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Chapter 15
• The scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors of one individual are influenced by the real,
imagined, or inferred behavior or characteristics of other
people
How do we explain, interpret and
judge behavior?
• Schema: a set of beliefs or expectations about
something/someone based on past experiences
• Ready-made category
• Allows us to make inferences about others
• Also plays a major role in how we interpret and remember
information
• E.g. if we witness a mother reprimanding her child at the
supermarket, we might assume she is a bad or abusive
mother because we saw something similar in a Lifetime movie,
and we may even assign her other traits that go along with
this assumption even if she doesn’t actually demonstrate those
traits!
• Primacy effect: early information is a greater determinant of
• Early information about someone makes a greater impact than later
information in forming impressions
• “Cognitive Misers”
• Humans don’t like to spend too much time figuring people out
• Go with the initial impression to save time
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• A person’s expectations about another elicits behavior from
the other person that confirms the expectations
• e.g. High school coach is told by middle school coach that a
player coming up is “amazing.” High school coach treats this
player as though s/he is talented, and the player responds
accordingly, confirming the initial belief.
• Stereotypes
• A set of characteristics believed to be shared by all
members of a social category
• Can become the basis for self-fulfilling prophecies
• e.g. “Elderly people are cheap!” You are a waiter in a restaurant and
make this assumption, so you don’t provide the greatest service. Then
your tip is smaller and you believe it is because the old people are
cheap!
• Theory that addresses the question of how people
make judgments about the causes of behavior
•e.g. “Why did I fail the test?”
•e.g. “Why did my best friend stop talking to me?”
• Heider (1958) says we first decide if the cause is
personal (internal attribution) or situational (external
attribution).
• Personal/Internal: Behavior caused by that individual’s
characteristics
• Situational/External: Circumstances prompted the
individual’s behavior
• Three criteria used to judge behavior as personal or
situational (Kelley, 1967):
• Distinctiveness: How do the person’s responses vary from situation to situation?
• Consistency: Has this behavior occurred before?
• Consensus: Do other people behave this way?
• If the behavior is low on consistency, we attribute the behavior to a passing
situational factor right away.
• e.g. I have never failed a psych test before! It was just a one-time, unusual occurrence
due to the unique situation. I had an AP test that day so I couldn’t study for my psych
test – that’s why I failed!
• If the behavior is low on distinctiveness and consensus, but high in consistency,
we would say the cause is internal or personal.
• e.g. I often fail tests. Nobody else failed the psych test. It’s ME!
• If the behavior is high on distinctiveness and consensus, but high on consistency,
we say the cause is external or situational.
• e.g. I never fail tests! Everyone else also failed this test. It’s the TEST!
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Tendency to overemphasize personal causes for others’ behavior and
underemphasize personal causes for our own behavior
• e.g. “She cut me off because she is a terrible driver!”
• e.g. “I cut someone else off because I am late for work.”
• Defensive attribution and the Self-Serving Bias
• Tendency to attribute our successes to our own efforts and our failures to
external factors
• e.g. “I failed the test because the teacher made it impossible and clearly
she hates me!” OR “I got an A because I’m a genius!”
• Just-World Hypothesis
• Assumption bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to
good people
• e.g. “She got herpes because she is a strumpet!”
• e.g. “She will win the election because she’s sooooo nice.”
• Attribution across cultures varies dramatically
• E.g. Japanese vs. American students and explaining academic performance
• Why do we have these biases?
• Attraction is closely linked to…
1. Proximity/propinquity
• We are attracted to people who are in the same space as we are
• Has the internet changed this at all?
2. Physical attractiveness
• We like physically attractive people!
• Being with hot people makes us feel like we are hot, too!
3. Similarity
• In attitudes, interests, values, and background
• Opposites only attract for the short term…
4. Exchange: how do we reward each other?
• We like people who appreciate us
• Should be even
5. Intimacy: how much trust and closeness is there?
• Self disclosure
• Should be equal
• Impact of physical attractiveness on attribution and on impression formation
• Beauty and the Best article
• People believe that physically attractive individuals are smarter, friendlier, and
generally “better” based solely on their physical attributes!
• Attitudes are relatively stable beliefs, feelings, and
behaviors directed toward something/someone
• Typically, feelings and beliefs about a person/thing
correspond with behaviors toward that person/thing,
but not always
• Self-monitoring: tendency to observe a situation to determine
how best to act.
• High self-monitors look for social cues about how they are expected to
behave in a given situation, overriding their attitudes, making it
difficult to predict behavior based on attitudes.
• Low self-monitors express and act on their attitudes consistently
making prediction easier.
• Many factors contribute to the development of attitudes
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Imitation
Reward
Teachers
Peers
Mass media
• Prejudice
• An intolerant, unfavorable, and rigid attitude toward a group
of people; negative stereotypes.
