Download Richard J. Gerrig, Ph.D. and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D.

A PowerPoint™ Slide Presentation for
Prepared by Brian Malley, Ph.D., University of Michigan
This multimedia product and its contents are protected under copyright law. The following are prohibited
by law:
•any public performance or display, including transmission over any network;
•preparation of any derivative work, including the extraction, in whole or part, of any images;
•any rental, lease, or lending of the program.
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Constructing Social Reality
• The Power of the Situation
• Attitudes, Attitude Change, and
Action
• Prejudice
• Social Relationships
• Aggression, Altruism, and Prosocial
Behavior
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Imagine cırcumstancesin which you
have done everything to get a job
interview on time, but nothinh has
gone your way.
• The electricity went off during the
night, so alarm did not wake you. The
friend who was supposed to give you
ride had a flat tire. When you tried to
get money for a taxi the ATM ate your
card.
• When you finally get to office, you
know what the manager is thinking
why would ı give a job to sb this
unreliable?
• You wnat to protest
• It ıs not me, it is circumstances. İf
you have completed the scenario you
have bagan to enter the world of
social psychology
• Social Psychology
– The branch of psychology that studies
the effect of social variables on
individual behavior, attitudes,
perceptions, and motives also studies
group and intergroup phenomena
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Social psychologists try to understand
behaviour within its social context.
• Social context includes the real, imgined
or symbolic presence of others, the
activities and interactions that take place
between people, the feature of settings in
which behaviour occurs, and the
expectations and norms that govern
behaviour in a given setting.
Constructing social reality
• We asked you to imagine everything that
could go wrong in advance of a job
interview. When you finally arrive at the
manager’s office you and the manager
have very different interpretations of the
same event.
• You know you have been a victim of
circumstances. However, at least in the
short run the manager judges you only by
what is readily apparent: you are late, and
you are disheveled. That is what we mean
by constructing social reality.
• The manager considers the evidence
you present and makes an
interpretation of the situation, if you
still wish to get the jobyou will have
to get the manager to construct a
new interpretation.
• Let’s look at one classical social
psychology example in which people
beliefs led them to view the same
situation from different vantage
points and make contrary
conclusions about what really
happened.
• The study concerned a football game
that tooks place some years ago
between two Leaque teams.
• An undefeated Princeton team played
Dartmouth in the final game of the
season. The game, which princeton
won, was rough fillede with penalties
and serious injuries to both sides.
After the game the newspapers of the
two schools offered very different
accounts of what had happened.
• A team of social psychology intrigued by
the different perceptions, surveyed
students at both schools showed them a
film of the game and recorded their
judgments about the number of the
infractions commited by each of the teams.
• Nearly all Princeton students judged the
game as rough and dirty none saw it as
clean and fair and most believed that
Dartmouth players started the dirty play.
• In contrast the majority of Dartmouth
students thought both sides were
equally to blame for the rough game
and many thought it was rough, clean
and fair. Morever, when the Princeton
students viewed the game film they
saw the Dratmouth team commit
twice as many penalties as their own
team. When viewing the same film
Dartmouth students saw both sides
commit thev same number of
penalties.
• This study makes clear that a
complex social occurence such as a
football game, can not be observed in
objective, unbiased fashion.
• Social Cognition
– Process by which people select,
interpret, and remember social
information. Social situations obtain
significance when observers selectively
encode what is happening in terms of
what they expect to see snd what to see
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• To explain how the Princeton and
Dratmouth fans came to such
different interpretations of the
football game returns us to reaşm of
prerception
• Social Perception
– Process by which people come to
understand and categorize the
behaviors of others
• Attribution Theory
– Describes the ways the social perceiver uses
information to generate causal explanations.
– You want to know the whys of life.
– Why did my girlfriend break off the relationship
– Why did he get the job not I?
– Why did my parents divorceafter so many
years of marriage?
– All such whys lead to an analysis of possible
causal determinants for some action, event or
outcome.
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Attribution theory is a general
approach to describing the ways the
social perceiver uses informationto
generate causal explanations
• Attribution theory originated in the
writings of Fritz Heider.
• Heider, argued that people
continullay make causal analyses as
part of their attempts at general
comprehension of the social world.
– People are intuitive psychologists, who
try to figure out what people are like and
what causes their behaviour.
• Dispositional causes
• Situational causes
• Heider believed that the questions
that dominate most attributional
analyses are whether the cause of a
behaviour is found in the person
(internal or dispositional causality) or
in the situation (internal od
situational causality)
• Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)
– Tendency to underestimate impact of
situational factors and overestimate
influence of dispositional factors
– Suppose you have made an arragement
to meet a friend at 7 o Clock. İt is now
7:30 and the friend stiil has not arrived.
How might you explain this event to
yourself
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• I m sure sth really important happened that
made it impossible for her to be here on
time.
• What a jerk! Could not she try a little
harder?
• We have given you a choice again between
situational and a dispositional attribution.
• Research has shown that people are more
likely, to chhose the second type,the
dispositional explanation
• Self-Serving Bias
– People take credit for successes and
deny responsibility for failures.
– In many situations people tend to make
dispositional attributions for success
and situational attributions for failures.
– I got the prize because of my ability, I
lost the competition because it was
rigged.
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• These patterns of attribution may be good
for short-term self esteem. However, it may
often may be important to have an
accurate sense of what causes forces are
at work in your life outcomes
• Consider how you do in your classes. If
you get an A , What attributions do you
make, How about if you get C ?
• Research has demonstrated that the
students tend to attributehigh grades to
their own efforts and low grades to factors
that external to themselves.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
– Prediction modifies interactions so as to produce what is
expected
– Suppose for example, you go to a party expectation to
have a great time. Suppose a friend goes to expecting to
be boring.
