Social Psychology JB & IT

Social Psychology Scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by others Goal: explain social behavior Difference from Sociology? Social Psychology: focuses more on individuals with methods that involve experimentation. Sociologists study societies and people in groups.

OUTLINE What are attitudes, and how are they formed, maintained and changed? How do people from impressions of what others are like and the causes of their behaviour? What are the biases that influence the ways in which people view others’ behaviour? What are the major sources and tactics of social influence? How do stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination differ? How can we reduce prejudice and discrimination? Why are we attracted to certain people, and what progression do social relationships follow? What factors underlie aggression and prosocial behaviour?

Attitude and Social Cognitions Persuasion: Process of changing attitudes Attitudes: Evaluations of a person, behavior, belief, or concept Factors that affect whether we change our attitude: Message source Characteristics of the message Characteristics of the target

Persuasion: Changing Attitudes Routes to persuasion Central route processing: Occurs when a persuasive message is evaluated by thoughtful consideration of the issues and arguments used to persuade Peripheral route processing: Occurs when a persuasive message is evaluated on the basis of irrelevant or extraneous factors

Routes to Persuasion

Attitude + Behaviour The strength of the link between particular attitudes and behaviour differs Cognitive Dissonance: the mental conflict that occurs when a person holds two contradictory attitudes or thoughts (cognitions). e.g. Smokers  “I smoke” “Smoking leads to lungs cancer” If they don’t quit, smokers will try to reduce dissonance by: -Modifying one or both cognitions (I really don’t smoke too much) -Changing perceived importance of the cognition (Evidence is weak that smoking causes cancer) -Adding additional cognitions (I exercise so much that it doesn’t matter that I smoke) -Denying that cognitions are related (There is no evidence linking smoking to cancer)

Social Cognition: Understanding Others Social Cognition: the cognitive processes by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves. Schemas: Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences. -Organize information stored in the memory -Represent the way the social world operates -Helps us to recognize, categorize and recall information related to social stimuli (e.g. people, groups) Schemas for specific type of people (teacher, mother, student, etc) Help to predict what others are like on the basis of relatively little info Consider for a moment in the enourmous amount of information about other people to which we are exposed. How can we decide what is important and what is not and make judgments about the characteristics of others? Social psychologists interested in this question study social cognition, which is the way people understand and make sense of others and themselves. Those psychologists have learnt that individuals have highly developed schemas, Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences. Organize information stored in the memory; represent in our minds the way the social world operates; give us framework to recognize, categorize and recall information relating to social stimuli such as people and groups.

Attribution Processes: Understanding The Causes of Behavior Attribution theory: considers how we decide, on the basis of samples of a person’s behaviour, what the specific causes of that behaviour are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMOHcTlK7o

Understanding The Causes of Behavior Situational causes of behaviour: perceived causes of behaviour that are based on environmental factors. What are the external factors influencing… Who is the director/the actor..

Understanding The Causes of Behavior Dispositional causes of behaviour: perceived causes of behaviour that are based on internal traits or personality factors. Bad apple, good apple WITHIN oneself

Attribution Biases Typical biases include: Halo effect: Phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a person has positive traits is used to infer other uniformly positive characteristics e.g. Harry is intelligent, kind, and loving. Is he also caring? Probably yes! Assumed-similarity bias: Thinking of people as being similar to oneself even when meeting them for the first time e.g. Leads to the belief that others hold similar attitudes, opinions, likes and dislikes. If we always processed information in the rational manner that attribution theory suggests, the world might run a lot more smoothly. Unfortunately, although attribution theory generally makes accurate predictions, people do not always process information about others as logically as the theory seems to suggest. In fact, research reveals consistent biases in the ways people make attributions. Typical biases include:

Attribution Biases Self-serving bias: Tendency to attribute success to personal factors and attribute failure to factors outside oneself e.g. failure to pass exam  I had a bad day (rather than didn’t study well) Fundamental attribution error: Tendency to overattribute others’ behavior to dispositional causes and minimize of the importance of situational causes e.g. failure to pass exam  she’s lazy (rather than she might have had a bad day)

Social influence and groups

Conformity: Following What Others Do Conformity: a change in behaviour or attitudes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs of standards of other people. Asch conformity experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA -8 actors, 1 participant -which line is identical to one on the left? -everyone answers wrong -ptcpt answers wrong, although he thinks truth

Conformity Conclusions Hundreds of experiments examined conformity. Things that affect conformity: Characteristics of the group: the more attractive group appears to its members, greater its ability to produce conformity Situation in which the individual is responding: conformity is higher when people must respond publicly than it is when they do privately Kind of task: people working on ambiguous tasks and questions (those with no clear answer) are more susceptible to social pressure (e.g. what type of cloth is fashionable?)

