Embedded Files
Standards:
Apply attribution theory to explain motives.
Articulate the impact of social and cultural categories on self-concept and relations with others.
Anticipate the impact of self-fulfilling prophecy on behavior .
Identify important figures and research in the areas of attitude formation and change.
Discuss attitude formation and change, including persuasion strategies and cognitive dissonance.
Identify the contributions of key researchers in the areas of conformity, compliance, and obedience.
Explain how individuals respond to expectations of others, including groupthink, conformity, and obedience to authority.
Describe the structure and function of different kinds of group behavior.
Predict the impact of the presence of others on individual behavior.
Describe processes that contribute to differential treatment of group members.
Describe the variables that contribute to altruism and aggression.
Describe the variables that contribute to attraction.
What is Social Psychology?
Social psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the way individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others.
Studies how people are affected by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others
Not limited to social settings; people can engage in social behavior when alone
Ex. If you’re driving down the road and throw your food out the window, the action of littering defies social norms and could affect others.
The Person Perception
The Person Perception
When you interact with people, you’re constantly engaged in person perception, or the process of forming impressions of others.
People show considerable ingenuity in piecing together clues about others’ characteristics, however many impressions are inaccurate because they’re based on biases and fallacies that occur in their person perception.
Problems with the Person Perception:
Subjectivity: If a person’s behavior is ambiguous, people are likely to see it in a way that’s consistent with their expectations or stereotypes.
Illusory correlation occurs when people estimate that they have encountered more confirmations of an association between social traits than they have actually seen.
Evolutionary Bias
Reproductive success
Need to categorize
In-group: a group that one belongs to and identifies with
Out-group: a group that one does not belong to or identify with
Effects of Physical Appearance
Effects of Physical Appearance
Although we are told not to judge a book by its cover, studies have suggested that attractive people command more attention than less attractive people, and people’s judgments about personality are often swayed by appearance.
Attractive people tend to be seen as more intelligent, sociable, friendly, poised, warm, and well-adjusted than those who are less attractive.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes
Stereotypes, or widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership in a particular group, have a dramatic effect on the process of person perception.
The most common stereotypes are based on age, gender, ethnicity, and occupation. Stereotypes provide a sense of order, even if they’re inaccurate.
Attributions
Attributions
Attributions play a key role in the explanation of behavior. Attributions are inferences that people draw about the causes of events, others’ behavior, and their behavior.
Internal attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings.
External attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to situational demands and environmental constraints.
Ex. If you get into a car accident, you blame the other driver, the road conditions, basically everything except yourself. If you see another person get into a car accident, you claim they can't drive, they must have been distracted, etc.
As attributions are only inferences, they are subject to being incorrect or biased. The fundamental attribution error refers to an observers’ bias in favor of internal attributions in explaining others’ behavior.
Attributing one’s actions to situational factors requires more effort than attributing them to one’s personality. In contrast, those exhibiting the witnessed behavior tend to be more in tune with the situational factors causing their actions.
Ex. If you get angry and aggressive towards a bank teller for a mistake in your account, the others in the bank will assume you are a nasty and hostile person, rather than considering valid reasons for your behavior.
Attitudes
Attitudes
Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought.
Includes social issues, group or institution identification, consumer products, and people.
Attitudes are not good indicators of behavior.
Explicit attitudes are those that we hold consciously and can readily describe.
Implicit attitudes are those that are covert and are expressed in subtle automatic responses that people have little conscious control over.
Theories of Attitude Formation
Learning Theory: Attitudes may be learned by our parents, peers, the media, cultural traditions, and other social influences.
Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, observational learning - Evaluative conditioning consists of efforts to transfer emotion attached to an unconditioned stimulus to a new conditioned stimulus
Leon Festinger’s Dissonance Theory assumes that inconsistency among attitudes propels people in the direction of attitude change.
Cognitive dissonance exists when related cognitions are inconsistent-that is, when they contradict each other.
Persuasion
Persuasion
Although attitudes are not good predictors of behavior, it won’t stop others from trying to change those attitudes.
