Lecture 17: From Person to People Flashcards
bystander effect
social psychological phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present
Highlights how the presence of others can decrease personal responsibility and influence behavior in emergency situations
what is the relationship between the number of bystanders and the likelihood that any one person will intervene?
The MORE bystanders there are, the LESS likely it is that any one person will intervene
example of the bystander effect and explain it
Kitty Genovese murder 1964
Kitty Genovese was attacked and killed outside her apartment in NY
The attack lasted for 30 minutes and witnesses were aware of the assault since some reported hearing her screams and seeing parts of the attack from their windows
The shocking detail of the case: 37 people heard the murder occurring, but no one called the police since everyone was thinking “someone else will”
what is a key concept tied to the bystander effect?
diffusion of responsibility: Occurs when individuals in a group assume that others will take action or are better suited to handle the situations → ultimately leading to inaction
- When people see others around them, they feel less personally responsible for taking action
what does the bar graph for small (2) vs large group (6) and % who intervened show?
small group (2): 100% intervened
large group (6): ~60% intervened
–> when it is in a smaller group (less diffusion), people are more inclined to intervene and not be a bystander; but for larger groups (more diffusion), people are more likely to stand back and be bystanders
describe the minimal group paradigm and who developed it
developed by Henry Tajfel
Study design
People were split into groups based on trivial or random criteria (ie. coin toss) and then the participants had to decide who to give points to and who to take points away from
The participants never met any of the other participants and knew nothing about them except their group affiliation
Key findings:
People generally chose to give points to people within their group and remove points from people in the opposite group (even if it meant less overall benefit for everyone)
This study demonstrates how easily humans can develop loyalty and favoritism toward their group, even when the group boundaries are trivial or arbitrary
pros of categorization
helpful
efficient
fast
How quickly do we make these thin slicing judgements and how accurate they are? who studied and found this?
Studied and found by Nalini Ambady
Asked people to watch a silent video of a lecturer and asked them to give a guess of how effective/good of a lecturer do they think the person is
Course evaluation: does your little assumption about the lecturer’s ability to teach line up with the teacher course evaluations from students who actually took the course
It seems pretty accurate that your quick judgment lines up with the actual course evaluations
How little time do you need to make a judgment about how good of a lecturer you think they are? 6 seconds (how “thin” it is)
In the first 6 seconds, we have an impression and it doesn’t change (aka “stickiness”)
summary: 6 seconds and it is pretty accurate
thin slicing
really fast judgements that we make about other people
Humans have a tendency for categorization based on ___
Humans have a tendency for categorization based on generalizations
ie. Peaches as a category are sweet, so if you know it is a peach, you can just slide it into the peach category and assume all of the things you know about peaches to that new peach you just categorized
accuracy vs stickiness vs self fulfillment
accuracy: the degree to which our perceptions, beliefs, judgements align with reality
stickiness: how resistant beliefs or attitudes are to change even in the face of new and contradictory information
self fulfillment: occurs when a person’s belief or expectation about a situation/themselves causes behaviors that ultimately lead to the fulfillment of that belief even if it was NOT initially accurate
what are 5 things you can assume a little better than change from a 6 second video?
Talkativeness
Politics
Lying
Psychopathology (study of mental illness)
“gaydar”
what are 4 things we know about groups?
Group bias
Diffusion of responsibility
Categorization
Snap judgment
what is an example of what happens when we combine all the things we know about groups?
Time magazine: cops brutality and race the Diallo verdict
A black man killed by police men (shot 41 times)
The police told the black man to put his hands up, but the black man had a wallet in his hands, but the police men mistook it as a gun and then shot him 41 times
The police officers involved in this that were interviewed, would say that they had no bias “I don’t base my decision to shoot or not to shoot based on categories/races”
1. The person could be lying to the interviewer
2. The person actually believes that they don’t have bias but subconsciously they do (aka implicit bias)
implicit bias
Definition: biases that we don’t or can’t verbally express (because we may not know it even exists within us)
Comes up in educational settings, medical (health care), hiring
explicit biases
Explicit biases: biases that we know and can openly identify and say
how do we figure out if implicit biases exist in society?
we need to look for indirect CLUES of an implicit bias
explain the Hurricane Katrina news example of an implicit bias
Ie. Hurricane Katrina: two photos with people holding things they took from a local grocery thing (same thing, same day but described differently)
1. A black man: a young man walks through chest deep flood water after LOOTING a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday
2. white couple: two residents wade through chest-deep water after FINDING bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina
how can we test if we ourselves have implicit biases?
take the implicit association test
implicit association test and the universal results
What the test does: measure associations you have between two things that you may or may not know you have
An implicit associations test does the same thing (same idea) but with people’s faces and good/bad adjectives to describe them (white or good: clap; black or bad: stomp)
Record how quickly you can do that and then switch up the groups (ie. White or bad; black or good)
Does not matter who you are, but the results are UNIVERSAL across…People on average are slower on clapping when the groups are black and good vs white and bad
describe the association between the playing cards and clapping example with the implicit association test
Association with playing cards: If the card showed is heart or diamond, clap your hands; if the card showed is spade or club, stomp your feet
- Easy to do because hearts and diamonds are both red, and spade and club are both black à an implicit association between the cards and their colors
- However clapping with you see heart or club and stomping when you see diamond and spades is much harder because you are breaking associations (the color associations of the cards)
An implicit associations test does the same thing (same idea) but with people’s faces and good/bad adjectives to describe them (white or good: clap; black or bad: stomp)
Record how quickly you can do that and then switch up the groups (ie. White or bad; black or good)
what are 8 implicit association test subjects?
Race
Age
Sexuality
Weight
Disability
Gender
Gender-science
Gender-career
does it matter if you are a few milliseconds slower at reacting in the implicit associations test (white vs black man)? give example
YES!!
The officers in the Diallo Verdict: if they had a few milliseconds, they might not have shot and killed the person
explain the second study on implicit biases with the object (gun or tool) and a photo of a man (white or black) and the results
A study: you see a picture of an object (gun or tool), when you see the picture of the object, just say if it is a tool or a gun. But before you see the object, a picture of a black or white man flashes before your eyes (does it affect your results and your reaction speed at identifying the object accurately)
Results: you are much faster at calling a gun a gun when you see a black person’s face and you are slightly faster at calling a tool a tool when you see a white person’s face à still accurate but the reaction speed is very different
