Unit 10 (Chapter 15) Flashcards
Big ideas in social psychology
1) Situations are powerful, and may lead us to go against our values, morals, etc.
- The situations we encounter exert a strong influence on how we think, feel, and behave
- It’s not that individual dispositions do not matter—but they do so in interaction with the situation
2) We often fail to appreciate the power of the situation
- Fundamental attribution error
3) The history of the situations we have been in shapes our ongoing perceptions of and interactions with other people
4) Our perceptions of people & social situations are constructed and do not represent a direct read-out of reality
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to underestimate situational influences on behaviour and to overestimate the influence of personal dispositions.
Social psychology
The scientific attempt to understand and explain how the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual or perceived feelings, thoughts, and behaviours of others.
Obedience
In an unequal power relationship, submitting to the demands of the person in authority.
E.g., following the orders of an experimenter, police officer, a parent, or a professor.
Stanley Milgram’s experiment and his findings
Tested the extent to which participants would inflict harm on another (administer a shock of increasing voltage), after being instructed to do so. Varied proximity of the teacher to the learner, the proximity of the authoritative figure, and the location of the experiment to see how different factors affected obedience.
Ethics:
- Spurred the creation of Institutional Review Boards
- Is inflicting this kind of psychological turmoil justified? Careful debriefing post-experiment
Generalizability:
- Perhaps, on some level, participants knew they could not really hurt the learner
Methodological concerns
- Some evidence that experimenter had gone off script
Milgram study replication (Burger, 2009)
- Motivated by Burger’s students’ assertions that Ps in 1960s were fundamentally different
- Semi-replication—only went up to 150 volts (”Now or never” moment in original study, where 4/5 Ps would have kept going until the end if they passed this point)
- 70% of Ps willing to administer next level of shock (165 volts) vs. 82% in Milgram’s study
Factors driving obedience in Milgram’s study
- Release from responsibility
- Step-by-step involvement
- Lack of intimacy with the victim
- Immediacy and power of the experimenter
Release from responsibility
The feeling of responsibility for one’s actions is transferred to other people.
- In the Milgram study, the experimenter stated that he was responsible for everything that happened.
- Provided a cover for their actions; for example, “It was his fault; I was following orders.” Or “They volunteered for this.”
Step-by-step involvement
People can get caught on a “slippery slope” because of the step-wise nature of demands.
- In the Milgram study, each increment is only 15 volts, so each one seems like a small step, but step by step it gets to an extreme point.
- Situational factor we probably don’t take into consideration when thinking about how we would behave in this situation.
Lack of immediacy of the victim
Variations of the Milgram experiment varied the proximity of the learner.
- No visual or audio feedback; audio feedback; same room (visual and audio feedback); and touch proximity
- As the learner became more present (increased feedback and proximity), the rate of obedience (shocks delivered) decreased
Immediacy & power of the experimenter
Variations on the immediacy & social power of the experimenter.
- Experimenter gives orders over the telephone; experimenter has lower status; experimenter is contradicted by another experimenter.
- As the immediacy & social power of the experimenter decreased, rates of obedience decreased.
Conformity
Changing one’s behaviours or beliefs to match those of others, usually in response to real or imagined group pressure.
- May not involve direct appeals or requests to change our behaviour.
Costs and benefits of conformity
In Western cultures, conformity is often viewed negatively:
- Seen as a lack of individuality or critical thinking.
- Can prevent us from challenging erroneous or harmful group norms.
BUT Conformity also serves important social functions.
- Facilitates smooth social interactions.
- Helps us adhere to the “unwritten rules” of society (social norms), making social life more predictable and harmonious
Automatic mimicry
Some forms of conformity may be automatic. This is the most subtle form of mimicry.
Ex: Yawning videos with monkeys,
Research ex: Ps interacted with confederate who would either rub their face or shake their foot. Ps would unconsciously imitate the behaviors of the confederate.
Empathy
The ability to understand and share feelings of another person.
Role of automatic mimicry in social interaction
- Mimicry may facilitate empathy
- Mimicry may build social rapport and lead to pleasant social interactions:
§ People like individuals who mimic them better than those who don’t
§ People who are mimicked engage in more prosocial behavior afterward - Mimicry is stronger for people with a drive to affiliate with others
Informational social influence
The influence of other people that results from taking their comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct, proper, or effective.
- In an ambiguous situation (as in the Sherif study), other people can serve as frame of reference.
- Informational social influence is more likely when:
§ the situation is ambiguous or difficult
§ we feel low in knowledge or competence about the topic (ex: in a study group).
Research ex: auto-kinetic illusion study, “how far did the light move?”
Internalization
The private acceptance of a proposition, orientation, or ideology.
- Not just mimicking the group’s response—rather, adopting the group’s perspective
- Effects of informational influence can be long-lasting: group norms influenced individual judgments a year after individual was last tested. Norms can also persist through several group “generations”
In Sherif auto-kinetic illusion studies, the newly emerged group norm continued to influence participant responses when they were subsequently tested alone.
Normative social influence
The influence of other people that comes from the desire to avoid their disapproval and other social sanctions (ridicule, barbs, ostracism).
