PSYCHOLOGY

(8th Edition) David Myers

PowerPoint Slides Aneeq Ahmad Henderson State University
Worth Publishers, 2006

Social Psychology
Chapter 18

Social Psychology
Social Thinking
Attribution of Behavior to Persons or Situations Attitudes and Action

Social influence
Conformity and Obedience Group Influence

Social Psychology
Social Relations
Prejudice Aggression Conflict Attraction Altruism Peace Making

Focuses in Social Psychology

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Herman Melville Social psychology scientifically studies how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

Social Thinking
1. Does his absenteeism signify illness, laziness, or a stressful work atmosphere? 2. Was the horror of 9/11 the work of crazed evil people or ordinary people corrupted by life events? Social thinking involves thinking about others, especially when they engage in doing things that are unexpected.

Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations

Attribution Theory: Fritz Heider (1958) suggested that we have a tendency to give causal explanations for someones behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the persons disposition.

http://www.stedwards.edu

Fritz Heider
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Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations

A teacher may wonder whether a childs hostility reflects an aggressive personality (dispositional attribution) or is a reaction to stress or abuse (a situational attribution).
Dispositions are enduring personality traits. So, if Joe is a quiet, shy, and introverted child, he is likely to be like that in a number of situations.

http://www.bootsnall.org

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of the situations in analyzing the behaviors of others leads to the fundamental attribution error. We see Joe as quiet, shy, and introverted most of the time, but with friends he is very talkative, loud, and extroverted.

Effects of Attribution
How we explain someones behavior affects how we react to it.

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Attitude
A belief and feeling that predisposes a person to respond in a particular way to objects, other people, and events. If we believe a person is mean, we may feel dislike for the person and act in an unfriendly manner.

Attitudes Can Affect Action

Our attitudes predict our behaviors imperfectly because other factors, including the external situation, also influence behavior.

Democratic leaders supported Bushs attack on Iraq under public pressure. However, they had their private reservations.

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Attitudes Can Affect Action

Not only do people stand for what they believe in (attitude), they start believing in what they stand for.

13 (beliefs). Cooperative actions can lead to mutual liking

D. MacDonald/ PhotoEdit

Small Request Large Request

In the Korean War, Chinese communists solicited cooperation from US army prisoners by asking them to carry out small errands. By complying to small errands they were likely to comply to larger ones.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Role Playing Affects Attitudes

Zimbardo (1972) assigned the roles of guards and prisoners to random students and found that guards and prisoners developed role- appropriate attitudes.
Originally published in the New Yorker

Phillip G. Zimbardo, Inc.

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Actions Can Affect Attitudes

Why do actions affect attitudes? One explanation is that when our attitudes and actions are opposed, we experience tension. This is called cognitive dissonance.

To relieve ourselves of this tension we bring our attitudes closer to our actions (Festinger, 1957).

Cognitive Dissonance

Social Influence
The greatest contribution of social psychology is its study of attitudes, beliefs, decisions, and actions and the way they are molded by social influence.
NON SEQUITER 2000 Wiley. Dist. by Universal Press Syndicate Reprinted with Permission

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Conformity & Obedience

Behavior is contagious, modeled by one followed by another. We follow behavior of others to conform. Other behaviors may be an expression of compliance (obedience) toward authority.

Conformity

Obedience

The Chameleon Effect

Conformity: Adjusting ones behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).

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Group Pressure & Conformity

Suggestibility is a subtle type of conformity, adjusting our behavior or thinking toward some group standard.

Group Pressure & Conformity

An influence resulting from ones willingness to accept others opinions about reality.

William Vandivert/ Scientific American

Conditions that Strengthen Conformity

1. 2. 3. 4. One is made to feel incompetent or insecure. The group has at least three people. The group is unanimous. One admires the groups status and attractiveness. 5. One has no prior commitment or response. 6. The group observes ones behavior. 7. Ones culture strongly encourages respect for a social standard.

Reasons for Conformity

Normative Social Influence: Influence resulting from a persons desire to gain approval or avoid rejection. A person may respect normative behavior because there may be a severe price to pay if not respected.

Informative Social Influence: The group may provide valuable information, but stubborn people will never listen to others.

Informative Social Influence

Baron and colleagues (1996) made students do an eyewitness identification task. If the task was easy (lineup exposure 5 sec.), conformity was low in comparison to a difficult (1/2 sec. exposure) task.

