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Segment 1:
Sociocultural Perspective
T/F People act in accord with their consciences.
T/F We appreciate things more when we have to work for them.
T/F Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
T/F Opposites attract.
T/F Seeing is believing.
The scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an
individual are influenced by the real or imagined behavior of others.
Culture: Program of shared rules that govern the behavior of members of a community
and a set of values/beliefs/attitudes shared by most.
 Individualist: “I”
 Collectivist: “We”
 Norm: rules that regulate social life, including explicit laws and implicit cultural
conventions.
 Role: a given social position that is governed by a set of norms for proper behavior.
Researcher: Stanley Milgram
 Study created to further understand the role of obedience in human behavior.
 Humans are wonderful and caring creatures, but in the right situation
they are capable of anything.
Factors that make people less likely to obey:
 Experimenter is not in the room
 Victim was right in front of you
 Two experimenters gave conflicting demands
 Experimenter was an ordinary man (No lab coat)
 When peer group was there who refused to go further
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Researcher: Phillip Zimbardo
 Stanford Prison Experiment
 Study created to further understand the role of
membership roles in human behavior.
 The amount of power vested in the person giving orders.
 Surveillance: Whether or not someone is watching you
 Whether or not responsibility for actions is shared. If it is, one is more
likely to obey.
Abu Ghraib: Baghdad Correctional Facility 2004
Factors that cause people to obey when they
would rather not:
 Allocating responsibility to the authority (Milgram)
 Making the task routine (Duty, role, behavior, feels normal)
 Wanting to be polite (Don’t want to be rude)
 Becoming entrapped:
 Gradual process in which individuals escalate their commitment to a course of
action to justify their investment of time/money /effort.
Attribution Theory: People are motivated to explain their own and other
people’s behavior by attributing causes of that behavior to a situation or a
disposition.
 Situational: Identifying the cause of an action as something in the
situation or environment.
 Dispositional: Identify the cause of an action as something in the person,
such as a trait or a motive.
Fundamental Attribution Error: (Explaining others behavior)
 Overestimate personality factors.
 Underestimate the influence
of the situation.
Self-serving Bias: Tendency, in explaining one’s own behavior, to take credit for
one’s good actions and rationalize one’s mistakes.
 Football/Basketball players after game:
 Winners vs. Losers
Just-World Hypothesis: Good things happen to good people, bad things happen
to bad people.
 If something bad happens to you, you must have deserved it.
Factors Involved in attraction:
 Proximity, Physical attractiveness, Similarity, Exchange
Factors involved in attitude formation:
 Familiarity effect: Tendency of people to feel more positive toward a
person/item/product/ other stimulus that they have seen before.
 Validity effect: Tendency of people to believe that a statement is true or
valid simply because it has been repeated many times.
 Participants will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their
personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in
fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
 Explains:
 Astrology
 Fortune telling
 Non-scientific personality tests
 Prejudice: An unfair, intolerant, or unfavorable attitude toward a group of
people.
 Discrimination: An unfair act or series of acts taken toward an entire
group of people or individual members of that group.
 Other-Race Effect People can recognize faces of their own race better than
they can of other races.
 Must attend to the message.
 Comprehend the message.
 Accept it as convincing.
Certain personality characteristics make some people more susceptible to
attitude change:
 People with low self-esteem are more easily influenced.
 Highly intelligent people tend to resist persuasion because they can think
of counterarguments more easily.
Key aspects of coercive persuasion:
 Person is put under physical or emotional stress.
 Person’s problems are reduced to one simple explanation. (Which is
repeatedly emphasized)
 Leader offers unconditional love/acceptance/attention.
 New identity based on the group is created.
(Part of the whole)
 Person is subjected to entrapment.
(Start off small in demands but then they increase)
 Person’s access to information is severely controlled.
(Mainly contradictory information)
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The audience has a strong commitment to its present attitudes.
Those attitudes are shared by other people.
The attitudes were instilled during early childhood by such pivotal groups
as the family.