DO NOW 4.14.2011

1. DO NOW 4.14.2011 • Reading notes due tomorrow (Mod. 44-46) • Choose one the of the following to describe: • Projective Personality Test • The Big Five • MMPI-2 • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

2. Unit 12: Social Psychology AP Psychology Ms. Desgrosellier 2010 – 2011

3. Key Ideas: • Group dynamics • Bystander intervention • Attribution processes • Interpersonal perception • Organizational behavior • Conformity, compliance, and obedience • Attitudes and attitude change • Aggression and antisocial behavior

4. Social Psychology • Social Psychology: study of how groups influence individual’s attitudes and behavior.

5. Group Dynamics • Social group: two or more people sharing common goals and interests. • Interact and influence behavior of the other(s). • Norms: rules either implicit or explicit that govern the behavior of group members.

6. Social Roles • Roles: ascribed social positions and defined behavior expectations in groups.

7. Social Roles • Zimbardo Prison Study: Stanford students were randomly assigned the roles of either prisoner or guard. • The experiment had to be stopped after only 6 days because of the severe stress inflicted by certain “sadistic” guards who took their roles too seriously. • Those assigned the role of prisoner were cowering in their cells and one-third of those assigned to the role of guard inflicted harsh punishment for the slightest infraction of rules.

8. Social Roles • Zimbardo Prison Study • Video starts at: 13:08

9. Social Roles • Social loafing: the tendency of individuals to put less effort into group projects than when individually accountable. • e.g. When pulling a rope in tug-of-war, people tended to only pull 80% their real abilities when they were joined by other people.

10. Social Roles • Deindividuation: when in a large group, we tend to lose some self-awareness and may engage in behavior that is unusual or uncharacteristic for us because of the anonymity. • This especially occurs when there is a heightened sense of arousal. • e.g. People in crowds that riot. • e.g. People in masks.

11. Social Roles • Deindividuation can lead to prosocial behavior, with an unusual outpouring and generosity among virtual strangers all caught up in an emotionally arousing situation.

12. Effects of the Group • Social facilitation: improved performance of well-learned tasks in front of others. • e.g. musicians who are well practiced may perform better during a recital than during rehearsal. • Social impairment: when first learning a new task, one may perform worse in front of other people.

13. Effects of the Group • Group polarization: like-minded people share ideas resulting in a more extreme position for every individual. • e.g. When groups like the KKK get together, they become even more extremely racist.

14. Effects of the Group • Groupthink: individuals self-censor beliefs to preserve harmony in the group. • Groupthink can be countered when outside people bring in new ideas and opinions.

15. Minority Influence • minority influence: a lone dissenter shows that a single individual with a strong opinion can also have an effect. • e.g. on a jury, a single dissenting voice could change a verdict from guilty to not guilty.

16. Bystander Influence • Bystander intervention: the active involvement of a person in a situation that appears to require his/her aid. • Diffusion of responsibility: an explanation of the failure of bystander intervention stating that when several bystanders are present, no one person assumes responsibility for helping.

17. Bystander Influence • e.g. Kitty Genovese was repeatedly stabbed and raped outside her Queens, New York apartment in 1964. • 38 of her neighbors heard her screams for help at 3:30 am. Her attacker fled and then came back to stab her 8 more times and kill her. • No one called the police until 3:50 am.

18. Bystander Influence • Researchers set up a situation where people were alone or with a group, and then they heard a call for help. • When alone with someone in need, 40% helped. • In the presence of others, only 20% helped.

19. Bystander Influence • Altruism: the unselfish concern of one individual for the welfare of another. • e.g. helping someone who is injured with no benefit (e.g. rewards of heroism) to you.

20. Attribution Processes • Social cognition: the way people gather, use, and interpret information about social world. • Attribution theory: a way to understand how people explain others’ behaviors.

21. Attribution Processes • Dispositional factors: individual personality characteristics that affect a person’s behavior. • Situational factors: environmental stimuli that affect a person’s behavior.

22. Evaluating Behavior • Self-serving bias: to take personal credit for our own achievements and blame our failures on situational factors. • e.g. “I got an A in Psychology because I’m smart and I worked hard.I got a F in math because I have it first period and my classmates suck.”

23. Evaluating Behavior • fundamental attribution error: tendency when judging others’ behaviors to overestimate the role of personal factors and underestimate situational factors. • e.g. A peer fails a class because they’re lazy or stupid, but ignores how their parents’ divorce affected their work.

24. Evaluating Behavior • actor-observer bias: a tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes and the behavior of others to personal causes. • e.g. I got into a car accident because it was raining and slick on the road. YOU got into an accident because you weren’t paying attention on the road.

