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Psyc 1001 - Lecture 11

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26 views8 pages

Psyc 1001 - Lecture 11

Uploaded by

matthew.nguyenn1
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Lecture 11: Week 11

Social Thinking
● Social psychology: the scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave
toward the other people around us,and how those people influence our thoughts, feelings,
and behavior
○ Focus on social influences that explain why the same person acts differently in
different situations

Attribution theory
● We tend to give a causal explanation for someone's behavior
● Behaviors of others explained by credit either the situation or the person’s disposition
● Fundamental attribution error
Tendency for observers, when analyzing others behavior, to underestimate the impact of the
situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition

Factors that affect attributions


● Culture
● Whose behavior
● Exceptions
○ Our deliberate, admirable actions are attributed to our own good character, not to
the situation (recall:Self-serving bias from last week!)
○ With age, younger selves’ behaviors are attributed to our traits
● Attributions matter
○ Attributions to a person’s disposition or to the situation have real consequences

Attitudes and actions


● Attitudes are feelings that predispose us to respond ina particular way to objects, people,
& events.
● Attitudes affect actions
○ When external influences are minimal, and the attitude is stable, relevant and
conscious
● Actions affect attitude
○ Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: a trivial act makes the next act easier
■ Doing becomes believing
● Role playing affects attitudes•
○ A new role may initially feel phony, but soon we adopt attitudes in keeping with
our roles.
○ Zimbardo’s prison study
■ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcEPFMEtLIo (0:49-2:49)
● Cognitive dissonance theory
○ People feel discomfort when their actions conflict with their attitudes; they reduce
the discomfort by bringing their attitudes more in line with their actions
■ People can easily act themselves into a way of thinking
■ Doing becomes believing”&“People can easily act themselves into away
of thinking”

Norms and Culture


● Cultural influences
○ Culture: Behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values,and traditions shared by group of
people and transmitted from one generation to next
○ Preservation of innovation; division of labor
● Social influences
○ Norms: Rules for expected and acceptable behavior
○ Influence and power of norms

Conformity
● Complying with social pressures; adhering to asocial standard
● Types of conformity
○ Suggestibility
■ Social contagion (chameleon effect)
■ Mood contagion
○ Natural mimicry
■ Enable ability to empathize
■ Mood linkage

Asch’s conformity experiments


● Which of the three comparison lines is equal to the standard line?
● What do you suppose most people would say after hearing five others say, “Line 3”
● More than one-third of the time, these“intelligent and well-meaning” college students
were “willing to call white black”by going along with the group.
● Normative social influence: Conform to avoid rejection or to gain social approval
● Informational social influence: Acceptothers’ opinions about reality

Conformity Is more likely when people:


● Are made to feel incompetent or insecure
● Are in a group with at least three people, especially a group in which everyone else
agrees
● Admire the group’s status and attractiveness
● Have not made a prior commitment to any response
● Know that others in the group will observe their behavior
● Are from a culture that strongly encourages respect for social standards

The Milgram experiment


● “Teachers” were ordered to deliver shocks to a“learner” for wrong answers.
● A majority of the people usually chose to obey orders, even though it supposedly meant
harming the learner.
● In 10 later studies, women obeyed at rates similar to men’s.
● In a repeat of the earlier experiment, 65 percent of the adult male “teachers” fully obeyed
the experimenter’s commands to continue. They did so despite the “learner’s” earlier
mention of a heart condition and despite hearing cries of protest after they administered
what they thought were 150 volts antagonized protests after 330 volts.

Conditions that influence obedience (Milgram)


● Person giving orders was close at hand and perceived to be a legitimate authority figure
● Authority figure was supported by powerful or prestigious institution
● Victim was depersonalized or at distance
● No role models displayed defiance

What do social influence studies teach us about ourselves?


