Download Social Psychology: Meeting of the Minds

Social Psychology
Thoughts about
Social Psychology
• “If you make it plain you like people, it’s
hard for them to resist liking you back.”
– Lois McMaster Bujold
• “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone
equally.”
– W.C. Fields
• “Keep your fears to yourself, but share your
courage with others.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Social Psychology
• Social Psychologists study social behavior. They
are interested in the ways people influence and
are influenced by each other.
• Social psychology is a diverse field incorporating
the study of attitudes and perceptions, persuasion,
and typical behaviors of relatively normal people
in their relationships with others.
Social Cognition
How we attend to, store, remember, and
use information about other people and the
social world
Social Perception and Cognition
• Social perception and cognition are mental
processes that help us to collect and
remember information about others, and to
make inferences and judgments based on
that information.
Making an Impression
• Impression formation
– The process by which people develop impressions of
others
• Impression management
– Refers to our efforts to control the type of impression
created.
• Halo effect
– The effect of labels
• Primacy effect
– People tend to give earlier information more weight
than later information.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Expectations can create outcomes
• Teachers expect students to do well or not
– Treat students differently
– Students perform as expected
• Men believe they are speaking to attractive or
unattractive women
– Treat women differently
– Judges’ ratings of women match men’s expectations
Attitudes and Behavior
• An attitude is an overall evaluation about some
aspect of the world: people, issues, or objects.
• This evaluation has three components:
– Affective (feelings) or one’s feelings about the object
or topic.
– Behavioral or one’s predisposition to act in a
particular way toward the object or topic.
– Cognitive (thoughts) refers to what you believe or
know about the object or topic
Attitudes and Behavior
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Attitude
Predicting behavior
Behavior affects attitudes
Implicit attitudes
– Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Cognitive Dissonance
• Attitudes and behavior don’t always go
hand in hand. But, when they are
inconsistent, an uncomfortable state called
cognitive dissonance, which is
accompanied by heightened arousal, arises.
Cognitive Dissonance
Boring task
Receive
“Did you
enjoy the task?”
$1
“Yes”
$20
“No”
Cognitive Dissonance
• Dissonance theory
– Reducing mismatch between behaviors and
feelings
• Self-perception theory
– Make inferences from our behaviors
• Cognitive dissonance in the real world
– Rationalizing illegal behavior
– AIDS prevention
Persuasion
• Elaboration likelihood model
– Central Route
• Expertise of the source, the number of arguments, or how other
people respond to the messag
– Peripheral Route
• involves considering the attractiveness andexpertise of the source,
the number of arguments, or how other people
• respond to the message.
• Obstacles to persuasion
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Strong attitude
Reactance
Forewarning
Selective avoidance
Effective Persuasion
• Generally the following situations are more
persuasive:
– Fast speakers (vs. slow speakers).
– The attempt at persuasion arouses strong emotions,
especially if it includes specific advice for a positive
outcome.
– The messenger is perceived as honest.
– The recipient has low self-esteem.
– When the message does not appear to be trying to
persuade.
– When both sides are presented
– Exposure effect
Social Cognition
and the Brain
• Social cognitive neuroscience
– Brain damage
– Neuroimaging studies
Social Perception and Cognition
• Stereotypes and Prejudices
– A stereotype is a generalized belief or expectation
about group of people.
• We tend to remember unusual qualities or characteristics
more readily than ordinary ones, so we form false stereotypes
easily.
• Some stereotypes are based on exaggerations of essentially
correct observations.
• This is not a justification for basing our behavior towards
other people according to rigid stereotypes.
Stereotypes
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Ingroup
Outgroup
Illusory correlation
Illusion of outgroup homogeneity
– Ingroup differentiation
• Discrimination
Social Perception and Cognition
• Stereotypes and Prejudices
– Prejudice is an unfavorable attitude toward a
group of people.
• Aversive racism refers to the behavior of
unintentionally discriminating against some groups
while expressing the belief that all people are
equal.
• People tend to acknowledge that prejudice is a
serious problem in the world, but deny that they
themselves are prejudiced.
Understanding Prejudice
• Realistic conflict theory
– Competition for scarce resources
• Social categorization theory
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Social learning theory
Social Perception and Cognition
• Overcoming Prejudice
• Just getting people from different groups to talk
does not appear to be enough to solve this
problem…
• Getting people from two different groups to work towards a
common goal appears to be a more effective strategy.
• Evidence for this was provided by the Robber’s Cave
experiment.
• But the children in the experiment were from arbitrarily
formed competitive groups, not two different racial or ethnic
groups.
Combating Prejudice
• Contact hypothesis
• Recategorization
• “Jigsaw classroom”
Attribution
An explanation for the cause of an event or
behavior
Attributions: Causes
• Internal attributions
– Dispositional attributions
• External attributions
– Situational attributions
• Theory of causal attribution
– Consensus
– Consistency
– Distinctiveness
Attributional Biases
• Fundamental attribution error
• Self-serving bias
• Belief in a just world
– Blaming the victim
Relationships: Liking
• Repeated contact
• Similarity
• Physical attraction
– “Average” faces
– Symmetry
– Feminized faces
Relationships: Loving
• Passionate love
• Compassionate love
• Sternberg’s triangular model of love
– Passion
– Intimacy
– Commitment
• Attachment style
Relationships:
Mating Preferences
• Evolutionary theory
• Social exchange theory
Social Organizations
• Deindividuation
• Norms
– Perceived norms
• Roles
• Status hierarchy
Yielding to Others
• Conformity
• A change in beliefs or behavior because of
pressure from others
– Informational social influence
– Normative social influence
Conformity: Asch’s Studies
Find the matching line
1 2 3
Compliance
• A change in behavior brought about through a
direct request rather thanby social norms.
• Six principles
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Friendship/liking
Commitment/consistency
Scarcity
Reciprocity
Social validation
Authority
Complience
• These principles are consistent with some of the techniques most
often used to win compliance:
– 1) The foot-in-the-door technique involves making an
insignificantrequest and then following up with a larger request if the
person complies with the first. This technique appears to work because
people want to seem consistent. If they agree to the first request, they are
being nice people; declining the second request would call these
selfperceptions into account.
– 2) The lowball technique consists of first getting someone to make an
agreement and then increasing the cost of the agreement.
– The door-in-the-face technique involves making a very large request
first. When denied, the requester can make a smaller request, for what
one actually wanted in the first place.
• People sometimes go to surprising lengths to comply with a request,
including making up details to support false admissions of guilt.
The Milgram Studies
Teacher and Learner
The Milgram Studies
Increasing Shocks for Errors
The Milgram Studies
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15 volts to 450 volts (“XXX”)
At 120 volts nearner shouts in pain
At 150 volts learner asks to stop
At 300 volts learner pounds on wall
At 330 volts learner stops responding
Question: how far will teachers go?
The Milgram Studies
• Psychiatrists predicted
– 2% would go to maximum level
• Actual results
– 65% of teachers went to the maximum level
• Other factors
– Lab coat
– Proximity
• Ethical issues
Decision Making in Groups
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Majority-win rule
Truth-win rule
Group polarization
Groupthink
Performance in Groups
• Social loafing
• Social compensation
• Social facilitation
Helping Others
• Altruism
• Prosocial behavior
• Bystander intervention
– Bystander effect
– Evaluation apprehension
– Diffusion of responsibility