Psychology in Action (8e)

1. Psychology in Action (8e) PowerPoint  Lecture Notes Presentation Chapter 16: Social Psychology

2. Lecture Overview • Our Thoughts About Others • Our Feelings About Others • Our Actions Toward Others • Applying Social Psychology to Social Problems

3. Introductory Definition • Social Psychology(study of how other people influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions)

4. Our Thoughts About Others • Attribution (an explanation for the cause of behaviors or events) • To determine the cause we first decide whether the behavior comes from an: • internal(dispositional)cause, such as personal characteristics, or • external(situational)cause, such as situational demands.

5. Fundamental Attribution Error: misjudging causes of others’ behavior and attributing to internal (dispositional) vs. external (situational) ones Saliency bias may explain focus on dispositional causes. Our Thoughts About Others:Mistaken Attributions

6. 2. Self-Serving Bias: taking credit for our successes, and externalizing our failures Our Thoughts About Others:Mistaken Attributions

7. Our Thoughts About Others • Attitude (learned predisposition to respond cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally to a particular object)

8. Cognitive Dissonance: feeling of discomfort created from a discrepancy between an attitude and behavior or between two competing attitudes Our Thoughts About Others: Cognitive Dissonance

9. Attitudes Can Affect Actions Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, argues that people feel discomfort when their actions conflict with their feelings and beliefs; they reduce the discomfort by bringing their attitudes more in line with their actions.

10. Our Thoughts About Others: Cognitive Dissonance (Continued)

11. Our Thoughts About Others: Cognitive Dissonance (Continued) • Festinger and Carlsmith’s Cognitive Dissonance Study: Participants given very boring tasks to complete, and then paid either $1 or $20 to tell next participant the task was “very enjoyable” and “fun.” • Result? Those paid $1 felt more cognitive dissonance, therefore, they changed their attitude more about the boring tasks.

12. Attitudes • Attitudes are feelings, often based on our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events. • For example, we may feel dislike for a person, because we believe he or she is mean, and, as a result, act unfriendly toward that person.

13. Attitudes Can Affect Actions The foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the tendency for people who agree to a small request to comply later with a larger one. Because doing becomes believing, a trivial act makes the next act easier.

14. Attitudes Can Affect Actions Influential Theory of Reasoned Action • The theory states that two major predictors of behavior are attitudes toward the behavior and subjective social norms. • A person’s attitude toward a behavior is a function of the desirability of the possible outcomes weighted by the likelihood of those outcomes. • Subjective social norms reflect one’s perception of whether significant others approve of the behavior weighted by the motivation to conform with those expectations.

15. Actions Can Affect Attitudes • One of social psychology’s most significant findings is that action shapes attitude. • For example, the low-ball technique (e.g., After a customer has signed on to buy a new car because of its very low price, the salesperson reports that the sales manager won’t agree because “we’d be losing money.” )

16. Actions Can Affect Attitudes Brainwashing: Writing things down, even if you disagreed with them, eventually you will begin to believe. • However, they soon seem to reflect our true self as we adopt attitudes in keeping with our roles.

17. Attitudes Can Affect Actions Cognitive dissonance theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, argues that people feel discomfort when their actions conflict with their feelings and beliefs; they reduce the discomfort by bringing their attitudes more in line with their actions.

18. The Justification of Effort • Cognitive dissonance theorists have predicted that working hard to attain a goal makes the goal more attractive than the same goal obtained with no effort.

19. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • Philip Zimbardo states, “It’'s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. • We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches.” • The following factors seem important in understanding the cruelty.

20. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • A prison is a place of enormous power differential. Guards have total power over prisoners who are powerless. • Aversive experiences predispose one to anger and aggression. • A novel environment without established norms for acceptable behavior lead us to look to others for direction, especially to those in charge.

21. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • “Peer modeling” also helps to define reality. When a few soldiers took the lead in abusing prisoners and establishing “appropriate” standards for behavior, the rest followed. • A “macho” culture was established for both male and female guards

22. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • Dehumanization of the prisoners as animals or scum was made easier in Iraq because of the foreign language and customs • A “we” versus “they” mentality existed.

23. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • The mechanics of “moral disengagement” were evident. In this process, normally moral people temporarily detach themselves from principle and reframe evil behavior as necessary and even worthy. Some minimized or underestimated the harmful consequences of their actions by relabeling or sanitizing it as “all fun and games.”

24. Abu Ghraib: an atrocity-producing situation • Deindividuation of the guards diffused responsibility and undermined self-restraint. • Unresponsive bystanders, who had private concerns, did not openly disagree or challenge the immoral behavior going on in the prison.

25. The Chameleon Effect The chameleon effect refers to our natural tendency to mimic others. • Unconsciously mimicking others’ expressions, postures, and voice tones helps us to empathizewith others. • Research participants in an experiment tend to rub their own face when confederates rub their face.

