Ch.13 Flashcards
Social psychology
study of how people influence others’ behaviour, beliefs, and attitudes
• helps us understand not only why we sometimes act helpfully and even heroically in the presence of others,
• but also why we occasionally show our worst sides, caving in to group pressure
• or standing by idly while others suffer.
• replicability is especially crucial when it comes to evaluating research in social psychology.
Evolutionary perspective on social behaviour
• need-to-belong theory, humans have a biologically based need for interpersonal connections.
• Dunbar argued that the size of our cortex relative to the rest of our brain places limits on how many people we can closely associate with.
• Virtually all of the social influence processes are adaptive under most circumstances and help to regulate cultural practices.
• evolutionary perspective on social behaviour:
— Conformity, obedience, and many other forms of social influence become maladaptive only when they’re blind or unquestioning.
— many social influence processes have been naturally selected, because they’ve generally served us well over the course of evolution.
Yawning
• Yawning emerges in fetuses as early as 3 months but contagious yawning doesn’t start until around age 4.
— This developmental trend may reflect the emergence of empathy and theory of mind.
• as we become better able to identify with others’ mental states, we become more likely to mimic their actions.
• some argue that contagious yawning promotes the social bonding of individuals within groups.
• it’s also possible that contagious yawning has no actual function itself. It may merely be an indirect consequence of the fact that natural selection
Social comparison (upward vs. downward)
• Evaluate our abilities and beliefs by comparing them with those of others.
— Doing so helps us to understand ourselves and our social worlds better.
Upward:
• Compare ourselves with people who seem superior to us in some way.
— when engage in this, especially with people who aren’t too different from us, we may feel better because we conclude that “If they can achieve that, I bet I can too.”
Downward:
• Compare ourselves with others who seem inferior to us in some way.
— when engage we often end up feeling superior to our peers who are less competent than us in an important domain of life.
• both can boost our self-concepts.
• when social comparison makes us look inferior relative to someone else, may buffer our self-concepts by persuading ourselves that it’s only because the other person is exceptionally talented
Social contagion
• Just as we often turn to others to better understand ourselves, we often look to them when a situation is ambiguous to figure out what to believe and how to act.
— we can influence the way people feel, act, and think by our own actions. Just as they can do for us.
• Can cause
- Mass Hysteria
— Which episode of this can lead to collective delusions.
- Urban Legends
— False stories that have been repeated so many times that people believe them to be true.
— grow less accurate with repeated retellings
— convincing because they’re surprising yet plausible.
— make good stories because they tug on our emotions, especially negative ones.
— emotion of disgust, arouses our perverse sense of curiosity.
mass hysteria
• outbreak of irrational behaviour that is spread by social contagion
• most likely to engage in social comparison when a situation is ambiguous.
— everyone prone to hysteria under right circumstances
• Episodes of mass hysteria lead to collective delusions, in which many people simultaneously come to be convinced of bizarre things that are false.
Ex: UFOs, The War of Worlds
attributions
process of assigning causes to behaviour
• Dispositional/Internal factors (inside the person)
• Situational/External factors (outside the person)
— dispositional influences: means enduring characteristics, such as personality traits, attitudes, and intelligence.
fundament attribution error
• Tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on other people’s behaviour.
• Because of this error, we attribute too much of people’s behaviour to who they are. And attribute too little of their behaviour to what’s going on around them.
• Is associated with cultural factors.
• Likely b/c of the fact that we’re rarely aware of all of the situational factors impinging on others behaviour at a given moment.
• less likely to commit, if we’ve been in the same situation ourselves or been encouraged to feel empathic toward those we’re observing.
• We tend to commit only when explaining others’ behaviour; when explaining the causes of our own behaviour, we typically invoke situational influences, prob b/c we’re aware of all of the situational factors affecting us.
Conformity (Asch’s studies and factors that decreased conformity)
• tendency of people to alter their behaviour as a result of group pressure.
• Asch’s, study had a cover story that concealed study’s true goal.
• other “participants” in the study are actually confederates, or undercover agents of the researcher.
• individual differences in personality play a key role in conformity.