● Strong social influences induce many people to conform to falsehoods or capitulate to
cruelty
● Great evils often grow out of compliance with lesser evils
● After the first acts of compliance or resistance,attitudes begin to follow or justify the
behavior
● Minority influence is more likely when a position is held firmly

Group Behaviour
● Social facilitation: an observer improves performance on easy or well-learned tasks, but
hinders iron difficult or newly learned ones
● Social loafing: when people work towards a group goal together,they put in less effort
● Deindividuation: a psychological state when a group experience makes people
anonymous, and they become less self-aware and self-restrained, capable of things they
would not normally do
● If a group is like-minded, discussion strengthens its prevailing opinions.
● Talking over racial issues increased prejudice in a high-prejudice group of high school
students and decreased it in a low-prejudice group.
The Internet as SocialAmplifier
● The internet connects like-minded people
● These connections can bring emotional healing
● Online sharing can also strengthen social movements
● Electronic communication and social networking can encourage people to isolate
themselves from those with different opinions
● On social media, we often share political content with like-minded others
● Like-minded separation + conversation = group polarization

Groupthink
● Mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group
overrides realistic appraisal of the alternatives
● Studies have shown that groupthink—fedby overconfidence, conformity,
self-justification, and group polarization—can contribute to bad decision making

Antisocial Relations
● Prejudice
○ Prejudgment; unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group and its
members
○ Can be explicit or implicit
● Racial and ethnic prejudice
○ Overt interracial prejudice wanes; subtle prejudice lingers
○ Implicit Association Test findings
● People viewed (a) a White or Black face, instantly followed by (b) a flashed gun or hand
tool, which was then followed by (c) a masking screen. Participants were more likely to
misperceive a tool as a gun when it was preceded by a Black face rather than a White
face. (KeithPayne, 2006)

Other Targets of Prejudice


● Gender prejudice: Sharp decline of overt gender prejudice; implicit prejudice still exists
● LGBTQ prejudice: Cultural variation, but explicit prejudice in most of the world;higher
negative mental health consequences
● Belief systems prejudice: Explicit prejudice;Muslims

Components of Prejudice
● Prejudice is a mixture of beliefs (oftenovergeneralized, and called stereotypes),negative
emotions (hostility, envy, or fear),and predispositions to action (to discriminate)
● Prejudice is a negative attitude;discrimination is a negative behavior.

Roots of prejudice
● 1. Social inequalities and divisions
○ Just-world phenomenon:victim-blaming
○ Ingroup: “us”
○ Outgroup: “them”
○ Ingroup bias
● 2. Negative emotions
○ Scapegoat theory: when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a
target for negative emotions.
○ Research evidence
■ Economically frustrated people tend to express heightened prejudice
■ Experiments that create temporary frustration intensify prejudice
● 3. Cognitive shortcuts
○ Categorization by gender, ethnicity,race, age, and other factors may lead to
stereotype
■ Outgroup homogeneity
■ Other-race effect: tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more
accurately than faces of other races.

● 4. Remembering Vivid cases:Availability Heuristic


● 5. Victim blaming:Hindsight bias Vivid Cases Feed Stereotypes
● Global terrorism has created, in many minds, an exaggerated stereotype of Muslims as
terrorism-prone.Actually, as reported by a U.S. National Research Council Panel on
terrorism, most terrorists are not Muslim and “the vast majority of Islamic people have no
connection with and do not sympathize with terrorism” (Smelser &Mitchell, 2002)

Prosocial Relations: Altruism


● Unselfish concern for the welfare of others
● Bystander intervention
● Situational factor influence: Presence of others
Responses to a simulated emergency
● When people thought they alone heard the calls for help from a person they believed tobe
having an epileptic seizure, they usually helped.
● When they thought for others were also hearing the calls, fewer than one-third responded.
(Data From Darley & Latane,1968a.)

Bystander intervention
● Helping someone depends on the characteristics of the person, situation, an internal state
○ What contributes to the likelihood that a person will help another in

The odds of helping are highest in the following situations:


● The person appears to need and deserve help.
● The person is in some way similar to us.
● The person is a woman.
● We have just observed someone else being helpful.
● We are not in a hurry.
● We are in a small town or rural area.
● We are feeling guilty.
● We are focused on others and not preoccupied.
● We are in a good mood.

So...
● Happiness breeds helpfulness and
● Helpfulness breeds happiness

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