Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

1. Behavior in Social and Cultural Context Chapter 8 ©2002 Prentice Hall

2. Behavior in Social and Cultural Context • Roles and rules • Social influences on beliefs • Individuals in groups • Us versus them: Group identity • Group conflicts and prejudice ©2002 Prentice Hall

3. Roles and Rules • Defining norms and roles • The obedience study. • The prison study. • The power of roles. ©2002 Prentice Hall

4. Defining Roles and Rules • Norms • Rules that regulate human life, including social conventions, explicit laws, and implicit cultural standards. • Role • A given social position that is governed by a set of norms for proper behavior. • Culture • A program of shared rules that govern the behavior of members of a community or society, and • A set of values, beliefs and attitudes shared by most members of that community. ©2002 Prentice Hall

5. The Obedience Study • Stanley Milgram and coworkers investigated whether people would follow orders, even when the order violated their ethical standards. • Most people were far more obedient than anyone expected. • Every single participant complied with at least some orders to shock another person. • 2/3 shocked the learner to the full extent. • Results are controversial and have generated much research on violence and obedience. ©2002 Prentice Hall

6. Factors Leading to Disobedience in Milgram’s study • When the experimenter left the room. • When the victim was in the same room. • When the experimenter issued conflicting demands. • When the person ordering them to continue was an ordinary man. • When the subject worked with peers who refused to go on. ©2002 Prentice Hall

7. The Prison Study • Subjects were physically and mentally healthy young men who volunteered to participate for money. • They were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards. • Those assigned the role of prisoner became distressed, helpless, and panicky. • Those assigned the roles of guards became either nice, “tough but fair,” or tyrannical. • Study had to be ended after 6 days. ©2002 Prentice Hall

8. The Power of Roles • Factors that cause people to obey: • Allocating responsibility to the authority. • Routinizing the task. • Wanting to be polite. • Becoming entrapped. • Entrapment: A gradual process in which individuals escalate their commitment to a course of action to justify their investment of time, money, or effort. ©2002 Prentice Hall

9. Social Influences on Beliefs • Defining social cognition. • Attributions. • Attitudes. ©2002 Prentice Hall

10. Social Cognition • An area in social psychology concerned with social influences on thought, memory, perception, and other cognitive processes. • Researcher are interested in how people’s perceptions of themselves and others affect: • Their relationships, thoughts, beliefs and values. ©2002 Prentice Hall

11. Attributions • Attribution Theory • The theory that people are motivated to explain their own and other peoples’ behavior by attributing causes of that behavior to a situation or a disposition. • Fundamental Attribution Error • Tendency in explaining others’ behaviors to overestimate personality factors and underestimate situational influence. ©2002 Prentice Hall

12. Attributions • Self-serving bias • Tendency, in explaining own behavior, to take credit for one’s good actions and rationalize one’s mistakes. • Just-world hypothesis • The notion that many people need to believe that the world is fair and that justice is served • Bad people are punished and good people rewarded. ©2002 Prentice Hall

13. Attitudes • A relatively stable opinion containing beliefs and emotional feelings about a topic. • Explicit • We are aware of them, they shape conscious decisions • Implicit • We are unaware of them, they may influence our behavior in ways we do not recognize. ©2002 Prentice Hall

14. Factors Influencing Attitude Change • Change in social environment • Change in behaviors. • Due to a need for consistency. • Cognitive Dissonance • A state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent, or • when a person’s belief is incongruent with his or her behavior. ©2002 Prentice Hall

15. Influencing Attitudes Effective ways to influence attitudes Repetition of an idea or assertion (validity effect) Endorsement by an attractive or admired person Association of message with a good feeling ©2002 Prentice Hall

16. Coercive Persuasion • Person is under physical or emotional duress. • Person’s problems are reduced to one simple explanation, repeated often. • Leader offers unconditional love, acceptance, and attention. • New identity based on group is created. • Person is subjected to entrapment. • Person’s access to information is controlled. ©2002 Prentice Hall

17. Individuals in Groups • Conformity. • Groupthink. • The anonymous crowd. • Disobedience and dissent. ©2002 Prentice Hall

