Social Psychology Flashcards
Cooperative game vs wall street game
Prisoner’s dilemma type experiment where they told people they were playing either The Cooperative Game or The Wall Street Game. Majority of participants in the Cooperative Game played cooperatively; far fewer in the Wall Street game did.
Fundamental attribution error
in the west, we are much more likely to think the cause of someone’s behaviour is an internal factor rather than an external one. In other, more collectivist cultures, this is not the case. I’d say the same in collectivist cultures within western cultures.
Construal (3)
- Stories we tell
- Esp important for social behaviour- We can only guess what’s going on in someone’s head
- Overconfidence e.g. split brain patient
What types of stories do we tell ourselves about others, and ourselves?
Attributions
Stereotypes
Impressions
Attributions
Attributions: what caused people to behave the way they did
Fundamental attribution error
People tend to put more effort into attributions for extreme or unusual events
What are stereotypes? Why do people have them?
Stereotypes: what different groups of people are like
Efficient way to form an impression, and sometimes that impression will be accurate
Can provide a sense that what roles people are in, outcomes they receive, and the hierarchy of society are just
Two heuristics for impressions
Transference: tendency to transfer impressions of one person onto another person who looks similar (e.g. person looks like your sister so you treat them like you treat your sister)
False consensus: Overestimate how much other people share your beliefs and attitudes
Why do we use heuristics for our impressions of people?
Know who we’re interacting with.
What will people be like in the future?
Name & describe 5 impression management strategies
- Self-promotion: competent
- Ingratiation: likeable
- Exemplification: dedicated
- Intimidation: dominant
- Supplication: needy
Self-serving bias
Processing info to maintain a positive attitude towards yourself.
Self-serving attributions
Thinking good outcomes are bc of something about us but bad outcomes are cuz of something external to ourselves, or explaining past actions or outcomes in ways that reflect well on yourself.
Forecasting errors
People are often inaccurate forecasting their reactions to future events
Affective forecasting error
People’s inability to predict the emotional reactions they will have to future events. We focus on information that has little relevance in predicting our actual happiness, and we have little awareness of our own psychological immune system, which allows us to bounce back emotionally from negative outcomes
When are we more likely to tell external vs internal stories?
We often tell internal stories when we do well and external stories when we do badly. People generally tell internal stories when other people do badly.
How does perspective influence storytelling?
The perspective you tell a story from emphasizes certain facts and so leads people to make certain attributions. Example: body cams vs dashcams
What is the experiment where they switch cards and how does it demonstrate storytelling?
Participants choose which of two people are more attractive, then they’re actually given the other card…and then they tell a story about why they prefer the person in the card they’re given. 80% don’t notice they were given the wrong card, they just confidently tell a story that makes sense for why they’d prefer that person-they feel like that story is true
Attitude
Orientation toward target stimulus that involves an affective feeling, a cognitive belief, and a behavioural motivation.
Implicit/explicit attitudes
Attitudes can be implicit/automatic or explicit. Implicit and explicit attitudes can be uncorrelated with one another and can predict different kinds of behaviour.
Elaboration likelihood model (2)
Attitudes can be changed via two different routes (dual-processing):
- Central route of persuasion: People are motivated to take the time to process information and are convinced by the strength of an argument
- Peripheral route of persuasion: People are less motivated to process information deeply and are instead influenced by superficial factors like fame or the attractiveness of the person
What is one effect of having a high need for cognition?
Some people need to think more than others do. If you have a high need for cognition, you are more likely to be persuaded by logical arguments.
Compliance strategies- Give 5 strategies get people to do what you want them to do?
- Give a reason
- Reciprocity: door in face–perceptual contrast and reciprocal concessions.
- Exploit consistency: foot in door or lowball
- Social proof
- Scarcity principle
How can you resist requests?
- Resist low-balling: recognize consistency traps and avoid premature agreement that might make us feel like we’ve wasted our effort if we don’t follow through.
- Foot-in-the-door: refuse even small requests to prevent the consistency trap
- Violate schema: Andrew’s observational approach: accept all gifts while suppressing urge to reciprocate OR, even more effective, ASK FOR MORE.
What is cognitive dissonance?
A negative feeling/emotion–mostly anxiety–caused by an incongruence between our behaviour and our attitudes or beliefs that cannot be sufficiently justified by the situation. Can be a conflict between what you think is the right thing to do and what you’re actually doing.
Five ways to cope with cognitive dissonance
○ Change behaviour-“I’ll never text and drive again!”
○ Change attitude-“Actually, texting and driving isn’t that bad”
○ Reframe behaviour-“Driving while intoxicated is much worse”
○ Add consonant cognitions-“Multitasking is the sign of an efficient person” or “my brother texts and drives like 3x as much as me”
○ Reduce perceived control-“I have to reply quickly or my friends will reject me”
Effort justification
Developing a positive attitude towards something unpleasant or that requires a lot of effort, to reduce the dissonance you feel from doing it
Cultural differences with cognitive dissonance
Westerners tend to feel more dissonance when their behaviour is out of line with their values. People from more collectivist cultures tend to feel more dissonance when their attitudes are out of synch with important others or the way they wish to appear in others’ eyes.
