Social Psychology

Normal Triplett

 Published first study of social psychology

 Effect of competition on performance
 People perform better on familiar tasks when in thepresence of others than when along

William McDougall and E.H Ross (sociologist) – first textbooks on social psychology

Verplank

 Social approval influences behavior

 Conversation course changes dramatically based upon the feedback (approval) from others
 Verplank, Pavlov Thorndike, Hull, Skinner – reinforcement theory

Social learning theorists: Albert Bandura

 Behavior is learned through imitation

Role theory

 People are aware of the social roles they are expected to fill and much of their observable behavior
can be attributed to adopting those roles

Cognitive Theory – cognitive constructs influence understanding of social behavior

ATTITUDES
 Components: cognition or beliefs, feelings ,behavioral predisposition
 Typically expressed in opinion statements

Theories
Consistenc  People prefer consistency, and will change or resist changing attitudes based upon
y Theories this preference
 Inconsistencies are viewed as stimuli/irritants often resolved by changing attitudes
Balance  ~way 3 elements (person, other person, thing/idea/some other person)
Theory  Balance exists when all 3 fit together harmoniously
(Fritz o when no balance, there will be stress, with a
Heider) tendency to remove this stress by achieve balance
(e.g., change attitudes)
 balance: 1 or 3 positives
 imbalance: if 0 or 2 positives
Cognitive Leon Festinger
Dissonance  Cognitive dissonance: conflict you feel when your attitudes are not in sync with your
Theory behaviors
 Most proactive of CDT predictions – engaging in behavior that conflicts with an
 attitude may result in changing one’s attitude so that it is consistent with the behavior
 The greater the dissonance, the greater the pressure to reduce dissonance, the less
the person’s attitude will change
o Attitude change generally occurs when the behavior is induced with minimum
pressure
 If person pressured to say/do something contrary to his privately held attitudes tend
to change those attitudes
 Dissonance can be reduced by changing dissonant elements or by adding consonant
elements
2 types of dissonant situations
 Free-choice: person makes a choice between several desirable alternatives;
o Post-decisional dissonance (dissonance emerging after his choice)
o Spreading of alternatives
 Accentuating positive in one or negative in the other, spreading apart the
relative worth of 2 alternatives
 Forced-compliance dissonance: person forced into behaving in a manner that is
inconsistent with his beliefs or attitudes
o Force may be either anticipated punishment/reward
Festinger and Carlsmith (forced-compliance dissonance)
 $1 vs. $20 받고 재미없는 실험 재밌다고 말한후 – deal with dissonance: $1
changed cognition, $20 explain away the dissonance
 No need to change internal cognitions when behavior can be justified by means of
external inducement
 Minimal(/insufficient) justification effect: changing internal cognitions to reduce the
dissonance when the external justification is minimal
 Alternative theory: Self-perception Theory (Daryl Bem)
Self-  Explain forced-compliance dissonance
Perception  When your attitudes about something are weak or ambiguous, you observe your own
Theory behavior and attribute an attitude to yourself e.g., I guess he likes is as he’s always
(Daryl eating it
Bem)  People infer what their attitudes are based upon observation of their own behavior
o $20 group attributes lying to the monetary compensation
 Doesn’t hypothesize a state of discomfort/dissonance (vs. Festinger)
o A person’s initial attitude is irrelevant and there’s no discomfort reduced by
behavior
 Overjustification effect: if you reward people for something they already like doing,
they may stop liking it
Carl  Attitudes change as a process of communicating a message with the intent to
Hovland’s persuade someone
Model  3 components of Communication of persuasion:
o Communicator/source
o Communication/presentation of argument
o Situation
 The more credible the source is perceived to be, the greater the persuasive impact
Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss
 Source credibility study
 Sleeper effect: persuasive impact of the high credibility source decreases while that of
 low credibility source increases
 Sources can increase their credibility by arguing against their own self-interest (e.g.,
drug addicts against drugs)
 2-sided messages: contain arguments for and against a position, as they seem to be
‘balanced’ communication
Elaboration Petty and Cacioppo
Likelihood  2 routes to persuasion
Model of o Central: issue very important to us
Persuasion  Strong arguments will change our minds
o Peripheral issue not very important/can’t clearly hear message
 Strength doesn’t matter
 What matters is how, by whom, in what surroundings
Resistance William McGuire
to  Analogy of inoculation against disease
Persuasion o People can be inoculated against the attack of persuasive communication
 Tested by using cultural truism
o Beliefs that are seldom questioned, thus vulnerable to attack
Refuted counterarguments
 People can be psychologically inoculated against an oncoming attack by first exposing
them to a weakened attach
 Inoculate people against attacks on cultural truisms by refuted counterarguments
(first presenting argument against the truisms and then refuting the argument)
 Motivates people to practice defending their beliefs
Belief perseverance
 Under certain conditions, people hold beliefs even after those beliefs have been
shown to be false
o If you are induced to believe a statement and then give your own explanation
for it, you will tend to continue to believe the statement even when the
statement is shown to be false
Reactance
 When social pressure to behave in a particular way becomes so blatant that the
person’s sense of freedom is threatened the person will tend to act in a way to
reassert a sense of freedom
 If you try too hard to persuade someone of something, that person will choose to
believe the opposite
AFFILIATION and ATTRACTION
Social Leon Festinger
Comparison We are drawn to affiliate because of a tendency to evaluate ourselves in relationship
Theory to others
1. People prefer to evaluate themselves by objective, non-social means
 When not possible evaluate opinions and abilities by comparing them
to those of others
2. The less the similarity of opinions and abilities between 2 people, the less the
tendency to make these comparisons
3. When a discrepancy exists wrt opinions and abilities, there is a tendency to
change one’s position so as to move it in line with the group
Stanley Schachter
 Greater anxiety leads to greater desire to affiliate
 Anxious people prefer the company of other anxious people
Reciprocity We tend to like people who indicate that they like us
Hypothesis  Our attractions are a two-way street; we take into account the other person’s
evaluation of us as well as that person’s qualities arriving at a like or a dislike
Gain-Loss Principle
 Aronson and Linder
 Evaluation that changes will have more of an impact than an evaluation that
remains constant
 e.g., like someone more if their liking for us has increased than someone who has
consistently liked us
Social  Person weighs the rewards and costs of interacting with another
Exchange o The more rewards outweigh the costs, the greater the attraction to the other
Theory person
 People attempt to maximize rewards and minimize costs
Equity Theory
 We consider not only our own rewards and costs but also the costs of rewards of
the other person

