Social Psychology

Social Psychology 12

Questions to Consider: • How Do Attitudes Guide Behavior? • How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others? • How Do Others Influence Us? • When Do We Harm or Help Others? • What Determines the Quality of Relationships?

How Do Attitudes Guide Behavior? • We Form Attitudes through Experience and Socialization • Behaviors Are Consistent with Strong Attitudes • Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance • Attitudes Can Be Changed through Persuasion

1. We Form Attitudes through Experience and Socialization • Opinions, beliefs, and feelings are called attitudes • Shaped by social context • Play an important role in how we evaluate and interact with other people • Direct experience of, or exposure to, things shapes attitudes

1. We Form Attitudes Through Experience and Socialization • The mere exposure effect • The more we are exposed to something, the more likely we are to like it • Prefer our mirror image to photographic • Attitudes can be conditioned • Advertisers take advantage of this • Attitude of celebrity paired with product • Attitudes are shaped through socialization — parents, teachers, peers, and others

2. Behaviors Are Consistent with Strong Attitudes • An attitude is more likely to predict behavior, to be consistent over time, and to be resistant to change: • The stronger it is • The more personally relevant it is • The more specific it is • If it is formed through direct experience

2. Behaviors Are Consistent with Strong Attitudes • Attitude accessibility predicts behavior consistent with the attitude • Explicit attitudes: • Those you are aware of and can report • Implicit attitudes: • Those you are not aware of • May be associated with the brain areas involved with implicit memories

3. Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance • Leon Festinger proposed that cognitive dissonance occurs when there is a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior • Dissonance causes anxiety and tension; motivates people to reduce the dissonance • People reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors • Or they rationalize or trivialize the discrepancy

3. Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance • Postdecisional dissonance: • Occurs when forced to choose between two or three attractive options • Once the choice is made, negative qualities of the nonchosen options are emphasized

4. Attitudes Can Be Changed through Persuasion • Persuasion: active an conscious effort to change attitude through a message • In the elaboration likelihood model persuasion leads to attitude change in two ways: • The central route • People pay attention to arguments, consider all the information, and use rational cognitive processes • Leads to strong attitudes that last over time and are resistant to change

4. Attitudes Can Be Changed through Persuasion • The peripheral route • People minimally process the message • Leads to more impulsive action • Three critical factors influence the extent to which a message is persuasive: • Source: who delivers message • Content : what message says • Receiver: who processes message

When people are motivated to consider information carefully, theyprocess it via the central route, and their attitude changes reflect cognitive elaboration(left). When they are not motivated, theyprocess information via the peripheral route,and their attitude changes reflect the presenceor absence ofshallow peripheral cues (right).

II. How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others? • Nonverbal Actions and Expressions Affect Our Impressions • We Make Attributions about Others • Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Categorization • Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice

1. Nonverbal Actions and Expressions Affect Our Impressions • First impressions are greatly influenced by nonverbal cues • Facial expression, especially eye contact, is one of the first things people notice • Interpreting facial expression may vary by culture

1. Nonverbal Actions and Expressions Affect Our Impressions • Thin slices of behavior • Accurate judgments can be made based on only a few seconds of observation; this is referred to as impression formation • Happiness, hostility, anger, and sexual orientation have been accurately predicted by observing a few seconds of how a person walks

2. We Make Attributions about Others • Attributions are people’s causal explanations for events or actions, including other people’s behavior • People are motivated to draw inferences in part by a basic need for order and predictability in their lives • Just world hypothesis

2. We Make Attributions about Others • Personal (internal) attributions: • Within a person, such as abilities, traits, moods, or effort • Situational (external) attributions: • Outside events, accidents, or the actions of other people • Attributions can also be stable over time versus variable, or controllable versus uncontrollable.

2. We Make Attributions about Others • Fundamental attribution error: • We tend to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of situation • Actor-observer discrepancy

3. Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Categorization • Attitudes and beliefs about groups are stereotypes • Cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the basis of their membership in certain groups

3. Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Categorization • Stereotypes are maintained by a number of processes: • We focus on information that confirms the stereotypes • We remember information that matches our stereotypes leading to an illusory correlation in which people believe that a relationship exists when it does not • Subtyping: placing a person who does not fit a stereotype into a special category instead of altering the stereotype.

3. Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Categorization • Self-fulfilling effects: • Self-fulfilling prophecy • Rosenthal’s study of “academic blooming” • Bloomer IQ should increase • Increase not due to students but teacher stereotypes

4. Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice • Negative stereotypes of groups lead to: • Prejudice • Affective or attitudinal responses associated with stereotypes, usually involving negative judgments about people on the basis of their group membership • Discrimination • Unjustified and inappropriate treatment of people as a result of prejudice

4. Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice • Ingroup/outgroup bias: • Some people are more likely to develop associations between aversive events and members of an outgroup • Those people appear to be more likely to be racially biased. • The formation of ingroup and outgroup distinctions appear to occur early in life

4. Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice • Outgroup homogeneity effect • Outgroup members less varied than ingroup members • Ingroup favoritism • Tendency of people to evaluate favorably and give privilege to members of the ingroup more than outgroup members

III. How Do Others Influence Us? • Groups Influence Individual Behavior • We Conform to Social Norms • We Are Compliant • We Are Obedient to Authority

1. Groups Influence Individual Behavior • Social facilitation: presence of others enhances performance • involves three basic steps: • Organisms are genetically predisposed to become aroused by the presence of others of their own species • Arousal leads to increased performance of the dominant response in that environment • Simple dominant responses are improved (ex. basic math) but more complex responses (ex. Calc) are impaired because the presence of others may interfere with cognition

The mere presence of other people leads to increased arousal, which in turn favors the dominant response. If this is the correct response, performance is enhanced, but if it is the incorrect response, performance suffers.