25. Evaluating Behavior • just-world phenomenon: tendency to believe in fairness, that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. • e.g. blaming rape victims for what happened to them.

26. Influencing Behavior • Self-fulfilling prophecy: a tendency to let preconceived expectations influence one’s behavior, thus evoking those very expectations.

27. DO NOW 4.14.2011 • Take out your reading notes to be checked. • Recommended reading over break: • Modules 47 – 58 • Briefly describe the Stanford Prison Study.

28. Interpersonal Perception • In-group: groups to which we belong and tend to favor. • Out-group: groups to which we do not belong, we tend to attribute negative qualities to out-groups.

29. Causes of Conflict • Prejudice: unjustified attitudes we hold about others. • Discrimination: unjustified action against an individual or group. • Stereotypes: scheme used to quickly judge others. • Can be an overgeneralized belief about the characteristics of members of a particular group.

30. Causes of Conflict • Scapegoat theory: when own self-worth is in doubt or jeopardy, we find others to blame. • attributes prejudice to frustration • Ethnocentrism: belief that our culture or social group is superior to others.

31. Causes of Conflict • Out-group homogeneity: belief that members of another group are more similar in their attitudes than they actually are. • e.g. I’m a jock, but not all jocks are the same. You’re a nerd, all nerds are the same.

32. Increasing Cooperation • Contact theory: if members of two opposing groups are brought together in an emergency situation, group cooperation will reduce prejudicial thinking.

33. Increasing Cooperation • Jigsaw classroom: expert groups of diverse backgrounds learn one part of a lesson and share information in jigsaw groups. • Students are dependent on others. • Self-esteem and achievement of “worse” students improve. • Former stereotypes are diminished. • Friendships based on proximity, similarity, reciprocal liking, and utilitarian value.

34. Friendships

35. Friendships • Mere exposure effect: the more we come in contact with someone, the more likely we are to like that person. • Most consider beautiful people to be more socially skilled than less attractive people.

36. Friendships • Studies show that friends are rated very similarly in physical attractiveness. • Similarity of interests and social background is also likely to determine who become friends.

37. Conformity • Conformity: the adoption of attitudes and behaviors shared by a particular group of people.

38. Conformity • Solomon Asch conformity study • Asch instructed subjects to choose which of three lines was the same length as the original line shown. Each subject was on a panel with other “subjects” who were actually confederates who all initially gave the wrong answer. • Approximately 35% of the real subjects chose to give an obviously wrong but conforming choice.

39. Conformity

40. Conformity • Asch – 7:07

41. Conformity • Normative social influence: going along with the decisions of a group in order to gain its social approval. • Information social influence: accepting others’ opinions about reality especially in conditions of uncertainty.

42. Compliance • Compliance: engaging in a particular behavior at another person’s request. • Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: agreement to a smaller request leads to agreement with larger requests later. • e.g. Letting me borrow $1 now makes it more likely that you will lend me $5 next time.

43. Compliance • Reciprocity: small gift makes others feel obligation to agree to later request. • e.g. Have this free gift, but you can make a donation if you want.

44. Obedience to Authority • Stanley Milgramobedience study: • Participants thought they were studying how punishment influenced learning. • There was a confederate learner and the participant was the teacher who had to give increasingly stronger electric shocks to the learner when they got an answer wrong. • “Teachers” didn’t know that “learners” were not actually being shocked.

45. Obedience to Authority • If the “teacher” asked questions or hesitated to deliver a shock, the researcher in a lab coat would simply urge them to continue. • Milgram found that 66% of participants would go up to the lethal shock level. • Besides learning about obedience to authority, Milgram’s study also helped establish important ethical guidelines for psychological research.

46. Obedience to Authority • Milgram – 8:06

47. DO NOW 4.25.2011 • Take out your spring break practice test to be checked. • FINAL review session this Saturday, 9am – Noon. • AP EXAM, Monday, 5.2.2011, Noon.

48. Attitudes & Attitude Change • Attitudes: learned predisposition to respond favorably or unfavorably to certain people, objects, or events. • Mere exposure effect leads to increased liking of a person or another stimulus. • e.g. One study found that a confederate placed in a lecture class only 3 times (and who never spoke) would be rated more attractive then strangers by the class.

49. Ways of Changing Attitudes • Elaboration likelihood model (ELM): attitudinal change through two routes: central or peripheral. • Central route of persuasion: relatively stable change by carefully scrutinizing facts, statistics, and other information.

50. Ways of Changing Attitudes • Peripheral route of persuasion: pairs superficial positive factors (e.g. supermodels & celebrities) with an argument leading to less stable changes in attitudes. • Communicators should be experts, likeable, and good-looking. • Messages should be geared to the audience – one-sided if in agreement, two-sided if audience differs.