Social Psychology

Unit 13

Topics in Social Psychology

• Attitude and Behavior

• Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination

• Aggression and Anti-social behavior

• Attraction

• Influence of others on our behavior

• Group Dynamics

Social Psychology

• Social Psychology is a field devoted to studying

the way people relate to others

• Social Cognition is a study of how people think

about themselves and others.

• Throughout our lives, we go about our days

making observations which eventually lead to

predictions about what will happen next, so we

can act accordingly

Attitude Formation and Change

• One of the biggest focuses in Social Psychology is

how we formulate our attitudes, and how they can

change.

• An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings. We have

attitudes about a great deal of things such as

groups od people, events, places, lifestyles, etc.

• We have positive and negative attitudes about

certain aspects of our environment.

Attitude• An area greatly dedicated to affecting people’s attitudes is

advertising.

• Companies seek to find out how to have people develop a

positive attitude about their product.

• One method of advertising stems from capitalizing on the

mere exposure effect. It states that, generally, the more we

are exposed to something, the more we come to like it.

• So, when you go to the store, you are more likely to pick the

product that has been shown to you a great deal of times.

Persuasive Messages• Methods with which to persuade our opinion or attitude about

something are two-fold

• The central route to persuasion involves deeply processing

the content of the message. What it is about THIS product

that is better than THAT product.

• The peripheral route to persuasion includes all other aspects

of the message such as quality of the marketing campaign,

the speaker, the shininess of the product

• Actors, athletes and models are all useful communicators of

messages

Likelihood of Persuasion

• Studies have shown that educated people are

less likely to be persuaded by advertisements.

• Furthermore, the higher the level of education,

the better it is to show both sides of an

argument in attempting to persuade people

• For the less educated, one sided arguments

are much better.

Attitude and Behavior

• Research has shown that relationships between attitudes and

behavior are often greatly contrasted.

• However, our minds feel tension when our attitudes don’t

match our behavior. This is stated by the cognitive

dissonance theory. We seek consistency in our thoughts and

attitudes.

• If we know smoking is bad for us, yet we are addicted to it,

we may either quit smoking (matching attitude and behavior)

or we can convince ourselves smoking really isn’t that bad,

Compliance Strategies

• We also use strategies to get people to comply with

our wishes. We often use a few different methods:

• The foot in the door phenomenon based on the

idea that if you can get someone to agree to a

small request early on, they are more likely to

agree to a bigger request later.

• (ex: You want $20, ask for $5 now, and $15 later)

Compliance Strategies

• The door in the face strategy is asking for an

unreasonable request first, like $100, and then

moving it down to $20.

• You wanted $20 all along, but giving you $20

seems much better after first being asked for $100

• The Norms of reciprocity idea is based of the

theory that we feel compelled to do something nice

for someone who has done something nice for us.

Attribution Theory

• Another idea within the field of Social cognition

is Attribution Theory which tries to explain how

people determine the cause of something they

observe.

• We can either attribute our observations to

Personal (dispositional) factors or Situational

factors. These attributions can either be stable

or unstable.

Attribution Theory

• Say that your friend Mark does well in his

basketball game. If you think to yourself that Mark

did well in his game because he is good at

basketball, you have made a person (dispositional)

attribution.

• If you think to yourself, Mark did well because they

were playing an easy team, you made a situational

attribution. (Mark did well because of the situation)

Attribution Theory

• Additionally, your attributions can be stable or

unstable

• If you feel that Mark has always shown great talent in

basketball and that is why he did well, you have made

a person-stable attribution.

• If you think that Mark did well at his game because he

practiced his techniques and shots a ton in the days

leading up to the game, you have made a person-

unstable attribution.

Attribution Theory

• Now, you may put more weight onto the

situational context.

• If you think Mark did well because the team he

played is ALWAYS bad, you have made a

Situational-stable attribution.

