Chapter 14 Social Psychology

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Chapter 14Social Psychology
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Social Psychology

• Social Psychologists study social behavior. They
  are interested in the ways people influence and
  are influenced by each other.
• Social psychology is a diverse field
  incorporating the study of attitudes and
  perceptions, persuasion, and typical behaviors of
  relatively normal people in their relationships
  with others.

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Module 14.1

• Social Perception and Cognition

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Social perception and cognition are mental
  processes that help us to collect and remember
  information about others, and to make inferences
  and judgments based on that information.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• First impressions
• The primacy effect is the principle that the
  first information learned about someone will be a
  more powerful influence on our perceptions than
  any later information will be.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Stereotypes and Prejudices
• A stereotype is a generalized belief or
  expectation about group of people.
• We tend to remember unusual qualities or
  characteristics more readily than ordinary ones,
  so we form false stereotypes easily.
• Some stereotypes are based on exaggerations of
  essentially correct observations.
• This is not a justification for basing our
  behavior towards other people according to rigid
  stereotypes.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Stereotypes and Prejudices
• Prejudice is an unfavorable attitude toward a
  group of people.
• Aversive racism refers to the behavior of
  unintentionally discriminating against some
  groups while expressing the belief that all
  people are equal.
• People tend to acknowledge that prejudice is a
  serious problem in the world, but deny that they
  themselves are prejudiced.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Implicit Measures of Stereotypes and Prejudices
• Some research on prejudice has been done, but
  subtle, unintentional racism is difficult to
  measure.
• The Implicit Association Test, used for
  personality assessment, can be used for the
  purpose of detecting subtle prejudice.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Overcoming Prejudice
• Just getting people from different groups to talk
  does not appear to be enough to solve this
  problem
• Getting people from two different groups to work
  towards a common goal appears to be a more
  effective strategy.
• Evidence for this was provided by the Robbers
  Cave experiment.
• But the children in the experiment were from
  arbitrarily formed competitive groups, not two
  different racial or ethnic groups.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Attribution
• Attribution refers to the set of thought
  processes we use to assign causes to our own and
  others behavior.
• Internal attributions are explanations based on
  an individuals perceived stable characteristics,
  such as attitudes, personality traits, abilities
• These are called dispositional.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Attribution
• Attribution Theory
• External attributions are explanations based on
  the current situation and events that would
  influence all people.
• These are called situational.
• Due to lack of familiarity with culturally
  determined responses in other societies, most
  people attribute externally influenced behaviors
  to dispositional qualities.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Attribution
• One psychologist, Kelley, proposed three sources
  of information when we make an internal or
  external attribution
• Consensus information how one individuals
  behavior compares with other peoples.
• Consistency information how the persons
  behavior varies over time.
• Distinctiveness how the persons behavior
  varies between situations.

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Concept Check

• Internal or external attribution?
• He went to the theatre to impress his new
  girlfriend.

External
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• Internal or external attribution?
• He went to the theatre because it was a
  requirement for his English Literature class.

External
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Social Perception and Cognition

• The Fundamental Attribution Error
• We commit the Fundamental Attribution Error when
  we make dispositional attributions for a persons
  behavior despite the presence of possible
  external influences.
• Research suggests that Americans are more prone
  to commit the fundamental attribution error.
• This may be because we emphasize individual
  responsibility and accomplishment in our society.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• The Actor-Observer Effect
• Related to the fundamental attribution error, we
  also tend to make situational attributions for
  our own behaviors and dispositional ones for the
  behavior of others.
• This is called the actor-observer effect.
• It may be engendered in part because we are more
  acutely aware of how our own behavior varies from
  situation to situation.

