social thinking and behaviour Flashcards
Prejudice:
a negative attitude toward people based on their membership in a group.
Discrimination
overt behaviour that involves treating people unfairly based on the group to which they belong (acting on your prejudice)
Explicit Prejudice:
people express publicly
Implicit Prejudice
hidden from public view
Implicit Association Test (IAT):
an implicit measure that can reveal many types of unconscious prejudice
Prejudice Confirms Itself
Stereotype threat: stereotypes create self-consciousness among stereotyped group members and a fear they will live up to other people’s stereotypes.
Women graduating in traditionally ‘male’ fields report high levels of stereotype threat.
Reducing Prejudice
Teaching interventions designed to minimise stereotype threat
Equal Status Contact:
: prejudice between people is most likely to be reduced when they:
• Engage in sustained close contact
• Have equal status
• Work to achieve a common goal that requires cooperation
• Are supported by broader social norms
• Kin Selection:
organisms are more likely to help others with whom they share the most genes, namely their offspring and genetic relatives
– Increases odds that genes will survive across successive generations
• Reciprocal Altruism:
helping others increases the odds that they will help us or our kin in return
Social Learning & Cultural Influences:
• Norm of Reciprocity
we should reciprocate when others treat us kindly
Social Learning & Cultural Influences:
• Norm of Social Responsibility:
people should help others and contribute to the welfare of society
• We internalise these norms & values as our own through socialization processes
Batson - pro-social behaviour can be motivated by two things:
- Altruism: helping another for the ultimate purpose of enhancing that person’s welfare
- Egoistic Goals: helping others to improve our own welfare, e.g.
Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis:
altruism is produced by empathy
• Empathy: the ability to put oneself in the place of another & share what that person is experiencing
Situational & personal factors:
when do people help
- Not being in a hurry
- Recently observing a pro-social role model
- Being in a good mood
5 Step Bystander Intervention Process (Latané & Darley, 1970):
- Notice the event
- Decide if the event is really an emergency
– Social comparison: look to see how others are responding
–
• Assuming responsibility to intervene
– Diffusion of Responsibility: believing that someone else will help
- Self-efficacy in dealing with the situation
- Decision to help (based on cost-benefit analysis)
• Bystander Effect:
presence of multiple bystanders inhibits each person’s tendency to help
– Due to social comparison or diffusion of responsibility
Whom do they help
– Similarity
– Gender
• Male bystanders are more likely to help women
• Women are equally likely to help either gender
– Perceived fairness & responsibility
increasing pro social behaviour
Exposing people to pro-social models:
· Encouraging feelings of empathy & connectedness to others:
· Learning about factors that hinder bystander intervention:
Attraction
Matching Effect:
we are most likely to have a partner whose level of physical attractiveness is similar to our own
• People may refrain from approaching more attractive dating partners out of a fear of rejection
love
Love:
• Passionate Love: involves intense emotion, arousal, & yearning for the partner
– Tends to be less stable
• Companionate Love: involves affection & deep caring about the partner’s well-being
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Proposes that love involves three major components:
- Passion: feelings of physical attraction and sexual desire
- Intimacy: closeness, sharing and valuing one’s partner
- Commitment: a decision to remain in the relationship
Social Psychology: the study of
- Social Thinking: how we think about our social world
- Social Influence: how other people influence our behaviour
- Social Relations: how we relate toward other people
Gordon Allport (1968):
“How the thoughts, feelings, & behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.”
Three key aspects of social thinking:
– Attributions, impressions, & attitudes
Doing Social Psychology
We’re all social psychologists: we try to work out what people will do, when they will do it and why they will do it.
Our common sense understandings are sometimes correct, but sometimes not.
One problem with common sense is that we only have our own perceptions, experiences & memories to go on.
And what happens if common sense suggests two different possibilities? How do we decide between them?
Attributions
judgements about the causes of our own & other people’s behaviour & outcomes
Personal (Internal) Attributions
infer that people’s characteristics cause their behaviour
Situational (External) Attributions:
infer that aspects of the situation cause a behaviour
Three types of information determine the type of attribution we make:
- Consistency: behaviour occurs reliably in the same situation
- Distinctiveness: does someone act this way under particular circumstances or do they always act this way?
- Consensus: is the opinion shared by lots of people?
