Social Psychology Elliot Aronson Timothy D. Wilson Robin M. Akert

Social Psychology Elliot Aronson Timothy D. Wilson Robin M. Akert
6th edition Elliot Aronson University of California, Santa Cruz Timothy D. Wilson University of Virginia Robin M. Akert Wellesley College slides by Travis Langley Henderson State University

Chapter 1 Introducing Social Psychology
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” –Henry David Thoreau

WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?
The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people. Definition: (Allport, 1985). Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

WHAT IS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?
At the very heart of social psychology is the phenomenon of social influence: We are all influenced by other people. Social psychologists are interested in understanding how and why the social environment shapes the thoughts and feelings of the individual. Social Influence The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.

The Power of Social Interpretation
To understand social influence it is more important to understand how people perceive and interpret the social world than it is to understand that world objectively. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

The Power of Social Interpretation
The term "construal" refers to the world as it is interpreted by the individual. Given the importance placed on the way people interpret the social world, social psychologists pay special attention to the origins of these interpretations. To understand how people are influenced by their social world, social psychologists believe it is more important to understand how they perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world than it is to understand the objective properties of the social world itself (Lewin, 1943). For example, when construing their environment, are most people concerned with making an interpretation that places them in the most positive light (e.g., Jason believing “Debbie is going to the prom with Eric because she is just trying to make me jealous”) or with making the most accurate interpretation, even if it is unflattering (e.g., “Painful as it may be, I must admit that Debbie would rather go to the prom with a sea slug than with me”)?

Example: Consider what happens in a murder trial.
Even when the prosecution presents compelling evidence, these construals rest on a variety of events and perceptions that often bear no objective relevant evidence. Even when the prosecution presents compelling evidence it believes will prove the defendant guilty, the verdict always hinges on precisely how each jury member construes that evidence. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Example: Consider what happens in a murder trial.
Even when the prosecution presents compelling evidence, these construals rest on a variety of events and perceptions that often bear no objective relevant evidence. Did a key witness hesitate before answering, suggesting to some jurors that she might not be certain of her data? Or did some jurors consider the witness too remote, arrogant, certain of herself? Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

A special kind of construal is what Lee Ross calls “naïve realism.”
The conviction all of us have that we perceive things “as they really are.” Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

A special kind of construal is what Lee Ross calls “naïve realism.”
The conviction all of us have that we perceive things “as they really are.” Example: Although both Israelis and Palestinians understand intellectually that the other side perceives the issues differently, both sides resist compromise, fearing that their “biased” opponent will benefit more than they. Ross (2004); Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross (2005). In a simple experiment, Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians. ” Ross concludes, “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it comes from the other side?” The hope is that once negotiators on both sides become fully aware of this phenomenon, and how it impedes conflict resolution, a reasonable compromise will be more likely. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Another distinctive feature of social psychology is that it is an experimentally based science. As scientists, our goal is to find objective answers to a wide array of important questions: What are the factors that cause aggression? How might we reduce prejudice? What variables cause two people to like or love each other? Why do certain kinds of political advertisements work better than others? As experimental scientists, we test our assumptions, guesses, and ideas about human social behavior empirically and systematically rather than by relying on folk wisdom, common sense, or the opinions and insights of philosophers, novelists, political pundits, our grandmothers, and others wise in the ways of human beings. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

How Else Can We Understand Social Influence?
Social psychologists approach the understanding of social influence differently than philosophers, journalists, or the lay person. Social psychologists develop explanations of social influence through experiments in which the variables being studied are carefully controlled.

