Social Psychology

What is Social Psychology?

It is the study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others. Social Psychologists
consider the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations.

The broad scope of social psychology is conveyed by the kinds of questions psychologists ask, such as:
 How can we convince people to change their attitudes or to adopt new ideas and values?
 In what ways do we come to understand what others are like?
 How are we influenced by what others do and think?
 Why do some people display such violence, aggression and cruelty toward others that people
throughout the world live in fear of annihilation at their hands?
 And why, on the other hand, do some people place their own lives at risk to help others?

Subject Outline
 Attitudes, our evaluations of people and other stimuli.
 Examine how people form judgments about others and the causes of their behavior.
 Social influence, the process by which the actions of an individual or a group affect the behavior
of others.
 Examples of positive and negative social behavior.
 Factors that underlie aggression and helping.

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ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION
Attitudes are learned predispositions to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner to a particular
person, behavior, belief, or thing.
For example, when you think of the various people in your life, you hold vastly differing attitudes
toward them, depending on the nature of your interactions with them. These attitudes may range
from highly positive, to extremely negative.

Attitudes are also likely to vary in importance.

For example, our attitudes toward friends, family and peers are generally central to our
interactions in the social world,
our attitudes toward, say, television newscasters may be relatively insignificant.

ABC MODEL OF ATTITUDES.

Social psychologists generally consider attitudes to follow the ABC model, which suggests that an attitude
has three components:
1. Affect
2. Behavior
3. Cognition

 The affect component encompasses our positive or negative emotions about something – how we
feel about it.
 The behavior component consists of a predisposition or intention to act in a particular manner that is
relevant to our attitude.
 Finally, the cognition component refers to the beliefs and thoughts we hold about the object of our
attitude.
For example, someone’s attitude toward Mariah Carey may consist of a positive emotion (the affect
component), an intention to buy her latest recording (the behavior component), and the belief that
she is a good singer (the cognition component)

Affect
“I like to make my own decisions.”
“It angers me when others restrict
my rights”

Attitude
‘I am in your
favor of
legalized
Behavior abortion’ Cognition
“I intend to support “Poor women suffer if they
legislative means to permit cannot obtain an abortion.”
abortions”. “It is a woman’s right to deal
”I would consider getting an with her own body”
abortion if necessary” 2
Forming and Maintaining Attitudes
Although people do not enter the world holding well - defined attitudes towards any particular person or
object, anyone who has seen an infant smile at her parents know that at least certain attitudes develop
quickly. Interestingly, some of the same principles that govern how attitudes are acquired and develop in
the youngest of children continue to operate throughout life.

Classical conditioning and attitudes

Advertisers make use of the principles of classical conditioning of attitudes by attempting to ink a product
they want consumers to buy with a positive feeling or event.
For instance, many advisement feature young, attractive, healthy men and women using a
product.

The idea behind such advertisements is to create a classically conditioned response to the product, so that
a glimpse of it evokes a positive feeling. Attitudes that are reinforced, either verbally or nonverbally, tend
to be maintained.

Persuasion: Changing Attitudes

The work of advertiser draws heavily upon findings from social psychology regarding persuasion. Research
has is identified a number of factors that promote effective persuasion - many of which you will recognize
if you consider for a moment some of the advertisements with which you are most familiar.

The individual who delivers a persuasive message, known as the attitude communicator, has a major
impact on the effectiveness of that message. Communicators who are both physically and socially
attractive seem to produce greater attitude change.

As you might expect, it is not just who delivers the message but what the message is like that affects
attitude and behavior change. Most research suggests that highly intelligent people are more resistant to
persuasion that those who are less intelligent.

Central – route processing occurs when the recipient thoughtfully considers the issues and arguments
involved in persuasion.

Peripheral – route processing, in contrast, occurs when people are persuaded on the basis of factors
unrelated to the nature or quality of the content of a persuasive message. Instead, they are influenced by
factors that are irrelevant or extraneous to the attitude topic or issue, such as who is providing the
message or how long the arguments are.

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Social Cognition
It is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information
about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in
our social interactions.

Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)

The Social Learning Theory (SLT) started in the 1960s by Albert Bandura.

It developed into the SCT in 1986 and posits that learning occurs in a social context with a dynamic and
reciprocal interaction of the person, environment, and behavior.

Social cognition concerns the various psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantage
of being part of a social group. Of major importance to social cognition are the various social signals that
enable us to learn about the world. Such signals are particularly important in infant development.

