Download Social Psychology Chapter 13

Social Psychology
Chapter 13
Social Psychology
Social psychology:
The scientific study of how the individual is influenced by the thoughts,
feelings, and behaviours of other people
ATTITUDES
Dimensions
Change
Formation
Consistency
Attitudes:
Feelings and beliefs about other people, ideas, or objects that are based
on a person’s past experiences, and shape future behaviour
•
Cognitive Dimension: thoughts and beliefs
•
Emotional Dimension: evaluative feelings
3. Behavioural Dimension: how beliefs and evaluations are
demonstrated
How are Attitudes Formed?
Learning
- Operant conditioning
- Observational learning
How are Attitudes Formed?
• Does behaviour shape attitudes?
• “Stanford Prison Experiment”: college students asked to act
and dress as prisoners or guards quickly developed attitudes
consistent with their assigned role.
Persuasion: Changing Attitudes
4 Key Components (Carl Hovland):
• Communicator
– seem credible, perceived power/ prestige
• Communication
– Clear, convincing logical
• Medium
– Mass media vs. face to face
• Audience
– Age and education related
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
• Adaptive: people want to hold attitudes that will be helpful in
day-to-day life
• attitude change can be accomplished via two routes: central
and peripheral
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
• Central Route: emphasizes conscious, thoughtful consideration
of arguments about an issue
• Peripheral Route: emotional, superficial evaluations of a
message
Figure 13.2 Elaboration Likelihood Model
Attitude Consistency:
Cognitive dissonance (Festinger):
• mental discomfort when have a discrepancy between beliefs
and behaviour
• try to reduce cognitive dissonance by changing one’s attitudes
or behaviours
Figure 13.3 Cognitive Dissonance
Social Cognition
Mental Shortcuts
Attribution
Social Cognition
Nonverbal Communication
Prejudice
• Social cognition: process of analyzing and interpreting events,
other people, oneself, and the world
• Impression formation: process by which a person uses the
behaviour and appearance of others to infer their intentions
Mental Shortcuts
• pragmatic rules of the thumb
Mental Shortcuts
• False Consensus Effect: assume others hold the same beliefs
as they do
• Framing: the way information is presented determines how
easily people accept it
Assessing the World by Using Nonverbal
Communication
Nonverbal Communication
• nonverbal communication, the communication of information through the
use of physical cues or actions.
• Often plays a greater role in impression formation than oral
communication.
Facial Expressions
Six basic emotions are
distinguished in facial
expressions cross culturally:
•
•
•
•
•
fear
anger
joy
sadness
disgust
•
surprise
Body Language
Body Language:
Body positions, gestures, and movements that convey information about
moods and attitudes.
• Gestures and aspects of body language have different meanings in different
societies
Eye Contact
• People tend to judge others based on eye contact.
• Eye contact is a powerful form of nonverbal communication in all cultures.
• The meaning of eye contact is culturally defined
Attribution
Inferring the Causes of Behavior
Attribution
Attribution
• The process by which a person infers other people’s motives and intentions.
• Attribution must take into account both dispositional (internal) and situational
(external) causes of behaviour.
Kelly’s Attributional Model
Criteria used to determine whether the causes of behavior are
internal or external:
1) Consensus
– Would most people act this way in the same situation?
2) Consistency
– Has the person behaved like this in similar situations?
3) Distinctiveness
– Was the behavior unique to this situation, or has it occurred under different
circumstances?
Errors in attribution
• Fundamental attribution error
– Tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional
influences in explaining behavior
– Napolitan & Goethals (1979) classic study demonstrating fundamental attribution
error
Errors in attribution
• Actor-Observer Effect
– Tendency to attribute the behavior of others to internal causes but
one’s own behavior to situational causes
Errors in Attribution
• Self-serving bias
– Tendency for people to feel their positive behaviours are due to internal traits, but
blame their failures and shortcomings on external factors.
Prejudice: The Darker Side of Attitudes
Prejudice
Definitions:
• Prejudice = a negative evaluation of a group, typically based on unfavorable stereotypes
about the group and little or no experience with the group.
• Stereotypes = fixed, overly simple, often false ideas about the traits, attitudes, and behaviors
of a group’s members
Prejudice
• Discrimination
– Behaviour targeted at individuals or groups, intended to hold them apart and treat
them differently
– Prejudice translated into behavior.
What causes prejudice?
