12 social psychology

Social Psychology
Psychology 2012 – Fall 2003

Introduction: What Is Social
Psychology?
 The scientific study of how people think,
feel, and behave in social situations.
 Social cognition – the study of the mental
processes people use to make sense out
of their social environment
 Social influence – the study of the effect of
situational factors and other people on an
individual’s behavior

Person Perception: Forming
Impressions of Other People
 On the basis of very limited information, we quickly
draw conclusions about the nature of people who are
complete strangers to us
 Person perception – refers to the mental processes we use
to form judgments and draw conclusions about the
characteristics and motives of others

Personal perception is an active and subjective process that
always occurs in some interpersonal context, which has three
key components:
 The characteristics of the individual you are attempting to size up
 Your own characteristics as the perceiver
 The specific situation in which the process occurs

 Person perception follows some basic principles
1. Your reactions to others are determined by your
perceptions of them, not by who or what they really are
2. Your goals in a particular situation determine the amount
and kind of information you collect about others
3. In every situation, you evaluate people partly in terms of
how you expect them to act in the situation

Social norms are the rules or expectations, for appropriate
behavior in a particular social situation
4. Your self-perception also influences how your perceive
others and how your act on your perceptions

 Social categorization: using mental shortcuts
in person perception
 Social categorization – the mental process of
classifying people into groups on the basis of
common characteristics

It may be automatic and spontaneous, and it may be
unconscious
 Using social categories is cognitively efficient but
may lead to inaccurate conclusions

 Implicit personality theories
 Implicit personality theory – a network of
assumptions or beliefs about the
relationships among various types of
people, traits, and behaviors
 Implicit personality theories, like social
categories, can be useful as mental
shortcuts in perceiving other people, but
they are not always accurate

Attribution: Explaining the
Causes of Behavior
 Attribution – the mental process of inferring the
causes of people’s behavior, including one’s own
 Also used to refer to the explanation made for a particular
behavior
 The fundamental attribution error – we tend to
spontaneously attribute the behavior of others to internal,
personal characteristics

While downplaying or underestimating the effects of external,
situational factors

Plays a role in a common explanatory pattern called blaming
the victim – an innocent victim is blamed for somehow causing
a misfortune
 Just world hypothesis – a victim must have done something wrong
because the world is fair

Attribution: Explaining the
Causes of Behavior
 The actor-observer discrepancy
 When it comes to explaining our own behavior, we are more
likely to use an external, situational attribution than an
internal, personal attribution

This is called the actor-observer discrepancy because there is a
discrepancy between the attributions you make when you are
the actor in a given situation
 And those you make when you are the observer of other people’s
behavior
 The self-serving bias – the tendency to attribute
successful outcomes of one’s own behavior to
internal causes
 And unsuccessful outcomes to external, situational causes

Common in many societies, the self-serving bias is far from
universal

The Social Psychology of
Attitudes
 Attitude – a learned tendency to
evaluate some object, person, or issue
in a particular way
 Such evaluations may be positive,
negative, or ambivalent

Attitudes can include three components:
 A cognitive component
 An emotional/affective component
 A behavioral component

Attitudes
 The effect of attitudes on behavior
 Research indicates that you’re most likely to
behave in accordance with your attitudes when:
1. Attitudes are extreme or are frequently expressed
2. Attitudes have been formed through direct experience
3. You are very knowledgeable about the subject
4. You have a vested interest in the subject
5. You anticipate a favorable outcome or response from
others

Attitudes
 The effect of behavior on attitudes
 Cognitive dissonance – an unpleasant state of
psychological tension (dissonance) that occurs
when there’s an inconsistency between two
thoughts or perceptions (cognitions)

It typically results from the awareness that attitudes and
behavior are in conflict

Cognitive dissonance can change the strength of an
attitude so that it is consistent with some behavior we’ve
already performed

Cognitive Dissonance
 The unpleasant state that occurs when
attitudes don't match behaviors
 Responses:
 Change Behavior
 Explain Away Inconsistency
 Minimize Inconsistency
 Change Attitude

Understanding Prejudice
 Prejudice – a negative attitude toward people
who belong to a specific social group
 Ultimately based on the exaggerated notion that
members of other social groups are very different
from members of our own social group
 Keep two well-established points in mind:

Racial and ethnic groups are far more alike than they are
different

Any differences that may exist between members of
different racial and ethnic groups are far smaller than
differences among various members of the same group

 From stereotypes to prejudice: in-groups and out-
groups
 Stereotype – a cluster of characteristics that are attributed to
members of a specific social group or category

Are based on the assumption that people have certain
characteristics because of their membership in a certain
group
 Once formed, stereotypes are hard to change