A motivated—social cognitive perspective also defies relatively straightforward theories of imitation

and social learning, which assume that people are conservative because their parents (or other agents of
influence) modeled conservative attitudes or behaviors.

In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural schemata or schemas) describes a pattern of
thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. People
use schemata to organize current knowledge and provide a framework for future understanding.

Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception,
attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence
on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior.

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 Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance: The conflict that happens when a person holds two attitudes or thoughts
(referred to as cognitions) that contradict each other.

The presence of two contradictory cognitions (“ I smoke” and “ Smoking leads to cancer)produces
dissonance, which may be reduced through several methods.

Two contradictory cognitions

1. “I smoke”
2. “Smoking leads to cancer”.

Dissonance
Denying that cognitions are
Modifying one or both cognitions related (“There is no evidence
(” I really don't smoke too much.”) linking smoke and cancer.”)

Adding additional cognitions (”I exercise so

Changing perceived importance of much that it doesn’t matter that I smoke.”)
one cognition (”The evidence is weak
that smoking causes cancer.”)

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Persuasion: Changing the Attitudes
Why did the makers of Reeboks conclude that an endorsement by Shaquille O’Neal would lead people to
use more of their product?

According to professionals working in the field of advertising each of these celebrity endorsements is a
carefully selected match between the product and the individual chosen to represent it. It is not the
matter of finding a well-known celebrity; the celebrity must also be believable and trustworthy and also
reflect the qualities that advertises want their particular product to project.

The work for advertises draws heavily upon findings from social psychology regarding persuasion. This
research has identified a number of factors that promote effective persuasion - many which you will
recognize if you consider for a moment some of the advertisements with which you are most familiar.

Message Source
The individual who delivers a persuasive message, known as the attitude communication for, has a
major impact on effectiveness of that message.
Communicators who are both physically and socially attractive seem to produce greater attitude change.
Moreover, the expertise and trustworthiness of a communicator are related to the impact of the message
- except in situations in which the communicator is believed to have an ulterior motive.
If a prestigious communicator seems to be benefiting from persuading others, the message may be
discounted.
For example, a prestigious scientist who argues that a drug is safe would generally be a particularly
influenced source, unless it is revealed that the scientist has a financial interest in the drug’s manufacturer
and stands to benefit financially from its widespread use.

Characteristics of the Message

As you might expect, it is not just who delivers a message but what is like that affects attitude and behavior
change.

Characteristics of the Target

Once a message has been communicated, the characteristics of the target of the message determine
whether the message will be accepted.
For example, it seems reasonable to assume that recipient’s intelligence would be related to their
persuadability - and it is, although the relationship complex.
Specifically, high intelligence both aids and hinders persuasion. Because higher intelligence enables
people to understand a message better and recall later more easily, persuasion maybe more likely. On the
other hand, higher intelligence is associated with greater knowledge about a subject and more confidence
in one’s own opinions, and so messages of opposing viewpoints may be more likely to be rejected.

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How do social psychologists reconcile these conflicting predictions?
Although the question has yet to be definitively resolved, most research suggests that highly intelligent
people are more resistant to persuasion than those who are less intelligent.

Central-route processing occurs when the recipient thoughtfully considers the issues and arguments
involved in persuasion.

Peripheral-route processing, in contrast, occurs when people are persuaded on the basis of factors
unrelated to the nature or quality of the content of a persuasive message. Instead, they are influenced by
factors that are irrelevant or extraneous to the attitude topic or issue, such as who is providing the
message or how long the arguments are.

The Link Between Attitudes and Behavior

Not surprisingly, the attitudes influence behavior.
 If you like hamburgers (the affect component),
 are predisposed to eat at McDonalds or Burger King (the behavior component),
 and believe hamburgers are a good source of protein (the cognitive component),

it is very likely that you will eat hamburgers frequently. The strength of the link between particular
attitudes and behaviors varies, of course, but generally people strive for consistency between their
attitudes and their behavior.

Furthermore, people tend to be fairly consistent in the different attitudes they hold. You would probably
not hold the attitude that eating meat is immoral and still have a positive attitude towards hamburgers.

Interestingly, the consistency that leads attitudes to influence behavior sometimes works the other way
around, for in some cases it is our behavior that shapes our attitudes.