Conformity to Social Roles Social roles are behaviors that are associated with people in a given position. E.g. role of student, teacher In some cases, social roles influence us so profoundly that we engage in behavior in entirely atypical and damaging ways. Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv3J12pARM -volunteer students given either prisoner or guard role in mock prison -guards: abusive, arbitrary punishment, withhold food, hard labor -prisoners: docile and submissive to the guards, demoralized, depressed

Compliance: Submitting to Direct Social Pressure Compliance: behavior that occurs in response to direct social pressure Foot-in-the-door technique: ask a person to agree to a small request which since it’s small, the likelihood that he/she will comply is high  later more important request  compliance to important request increases Taking an action makes the individual more committed to the issue  increased likelihood of future compliance - When we refer to conformity, we usually mean a phenomenon in which the social pressure is subtle or indirect. But in some situations social pressure is much more obvious with direct, explicit pressure to endorse a particular point of view or behave in a certain way. Social psychologists call the type of behaviour that occurs in response to direct social pressure compliance. Several specific techniques represent attempts to gain compliance. One of the most employed techniques is the foot in the door technique.

Obedience: Following Direct Orders Obedience: a change in behavior in response to the commands of others. Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W147ybOdgpE -participants vs actors (which they knew as students) -participants acted as teachers -authority required them to give ‘electric shocks’ to students who answered the questions incorrectly (15- 450 volts) -65% of them continued till the highest shock setting -450 volts- Compliance techniques are used to gently lead peoplee toward agreement with a request. In some cases, however, requests aim to produce obedience, a change in behaviour in response to the commands of others. Although obedience is considerably less common than conformity and compliance, it does occur in several specific kinds of relationships. For example, we may show obedience to our bosses, teachers or parents merely because of the power they hold to reward or punish us.

Liking and Loving: Interpersonal Attraction and the Development of Relationships Nothing is more important in most people’s lives than their feelings for others. Therefore, it is not surprising that liking and loving have become a major focus of interest for social psychologists. Interpersonal attraction: positive feelings for others; liking and loving.

Stereotypes Stereotypes: a set of generalized beliefs and expectations about a particular group and its members (women, Turkish, immigrants, etc.) Stereotypes can lead to prejudice: a negative (or positive) evaluation of a particular group and its members. e.g. racial prejudice occurs when a member of a racial group is evaluated in terms of race and not because of his or her own characteristics. Stereotypes can have harmful consequences such as discrimination: behavior directed toward individuals on the basis of their membership in a particular group. Discrimination  exclusion from jobs, neighborhoods, and educational opportunities, lower salaries and benefits, more favorable treatment toward favored groups (employer hires own race) Stereotypes also cause members of stereotyped groups to behave in ways that reflect the stereotype through a phenomenon known as self-fulfilling prophecy: expectations about the occurrence of a future event or behavior that act to increase the likelihood the event or behavior will occur. e.g. if people think that members of specific group lack ambition, they may treat them in a way that actually brings about a lack of ambition. If you are like most people, you probably automatically form some sort of impression of what each person is like. Most likely your impression is based on a stereotype, a set of generalized beliefs and expectations about a specific group and its members. Stereotypes, which may be negative or positive, grow out of our tendency to categorize and organize the vast amount of information we encounter in our everyday lives. All stereotypes share the common feature of oversimplifying the world: we view individuals not in terms of their uniwue, personal characteristics, but also in terms of characteristics we attribute to all the members of a particular group.

Reducing the Consequences of Prejudice and Discrimination How can we diminish the effects of prejudice and discrimination? Some effective strategies are: Increasing contact between target of stereotyping and the holder of the stereotype e.g. status equality, cooperation, relatively intimate contact Making values and norms against prejudice more conspicuous: reminding people about the values they already hold regarding equality and fair treatment of others Providing information about the targets of stereotyping: teaching people to be more aware of the positive characteristics of targets of stereotyping. Increase the sense of social belonging of ethnic minority students: a simple intervention in which members of minority groups are made to understand that feelings of inadequacy are not unique to them and that such feelings diminish with time