Attribution, Stereotype, and Discrimination - AP Psychology

Although the concept of "self-fulfilling prophecy" has existed for centuries and was a popular one in Ancient Greece, it was officially coined by the famous sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 20th century.

Stereotype threat is the fear of confirming negative stereotypes about one's social group, often making people act as the stereotype suggests. Jane, being a woman, performs more poorly on the first test because she is reminded of the gender stereotype by the gender-identifying survey.

We all encounter some little areas of insecurity where we feel as if we do not quite measure up. Self-immunization is a strategy that we employ to defend ourselves against feeling like we are inadequate or that we are failures. By trivializing our mistakes we say to ourselves things like, "Oh, that test really wasn't that important. It doesn't matter." Or, "I don't think anyone saw me trip in the hallway, so it isn't a big deal." We immunize ourselves from thinking ourselves worse than we are by accepting our failures, but in a more diminutive form.

Since we don't know why the student had an unusually busy schedule, and whether or not he blames himself, we cannot determine if this is internal or external attribution. However, since he blames the grade on temporary factors, rather than something permanent, such as "being unlucky," we can determine that he is making an unstable attribution.

In order to guide adolescents' gender development, one should encourage girls to be more self-assertive, encourage boys to be less physically aggressive, and encourage boys to be more sensitive in relationships. This is because children and adolescents are usually taught to do things within their gender roles, which means they are also taught to not do things that are not in their gender roles. So, instead of teaching boys to be insensitive, they should be taught to be more sensitive and less aggressive. Girls are usually assumed to be passive, so they should be taught to be a little more self-assertive.

Stereotype threat is a phenomenon that was discovered when researchers found that African-American students performed more poorly on a math test after being told that their racial group typically does poorly on math tests. When a control group took the same test without this information, students performed equally well regardless of race.

The fundamental attribution error is when people place too strong of an emphasis on internal characteristics when judging an externally influenced behavior. In the correct answer option, Mark committed the fundamental attribution error because he automatically assumes the other person intended to trip him, but the other person might have tripped themselves or have just not been paying attention to their surroundings.

In external attribution, people believe that a person's behavior is a result of their situation or environment, as opposed to something inate within them, as with internal attribution. We are not given enough information to classify the attribution as stable or unstable.

Self-serving bias causes people to view their successes as a result of something positive within themselves, and their failures as a result of their situation, or something outside of their control.

LaPiere took one Chinese couple around America to visit restaurants and test whether, amidst intense xenophobia towards Chinese people that existed at this time, their staff would serve them. As it turned out, although approximately 90% of the restaurants said they would refuse service to them, only one restaurant turned them down. This study demonstrates that one may express a strong attitude towards something, but it may not have any influence on behavior. In this case, the xenophobic attitude expressed by the staff did not impact their behavior, which resulting in service for the Chinese couple.

The just world bias is the general tendency humans have to believe that the world is a just place where people get what they deserve. When we see a person of low socio-economic standing, we may try to rationalize their status by assigning a false bias of negative choices or low moral character to that person. This is not necessarily true, since there are broader forces that are out of our individual control that contribute to poverty. This belief persists in many other cases and is prevalanet in much of American discourse on crime.

In trying to combat prejudice, social psychologists created the concept of a superordinate goal that two groups, who are originally hostile to one another, could work towards in a joint effort. In Sherif's study of 1966, this idea was tested out at a camp and was found to be true. After the superordinate goal was attained, animosity was significantly reduced between the groups being tested.

Stereotype threat is when a person feels at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes about his or her race. Feeling this way can lead to a number of negative consequences; one popular study found that when black students were made aware that other black peers performed poorly on a math test, the students performed significantly worse on said test.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to place more emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone's bad behavior. An example of this is thinking that a person who didn't answer your call is rude (internal), but in reality, they may not have received your message (external).

Fundamental attribution error is a social psychology term coined by Lee Ross to describe the inclination to explain others' behavior in terms of internal, stable factors (like personality) while describing our own behavior in terms of external, changeable factors. The self-serving bias is a facet of attribution theory, and refers to our tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external ones.

The self-fulfilling prophecy stems from the Thomas theorem, which posits that situations are not merely situations in the human eye, but are rather warped according to our perceptions and the meaning we ascribe to them. Accordingly, we may have a belief about ourselves or the world that we carry with us in each situation. This belief may warp our perception of the situation and may influence to act in ways that reinforce this belief. So for example, if one believes one will always fail academically one may never try. These actions, influenced by this belief, serve to then reinforce this belief.

This can influence how we behave towards other people as well. The self-fulfilling prophecy may reinforce stereotypes and beliefs we have about other people.

The actor-observer bias is the curious phenomena in which we focus more on how the situation is influencing us when we involved in a situation, but more focused on our influence on a situation when we are not involved, but rather observing. When we are observing a situation, we focus on how our disposition influences the people in that situation. For whatever reason, we are much more aware of context when we are in it and more likely to focus on the individual and disregard context when we are observing. One might think that one would lose context when directly involved in a situation, rather than coolly observing from outside, but the opposite is often the case.

The self-serving bias is the tendency we have to hold ourselves responsible for good outcomes, such as mounting a glorious statue, and blame the circumstances for negative ones, such as employing slaves to do it. Self-serving bias applies both to outcomes and justifying the methods by which those outcomes were achieved.

The just-world bias is a common bias in which we believe people get what they deserve. We might believe poor people didn't work hard enough or an ill person didn't take care of themselves enough instead of looking at circumstances that were out of their control.