Chapter 13: Social Psychology Flashcards
Social Psycholog
Scientific studies of how individuals behave, think, and feel in social situations; how people act in the presence (actual or implied) of others
Need to Affiliate
Desire to associate with other people; appears to be a basic human trait
Interpersonal Attraction
Social attraction to another person
Physical Proximity
Physical nearness to another person in terms of housing, school, work
Similarity
Extent to which two people are alike in terms of age, education, attitudes, and so on
Mere exposure effect
the tendency to feel positively towards stimuli we have seen frequently.
Evolutionary psycholog
the approach to psychology that aims to discover and understand why the mind is designed the way it i
Adaptive problems
the issues that ancestors had to successfully deal with in order to survive and reproduce
Our ancestors had adaptive solutions (called ———-) that they passed on to successive generations to help them survive and ——–.
adaptations; reproduce
Buss
HUGE study about mate preferences
• 37 samples of people • 10,047 subjects
– drawn from 33 countries – located on 6 continents
• Rated 18 characteristics on a 4-point scale ranging from
– 0 = irrelevant – 3 = indispensable
Women’s Mate Preferences
Women’s Mate Preferences
• Good Financial Prospects (GFPs)
– Cross-culturally and women value this about twice as much as men do. Why?
• High Social Status
– In the vast majority of the 37 cultures, women rated this as more important than men did. Why?
Women’s Mate Preferences
• Ambition and Industriousness
– In the vast majority of the 37 cultures, women valued this as more important than men did.
• Older Men
– In ALL 37 cultures, women preferred older men - roughly 3.5 years older than themselves
– With age comes: resources, physical strength, hunting prowess, wisdom, maturit
Men’s Mate Preferences
• Youth - In ALL 37 cultures, men preferred younger women - roughly 2.5 years younger than themselves
• Physical Attractiveness - Men rate attractiveness as important in a LTM whereas women rate it as desirable but not crucial.
– Why the sex difference?
– Women’s looks signal their reproductive value and fertility and men’s looks do not
• Hence, men have evolved standards of beauty that correspond to those signals.
Social Influence
a change in behavior caused by real or
imagined pressures from others
Conformity
changing one’s behavior to match the responses or actions of other
- no pressure necessarily
Solomon Asch (1955)
Which of the lines on the left most closely matches Line A on the right?
• What would you say if you were in a group of 6 others, and all agreed the answer was 3?
• When alone, 95% of participants answered every trial correctly.
• But 75% (!!!) went against their own eyes at least once if the group gave a wrong answer.
Conclusion: people faced with strong group consensus sometimes go along even though they think the others may be wrong.
Compliance
changing one’s behavior in
response to a direct request
Foot-in-the-door technique
increases compliance with a large request by first getting compliance with a smaller, related reques
Door-in-the-Face Technique
A person who has refused a major request will be more likely later on to comply with a smaller request
Low-Ball Technique
Commitment is gained first to reasonable or desirable terms, which are then made less reasonable or desirable
Obedience
changing one’s behavior in response to a directive from an authority
figure
Stanley Milgram (student of Asch) performed a series of studies on the Obedience to Authority
• Participant = teacher • Confederate = learner • task = word recall • mistake = learner receives shock from teacher
– with each mistake shock increased by 15 volts
– 65% still obedient at the end
Group Cohesivenes
Degree of attraction among group members or their commitment to remain in the group
Groupthink
Compulsion by decision makers to maintain agreement, even at the cost of critical thinking.
– It is a danger that lies in powerful pressures
group cohesion.
Group Sanctions
Rewards and punishments administered by groups to enforce conformity or punish nonconformity
Escalation of Commitment
Investing (time, money) to a failing course of action.
Social responsibility norm
societal rule that people should help those who need their assistance
Kitty Genovese’s Murder
– At 3:15 AM on March 13, 1964, Kitty was stabbed 17 times and sexually assaulted over @ 32 minutes in Queens, NY on a street outside her apt.
• 38 people witnessed it
– NO one helped
Bystander effect
tendency for a bystander to be less likely to help in an emergency if there are other onlookers present
Diffusion of responsibility
tendency for each group member to dilute personal responsibility for acting by spreading it among all other group members
Darley & Latane (1968)
Via an intercom, NYC college students heard another
student having a seizure
• Independent variable = number of other
people subject knew could help
– no others = 85% of subjects helped – 1 other = 62% of subjects helped – 4 others = 31% of subjects helped
Attributions
The thought processes we use to assign (attribute) causes to our own and others’ behavior
Internal attributions
explanations based on an
individual’s personality - She’s weird; she’s cool; she’s carefree - These are dispositional
External attributions
explanations based on the
current situation - She’s out of laundry money; she lost a bet - These are situational
The Fundamental Attribution Error
• We also tend to make internal attributions for a person’s behavior despite the presence of possible external influences.
• The tendency for observers to: – Overestimate the causal influence of personality
factors on behavior
– And to underestimate the causal role of situational influences
We experience ————— (an
unpleasant state of psychological arousal) when there’s an inconsistency within our important attitudes and behaviors.
cognitive dissonance
To relieve ourselves of this tension we need
to change our attitude or change our behavior.
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)
• Students first performed a boring task
– turning pegs in holes
• Then asked to tell next participant that it was
‘fun, enjoyable, & interesting’
• They were paid either $1 or $20 to do this
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)
• Those receiving $1 payment came to see it as more enjoyable
• Those receiving $20 didn’t change their attitudes (from baseline) much at all – why?
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• Counterattitudinal action led to cognitive dissonance
• A behavior that is inconsistent with an existing
attitude.
• Telling others that a task is interesting and fun when it
really stinks.
• It will lead to change in that attitude ONLY when
actor sees no strong external justification for taking the action
• $20 provided adequate justification for misleading
another student
• $1 was insufficient justification, thus arousing
