14 Flashcards
Social psychology
scientific study of how people’s
thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others.
They examine how the nature of situations in which we find ourselves
influences our behaviour in important ways.
Persuasion
is the process of changing attitudes.
Attitudes
is the valuations of a particular person, behaviour, belief, or concept.
The ease with which attitudes can be
changed depends on 3 factors:
- Message source
- Characteristics of the message
- Characteristics of the target
Characteristics of the message:
What the message is like.
Generally, two-sided messages (which include both the communicator’s position and the one they are arguing against) are more effective than one-sided messages, assuming the arguments for the other side can be effectively refuted and the audience is knowledgeable about the topic.
Message source
The characteristics of a person who delivers a persuasive message, known as attitude communicator.
Communicators who are physically and socially attractive—think athletes
and celebrities—produce greater attitude change than those who are less attractive.
Characteristics of the target:
Once a communicator has delivered a message, characteristics of the target of the message may determine
whether the message will be accepted.
Intelligent people are more resistant to persuasion than are those who are less intelligent.
magnitude of the differences in resistance to persuasion between men and women is not large
Link Between Attitudes and Behaviour
Attitudes influence our behaviour, but our behaviour also influences our
attitudes.
Cognitive dissonance
is the conflict that occurs when a person holds two contradictory attitudes or thoughts (referred to as
cognitions).
When an individual experiences cognitive dissonance, they often adjust their attitude rather than their behaviour.
How does one reduce the arising dissonance?
The theory predicts that participants will reduce dissonance by adopting more positive attitudes toward the task.
People will be motivated to reduce their dissonance by one of the following methods
- Modifying one or both cognitions
- Changing the perceived importance of one cognition
- Adding the additional cognitions
- Denying that the two cognitions are related to each other
Social cognition
is the cognitive processes by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves.
schemas
Social psychologists have learned that individuals have highly developed schemas, sets of cognitions about people and social
experiences.
Ex. a schema for “mother” includes the characteristics of warmth, nurturance, and caring.
Schemas allow us to organize
the way in which we recall, recognize, and categorize information about others, as well as make predictions of what others are like on the basis of relatively little information, since we tend to fit people into schemas even
when there is not much concrete evidence to go on.
Ex. Our schema for “teacher,”
generally consists of several characteristics: knowledge of the
subject matter he or she is teaching, a desire to impart that knowledge, and an awareness of the student’s need to understand what is being said.
Regardless of their accuracy, schemas
are important because they organize the way in which we recall, recognize, and categorize information about others.
Moreover, they allow us to make predictions of what others are like on the basis of relatively little information, since we tend to fit people into schemas even when there is not much concrete evidence to go on.
Impression formation
is the process by which an individual organizes information about another person to form an overall impression of that person.
Central traits
are major traits utilized to form an overall impression of others, the presence of which alters the meaning of other traits.
Ex. consider your impression of someone described as “cold” and industrious vs. “warm” and Industrious.
We make impressions remarkably quickly!
Using what have been called “thin slices of behaviour,” we are able to make judgments of people in mere seconds that are accurate and that match those of people who make judgments based on longer snippets of behaviour.
Attribution theory
is the theory of personality that seeks to explain how we decide, based on samples of an individual’s behaviour, what the specific causes of that person’s behaviour are.
In seeking an explanation for behavior, one central question we
must answer is
Attribution Processes:
Understanding the Causes of Behaviour
whether the cause is situational or
dispositional.
Situational causes
are perceived causes of behaviour that are based on environmental factors.
Dispositional causes
are perceived causes of behaviour that are based on a person’s internal traits or personality characteristics.
Halo effect
is the phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a person has positive traits is used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics.
Ex. Harry is intelligent, kind, and loving. Is he also conscientious? If you were to guess, your most likely
response probably would be yes.
The opposite would also hold true (Ex. Learning that Harry was unsociable and argumentative would
probably lead you to assume that he was lazy as well).
However, because few people have either uniformly positive or uniformly negative traits, the halo effect
leads to misperceptions of others.