Individual Characteristics
 Correlations between affiliation and similarity of intelligence, attitudes, education, height, age,
religion, SES, drinking habits and mental health

Opposites attract?Need Complementarity

 People choose relationships so that they mutually satisfy each other’s needs
 Possible that similarity is more powerful on some and complementarity is more powerfulon others
 Even successful complementary relationships have fundamental similarities in some attitudes that
favor dissimilarity
Potency of physical attractiveness as a determinant of attraction?

 Attractiveness stereotype (tendency to attribute positive qualities and desirable characteristics to

attractive people)

Spatial proximity

 May also increase the intensity of initial interactions

Mere exposure hypothesis

 Based on familiarity
 Robert Zajonc
 Mere repeated exposure to a stimulus to enhanced liking for it

PROSOCIAL BEHAVIORS
 Helping behavior vs. altruism
o Helping behavior: includes altruistic motivations, but also includes behaviors that may be
motivated by egoism/selfishness
o Altruism: form of helping behavior in which the person’s intent is to benefit someone else at
some cost to himself

Bystander Intervention
 John Darley and Bibb Latane
 Initial thought: bystander’s apathy – homo urbanus, a city dweller whose only interest is in himself
and thus the apathy of the bystanders was blamed on their personality laws
 But now: 2 factors
o Social influence
 Staged emergencies in lab
 Bystanders define the situation and such judgment will be influenced by past experiences,
desires, what the person actually sees, and the influence of other people present (social
influence)
 Presence of others may lead to the interpretation of an event as a
nonemergency(pluralistic ignorance)
 방안으로연기– alone vs. 2 confeds ignoring (=consider as nonemergency)

o Diffusion of responsibility
 One bystander: sole responsibility and thus 100% liability and guilt for not helping
 Multiple bystanders: responsibility, blame, guilt can be shared
 The more people present, the less likely they would offer help
Empathy and Helping behavior
 Empathy: ability to vicariously experience the emotions of others
 Batson’s empathy-altruism model
o Relationship between empathy and helping behavior
o When faced with situations in which others may need help, people might feel distress and/or
they might feel empathy
o Both of these states are important, since either can determine helping behavior
o Ps witnessing a person in distress given a choice to either help or not help (used electric shocks)
o Easy-escape: more distress than empathy, tended to leave rather than help
o People who reported more empathy than distress were more likely to help regardless of
whether they were in the easy or difficult escape conditions

