Psych Chap 12 Flashcards
Social Psychology
is the study of how thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behaviours are influenced by interactions between people.
Social psychology involves understanding..
- It involves understanding behaviour within its social context.
Social Facilitation
shows how an audience can affect task performance (differently for easy and difficult tasks), potentially explained by the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Yerkes-Dodson Law; social facilitation follows the ————-
- performance is best at moderate level of arousal
– Social facilitation follows the Yerkes-Dodson Law: for easy tasks, higher arousal (from an audience) improves performance, but for difficult tasks, high arousal makes performance worse.
Social reality
is a phenomenon that emerges and is constructive through social interactions. ( people see what they want to see, ignore things that don’t align with their beliefs)
Social reality is
constructive, with people selectively encoding information based on expectations and desires (e.g., biased penalty perception by football fans).
Confirmation bias
is the tendency to attend only to information confirming existing beliefs, looking for positive evidence and ignoring contradictions. Disconfirming evidence is often considered an exception.
What is an example of confirmation bias
- someone who does not fit a stereotype is a subtype of the stereotype but their existence does not invalidate the stereotype
Connect migraines to confirmation bias
- confirmation bias—people focus on facts that support what they already believe and ignore those that don’t. In this example, a person with symptoms of both a migraine and a brain tumor assumes they have only a migraine because they notice symptoms that match their belief while overlooking other possibilities.
Leon Festinger’s quote
• Strong beliefs are hard to change.
• People ignore facts that challenge their beliefs.
• They question sources and reject logic.
• The more committed they are, the harder they defend
• Even with clear evidence, they may believe more strongly and try to convince others.
** Constructing Social Reality: Mary as a Murderer and victim of torture**
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Mary as a Murderer:
- Two days after Martin Brown’s murder, Mary and another girl visited his mother, asking to see him in his coffin.
- Brian Howe’s murder involved strangulation, nostril squeezing, puncture wounds, cut hair, genital mutilation, and an attempted “M” carving. The coroner concluded the killer was a child due to the low force used.
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Mary as a Victim of Torture:
- Her mother, a prostitute, was often absent, leaving Mary with her violent stepfather.
- Mary was unwanted and neglected; her aunt reported her mother rejected her at birth.
- She suffered frequent injuries while alone with her mother, raising suspicions of abuse (e.g., dropped from a window, given sleeping pills).
- despite her abuse of the child, the mother kept custody of her child, she also encouraged Mary to take part in sexual activities with her client
Attribution Theory
- Attribution Theory describes how people generate causal explanations for behavior.
What are 2 ways to explain causality
- Two types of causality: dispositional (internal, based on the person) and situational (external, based on the situation).
The FAE represents that people have the tendency to
- The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining others’ behavior.
** The Fundamental Attribution Error (Example):**
- Example of FAE: After reading about Breivik’s crimes, typical reactions focus on dispositional attributions like “evil,” “crazy,” or “selfish”. People are less likely to think that this man might be a victim of crime himself, this man might have encountered some unfair treatments in his country, this man might have experienced some tragic events recently (these are situational attribution that people rarely consider)
The actor observer bias states that people often use
situational attributions to explain their own behaviours and dispositional attributions to explain the behaviours of others.
** Actor-Observer Bias (Example 1):**
- Example: When a classmate performs poorly on an exam, we tend to think they are lazy or not smart (internal cause) rather than considering external factors like illness or lack of study time due to work (external cause).
- Conversely, when we ourselves perform poorly, we blame the situation (external cause).
When we fail, we are less likely to
attribute it to internal factors like lack of intelligence or responsibility. The cause is external and not internal like a lack of responsibility or intelligence
Actor observer bias example 2
- Example 2: A dispositional attribution like “he is poor at time management” can lead to character assassination (e.g., selfish, unreliable).
Actor-observer bias means we see our own actions as influenced by the …. but assume others act based on … This happens because…
- Actor-observer bias means we see our own actions as influenced by the situation but assume others act based on their personality. This happens because we know our own context but lack that info for others, so we think their behavior is just “how they are.”
Self serving bias leads …
- Self-Serving Bias leads people to take credit for successes (dispositional attribution) and deny responsibility for failures (situational attribution). Pessimists tend to think oppositely.