Research ex: Ash line judgement study, where 75% of participants conformed at least once, and participants conformed 33% of the time
Persuasion
Intentional effort to change other people’s attitudes in order to change their behaviour.
Attitude (and its ABCs)
An evaluation of an object (e.g., a specific person, a category of people, a type of food, a political cause) along a positive or negative dimension.
- Includes three components (the ABCs):
§ Affective (how we feel)
§ Behavioural (what we do)
§ Cognitive (what we think)
Example of the ABCs of attitude: pineapple on pizza
- Affect: I like it (I have positive feelings about it)
- Behaviour: I ate Hawaiian pizza 10 times last month
- Cognition: I think that the sweetness of the pineapple provides a perfect balance to the savoury flavours
Dual-process model of cognition
System 1: Intuitive System:
- Quick & automatic
- Little or no effort
- Relies on heuristics (“rules-of-thumb”)
System 2: Rational system:
- Slow, effortful & controlled
- Based on rules & deduction
The elaboration likelihood method (ELM)
A model of persuasion maintaining that there are two different routes to persuasion—the central route and the peripheral route.
- Which route is taken depends on the motivation and ability to think about (elaborate on) the information being presented (no one size fits all!!!)
The central route to persuasion
Followed when people think carefully & deliberately about about the content of a persuasive message, attending to its logic and the strength of its arguments, as well as to related evidence.
o Thus, attitudes will be influenced primarily by the strength of the arguments
o Tends to produce longer-lasting attitude change
The peripheral route to persuasion
Followed when people primarily attend to peripheral cues (i.e. distracted, unmotivated, busy, etc.)—superficial, easy-to process features of a persuasive communication that are tangential (peripheral) to the persuasive information itself.
E.g., # of arguments, attractiveness of the source of the message.
Central or peripheral route to persuasion?
Motivation and ability (sufficient time, cognitive resources) both determine which route we will engage in when responding to a persuasive message.
o Variability within- and across-persons. E.g., individuals high in need for cognition more likely to enjoy and engage in effortful cognitive processes.
Ex: Buying a car = central route since more motivation
Compliance
Agreeing to the explicit request of another person.
- Compliance techniques more focused on changing outward behaviour rather than internal attitudes
Examples: agreeing to do someone a favour, getting people to donate to a charity
Norm of reciprocity
People generally agree to help others who have helped them in the past or might help them in the future. AKA You should provide benefits to those who have provided benefits to you. Related to the DITF technique, as people feel as though they owe you for bringing down the price, time commitment, etc…
Ex: Solicitations for donations more successful when gift is included.
Door-in-the-face (DITF) technique
A compliance approach where the target request is preceded by a more extreme request that is likely to be rejected. Since effect is being driven by the perception that the requester has compromised with you (obligating you to compromise in turn), efficacy of the technique should be diminished if a different person makes the second request.
Research ex: Asked to volunteer at the jail for 2 hrs/week for two years, then asked if they would do it for one afternoon or evening. More likely to any yes to second request if first one was also asked.
Foot-in-the-door technique
People are more likely to comply with a larger request if they have already complied with a smaller initial request. Underlying mechanism is a shift in self-perception.
o After the initial favour, a person “may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes”
E.g., charities often first ask for very small donations, then later ask for bigger donations.
Research ex: People were more likely to put big ugly sign in yard, if agreed to put small one in window first.
Research on first impressions
- Ps asked to rate faces on trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, likability and attractiveness
- Time given ranged from 100 to 1,000 ms; compared with ratings by people given unlimited time
- Judgments made after a 100 ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints
- Automatic process—cannot help doing this
Dimensions along which faces are thought to be evaluated
Warmth: may help us tell friends from foes.
Competence: enables us to gauge the person’s ranking in the social order.
- We are drawn to individuals who are high in both warmth and competence
- We are wary of people who are competent but lack warmth
-We disdain those who are low on both dimensions
- We feel pity and protective urges toward those who are warm but incompetent
Baby faces and why were attended to them
- Infantile features (large eyes, large head, small jaw) automatically evoke nurturing response in adult perceivers.
- Baby-faced adults assumed to be warmer, more honest, more naive, and weaker (overgeneralization).
- From an evolutionary perspective, this could be due to the fact that we must protect babies, and couldn’t afford to miss out on a potential cue from one (may lead to death).
Bottom-up processing
Impressions are shaped by someone’s appearance or actions (data-driven, “bottom-up” approach).
Ex: “I like your bracelet” from mean girls
Top-down processing
Impressions are also shaped by the pre-existing knowledge and expectations we bring to a social interaction (“top-down” approach).
Ex: Cady connecting Regina’s fake attitude to when she complimented her bracelet.
Schemas
Internal cognitive structures containing generalized knowledge about the world.
- Serve as frameworks that guide our perceptions and interpretations of incoming information, and help us organize our knowledge about the world.
Person schemas
Contain information about specific individuals.
E.g., appearance (blonde, pretty), personality (super shady), likes (shopping, gossiping, butter), dislikes (Gretchen), behaviours (manipulates others), etc.
