Social Influence, Attribution, and Persuasion

Attribution errors are all versions of one asymmetry: you know your own situation and only see other people's behavior. When a stranger cuts you off in traffic you see a reckless person, because the traffic and the emergency they may be driving to are invisible to you; when you do it, the reason is right there in your own head. The fundamental attribution error is the general tendency to over-read disposition in others, the actor-observer bias is the same asymmetry stated as a self-other contrast, and the self-serving bias is the version that protects self-esteem: my success was skill, my failure was bad luck.

Cognitive dissonance runs backward from the way people expect attitudes to work. The usual assumption is that attitude drives behavior; dissonance shows the reverse, because a behavior that cannot be undone is easier to justify than to regret. This is why the effect is largest when the person felt they freely chose the act and received little external justification for it: with no reward to point at, the only way to explain having done it is to decide it was worth doing.

For group items, ask what the group did to the individual. Conformity: the group changed the individual's judgment with no request. Compliance: someone asked. Obedience: an authority ordered. Facilitation and loafing: the presence of others changed effort — up on easy well-learned tasks, down when individual contributions vanish into a pooled total. Groupthink and polarization: the group changed its own decision, either by suppressing dissent or by pushing further in the direction it already leaned.

Attribution is where the section usually starts. A dispositional attribution explains behavior by something internal — personality, ability, effort — while a situational attribution explains it by circumstances. The fundamental attribution error is the well-documented tilt toward dispositional explanations for other people's behavior, and it is stronger in individualist cultures. The actor-observer bias states the asymmetry directly: your own lateness was traffic, theirs was carelessness. The self-serving bias is the motivated variant, taking internal credit for success and external blame for failure. The just-world hypothesis extends the pattern to victims, reasoning that people must have deserved what happened to them, which is why it appears in items about blaming the disadvantaged.

Attitudes and persuasion are the second family. An attitude has affective, behavioral, and cognitive components, and attitudes predict behavior best when they are strong, specific, and personally relevant. Cognitive dissonance names the discomfort of a mismatch between attitude and action, and the standard resolution is to change the attitude, because the action is already in the past. The classic finding, and the one most often tested, is that small incentives produce larger attitude change than large ones: a person paid well has an external justification and needs no internal one. Persuasion itself is organized by the elaboration likelihood model. When the audience cares and can think about the issue, the central route works and argument quality decides the outcome, producing durable change. When the audience is uninterested or distracted, the peripheral route dominates and superficial cues — an attractive spokesperson, an expert's title, sheer repetition — carry the message, producing change that fades.

Group influence is the third and largest family. Asch showed that participants would endorse an obviously wrong line judgment to match a unanimous majority, with conformity dropping sharply once a single ally dissented; Milgram showed that ordinary participants continued delivering what they believed were escalating shocks when instructed by an experimenter, with obedience falling as the authority's proximity or legitimacy declined. Distinguish the three influence terms carefully: conformity adjusts to a group norm without any request, compliance follows a direct request, and obedience follows an order from an authority. In performance settings, social facilitation improves output on simple or well-practiced tasks when others are present and impairs it on difficult or novel ones, while social loafing reduces individual effort when contributions are pooled and no one is individually accountable. Deindividuation describes the loss of self-awareness in a crowd that permits behavior a person would not perform alone.

Group decisions have their own pathologies. Groupthink arises in cohesive, insulated groups under a directive leader, where the pressure for unanimity suppresses dissent and alternatives go unexamined; group polarization is the tendency for discussion to push a group's average position further in the direction it already leaned. Finally, prosocial behavior supplies the bystander effect: the more witnesses present, the less likely any one of them is to help, because responsibility is diffused across the group and each person waits to see whether anyone else treats the situation as an emergency.