Download Unit 10: Chapter 16, Social Behaviour

Intro psych overheads, unit 10 - social behaviour
Social Behaviour
Person perception: the process of forming impressions of others.
Affected by:
1) physical appearance.
- attractive people are over-represented in the media
and are mostly portrayed in a highly favourable light
i. seen as more intelligent and competent
ii. get better jobs and earn higher wages
- people with baby-faced features seen as more honest
and trustworthy, naïve, submissive, warm, and
helpless.
- after watching people for 10 seconds on tape, most
guess their sexual orientation right 70% of the time.
- we sometimes mimic others without being aware of it:
“the chameleon effect” (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
2) cognitive schemas.
- Schemas: cognitive structures that guide information
processing.
- Social schemas help us quickly process and store
information about others.
3) stereotypes.
- widely held beliefs that people have certain
characteristics because of their membership in a
particular group.
i. gender stereotypes
ii. age stereotypes
iii. ethnic stereotypes
iv. occupational stereotypes
4) subjectivity in person perception.
- illusory correlation
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The evolutionary perspective:
 many biases were adaptive in humans’ ancestral environment
o e.g. attractiveness
o e.g. seeing babies as helpless creatures
o e.g. classifying people as quickly as we can
o Ingroup: a group one belongs to and identifies with.
o Outgroup: a group one does not belong to/identify with.
The Attribution process
Attributions: inferences that people draw about the causes of
events, others’ behaviour, and their own behaviour.
Internal attributions: ascribe the causes of behaviour to personal
dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings.
External attributions: ascribe the causes of behaviour to situational
demands and environmental constraints.
Attributions for success and failure:
 Weiner (1980; 1986; 1994)
Internal
cause
External
cause
Unstable cause
(temporary)
Effort, mood, fatigue
Stable cause
(permanent)
Ability, intelligence
Luck, chance, opportunity Task difficulty
Bias in Attributions
Actor-Observer bias: when an actors and an observers often make
different attributions
 fundamental attribution error: observers’ bias is in favor of
internal attributions in explaining others’ behaviour, while the
actor locates the cause of their behaviour in the situation.
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Defensive attribution: a tendency to blame victims for their
misfortune, so that one feels less likely to be victimized in a similar
way.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to attribute one’s successes to
personal factors and one’s failures to situational factors.
Interpersonal attraction
 physical attractiveness.
o Sprecher & Duck, 1994: the key determinant of romantic
attraction was the attractiveness of the other person.
o more important for female popularity
o The matching hypothesis: males and females of
approximately equal physical attractiveness are likely to
select each other as partners.
 similarity effects.
o married couples tend to be similar in age, race, religion,
social class, personality, education, and attitudes.
o also true among friends
 reciprocity effects.
o Reciprocity involves liking those who show they like you.
o happier and longer lasting relationships are ones where
the partners idealize each other to some extent.
Love
Hatfield & Berscheid (1988)
1) Passionate love: a complete absorption in another that
includes tender sexual feelings and the agony and ecstasy of
intense emotion.
2) Companionate love: warm, trusting, tolerant affection for
another whose life is deeply intertwined with one’s own.
Sternberg (1988)
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Intimacy: warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship
Commitment: an intent to maintain a relationship despite
difficulties and costs
 passion erodes but intimacy & commitment increase with time
 feelings of commitment are more predictive of whether couples
break up than their ratings of overall love.
Cross cultural similarities:
- David Buss (1989, 1994): all cultures value mutual
attraction, kindness, intelligence, emotional stability,
dependability, good health.
- males place more emphasis on attractiveness; females
put a higher priority on social status and financial
resources.
Cross cultural differences:
- Love as a basis for marriage is a Western invention
- Cultures high in collectivism often have arranged
marriages
Attraction and the Evolutionary perspective
 certain aspects of good looks signal good health, genes, fertility
 facial symmetry
 women’s’ waist- to-hip ratio (.7 to .8)
 men seek youthfulness and physical attractiveness
 women seek those with ambition, social status, $ potential
 Buss (1988):
o Men emphasized material resources by buying gifts,
bragging
o Women enhanced their appearance by dieting, wearing
stylish clothes, new hairstyles
Intro psych overheads, unit 10 - social behaviour
 Schmidt & Buss (1996)
o For short-term relationships, women should flirt,
behave seductively, and claim that rivals are just teases.
Men should give gifts and money right off the bat.
o For long term relationships, women should display
sexual exclusivity and claim that rivals are promiscuous.
Men should show their potential for accumulating
resources and claim that rivals have less potential
Attitudes: positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought
Components of attitudes
 up to 3 different types of components:
o cognitive
o affective
o behavioural
 Attitudes vary along 3 dimensions:
o strength
o accessibility
o ambivalence
 vested interest: does the attitude relate to an issue that can
affect a person’s personal outcomes?
 one’s knowledge of an attitude object: the more knowledge
you have about an object, the stronger your attitude is.
Attitudes and Behaviour:
 the average correlation between attitudes and behaviour is
about .38. Why isn't this relationship more consistent?
o haven’t taken into account the strength of the attitude stronger attitudes are more predictive of behaviour
o depends on the situation and how you think people
expect you to behave.