How Else Can We Understand Social Influence?
Why do people behave the way they do? One way to answer this question might be simply to ask them. The problem with this approach is that people are not always aware of the origins of their own responses and feelings. (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977b; Wilson, 2002)

Folk Wisdom Although a great deal can be learned from “common sense” knowledge, there is at least one problem with relying entirely on such sources: They frequently disagree with one another, and there is no easy way of determining which of them is correct. Are we to believe that “out of sight is out of mind” or that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”? Which is true, that “haste makes waste” or that “he who hesitates is lost”? In the aftermath of both the Waco conflagration and the Heaven’s Gate tragedy, the general population was just as confused as it had been following the Jonestown suicides. It is difficult for most people to grasp just how powerful a cult can be in affecting the hearts and minds of relatively normal people. Finding someone to blame became a national obsession. After the Heaven’s Gate tragedy, many people blamed the victims themselves, accusing them of stupidity or derangement. But the evidence indicated that they were mentally healthy and for the most part uncommonly bright and well educated. After Waco, many pointed to the impatience of the FBI, the poor judgment or leadership of by authority figures. Fixing blame may make us feel better by resolving our confusion, but it is no substitute for understanding the complexities of the situations that produced those events. How can we know which explanation account for the Jonestown massacre? a. Reverend Jones succeeded in attracting the kinds of people who were psychologically depressed to begin with? b. Only people with self-destructive tendencies join cults? c. Jones was such a powerful, messianic, charismatic figure that virtually anyone—even strong, nondepressed individuals like you or us—would have succumbed to his influence? d. People cut off from society are particularly vulnerable to social influence? e. All of the above? f. None of the above? Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Philosophy Throughout history, philosophy has been a major source of insight about human nature. The creativity and analytical thinking of philosophers are a major part of the foundation of contemporary psychology. But what happens when philosophers disagree? Social psychologists address many of the same questions that philosophers address, but we attempt to answer them scientifically. In recent decades, psychologists have looked to philosophers for insights into the nature of consciousness (e.g., Dennett, 1991) and how people form beliefs about the social world (e.g., Gilbert, 1991). Are there some situations where philosopher A might be right and other conditions where philosopher B might be right? In 1663, the great Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza offered a highly original insight. He proposed that if we love someone whom we formerly hated, that love will be greater than if hatred had not preceded it. Spinoza’s proposition is beautifully worked out. His logic is impeccable. But how can we be sure that it holds up? Does it always hold? What are the conditions under which it does or doesn’t hold? These are empirical questions for the social psychologist (Aronson, 1999; Aronson & Linder, 1965). Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology Compared with Personality Psychology
When trying to explain social behavior—how an individual act within a social context (in relation to others)--personality psychologists explain the behavior in terms of the person's individual character traits. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology Compared with Personality Psychology
While social psychologists would agree that personalities do vary, they explain social behavior in terms of the power of the social situation (as it is construed by the individual) to shape how one acts. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

One of the tasks of the social psychologist is to make educated guesses (called hypotheses) about the specific situations under which one outcome or the other would occur. Just as a physicist performs experiments to test hypotheses about the nature of the physical world, the social psychologist performs experiments to test hypotheses about the nature of the social world. The next task is to design well-controlled experiments sophisticated enough to tease out the situations that would result in one or another outcome. We will discuss the scientific methods social psychologists use in more detail in Chapter 2. The major reason we have conflicting philosophical positions (just as we have conflicting folk aphorisms) is that the world is a complicated place. Small differences in the situation might not be easily discernible, yet these small differences might produce very different effects. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology Compared with Other Social Sciences
Personality Psychology When trying to explain social behavior, personality psychologists generally focus on individual differences—the aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from others. Social psychologists are convinced that explaining behavior primarily through personality factors ignores a critical part of the story: the powerful role played by social influence. For example, to explain why the people at Jonestown ended their own lives and their children’s by drinking poison, it seems natural to point to their personalities. Perhaps they were all “conformist types” or weak-willed; maybe they were even psychotic. Remember that it was not just a handful of people who committed suicide at Jonestown but almost 100 percent of the people in the village. Though it is conceivable that they were all psychotic, it is highly improbable. If we want a deeper, richer, more thorough explanation of this tragic event, we need to understand what kind of power and influence a charismatic figure like Jim Jones possesses, the nature of the impact of living in a closed society cut off from other points of view, and a myriad of other factors that might have contributed to that tragic outcome.

The difference between social psychology and other social sciences in level of analysis reflects another difference between the disciplines: what they are trying to explain. Other social sciences are more concerned with broad social, economic, political, and historical factors that influence events in a given society. For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation.