AGGRESSIVE and ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Frustration-  When people are frustrated, they act aggressively
Aggression  Strength of frustration experienced is correlated with the levels of aggression
Hypothesis observed
Albert  Aggression is learned through modeling (direct observation) or through
Bandura’s Social reinforcement
Learning Theory Study on the effect of modeling
 1 groups of young children 3-5 yo observe either an adult playing with tinker
toys or an adult committing aggressive acts on an inflated rubber “Bobo” doll
 Each child was made to fell frustrated and then left alone
 Children who observed the aggressive model were more likely to behave
aggressively toward the toll
 Aggressive behavior is selectively reinforced (people act aggressively because
they expect some sort of reward such as material benefit, attention) for doing so

CONFORMITY, OBEDIENCE, and COMPLIANCE

MuzaferSherif’s  Auto kinetic effect: stare at a point of light in a room that is otherwise
Conformity completely dark, the light will appear to move
Study Concept of norm formation
 Estimate movement amount of a light point individually
o Which then conforms to group’s estimate when grouped together to
estimate
Solomon Asch’s  Conformity: yield to group pressure when no explicit demand has been made
conformity to do so
Study  Compare line lengths
Control Exp
Confeds correctly say answer Confeds make wrong answers
Greater error rate
Stanley  Studied the pressure to conform and obedience behavior
Milgram’s  Electric Shock
Obedience  Obedience to authority measured by the maximum shock a P would administer
Experiment  65% beyond Danger: severe Shock to the last switch, being completely
obedient to the experimenter
 Many Ps showed signs of tension and stress (e.g., nervous laughter,
uncontrollable seizures)
 Tension attributed to a conflict between deeply ingrained tenets not to hurt
others and the equally completing tendency to obey those who are in
authority
Foot-in-the-  Compliance: change in behavior that occurs as a result of situational or
Door Effect interpersonal pressure
 Compliance with a small request increases the likelihood of compliance with a
larger request
Door-in-the-  People who refuse a large initial request are more likely to agree to a later
Face Effect smaller request
These two effects are not contradictory – the initial request in FD is quite reasonable while initial
request in DF is large and unreasonable =effects depend upon the nature of the original request

SELF-PERCEPTION
 How our social lives influence our social-perception?
 Self-perception is influenced by other people’s views, social roles, group memberships

Clark and  Ethnic self-concept among ethnically white and black children using the famous
Clark’s Doll doll preference task
Preference o Majority white and black children preferred the white doll
Study o However, recent studies suggest that black children hold positive views of
their own ethnicity
Dimensions  Individuals have more than one dimension of personal identity
of Personal Hierarchy of salience – determines which identity will be enacted in a particular
Identity situation
 Which holds the most importance for us in each situation
 The more salient the identity, the more we conform to the role expectations of
identities
o e.g., male and famele in same-sex groups were less likely to list gender in
their self-descriptiosn than in mixed gender groups
Albert  Part of social cognitive theory
Bandura and Self-efficacy: individual’s belief in his ability to organize and execute a particular
Self Efficacy pattern of behavior
Theory  Individuals with strong self=efficacy exert more effort ton challenging tasks than
those with low self-efficacy
 Self-efficacy judgments are based on:
o Performance accomplishments (history)
o Social persuasion
o Vicarious experience
o Physical and emotional states
SOCIAL PERCEPTION
Ways in which we form impressions about the characteristics of individuals and of groups of people