Social Cognition: Understanding Others

Regardless of whether they agreed with his policies and ideology, inspire of how much they felt he
distorted the facts at news conferences, and irrespective of the trouble his subordinates found themselves
in, most Americans genuinely liked former president Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s problems, which might
have been expected to reflect unfavorably upon him personally, never seemed to affect his popularity,
and he was dubbed the ‘Teflon president ‘by the press. Perceived as a ‘nice guy ‘, he remained one of the
most popular presidents of the century until the end of his second term.

Situations such as this illustrate the power of our impressions and attest to the importune too determining
how people develop an understanding of others. One of the dominant areas of study in social psychology
during the last few years has focused on learning how we come to understand what others are like and
how explain the reasons underlying others behavior.

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Impression Formation
How do we decide that Adam is a flirt, or Sam is a jerk, or John is a really nice guy?
The earliest work on social cognition was designed to examine impression formation, the process by
which an individual organizers information about another person to form an overall impression of that
person.

In one classic study, for instance, students were told that they were about to gear a guest lecturer.
One group of students were told that the lecturer was ‘a rather warm person, industrious, critical,
practical, and determined’ while a second group was told that he was rather ‘a cold person, industrious,
critical, practical and determined.’

The simple substitution of ‘cold’ for ‘warm’ was responsible for drastic differences in the way students in
each group perceived the lecturer, even though he gave the same talk in the same style in each condition.
Students who had been told he was ‘warm’ rated him considerably more positive than students who had
been told he was ‘cold.’

The findings from this experiment led to additional research on impression formation that focused on the
way in which people pay particular attention to certain unusually important traits - known as central traits
- to help them form an overall impression of others. According to this work, the presence of a central trait
alters the meaning of other traits. Hence the description of the lecturer as ‘industrious’ presumably meant
something different according to whether it was associated with the central trait ‘warm’ or ‘cold.’

Attribution Theory
The theory of personality that seeks to explain how we decide, on the basis of samples of an individual’s
behavior, what the specific causes of that person’s behaviors are.

Attribution Processes: Understanding the Causes of Behavior

In contrast to work on social cognition, which describes how people develop an overall impression about
others personality traits, attribution theory seeks to explain how we decide, on the basis of samples of
an individual behavior, what the specific causes of that person’s behavior are.

Figure
The general process we use to determine the causes of behavior and other social occurrences proceeds
in several steps, as illustrated in figure 18.4. after first noticing that a behavioral event has occurred, we
must interpret the meaning of the event. This leads to the formulation of an initial explanation. Depending
on the time available, the cognitive resources on hand ( such as the attention that can be given to the
matter ), and the motivation of the perceiver ( determined In part by how important the event is ), we
may then choose to accept our initial explanation or seek to modify it. If we had the time, cognitive
resources, and the motivation, then the event becomes the trigger for deliberate problems solving as we
seek a fuller explanation. During the problem formulation and resolution stage, we may try out several
possibilities before determining that a solution has been reached.

Situational causes (of behavior): A cause of behavior that is based on environmental factors.

Dispositional causes (of behavior): A cause of behavior that is based on internal traits or personality
factors.

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Bases in Attribution: To Err Is Human
If we always processed information in a rational manner the attribution theory suggests, the world might
run a lot more smoothly. Unfortunately, although attribution theory generally makes accurate
predictions, people do not always process information about others in as logical a fashion as the theory
seems to suggest.

In fact, research reveals consistent biases in the ways people make attributions. Among the most typical:

 The fundamental attribute errors. One of the most common biases in people’s attributions in the
tendency to over-attribute others behavior is dispositional causes, and the corresponding failure to
recognize the importance of situational causes. Known as the fundamental attribute error, the
tendency is quite prevalent. We tend to exaggerate the importance of personality characteristics
(dispositional causes) in producing others behaviors, minimizing the influence of the environment
(situational factors)

 Fundamental attribute error: A tendency to attribute others behavior to dispositional causes and the
tendency to minimize the importance of situational causes.

 Halo effect: A phenomenon in which as initial understanding that a person has positive traits is used
to infer other uniformly positive characteristics.

Social Influence
Based on what research has told us about social influence, the process by which the actions of an
individual or group effect the behavior of others, the answer to the question would almost always be the
first option. As you undoubtedly know from your own experience, pressure to conform can be painfully
strong, and they can bring about changes in behavior that, when considered in perspective, otherwise
never would have occurred.