Fundamental Attribution Error:
we underestimate the impact of the situation & overestimate the role of personal factors when explaining other people’s behaviour
FAE is reduced when people have time to reflect on their judgments or are highly motivated to be careful
FAE does not apply to our own behaviour: you assume things of other people because you know the situation of your life (you have all your own information) but not for other people so you apply it to others because you don’t know their situation.
Self-Serving Bias:
the tendency to make personal attributions for successes & situational attributions for failures
- Protects or enhances our self-esteem
- Not used by people who are depressed - less likely to take praise whenthey’ve done well but more likely to blame themselves in times of failure or not so good success
Culture & Attribution
FAE may reflect a Westernised emphasis on individualism: as Western individuals we are more likely to focus on ourselves and our own experiences so we focus less on other people and their situations. Therefore we are more likely to make self-serving attributions / personal attributions.
Members of other cultures are less likely to display a self-serving bias. There is more awareness of the context of behaviours.
Culture influences how we go about making attributions.
Forming Impressions
We all form impressions of others & assign characteristics to them, e.g.
The terms not only describe the type of person someone is, they also evaluate them.
How do we form impressions of others & attribute specific characteristics to them.
Asch (1946)
presented one of the following lists of words to different groups of participants:
• Intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious
• Envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent
Participants asked to describe the person’s personality.
People who heard the first list evaluated the person much more favourably than people who heard the second list.
Primacy Effect:
our tendency to attach more importance to the initial information that we learn about a person.
· We tend to be more alert to information we receive first
· Initial information may shape how we perceive subsequent information
· Influences our desire to make further contact with a person
mental set
a readiness to perceive the world in a particular way
· Schemas: mental frameworks that help us organise & interpret information
E.g. try to understand the passage that you’ll find below.
Stereotype:
a generalised belief about a group or category of people
Can bias the way we perceive other people’s behaviour
Darley & Gross (1983
showed how stereotypes about social class can bias the way we perceive the behaviour of others:
· Pps shown video of 9 year old girl
· Pps asked to analyse her academic potential
· One go told she as middle class other group told she was working class
· Those who heard she was working said she would do significantly less well academically than those who heard she was middle class
· Shows how schemas can affect perceptions of people
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
our expectations affect our behaviour toward a person, which can cause the person to behave in a way that confirms our expectations.
Attitude:
a positive or negative evaluative reaction toward a stimulus, such as a person, action, object, or concept
Three factors help explain why attitudes don’t always predict behaviour
- Attitudes influence behaviour more strongly when situational factors that contradict our attitude are weak.
· Conformity pressure
• Theory of Planned Behaviour: our intention to engage in a behaviour is strongest when:
– We have a positive attitude toward that behaviour
– When subjective norms (our perceptions of what other people think we should do) support our attitudes
– When we believe that the behaviour is under our control
- Attitudes have a greater influence on behaviour when we are aware of them and when they are strongly held
- General attitudes best predict general classes of behaviour, & specific attitudes best predict specific behaviours
Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957):
people strive for consistency in their cognitions
Cognitive dissonance is created when two or more cognitions contradict one another
People are motivated to reduce dissonance
• Changing one of their cognitions
• Adding new cognitions
Counter-attitudinal Behaviour: behaviour that is inconsistent with one’s attitude
· Produces dissonance only if we perceive that our actions were freely chosen
· Especially likely to cause dissonance if:
• Behaviours produce foreseeable negative consequences
• Behaviours threaten our sense of self-worth
Self-Perception Theory:
we make inferences about our own attitudes by observing how we behave
Both Dissonance Theory & Self-Perception theory seem to be correct
· Dissonance theory explains attitude change when counter attitudinal behaviour threatens self-worth or is highly inconsistent
· Self-perception theory explains attitude change in situations that are less likely to create significant arousal
Persuasion
Three aspects of the persuasion process:
· Communicator Credibility:
· The Message:
· The Audience:
· The Audience:
· Need for Cognition
· Two routes?
· Central Route to Persuasion: people think carefully about the message and are influenced because arguments seem compelling
· Peripheral Route to Persuasion: people don’t scrutinise the message but are influenced mostly by other factors
The Message
Two-sided refutational approach: presents both sides of the issue
Fear is effective when the message provides people with a way to reduce the threat
· Communicator Credibility
: how believable we perceive the communicator to be
- Expertise
- Trustworthiness
- Physical attractiveness & likeability
