Download SocialPsyc Shelley

If this had been the first day of
class, with a professor that you
had never met before….
What would you think:
-about the professor?
-about the course?
Social Psychology: Chapter/Lecture Outline
Interpreting the behaviour of others: social cognition
– Person Perception: How do We Form Impressions of Others?
– Attribution Theory: Attributing Causes to Behaviour [Lec]
– Attitudes and Attitude Change [Lec]
Behaving in the presence of others: social influence
– Social Facilitation and Interference
– Social Influences on Altruism: The Bystander Effect
– The Power of the Group: Conformity [video]
– The Power of Authority: Obedience [video]
Establishing relations with others
– What Makes a Face Attractive?
– Determinants of Liking and Loving
– The Psychology of Romantic Love [Lec]
Overview of social psychology
• Social psychologists are interested in studying individuals in their
social context (= people in groups)
– E.g., child in context of the family, spouse in context of marriage,
college students in the context of their class
• In contrast to sociology: the study of social structure with the unit of
analysis being behaviour of social systems
– E.g., educational system, family system, political system
• Anthropology: Concerned with the total cultural context.
– Usually involves cultures other than Western industrial cultures
While there is considerable overlap between the three domains, in social
psychology the unit of analysis is the individual in society
Overview of social psychology (cont.)
• There are certain aspects of human behaviour that are naturally a part
of social psychology
– E.g., attitude formation, persuasion, conformity to social pressures,
prejudice, stereotypes, person perception, interpersonal attraction
First impressions
• What did the demo reveal to you?
• How did you form your first impression of
the professor on the first day?
– You would you use the most salient (available
and obvious) information
• Physical appearance
• Gender
• Race
First impressions (cont.)
• Physical attractiveness:
– Attractive people rated as more intelligent,
caring, capable
– Two recent studies showed that finding a
professor attractive on the first day of class (not
being attracted TO, but finding them attractive)
predicted higher course evaluations.
First impressions (cont.)
• Social schemas and stereotypes also make
up part of first impressions
– We deal with these in detail later.
Attribution Theory:
Attributing Causes to Behaviour
• Important aspect of forming and changing our opinions
about people and issues is our attribution of people's
behavior (our explanation for why they did something)
Social Attributions
How we explain someone’s behavior affects
how we react to it
Situational attribution
“Maybe that driver is ill.”
Tolerant reaction
(proceed cautiously, allow
driver a wide berth)
Negative behavior
Dispositional attribution
“Crazy driver!”
Unfavorable reaction
(Speed up and race past the
other driver, craning to give
them a dirty look)
Covariation model
• How do we attempt to figure out attributions for people's
behaviour?
• We often seem to ask ourselves about three aspects of
people's behaviour that covary:
– Consistency: Does the person do the same thing each
time?
– Consensus: Does everybody do it?
– Distinctiveness: Is the response (or behaviour or
change) unique to that stimulus (or cause or situation) ?
Example: Why does Claire
Laugh at that Comedian?
• Is it something about the comedian (external
attribution) or about Claire (internal attribution)?
• Does she always laugh at him?
– [Consistency: Does the person do the same thing each
time?]
• Do other people laugh at him?
– [Consensus:Does everybody do it?]
• Does she laugh only at him?
– [Distinctiveness: Is the behaviour unique to that cause?]
– If all answers are yes, then we attribute Claire’s
behaviour to an external cause – that specific comedian.
Errors of Attribution
• However, people make certain systematic
mistakes in attributing causes to people's
behaviour. This is illustrated in the next demo.
Fundamental attribution error
• The fundamental attribution error is a tendency to
underestimate the influence of external factors and to
overestimate the influence of internal factors when
explaining other people's behaviour.
Fundamental attribution error (FAE) (cont.)
• Study by Napolitan & Goethals (1979):
– Even when people were told that a woman was acting friendly and
unfriendly as part of a study, they believed she really was the way
she acted; that is, they attributed her behavior to her personality
rather that to the situation
• Reasons for FAE:
1. Environmental forces on our behavior salient to us
2. We have more information about the external forces
impinging on us than on other people
3. We don't want to label ourselves, but we like to label others
Self-Serving Bias
•
Tendency to take credit for positive outcomes by
attributing them to internal causes, but to blame negative
outcomes on external causes, especially ones beyond one's
control
–
–
E.g., I failed the psyc test because:
• My room mates were partying all night and I couldn’t study
• Exam was too difficult/too picky (external attributions)
But I did well on the soc test because:
•
I am quite intelligent (internal attribution)
Attributions in school:
Bernard Weiner
• Weiner came up with his social-cognitive theory
of motivation in the early 1980’s.