What was the peg turning experiment?
Demonstrated cognitive dissonance. Festinger & Carlsmith 1959. Those only given $1 to lie rated the task more highly afterwards, demonstrating that they experienced a change in attitude due to dissonance.
When do people perform better in front of a group rather than alone?
- If a task is easy, you’ll perform better in front of a group
- If a task is difficult or unfamiliar, you’ll perform worse in front of a group
Social loafing
Tendency to slack off when in a group if you feel your contributions don’t matter or are anonymous
How does homogeneity affect decision-making in groups?
Poorer
Attitudes and opinions tend to become more polarized.
Focus on knowledge held in common and fail to share or acknowledge info that only few people can contribute.
What is groupthink? What 2 things cause it?
Pressure in a homogenous group to maintain allegiance to a dominant leader, or time pressure, inhibits members from sharing unpopular opinions or beliefs
What two factors can make cognitive dissonance dangerous?
- See world as rational and predicable E.g. victim blaming
* See world as just. E.g. gay disasters
Explain how cognitive dissonance can lead to dehumanization when we do harm.
We can’t attribute it to the supernatural cuz we want to feel in control.
We can’t attribute it to ourself because we like to think we’re good.
We often end up dehumanizing the person we harmed–if they aren’t fully human, we shouldn’t have treated them better.
What is dehumanization?
- Often a response to cognitive dissonance
- Thinking someone is less than human
- Often reflected in language e.g. immigrants are “insects” and homeless people are “rats”
- Used in propaganda and often used to prep people for conflict–if you can get people to think of the enemy as less than human they won’t feel dissonance when you ask them to fight them
- EXAMPLE 1: 3/5ths rule during slavery–white people literally thought black people were 3/5ths human.
- EXAMPLE 2: Ktiely et al 2015, alt right participants rated muslims as 55.4% evolved
Realistic group conflict theory
Conflict occurs between two groups when they are competing for limited resoruces
What happens when a person with an implicit racial bias against Black people see a Black face?
There is an immediate reaction of the amygdala (fear response) but this is quickly downregulated by the prefrontal cortex (explicit motivations)
Give four possible ways to reduce prejudice and explain them
1st. Positive contact: work together as equals towards a common goal in an environment where social change is supported -> reduce anxiety, promote perspective taking, diversify sense of self
2nd. Jigsaw classroom: empower each student to become an expert on one topic and then contribute that one thing to their group
3rd. Robber’s cave study: even minimal groups quickly form an identity, but this can be reduced through cooperative tasks
4th. Imagining positive contact
Parental investment theory
Theory that women prefer a mate who can provide long term investment and security but men prefer “short-term mating strategy” (puke) with many fertile partners
Describe Milgram’s experiments.
Proposal: Could an experimenter, with mild authority, obtain obedience from ordinary people to inflict pain on an innocent peer?
A participant was asked to play a role of a teacher punishing another person (who was actually a confederate) if they didn’t correctly remember certain pairs of words. They were told to administer electric shocks when the student got it wrong. The shocks started small and got higher the more the student got the questions wrong. They went up to 450 vaults. The machine had “danger: severe shock” written on it by 450v.
A third person, the authority figure running the study, told the participant that the study was not dangerous, but the student/confederate mentioned that they have a heart condition. If the student said they didn’t want to administer another shock, the authority figure would prompt them to continue 4 times. At 150 vaults the learner says “I think this is causing my heart to do weird things, I want you to let me out and stop doing the study”. At 400 vaults they start screaming. At 425 they go silent. 65% of participants went all the way to 450 vaults.
What did people THINK would happen in Milgram’s experiments? What actually happened?
- Community members said 0 people would go the whole way
- Psychiatrists said 0.1% would obey
- Milgram predicted 3% would obey
- 65% of people went the whole way.
What 2 theories about what causes atrocities did Milgram want to test?
Personality attribution: evil people committed these acts
Situational attribution: something about the situation facilitated ordinary people to commit evil actions
What did Milgram’s study show is not necessary for someone to do something extremely wrong?
What did it show is sufficient?
Evil personality isn’t a necessary condition for following extreme orders.
A sufficient condition is taking responsibility from their shoulders and putting it onto an authority figure.
How was Milgram’s pilot study different from the real one? Why did he change it?
In the pilot study, the confederate didn’t mention having a heart condition. 100% of participants went up to 450v.
How was Milgram’s study a best case scenario?
- Experimenter had very mild authority
- Participants were everyday citizens
- Victims were in-group members-chosen to look like the participants and have similar backgrounds
- Victims were recruited from the same town as the participants.
