Download PSYC 100 Chapter 16

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CHAPTER 16
Social Psychology
INTRODUCTION
 
 
How do you describe the driver’s behavior?
What if the adjacent white car or red car belonged to
you?
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 
Please watch this short clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boHgUJn2gK8
INTRODUCTION
  When
considering acts of terrorism, genocide,
and war, there are some important issues that
can be addressed:
 
 
What drives some individuals to destroy the lives of
thousands of people?
What motivates the heroic acts of other individuals to
risk death to save others? Or to generously reach out
with time, money, food, resources, for those coping
with loss?
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Social psychology is the scientific study of
how we think about, influence, and relate to
one another.
INTRODUCTION
1. 
2. 
3. 
Social Thinking
Social Influence
Social Relations
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Our social behavior arises from our social cognition:
The way we think about social situations.
SOCIAL THINKING
  How
do we understand and explain the
behavior of other people?
theory is the idea that we explain
someone’s behavior by crediting either to the
situation or the person’s disposition.
 
E.g. A teacher may wonder whether a student’s
hostility reflects an aggressive personality
(dispositional attribution) or a reaction to stress in
their life (situational attribution).
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  Attribution
SOCIAL THINKING CONTINUED
  Fundamental
  E.g.
Napolitan & Goethals (1979)
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attribution error: the tendency
for observers, when analyzing another’s behavior,
to underestimate the impact of the situation
and to overestimate the impact of personal
disposition.
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
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When explaining others’ behavior, particularly the
behavior of strangers we have only observed in
one type of situation, we often commit the
fundamental attribution error: we disregard the
situation and leap to unwarranted conclusions
about their personality traits.
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
  Attribution
 
 
do you explain poverty or unemployment?
Researchers in Britain, India, Australia and the U.S.
find that political conservatives tend to attribute
such problems to the dispositions of the poor and
unemployed themselves.
Political liberals are more likely to blame past and
present situations.
  Attributions
and consequences
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  How
and relationships
ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS
Attitudes are feelings, often influenced by our
beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a
particular way to objects, people, and events
 
 
If we believe someone is mean, we may feel dislike for
the person and act unfriendly
The influence of attitudes on behavior helps us to
understand persuasion.
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Does what we think affect what we do?
Or does what we do affect what we think?
ATTITUDES INFLUENCE ACTIONS
  Central
 
 
Occurs when interested people focus on the
arguments and respond favorably.
Occurs mostly when people are naturally analytical
or involved in the issue.
Durable and lasting influence on behavior.
  Peripheral
 
 
route to persuasion:
Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues,
such as a speaker’s attractiveness.
This is the route of snap judgments.
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 
route to persuasion:
ACTIONS AFFECT ATTITUDES
  Not
only do attitudes influence behavior, but in
some instances, attitudes follow behavior
foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the
tendency for people who have first agreed with a
small request to comply later with a larger
request.
  Examples:
 
 
U.S. soldiers imprisoned by Chinese communists
during the Korean War
Freedman & Fraser (1966): Be a Safe Driver signs,
read about this study, page 677
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  The
ROLE-PLAYING AFFECT ATTITUDES
  Role-playing
affects attitudes as well: when you
adopt a new role, you strive to follow the social
prescriptions.
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A role is a set of explanations or norms about a
social position, defining how those in the position
ought to behave.
ACTIONS AFFECT ATTITUDES
  Abu
Prison Guard experiment (1972)
Ghraib, page 678.
  Zimbardo’s
Ted Talk: The Psychology of Evil
http://www.ted.com/talks/
philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
Warning: This video contains graphic images of
violence.
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  Zimbardo’s
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
  Why
do our attitudes and actions interact so
strongly?
they do not align, we experience tension.
Cognitive dissonance theory:
the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort
(dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts
(cognitions) are inconsistent.
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  When
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
  Cognitive
 