They are not always completely false; sometimes they
have a kernel of truth, making them easy to confirm

Especially when you see only what you expect to see
 When stereotypes become expectations that are applied to
all members of a given group, they can be both misleading
and damaging

 Another strong tendency in person perception is to
perceive others in terms of the basic social
categories of “us” and “them”
 The in-group (we) refers to the group to which we belong
 The out-group (them) refers to the groups of which we are
not a member
 Two important patterns characterize our views on in-
groups versus out-groups
1. When we describe the members of our in-group, we typically
see them as being quite varied,
 Despite having enough features in common to belong to the
same group
1. The out-group homogeneity effect – we tend to see members
of the out-group as much more similar to one another, even in
areas that have little to do with the criteria for group
membership

 In-group bias – our tendency to make
favorable, positive attributions for
behaviors by members of our in-group
 And unfavorable, negative attributions for
behaviors by members of out-groups

Ethnocentrism – one form of in-group bias that
focuses on the belief that one’s own culture or
ethnic group is superior to others

 In combination, stereotypes and in-group/out-
group bias form the cognitive basis for
prejudicial attitudes
 Prejudice also has a strong emotional component,
which is intensely negative

Involving hatred, contempt, fear, and loathing
 Behaviorally, prejudice can be displayed in
the form of discrimination
 Behaviors ranging from privately sneering at
another group to physically attacking member of
the out-group

 Overcoming prejudice
 Social psychologist Sherif helped clarify the conditions that
produce intergroup conflict and harmony

Best known for his “Robbers Cave” experiment

The Robbers Cave Experiment
 Boys were randomly assigned to two groups – a fierce rivalry
quickly developed
 To restore harmony, Sherif created a series of situations in which
the two groups would need to cooperate to achieve a common
goal
 After a series of joint efforts, the rivalry diminished and the groups
became friends
 Sherif demonstrated how hostility between groups could be
created and how that hostility could be overcome

However, some researchers questioned the applicability of
these results to other intergroup situations, in which intrinsic
differences might come into play

 The jigsaw classroom: Promoting cooperation
 Social psychologist Aronson adapted Sherif’s results
to a newly integrated elementary school
 When mere contact between black and white children did
not dissipate tension and prejudice, Aronson reasoned that
the competitive schoolroom atmosphere might be partly at
fault
 Aronson developed a cooperative technique called the
jigsaw classroom technique

Which brought students together in small, ethnically diverse
groups to work on a mutual project
 As a result, interdependence and cooperation replaced
competition
 In combination, the Robbers Cave study and the jigsaw
classroom experiment illustrated how cooperative efforts can
promote intergroup harmony

 Sometimes people who are not consciously
prejudiced against particular groups nevertheless
react in prejudiced ways
 Psychologist Devine argues that prejudice reduction
at the individual level is a three-step process
1. Individuals must decide that prejudiced responses are
wrong and consciously reject prejudice and stereotyped
thinking
2. They must internalize their nonprejudiced beliefs so that
they become an integral part of their self-concept
3. Individuals must learn to inhibit automatic prejudicial
reactions and deliberately replace them with nonprejudiced
responses that are based on their personal standards

Conformity: Following the
Crowd
 Social influence – the psychological study of
how our behavior is influenced by the social
environment and other people
 Conformity – the tendency to adjust one’s
behavior, attitudes, or beliefs to group norms in
response to real or imagined group pressure

American social psychologist Asch was best known for
his pioneering studies of conformity

Asch’s research, which involved a simple, objective task
with an obvious answer (judging the similarity in the
lengths of lines), demonstrated:
 The degree to which people will conform to a majority view
and
 The conditions under which conformity is most likely

Conformity
 Tendency to follow others in attitudes
or behaviors
 Generally positive, allows us to live
together

Asch’s Study
 Used 7-9 people, only one a real subject
 Had people judging line lengths
 At first confederates told the truth
 Then they all began giving the same wrong
answer

Follow Up Studies
Later, Asch measured the effect of having at least
one confederate dissent & give the correct answer

Crowd
 Factors influencing conformity
 We sometimes find ourselves conforming
to the larger group for two basic reasons:

Normative social influence – refers to behavior
that is motivated by the desire to gain social
acceptance and approval

Informational social influence – refers to
behavior that is motivated by the desire to be
correct

Crowd
 Culture and conformity
 Meta-analysis indicates that conformity is
generally higher in collectivistic cultures than in
individualistic ones

Individualistic cultures tend to emphasize independence,
self-expression, and standing out from the crowd;
 Thus the whole notion of conformity tends to carry a
negative connotation

