Lecture 6 - Social Psychology Flashcards
Social Psychology
Concerned with how our behaviour is influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other people.
Social Psychologists use scientific methods to study how people think, feel about, influence, and relate to one another
Attributions
Causal Explanations for behaviour
* Attributions help us understand our experience and explain other people’s behaviours
* Strongly influence the way e interact with others
Internal Attribution
Something within the person that we observe
Ex. Personality
External Attribution
Caused by something outside the person we observe
Ex. Their Situation
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to attribute our own successes to internal causes and failures to external ones
Fundamental Attribution Error
Tendency to Explain Other’s behaviour by overestimating personality factors, and underestimating the influence of situation
Ex. Assume cashier is mean person when they are rude to you, but what if their mom is dying and they are having a hard time?
Similarity between Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) and Self-Serving Bias
- Both involve attribution
- Both are forms of cognitive biases
- Both can lead to distorted perceptions of others and one’s own behaviour
Difference between Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) and Self-Serving Bias
FAE focuses on attributing others’ behaviour, blaming personal traits overe situational factors
Self Serving Bias Attributes one’s own behaviour in a way that protects self esteem by taking credit and deflecting blame for failure
Conformity
Occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure
Orne (1962)
Developed a task participants would disobey experimenter or would refuse to do (for long)
Gave particpants 2000 sheets of paper and it took them 5.5 hrs of writing before they realized it was pointless
- This showed obedience to authority
Milgram Study
Real participant and a fake
Real particpant “randomly assigned” to act as teacher
Fake assigned as learner
Teacher shocks partcipant after every wrong answer and it gets worse each time until learner complains of heart trouble and demands to be released
Results: 65% were given maximum shock which showed they would not disobey the authority teacher
80% Continue after learner screams my hearts bothering me I wont be in the experiment anymore
Attitudes
Relatively stable and enduring evaluations of things and people.
ABC model of attitudes:
Affective Component: How we FEEL towards object
Behavioural Component: How we BEHAVE toward
Cognitive Component: What we BELIEVE about the object
Do Attitudes Influence Behaviour?
Stronger attitudes predict behaviour more accurately than weak or vague attitudes.
Although, people sometimes misrepresent their attitudes (e.g. for social desirability)
People are not always aware of their attitudes (implicit bias)
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Timed categorization task where you sort words
* measures a persons reaction time
* Faster at pairing Stereotype-compatible words indicates higher level of implicit bias
Implicit Bias
Implicit bias refers to the unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that influence our understanding, actions, and decisions, often without our awareness.