For example, when our awareness of our attitudes
and actions clash, we can reduce the resulting
dissonance by changing our attitudes.
Examples of cognitive dissonance.
  Changing
our behavior can change how we think
about others and how we feel about ourselves.
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 
dissonance theory
RECAP
  Our
social behavior arises from our social cognition
error
theory and fundamental attribution
  Attitudes
 
 
Central route to persuasion
Peripheral route to persuasion
  Actions
 
 
 
affect attitudes
Foot-in-the-door
Role-playing affects attitudes
Cognitive dissonance
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  Attribution
IMAGINE YOURSELF AS A RESEARCH PARTICIPANT…
 
1. 
3. 
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2. 
You volunteer to participate in a study examining memory.
Enter the research setting, speak with a man in a white
coat regarding the study and sign your paperwork.
You meet another participant in the study – you will be the
“teacher” and the other participant the “learner”
Both participants get a sample 45 volt shock from this
apparatus:
EXPERIMENT BEGINS:
As the teacher, you will read some phrases to the
learner in the other room, and they will repeat them
back to you.
  When the learner makes a mistake, you administer a
shock from the apparatus. With each mistake, stronger
shock.
 
How far
would you
go?
  What if the
man in the
lab coat told
you to go on?
 
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
and Obedience
  Group Influence
  The Power of Individuals
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  Conformity
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
  What
  Behavior
 
 
 
is contagious.
Examples page 532
Chameleon effect – unconsciously mimicking others
Automatic mimicry assists in empathy
  Suggestibility
and violence.
  Group pressure and conformity.
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do experiments on conformity and
compliance reveal about the power of social
influence?
GROUP PRESSURE AND CONFORMITY
  Conformity:
adjusting one’s behavior or
thinking to coincide with a group standard
  Asch (1955) conformity experiment
 
Read about this study, page 681
GROUP PRESSURE AND CONFORMITY
  Conditions
 
 
 
 
 
 
One is made to feel incompetent of insecure
The group has at least three people
The group is unanimous
One admires the group’s status and attractiveness
One has made no prior commitment to any response
Others in the group observe one’s behavior
One’s culture strongly encourages respect for social
standards
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 
that strengthen conformity:
GROUP PRESSURE AND CONFORMITY
  Reasons
for conforming:
Normative social influence: influence resulting from a
person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval
 
Informative social influence: influence resulting from
one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality
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OBEDIENCE
 
 
Stanley Milgram, a student of Asch, completed nearly 20
experiments examining obedience.
Milgram’s studies examined a participants’ willingness to
obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform
acts that conflicted with their conscience.
MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE STUDIES
  Factors
 
 
 
Person giving the orders was nearby and perceived as a
legitimate authority.
Authority figure was supported by a prestigious
institution.
Victim was depersonalized or at a distance.
There were no role models for defiance.
  By
manipulating these factors, repetitions of the
original study gained compliance up to 93%.
  Examples of obedience in the holocaust, page 685.
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 
that increased obedience.
LESSONS FROM CONFORMITY AND
OBEDIENCE STUDIES
  Ordinary
people can be corrupted by an evil
situation.
  How does the information on conformity and
obedience tie in with the work of Dan Ariely??
Watch this Ted Talk
 
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/
dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
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“The most fundamental lesson of our study is that
ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without
any particular hostility on their part, can become
agents in a terrible destructive process”
Milgram, 1974
GROUP INFLUENCE
  Does
the presence of others
improve performance?
 
 
Social facilitation
Simple versus difficult tasks
How is performance affected when tasks are completed
as a group?
  Social loafing
  Abandoning normal restraints to the power of a group:
  Deindividuation
  mob rule
 
EFFECTS OF GROUP INTERACTION
Interacting with others can have good and bad effects.
  Groups prevailing tendencies are enhanced over time.
 