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Informative Social Influence

Baron et al., (1996)

Obedience
People comply to social pressures. How would they respond to outright command? Stanley Milgram designed a study that investigates the effects of authority on obedience.
Courtesy of CUNY Graduate School and University Center

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)

Both Photos: 1965 By Stanley Miligram, from the film Obedience, dist. by Penn State, Media Sales

Milgrams Study

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Milgrams Study: Results

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Individual Resistance
A third of the individuals in Milgrams study resisted social coercion.

An unarmed individual single-handedly challenged a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square.

AP/ Wide World Photos

Lessons from the Conformity and Obedience Studies

In both Ash's and Milgram's studies, participants were pressured to follow their standards and be responsive to others.

In Milgrams study, participants were torn between hearing the victims pleas and the experimenters orders.

Group Influence
How do groups affect our behavior? Social psychologists study various groups:

1. One person affecting another 2. Families 3. Teams 4. Committees

Individual Behavior in the Presence of Others

Social facilitation: Refers to improved performance on tasks in the presence of others. Triplett (1898) noticed cyclists race times were faster when they competed against others than when they just raced against the clock.
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Michelle Agnis/ NYT Pictures

Social Loafing
The tendency of an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal than when tested individually (Latan, 1981).

Deindividuation
The loss of self-awareness and selfrestraint in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.

Mob behavior

Effects of Group Interaction

Group Polarization enhances a groups prevailing attitudes through a discussion. If a group is like-minded, discussion strengthens its prevailing opinions and attitudes.
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Groupthink
A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides the realistic appraisal of alternatives. Attack on Pearl Harbor Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis Watergate Cover-up Chernobyl Reactor Accident

Power of Individuals
Margaret Bourke-White/ Life Magazine. 1946 Time Warner, Inc.

The power of social influence is enormous, but so is the power of the individual. Non-violent fasts and appeals by Gandhi led to the independence of India from the British.

Gandhi
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Social Relations
Social psychology teaches us how we relate to one another through prejudice, aggression, and conflict to attraction, and altruism and peacemaking.

Prejudice
Simply called prejudgment, a prejudice is an unjustifiable (usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice is often directed towards different cultural, ethnic, or gender groups.

Components of Prejudice 1. Beliefs (stereotypes) 2. Emotions (hostility, envy, fear) 3. Predisposition to act (to discriminate)

Reign of Prejudice
Prejudice works at the conscious and [more at] the unconscious level. Therefore, prejudice is more like a kneejerk response than a conscious decision.

How Prejudiced are People?

Over the duration of time many prejudices against interracial marriage, gender, homosexuality, and minorities have decreased.

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Racial & Gender Prejudice

Americans today express much less racial and gender prejudice, but prejudices still exist.

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Race
Nine out of ten white respondents were slow when responding to words like peace or paradise when they saw a black individuals photo compared to a white individuals photo (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003).

Gender
Most women still live in more poverty than men. About 100,000,000 women are missing in the world. There is a preference for male children in China and India, even with sexselected abortion outlawed.

Gender
Although prejudice prevails against women, more people feel positively toward women than men. Women rated picture b [feminized] higher (665) for a matrimonial ad (Perrett, 1998).
Professor Dave Perrett, St. Andrews University

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Social Roots of Prejudice

Why does prejudice arise? 1. Social Inequalities 2. Social Divisions 3. Emotional Scapegoating

Social Inequality
Prejudice develops when people have money, power, and prestige, and others do not. Social inequality increases prejudice.

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In and Out Groups

Ingroup: People with whom one shares a common identity. Outgroup: Those perceived as different from ones ingroup. Ingroup Bias: The tendency to favor ones own group.

49 Scotlands famed Tartan Army fans.

Mike Hewitt/ Getty Images

Emotional Roots of Prejudice

Prejudice provides an outlet for anger [emotion] by providing someone to blame. After 9/11 many people lashed out against innocent Arab-Americans.

Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

One way we simplify our world is to categorize. We categorize people into groups by stereotyping them.
Michael S. Yamashita/ Woodfin Camp Associates

51 alike. Foreign sunbathers may think Balinese look

Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

In vivid cases such as the 9/11 attacks, terrorists can feed stereotypes or prejudices (terrorism). Most terrorists are non-Muslims.

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Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

The tendency of people to believe the world is just, and people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (the just-world phenomenon).
The New Yorker Collection, 1981, Robert Mankoff from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Hindsight Bias
After learning an outcome, the tendency to believe that we could have predicted it beforehand may contribute to blaming the victim and forming a prejudice against them.

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Aggression
Aggression can be any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. It may be done reactively out of hostility or proactively as a calculated means to an end. Research shows that aggressive behavior emerges from the interaction of biology and experience.

