Chapter 13 Flashcards
Kurt Lewin
Behavior = function of the Person and the Environment.
Synchrony
When two individuals’ speech, language, and physiological activity become similar during social interaction.
Mimicry
Copying behaviors, emotional displays and facial expressions.
Usually unconscious
Serves as a ‘social glue’, helps coordinated behavior is social settings.
Social norms
Guidelines for how to behave in social contents.
Usually unwritten, or implied.
Why do we follow social norms?
Social approval, social pressure.
To avoid ostracism –> Being ignored or excluded from social contact.
Social roles
Guidelines that apply to specific positions within the group.
Social loafing
A member of the group puts less effort into working on a task than others.
Factors that encourage loafing
Low efficacy beliefs.
Believing one’s contribution isn’t important.
Not caring about the outcome.
Feeling like other’s aren’t trying either.
Social facilitation
A group member’s performance is affected by the presence of others.
But, the presence of others may impair performance when the task is hard or
skill level is low.
Conformity
Change in behavior to fit in with a group.
Can be unintentional.
Similar to mimicry in some ways.
Reasons for conforming
Normative influence
Informational influence
Normative influence
‘Public compliance’
Social pressure to adopt a group’s perspective in order to be accepted by the group.
Informational influence
‘Private acceptance’
Genuine interest in the information provided by the group.
People tend to be more likely to conform when…
Larger group in the vicinity.
There are friends, family or acquaintances in the vicinity.
Task is rather ambiguous.
Others conform first.
Responses are made publicly.
Groupthink
Decision making problem in which group members avoid arguments and strive for agreement.
Doesn’t always guarantee good decision making.
Usually occurs when there is a strong leader in the group unwilling to accept ideas of other group members, or when all group members have very similar ideals.
What are some negative aspects of groupthink?
May minimize/ignore potential problems, risks.
May settle on the ‘easy’ solution too quickly, without considering other (better?) options
May lead to overconfidence, and less time considering consequences of a decision, learning from mistakes.
Obedience to authority
Obedience, authority, compliance all topics of interest following WWII.
Stanley Milgram Obedience Studies.
(65% obedience rate)
Bystander effect
An individual is less likely to help when there are other people present, who are also not helping.
AKA ‘Bystander apathy’
Possible explanations to the bystander effect
Normative influences: “What happens if I end up embarrassing myself?”
Informational influences: “What if others know something I don’t? Am I overreacting?”
Diffusion of responsibility.
Diffusion of responsibility
Reduced personal responsibility that a person feels when more people are present in a situation.
Altruism
Helping others in need without receiving or expecting reward for doing so.
Evolution of Altruism
Seems counterintuitive to natural/sexual selection competition.
Kin selection
Kin selection
Strategy that favours reproductive success of a relative.
Social cognition
Combines influence of social context and cognition.
2 major processes in our consciousness
Explicit processes: Conscious thought
Deliberate, effortful, relatively slow
Implicit processes: Unconscious thought
Intuitive, very fast, effortless, “lower-level
processes”, can lead to bias, stereotypes.
Schemas
Organized clusters of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations.
Influence our attention and perceptual processes → Biases
Heuristics
‘Best guess’.
Problem solving strategies based on prior experiences.
Person Perception
Process by which individuals categorize and form judgments about other people.
Can occur very quickly, unconsciously (Ex: First impressions)
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
First impression or expectation
affects one’s behaviour –> affects other person’s behaviour –> leads to confirmation of original impression, expectation
Naïve Realism
Assumption that our perceptions of reality are accurate, and we see things the way they are.
We tend to view the world from the perspective of our own ‘self-concept’
False Consensus Effect
Tendency to project one’s self-concept onto the social world.
Self-serving biases
Biased ways of processing relevant information to enhance our positive self-evaluation.
Ex: Taking credit for success, blaming others, circumstances, or bad luck on our failures.
Better than average effect.
Average effect
We assume we are above average at skills/qualities that are important to us.
Internal attributions
AKA Dispositional attribution.
Explaining the behavior of another person in terms of an innate quality.
External attributions
AKA Situational attributions.
Explaining the behavior of another person as the result of the situation.
Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)
Tendency to over-emphasize internal attributions and under-emphasize external factors when explaining other people’s behaviors.
Western cultures are more likely to make this mistake.
Ingroups
Groups someone feels positively toward and identifies with.
Ingroup bias
Extension of a positive bias toward the self to include one’s ingroups.
Outgroups
‘Other’ groups someone doesn’t identify with, or dis-identifies with.
Stereotype
A cognitive structure (schema) that guides how we process info about our social world.
Set of beliefs about the characteristics of a specific social group.
Prejudice
Emotionally charged response toward outgroup members.
Include holding negative attitudes and making critical judgements about other groups.
Discrimination
Behavior that disadvantages members of a certain social group.
Implicit Associations Test
Measuring Prejudice.
Measures how fast people can respond to images or words flashed on a computer screen.
Rxn. time scores correlate with amygdala activation.
Improving intergroup relations
Evidence to suggest that people’s implicit networks can be “reprogrammed” with practice.
Can help avoid stereotypical thinking.
Contact hypothesis: Social contact between members of different groups is extremely important to overcoming prejudice.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
Dual-process model of persuasion that predicts whether factual information or other types of information will be most influential.
When an audience is motivated/interested in a topic, and has time to make a decision→ Rational (Explicit) thinking
When an audience is not interested, and has to make a quick decision → Less rational (Implicit) thinking
Central route to persuasion
Focuses on facts, logic and content of the messages.
Audience needs both motivation and time to listen and think rationally about the message.
Peripheral route to persuasion
Focuses on the features of the issue/presentation that aren’t factual.
Ex: Attractiveness of the person delivering the message.
“Style” vs. “Substance” of the message.
Tips for successfully communicating a message
Central route: Make sure message is being presented, clearly, in a manner that’s accessible to all people.
Ex: the curse of knowledge
Peripheral route: Use experts or authority figures, high-status individuals, use likable communicators.
Solid validation –> Other people are listening to this message, so you should too!
Construal-Level Theory
Information affects us differently depending on the psychological distance from it.
Distance: Can be actual distance from the message, or how close do you relate with it or if you’re interested in it.
Messages that are made to feel more personally relevant.
Identifiable victim effect
People are more powerfully moved to action by the story of a single suffering person than by information about a whole group of people.
Experiential and analytic systems.
Experiential system
Operates implicitly, quickly, and intuitively,
predominantly emotional.
Analytic system
Operates explicitly, slower and more methodical, uses logic to understand reality.
Reciprocity
Strong social norm to repay others.
“Door in the face” technique
1. Ask for something relatively big.
2. Follow with a request from something
relatively small.
Consistency
Hard to say “no” after saying “yes”
“Foot-in-the-Door Technique”
1. Make a simple request
2. After they say yes, follow-up with a larger
request.
Cognitive dissonance
Inner tension, discomfort felt when we hold
inconsistent beliefs.
Confirmation Bias → Only searching for
evidence that will confirm one’s beliefs.
Self-Justification → Justifying or excusing
one’s behaviors.