Sociology Sociologists are more concerned with why a particular society or group within a society produces behavior (e.g., aggression) in its members. The major difference is that sociology, rather than focusing on the psychology of the individual, looks toward society at large. Sociology is concerned with such topics as social class, social structure, and social institutions. Of course, because society is made up of collections of people, some overlap is bound to exist between the domains of sociology and those of social psychology. Social psychologists seek to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence regardless of social class or culture. Sociologists seek to explain properties of societies.

The goal of social psychology is to identify universal properties of human nature that make everyone susceptible to social influence, regardless of social class or culture. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

THE POWER OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE
When trying to convince people that their behavior is greatly influenced by the social environment, the social psychologist is up against a formidable barrier: All of us tend to explain people’s behavior in terms of their personalities. People tend to explain behavior in terms of individual personality traits and underestimate the power of social influence in shaping individual behavior. Fundamental Attribution Error The tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personality traits, thereby underestimating the power of social influence.

Underestimating the Power of Social Influence
When we underestimate the power of social influence, we gain a feeling of false security. Doing so gives the rest of us the feeling that we could never engage in the repugnant behavior shown by others. Ironically, this in turn increases our personal vulnerability to possibly destructive social influence by lulling us into lowering our guard. By failing to fully appreciate the power of the situation, we tend to: Oversimplify complex situations which, Decreases our understanding of the true causes. When trying to explain repugnant or bizarre behavior, such as the people of Jonestown, Waco, or Heaven’s Gate taking their own lives or killing their children, it is tempting and, in a strange way, comforting to write off the victims as flawed human beings.

Aspects of the social situation that may seem minor can have powerful effects, overwhelming the differences in people’s personalities. Personality differences do exist and frequently are of great importance. But social and environmental situations can be so powerful that they have dramatic effects on almost everyone. See Ross & Ward (1996).

Lee Ross and colleagues had university resident assistants identify which students would play games more cooperatively and which would play more competitively. All student volunteers then played the same game. Half were told that it was the Wall Street Game. Half were told that it was the Community Game. Players’ behavior changed depending on something as seemingly trivial as the game’s name. When it was called the Wall Street Game, two thirds played competitively. When it was called the Community Game, only one third played competitively. See figure in next slide. See Griffin & Ross (1991), Ross & Nisbett (1991), Ross & Ward (1996).

The name alone conveyed strong social norms about what kind of behavior was appropriate in this situation. The name of the game sent a powerful message about how the players should behave.

The Subjectivity of the Social Situation
Human beings are sense making creatures, constantly interpreting things. How humans will behave in a given situations is not determined by the objective conditions of a situation but, rather how they perceive it (construal). Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

What exactly do we mean by the social situation? One strategy for defining it would be to specify the objective properties of the situation and then document the behaviors that follow from these objective properties. Behaviorism A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment—that is, how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviors. For example, dogs come when they are called because they have learned that compliance is followed by positive reinforcement (e.g., food or fondling); children will memorize their multiplication tables more quickly if you praise them, smile at them, and paste a gold star on their forehead following correct answers. Psychologists in this tradition, such as John Watson (1924) and B. F. Skinner (1938), suggested that all behavior could be understood by examining the rewards and punishments in the organism’s environment and that there was no need to study such subjective states as thinking and feeling.

Behaviorists chose not to deal with cognition, thinking, and feeling because they considered these concepts too vague and mentalistic and not sufficiently anchored to observable behavior. But behaviorism therefore has proved inadequate for a complete understanding of the social world. We need to look at the situation from the viewpoint of the people in it, to see how they construe the world around them. See Griffin & Ross (1991); Ross & Nisbett (1991). To understand the behavior of Los Angeles residents who ignored a neighbor’s predawn cries for help, a behaviorist would analyze the situation to see what specific, objective factors were inhibiting any attempts to help. What were the objective rewards and punishments implicit in taking a specific course of action? What were the rewards and punishments implicit in doing nothing? Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

