1. Social-psychological researchers have ethical obligations to society, funders and employers, colleagues, and subjects. For society, they owe responsible work that accords with their society's moral/legal order. For funders and employers, they owe clear relationships without moral compromise. For colleagues, they owe work that upholds accepted standards, and for subjects, they owe protection and to fully inform them ("SRA Ethical Guidelines," 2003, p. 13).
2. Self-serving bias is the tendency to grab credit while refusing to accept responsibility for failure. The effects include ego protection and the ability to meet goals ("Self-Serving Bias," n.d.).
3. Fundamental attribution error is focusing on a person rather than the situation that is really causing the problem. It is "fundamental" error because the whole basis of the analysis is wrong (Heath, 2010). An example would be "killing the messenger," where the person delivering bad news would be blamed when the real problem is the situation the news is about.
4. My attitude toward math has changed. I used to hate it, but after watching the TV show Numb3rs, I found it had fascinating possibilities. Sheridan (1992) argues that Feynman's first principle is that people tend to fool themselves, and I had falsely condemned math in line with this principle.
6. The Asch and Milgram experiments showed how people can be pressured into doing things they do not fundamentally agree with by authority figures or group consensus (Shuttleworth, 2008). In both experiments the influence of peer pressure was tested, with Asch participants modifying their answers to questions based on it and Milgram participants increasing "voltage" to subjects because of it.
7. I agree that conformity is neither all bad nor all good. Sometimes conformity is essential, as when a large group of people must leave a burning building as quickly as poss
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