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Persuasion: what are some of the factors that determine whether
persuasion works?
Source factors:
 more successful when the source has high credibility
 expertise is important when the arguments are ambiguous
 trustworthiness can be even more important than expertise
 likeability also increases the effectiveness of the source
Message factors:
 Two sided arguments tend to be more effective
 Adding weak arguments hurts your effectiveness
 repetition is effective  the validity effect
 appeals to fear can be effective
Receiver factors:
 forewarning
 If receiver’s attitudes are incompatible with the message they
will be harder to persuade
 people scrutinize arguments that are contrary to
their own beliefs more (disconfirmation bias)
 stronger attitudes are harder to change
 prior knowledge leads to increased scrutiny and
greater resistance
Theories of Attitude Formation and Change
Learning theory:
 the affective component in an attitude can be created through
classical conditioning.
 operant conditioning: when people respond to your attitudes
with agreement (reinforcement) or disagreement (punishment)
 observational learning: other people’s attitudes may rub off on
you
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Dissonance theory
 Leon Festinger’s 1959 study:
o had male college students work on dull tasks for an hour.
o asked them to “testify” to the next subject that the
experiment was interesting. Subject was either paid $1 or
$20.
o asked the subject about their true feelings about the initial
boring task. Found that those paid $1 rated the initial task
as more interesting than those who had been paid $20
 Cognitive dissonance: when cognitions contradict
each other, motivating people to alter their
cognitions.
o those paid $20 had an obvious reason for behaving
inconsistently - they were being paid a lot. Those paid $1
had no readily apparent justification for their lie, and so
experienced dissonance. To reduce the dissonance they
persuaded themselves that the task wasn’t so bad after
all.
Self-perception theory
 Daryl Bem (1967):people think “a dollar isn't enough to get me
to lie, so I must have found the task enjoyable” because they
are engaging in normal attributional efforts to better understand
their own behavior.
Elaboration likelihood model
 Petty & Cacioppo (1986): there are 2 basic routes to
persuasion:
1) the central route
2) the peripheral route
o central route leads to more enduring attitude change
o attitudes changed through the central route predict
behaviour better than attitudes changed through
peripheral processes.
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Conformity and Obedience: Yielding to others
 Solomon Asch (1951, 1955, 1956)
o key determinants of conformity
 conformity ↑ as group size ↑
 if just one accomplice broke with the majority, this
lowers conformity to about ¼ of its peak
 conformity ↑ when the situation is ambiguous,
especially when the judgment is important
 pressure from ingroup members produces more
conformity
Obedience: a form of compliance when people follow direct
commands
Stanley Milgram (1963)
 40 men recruited to participate in a Yale University study
 learner (accomplice) receives shock every time he makes a
mistake on a learning task
 subject gives shock from 15 to 450 volts
 300 volts: learner pounds on the wall and falls silent
 DV: the amount of shock the teacher was willing to administer.
 Results: 65% went all the way to the end!
 Milgram’s conclusion: obedience to authority is more
common than anyone had previously thought.
Cultural variations in conformity and obedience
 the Asch and Milgram studies have been repeated in various
cultures, yielding roughly similar results
 many reported even higher rates of obedience
 collectivist cultures encourage more conformity than
individualistic cultures.
o decline in the amount of conformity in US studies since
the 1950s
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Behaviour in Groups
Group: two or more people who interact and are interdependent.
They tend to have:
* roles that allocate special responsibilities to some members
* norms about suitable behaviour
* a communication structure reflecting who talks to whom
* a power structure determining who has the most influence
The Bystander effect: people are less likely to provide needed help
when they are in groups than when they are alone.
 Darley & Latane (1968)
o When subject is the only bystander, 80% helped
o With one other person besides the subject, 60% helped
o With 3 others besides the subject, 30% helped
 bystander effects are most likely in ambiguous situations
 diffusion of responsibility: If others are present, each may
think that someone else will help.
Group productivity and social loafing
 social loafing: a reduction in effort by individuals when they
work in groups as compared to when they work alone
 Latane (1979)
o When people thought they were working in larger groups,
individual output declined
 social loafing and the bystander effect share a common cause:
diffusion of responsibility in groups.
o A group size ↑, responsibility for getting the job done is
divided among more people, and many don’t work as
hard since their individual contribution is less noticeable
Intro psych overheads, unit 10 - social behaviour
Decision making in groups
 Group polarization: when group discussion strengthens a
group’s dominant point of view and produces a shift toward a
more extreme decision in that direction.
o more likely when wrestling with important decisions
o risky shift: groups can arrive at riskier decisions than
individuals do
 Groupthink: when members of a cohesive group emphasize
concurrence at the expense of critical thinking in arriving at a
decision.
o Can lead to major blunders
o Suspension of critical judgment
o Censorship of dissent
o “us versus them”
o in cohesiveness: the strength of the relationship linking
group members to each other and to the group itself
Understanding Prejudice
Prejudice: a negative attitude held towards members of a group.
Discrimination: behaving differently toward members of a group.
Prejudicial stereotypes: highly accessible cognitive schemas that
can be activated automatically
 highly resistant to change
 what people perceive is what they expect to perceive
 Memory biases confirm people’s prejudices (the illusory
correlation effect)
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