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Behavior in Social &
Cultural Context
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY
• Social psychologists
– Study how social roles, attitudes,
relationships, and groups influence people to
do things they would not necessarily do on
their own.
• Cultural psychologists
– Study the origins of roles, attitudes, and group
norms in people’s ethnic, regional, and
national communities.
Roles and Rules
• Norms
– Rules about how people are supposed to act.
• Roles
– Positions in society that are regulated by
norms about how people in those positions
should behave.
Milgram’s Obedience Study
• Method
– Subjects thought they were in an experiment
about the effect of punishment on learning,
and were instructed to give increasing levels
of shock to another subject every time an
error was made.
– No one received shocks, but the subjects did
not know this.
Milgram’s Obedience Study
• Results
– Every subject administered at least one shock to the
learner.
– Two-thirds obeyed the experimenter and gave all the
levels of shock, even though they thought the victim
was in pain.
– Many subjects were visibly upset by being asked to
administer shocks, but continued anyway.
Milgram’s Obedience Study
Subsequent studies examined conditions for
disobedience.
• Nothing the victim said or did decreased the subjects’
compliance.
• Participants were more likely to disobey orders when:
– The experimenter left the room.
– The victim was in the room with the subject, and the subject
had to administer the shock directly to the victim.
– Two experimenters issued conflicting demands.
– An ordinary person, not an authority figure, issued commands.
– The participant worked with peers who refused to go further.
Milgram’s Obedience Study
• Conclusions
– Obedience is a function of the situation, not of
personality.
– The nature of the relationship to authority
influences obedience.
Stanford Prison Study (Zimbardo)
• Method
– College students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners or
guards.
– No further instructions were given on how to behave.
• Results
– Some “prisoners” quickly became distressed, helpless, and panicky;
others became rebellious and angry.
– Half of the prisoners begged to be let out of the study after a few day.
– Guards acted like guards; one-third became tyrannical.
– Guards seemed to enjoy their roles.
– Researchers terminated the study early, because they had not expected
such a quick transformation from college student to prisoner or guard.
• Conclusions
– Researchers say people’s behavior depends in part on their roles.
– Situations can outweigh personality.
Why People Obey
• In both studies subjects’ behaviors depended on their
assigned roles.
• Factors that cause people to obey when they would
rather not:
– Legitimization of authority
• allows people to feel absolved of responsibility for their actions
– Routinization
• behavior becomes normalize
– Wanting to be polite
• people do not want to rock the boat or appear rude
– Entrapment
• obedience escalates through a commitment to a course of action
SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON BELIEFS
• Social Cognition
– Area in social psychology concerned with
social influences on thought, memory,
perception, and other cognitive processes.
Attributions
• Attribution theory
– Theory that people are motivated to explain their own and
others’ behavior by attributing causes of that behavior to a
situation or a disposition.
• Situational attributions
– Identify the cause of an action as something in the environment.
• Dispositional attributions
– Identify the cause of an action as something in the person, such
as a trait or motive.
• Fundamental attribution error
– Tendency to overestimate personality factors and underestimate
the influence of the situation when explaining someone else’s
behavior.
– More prevalent in Western cultures.
Attributions
• Self-serving bias
– When explaining one’s own behavior, people take
credit for good actions and attribute the bad ones to
the situation.
• Just-world hypothesis
– People have a need to believe the world is fair and
that good people are rewarded and bad people are
punished.
– This can lead to blaming the victim.
• Most human actions are determined by both
the situation and personality.
Attitudes
• Relatively stable opinions containing a cognitive
element and an emotional element.
• Affected by many social and environmental
influences:
– Some arise from the characteristic attitudes of each
generation.
– Events that occur when a person is between the ages
of 16 to 24 appear to be critical for the formation of
generational identity.
• Attitudes and behavior can affect each other.
Cognitive Dissonance
• Uncomfortable feeling that occurs when two
attitudes or an attitude and behavior are in
conflict.
• To resolve the dissonance most people will
change one of the attitudes.
• Usually people restore cognitive consistency by
dismissing evidence that might otherwise throw
their fundamental beliefs into question.
Persuasion
• A form of social influence.
• It is the process of guiding people toward
the adoption of an idea, attitude, or
behavior by rational and symbolic (though
not always logical) means.
• It is strategy of problem-solving relying on
"appeals" rather than strength.
Friendly Persuasion
• Repetition of information increases the likelihood
it will be believed--called the validity effect
– Exposure to an argument from an attractive person is
also persuasive.
– Pairing a message with something pleasant also
increases persuasion.
– Fear
• Often causes people to resist arguments that are in their own
best interest.
• May aid persuasion if the information produces moderate
anxiety levels and if message provides information on how to
avoid the danger.
Coercive Persuasion
(brainwashing)
• Involves the following processes
– The person is put under physical or emotional
distress.
– The person’s problems are defined in simplistic terms
and simple answers are offered repeatedly.
– The leader offers unconditional love, acceptance, and
attention.
