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Social Psychology
Social psychology
• Two major assumptions
– Behavior is driven by context
– Subjective perceptions guide our behavior
Conformity and obedience
• Social norms
– Your example?
– Milgram
– Conclusions:
• Anxiety prevents us from breaking norms
• We need to justify our actions
• Context directs our feelings and behavior
Conformity and obedience
• Would you resist group pressure?
– Studies say: Probably not.
Asch study
•Demonstrates suggestibility as a form of conformity.
Milgram study
• Subjects believed they were participating in a
study on the effects of punishment on learning
– Shock was delivered for each mistake made
– Each shock was larger than the previous one
• Milgram found that obedience is highest when:
– Authority figure is nearby
– Authority figure is convincing and associated with a
powerful institution
– Victim is depersonalized and/or distant
– Disobedience has not been modeled by others
Conformity and obedience
Conditions that strengthen conformity:
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One is made to feel incompetent or insecure.
The group has at least three people.
The group is unanimous.
One admires the group’s status and
attractiveness.
One has no prior commitment to a response.
The group observes one’s behavior.
One’s culture strongly encourages respect for a
social standard.
Conformity and obedience
• Why do we conform?
– To be liked
– To be right
– To be alike
Group influence
• Individual behavior is influenced by the
presence of others
– Social facilitation
– Social loafing
– Disindividuation
Group influence
• Individual behavior
may also influence
the behavior of the
group
Group influence
• Group behavior is influenced by the
interactions within a group
– Group polarization
– Groupthink
Social relations
• How we relate to one another through a
variety of attitudes and actions
Prejudice
• An unjustifiable, most unconscious,
attitude toward a group and its members
– Beliefs
– Emotions
– Predisposition to act
• Discrimination = behavior
• How common is prejudice?
– Implicit association test
Social roots of prejudice
• Social inequalities increase prejudice
• Social divisions increase prejudice
• Emotional scapegoating
Cognitive roots of prejudice
• Categorization
• Availability heuristic
• Just-world phenomenon
Attraction
• Influenced by:
– Proximity
– Physical attractiveness
– Similarity
Romantic love
• Passionate love
• Companionate love
Social thinking
• Attribution theory - our interpretation about
the cause of someone else’s behavior
– Dispositional attribution
– Situational attribution
• Fundamental attribution error
• Self-serving bias
Attitudes and actions
• Attitudes are beliefs that influence who we
feel and act
– Attitudes direct our behavior
– Our actions can also direct our attitudes
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiment
• Examined the effects of role playing on
attitudes and behavior
– Arbitrarily assigned volunteers to play the role
of prisoner or prison guard
– Demonstrated that role playing can have a
strong effect on beliefs
Cognitive dissonance
• Tension that results from opposition
between actions and beliefs
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
• Strategy for gaining compliance
– People who agree to a small request will later
agree to a larger request
• Charities
• Alliances
Can attitudes be legislated?
• Can people’s beliefs be changed by
creating laws that enforce specific
behaviors?