The Biology of Aggression

Three biological influences on aggressive behavior are: 1. Genetic Influences 2. Neural Influences 3. Biochemical Influences

Influences
Genetic Influences: Animals have been bred for aggressiveness for sport and at times for research. Twin studies show aggression may be genetic. In men, aggression is possibly linked to the Y chromosome. Neural Influences: Some centers in the brain, especially the limbic system (amygdala) and the frontal lobe, are intimately involved with aggression.

Influences
Biochemical Influences: Animals with diminished amounts of testosterone (castration) become docile, and if injected with testosterone aggression increases. Prenatal exposure to testosterone also increases aggression in female hyenas.

The Psychology of Aggression

Four psychological factors that influence aggressive behavior are: 1. Dealing with aversive events 2. Learning aggression is rewarding 3. Observing models of aggression 4. Acquiring social scripts

Aversive Events
Studies in which animals and humans experience unpleasant events reveal that those made miserable often make others miserable.

Ron Artest (Pacers) attack on Detroit Pistons fans.

Jeff Kowalsky/ EPA/ Landov

Environment
Even environmental temperature can lead to aggressive acts. Murders and rapes increased with the temperature in Houston.

Frustration-Aggression Principle
A principle in which frustration (caused by the blocking of an attempt to achieve a desired goal) creates anger, which can generate aggression.

Learning that Aggression is Rewarding

When aggression leads to desired outcomes, one learns to be aggressive. This is shown in both animals and humans. Cultures that favor violence breed violence. Scotch-Irish settlers in the South had more violent tendencies than their Quaker Dutch counterparts in the Northeast of the US.

Observing Models of Aggression

Sexually coercive men are promiscuous and hostile in their relationships with women. This coerciveness has increased due to television viewing of R- and X-rated movies.
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Acquiring Social Scripts

The media portrays social scripts and generates mental tapes in the minds of the viewers. When confronted with new situations individuals may rely on such social scripts. If social scripts are violent in nature, people may act them out.

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Do Video Games Teach or Release Violence?

The general consensus on violent video games is that, to some extent, they breed violence. Adolescents view the world as hostile when they get into arguments and receive bad grades after playing such games.

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Summary

Conflict
Conflict is perceived as an incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas. A Social Trap is a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing their self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.

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A Game of Social Trap

By pursuing our self-interest and not trusting others, we can end up losers.

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Enemy Perceptions
People in conflict form diabolical images of one another.

http://www.aftonbladet.se

http://www.cnn.com

Saddam Hussein Wicked Pharaoh

George Bush Evil

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Psychology of Attraction
1. Proximity: Geographic nearness is a powerful predictor of friendship. Repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases their attraction (mere exposure effect).

A rare white penguin born in a zoo was accepted after 3 weeks by other penguins just due to proximity.

Rex USA

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Psychology of Attraction
2. Physical Attractiveness: Once proximity affords contact, the next most important thing in attraction is physical appearance.

Brooks Kraft/ Corbis

Brooks Kraft/ Corbis

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Psychology of Attraction
3. Similarity: Similar views among individuals causes the bond of attraction to strengthen. Similarity breeds content!

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Romantic Love
Passionate Love: An aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a love relationship.

Two-factor theory of emotion 1. Physical arousal plus cognitive appraisal 2. Arousal from any source can enhance one emotion depending upon what we interpret or label the arousal
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Romantic Love
Companionate Love: A deep, affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined.
Courtship and Matrimony (from the collection of Werner Nekes)

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Altruism
An unselfish regard for the welfare of others.

Equity: A condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give. Self-Disclosure: Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.

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Bystander Effect
Tendency of any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.

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Bystander Intervention
The decision-making process for bystander intervention.

Akos Szilvasi/ Stock, Boston

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The Norms for Helping

Social Exchange Theory: Our social behavior is an exchange process. The aim is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.
Reciprocity Norm: The expectation that we should return help and not harm those who have helped us. SocialResponsibility Norm: Largely learned, it is a norm that tells us to help others when they need us even though they may not repay us.

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Peacemaking
Superordinate Goals are shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.
Syracuse Newspapers/ The Image Works

Communication and understanding developed through talking to one another. Sometimes it is mediated by a third party. 80

Peacemaking
Graduated & Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction (GRIT): This is a strategy designed to decrease international tensions. One side recognizes mutual interests and initiates a small conciliatory act that opens the door for reciprocation by the other party.

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