Group polarization is the enhancement of a group’s
prevailing inclinations, presumably through discussion
within the group.
  This effect can have benefits and consequences
  Ideological separation + deliberation = polarization
between groups.
  E.g. political attitudes in college
  E.g. gender development
  E.g. internet communication
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 
EFFECTS OF GROUP INTERACTION
  Janis
  Groupthink:
 
 
Occurs when the desire for harmony in a decisionmaking group overrides a realistic appraisal of
alternatives.
Groupthink can also contribute to collective good
decisions.
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(1982) studied the decision-making
procedures that lead to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs
fiasco.
RECAP
  Conformity
 
 
Individual tasks: social facilitation
Group tasks: social loafing, deindividuation
  Group
 
 
interaction:
Group polarization
Group Think
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and Asch’s study
  Obedience and Milgram’s study
  Group influence
RECAP
What did we learn from the work of Asch, Milgram, and
Zimbardo?
Match the term with the definition:
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 
7. 
Social Loafing
Deindividuation
Attitudes
Cognitive dissonance
theory
Roles
Foot-in-the-door
phenomenon
Fundamental
Attribution Error
A. 
B. 
C. 
D. 
E. 
F. 
G. 
Tendency for people who have first agreed with a
small request to comply later with a larger
request.
Set of explanations or norms about a social
position, defining how those in the position ought
to behave.
tendency for people in a group to exert less effort
toward attaining a common goal than when
individually accountable
Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that
predispose us to respond in a particular way to
objects, people, and events
Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring
in group situations that foster anonymity
Tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s
behavior, to underestimate the impact of the
situation and to overestimate the impact of
personal disposition.
Theory that we act to reduce the discomfort we
feel when two of our thoughts are inconsistent.
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1. 
SOCIAL RELATIONS
  How
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 
Prejudice
Aggression
Attraction
Altruism
Peacemaking
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1. 
do we relate to one another?
PREJUDICE
  Prejudice:
an unjustifiable, and usually negative,
attitude toward a group and its members
 
 
Generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative
feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory actions
Stereotypes: generalized belief about a group of
people
Discrimination: unjustifiable negative behavior
toward a group and its members
  Close-up
  The
on automatic prejudice, page 543.
roots of prejudice: social, emotional, cognitive.
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 
SOCIAL ROOTS OF PREJUDICE
 
Social inequalities:
 
 
Ingroup and Outgroup: we reserve our most intense
dislike for outgroup rivals most like us.
 
 
Examples include the Protestants and Catholics in
Northern Ireland, the Iraqi Sunni and Shia, the Rwandan
Hutu and Tutsi, and the fans for our rival sports team.
Ingroup bias: the tendency to favor our own group
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 
People blame-the-victims, such as in poverty, rather than
seeking to understand the social situation.
These inequalities are used to justify continued
discrimination.
EMOTIONAL ROOTS OF PREJUDICE
  Prejudice
is exceptionally dangerous and angry
in times of emotional trauma, such as post 9/11.
theory: the theory that prejudice
offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to
blame.
 
 
Prejudice levels are high in economically frustrated
people.
Negative stereotypes blossom when people are scared
or outraged.
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  Scapegoat
COGNITIVE ROOTS OF PREJUDICE
 
Categorization is used to simplify the world.
 
 
 
Just world phenomenon
Vivid cases: vivid and violent cases are readily available to our
memory and therefore influence our judgments of a group.
 
E.g. Post 9/11, many people stereotyped Muslims as terror prone
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 
Often overestimate the similarity within other groups.
Other-race effect: the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race
more accurately than faces of other races (outgroup homogeneity
effect)
AGGRESSION
Aggression is any physical or verbal behavior
intended to hurt or destroy
the field of psychology, the term is more
precise.
  Aggression emerges from biology and experience.
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  In
BIOLOGICAL FACTORS
influences: animals can be bred for
aggressiveness.
  Neural influences:
 
 
Amygdala
Prefrontal cortex
Death row inmates and undiagnosed head trauma
  Underactive PFC in violent criminals
 
