Chapter 5 - Opinions Flashcards
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecy
behavior based on false belief about a situation causes that situation in the end.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Galatea effect
people who have higher self-expectations will have more positive outcomes.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Pygmalion effect
the idea that when people place greater expectations on an individual or a group, it will result in greater outcomes attained by the individual or group.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Thomas and Thomas Theorem
if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
This means that the perceptions people have about reality influence their choice of actions. Whether the perceptions match reality is not what matters: people act as if their beliefs are reality.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Social context effects / complex aggregation
self-fulfilling prophecies emerge in an interplay between the individual (micro) and the social context (meso and macro).
The beliefs and behavior of one person affects the beliefs and behavior of others, which leads to a change in the collective outcome.
Conformity
Conformity
tendency of people to copy the opinions and behaviors of other people in their environment.
Conformity
Conformity in judgment
there is a tendency of people to conform to the publicly revealed judgment of the majority group in small-scale settings, even when this majority judgment is false.
(Empirical evidence for this is provided by the results of the Asch-experiment.)
Conformity
Parental transmission
Propositions about conformity (generally supported by empirical evidence)
children tend to conform to the opinion and behaviors of their parents.
Conformity
Peer transmission
Propositions about conformity (generally supported by empirical evidence)
students conform to the opinions and behavior of their peers.
Conformity
Media transmission
& Werther effect
Propositions about conformity (generally supported by empirical evidence)
people conform to the opinions and behavior expressed in media.
- Werther effect: suicides reported in mass media increase the likelihood of actual suicides.
Conformity
Conformity is a specific case of social influence
Social influence is___?
a process by which people’s opinions and behavior are affected by others.
Conformity
Positive social influence
process by which people’s opinions and behavior develop in the same direction as the opinions and behavior of other actors in their environment.
Conformity
Negative social influence
process by which people’s opinions and behavior develop in the opposite direction to the opinions and behavior of other actors in their environment.
Informational and normative social influence
Informational social influence
influence to accept information obtained from another as evidence about reality.
Informational and normative social influence
Normative social influence
influence to conform to the positive expectations of another
Social learning theory
Social learning theory
people tend to conform to opinions of others in their environment in order to learn from them.
Social learning theory
Individual learning
thing people try out themselves, without being influenced by others
Social learning theory
Direct social learning
learning via communication with others (sharing opinions, exchanging facts).
Social learning theory
Observational social learning
learning via observation of other people’s behavior (and presumed underlying opinions)
Social learning theory
The dual-process model distinguishes two modes of social learning
- System l: work of the irrational part of the human brain, processing information quickly,
automatically and unconsciously. - System ll: work of the rational part of the human brain, processing information slowly,
deliberately and consciously.
Most of the time, people use system l to process information. This makes them tend to process information not systematically and carefully and therefore makes them prone to cognitive errors.
Social learning theory
Social learning biases
conditions that modify the degree of conformity.
Social learning theory
Popularity bias (bandwagon effect)
the tendency to copy opinions from the social environment is positively affected by the number of supporters for a certain opinion.
- Majority effect: opinions that receive majority support are copied disproportionally more often.
- Social proof: the ‘evidence’ individuals perceive which arises when a group of people in the environment does something in the same way.
Social learning theory
Exposure bias
the more strongly people are exposed to a certain opinion in the population, the more likely they are to conform to that opinion.
Social learning theory
Status bias
people conform more strongly to a certain opinion when higher status figures support that opinion. (Status is subjective and who is a higher status figure differs from person to person.)
Social learning theory
Susceptibility bias
the more strongly individuals in a certain social condition are susceptible (open) to adopting opinions, the likely it is that they will conform to the opinions in that social context. (Uncertainty about personality or about a situation increases susceptibility to conformation.)
- Simple contagion: diffusion of opinions that need few sources.
- Complex contagion: diffusion of opinions that need more sources.
Social learning theory
Confirmation bias
people seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirming evidence.
Social learning theory
Adaption bias
the more certain opinions are adapted to the social environment (the more useful), the more likely it is that people will conform to those opinions. (So when social conditions change, people’s opinions may change too.)
Popularity of cultural products
Cumulative advantage / Matthew effect
positive feedback process in which prior success increases the likelihood of successive success.
Popularity of cultural products
Consequences of cumulative advantage
Hint: 2 answers
- Inequality in success: social influence makes people choose for things that have been reviewed positively, instead of things that do not have or have less positive reviews.
- Unpredictability: which things will become popular, cannot be predicted up front by measuring the quality, because popularity depends on social influence
Diffusion of innovations
Innovation
a completely new believe, or some new practice or object that is based on new beliefs (knowledge), which is aimed to solve a certain problem.
Diffusion of innovations
Diffusion
the transmission and spread of something.
Diffusion of innovations
Tarde’s diffusion theory
Tarde’s S-shaped curve of cumulative adoption of an innovation represents three stages of the diffusion process
- The diffusion process starts with a long period in which only a few people adopt the innovation.
- After that period, a large group of people follow and many people rapidly adopt the innovation.
- At the end of the diffusion process the speed of adoption slows as it reaches the remaining group of people in the population.
The diffusion of innovations is subject to social learning biases. The biases influence whether people are willing to believe or use the innovation.
Hearing about an innovation diffuses like a simple contagion: people hear about the innovation quite easily. However, adopting the innovation is a complex contagion: people want other people to try first, they first want to see whether it is necessary to adopt the new innovation, etc. These findings confirm Tarde’s diffusion theory and the social learning theory. However, Tarde’s theory only covers one-to-one social transmission, but one-to-many social influence also plays a big role in diffusion of innovations, especially in times of social media.