18. Test line A B C Conformity • Subjects in a group were asked to match line lengths. • Confederates in the group picked wrong line. • Subjects went along with wrong answer 37% of trials. • Meta-analyses demonstrates that conformity has decreased in US since 1950. May be due to social norms. • Individualistic v.s. Collectivist cultures. ©2002 Prentice Hall

19. Groupthink • In close-knit groups, the tendency for all members to think alike and suppress disagreement for the sake of harmony. • Symptoms of groupthink include • Illusion of invincibility. • Self-censorship. • Pressure on dissenters to conform. • Illusion of unanimity. • Groupthink can be counteracted by: • Creating conditions rewarding dissent • Basing decision on majority rule. ©2002 Prentice Hall

20. The Anonymous Crowd • Diffusion of Responsibility • In organized or anonymous groups, the tendency of members to avoid taking responsibility for actions or decisions because they assume that others will do so. • Bystander apathy • People fail to call for help when others are near. • Social loafing. • When people work less in the presence of others, allowing others to work harder. ©2002 Prentice Hall

21. Deindividuation • In groups or crowds, the loss of awareness of one’s own individuality. • Factors influencing deindividuation. • Size of city, group. • Uniforms or masks. • Deindividuation can influence unlawful as well as friendly behaviors. • Depends on norms of the specific situation. ©2002 Prentice Hall

22. Disobedience and Dissent • Situational factors contributing to nonconformity: • You perceive the need for intervention or help. • Situation makes it more likely that you will take responsibility. • Cost-benefit ratio supports your decision to get involved. • You have an ally. • You become entrapped. ©2002 Prentice Hall

23. Helping by Culture ©2002 Prentice Hall

24. Group Conflict and Prejudice • Defining ethnocentrism • Group Identity: Us versus them • Stereotypes • Prejudice ©2002 Prentice Hall

25. Ethnocentrism • The belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others. • Aids survival by making people feel attached to their own group and willing to work on their group’s behalf. ©2002 Prentice Hall

26. Group Identity: Us versus Them • Social Identity • The part of a person’s self-concept that is based on identification with a nation, culture, or group or with gender or other roles in society. • Us versus them social identities are strengthened when groups compete with one another. • Robber’s Cave studies ©2002 Prentice Hall

27. Robbers’ Cave Experiment • Boys were randomly separated into two groups • “Rattlers” and “Eagles” • Competitions fostered hostility between the groups. • Experimenters contrived situations requiring cooperation for success. • Cross-group friendships increased. ©2002 Prentice Hall

28. Stereotypes • Cognitive schemas or a summary impressions of a group, in which a person believes that all members of the group share a common trait or traits (positive, negative, or neutral). • Allow us to quickly process new information and retrieve memories. • Distort reality in 3 ways. • Exaggerate differences between groups. • Produce selective perception. • Underestimate differences between groups. ©2002 Prentice Hall

29. Prejudice • The origins of prejudice. • Defining an measuring prejudice. • Reducing prejudice and conflict. ©2002 Prentice Hall

30. Origins of Prejudice • Psychological functions. • People inflate own self worth by disliking groups they see as inferior. • Social and cultural functions. • By disliking others we feel closer to others who are like us. • Economic functions. • Legitimizes unequal economic treatment. ©2002 Prentice Hall

31. Problems with Measuring Prejudice • Not all people are prejudiced in the same way. • People know they shouldn’t be prejudiced so measures of prejudice have declined. • Distinguishing between explicit and implicit prejudice. • Measuring implicit prejudice. • Measures of symbolic racism. • Measures of behaviors rather than attitudes. • Measures of unconscious associations with a target group. ©2002 Prentice Hall

32. Measures of unconscious associations with the target group. ©2002 Prentice Hall

33. Reducing Prejudice and Conflict • Groups must have equal legal status, economic opportunities, and power. • Authorities and community institutions must endorse egalitarian norms and provide moral support and legitimacy for both sides. • Both sides must have opportunities to work and socialize together, formally and informally. • Both sides must cooperate, working together for a common goal. ©2002 Prentice Hall