Download Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

Behaviour in Social and
Cultural Context
Chapter 8
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Chapter Outline
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Roles and rules
Social influences on beliefs
Individuals in groups
Us versus them: Group identity
Group conflict and prejudice
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Roles and Rules
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Defining norms and roles
The obedience study
The prison study
The power of roles
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Defining Roles and Rules
• Norms
– Rules that regulate human life, including
social conventions, explicit laws, and
implicit cultural standards
• Role
– A given social position that is governed by
a set of norms for proper behaviour
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Defining Roles and Rules
• Culture
– A program of shared rules that govern
the behaviour of members of a
community or society, and
– A set of values, beliefs and attitudes
shared by most members of that
community
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The Obedience Study
• Stanley Milgram and coworkers investigated
whether people would follow orders, even
when the order violated their ethical
standards
• Most people were far more obedient than
anyone expected
– Every single participant complied with at least
some orders to shock another person
– 2/3 shocked the learner to the full extent
• Results are controversial and have generated
much research on violence and obedience
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Milgram’s Obedience Experiment
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Factors Leading to Disobedience
in Milgram’s study
• When the experimenter left the room
• When the victim was in the same room
• When the experimenter issued conflicting
demands
• When the person ordering them to continue
was an ordinary man
• When the subject worked with peers who
refused to go on
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Evaluating the Obedience Study
• Raises ethical questions regarding the
deception used in the study
• Ethical concern over the emotional pain
many subjects experienced
• Some question the similarity of this
study with the actions of Nazis in
Germany
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The Prison Study
• Subjects were physically and mentally
healthy young men who volunteered to
participate for money
• They were randomly assigned to be prisoners
or guards
• Those assigned the role of prisoner became
distressed, helpless, and panicky
• Those assigned the roles of guards became
either nice, “tough but fair,” or tyrannical
• Study had to be ended after 6 days
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Why People Obey
• Factors causing people to obey:
– Allocating responsibility to the authority
– Routinizing the task
– Wanting to be polite
– Becoming entrapped
• Entrapment: A gradual process in which
individuals escalate their commitment to a
course of action to justify their investment of
time, money, or effort
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Social Influences on Beliefs
• Defining social cognition
• Attribution theory and concepts
• Attitudes
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Social Cognition
• An area in social psychology concerned
with social influences on thought,
memory, perception, and other cognitive
processes
• Researcher are interested in how
people’s perceptions of themselves and
others affect:
– Their relationships, thoughts, beliefs and
values
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Attributions
• Attribution Theory
– The theory that people are
motivated to explain their
own and other peoples’
behaviour by attributing
causes of that behaviour to
a situation or a disposition
• Fundamental Attribution
Error
– Tendency in explaining
others’ behaviours to
overestimate personality
factors and underestimate
situational influence
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Other Attributions
• Self-serving bias
– Tendency, in explaining own behaviour, to take credit for
one’s good actions and rationalize one’s mistakes
• Group-serving bias
– The tendency to explain favourably the behaviours of
members of groups to which we belong
• Just-world hypothesis
– The notion that many people need to believe that the world
is fair and that justice is served
– Bad people are punished and good people rewarded
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Attitudes
• A relatively stable opinion containing beliefs
and emotional feelings about a topic
– Explicit
• We are aware of them; they shape conscious
decisions
– Implicit
• We are unaware of them; they may influence
our behaviour in ways we do not recognize
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Factors Influencing Attitude Change
• Change in social environment
• Change in behaviours
• Due to a need for consistency
– Cognitive Dissonance
• A state of tension that occurs when a person
simultaneously holds two cognitions that are
psychologically inconsistent, or
• When a person’s belief is incongruent with his
or her behaviour
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Friendly Persuasion
• Validity effect
The tendency of people to believe
that a statement is true or valid simply
because it has been repeated many
times
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Influencing Attitudes
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Coercive Persuasion
• Person is under physical or emotional duress
• Person’s problems are reduced to one simple
explanation, repeated often
• Leader offers unconditional love, acceptance,
and attention
• New identity based on group is created
• Person is subjected to entrapment
• Person’s access to information is controlled
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Individuals in Groups
• Conformity
• The anonymous crowd
• Altruism and dissent
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Conformity
• Subjects in a group were asked to match line
lengths
• Confederates in the group picked wrong line
• Subjects went along with wrong answer 37% of
trials
• Meta-analyses demonstrate that conformity has
decreased in US since 1950. May be due to
social norms
– Individualistic vs.