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Conformity: a change in behavior or attributes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or
standards of other people.

Among the most important variables conformity are the following:

 The characteristics of the group. The more attractive a group is to its members, the
greater its ability to perform conformity (Hogg & Hardic, 1992).

Furthermore, a person’s relative status, the social rank held within a group, is critical: The lower
a person’s status in the group, the greater the power of the group over that person’s behavior.
 The nature of the individual’s response. Conformity is considerably higher when people
must make a response publicly than when they can respond privately, as our founding
fathers noted when they authorized secret ballots in voting.

 The kind of task. People working on tasks and questions that are ambiguous (having no
clear answer) are more susceptible to a social pressure. Asked to an opinion, such as on
what type of clothing is fashionable, a person is more likely to yield to conformist
pressures than is asked a question of fact. Moreover, tasks at which an individual is less
competent relative to the group create conditions in which conformity is more likely.

 Unanimity of the group. Conformity pressures are most pronounced in groups that are
unanimous in their support of a position. But what of a case in which people are dissenting
views have an ally in the group, known as a social supporter, who agrees with them?
Having just one-person present who shares the unpopular point of view is sufficient to
reduce conformity pressure (Allen, 1975; Levine,1989).

Compliance: Submitting to Direct Social Pressure

 When we discuss conformity, we are usually talking about a phenomenon in which the
social pressure is subtle or indirect.
 But in some situations, social pressure is much more obvious, and there is direct, explicit
pressure to endorse a particular point of view or to behave in a certain way. Social
psychologists call the type of behavior that occurs in response to direct social pressure
compliance.

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Social Identity Theory
Henri Tajfel's greatest contribution to psychology was social identity theory.
 Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s).
 Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which
people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a
sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.
 In order to increase our self-image, we enhance the status of the group to which we
belong.
For example, England is the best country in the world!
 We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against
the out group (the group we don’t belong to).
For example, the Americans, French etc. are a bunch of losers!
 Therefore, we divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social
categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
 This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). Social identity theory states that the
in-group will discriminate against the out-group to enhance their self-image.
 The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will
seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
 Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may
result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the
Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and
Serbs.

Stereotyping
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based
on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to
exaggerate:
1. The differences between groups.
2. The similarities of things in the same group.

We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as
being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more
similar than they are. Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them”
and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.

PREJUDICE: The negative (or positive) evaluations of groups and their members.

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DISCRIMINATION:
 Negative behavior toward members of a particular group.
 We view individuals not in terms of their individual characteristics, but in terms of their
membership in a particular group.
 The most common stereotypes and forms of prejudice have to do with racial, religious, and ethnic
categorizations.
 Although usually backed by little or no evidence, stereotypes often have harmful consequences.
 In addition, other explanations for prejudice emphasize human cognitive limitations that lead us
to categorize people on the basis of visually conspicuous physical features such as race, sex, and
ethnic group. Such categorization can lead to the development of stereotypes and ultimately to
discriminatory behavior.

WORKING TO END PREJUDICE and DISCRIMINATION

How can we diminish the effects of prejudice and discrimination? Psychologists have developed several
strategies that have proven effective. Among them:
 Increasing contact between the target of stereotyping and the holder of the stereotype.
 Making positive values and norms against prejudice more conspicuous.
 Providing information about the objects of stereotyping.
 Reducing stereotype vulnerability, obstacles to performance that stem from awareness of
society’s stereotypes regarding minority group members.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Why are we attracted to certain people and what progression do social relationships follow?
What factors underlie aggression and prosocial behavior?

Interpersonal attraction: Positive feelings for others: liking and loving.

 We turn to two routes that social psychologists have learned about the sources of our attraction
to others, and we end with a look at two sides of the coin of human behavior: aggression and
helping.

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 When 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote “How do I love thee? Let me count the
ways,” she was expressing feelings about a topic that is central to most people’s lives – and one
that has developed into a major subject of investigation by social psychologists: loving and liking.
Known more formally as the study of interpersonal attraction or close relationships, this topic
encompasses the factors that lead to positive feelings for others.