  Biochemical
 
 
 
influences:
Testosterone and female hyenas
Low serotonin and high levels testosterone
Alcohol
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  Genetic
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL-CULTURAL
FACTORS IN AGGRESSION
  Aversive
 
Major league baseball pitchers are most likely to hit
batters when frustrated by the previous batter
hitting a home run
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events influence aggression
  Frustration-aggression principle: frustration,
the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal,
creates anger, which can generate aggression
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON
AGGRESSION
  Learning:
 
 
Rejection-induced aggression and bullying
Ostracism
  Economic
disparity influences crime rates: relative
deprivation
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rewards and punishment shape behavior.
  Rejection intensifies aggression.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON
AGGRESSION
  Observing
 
models of aggression:
Models for children today?
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THE PSYCHOLOGY ATTRACTION
What factors predict friendship, attraction,
chemistry?
2. 
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Proximity
Physical attractiveness
3.  Similarity
1. 
THE PSYCHOLOGY ATTRACTION
  Physical
 
 
 
In movies, the morally superior character is most
often attractive.
However, people’s attractiveness is surprisingly
unrelated to self-esteem and happiness
Averaged faces are rated more attractive in research
settings.
  Similarity:
we like people who are like us and
who like us (reward theory of attraction)
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attractiveness has been repeatedly
confirmed as the determination of first
impressions.
ROMANTIC LOVE
  Elaine
Hatfield distinguishes temporary
passionate love from more enduring companionate
love
love is an aroused state of intense
positive absorption in another, usually present at
the beginning of the relationship
 
Emotions are influenced by physical arousal plus
cognitive appraisal
  Companionate
love is the deep affectionate
attachment we feel for those with whom our lives
are intertwined
 
 
Equity
Self-disclosure
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  Passionate
ALTRUISM
  However,
it is important to consider circumstances
when we do not help others:
 
 
 
Kitty Genovese
Bystander effect, sometimes called diffusion of social
responsibility, is the tendency for any given bystander
to be less likely to give aid if others are present
Bystander effect on King County Metro Bus
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Altruism is unselfish regard for the welfare of
others
  Altruistic individuals make this world a better
place.
ALTRUISM
  Factors
 
 
 
for helping: why do we help?
Social exchange theory
Reciprocity norm
Social responsibility norm
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Person appears to need and deserve help, person is
similar to us, we have just observed someone being
helpful, we are not in a hurry, we are in a small town
or rural area, we feel guilty, we are not preoccupied, we
are in a good mood.
  Norms
 
influencing altruism?
CONFLICT AND PEACEMAKING
  What
  Conflict
is the perceived incompatibility of
actions, goals, or ideas
 
Social trap: a situation in which conflicted parties,
by each rationally pursuing their self-interest,
become caught in mutually destructive behavior
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in the human mind causes destructive
conflict? How might the perceived threats of
social diversity be replaced by a spirit of
cooperation?
PROMOTING PEACE
  How
  Contact,
cooperation, communication, conciliation
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can we transform feelings of prejudice,
aggression, and conflict into attitudes that
promote peace?
CHAPTER 16 RECAP
 
Social Thinking:
 
 
 
Social Influence
 
 
 
 
Describe cognitive dissonance and give an example.
Be able to describe conformity and obedience, including the work of Asch
and Milgram, as well as the lessons from these studies.
Describe the effects of group interaction, including performance when
being observed and performance as a group.
Social Relations
 
 
 
 
Define prejudice, as well as the cognitive, emotional and social roots for
prejudice.
Define aggression and attraction, including the factors contributing to
each.
What is altruism? Why do we choose to help or not help in a situation?
Define conflict and the ways we can promote peace.
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 
Describe attribution theory and the fundamental attribution error.
Distinguish the central and peripheral routes to persuasion. How do
attitudes influence behavior? Describe foot-in-the-door and roles.
Describe the ways roles affect attitudes. Take-home message from Philip
Zimbardo Ted Talk OR his famous Stanford Prison Experiment.