Examples of self serving bias
- “I got the prize because of my ability”, “i lost the competition because it was rigged”
Self-Serving Biases (Examples), Expectations
- Students attribute high grades to their effort and low grades to external factors.
- Professors attribute student success to themselves but not student failures.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
- are predictions that modify behavioral interactions to produce the expected outcome.
- ** Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (Examples):**
- Example: Expecting a party to be boring can lead to non-participation and being ignored, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
- Experiment: Teachers told some students were “academic spurters”; these randomly chosen students performed better due to the teachers’ altered behavior.
Behavioural Confirmation
- Behavioral Confirmation happens when someone’s expectations about a person make that person act in a way that proves those expectations right. It’s the same as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Prejudice
- is negative feelings and opinions about a target object due to its group membership (different from stereotype).
Discrimination
- is the inappropriate or unjustified treatment of people as a result of prejudice.
Prejudice forms in two steps:
Social Categorization and In-group Bias
Social Categorization
- Social Categorization is organizing the social environment by categorizing oneself and others into groups (in-group and out-group).
In-group Bias
- In-group Bias is showing affinity for one’s own group over the out-group, evaluating the in-group as better.
2 basic social categories
• In-group: The group you identify with.
• Out-group: The group you don’t identify with.
- In-group bias means and causes
- means we see our own group as better than others, even if the groups are randomly assigned. This can lead to unfair treatment and hostility toward outsiders.
- causes people to favor their own group and treat outsiders unfairly, even without a clear reason. Simply belonging to a group can be enough to create biased judgments and hostility.
In-group variability, Out-group homogeneity
-
In-group variability is the belief that members of one’s own group are more diverse. And
- Out-group homogeneity is the belief that outsiders are all alike (this is the origin of stereotypes.)
Stereotypes
- Stereotypes are generalizations assigning the same characteristics to all members of a group. They are strengthened by behavioural confirmation, and inconsistent information is often discounted and cannot alone reduce stereotypes.
- ** Reversing Prejudice (Experiment)
Step 1: Building Up Prejudice
- Boys were randomly divided into two groups at summer camp.
- Within-group activities (e.g., hiking, swimming, meal prep) built friendship.
- Between-group activities (e.g., baseball, tug-of-war) created hostility.
Step 2: Reversing Prejudice
- Strategy 1: Propaganda – Complimenting each group to the other. Did not work.
- Strategy 2: Non-competitive interaction – Watching a movie together. Did not work either.
Step 3: Cooperative Action on a Shared Goal (The Contact Hypothesis)
- The two groups worked together to pull a camp truck up a steep hill.
- This fostered mutual dependence, reduced hostility, and built friendships across group lines.
Applying the Contact Hypothesis to Other Social Settings
- Managing Employees – Encouraging teamwork on shared projects to reduce workplace tension.
- Parenting (with multiple children) – Assigning cooperative tasks (e.g., cleaning up together) to build stronger sibling bonds.
Some Classic Experiments,
-
Milgram Experiment ( demonstrate obedience to authority ), - Stanford Prison Experiment (situational attribution of behaviour)
-Asch Effect ( normative influence on conformity), and Sherif’s Experiment (informational influence on conformity).
Background of the Miligrams Obedience Experiment
Stanley Milgram studied obedience to authority, inspired by events like the Holocaust; asking why Nazis followed Hitler’s orders. It explored dispositional versus situational forces.
Milgram’s Obedience Experiment participants
Participants in the original 1963 study were 40 males of varying ages, occupations, and education, recruited via newspaper ads.
- ** The Milgram Experiment (Procedure):**
- Participants were led to believe punishment improved learning and acted as “teachers” administering electric shocks to a “learner” (a confederate) for memory errors.
- Shock levels increased from 15 to 450 volts. ( increasing the level by error made)
- The experimenter, as a legitimate authority figure, sat by the teacher and ordered them to continue when hesitant.
** The Milgram Experiment (Procedure), Family Influences on Obedience:**
- Family influences on obedience: Middle-class children are often encouraged to be curious and independent, ( resulting in high status occupations) while economically disadvantaged children are often taught to conform and obey authorities, potentially affecting job opportunities. ( less opportunity to develop the qualities for high status jobs)
- ** The Milgram Experiment (Results):**
- Findings: Two-thirds of participants delivered potentially fatal shocks when instructed by an authority figure.