Collectivist cultures
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Individualism and Collectivism
• Individualist Cultures
– Are those in which individual goals and
wishes are prized above duty to and
relations with others
• Collectivist Cultures
– Are those in which harmony with one’s
group is prized above individual goals and
wishes
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The Anonymous Crowd
• Diffusion of Responsibility
– In organized or anonymous groups, the
tendency of members to avoid taking
responsibility for actions or decisions
because they assume that others will do so
– Bystander apathy
• People fail to call for help when others are near.
– Social loafing
• When people work less in the presence of
others, allowing others to work harder
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Deindividuation
• In groups or crowds, the loss of
awareness of one’s own individuality
• Factors influencing deindividuation
– Size of city, group
– Uniforms or masks
• Deindividuation can influence unlawful
as well as friendly behaviours
– Depends on norms of the specific situation
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Altruism and Dissent
• Altruism
– involves a willingness to take selfless or dangerous
action on behalf of others
– is seen as a matter of personal conviction and
conscience
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Altruism and Dissent
• Situational factors contributing to altruism and
dissent:
– You perceive the need for intervention or help
– Situation makes it more likely that you will take
responsibility
– Cost-benefit ratio supports your decision to get
involved
– You have an ally
– You become entrapped
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Us versus Them:
Group Identity and Conflict
• Social Identity
The part of a person’s self-concept that is
based on his or her identification with a
nation, culture, or ethnic group or with
gender or other roles in society
• Ethnic Identity
A person’s close identification with a
religious or ethnic group, often related to
traditional family customs and practices
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Acculturation
• Process of cultural identity
change when two or more
cultures are in continuous
contact
– Often involves assimilation
or identification with the
dominant culture
– May involve separation,
marginalization, or
bicultural integration
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Group Identity: Us versus Them
• Ethnocentrism
– The belief that one’s own ethnic group,
nation, or religion is superior to all others
– Aids survival by making people feel
attached to their own group and willing to
work on their group’s behalf
• Us versus them social identities are
strengthened when groups compete
with one another
– Robbers’ Cave studies
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Robbers’ Cave Experiment
• Boys were randomly
separated into two groups
– “Rattlers” and “Eagles”
• Competitions fostered
hostility between the
groups
• Experimenters contrived
situations requiring
cooperation for success
• Cross-group friendships
increased
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Stereotypes
• Cognitive schemas or summary impressions
of a group, in which a person believes that all
members of the group share a common trait
or traits (positive, negative, or neutral)
• Allow us to quickly process new information
and retrieve memories
• Distort reality in 3 ways
– Exaggerate differences between groups
– Produce selective perception
– Underestimate differences between groups
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Group Conflict and Prejudice
• The origins of prejudice
• Defining and measuring prejudice
• Reducing conflict and prejudice
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Origins of Prejudice
• Psychological functions
– People inflate own self-worth by disliking
groups they see as inferior
• Social and cultural functions
– By disliking others we feel closer to others
who are like us
• Economic functions
– Legitimizes unequal economic treatment
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Defining and Measuring Prejudice
• Not all people are prejudiced in the
same way
• People know they shouldn’t be
prejudiced so measures of prejudice
have declined
• Distinguishing between explicit and
implicit prejudice
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Measures of Explicit Prejudice
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Defining and Measuring Prejudice
• Measuring implicit
prejudice
– Measures of
symbolic racism
– Measures of
behaviours rather
than attitudes
– Measures of
unconscious
associations with a
target group
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Reducing Prejudice and Conflict
• Groups must have equal legal status,
economic opportunities, and power
• Authorities and community institutions must
endorse egalitarian norms and provide moral
support and legitimacy for both sides
• Both sides must have opportunities to work
and socialize together, formally and
informally
• Both sides must cooperate, working together
for a common goal
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