Routes to Persuasion:
Central route: people carefully ponder the content and logic of persuasive messages
Ex. Political ads that highlight the candidates speeches and key issues
Peripheral route: persuasion depends on non-message factors, such as attractiveness or credibility of the source
Ex. Political ads with celebrity endorsers and/or emotional slogans
Conformity & Obedience
Conformity & Obedience
Conformity occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure.
Ex. If you mow your lawn to avoid complaints from neighbors, you are conforming to social pressure.
Two key processes that contribute to conformity:
Normative influence operates when people conform to social norms for fear of negative social consequences (i.e. peer pressure).
Ex. Pretending to have the same political/religious views as your family to avoid debate or criticism
Informational influence operates when people look to others for guidance about how to behave in ambiguous situations because they don't want to be incorrect.
Ex. When you don't know an answer to a question the teachers asks, so you just agree with the majority of the class.
Obedience is a form of compliance that occurs when people follow direct commands, usually from someone in a position of authority.
There are 3 key studies in group behavior - Asch's Line Experiment, Milgram's Obedience Study, & the Stanford Prison Experiment. Watch the videos below to get a full understanding of what the research was and what was discovered.
Solomon Asch & the Line Experiment
Solomon Asch & the Line Experiment
Solomon Asch developed a simple experiment where participants were told to identify which lines most closely resembled another, but some of the participants were planted to purposely give wrong answers and see if anyone followed suit.
Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Study
Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Study
Inspired by the defense's claim that the Nazis were "just following orders" during the Nuremburg Trials, Stanley Milgram developed an experiment to test how far people would go to harm another human just because someone in a position of authority told them to.
Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment
Phillip Zimbardo and his team designed a study to investigate why prisons become abusive, degrading, violent environments. The researchers attributed the bizarre transformation of behavior to social roles: widely shared expectations about how people in certain situations are supposed to behave.
Aggression & Altruism
Aggression & Altruism
Aggression is any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. It can be attributed to a number of factors:
Genes
Neural influences
Biochemical influences
Aversive events
Learning to express and inhibit
Media & society
Being blocked short of a goal increases people’s readiness to aggress, known as the frustration-aggression principle.
i.e. frustration creates anger 🡪 anger causes some to act aggressively, especially in the presence of an aggressive cue (weapon)
To a social psychologist, a conflict is a seeming incompatible of actions, goals, or ideas.
A social trap is a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursing their self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.
Altruism is an unselfish regard for the welfare of others.
Social exchange theory states that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.
Ex. Donating blood 🡪 Do they benefits outweigh the costs?
Attraction
Attraction
Factors that Influence Attraction:
Proximity - we like people who are geographically close to us
Mere exposure effect: the phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them
Reciprocity - we like people who like us
Similarity - we like people who like what we like
Association - we like people who are associated with the things we like
Appearance - we like people we find attractive
Historically, we are attracted to those who are viewed as healthy, but the idea of “healthy” changes with each generation and culture. Physical attractiveness predicts dating frequency and they are perceived as healthier, happier, more honest, and more successful than less attractive counterparts. Despite this, attractive people do not have higher self-esteem or happiness.
Types of Love:
Passionate Love: An aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a love relationship. Ex. Summer love
Based in the Schachter Two Factor Theory of Emotion:
Emotions have two ingredients - physical arousal plus cognitive appraisal
Arousal from any source can enhance one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label the arousal
Companionate Love: A deep, affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined. Ex. Soul mates
Equity: a condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it
Self-disclosure: revealing the intimate aspects to oneself to others (a.k.a. honesty)
Important Terms in Social Psych.pdf
Key Terms & People
Fundamental Attribution Error
Foot-in-the-Door vs. Door-in-the-face Phenomenon
Cognitive Dissonance
Group Polarization
Groupthink
Social Facilitation
Deindividuation
Social Loafing
Asch Conformity Experiment
Milgram Experiment
Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment
Diffusion of Responsibility
Page updated
Report abuse