-
Implications: The study revealed that ordinary people could commit harmful acts under authority, similar to those in Nazi Germany.
- Predictions by psychiatrists (less than 4% obedience at 300V, 0.1% at 450V) based on dispositional factors were significantly lower than actual results.
- Actual results: 87.5% were still obedient at 300 volts, and 65% blindly obeyed at 450 volts.
The Milgram Experiment (1963) showed that people obey…. Even when
The Milgram Experiment (1963) showed that people obey authority figures even when it means harming others. Psychiatrists originally thought obedience depended on personality traits (dispositional factors), but Milgram’s results proved that the situation itself (situational factors) had a strong influence on behavior. His follow-up studies tested how different situations affected obedience levels.
Milgram’s experiment showed that people’s willingness to give high-level shocks depended
on the situation,different conditions changed how many people obeyed. This supports the idea that behavior is influenced more by the situation than by personality traits. (people were more likely to obey when someone else gave the shock or when they were just watching. This matters because it shows that the situation, not personality, controls how people act.
Obedience was very low (less than 5%) when the situation was…
was confusing or less convincing. People disobeyed when the learner asked to be shocked, when the authority figure was also the victim, when two leaders gave different commands, or when participants could choose the shock level. This shows that people are less likely to obey when authority seems weak or unclear.
- Situational conditions favoring obedience: Peer administers shock (over —% obey), participant as bystander (—% obey).
- had over 90% obey
- participant as bystander had 70% obey
- **Situational conditions with about the same rate of obedience (around 65%):
- Two authorities—one as victim,
- women as participants.
People were much less likely to obey when…
when the situation was unclear or authority seemed weak. Obedience dropped when the learner wanted to be shocked, when an ordinary person gave orders, when two leaders gave conflicting instructions, or when participants could choose the shock level. This shows that strong, clear authority is needed for high obedience.
Obedience Experiment in Everyday Setting
• Participants: 22 nurses.
• Task: A doctor (stranger) ordered them to give a dangerous drug dose.
• Prediction: 10 out of 12 nurses said they wouldn’t obey.
• Actual Result: 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed and attempted to give the drug.
• Conclusion: People think they will not do certain things, but they will, people will do exactly the same thing as those who have been in the same situation. People tend to obey authority figures, even in real-life, high-risk situations.
- What people say are not consistent with what they do
- Even though sometimes people say they do not want to hurt you, they will hurt you under the forces of the situation true or false
True
while most participants verbally expressed hesitation or disagreed with the task (dissenting verbally), they still
went ahead and followed through with administering the shocks (inflicted harm behaviorally) when told to do so by the authority figure. Essentially, even though they didn’t feel good about it, they still carried out the harmful actions.
Stanford Prison Experiment objective
Study how situations influence behavior and power dynamics in prisons.
Stanford prison experiment setup
- A mock prison was created at Stanford. Volunteers assigned as prisoners or guards randomly.
- guards enforced order, while prisoners were stripped and dehumanized.
- All were emotionally stable, law-abiding individuals.
Stanford Prison Experiment Prisoner Behavior:
- Day 2: A riot broke out. One prisoner began to act crazy (genuine suffering), on successive days, 3 more prisoners developed similar stress- related symptoms, 5th prisoner
developed a psycho tic rash all over his body when the parole board rejected his appeal.( Some showed extreme stress, acting out, screaming, or developing psychosomatic symptoms.)
Stanford prison experiment; guard behaviour
• Became abusive—took away privileges, denied sanitation, and humiliated prisoners.
true or false in the stanford prison experiment the findings were that guards became abusive, prisoners broke down, and the study was halted after six days. And the guards and prisoners had internalized their roles
True
True or false the guards exhibited genuine real stress related symptoms and the prisoners developed genuine sadistic tendancies
False the guards exhibited sadistic tendencies and the prisoners real stress symptoms
The Stanford experiment was supposed to be planned for 14 days true or false
True
What are some key findings from the Stanford experiment
• People conform to social roles, changing their behavior drastically.
• Supports situational attribution (behavior shaped by the environment, not personality).
