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Behaviour in Social
and Cultural Context
Chapter 8
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education Canada
8-1
Chapter Outline
• Roles and Rules
• Social Influences on Beliefs
• Individuals in Groups
• Us versus Them: Group Identity
• Group Conflict and Prejudice
• The Question of Human Nature
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education Canada
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Roles and Rules
• Norms
– Rules that regulate social life, including explicit
laws and implicit conventions
• Role
– A given social position that is governed by a set
of norms for proper behaviour
– Social roles shaped by culture
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Culture & Roles
• Culture
– A program of shared rules that govern the
behaviour of people in a community or society
– A set of values, beliefs, and customs shared by
most members of that community
• E.g., cultural differences in conversational
distance
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The Obedience Study
• Milgram
designed series
of studies to test
whether people
would obey an
authority figure
when directly
ordered to
violate their
ethical
standards
• Learner = confederate
• Teacher = participant
• Experimenter = authority figure
• Task involved teacher giving “electric
shock” to learner when incorrectly
answered word pair questions
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The Obedience Study
• Milgram found that most people were far
more obedient than anyone expected
– Every single participant administered some
shock to the learner when told to do so
– 2/3 of participants shocked the learner to the
maximum level (labelled 450V or XXX)
• Recent research has replicated these results
even when easier for participants to disobey
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Factors Leading to Disobedience
1. When the experimenter left the room
2. When the victim was right there in the room
3. When two experimenters issued conflicting
demands
4. When the person ordering them to continue
was an ordinary man
5. When the participant worked with peers who
refused to go further
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Evaluating the Obedience Study
• Raises ethical questions regarding the use of
deception in study
• Ethical concern over emotional pain experienced
by participants
• Influence of the situation over personality traits
questioned by some
• Linked to actions in Nazi Germany and prisoner
abuse in Abu Ghraib in Bagdad
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The Prison Study
• Zimbardo and Haney designed classic Stanford
Prison Study
– Male university students randomly assigned to be
prisoners or guards
– Prisoner role – associated with distress, helplessness,
apathy, rebellion, and panic
– Guard role – some were nice, others “tough but fair”, but
a third of guards became punitive and harsh
• Powerful demonstration of how the social situation
affects behaviour
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Why People Obey
1. Allocating responsibility to the authority
2. Routinizing the task
3. Wanting to be polite
4. Becoming entrapped
– Entrapment: 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
• Social cognition
– An area in social psychology concerned with
social influences on thought, memory,
perception, and beliefs
• Social-cognitive neuroscience
– New specialty that uses technologies from
neuroscience to study the emotional and social
processes underlying beliefs, prejudices, and
social behaviour
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Attributions
• Attribution theory
– Argues that people are motivated to explain
their own and other people’s behaviour by
attributing causes of that behaviour to a
situation or a disposition
• Situational attribution: something in the situation
or environment caused the behaviour
• Dispositional attribution: something in the person
(e.g., traits or motive) caused the behaviour
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Attributions
• Fundamental Attribution Error
– The tendency, in
explaining other
people’s behaviour,
to overestimate
personality factors
and underestimate
the influence of the
situation
– More prevalent in
Western versus
Eastern cultures
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Other Attributions
• Self-serving bias
– The tendency, in explaining one’s own behaviour, to take
credit for good actions and rationalize mistakes
• Group-serving bias
– The tendency to explain favourably the behaviours of
members of groups to which we belong
• Just-world hypothesis
– Notion that people need to believe the world is fair and
justice is served; bad people are punished and good
people are rewarded
– When assumption called into question, people may
engage in attributions involving blaming the victim
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Attitudes
• Attitudes are beliefs about people, groups, ideas or
activities
– Explicit attitude: an attitude that we are aware of, that
shapes our conscious decisions and actions, and that
can be measured on questionnaires
– Implicit attitude: an attitude that we are unaware of,
that may influence our behaviour in ways we do not
recognize, and that is measured in various indirect
ways
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Attitude Change
• Attitudes may change with new experiences
and information, but also because of need
for consistency
– Cognitive dissonance: state of tension that
occurs when a person simultaneously holds two
cognitions that are inconsistent; or when beliefs
are incongruent with behaviour
– Resolve by changing attitude or behaviour
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Friendly Persuasion
• Attitudes & belief vulnerable to social
influence
– Familiarity effect: when people feel more
positively toward a person, item, or product
the more familiar they are with it
– Validity effect: when people believe a
statement is true or valid simply because
it has been repeated many times
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Persuasive Influences
• Additional influences:
– Messages presented by admired,
knowledgeable, or beautiful persons
– Messages
associated
with positive
“fuzzy”
feelings
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Coercive Persuasion
•
Coercive persuasion occurs when:
1. The person is put under physical/emotional stress
2. The person’s problems are reduced to one simple
explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized
3. The leader offers unconditional love, acceptance,
and attention
4. A new identity based on the group is created
5. The person is subjected to entrapment
6. The person’s access to information is severely
controlled
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Group Behaviour & Conformity
• Decisions we make in groups depend more on group
structure & dynamics compared to personal factors
• Conformity involves
taking action or adopting
attitudes as a result of
real or imagined group
pressure
• E.g., Asch’s line studies
• Related to both social
norms and culture
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Groupthink
•
Groupthink is a tendency for all members
of a group to think alike for the sake of
harmony and to suppress disagreement
•
Symptoms of groupthink:
1.
