attribute others’ behavior to dispositional causes and the 
corresponding failure to recognize the importance of sit-
uational causes). (p. 586)