• Social Learning Theory
• Motivational theory
• Cognitive Theory
• Personality Theory
Social Learning Theory
• Children learn to be prejudiced by observing other people in acts of
discrimination and stereotyping
Motivational Theory
•
Based on the idea that people compete for scarce resources
•
Asserts that people tend to dislike individuals who are viewed as competitors
•
This dislike is generalized to entire groups
Cognitive Theory
• The world is so complex, people cannot analyze all relevant data about
any one thing
• One such shortcut is stereotyping
Cognitive Theory
• Mental shortcuts can lead to:
– Illusory correlations:
• Unsubstantiated and incorrect correlations between social groups and behaviors
–
Social categorization
• Division of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’
Classic Study of Stereotyping & Prejudice
• Bodenhausen & Wyer (1985)
– Subjects read vignettes about people who had committed crimes and were asked to make parole
recommendations.
– Name of criminal = ‘John T.’, ‘Carlos Ramirez’ or ‘Ashley Chamberlain’
– Crime = embezzling company funds by forging signatures, or brutally attacking a man in a bar after an
argument.
– Sometimes an explanation of the crime was provided
– Subjects likely to recommend parole of ‘John T.’ regardless of crime (no stereotype)
– Less likely to recommend parole if crime fit stereotype i.e. Chamberlain embezzled, Ramirez attacked)
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
•Conformity
•Obedience
Social Influence
• Social influence refers to the ways people alter the attitudes or
behaviours of others
CONFORMITY
• Conformity – the act of going along with what other people think or do
• Asch (1951) conducted the following experiment:
– Seven to nine people were asked to judge which of three lines matched a
standard line
– Only one group member, the “naïve” participant, was really unaware of the
purpose of the study
– The other “participants” deliberately gave false answers
– Asch found some naïve participants would go along with the group, even when the
answer they gave was obviously wrong
Factors influencing conformity:
•
Amount of information – in ambiguous situations, people seek the opinions of
others
•
Relative competence of the group - Conformity increases if people feel group
members are more competent than they are
•
Position within a group - The more secure one’s status, the more independently
one will behave
•
Public nature of behaviour - People are more likely to make decisions inconsistent
with the group if decisions are private
Why Do People Conform?
• Social conformity approach - people conform to avoid the stigma of being wrong or
deviant
• Attribution - when a person can identify causes for group behaviour they disagree
with, conformity decreases
•
Independence - can be risky, and be seen as deviant
•
Expediency - it is efficient to go along with people one trusts because it conserves
mental energy
CONFORMITY VIDEO
OBEDIENCE
• Obedience is compliance with the orders of another person or group
Obedience: The
Milgram Studies
• Classic studies of obedience were performed by Stanley Milgram
• Milgram told participants they would be participating in a study of the
effects of punishment on learning
• Their task was to administer electric shock to a “learner,” but in reality,
the “learner” was a confederate
Results
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•
•
•
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No participant stopped before 300v
65% administered all 30 levels of shock
Teacher did display distress
Concluded obedience to authority common
What about female participants?
MILGRAM IN ACTION
Explaining Milgram’s Results
• Psychological Distance – the participant could defer personal responsibility
onto the researcher and therefore maintain psychological distance
• Cognitive Reinterpretations – dehumanization of victim increases obedience
of the participant
• Slippery slope - The initial act of obedience is relatively mild and escalation is
gradual so that each step seems only slightly different from the one before
Ethical Issues
• Milgram’s study raised ethical issues
• To ensure that there are no long-lasting ill effects from participating in a
study, participants are debriefed
• Debriefing means informing participants about the true nature of a study
after its completion
PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
Altruism - helping
Bystander Apathy – Not helping
Prosocial Behaviour: Helping
•
Prosocial behaviour - behaviour that benefits someone else or society that offers no
obvious benefit to the person performing it and may involve personal risk or sacrifice
•
Altruism is helping for which there is no discernible reward, recognition, or
appreciation
Bystander Apathy:
Not helping
• Latané and Darley found that whether or not someone helps depends
on a series of interconnected events and decisions
• The potential helper must:
– NOTICE what is happening,
– INTERPRET the event as an emergency
– accept PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for
helping
d) DECIDE how to help
Bystander Apathy:
Not helping
Reasons for not helping include:
• Ambiguity – witnesses may be confused about the situation
•
Pluralistic Ignorance – a situation in which individuals in a group don’t know that
there are others in the group who share their feelings
•
Diffusion of Responsibility – the tendency to assume that someone else will
respond and act
•
The Bystander Effect - as the number of people present at an emergency increases,
people often watch, but do not help
BYSTANDER APATHY VIDEO
Assignment #8
• Describe an example of cognitive dissonance in your life. For
instance, do you do things that you know you shouldn't do?
How do you justify your actions? If you engage in some
unhealthy behaviours, how do you reduce dissonance?