PSY A113 Homework Sheet #2

Chapter 3

Name: __________Valentina Penaranda _______________

1. What are social beliefs?

Social beliefs are enduring beliefs shared by society members with contents that are perceived by
society members as characterizing their society.

2. What is belief perseverance?

Belief perseverance is maintaining a belief even though there is information contradicting it.

3. How is controlled processing different from automatic processing?

Controlled processing is processing that takes conscious effort. You have to try to control your thinking
and attention when doing certain tasks. Automatic processing is unconsciously. People process
information without paying attention to it.

4. What is the overconfidence phenomenon?

This is a bias in which a person’s subjective confidence in his or her judgments is greater than the
accuracy of those judgments especially when confidence is relatively high.

5. What is a confirmation bias?

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Confirmation Bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of ones existing beliefs or
theories.

6. What is a representativeness heuristic?

This is a mental shortcut that we use when estimating probabilities

7. What is attribution theory?

Attribution theory is a theory that supposes that one attempts o understand the behavior of others by
attributing feelings, beliefs, and intentions to them .

8. What is the difference between a dispositional attribution and a situational attribution?

In a dispositional attribution, people infer that an event of behavior is due to personal factors such as
traits or feelings while in a situational attribution, people infer that it is due t outside or situation factors.

9. What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The self-fulfilling prophecy is the psychological phenomenon of someone predicting or expecting

something and subsequentially that becoming a reality.

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 10. Give an example of a stereotype.

An example is that girls should play with dolls and boys with trucks

11. What is the foot-in-the-door phenomenon?

This is a persuasive technique in which you get a person to comply with a large request by first asking
them to comply to a little thing and then asking more.

12. What is the lowball technique?

A technique designed to gain compliance by making a very attractive initial offer to induce a person to
accept the offer and ten make the terms less favorable.

13. What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as
relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.