Lecture 4: Social Norms and Impression Formation Flashcards
How might you resist unwanted normative influence?
- Question how norms are being used–knowledge is power! Being able to recognize when and how norms are being used against you is enough to prevent yourself from engaging in a behavior you would rather not do.
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Question claims about relationships–does this person really have the authority to tell you what to do?
- Should you really feel obligated to this salesperson? Do you really owe them something?
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Question others’ views of the situation–is the other person’s’ expectation of you valid?
- Does he really have the right to ask you to watch over a suspected criminal?
- Do you really owe the person this favour?
- Consider all of the norms that might be relevant to the situation: Should obeying this authority figure really overshadow the norm of social responsibility?
What is:
social judgment theory
- (Sherif & Hovland, 1961)*
- Resisting Persuasion*
We are more likely to be persuaded by positions that are close to our own. People accept information that supports their positions at face value, while opposing arguments are subject to scrutiny and criticism. People tend to remember strong and compelling arguments that support their attitudes, and weak and specious arguments that oppose their attitudes.
- latitude of acceptance: Range of positions that respondent finds acceptable (leads to assimilation).
- latitude of rejection: Range of positions that the respondent finds unacceptable (leads to contrast).
- latitude of noncommitment: Range of positions between acceptance and rejection that lead to the most persuasion, because we’re unsure of how we feel about it.
What is:
inoculation theory
- (McGuire, 1964)*
- Resisting Persuasion*
Just as weak doses of infection activate the immune system and prepare the body to fight stronger attacks, practicing to resist persuasion attempts can build up defenses and prepare one to resist strong persuasive appeals. By exposing people to weak or moderate counterarguments against their beliefs, they build up resistance strategies to ward off stronger future attacks.
- e.g. Children who watch commercials with toys are presented with fantastical images of what the toys can do. Children who played with the toys while watching the commercial (seeing that they often couldn’t do what the ads implied) learned to view the advertisements with a more cynical eye (Feschbach, 1980).
What did McAlister et al. (1980) demonstrate in regards to inoculation theory with anti-smoking?
Resisting Persuasion
McAlister did a study with two middle schools, with one school who had high school students go through presentations and skits that simulate situations in which they may be peer pressured to smoke and how to deal with the situation. Students in the inoculation school were much less likely to smoke after three years.
What do we base first impressions on?
- Appearance
- Group Memberships (e.g. Stereotypes)
- Expectations
- Accessibility
What did Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall (2005) demonstrate in regards to perceived competence from appearance?
In this experiment, participants were exposed to unfamiliar pairs of faces for one second. The faces were of actual candidates in previous House and Senate elections in the USA. (If anyone recognized these faces, their data was thrown out.) After being exposed to these pictures for one second, participants were asked to rate the faces on competency and a number of other traits (intelligence, honesty, etc.). What they found was that ratings of competence predicted actual election outcomes quite closely; candidates rated as more competent were elected ~70% of the time.
In some follow-up studies, if participants are asked to ‘think carefully’ and ‘make good judgments’ (instead of making snap decisions), the correlation between competency ratings and election outcomes disappears. As well, “dominant” faces are rated as more competent (i.e. people who appear more masculine, mature, etc.)
What kind of information might be accessible in a first impression situation?
- Any expectations you have about that person.
- Any relevant concepts that have recently been activated.
What did Asch (1947) find in regards to the role of expectations with trait lists?
Asch clued into the primacy effect. For example, if you’re presented with a list of traits that lists intelligence first as opposed to last, you’re more likely to rate this person as being intelligent. But Asch found that this didn’t work for all traits. There are certain traits called central traits which behave differently (e.g. warm vs. cold). These central traits carry more weight, and it doesn’t matter where they’re presented, they will have a large role in judgment. For example, the impression you form about someone who is “intelligent, determined, skillful, practical, industrious, cautious, and warm,” is very different from the image formed by someone who is “intelligent, determined, skillful, practical, industrious, cautious, and cold.” This is because these central traits carry so much information that they weigh heavily.