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• Figure 14.3
• Participants were asked whether certain people
  had certain traits, such as leniency, the
  opposite traits, such as firmness, or whether
  it depended on the situation. They were most
  likely to say that their own behavior depended on
  the situation and least likely to say it
  depends for Walter Cronkite, the person they
  knew the least. (Based on data of Nisbett,
  Caputo, Legant, Marecek, 1973)

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Social Perception and Cognition

• The Actor-Observer Effect
• We also tend in general to attribute unusual
  behavior in people to internal causes.
• We do not perceive ourselves as stable objects
  (because we are observing) but we see other
  people as such.
• When we watch ourselves on videotape, we tend to
  make more dispositional attributions about our
  own behavior.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Using Attributions to Control Perceptions of
  Ourselves
• Attributions that we use to optimize our
  perception of ourselves are called self-serving
  biases.
• You attribute your victory in a tennis match to
  your extraordinary skill.
• You attribute your failing mathematics to unfair
  tests.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• Using Attributions to Control Perceptions of
  Ourselves
• We also use self-handicapping strategies to
  protect our self-image.
• We intentionally put ourselves at a disadvantage
  to provide an excuse for an expected defeat or
  failure.
• For example, eating a whole pizza one half-hour
  before a swim meet with the current league
  champions.

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Social Perception and Cognition

• We are usually not fully aware of the reasons for
  others behavior, or our own.
• We try to make good guesses about both.
  Understanding the theories of social perception
  and cognition can help us to improve our accuracy.

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Module 14.2

• Attitudes and Persuasion

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Social Psychology

• Attitudes and Their Influence
• An attitude is a like or dislike that influences
  our behavior toward a person or thing.
• Persuasion refers to any attempt to change your
  attitudes and thus your behavior.

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Social Psychology

• Attitudes and Their Influence
• Measuring attitudes and the effectiveness of
  persuasive techniques is a challenging task.
• People answer attitude questionnaires
  impulsively.
• People answer attitude questionnaires depending
  on how they interpret the question.
• People may hold conflicting or mixed attitudes
  about some subjects.

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• Figure 14.4
• Likert scales, such as this one assessing
  attitudes toward labor unions, are commonly used
  in attitude research. Subjects rate the degree to
  which they agree or disagree with items that
  measure various aspects of a particular attitude.

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Routes of Attitude Change and Persuasion
• When making serious decisions, people tend to
  invest time and effort in evaluating the evidence
  and logic behind the message.
• This is the central route to persuasion.

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Routes of Attitude Change and Persuasion
• When evaluating a message on a topic or decision
  of relatively little importance, people pay more
  attention to relatively superficial aspects such
  as the speakers appearance or the amount of
  evidence (instead of its quality.)
• This is the peripheral route to persuasion.

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Highly Resistant Attitudes
• Peoples attitudes tend to fall along a
  continuum. Some attitudes are strongly held and
  could only be changed using the central route to
  persuasion, others are less unshakable and could
  be easily changed using the peripheral route.
• Some strongly held opinions are based on hardly
  any knowledge or evidence at all.
• Facts? Dont try to confuse me with the facts!

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Delayed Influence of Messages
• Messages may have no effect when we first
  encounter them, but change our attitudes later.
• The Sleeper Effect - delayed persuasion by an
  initially rejected message.
• Minority Influence - those who hold an unpopular
  opinion eventually change the attitudes of those
  who hold the majority opinion.

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• Table 14.1
• The Political Platform of the U.S. Socialist
  Party, 1900

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Presenting Persuasive Messages
• There are two broad categories of persuasive
  messages
• Do what is asked of you to make something good
  happen.
• Do what is asked of you and prevent something bad
  from happening (chain letters and some internet
  hoaxes work on this principle they almost always
  feature an implied threat.)

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Audience Variables in Persuasion
• Person Variables
• Level of cognitive abilities
• Importance of message to person
• Mood of person
• Situation Variables
• Perceived similarity between the audience and the
  speaker

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• People with Heightened Resistance
• What if people know they are about to hear an
  argument with which they will most likely
  disagree?
• Telling them that this is the case will increase
  the likelihood that they will reject the argument
  (the Forewarning Effect.)
• Presenting a weak version of an argument and
  following it with a stronger version increases
  the chance that the strong one will be rejected
  also (the Inoculation Effect.)

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Strategies of Persuasion
• Common techniques of persuasion to know and
  resist!
• A modest request is followed by a larger one (the
  foot-in-the-door technique.)
• An outrageous initial request is followed by a
  more reasonable one (the door-in-the-face
  technique.)
• A very favorable deal is followed by additional
  demands after a commitment has been made (the
  bait-and-switch technique.)
• The offer is improved before any reply is given
  (the thats-not-all technique.)

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Concept Check

• Name that form of persuasion
• A friend asks you to watch her kid brother one
  afternoon when she has an after school date.
  When her mother gets home, she asks you if you
  would come back every Tuesday and Thursday and
  baby-sit.