2.
3.
4.
An illusion of invulnerability
Self-censorship
Pressure on dissenters to conform
An illusion of unanimity
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The Anonymous Crowd
• Diffusion of responsibility
– In groups, the tendency of members to avoid taking
action because they assume others will
– Bystander apathy: in crowds, individuals’ failure to
take action or call for help because they assume
someone else will do so (e.g., Kitty Genovese)
– Social loafing: in work groups, where each member
of a team slows down, letting others work harder
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Deindividuation
• Deindividuation
– In groups or crowds, the loss of awareness of one’s own
individuality
• Factors influencing deindividuation:
– Size of the city or group; wearing uniforms or masks
• Influences conforming to the norm of the specific
situation, not overall mindlessness
– Implications for sense of responsibility for behaviour
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Altruism & Dissent
• Altruism
– The willingness to take selfless or dangerous
action on behalf of others
– Includes disobeying orders believed to be
wrong or going against prevailing beliefs
(dissent)
• E.g., fight for Canadian women to have legal status
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Altruism & Dissent
•
Situational factors in altruism & dissent:
1. Perceive the need for intervention or help
2. Situation increases the likelihood that you will take
responsibility
3. Cultural norms encourage you to take action
4. Cost-benefit ratio supports your decision to get
involved
5. You have an ally
6. You become entrapped
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Us versus Them: Group Identity
• Social identity
– The part of a person’s self-concept that is based on their
identification with a nation, religious or political group,
occupation, or other social affiliation
• Ethnic identity
– A person’s identification with a racial or ethnic group
• Acculturation
– The process by which members of minority groups come
to identify with the mainstream culture
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Ethnic Identities
• Bicultural identity:
person has strong ties
to their ethnicity and
the larger culture
• Marginal identity:
person feels connected
to neither their ethnicity
or dominant culture
• Assimilated identity:
person has weak
feelings of ethnicity
but a strong sense
of acculturation
• Ethnic separatist
identity: person has
strong sense of
ethnicity but weak
acculturation
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Ethnocentrism
• Ethnocentrism
– The belief that your own ethnic group, nation, or religion
is superior to all others
– Universal belief & may aid survival
• Based on social identity of “us”, where everyone
else is “them”
– Fostered by competition, reduced by interdependence in
reaching mutual goals
• E.g., Robbers Cave studies
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Robbers Cave Experiment
• Boys randomly assigned to
be “Eagles” or “Rattlers”
• Competitions fostered
hostility between groups
• Situations that required
cooperation for success
reduced hostility &
increased cross-group
friendships
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Stereotypes
• Stereotype
– Summary impression of a group, in which a person
believes that all members of the group share a common
trait or traits (positive, negative or neutral)
• May distort reality in three ways:
– Exaggerate differences between groups
– Produce selective perception
– Underestimate differences within other groups
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Group Conflict & Prejudice
• Prejudice
– A strong, unreasonable dislike or hatred of a
group, based on a negative stereotype
• The origins of prejudice are universal
because it has so many sources and
functions:
– Psychological, social and cultural, economic
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Origins of Prejudice
• Psychological functions
– People inflate their own self-worth by disliking
groups they see as inferior
• Social and cultural functions
– By disliking “them”, we feel closer to others
who are like us
• Economic functions
– Legitimizes unequal economic treatment
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Defining & Measuring Prejudice
• Prejudice is difficult to define and measure
– Not all people are prejudiced in the same way or
to the same extent
– People know they shouldn’t be prejudiced so
measures of these attitudes have declined
– Difference between explicit and implicit
prejudice
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Explicit Prejudice
• Surveys conducted often reflect a decrease in
prejudiced attitudes toward specific groups over
time
• Does this reflect true change or hidden attitudes?
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Implicit Prejudice
• Measuring implicit prejudice:
– Measures of symbolic racism
– Measures of behaviours rather
than attitudes
– Measures of unconscious
associations with target group
(e.g., Implicit Association Test)
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Reducing Prejudice & Conflict
1. Both sides must have equal legal status,
economic opportunities, and power
2. Authorities and community institutions must
provide moral, legal, and economic support for
both sides
3. Both sides must have opportunities to work and
socialize together, formally and informally
4. Both sides must cooperate, working together for
a common goal
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The Question of Human Nature
• Social and cultural psychology would argue
that ALL human beings contain the potential
for both good and evil
– Normal processes involving roles and situations
can often lead people to behave in ways they
may not otherwise
– Reflects “the banality of evil” (Arendt, 1963)
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End of Chapter 8
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education Canada
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