Chapter 12: Social Psychology

1. Chapter 12: Social Psychology

3. Psychology in the News • Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. What happened here? • US government explanation? • Would you have behaved differently than the guards at Abu Ghraib? • Characteristics of the individual or the situation?

4. Take Home Message: Power of social context or situation in explaining human behavior

5. Characteristics of the situation at Abu Ghriab • Absence of any real authority in the prison • Obedience to authority • Working conditions promoted aggression. • Stress of wartime.

7. Zimbardo et al. (1973) • Prison study • Description of design • What happened? • What does this demonstrate? • Ethics of study? • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jYx8nwjFQ&feature=player_detailpage

8. How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others? • Social psychology is concerned with how people influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions • Also concerned with the social judgments we make and how we automatically classify people into social categories • First impressions.

10. Nonverbal Actions and Expressions Affect Our First Impressions • How you initially feel about others will be determined mostly by their nonverbal behavior (i.e., facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and movements) • Thin slices of behavior: Seconds-long observations offer powerful cues for impression formation • Participants viewed soundless 30-second film clips of professors lecturing and then were asked to rate the professors’ teaching ability • Ratings corresponded very highly with the ratings given by the professors’ students (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993)

11. We Make Attributions About Others • Attributions: explanations for events or actions, including other people’s behavior • Just World hypothesis: When bad things happen to people, wemake sense of it by blaming the victim—victims must have done something to justify what happened to them. Examples?

12. Attributional Dimensions • Fritz Heider distinguished between two types of attributions: • Personal/internal or dispositional attributions: referto things within people, such as abilities, moods, or efforts • Situational/external attributions: refer to outside events, such as luck, accidents, or the actions of other people • Bernard Weiner noted that attributions can vary on other dimensions: • They can be stable over time (permanent) or unstable (temporary) • They can be controllable or uncontrollable

13. Attributions About the Self • We tend to have a self-serving bias in making attributions about our own behavior: • We attribute our successes to internal/stable characteristics. • We attribute our failures to external/unstable characteristics.

14. Attributional Bias • People tend to be systematically biased when they process social information • Fundamental attribution error:pervasive tendency to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of a situation when explaining another’s behavior. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv7LwFPp3SY • Actor/observer discrepancy: When interpreting our own behavior, we tend to focus on situations; when interpreting other people’s behavior, we tend to focus on dispositions