week 1 Flashcards
the bystander effect - Darley & Latané, 1968
The larger the number of bystanders, the less likely any one bystander will intervene or help
Reasons:
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Modelling of ‘nothing has happened’ (pluralistic ignorance)
- Fear of embarrassment (audience inhibition)
how can you get rid of the bystander effect?
- Make clear you need help
- Assign responsibility
why is the bystander effect social psychology?
- One person needs to act: influenced by whether and how others act
- Individual in context of social setting – power of social influence
Asch’s conformity experiment
experiment with a group of 8, 7 people are actors. 1 is the subject. they were shown a picture of a line, and had to say which line was the same on another picture. the group of 7 would vote unanimously for the wrong line and the 8th person, who had to choose last, would have to choose if he would go with the group or give the wrong answer.
About 37% gave incorrect answers!
Social context has an impact!
Even in such simple tasks.
Manipulation of size of the group: In bigger groups, the effect got stronger.
why were people giving the wrong answer in Asch’s experiment
- The strength of the opinion of others (7 out of 8 in consensus)
- Urge to be liked by the rest
- Confidence in your own decision
definition Social psychology
Social pyschology is the study of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others
social psychology: we aim at understanding the process:…
- Cognitive
- Affective
- Group
- Contextual effects
- Cultural
first experiment - triplett
-Audience= Facilitation of performance?
-Participants: 40 school children (8-17yrs, M & F)
-Task: winding a fishing reel
-Conditions (after getting acquainted with the task):
Alone
Competition
Results Participants clustered in three groups based on “observation”: Positively stimulated: performed better (N = 20) ‘Overstimulated’: performed more poorly (N = 10) Unaffected: performance did not differ by condition (N=10)
presence of others have influence on how you perform on certain tasks
when there is presence of others you get physical arousal.
with well learnt tasks you will perform better (familiar and simple tasks)
with novel/complex tasks you will perform poorer
How did Hitler influence the development of social psychology?
- Studying persuation and attitudes among (military) people e.g. the influence of army propoganda on attitudes and feelings. it was the starting point for attitudes and persuasion.
- Key figures forced to emmigrate to the States
3.By stimularting interest in particular topics
Conformity
Obedience
Collaborations of social psychology with other disciplines
- Sociology
- Law - acceptance
- Engineering – energy use reduction
- Designers – to stimulate recycling behaviour
research methods in social psychology
- Theory
- Construct (prejudice)
- Operationalization(making prejudiced comments)
- Variable (this many times a day on twitter)
- Hypothesis (more prejudiced comments from trump supporters)
theories
-A set of abstract concepts relating to each other
-Theories should be:
testable via specific hypotheses
falsifiable
survey research
Interviews, archival research, opinion polls
Descriptive in nature
- Group differences
- Differences in time
The more representative a sample, the better.
Correlational research
descriptive in nature:
group differences
differences in time
For difficult to manipulate independent variables (personality, gender)
Relation between variables
Causality is missing!
experiments
Aim: to receive causal information
-The effect of one variable (IV) over the other (DV)
-We control certain aspects and manipulate some other (IV)
control group and experimental group
the cause is manipulated (independent variable) and the effect is measured (dependent variable)
control group
is exposed to usual conditions
experimental group
is exposed to special/manipulated conditions
independent variable
is the factor that you purposely change or control in order to see what effect it has
dependent variable
The variable that responds to the change in the independent variable is called the dependent variable. It depends on the independent variable
True randomized experiments
- When there is random allocation of participants to experimental/control groups
- Usually in a controlled lab-setting
- Systematic variation of the independent variable
e. g., size of group in Asch’s experiment
Quasi experiment
-Are typically conducted in a natural setting
Realistic
- But low experimental control
- And no random assignment.
confederates
are actors that are helping the experimenter influence his research/experiment
ethical considerations
- Ethical Committee Approval
- Informed Consent
- Debriefing
Validity of Measures
If a scale/test measures what it intends to measure
e.g. Self esteem scale
self esteem scale
should measure the construct of self-esteem
called ”construct validity”
Validity of Studies: Internal Validity
whether the observed effects are due to the manipulation of the IV and not due to other “confounding” factors.
internal validity can be improved by:
- Controlling other factors (e.g. temperature of the lab)
- Using standard instructions / same experimenter
- Random assignment of participants to conditions
- Counterbalancing the order of conditions
- Avoiding demand characteristics
Validity of Studies: External Validity
Whether the results can be generalized:
- to other settings - called “ecological validity”
- to other people – called “population validity”
- over time
external validity can be improved by:
- Random sampling
- Running experiments in real-life settings