– A new identity based on the group is created.
– The person is subjected to entrapment.
– The person’s access to information is severely
controlled.
INDIVIDUALS IN GROUPS
• Conformity
– Taking action or adopting attitudes as a result of real
or imagined pressures
• Asch’s conformity study
– Judgment of line length--showed that many people
will conform to incorrect judgments.
• Influences on conformity:
– Prevailing social norms
– Culture
– Conformity increases when:
• Others are people like us
• Number of people who disagree with the subject increases.
Groupthink
• The tendency for all members of the group
to think alike and suppress dissent.
– Occurs when the need for agreement
overwhelms the need for the wisest decision.
– Symptoms of groupthink:
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Illusion of invulnerability
Self-censorship
Direct pressure on dissenters to conform
There is an illusion of unanimity
Groupthink is less likely when
• Conditions explicitly encourage and
reward the expression of doubt and
dissent.
• Group’s decision is based on majority rule
rather than demand for unanimity.
The Anonymous Crowd
• Diffusion of responsibility
– Tendency of individuals to fail to take action
because they believe someone else will do
so.
– Bystander apathy reflects diffusion of
responsibility.
Social Loafing
• Diffusion of responsibility in work groups
– Individuals slow down and let others work
harder.
– Does not happen in all groups.
• Increases:
– When members are not accountable for their work
– When working harder duplicates efforts
– When the work is uninteresting
• Declines:
– With challenging work
– When each member has a different job
Deindividuation
– Losing all awareness of individuality and
sense of self.
– Increases under anonymous conditions.
– In anonymous situations, people are more
likely to conform to the norms of the situation.
Altruism and Dissent
• Altruism
– Willingness to take selfless/dangerous action on behalf of others.
• Factors that predict independent action and altruism
– The individual perceives the need for intervention or help.
– The individual decides to take responsibility.
– The individual decides that the costs of doing nothing outweigh
the costs of getting involved.
– The individual has an ally; the presence of another dissenter
increases the likelihood of dissent.
– The individual becomes entrapped; once initial steps have been
taken, most people will increase their commitment.
US VERSUS THEM:
GROUP IDENTITY
• Personal identity
– A sense of self that is based on our own unique traits
and history.
• Social identities
– Aspects of our self-concepts that are based on
nationality, ethnicity, religion, and social roles.
• Ethnic identity
– A person’s identification with a racial or ethnic group.
• Many people face a dilemma of balancing ethnic
identity (close affiliation with a religious or ethnic
group) with acculturation (identifying with and
feeling part of the dominant culture).
Ethnic Identity and Acculturation
• Biculturalism/Integration
– Maintain ethnic identity & incorporate majority culture.
• Assimilation
– Relinquish ethnic identity and adopt majority culture.
• Ethnic Separatism/Unassimilation
– Strong ethnic identity, weak acculturation.
– Withdrawal from majority cultures.
– Sometimes due to segregation.
• forced separation by large society
• Marginalized
– Lack of identification with booth ethnic and/or majority
culture.
Ethnocentrism
• The belief that one’s own culture or ethnic
group is superior.
• Generates “us-them” thinking
Stereotypes
• Summary impression of a group in which all members of
that group are viewed as sharing a common trait or
traits.
• They help us quickly process new information, retrieve
memories, and organize experience.
• Stereotypes lead to distortions of reality in three ways:
– They accentuate differences between groups.
– They produce selective perception.
– They underestimate differences within other groups.
PREJUDICE
• Consists of negative stereotype/s of a
group and a strong emotional dislike of its
members.
Common Prejudices
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Racism
Ethnocentrism
Ageism
Heterosexism
Classism
Elitism
Ableism
Anti-Semitism
And many other
Chauvinism
• Extreme and unreasoning partisanship on
behalf of a group to which one belongs,
especially when the partisanship includes
hatred towards a rival group.
• A frequent contemporary use of the term
in is male chauvinism, which refers to the
belief that men are superior to women.
• Homophobia
– Irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination
against homosexuality.
• Xenophobia
– Irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination
against foreigners or of people significantly
different from oneself.
Origins of Prejudice
• Psychological Functions
– Serve to ward off feelings of doubt, fear, and insecurity.
– Prejudice is a “tonic” for low self-esteem.
– Allow people to use target group as scapegoat.
• Social and cultural functions
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Social pressure to conform.
Passed from generation to generation.
Media influence.
People use it to bond with others.
• Economic functions
– Justification of majority group in times of job competition.
Reducing Conflict and Prejudice
• Both sides have equal status and
economic standing.
• Both sides have opportunities to work and
socialize together, formally and informally.
• Both sides have the moral, legal, and
economic support of the authorities.
• Both sides cooperate in working toward a
common goal.
THE QUESTION OF HUMAN NATURE
• Bad people do bad things, but good
people (in certain circumstances) also do
bad things.
• The person in the situation…the eternal
dialogue.
• “I am the circumstance” (José Ortega y Gasset,
Spanish philosopher (1883-1955).