• Outcomes can be attributed to INTERNAL causes
(“I did not understand the material”)
• Or EXTERNAL causes (“The teacher did not do a
very good job explaining the material”)
• The EMOTIONAL response to a situation is
connected to the attribution;
– As is the resulting reaction to a poor outcome
Attitudes: Three components
Attitudes and Attitude Change
•
•
•
•
Schema is a mental organizing framework about a person
or thing that we have formed by prior experience (part of
the cognitive component of attitudes)
When we form an attitude about something, a schema
(organizing framework) about that issue is formed in our
mind
Once organized, schemas can be very difficult to change
Although people generally pay attention to new or
inconsistent information, if that information contradicts an
established schema, it will often be ignored
Schemas and Attitude Change
•
•
•
•
•
E.g., study by Lord et al (1979):
Two groups; either strongly in favor or against capital
punishment
Both groups read two studies; one indicating capital
punishment worked to deter crime, the other indicating
that it did not
Subjects perceived studies supporting their position to be
more valid, and ignored the other study; their attitudes
actually became more extreme
In other words, their schema regarding capital punishment
were quite resistant to change
Schemas and Attitude Change (cont.)
In the Lord et al (1979) study:
•
As they encountered more information about the topic, they shaped
the information to the point that it comes into agreement with the
existing schema
•
This process is called assimilation (=altering information to fit
existing schemas)
Schemas and Attitude Change (cont.)
However, schemas do change sometimes as a result of new
information, particularly if four conditions are fulfilled:
1. The information is novel or incongruent
2. Have time to think about it
3. Have ability to understand relation to our existing schema
4. Are motivated to change our schema
If not, information will not be 'processed'
•
•
The four conditions listed above increases the chances that
accomodation will occur
Accomodation refers to changing schemas as a result of new
information
Attitudes and schemas: Social Schema
Sometimes our tendency to form schemas can lead to
simplistic or inaccurate stereotypes
guy
Prejudice and discrimination
Prejudice and discrimination: Contact hypothesis
Groups that are prejudiced against each other rarely
have much sustained contact with each other. The
contact hypothesis suggests that increased contact,
under certain conditions, may decrease
prejudice. Those conditions are:
1. Groups must be roughly equal in task-related status.
2. Contact must involve cooperation and interdependence.
3. Contact must be informal so they can get to know each other
one-on-one.
4. Contact must occur in a setting where existing norms favour
group equality
5. People involved must view each other as typical of respective
groups.
– Otherwise, "good" guys on other side seen as exceptions
Cognitive Dissonance (Pp. 524-526)
• Festinger and Carlsmith (1959): Subjects induced
to act inconsistently with true feelings often
changed those feelings
– Tendency reduced when paid more money
• Cognitive dissonance: Tension produced when
people act in a way inconsistent with attitudes
– Reduced by either changing behaviour or changing
beliefs
– Influential idea, but hard to predict how people react to
it
Cognitive Dissonance (P. 525)
Figure 13.5
Self-Perception Theory (p. 526)
• Alternative to dissonance theory in which people
use observations of own behaviour as a basis for
inferring their own beliefs
– Example: If I told people a job was interesting, and kept
going to that job, that must mean I like the job
• A persuasion technique based on this idea:
– Foot-in-the-door
Social Influence: Overview (P. 528)
• How does the presence of others affect
performance?
• Social influences on altruism
• The power of the group
– Conformity
• Group decision-making
• The power of authority: Obedience
– Milgram’s obedience experiment
• The role of culture
How does the presence of others
affect performance? (P. 529)
• In the presence of others, performance can be
affected in several ways:
– Social facilitation: Performance enhanced
– Social interference: Performance impaired
• Interactions with task difficulty
– Others help spur performance of easy tasks, but
they hinder performance of new or difficult ones
– May happen because presence of others raises
arousal
• Recall: Performance is best when arousal is not too
low (as for easy tasks) or too high (as for difficult
ones)
Social Influences on Altruism (Pp. 530-531)
• Altruism: Acting in a way that shows unselfish
concern for the welfare of others
• Bystander effect: Reluctance to come to someone’s
aid when others are present; “I’m sure someone will
help”
• Diffusion of responsibility: Allowing sense of
responsibility to spread out among those present
– Derives from belief that others have already done something
to help or soon will
• The more witnesses, the less likely any single one will
help
Group influence video
• Conformity
– Being a part of the group is safe
– The group becomes a part of your identity
– Two kinds of conformity
• Acceptance: you have internalized an attitude, and
express that attitude
• Compliance: on the outside, you look like you have
accepted – BUT you have not changed your internal
way of thinking
Other types of conformity
• Confederates influencing answers
– Group gave the wrong answer; subject chose
not to disagree
• 76% conformed at least once; 37% conformed even
on critical trials
• People will conform even in the presence of
strangers.