Foot-in-the-door
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• Name that form of persuasion
• The person you are madly in love with wants you
  to take him/her to the Hullapalooza Rock Festival
  next month. You agree to treat to the tickets.
  You are then informed that he/she wont go
  without two good friends who also cant afford
  the tickets.

Bait-and-Switch
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• Name that form of persuasion
• The infomercial MC says that if you call within
  the next 30 minutes to buy one jar of Lard-off
  Miracle Fat Burning Cream, he will throw in two
  more jars at the same low price of 59.99.

Thats-not-All!
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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Cognitive Dissonance
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory suggests that an
  individuals behavior can change his or her
  attitudes.
• Cognitive dissonance refers to a state of tension
  that exists when an individual realizes that they
  hold contradictory attitudes on an issue, or has
  exhibited behavior that is inconsistent with an
  expressed attitude.

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• Figure 14.6
• Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that
  arises when people perceive that their attitudes
  do not match their behavior. Theoretically, they
  could resolve this discrepancy by changing either
  their attitudes or their behavior or by
  developing a new attitude or excuse to explain
  the discrepancy. Most of the research, however,
  has focused on how cognitive dissonance leads to
  a change of attitude

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Attitudes and Persuasion

• Cognitive Dissonance
• The classic study on cognitive dissonance was
  done by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959.
• A variety of interesting experiments have shown
  that cognitive dissonance has effects on our
  attitudes.
• The effect of cognitive dissonance on attitudes
  varies cross-culturally.

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• Figure 14.7
• In a classic experiment demonstrating cognitive
  dissonance, participants were paid either 1 or
  20 for telling another subject that they enjoyed
  an experiment (which was actually boring). Later
  they were asked for their real opinions. Those
  participants who were paid the smaller amount
  said that they enjoyed the study more than the
  others. (Based on data from Festinger
  Carlsmith, 1959)

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Persuasion and Manipulation

• Throughout your life you will make decisions
  about matters. Some will be important and some
  will be trivial.
• It is important to understand and remember the
  techniques of persuasion that you have learned
  about in this module, for those who try to change
  your attitudes or behavior may not necessarily
  have your best interests at heart.

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Module 14.3

• Interpersonal Attraction

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Established Lasting Relationships
• How do we choose the people who become our
  friends?
• We are likely to become friends with people who
  live near us and become familiar to us. This
  effect is called proximity.
• The more often we see someone or something the
  more likely we are to start to like the person or
  thing this is called the mere exposure effect.
• The mere exposure effect will not change our
  feelings if we hate the person and thing.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Established Lasting Relationships
• We also tend to be drawn to those who are like
  ourselves in background, attitudes, interests and
  other important ways.
• We choose people who tend to confirm our
  self-concept and level of self-esteem.
• We seek people with whom we feel we can make
  equitable transactions of goods and services
  according to exchange or equity theories, which
  view social relationships as transactions.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Special Concerns in Selecting a Mate
• Physical Attractiveness
• Though people are reticent to admit it, it is
  important to both sexes.
• Attractive people are generally treated better
  than others, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
  that confirms their good self-evaluation.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Special Concerns in Selecting a Mate
• Physical Attractiveness.
• Comparative psychology research suggests that in
  other species attractiveness may be interpreted
  as an indicator of good health and good genes.
• What is considered attractive in most cultures
  is roughly synonymous with what is considered
  normal or average-looking.
• Research evidence for these hypotheses is mixed
  and should be interpreted with caution.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Special Concerns in Selecting a Mate
• Marriage is valued in our society as a crucial
  social institution and source of fulfillment, but
  a disturbing number of marriages end in divorce.
• What is so difficult about achieving a satisfying
  and lasting marriage?

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Special Concerns in Selecting a Mate
• Characteristics of successful marriages
• Partners have similar attitudes and
  personalities.
• Both partners find the relationship sexually
  satisfying.
• They earn an adequate income for their lifestyle.
• The husband feels pride in his job.
• The wife was not pregnant before the couple
  married.
• The couples parents also had successful
  marriages.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Special Concerns in Selecting a Mate
• Trying to save a troubled marriage
• The results of marriage counseling are not
  encouraging.
• Usually one partner has given up before the
  counseling starts.
• Marriage counselors often give well-meaning
  advice that does not work.
• Couples need encouragement to treat each other
  with respect during periods of stress and
  turmoil.
• Every marriage has troubled times, and it is
  important to try to repair problems quickly when
  they arise.