• If you think Mark did well because the team he

played was good, but had a really off night, you

made a Situation-unstable attribution.

Attribution Theory

• Researcher Harold Kelley offered a 3-factor theory that explains the

kind of attributions we make based on 3 kinds of information:

Consistency, Distinctiveness and Consensus

• Consistency: how the individual acts in the same situation. How

does Mark normally play against THIS team?

• Distinctiveness: How similar this situation actually is to others we

have seen. Is this team comparable to other teams mark has played

and done well against? Does mark normally play well in games?

• Consensus: How others have fared in this situation. Have other

people played well against this team?

Attributional Biases• We often make mistakes in our attributions due to preconceived

notions about people.

• Even the expectations we have of other can influence the way we,

and the other person behaves. This is called a Self-fulfilling

prophecy

• Your friends tell you the Calculus teacher is mean so you go into

their class with a grumpy, bad attitude which elicits a poor attitude

from the teacher.

• However, If your friends tell you the teacher is awesome and nice,

you go in with a good cheerful attitude and the teacher responds

positively

Attributional Biases

• One of the most common errors in Attribution is the

Fundamental Attribution error. (Tendency to

overestimate dispositional/personal factors & not

consider the situation)

• Ex: You sit next to a man on the bus. He is quiet and

doesn’t say hello back to you. You assume he is a jerk.

However, you didn’t consider the fact he is on his way

home from the hospital where he was tending to his

sick wife.

Attributional Biases

• False-consensus effect: Overestimating the

amount of people who share the same

opinion/beliefs as you.

• Self-serving bias: Tendency to take more credit for

good outcomes than bad ones

• Just-world bias: Belief in our world as just. Bad

things happen to bad people. People deserve what

they get.

Stereotypes• We all have ideas about what members of different groups

are like. These ideas/expectations may influence how we

interact with these groups. These ideas we have are called

Stereotypes.

• Stereotypes can be positive or negative and are applicable to

almost any group of people in terms of race, ethnicity,

gender, geographic, religious, etc.

• Many Psychologists believe stereotypes are just schemata

about groups. Others believe stereotypes are harder to

change than schemata.

Prejudice

• Having negative stereotypes against a specific group

can lead to prejudice. Prejudice is an undeserved,

generally negative, attitude toward a group of people.

• Prejudices arise when stereotypes are uncritically

applied to all members of a group.

• If you stereotype French people as pompous or

Southerners as unintelligent, it can lead to a negative

attitude about these groups. This leads to

discrimination.

Discrimination

• Whereas prejudices and stereotypes are attitudes

and beliefs, Discrimination is an action against a

group.

• If I think all French people are pompous I have

stereotypes them. If this leads to me having a

negative attitude against them, I am prejudiced.

• However, if I act on this and refuse to hire a

French person, I have discriminated against them.

Ethnocentrism

• A person who is Ethnocentric has a belief that their

own culture, whether racial, geographic or religious is

superior to others.

• People become so used to their own cultures that they

often believe them to be the “norm” by which other

cultures should be judged.

• We can look down on others for not voting the same,

worshipping the same god or having a different skin

color.

Group Bias

• Often times we have the tendency to see our own

group (in-group) as more diverse than others (out-

groups)

• This is known as out-group homogeneity.

• We may tend to look at other cultures as having

members that are all the same.

• We also show a preference for our own groups. We tend

to view ourselves as generally good. This is called the

in-group bias.

Origins of Stereotypes and Prejudice

• Many theories exist on why we develop prejudices.

• Some researchers believe we magnify the

difference between our own group and others as a

way of cognitively categorizing our world.

• Others believe that we develop prejudices through

modeling. Children with prejudiced parents tend to

raise children with similar prejudices.

Combating Prejudice

• One idea on how to reduce prejudice is the Contact

theory. This is the idea that hostility will be reduced

with contact between two opposing groups as long

as these groups are working towards a mutual goal

know as a Superordinate goal.

