Personality & Social Influence

10-B: Freud's Psychodynamic Theory 

• Who was Sigmund Freud and how did his theory influence the field of psychology?  Be prepared to describe the three parts of the subconscious psyche.

• Through which five psychosexual stages did Freud believe we progressed?  You do not need to memorize the age ranges he theorized, but be prepared to generally describe the five stages and define what he called the Oedipus complex.

• What might cause fixations, complexes, anxieties and envies?  How, in Freud’s eyes, would your subconscious issues shape your personality?

• How might the ego use defense mechanisms to manage subconscious conflicts?  Be prepared to provide examples of how someone might use each of the following:

  • Conversion

  • Denial

  • Displacement

  • Identification

  • Intellectualization

  • Projection

  • Rationalization

  • Reaction formation

  • Regression

  • Sublimation

READ: Freudian Theory

10-C: Carl Jung

• How was Jung connected to Freud?

• What existed, in Jung’s view, in the two types of your unconscious minds?

• What are archetypes and how do we see them represented in our lives and culture?  Be prepared to give several specific examples.

• How did Jung see our complexes shaping your personality?  Be prepared to give several specific examples.

READ: Jung's Theory

READ: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 

10-D: Projective Personality Measures

• How do projective measures attempt to operationalize subconscious personality?

• How did Freud’s Free Association approach attempt this?  How does this relate to what we learned about schemas, primes and accessibility?

• How does the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) attempt to measure personality?

• How did Rorschach use (the now famous) inkblots to examine the subconscious?

Aside from dream analysis, one of the most popular approaches to measuring the thoughts and feelings of the unconscious was to use projective personality measures.  Projective measures involve presenting ambiguous stimuli to someone who ‘projects’ their own thoughts onto what they see. The theory goes, if themes emerge it might tell us something about what is bouncing around in your mind.  Be able to describe the how each approach was believed to work and the basic criticisms of using projective measures.

READ: WATCH: Projection Tests 

READ: Free Association

10-E: Disposition vs Situation 

• How can thought and behavior be better understood as an interaction between disposition and the social situation?  Be prepared to give some personal examples.

• What is the difference between normative and informational influence?

• How would you differentiate between conformity, compliance, obedience, and internalization? Provide personal examples for how your thought and behavior has been influenced by each.

As important as personality is in understanding thought and behavior, our stable personality traits (disposition) are not the only things that determine what we do.  A biosocial perspective would propose that our ancestors evolved as social creatures because being accepted within a group increased the odds of survival.  Those who were best able to adapt their behavior to fit in with, and learn from, the group were the most like to stay alive and reproduce.

One of the most frequently cited definitions of social psychology was offered by the famous researcher and theorist Gordon Allport (1954):

Social psychology is the study of “how the thoughts, feelings and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others"

Note that we are not influenced only by people that actually surround us, but also by people that we expect will be around or that we imagine might be around.  Just thinking about others influences how we think, what we feel, and what we do.

Think about it this way... you have personality traits, and if we put you and 100 of your classmates in the same social situation (e.g., a classroom, a party, a dangerous emergency) you would each respond in a somewhat unique way - your disposition influences your behavior.  However, if we put you in 100 different situations, your behavior would be different in each, and in some cases you would do things that go against your very own central traits.  Although we tend to think about ourselves in terms of our disposition, it turns out that we tend to drastically underestimate the power that the situation has over us.  It all comes down to this - you are neither your disposition or the situation you are in, you are the product of the ways in which both interact together.

There are two general categories of social influence...

READ: Normative Social Influence

READ: Informational Social Influence 

10-F: Conformity

• How did Asch (1951) demonstrate that people will conform to the behavior of others, even when they know it is wrong?

  • How was a participant's behavior an example of normative influence?

  • What happened to conformity when there was one other person who broke the norm?

  • How did writing down answers, rather than giving them out loud, affect conformity?

• How did Zimbardo demonstrate that the power of the social situation could overwhelm people's disposition?  How about his methodological approach allows us to conclude that their behavior was not simply evidence of their underlying dispositions?

  • Why was the study terminated early?

  • What is the general nature of the criticisms of Zimbardo's work, both in terms of ethics and methodology?

One of the most famous studies on conformity was done by Asch in (1951). 

What happens when you take ‘normal’ people and put them in a situation where the norms of behavior call for cruel and unusual behavior?  Phil Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford Prison Study set out to test how average college students would behave in a prison setting, with half randomly assigned to play the role of guards and half of prisoners. The footage can be pretty disturbing, but it is important to get a sense of what took place when disposition gave way to the apparent social norms of the situation.

It is important to note that many have criticized Zimbardo for mischaracterizing what happened, in that the guards were coached on how to treat the prisoners more than he admits, and some have even gone so far as to call the whole thing a sham.  However, it is still worth noting that even if Zimbardo was dishonest about the extent to which the oppressive rules and sadistic behavior developed spontaneously as a function of the social role, that was never the point in our view.  The point was that under some circumstances, people will engage in behavior that they would have never predicted from themselves.  What if instead of a researcher offering suggestions to guards, it was a powerful authority figure with a weapon giving orders?  How cruel would those average humans have been to other humans?  The fact that anything cruel happened at any of the participants' hands is still worth talking about.

10-G: Obedience

• What research procedure did Milgram use to test whether normal people would follow the orders of an authority figure and hurt another person?  Be prepared to describe in detail the setup, methodology, and results.

READ: The set-up (1.1) and the results (1.2)

10-H: Compliance Gaining

• How would you use each of the following techniques to increase the likelihood that a stranger would comply with your request?

  • Foot-in-the-door

  • Door-in-the-face

  • Reciprocity

• How did researchers demonstrate that each of these techniques can influence behavior?  Be clear about the methodology and results.

This is perhaps one of the most applied aspects of social psychology: how do people manipulate you, and how can you get people to agree to your requests.  Let us just look at three basic techniques, and if you find this interesting, take PSYC 221 (Social Psychology) and PSYC 424 (Communication & Persuasion). 

READ:  Foot-in-the-Door Technique

READ: Door-in-the-Face Technique

READ: Reciprocity Norm

For the first two, you should be able to describe the technique, apply it to an example, and explain the study that supports the concept.  For the third, you should be able to explain why we feel obligated to reciprocate favors and how you can use that concept to get what you want or need.