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Interpersonal Attraction

• Humans tend to crave contact with others even
  mediocre company is better than none.
• In our important relationships, we need to know
  more about our companions. To achieve fulfilling
  relationships requires choosing our friends and
  intimates wisely.

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Module 14.4

• Interpersonal Influence

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Interpersonal Influence

• Other people influence us in two major ways
• They give us information about situations.
• They set the norms (the rules that establish
  expected behavior) by which we conduct ourselves
  in situations.

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• Figure 14.11
• In Aschs conformity studies, subjects were asked
  to match one line with one of three other lines
  on another card. They were surrounded by people
  who gave obviously wrong answers.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Conformity
• Conformity is the maintenance or the alteration
  of ones behavior to match the behavior and
  expectations of others.
• At first it was believed that people were most
  likely conform in ambiguous situations where it
  is common to be unsure of ones own judgment.
• Aschs classic experiment demonstrated that
  conformity was also likely even when one could be
  fairly sure that his or her judgment was correct.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Conformity
• Apparently the need to conform is likely to
  overwhelm our need to be correct or feel right in
  our judgments.
• Size of group did not have much of an impact it
  was as hard for a subject to disagree in a group
  of 3 as in a group of 13.
• Two people had an easier time disagreeing with
  the majority than one person did.

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• Figure 14.14
• In Aschs experiments participants who were faced
  with a unanimous majority giving wrong answers
  conformed to the majority view on 32 of trials.
  Participants who had one ally giving the
  correct answer were less likely to conform.
  Evidently, it is less difficult to be in a
  minority of two

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Interpersonal Influence

• Conformity
• Aschs experiment has been done in other
  cultures.
• Cross-culturally the behaviors were the same.
• The motivations expressed were somewhat different
  (Asian subjects, for example, said they did not
  wish to embarrass the others in the group.)

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Interpersonal Influence

• Responsibility Toward Others
• Bystander Helpfulness or Apathy
• Why do people fail to intervene sometimes during
  a crime or accident?
• The presence of many people during a crime may
  create a sense of diffusion of responsibility.
• We may convince ourselves that if there are many
  other people present, someone else will help, so
  we need do nothing.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Responsibility Toward Others
• Bystander Helpfulness or Apathy
• Pluralistic ignorance is another explanation for
  this disturbing lack of action.
• People will sometimes assume in the absence of
  information that others have a different and
  better-informed opinion.
• They will decide therefore to say or do nothing.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Responsibility Toward Others
• Social Loafing
• Social loafing refers to the tendency to loaf
  or to do less work when we are with other people.
• The extent of the loafing sometimes depends on
  group members perceptions of each others
  ability levels.
• The effects are most pronounced when the task is
  considered unimportant.
• Social loafing is less commonly observed in
  cultures with a more collectivist mentality.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Group Decision-Making
• Although there are some advantages to appointing
  committees to review evidence and make decisions,
  there are also some special pitfalls to group
  decision-making processes.
• Since all of us will probably be part of group
  decision-making processes during our lives, it is
  useful to understand how these problems can occur.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Group Decision-Making
• Group Polarization
• If most members of a group already have a strong
  opinion on a matter they will lean even more
  strongly in that direction after discussing the
  issue.
• Under such circumstances discussion serves the
  purposes of making the group more extreme in its
  views rather than opening a dialog on differing
  opinions.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Group Decision-Making
• Groupthink
• Group members may suppress doubts about an issue
  or decision for fear of making trouble or being
  ostracized.
• Groupthink is the term invented for this
  tendency.
• Sometimes dominant members will silence
  dissenters, but sometimes dissenters will silence
  themselves.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Group Decision-Making
• Groupthink
• The decisions to invade the Bay of Pigs and to
  launch the space shuttle Challenger are famous
  historical examples of groupthink.
• Groupthink is a tendency that emerges in groups
  regardless of the level of cohesion.
• One way to guard against groupthink is to appoint
  an official devils advocate whose job it is to
  present opposing viewpoints.