Primacy/Recency  Primacy: first impressions are more important than subsequent impressions
Effects  Recency: most recent information is most important in forming our impressions
Attribution  We form impressions of others partially through observation of their behavior
Theory  Tendency for individuals to infer the causes of others’ behaviors
Fritz Heider (ref. balance theory)
 We are all naive amateur psychologists who attempt to discover causes and
effects in vents
 2 categories:
o Dispositional: person’s features e.g., beliefs, personality
o Situational: external and those ~surrounding’s features e.g., threats, money,
social norms, peer pressure
Types of Tendency for Bias
 Fundamental Attribution Error
o General bias toward making dispositional attributions rather than
situational attributions
o Kitty Genovese witness and Milgram subjects
 Halo effect
o Tendency to allow a general impression about a person (“I like Jill in
general”) to influence other, more specific evaluations about a person
 Belief in a Just World (BJW)
o M.J. Lerner
o In a just world, good things would happen to good people, and bad things
would happen to bad people
o A strong belief in a just world increases the likelihood of “blaming the
victim” since such a world view denies the possibility of innocent views

GROUPS
 Individual behavior is influenced by group norms, expectations of behavior in given situations

Theodore  Influence of group norms

Newcomb’s Bemington College – liberal atmosphere although majority of students’ families were
Study Republicans
 Students more conformed to liberalism (norms of community)
 Those liberals who ultimately married conservative men frequently returned to their
old conservatism
Proxemics: Proxemics: study of how individuals space themselves in relation to others
Edward  There are cultural norms that govern how far away we stand from the people we’re
Hall speaking to
Zajonc’s  Presence of others increases arousal and consequently enhances the emission of
Theory (ref.
mere dominant responses
exposure
theory)
Social  Group phenomenon; tendency for people to put forth less effort when part of a group
Loafing effort than when acting individually
 e.g., tug of war
Anonymity Philip Zimbardo–Prison Experiment
 People re more likely to commit antisocial acts when they feel anonymous within a
social environment
 There is diminished restraint of unacceptable behavior when anonymous
 Prison timulation
 Major processes in prison -deindividuation: loss of self-awareness and of personal
identity
Group Irving Janis
Decision-  Ways group decisions go awry
Making  Government officialsmaking serious blunders
 Judgment failed in such as decision makers were engaged in groupthing
 Tendency of decision making groups to strive for consensus by not considering
discordant information
Risky Shift
 Finding that group decisions are riskier than the average of individual choices and
such average riskiness of individual choices can be considered to be an estimate of the
group’s original riskiness
 Value Hypothesis
o Risky shift occurs in situations in which riskiness is culturally valued
 James Stoner
o Nature of dilemma may determine the shift direction
 Group polarization
o Tendency for group discussion to enhance the groups’ initial tendencies
towards riskiness or caution
o Extremity shifts: groups decisions tend to be more extreme but not necessarily
more risky than the indidiualdeiciosn.

LEADERSHIP
Leadership and Communication

 Leaders of groups engage in more communication than nonleaders

 By artificially increasing the amount a person speaks, that person’s perceived leadership status also
increases
Kurt Lewin’s Study

 Determine the effects of different leadership styles

 Leadership styles to supervise boys (pg. 53)

Autocratic Democratic Laissez-faire

Hostile More satisfying Less efficient
More aggressive More cohesive than autocratic Less organized
More dependent on leader groups Less satisfying than democratic
Greater work quantity <work motivation & interest groups

COOPERATION and COMPETITION

Prisoner’s Dilemma
 Classic method of investigating people’s choices to compete or cooperate
 Both remain silent – lesser sentence
 Both betray – moderate sentence

Robbers’ Cave Experiment

 Muzafer Sherif
 Created hostilities through competition and then reduced through cooperation
 1st week: created group allegiance within groups
o Didn’t know of each other
o Status Hierarchy
o Role differentiation for various tasks
o Norms for behaviour
 Rattlers: norms of toughness e.g., not bothering to treat cuts
 Eagles: norms e.g., not swearing and being polite
o Self-adopted names
 2nd week
o Informed about each other and 4 day competition
o Create hostilities between groups, e.g., name calling, physical encounters
 Reduce hostilities:
o Mere contact between group members e.g., movies = FAIL
o Arranged activities 2 groups had to cooperate to solve a problem
o Super ordinate goals, best obtained though intergroup cooperation
o Joint effort such increases intergroup relationships