Learning objectives for this review:

• Apply attribution theory to understand individual motives and perceptions, analyzing biases like the fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias.
• Analyze key research and theories on attitude formation and change, highlighting contributions from figures like Leon Festinger and discussing concepts such as the central and peripheral routes to persuasion, cognitive dissonance, and the elaboration likelihood model.
• Analyze key research in conformity, compliance, and obedience, identifying contributions from researchers like Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo, and explain how individuals respond to social expectations through behaviors such as groupthink, conformity, and obedience to authority.
• Describe how group dynamics influence individual behavior and mental processes, exploring concepts such as social facilitation, the bystander effect, group polarization, deindividuation, social norms, and conflict resolution strategies like the prisoner’s dilemma and superordinate goals.
• Explain the psychological processes that lead to bias, prejudice, and discrimination, including in-group/out-group dynamics, ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and the impacts of phenomena like the scapegoat theory and mere-exposure effect.
• Describe the variables that contribute to altruism and aggression.
• Describe the variables that contribute to interpersonal attraction.