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Interpersonal Influence

• Conformity Good and Bad
• Conformity to rules that benefit the members of
  society in general is necessary for our survival
  as a species.
• It may be just as vital, however, for some of us
  to resist that urge in certain situations where
  the human need for conformity may override our
  ability to see the truth and take action where it
  is necessary to prevent destructive mistakes.

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Module 14.5

• The Power of the Social Situation

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The Power of the Social Situation

• Behavior Traps
• We are often quite judgmental when we see people
  who have done something that seems senseless or
  foolish from our standpoint.
• Under some circumstances, most of us are capable
  of the same behaviors we are judging.

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The Power of the Social Situation

• Behavior Traps
• The situation sometimes influences, even coerces
  us, into self-defeating behaviors.
• We refer to these situations as behavior traps
  because we often wander into them without
  realizing the danger until it is too late.
• There are several categories of behavior traps.

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Behavior Traps

• Escalation of Conflict
• Once a conflict is started, it is often very
  difficult for the participants to quit, even when
  the situation becomes harmful for us.
• Psychologists have held auctions for 1.00 bills
  in which bidders were willing to pay 25.00 for
  the single dollar just to successfully outbid an
  opponent.

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Behavior Traps

• The Prisoners Dilemma
• A prisoners dilemma is a situation in which a
  person must choose between a cooperative act and
  an act very beneficial only to him or herself and
  most likely hurtful to others.
• In the many variants of the dilemma, people have
  great difficulty choosing the cooperative option,
  even in the face of the distinct possibility of
  the competitive or selfish strategy backfiring
  and being quite a costly choice.

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• Figure 14.16
• In the prisoners dilemma, each person
  considering the choice alone finds it beneficial
  to confess. But when both people confess, they
  suffer worse consequences than if both had
  refused to confess.

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Behavior Traps

• The Prisoners Dilemma
• In general, even our cooperative strategies
  require some degree of individual recognition.
• We tend to engage in reciprocal altruism, helping
  others with the understanding that they are
  supposed to eventually help us.
• We need to keep track of who holds up his or her
  end of the bargain, and who does not, so that we
  know with who it is in our best interest to
  cooperate.

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Behavior Traps

• The Commons Dilemma
• The commons dilemma takes its name from a parable
  in which a common resource is overused by those
  who share it.
• This is generally what happens when people must
  share such a resource.
• Research on the commons dilemma shows that in
  some hypothetical situations, people can imagine
  themselves refraining in their use of a resource
  if their living depends upon it.

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• Figure 14.17
• The commons dilemma Unless the users agree to
  moderate their use of a common resource, it will
  soon be used up. For example, years of
  overfishing off the coast of Newfoundland so
  thoroughly depleted the fish population that the
  Canadian government finally had to ban commercial
  fishing.

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Behavior Traps

• Obedience to Authority
• The Nuremberg Trial, at which many Nazi war
  criminals took the stand and said in their own
  defense I was just following orders, provoked
  international outrage.
• People all over the world said to themselves I
  would never follow such immoral orders.

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Behavior Traps

• Obedience to Authority
• Stanley Milgram set up an experiment to find out
  how realistic that claim actually was.
• In his classic experiment, he was able to show
  that, at least in the laboratory, almost
  three-quarters of experimental subjects would
  follow orders to hurt someone if the authority
  figure and the situation demanded it.
• Variations of the original experiment were done,
  and although compliance could be lowered in some
  instances, some of participants still followed
  orders.

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• Figure 14.21
• Milgram varied his procedure in many ways to find
  out what elements promoted or inhibited
  obedience. Division of responsibility increased
  obedience an implication of personal
  responsibility decreased obedience.

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Behavior Traps

• Obedience to Authority
• Many experts predicted a different result when
  told about the plan for this experiment.
• It was thought that only a very few, very
  abnormal people would agree to give the higher
  levels of shock.
• Some scientists and others refused to believe
  these results. Milgrams career suffered because
  what he told us about ourselves was not very
  comforting.
• Todays ethical standards for experimentation
  would probably have prevented this study from
  being done.

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The Power of the Social Situation

• We can teach people to cooperate and help each
  other in some instances.
• But it is possible that in order to discourage
  destructive behavior in people, sometimes we
  would be well advised to consider changing the
  situation instead.