– Can you imagine the different ways in which the two of
you might behave given these expectations.
– These alternative ways of behaving may alter how others
at the party behave toward you. In that case which of you
is actually more likely to have a good time at the party.
• Behavioral Confirmation
– People behave in ways that elicit specific expected
reactions and then use those reactions to confirm their
beliefs
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• One of the most powerful
demonstration of social expectancy
unfolde in elementary school
classrooms.
• Provided teachers with information to
create self-fulfilling prophecies.
• Elemantary school teachers in Boston
were informed by researchers that their
testing had revealed that some of their
testing had revealed that some of their
students were academic spurters. The
teachers were lead to believe that these
particular students were intelectual
bloomers who will show unusual gains
during the academic year.
• In fact there was no objective basis for that
prediction.
• However, by the end of that school year, 30
percent of the children arbitrarily named as
spurters had gained an average of 22 IO
points! Almost all of them had gained at
least 10 points.
• Their gain in intellectual performance as
measured by a standart test of intelligence
was significantly greater than that of their
control group classmates who had started
out the same average IQ
• How did the teacher’s false expectations get
translated into such positive student
performance?
• First, the teachers acted more warmly and more
friendly toward the late bloomers, creating a
climate of socail approval and acceptance.
• Second, they put greater demands, involving both
quality and level of difficulty of material to be
learned on those for whom they had high hopes.
• Third, they gaave more immediate and clearer
fedback about the selected student’s
performance.
• Social Role
– Social-defined pattern of behavior
• Rules
– Behavioral guidelines
• Social Norms
– Expectation a group has for its members
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Conformity
– Tendency for people to adopt behaviors,
attitudes, and values of other members
of a group
– Information Influence
• Sherif’s autokinetic effect
• Norm crystallization
– Normative Influence
• Asch effect
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Minority Influence and Nonconformity
– Serge Moscovici
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Group Polarization
– The tendency of groups to make
decisions that are more extreme then
the decisions that would be made by the
members acting alone
– Two underlying process
• Information-influence
• Social comparison
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Groupthink
– Irving Janis
– Tendency of
decision making
group to filter out
the undesirable
input so that a
consensus may be
reached
• Factors leading to
Groupthink:
– High level of group
cohesiveness
– Isolation of group
from outside
information or
influences
– Dynamic, influential
leader
– High stress from
external threats
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Obedience paradigm
– Test situation
– To shock or not to shock?
• Demand characteristics
– Why do people obey authority?
• Normative and informational sources of
information
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Attitude
– Positive or negative evaluation of
people, objects, and ideas
– Cognitive
– Affective (emotional)
– Behavioral
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Elaboration likelihood model
– Defines how likely it is that people will
focus their cognitive process to
elaborate on a persuasive message
• Central routes
• Peripheral routes
• Motivation
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Dissonance Theory
– Leon Festinger
– Cognitive Dissonance
• State of conflict someone experiences after
making a decision, taking an action, or being
exposed to information that is contrary to
prior beliefs, feelings, or values
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Self-perception Theory
– Daryl Bem
– People observe themselves to figure out
the reasons they act as they do
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Compliance
– A change in behavior consistent with a
direct request
• Techniques used to bring about
compliance:
– Reciprocity
• Reciprocity norm
– Commitment
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Prejudice
– A learned attitude towards a target
object, involving negative feelings,
negative beliefs that justify the attitude
and a behavioral intention to avoid,
control, dominate, or eliminate those in
the target group
– Kenneth Clark
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Social Categorization
– Process by which people organize their
social environment by categorizing
themselves and others into groups
– In-group
• Group with which a person identifies
– Out-groups
• Group with which a person does not identify
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• In-group bias
– An evaluation of one’s own group as
better then others
• Racism
• Sexism
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Stereotypes
– Generalizations about a group of people
in which the same characteristics are
assigned to all members of a group
– Stereotypes encode expectations
– People use stereotypical behaviors to
produce behavioral confirmation
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Muzafer Sherif
– Robbers Cave Experiment
– Contact hypothesis
• A program combating prejudice must foster
personal interaction in the pursuit of shared
goals
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Liking
– Physical attractiveness
– Similarity
– Reciprocity
• Loving
– Passion
– Intimacy
– Commitment
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Individual Differences
– Impulsive Aggression
– Instrumental Aggression
• Situational Influences
– Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
– Direct Provocation and Escalation
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Constructing Social Reality
– Origins of Attribution Theory
– Fundamental Attribution Error
– Self-Serving Biases
– Expectations and Self-Fulfilling
Prophecies
– Behaviors that Confirm Expectations
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• C. Daniel Batson’s forces that prompt
people to act for the public good:
– Altruism
– Egoism
– Collectivism
– Principlism
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Altruism
– Prosocial behaviors without
consideration for self safety or interests
• Reciprocal Altruism
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Bystander Intervention
– Bib Latané and John Darley
– Willingness to assist a person in need
• Diffusion of Responsibility
– The larger the number of bystanders,
the less responsibility any one
bystander feels to help
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Bystander must notice the
emergency
• Bystander must label events as an
emergency
• Bystander must feel responsibility
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Constructing Social Reality
– Attribution Theory
– Fundamental Attribution Error
– Self-Serving Bias
– Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Attitudes, Attitude Change, and
Action
– Attitudes and Behaviors
– Processes of Persuasion
– Persuasion by Your Own Actions
– Compliance
• Prejudice
– Origins of Prejudice
– Effects of Stereotypes
– Reversing Prejudice
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010
• Social Relationships
– Liking
– Loving
• Aggression, Altruism, and Prosocial
Behavior
– Individual Differences
– Situational Influences
– Roots of Altruism
– Effects of the Situation on Prosocial
Behavior
Copyright © Pearson Education 2010