Obedience
• Doing what the authority figure wants
– Big topic after WWII: how could people
commit atrocities, saying “I was just following
orders”
– Milgram’s learner and teacher
• What did you think of Milgram’s results?
• What does this tell us about social influences?
• What do you think about how the psychologists
related Milgram’s experiment to the Aryan Nations?
Group influences
• Going along with the group
– Deindividuation: becoming part of a group, and
relax normal restraints – swept up in what the
group is doing
• Can lead to acting contrary to normal behaviour
The Power of the Group (Pp. 531-532)
• Social loafing: Tendency to put in less
effort when working in a group than when
working alone
– May be connected to the bystander effect,
diffusion of responsibility
– Groupthink: Tendency for members to
become so interested in seeking consensus that
they ignore, suppress, dissenting view
– Can be countered by encouraging dissent,
awareness, of the tendency
Group Decision-Making (P. 534)
• Group polarization: Tendency for a group’s
dominant point of view to become stronger, more
extreme with time
– May relate to conformity, wish to be liked by other
group members
• Deindividuation: Loss of individuality that comes
from being in a group
– Example: People might do things when in a large,
rowdy group that they would never do alone
– May also relate to diffusion of responsibility
Power
• What if we put good people in an evil
place?
The Power of the Group
• Deindividuation
– Roles played in a group can have a powerful
effect on behaviour.
– Stanford Prison Experiment: 24 healthy, welladjusted (they were screened) male
undergraduates
– Paid $15/day for taking part (1978)
• Zimbardo said: “Maintain law and order, but no physical
violence.”
• The guards made up their OWN rules – they felt they
needed some rules.
• What happened after the first day?
• What happened to Zimbardo himself, as the “prison
superintendent”? What did “I can’t believe what you are
doing to those boys?” do to Zimbardo?
• What surprised Zimbardo?
– The speed with which things deteriorated
Abu Ghraib
• Parallels:
– Did anything look familiar? Sound familiar?
– Zimbardo testified for one of the soldiers
charged with torture
• He pointed out that everything that happened at the
prison could have been predicted by his experiment
And now for something a little less
disturbing
• Or not….
LOVE
What makes a face attractive? (p. 541543)
• Evolutionary perspective
– Want our best reproductive bet: healthy, vigorous,
youthful.
– What is an “attractive” face transcends culture – babies
show preferences for faces adults rate as attractive
• “Prototypical” faces
– Closest to “average” – Langlois & Roggman found that
composite faces rated better than individuals
• Socialized components
– Standards of beauty change; Marilyn Monroe to Rene
Zellweger or Kate Moss
Love
• Okey dokey. He/she has an attractive face.
• Now what?
• Environment plays a big role:
–
–
–
–
Proximity (hey – you’re here)
Similarity (we like the same things!)
Reciprocity (you like me)
Level of arousal (I’m scared – you’re cute)
• Why generations of men have learned to take women to scary
movies…
Theories of love
•
•
•
•
•
•
Passionate and companionate love
Idea developed by Elaine Hatfield (formerly Walster) and
Ellen Berscheid
Two kinds of romantic love
Passionate love: complete absorption in another, includes
sexual feelings and intense emotion, both positive and
negative
Companionate love: warm, trusting, tolerant affection for
another whose life is deeply intertwined with your own
Passionate love and companionate love may coexist, but
often occur separately
Triangular theory of love
•
Robert Sternberg (1988) has added a third dimension to the above,
by splitting companionate love into two components: intimacy and
commitment
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love suggests three elements to
love:
•
–
–
–
•
Passion: excitement, intense sexual feelings
Intimacy: warmth, closeness, sharing
Commitment: intent to maintain relationship in spite of difficulties and
problems
Eight kinds of love relationships that emerge from Sternberg's
Triangular Theory of love:
–
Fatuous love, infatuation, romantic love, liking, companionate, love,
empty love, consummate love
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love:
Different Types of Love
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love:
Changes over Time
Triangular theory of love (cont.)
•
•
Sternberg also suggests the type of love change over time.
About when does passion peak in a relationship?
–
•
When does passion reach its lowest point?
–
•
Between 2 and 4 years
At about 10–15 years
When do intimacy, commitment and passion become
approximately equal?
–
•
4–8 years
When does intimacy start to decline in relationships?
–
It doesn’t; according to the figure, intimacy continues to grow
throughout most lasting relationships