• conformity was influenced by the following independent variables:
—UNANIMITY: If all confederates gave the wrong answer, the participant was more likely to conform. Nevertheless, if one confederate gave the correct response, the level of conformity plummeted by three-fourths.
— DIFFERENCE IN THE WRONG ANSWER: Knowing that someone else in the group differed from the majority -even if that person held a different view from the participant-made the participant less likely to conform.
— SIZE: The size of the majority made a difference, but only up to about five or six confederates. People were no more likely to conform in a group of ten than in a group of five.
• associated with activity in the amygdala, which triggers anxiety in response to danger cues. = linked with negative emotion of anxiety
• associated with activity in the parietal and occipital lobes. = areas of the brain responsible for visual perception, suggesting that social pressure might sometimes affect how we perceive reality.
• People’s responses to social pressure are associated with individual and cultural differences.
• People with low self-esteem are especially prone to conformity
obedience (Milgram’s study)
• adherence to instructions from those of higher authority.
• Wanted to understand the certain behaviours that occurred during the Holocaust.
• Set up a study to determine to what extent people could be ordered to commit atrocities and have the participants actually follow those orders.
• greater the “psychological distance” between teacher (the actual participant) and experimenter, the less the obedience.
• Second, the greater the psychological distance between teacher and learner, the more the obedience.
• more morally advanced participants were more willing to defy the experimenter
• Especially moral people may sometimes be more willing to violate rules than less moral people, especially if they view them as unreasonable.
• authoritarianism are more likely to comply with the experimenters’ demands
• participants with elevated levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness were more likely to obey the experimenter than were other participants.
• no consistent sex differences in obedience.
Deindividuation (Stanford prison study)
• Tendency of people to engage in uncharacteristic behaviour when they are stripped of their usual identities.
• Just as important, people’s responses to deindividuation almost surely are shaped in part by their personality traits.
• become more vulnerable to social influences, including the impact of social roles.
• deindividuation doesn’t necessarily make us behave badly; it makes us more likely to conform to whatever norms are present in the situation.
• A loss of identity actually makes people more likely to engage in prosocial, or helping, behaviour when others are helping out.
The study:
• coin toss = randomly assigned 24 male undergraduates.
• prisoners and guards forced to dress in clothes befitting their assigned roles.
• Zimbardo prison “superintendent,”
• guards to refer to prisoners only by numbers, not by names.
• First day passed without incident
• Guards began to treat prisoners cruelly and subject them to harsh punishments.
• Day two the prisoners mounted a rebellion, which the guards quickly quashed. Things went steadily downhill from there. The guards became increasingly sadistic.
• adopted their designated roles more easily than anyone might have imagined.
groupthink (and how to avoid it)
• emphasis on group unanimity at the expense of critical thinking.
— Groups sometimes become so intent on ensuring that everyone agrees with everyone else that they lose their capacity to evaluate issues objectively. To be sure, groups sometimes make good decisions, especially when group members are free to contribute opinions that aren’t influenced -and potentially contaminated- by peer pressure.
Treatments to avoid it:
• Encourage active dissent within an organization.
• all groups appoint a “devil’s advocate” a person whose role is to voice doubts about the wisdom of the group’s decisions.
• having independent experts on hand to evaluate whether the group’s decisions make sense.
• holding a follow-up meeting to evaluate whether the decision reached in the first meeting still seems reasonable can serve as a helpful check against errors in reasoning.
inoculation effect
• approach to convincing people to change their minds about something by first introducing reasons why the perspective might be correct and then debunking those reasons.
Ex: If we want to persuade someone that sleep-assisted learning doesn’t work, we might first point out that the brain remains active during sleep, so it’s possible that such learning could take place. This inoculation makes people more receptive to learning that there’s no evidence that we can learn outside information while sleeping.
Bystander non-intervention
• the more people around, the less likely you and others will act to help.
— significantly more likely to seek or offer help when they were alone than in a group.
pluralistic ignorance
• error of assuming that no one in a group perceives things as we do
— relevant when we’re trying to figure out whether an ambiguous situation is really an emergency.