What did Kelley (1950) demonstrate in regards to the primacy effect with a guest professor?
Kelley wanted to look at this effect in more concrete ways than just viewing trait lists (as Asch did). He produced different expectations in students. He presented one group of students with a description of a guest professor that was warm, intelligent, industrious, etc., while the others were told that he was cold, intelligent, industrious, etc. The different expectations of the students led them to interpret the exact same behaviour in different ways because their expectations are different.
What are:
implicit personality theories
Impression Formation: Role of Expectations
We tend to believe that certain traits “go together” (e.g. the halo effect—when judgments of a person’s’ characteristics are influenced by an overall impression, either positive or negative). This can have very important effects. For example, the “attraction-leniency effect” describes how jurors are more likely to give attractive criminals more lenient effects. This can be prevented if the judge is very clear about what the jurors are supposed to be looking at when making a judgement. There is also a flipside to this effect, which is that a less attractive person is more likely to get a harsher sentence. However, if an attractive person used their attractiveness as a part of the crime (i.e. used their attractiveness to their advantage), then jurors tend to punish people more.
What did Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz (1977) demonstrate in regards to the actor-observer bias with a game show?
In this experiment, there are three categories of people: quizmasters, contestants, and spectators. The quizmasters were told to ask very difficult questions that only very few people knew the answer to, and the contestants were struggling. At the end, everyone was asked to rate how smart they think the quizmasters and contestants are. Both the contestants and spectators rated the quizmasters as being more intelligent, whereas the quizmasters didn’t. They recognized that the situation was set up to make the quizmasters look smarter, so they didn’t think that they were smarter due to their advantage.
What is Kelley’s (1950) covariation model?
When people want to determine the cause of an event, they may seek out information about potential causal factors—factors that are present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it does not occur. In order to figure out which kind of attribution to make (actor—internal attribution, or target/situation—external attribution), we need to consider three types of information:
- Distinctiveness information—does this person behave like this in other situations?
- Consensus information—how do other people behave in this situation?
- Consistency information—do they continue to engage in this behaviour when faced with this situation over time?
What is:
Gilbert’s stage model of attribution
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Dispositional attribution: We determine what the person is doing (categorization) and then attribute that behaviour to their disposition (characterization).
- Categorization—What is the person doing?
- e.g. We don’t just see someone “putting something in their pocket”, we see someone stealing
- Characterization—What trait does the behavior imply?
- e.g. Stealing implies that the person is dishonest, or “a thief”
- Categorization—What is the person doing?
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Situational attribution: If motivated and able, we correct for situational/external factors (correction).
- Correction—What situational constraints may have caused the behavior?
- e.g. Is the person unemployed and trying to feed their family?
- Correction—What situational constraints may have caused the behavior?
What did Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull (1988) demonstrate in regards to attribution with the anxious woman?
Participants in this experiment were asked to watch a silent video of a woman who was behaving very awkwardly. In one situation, they were told that she was describing her sexual fantasies or reliving her most embarrassing moment. In another condition, they were told she was talking about her hobbies or favourite restaurants in town. Those given a situational cause for her behavior rated her as being generally less anxious—they corrected!
Would the same correction happen if the subjects were busy or distracted? They did another experiment where some participants were told to memorize the topics that the woman was talking about. In this condition, participants rated her as being just as dispositionally anxious as people who were told she’s talking about her favourite restaurants. In this case, they didn’t have the cognitive resources to make corrections.
How did Trope & Gaunt (1998) demonstrate the integration model of attribution with a strict TA?
Do we always ignore the situation in our initial attributions? Trope & Gaunt (1998) have shown that when situational information is salient and applicable, people will use this information even when under cognitive load. For example, in a study with TA giving low grades, subjects judged whether the TA was dispositionally strict or lenient. What they manipulated was whether the participants were told that the TAs were told by the professor to mark very harshly versus being told that the university guidelines say that they should mark harshly. Even when the participants were cognitively busy, they took into consideration the stronger external cue (the professor) and didn’t attribute strictness to the TAs disposition.