- No punishment for disobeying clearly communicated.
How did Milgram say we can reduce conformity?
- Distance between participant and teacher: classic case of being in the same room, full isolation from student, in the same room, only auditory input, physical touch
- Distance between teacher and authority figure: if the authority figure left but could be reached by phone, 20% obedience
- Legitimacy of the authority figure: office building instead of uni ~50% obedience, authority leaves and a new authority comes in ~20%, 1 teacher stops at 150v ~10%, 2 authority figures and 1 says they should stop at 150v 0%
How did Burger replicate Milgram in 2009?
Modified it to call 150v the “point of no return” because almost all participants that went to 150v went all the way to 450v. 70% went above 150v, when 80% of Milgram’s did. Estimated about 55% would go all the way now.
How can we prevent future atrocity? Andrew’s ideas.
§ Dissent: publicly express critique of authority figures
§ Delegitimize authority figures: remind people around us that authority figures make mistakes
§ Reduce psychological distance: between authority figures and victims
§ Permit disagreement: between authority figures–install or elect people who are likely to have a different point of view
§ Reduce specialization/compartmentalization: of executive, law-enforcing organizations, which increase the psychological distance between authority figures and victims
Give examples of 5 things that might cause aggression.
- Insults that threaten our need to belong
- Goals frustrated
- Annoying or uncomfortable sensations
- Personality, upbringing, socialization
- Gun
Do violent video games cause violence?
- Desensitize people to violence immediately after playing and increase aggressive thoughts, actions and interpretations–but doesn’t last long and no evidence increases aggressive behaviour–tho may add up if played for days.
- Doing exercise first leads to more aggressive behaviours after playing violent games
- Players who cooperate in a violent video game show decreased aggression and more prosocial behaviour
- Highly skilled players show less aggression after playing
- Those with more aggressive traits are more likely to seek out aggressive media and be more aggressive after playing
- No increase in aggressive behaviour in children and adolescents
- Studies that don’t show a link might not get published
- APA 2015–effects on aggressive thoughts, feelings and impulses may be relatively short-lived, and no strong links found between violent games and actual violence or minor crime
Kin selection
Evolved tendency to help those we are genetically related to
Norms of reciprocity
Evolved as cultural adaptations in larger societies where trust among strangers is necessary for society’s success
Empathy gap
People have difficulty feeling similar to, or imagining the mental state of, a person in need
Give examples of things that might cause aggression.
- Personal slights and insults that threaten our need to belong
- Hangry
- Boys being socialized towards aggressive behaviours because they’re shown it’s an appropriate response
- Having a gun in the room made participants more likely to give retaliatory shocks
What 3 factors are involved in the bystander effect?
- Notice
- Realize
a. Informational influence
b. Minority influence
c. Pluralistic ignorance - Decide
a. Diffusion of responsibility
b. Alone
Pluralistic ignorance
People are collectively unaware of each others’ true attitudes or beliefs
What does the “smoke under the door” experiment show us?
People are less likely to react to what seems to be a fire if the other people in the room don’t react. Suggests we look to others to decide what to do–we assume others know more than we do. This is informational influence. See: Woolworths fire in Manchester in 1999.
Conformity
We change our behaviour simply because of what those around us are doing.
What are informational and normative influence?
- Informational influence: the ways we change our decision-making or behaviour bc we think other people around us know more than we do.
- Normative influence: the ways we change our behaviour bc we want to fit in with other people
Why might normative influence be useful?
It can help people predict how people around them will act. But it SUCKS for ND people.
What is the autokinetic effect?
Sherif 1936. Participants practice saying how much a dot in the dark moved. Then, 3 days later, they’d make a public statement about how much they thought they moved. Participants’ statements would converge.
This was shown to be public compliance rather than private acceptance because afterwards they were put in a room alone again, and they reverted to their original answers.
Name four moderators of informational influence.
–Ambiguity
–Importance
–Crisis
–Expertise
When are we most at risk of normative influence? (5 reasons)
◊ Unsure how much group values you ◊ How close are you to group? ◊ Unanimous agreement ◊ Low self-esteem ◊ Lots of people in the in-group
What is Asch’s line judgement test? Give 5 outcomes.
–1 participant, 7 confederates. Which line most matches this line?
–90% of time, all confederates get it right. 10%, all make a weird choice.
–Alone, participants 100% accurate.
–With confederates, 50% conformed to wrong answer.
–25% never conformed to the wrong answer.
–If 1 person dissented, conformity 5%.
What is minority influence?
If one person doesn’t conform to normative influence, way more people stop conforming.
Request
Someone comes to us directly with a request for us to change our behaviour, or our belief, in some way.
Order
Someone tells you that you must change your behaviour or beliefs, or there will be consequences. If we defy them, we break our social bond with them and they may sanction us in some way.