Self serving bias
is the tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal, dispositional
factors and one’s failures to environmental, situational factors.
Ex. If you get an A on a test, you may think it’s due to your hard work, but if you get a poor grade, it’s due to the professor’s inadequacies.
Assumed-similarity bias
is the tendency to think of people as being similar to oneself, even when meeting them for the first time.
Given the range of people in the world, this assumption often reduces the accuracy of our judgments (It is why we are shocked when people behave in ways that are different from us).
Ex. An honest person is particularly shocked to be lied to; a trusting person is particularly shocked by a
betrayal.
Fundamental attribution error
is the is the tendency to over-attribute others’ behaviour to
dispositional causes and the corresponding failure to recognize the importance of situational
causes.
Ex. We are more likely to jump to the conclusion that someone who is late to class is disorganized or
unmotivated (a dispositional cause) rather than to assume that the lateness is due to situational factors, such as the bus running behind schedule.
These conclusions are not necessarily wrong, but just indicate an over-reliance on dispositional cues when
evaluating others’ behaviour (As such, some psychologists prefer the term correspondence bias over
fundamental attribution error, since our attributions may, at times at least, be correct).
Social influence
is the process by which the actions of an individual or group affect the behaviour of others.
Pressures to conform can be painfully strong and can bring about changes in behaviour that otherwise never would have occurred.
Conformity
is a change in behaviour or
attitudes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or standards of other people.
Even very subtle social pressures can result in conformity
The characteristics of the group
Conformity
The more attractive a group appears to its members, the greater is
its ability to produce conformity.
Conformity Conclusions
- The characteristics of the group
- The person’s relative status (social rank):
- The situation in which the individual is responding:
- Unanimity of the group:
The person’s relative status (social rank):
Conformity
the lower a person’s status in the group, the greater the
power of the group over that person’s behaviour.
The situation in which the individual is responding
Conformity
Conformity is considerably higher when people must respond publicly than it is when they can do so privately.
Unanimity of the group
Conformity
Groups that unanimously support a position show the most pronounced
conformity pressures.
Yet, having just one person present who shares the minority point of view (a social supporter)
is sufficient to dramatically reduce conformity pressures.
Social supporter
A group member whose dissenting views make nonconformity to the group easier.
Groupthink
is a type of thinking in
which group members share such a
strong motivation to achieve
consensus that they lose the ability to
critically evaluate alternative points of
view.
It is most likely to occur when a popular or powerful leader is surrounded by people of lower status.
Moreover, groupthink often occurs in
groups that are particularly cohesive.
Groupthink almost always produces
negative consequences
Compliance
is behaviour that occurs in
response to direct social pressure.
Techniques that are likely to lead to
compliance are often used in sales and marketing include:
Foot-in-the-door technique
* Door-in-the-face technique
* That’s-not-all technique
* Not-so-free sample
Foot-in-the-door technique:
Small request followed by a larger request.
Door-in-the-face technique:
Large request followed by a smaller request.
If you refuse the large request, you are likely to be compliant with the smaller request, which seems
reasonable in comparison.
That’s-not-all technique
Offering a deal at an inflated price.
You are more likely to comply if you feel you are getting a special deal.
Not-so-free sample:
When someone gives you something, you feel
social pressure to reciprocate.
The norm of reciprocity
is the well-accepted societal standard dictating that
we should treat other people as they treat us (i.e., the need for reciprocation—in
the form of a purchase).
Obedience
is a change in behaviour due to the commands of others.
Stanley Milgram
conducted a classic study on obedience.
The experimenter’s orders were accepted, then, because the
participants thought that they personally could not be held accountable for their actions—they could always blame the experimenter.
Philip Zimbardo
wondered whether direct orders were even necessary, or whether indirect pressure, derived from social roles and the power of the situation, would be enough to make people act in ways that most would consider immoral.
Stanford Prison Experiment
Lucifer Effect
(the tendency for
ordinarily good people to do extraordinarily
bad things).
He argued that we all have the capacity for both
good and evil within us, and the behaviour we
engage in will depend on the situation we find
ourselves in (and on whether or not we choose
to act).