26. Asch’s Experiments on Conformity Conformity is adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. • Solomon Asch found that under certain conditions, people will conform to a group’s judgment, even when it is clearly incorrect.

27. Asch’s Experiments on Conformity • Experiments indicate that conformity increaseswhen we feel incompetent or insecure, admire the group’s status and attractiveness, have made no prior commitment to a response, are being observed by other group members, come from a culture than encourages respect for social standards, and are in a group with at least three people who are unanimous in their judgment.

28. Normative and Informational Social Influence • We are sensitive to social norms and so we sometimes conform to gain social approval (normative social influence). • At other times, we accept information about reality provided by the group (informational social influence).

29. Prejudice  (learned, generally negative, attitude toward members of a group) Discrimination (negative behaviors directed at members of a group) Our Feelings About Others: Prejudice and Discrimination

31. Our Feelings About Others: Prejudice and Discrimination (Cont.) • Three components of prejudice: • Cognitive (stereotype--set of beliefs about the characteristics of people in a group generalized to all group members) • Affective (feelings associated with objects of prejudice) • Behavioral(discrimination--negative behaviors directed at members of a group)

32. Our Feelings About Others: Sources of Prejudice and Discrimination 1. Learned response 2. Mental shortcut • in-group favoritism (in-group viewed more positively than out-group) • out-group homogeneity effect (out-group judged as less diverse than in-group) 3. Economic and political competition 4. Displaced aggression

33. Our Feelings About Others: Interpersonal Attraction • Interpersonal Attraction (positive feelings toward another) • Three Key Factors: • Physical Attractiveness • Proximity(geographic closeness) • Similarity (need complementarity vs. need compatibility)

34. Liking isa favorable evaluation of another. Loving can be defined in terms of caring, attachment, and intimacy. Our Feelings About Others: Interpersonal Attraction (Liking and Loving)

35. Our Feelings About Others: Interpersonal Attraction (Liking and Loving) • Sample items from Rubin’s liking and loving test:

36. Our Feelings About Others: Interpersonal Attraction (Continued) • Romantic Love(erotic attraction with future expectations) • Companionate Love (lasting attraction based on trust, caring, tolerance, and friendship)

37. Conformity (changing behavior because of real or imagined group pressure) Obedience (following direct commands, usually from an authority figure) Our Actions Toward Others: Social Influence

38. Our Actions Toward Others: Conformity Asch’s Conformity Study: • Participants were asked to select the line closest in length to X. • When confederates gave obviously wrong answers (A or C), more than 1/3 conformed and agreed with the incorrect choices.

39. Our Actions Toward Others: Conformity (Continued) Why do we conform? • Normative Social Influence (need for approval and acceptance) • Informational Social Influence (need for information and direction) • Reference Groups (people we conform to because we like and admire them and want to be like them)

40. Our Actions Toward Others: Obedience • Milgram’s obedience study: Participants serving as “teachers” are ordered to continue shocking someone with a known heart condition who is begging to be released. • Result? 65% of “teachers” delivered highest level of shock (450 volts) to the “learner.”

41. Our Actions Toward Others: ObedienceMilgram’s “Shock Generator”

42. Our Actions Toward Others: Obedience Four Major Factors Affecting Obedience: • Legitimacy and closeness of the authority figure • Remoteness of the victim • Assignment of responsibility • Modeling/imitation

43. Our Actions Toward Others: Obedience

44. Our Actions Toward Others: Group Processes • Group membership involves: • Roles(set of behavioral patterns connected with particular social positions) • Deindividuation (reduced self-consciousness, inhibition, and personal responsibility)

45. Group Processes: “Power of the Situation” Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study: • Students were randomly assigned as “prisoners” or “guards.” • Original study scheduled to last for 2 weeks but terminated after 6 days due to alarming psychological changes in both “prisoners” and “guards.”

46. Group polarization(group movement toward either a riskier or more conservative decision; result depends on the members’ initial dominant tendency) Groupthink (faulty decision making occurring when a highly cohesive group seeks agreement and avoids inconsistent information) Group Processes: Problems with Decision Making

47. Our Actions Toward Others: Group Processes(Continued) Symptoms of Groupthink: • Illusion of invulnerability • Belief in the morality of the group • Collective rationalizations • Stereotypes of out-groups • Self-censorship • Illusion of unanimity • Direct pressure on dissenters

48. Aggression (any behavior intended to harm someone) Our Actions Toward Others: Aggression

49. Biological Factors in Aggression: instincts, genes, brain and nervous system, hormones and neurotransmitters, substance abuse, and other mental disorders Our Actions Toward Others: Aggression (Continued)

50. Psychosocial Factors in Aggression: Aversive stimuli Culture and learning Violent media/ video games Our Actions Toward Others: Aggression (Continued)