- Deindividuation- loss of self awareness in a group, reduced individuality, and attention to personal standards
Deindividuated people often … and deindividuation accounts for the …
- Do things they would not do if they were alone or self aware
- abusive behaviours of he guards in the prison
What is the conclusion of the Stanford prison experiment
- people are trying to adjust to the social roles assigned to them
- People are transformed by the roles that they are playing
- The results of the experiment support situational attribution of behaviour, rather than dispositional attribution
Asch Conformity Experiment purpose
• Purpose: Show how people conform to group pressure to be liked and accepted (normative influence).
Asch conformity task? Groups?
• Task: Match a line to the correct length.
• Groups: 6-8 students, 1 real participant, others were confederates.
Asch conformity Experiment Setup: Process
• First 3 trials: Confederates gave correct answers.
• Fourth trial onward: Confederates gave wrong answers, testing if the participant would conform.
• This happened 12 times out of 18 trials.
Asch conformity: Results
Results:
• 75% conformed at least once.
• 25% never conformed.
• 5% always conformed.
• Control group (no pressure): Only 1 out of 35 gave a wrong answer.
Key Takeaway: Asch Conformity experiment
- People conform to fit in, even when the right answer is obvious.
- Conformity reduced when
- The naive participant had a partner who shared his viewpoint
- Judgements were made in private ( subjects wrote down their answers instead of reporting them in public)
- Group size decreased
The Emperor’s New Clothes (Conformity & Social Pressure)
• People pretend to see something because they fear looking foolish.
• A child speaks the truth, breaking the illusion, showing that social pressure influences behavior.
What If Scenario (Obvious Wrong Judgment in a Group)
• When one confederate makes an obviously wrong judgment, the actual subjects ridicule them.
• Shows that people reject extreme deviations from group norms.
People go along with the group, even
When they know it’s wrong
If someone breaks the norm too drastically…
the group may mock or reject them.
Autokinetic Effect:
A visual illusion where a stationary light in darkness appears to move.
Sherif’s Autokinetic Effect Experiment (1935) purpose
• Purpose: To study informational influence
- how people look to other people around the dining table to find out what fork to use in a fancy restaurant
- informational influence can lead to norm crystallization- norm formation and solidification (Sherif believed that when people are unsure, they look to others for guidance. Over time, shared beliefs become solid and form social norms.)
Sherifs experiment of auto-kinetic effect phase 1- 3
- Phase 1: Individual Norms
• Participants judged light movement alone. (How far the spot has moved)
• Estimates varied (2-6 inches).
• After repeated trials, personal norms stabilized.- Phase 2: Group Norms
• Small groups (2-3 people) made judgments together.
• Estimates converged to a shared group norm (~4 inches).
• Extreme opinions became less extreme. - Phase 3: Testing Individual Norms Again
• Participants re-tested alone.
• Most still followed the group norm (conformity). The same people who said it was 2 or 6 just conformed to 4
- Phase 2: Group Norms
Conclusion of sherifs experiments
• Group norms form through social interaction.
• Extreme views balance out in a group.
• People adjust judgments based on others’ input.
• Expectations influence perception (common in psychology).
The sherif experiment shows how
social influence shapes perceptions and behaviors, especially in ambiguous situations.
Which experiment is associated with “studied normative influence (conforming to fit in).”
Asch 1951
Which experiment is associated with “Studied informational influence (conforming for accuracy).”
Sherif (1935)
Which experiment is associated with “Used confederates (actors) to intentionally create incorrect norms”
Asch (1951)
Which experiment is associated with “No confederates—participants naturally developed group norms.”
Sherif (1935)
Which experiment is associated with “Tested how individuals fit into a pre-established group norm.”
Asch (1951)
Which experiment is associated with “Ambiguous reality (autokinetic effect—light appearing to move).”
Sherif (1935)
Which experiment is associated with “Clear and unambiguous reality (choosing matching line lengths).”
Asch (1951)
Which experiment is associated with “Tested how group norms were formed over time.”
Sherif (1935)
Sherif’s Study: People conform when they are
unsure and rely on others for guidance.
Main Difference between asch and sherif
Asch studied social pressure, while Sherif studied perception in uncertainty.
