Social Psychology

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Social Psychology
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Thoughts about Social Psychology

• If you make it plain you like people, its hard
  for them to resist liking you back.
• Lois McMaster Bujold
• I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone
  equally.
• W.C. Fields
• Keep your fears to yourself, but share your
  courage with others.
• Robert Louis Stevenson

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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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Social Cognition

• How we attend to, store, remember, and use
  information about other people and the social
  world

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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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Making an Impression

• Impression formation
• The process by which people develop impressions
  of others
• Impression management
• Refers to our efforts to control the type of
  impression created.
• Halo effect
• The effect of labels
• Primacy effect
• People tend to give earlier information more
  weight than later information.

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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• Expectations can create outcomes
• Teachers expect students to do well or not
• Treat students differently
• Students perform as expected
• Men believe they are speaking to attractive or
  unattractive women
• Treat women differently
• Judges ratings of women match mens expectations

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Attitudes and Behavior

• An attitude is an overall evaluation about some
  aspect of the world people, issues, or objects.
• This evaluation has three components
• Affective (feelings) or ones feelings about the
  object or topic.
• Behavioral or ones predisposition to act in a
  particular way toward the object or topic.
• Cognitive (thoughts) refers to what you believe
  or know about the object or topic

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Attitudes and Behavior

• Attitude
• Predicting behavior
• Behavior affects attitudes
• Implicit attitudes
• Implicit Association Test (IAT)

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Cognitive Dissonance

• Attitudes and behavior dont always go hand in
  hand. But, when they are inconsistent, an
  uncomfortable state called cognitive dissonance,
  which is accompanied by heightened arousal,
  arises.

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Cognitive Dissonance
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Cognitive Dissonance

• Dissonance theory
• Reducing mismatch between behaviors and feelings
• Self-perception theory
• Make inferences from our behaviors
• Cognitive dissonance in the real world
• Rationalizing illegal behavior
• AIDS prevention

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Persuasion

• Elaboration likelihood model
• Central Route
• Expertise of the source, the number of arguments,
  or how other people respond to the messag
• Peripheral Route
• involves considering the attractiveness
  andexpertise of the source, the number of
  arguments, or how other people
• respond to the message.
• Obstacles to persuasion
• Strong attitude
• Reactance
• Forewarning
• Selective avoidance

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Effective Persuasion

• Generally the following situations are more
  persuasive
• Fast speakers (vs. slow speakers).
• The attempt at persuasion arouses strong
  emotions, especially if it includes specific
  advice for a positive outcome.
• The messenger is perceived as honest.
• The recipient has low self-esteem.
• When the message does not appear to be trying to
  persuade.
• When both sides are presented
• Exposure effect

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Social Cognition and the Brain

• Social cognitive neuroscience
• Brain damage
• Neuroimaging studies

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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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Stereotypes

• Ingroup
• Outgroup
• Illusory correlation
• Illusion of outgroup homogeneity
• Ingroup differentiation
• Discrimination

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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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Understanding Prejudice

• Realistic conflict theory
• Competition for scarce resources
• Social categorization theory
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Social learning theory

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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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Combating Prejudice

• Contact hypothesis
• Recategorization
• Jigsaw classroom

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Attribution

• An explanation for the cause of an event or
  behavior

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Attributions Causes

• Internal attributions
• Dispositional attributions
• External attributions
• Situational attributions
• Theory of causal attribution
• Consensus
• Consistency
• Distinctiveness

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Attributional Biases

• Fundamental attribution error
• Self-serving bias
• Belief in a just world
• Blaming the victim

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Relationships Liking

• Repeated contact
• Similarity
• Physical attraction
• Average faces
• Symmetry
• Feminized faces

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Relationships Loving

• Passionate love
• Compassionate love
• Sternbergs triangular model of love
• Passion
• Intimacy
• Commitment
• Attachment style

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Relationships Mating Preferences

• Evolutionary theory
• Social exchange theory

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Social Organizations

• Deindividuation
• Norms
• Perceived norms
• Roles
• Status hierarchy

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Yielding to Others

• Conformity
• A change in beliefs or behavior because of
  pressure from others
• Informational social influence
• Normative social influence

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Conformity Aschs Studies
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Compliance

• A change in behavior brought about through a
  direct request rather thanby social norms.
• Six principles
• Friendship/liking
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Reciprocity
• Social validation
• Authority

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Complience

• These principles are consistent with some of the
  techniques most often used to win compliance
• 1) The foot-in-the-door technique involves making
  an insignificantrequest and then following up
  with a larger request if the person complies with
  the first. This technique appears to work because
  people want to seem consistent. If they agree to
  the first request, they are being nice people
  declining the second request would call these
  selfperceptions into account.
• 2) The lowball technique consists of first
  getting someone to make an agreement and then
  increasing the cost of the agreement.
• The door-in-the-face technique involves making a
  very large request first. When denied, the
  requester can make a smaller request, for what
  one actually wanted in the first place.
• People sometimes go to surprising lengths to
  comply with a request, including making up
  details to support false admissions of guilt.

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The Milgram Studies
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The Milgram Studies
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The Milgram Studies

• 15 volts to 450 volts (XXX)
• At 120 volts nearner shouts in pain
• At 150 volts learner asks to stop
• At 300 volts learner pounds on wall
• At 330 volts learner stops responding
• Question how far will teachers go?

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The Milgram Studies

• Psychiatrists predicted
• 2 would go to maximum level
• Actual results
• 65 of teachers went to the maximum level
• Other factors
• Lab coat
• Proximity
• Ethical issues

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Decision Making in Groups

• Majority-win rule
• Truth-win rule
• Group polarization
• Groupthink

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Performance in Groups

• Social loafing
• Social compensation
• Social facilitation

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Helping Others

• Altruism
• Prosocial behavior
• Bystander intervention
• Bystander effect
• Evaluation apprehension
• Diffusion of responsibility