In collectivistic cultures, however, publicly conforming
while privately disagreeing tends to be regarded as
socially appropriate tact or sensitivity

Conformity Increases
When:
 People are unsure of a situation
 People are of low group status
 People lack information
 The behavior is public

Obedience: Just Following
Orders
 Social psychologist Milgram is best known for
his experimental investigations of obedience
 Obedience – the performance of an action in
response to the direct orders of an authority or
person of higher status
 Milgram’s original obedience experiment

Milgram embarked on one of the most systematic and
controversial investigations in the history of psychology;
 How and why people obey the destructive dictates of an
authority figure

Orders
1. Following a “fixed” drawing to determine “teacher”
(always a real subject) and “learner” (always an
accomplice in the experiment), the “learner” was
strapped into an “electric chair”
2. The teacher tested the learner on a simple word-
pair memory task
3. The teacher was given a sample shock of 45 volts
 No more actual shocks were delivered at any other time in
the experiment
1. At predetermined levels, the learner vocalized his
discomfort, then his pain, then agonized screams,
and finally dead silence
2. If the teacher protested, the experimenter told him
that he must continue

Orders
 The results of Milgram’s original experiment
 Milgram asked psychiatrists, college students, and
middle-class adults to predict how subjects would
behave

All three groups predicted that all of Milgram’s subjects
would refuse to obey at some point

None of hose surveyed thought that any of Milgram’s
subjects would go to the full 450 volts
 They were wrong.

2/3 of Milgram’s subjects went to the full 450 volt level

Of those who defied the experimenter, not one stopped
before the 300 volt level

Orders
 Making sense out of Milgram’s findings
 Milgram and others identified several aspects of
the experimental situation that had a strong
impact on the subjects
1. A previously well-established framework to obey
2. The situation, or context, in which the obedience
occurred
3. The gradual, repetitive escalation of the task
4. The experimenter’s behavior and reassurances
5. The physical and psychological separation from the
learner

Orders
 Conditions that undermine obedience
 In a lengthy series of experiments involving over
1,000 subjects Milgram systematically varied the
basic obedience paradigm
 Milgram identified several conditions that decrease
the likelihood of destructive obedience

Willingness to obey diminishes sharply when the buffers
that separate the teacher from the learner are lessened
or removed
 When teachers were allowed to act as their own
authority and freely choose the shock level

95 percent did not venture beyond 150 volts – the first
point at which the learner protested

Orders
 Asch, Milgram, and the real world:
Implications of the classical social influence
studies
 The scientific study of conformity and
obedience had produced some important
insights
 Our behavior is influenced by situational factors
 Each of us does have the capacity to resist group
or authority pressure

Helping Behavior: Coming to
the Aid of Strangers
 Helping behavior: coming to the aid of strangers
 The chilling story of Kitty Genovese’s murder led
researchers to investigate what factors influence our
decision to help another person.

Social psychologists Latane and Darley wrote the
landmark book, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why
Doesn’t He Help?
 Factors that increase the likelihood of bystanders helping
1. The “feel good, do good” effect
2. Feeling guilty
3. Seeing others who are willing to help
4. Perceiving the other person as deserving help
5. Knowing how to help
6. A personalized relationship with the victim

Helping Behavior: Coming to
the Aid of Strangers
 Factors that decrease the likelihood of bystanders
helping
1. The presence of other people

The bystander effect is the phenomenon in which the greater
the number of people present, the less likely each individual is
to help someone in distress. This seems to occur for two
reasons
 Diffusion of responsibility – the phenomenon in which the
presence of other people makes it less likely that any individual
will help someone in distress

Because the obligation to intervene is shared (diffused) among all
the onlookers
 Our desire to behave in a socially acceptable way (normative
social influence) and to appear correct (informational social
influence)
1. Being in a big city or a very small town
2. Vague or ambiguous situations
3. When the personal costs for helping outweigh the benefits

Bystander Effect
(Data from Darley & Latane, 1968)

Compliance Techniques
 Foot in the door
 Door in the face

Foot in the Door
 Start with a small request
 Follow up with a large one
% complying
with large
request

Door in the Face
 Start with a large request.
 Follow up with a small one.
% complying
with small
request

Group Influence
 Social Facilitation
 Social Loafing
 Group Polarization
 Groupthink

Social Facilitation
Positive effects on performance
due to the presence of an
audience or of co-actors

Social Loafing
The tendency to put forth less
effort when working on a task
with others than when working
alone

Group Polarization
Group discussion causes
members to shift to more
extreme positions

Groupthink
 Strikes tightly-knit groups
 Results in hesitation to dissent
in order to preserve solidarity

12 social psychology

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