How do I like thee, among the most important factors considered by social psychologists are the
following?
 Proximity
 Mere exposure
 Similarity
 Need complementarity
 Physical attractiveness
- Whereas our knowledge of what makes people like one another is extensive, our understanding
of love is more limited in scope and recently acquired.
- For some time, social psychologists believed that love was a phenomenon too difficult to observe
and study in a controlled, scientific way.
- However, love is such a central issue in most people’s lives that, in time, social psychologists could
not resist its allure and became infatuated with the topic.
- With more than one out of two marriages ending in divorce, and broken love affairs a common
phenomenon, it is not surprising that social psychologists have begun to turn their attention
increasingly toward understanding how relationships develop, are maintained and, in some cases
dissolve.
- Once relationships have evolved, how can we distinguish successful ones from those that will
ultimately fail? According to Sternberg’s theory of love, the three individual components of love
–intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment _vary in their influence over time and follow
distinct courses.
- The disruption of communication patterns may be both a cause and effect of the decline of a
relationship.

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Obedience, Prejudice
 Compliance techniques provide a means by which people are gently led toward
agreement with another person’s request.
 In some cases, however, requests are geared toward producing Obedience, a change in
behavior due to the commands of others.
 Although Obedience is considerably less common than conformity and compliance, it
does occur in several specific kinds of relationships.
For example, we may show Obedience to our boss, teacher, or parent, merely because of
the power they hold to reward or punish us

Milgram’s Studies on Obedience to Authority

 The powerful ability of those in authority to control others was demonstrated in a
remarkable set of studies performed by Stanley Milgram (1963).
 Milgram was interested in understanding the factors that lead people to obey the orders
given by people in authority.
 He designed a study in which he could observe the extent to which a person who
presented himself as an authority would be able to produce obedience, even to the extent
of leading people to cause harm to others.

 Like his professor Solomon Asch, Milgram’s interest in social influence stemmed in part
from his desire to understand how the presence of a powerful person—particularly the
German dictator Adolf Hitler who ordered the killing of millions of people during World
War II—could produce obedience.
 Under Hitler’s direction, the German SS troops oversaw the execution of 6 million Jews as
well as other “undesirables,” including political and religious dissidents, homosexuals,
mentally and physically disabled people, and prisoners of war.
 Milgram used newspaper ads to recruit men (and in one study, women) from a wide
variety of backgrounds to participate in his research.
 When the research participant arrived at the lab, he or she was introduced to a man who
the participant believed was another research participant but who was actually an
experimental confederate.
 The experimenter explained that the goal of the research was to study the effects of
punishment on learning.
 After the participant and the confederate both consented to participate in the study, the
researcher explained that one of them would be randomly assigned to be the teacher and
the other the learner. They were each given a slip of paper and asked to open it and to
indicate what it said.
 In fact both papers read teacher, which allowed the confederate to pretend that he had
been assigned to be the learner and thus to assure that the actual participant was always
the teacher. While the research participant (now the teacher) looked on, the learner was
taken into the adjoining shock room and strapped to an electrode that was to deliver the
punishment. The experimenter explained that the teacher’s job would be to sit in the
control room and to read a list of word pairs to the learner. After the teacher read the list

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 once, it would be the learner’s job to remember which words went together. For instance,
if the word pair was blue-sofa, the teacher would say the word blue on the testing trials
and the learner would have to indicate which of four possible words (house, sofa, cat, or
carpet) was the correct answer by pressing one of four buttons in front of him.

 After the experimenter gave the “teacher” a sample shock (which was said to be at 45
volts) to demonstrate that the shocks really were painful, the experiment began. The
research participant first read the list of words to the learner and then began testing him
on his learning.

 The experimenter sat behind the teacher and explained to him that each time the learner
made a mistake the teacher was to press one of the shock switches to administer the
shock. They were to begin with the smallest possible shock (15 volts) but with each
mistake the shock was to increase by one level (an additional 15 volts).

 Once the learner (who was, of course, actually an experimental confederate) was alone
in the shock room, he unstrapped himself from the shock machine and brought out a tape
recorder that he used to play a prerecorded series of responses that the teacher could
hear through the wall of the room.

 The teacher heard the learner say “ugh!” after the first few shocks. After the next few
mistakes, when the shock level reached 150 volts, the learner was heard to exclaim “Get
me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out!”
As the shock reached about 270 volts, the learner’s protests became more vehement, and
after 300 volts the learner proclaimed that he was not going to answer any more
questions. From 330 volts and up the learner was silent. The experimenter responded to
participants’ questions at this point, if they asked any, with a scripted response indicating
that they should continue reading the questions and applying increasing shock when the
learner did not respond.

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