• Ultimate Attribution Error: tendency to use stereotyped
beliefs about a group to make internal attributions about
shortcomings and external attributions about successes.
• Discrimination
• An act or series of acts that denies opportunities and social
esteem to an entire group of people or individual members
of that group
• Frustration-aggression theory
• People who are frustrated in their goals may turn their anger away from
the proper target toward another, less powerful target
• Authoritarian personality
• Personality pattern characterized by rigid conventionality, exaggerated
respect for authority, and hostility toward those who defy social norms
• Racism
• Prejudice and discrimination directed at particular racial group based on
the belief that certain groups are innately inferior
• What Would You Do part 1
• What Would You Do part 2
• In-Group Bias: Belief that those with whom you identify are not only
different, but BETTER than those outside the group.
• Recategorization
• Try to expand our schema for a particular group
• What qualities are shared between groups
• Controlled processing
• Train ourselves to be more mindful of people who differ from us
• Think about examples that fall outside the stereotypes
• Improving contact between groups
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Group members must have equal status
Need one-on-one contact with other group
Relations are improved when groups come together to cooperate
Social norms should encourage contact
• Elementary education teacher Jane Elliot wanted to
teach her class about discrimination after the
assassination of Martin Luther King.
• She designed an experiment to show how easily children
could be transformed into prejudiced monsters.
• A Class Divided: video on Elliott’s work
• Process of persuasion
• Must pay attention to the message
• Must comprehend the message
• Comprehension leads to acceptance
• Communication model
• Source: credible spokesperson?
• Message: present both sides!
• Medium: written for complex messages; video for more
simple; face to face is best!
• Audience: how committed is audience to their point of view?
• People with low self esteem easier to change
• Intelligent people more resistant to change
• Cognitive Dissonance (Leon Festinger)
• Perceived inconsistency between two cognitions
• e.g. “I am an honest person” and “I cheated on the test”
• Dissonance can be reduced through attitude change
• e.g. “I am not that honest”
• An alternative is to increase the number thoughts that support
one or the other dissonant cognitions
• e.g. “I have never stolen, never gotten arrested, never cheated on a
FINAL,” etc.
• Culture greatly influences attitudes and behaviors
• Cultural truism
• Beliefs that most members of a society accept as selfevidently true
• People in the culture do not question these
• e.g. “Eating dog is unacceptable.”
• Truisms are the backbone of norms, shared
expectations about how to behave in a given culture.
• Not all cultures are the same, and not all cultures have the same
norms.
• People in a given culture may feel their way is the “right” way,
and other cultures are “backwards.”
• This is the basis of ethnocentrism, or the belief that one’s own
culture superior.
• Examining cultural assimilators helps to reduce these
assumptions.
• Cultural assimilators are the explanations for why members of a culture
have a particular behavior.
• Understanding cultural assimilators helps people to maintain an open mind
about other cultures’ norms and values.
• Voluntarily yielding to social norms, even at the expense of
one’s own preferences
• Asch Experiment
• Conformity across cultures
• Tends to be higher in collectivist cultures
• Change in behavior in response to an explicit request
from another person or group
• Work of Robert Cialdini and the methods of gaining
compliance
• Foot-in-the-door effect: Get them to say yes to a small
request first
• Lowball procedure: Get compliance then raise price of
compliance
• Door-in-the-face effect: Get them to decline large request
then ask something smaller
• Change in behavior in response to a command from another
person, typically an authority figure
• Milgram’s studies on obedience show willingness to follow
commands
• Milgram Revisited
• Deindividuation
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Loss of personal sense of responsibility in a group
People more likely to engage in risky behavior when anonymous
Helps to explain mob behavior
Mob Behavior also facilitated by the snowball effect, when one vocal
person convinces a few people, who convince a few more, etc.
• Helping Behavior
• Altruistic behavior
• Helping behavior that is not linked to personal gain
• Bystander effect
• Helpfulness decreases as bystanders increase
• Kitty Genovese Case and the bystander effect
• Mood can affect willingness to help
• Cultures differ in amount of help offered in response to requests for minor
help (collective cultures more willing)
• Risky Shift
• Increased willingness to take risks when making decisions as a
group as opposed to making decisions as individuals.
• Polarization in group decision making
• Shift toward more extreme position following group discussion
• The effectiveness of groups
• The more people in the group…
• The more stable the group is
• The less cohesive/efficient the group may become
• Social loafing
• Tendency to expend less effort when part of a large group
• Groupthink
• Pressure to conform to group
• Great person theory
• Personal qualities qualify one to lead
• Right place-right time theory
• Circumstances are optimal for individual with particular
characteristics
• Fielder’s Contingency Theory
• Depends on the traits of the leader, the circumstances, and
the interaction of the group itself.
• Task-Oriented vs. Relationship Oriented Leaders
• In extreme circumstances – very good or very bad – best to
be task oriented.
• In moderate circumstances, best to be relationship oriented.