1. Groups Influence Individual Behavior • Social loafing: • People work less hard in a groups when no one person’s efforts are identified • Deindividuation: • People sometimes lose their individuality when they become part of a group. • Occurs when people are not self-aware or when there is diffusion of responsibility • Crowd mentality/mob behavior • Riots, looting, the wave, chicken dance

1. Groups Influence Individual Behavior • Group decision making: • Risky shift effect • Engage in riskier behavior in a group than by ourselves • Group polarization • Groups enhance attitudes of member who already agree • Groupthink has been implicated in such disasters as the Challenger explosion and the George W. Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq • Extreme form of group polarization • Results from pressure and threats • Information overlooked, dissension discouraged, constant reassurance

2. We Conform to Social Norms • Conforming, or adhering, to social norms (expected standards of conduct) or expectations is necessary in a civilized society • Solomon Asch’s objective line length test

2. We Conform to Social Norms • Several factors have been identified that increase conformity • Larger group sizes • Less than 3=little conformity • 3+ conformity increases (peaks at 7 members) • Unanimity of group opinion • More unanimous=more conformity

3. We Are Compliant • Compliance, or going along with a request, is increased when: • a person is in a good mood • Lack of attention • a reason is provided for complying • a variety of strategies are used • the foot-in-the-door effect • the door-in-the-face effect

4. We Are Obedient to Authority • In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most controversial studies in social psychology on obedience • Nearly two-thirds of participants in Milgram’s study completely obeyed the directives of the experimenter, providing what they believed was a shock that was sufficient to kill the supposed learner

Psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, and both graduate students and professors in the behavioral sciences offered predictions about the results of Milgram’s experiments. Their predictions were incorrect.

4. We Are Obedient to Authority • Later studies have replicated Milgram’s findings suggesting that ordinary people can be coerced into obedience by insistent authorities, even when what they are coerced into goes against the way they would usually behave.

IV. When Do We Harm or Help Others? • Aggression Can Be Adaptive • Aggression Has Social and Cultural Aspects • Many Factors May Influence Helping Behavior • Some Situations Lead to Bystander Apathy

1. Aggression Can Be Adaptive • Aggression involves intentional harm to another • Biological factors • Stimulating or damaging the septum, amygdala, or hypothalamus regions in the brain leads to corresponding changes in the level of aggression that animals display • Kluver-Bucy syndrome

1. Aggression Can Be Adaptive • Drugs that enhance the activity of serotonin lower aggression, whereas those that interfere with serotonin increase aggressive behaviors • Decreased serotonin levels may interfere with good decision making in the face of danger or social threat

Male vervet monkeys were given either serotonin enhancers or serotonin blockers. The results suggest serotonin is important in the control of aggressive behavior.

1. Aggression Can Be Adaptive • Dollard proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis: • The extent to which people feel frustrated predicts the likelihood that they will be aggressive • Ex. Stuck in traffic

2. Aggression Has Social and Cultural Aspects • Violence varies dramatically across cultures and even within cultures at different times • Murder rate variable across countries • Higher levels of violence in the southern United States

3. Many Factors May Influence Helping Behavior • Prosocial behaviors provide benefits to those around us and promote positive interpersonal relationships • Such behaviors may ensure the survival of the human species as such behaviors improve group functioning and strong groups are more likely to function in an effective manner

3. Many Factors May Influence Helping Behavior • Altruism is defined as the providing of help in the absence of apparent rewards for doing so • Inclusive fitness: benefits of transmitting genes rather than individual survival • Kin selection: altruistic towards those we share genes with • Reciprocal helping: help to get help later

4. Some Situations Lead to Bystander Apathy • Four major reasons have been identified explaining the bystander intervention effect (failure to offer help to someone observed to be in need): • First, a diffusion of responsibility occurs, such that people expect other bystanders to help. • The greater the number of people who witness someone in need of help, the less likely it is that any of them will step forward.

4. Some Situations Lead to Bystander Apathy • Second, people fear making social blunders in an ambiguous situation • Third, people are less likely to help when they are anonymous and can remain so • Fourth, a cost-benefit trade-off involves how much harm people risk by helping, or what benefits they would have to forgo if they stopped to help

V. What Determines the Quality of Relationships? • Situational and Personal Factors Influence Friendships • Love Is an Important Component of Romantic Relationships • Making Love Last Is Difficult

1. Situational and Personal Factors Influence Friendships • Proximity, or how often people come into contact, is a prime factor in the development of friendships • Birds of a feather: • Similarity increases liking • Matching principle

1. Situational and Personal Factors Influence Friendships • Personal characteristics: • Admirable personal characteristics and physical attractiveness increase how much we like another person • However, people who seem too perfect make others feel uncomfortable or inadequate

Social Psychology