• This is often used in schools in attempts to have

multi-cultured groups of students work together on

a task.

Aggression and Anti-social Behavior

• One topic of great interest to social psychologists is the

study of Aggression and Anti-social behavior.

• Aggression is separated into two categories: Instrumental

and Hostile.

• Instrumental aggression is when the aggression is intended

to secure a particular end(beating up a kid so you can have

his lunch money)

• Hostile aggression is aggression for the sake of aggression.

No clear purpose exists

Aggression

• Freud suggested that aggression is linked to the

Thanatos(death instinct)

• Frustration-aggression hypothesis argues there is

a link between feelings of frustration and

aggressive behavior.

• Additionally, many psychologists believe

aggression stems from modeling (Bandura,

Bobo)

Pro-social Behavior

• Studies have also been conducted on people’s

willingness to help one another. This is termed Pro-

social behavior.

• Bystander intervention, an area of great research, is

studied to determine how more or less likely people

are to help someone in trouble.

• Psychologists have studied crimes in the view of

public to determine who helps, doesn’t help and why.

Pro-social Behavior• Interestingly, the more people around to view a

crime happening, the less likely one is to help.

This is known as the bystander effect.

• The larger the group witnessing the crime the

less responsibility we, as individuals feel. This is

called Diffusion of responsibility.

• Pluralistic ignorance is when we decide what is

appropriate behavior by looking at others. If no

one is acting, we deem that appropriate.

Attraction

• Social Psychologists are also interested in what

increases the chances that people will like one

another.

• Generally, people like those who are similar to

them (similarity), people who they are

frequently in contact with (proximity) and

people who return the feelings (reciprocal

liking).

Attraction

• Obviously, people who are physically

attractive attract more attention.

• Additionally, people who are attractive tend to

experience more social benefits than others.

• Attractive people, especially men, tend to be

looked at as competent in the workplace and

as possessing better qualities.

Love

• Love has long been a difficult concept to quantify.

Romantic love has been shown to correlate with

interpersonal attraction, heightened arousal and

sexual desires.

• We often self-disclose with those we love. This is the

sharing of bits of personal information. It should be

reciprocal. Relationships that lack self-disclosure can

be filled with anxiety, unhappiness and loneliness.

Social Influence on Behavior

• Our behaviors can be affected by another’s actions or

even someone else’s presence.

• Many studies have shown that some people perform

better at tasks when there are others watching them

than they would have done alone. This is known as

Social Facilitation.

• However, the more increasingly difficult the task, the

actual performance suffers. This is called Social

impairment.

Conformity

• Conformity is the tendency to go along with the

actions of others.

• Solomon Asch (3 vertical line study)

• Asch asked people to determine the longest line.

There were 3 people in a room. 2 were actors.

People not in on experiment, the majority of the

time conformed to the incorrect answers of the

group.

Stanley Milgram• Stanley Milgram created a very

controversial experiment involving

participants giving electric shocks to

people when told to do so.

• Results of this experiment were

“Shocking”

Group Dynamics

• All of us are members of groups. Often our groups

have norms and roles.

• One way people take advantage of being part of a

group is through Social loafing. This is individuals may

not put in as much effort for a task as they would

alone.

• One explanation for this is that your individual efforts

are less discernable when you are part of a group.

Group Dynamics

• Group Polarization is the tendency of groups to make

more extreme decisions than they would likely make as

individuals.

• Diffusion of responsibility plays a role into why groups

make such extreme decisions.

• Groupthink is a similar phenomenon in which groups

make bad decisions due to group members

suppressing reservations they may have about a

decision.

Group Dynamics

• When people get swept up in sort of a mob

mentality they do things they wouldn’t normally do,

like looting or rioting.

• This is due to the members feeling anonymous and

less responsible for their actions. This is known as

de-individuation.

• One additional sketchy experiment was the Stanford

Prison experiment conducted by Philip Zambardo.