This emphasis on construal, the way people interpret the social situation, has its roots in an approach called Gestalt psychology. For example, one way to try to understand how people perceive a painting would be to break it down into its individual elements, such as the exact amounts of primary colors applied to the different parts of the canvas, the types of brush strokes used to apply the colors, and the different geometric shapes they form. We might then attempt to determine how these elements are combined by the perceiver to form an overall image of the painting. According to Gestalt psychologists, however, it is impossible to understand the way in which an object is perceived simply by studying these building blocks of perception. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. One must focus on the phenomenology of the perceiver—on how an object appears to people—instead of on the individual elements of the objective stimulus. Gestalt Psychology A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds (the gestalt or “whole”) rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Gestalt Psychology The Gestalt approach was formulated in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century by Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer, and colleagues. In the late 1930s, several of these psychologists emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi regime. “If I were required to name the one person who has had the greatest impact on the field, it would have to be Adolph Hitler.” (Cartwright, 1979, p. 84) Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Gestalt Psychology Among the émigrés was Kurt Lewin, generally considered the founding father of modern experimental social psychology. Lewin took the bold step of applying Gestalt principles beyond the perception of objects to social perception. Lewin was the first scientist to stress the importance of taking the perspective of the people in any social situation to see how they construe this social environment. As a young German-Jewish professor in the 1930s, Lewin experienced the anti-Semitism rampant in Nazi Germany. The experience profoundly affected his thinking, and once in the United States, Lewin’s ideas helped shape American social psychology, directing it toward a deep interest in exploring the causes and cures of prejudice and ethnic stereotyping. Lewin illustration copyright (2007) Nick Langley. Used with permission.

WHERE CONSTRUALS COME FROM: BASIC HUMAN MOTIVES
If it is true that subjective and not objective situations influence people, then we need to understand how people arrive at their subjective impressions of the world. What are people trying to accomplish when they interpret the social world? A focus on individual differences in people’s personalities, though valuable, misses what is usually of far greater importance: the effects of the social situation on people. To understand these effects, we need to understand the fundamental laws of human nature, common to all, that explain why we construe the social world the way we do.

Where Construals Come From
We human beings are complex organisms; at a given moment, various intersecting motives underlie our thoughts and behaviors. Over the years, social psychologists have found that two of these motives are of primary importance: The need to feel good about ourselves, The need to be accurate. There are times when each of these motives pulls us in the same direction. Often, though, these motives tug us in opposite directions—where to perceive the world accurately requires us to face up to the fact that we have behaved foolishly or immorally. Leon Festinger, one of social psychology’s most innovative theorists, was quick to realize that it is precisely when these two motives tug in opposite directions that we can gain our most valuable insights into the workings of the human heart and mind.

The Self-Esteem Approach: The Need to Feel Good about Ourselves
Most people have a strong need to maintain reasonably high self-esteem, to see themselves as good, competent, and decent. Given the choice between distorting the world in order to feel good about themselves and representing the world accurately, people often take the first option. See Aronson (1998); Baumeister (1993); Tavris & Aronson (2007). Self-Esteem People’s evaluations of their own self-worth; the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Justifying Past Behavior
Acknowledging major deficiencies in ourselves is very difficult, even when the cost is seeing the world inaccurately. Although extreme distortion of reality is rare outside of mental institutions, normal people can put a slightly different spin on the existing facts, one that puts us in the best possible light. Suppose a couple divorces after years of marriage made difficult by the husband’s irrational jealousy. Rather than admitting his jealousy and overpossessiveness drove her away, he blames the breakup of his marriage on the fact that she was not responsive enough to his needs. His interpretation serves some purpose: It makes him feel better about himself. Consider Roger; everybody knows someone like Roger. He’s the guy whose shoes are almost always untied and who frequently has coffee stains on the front of his shirt or mustard stains around his lips. Most observers might consider Roger a slob, but Roger might see himself as casual and non-compulsive.

Suffering and Self-Justification
Why would hazing cause someone to like his fraternity? Didn’t behavioristic psychology teach us that rewards, not punishments, make us like things associated with them? But social psychologists have discovered that this formulation is far too simple to account for human thinking and motivation. Unlike rats and pigeons, human beings have a need to justify their past behavior, and this need leads them to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that don’t always fit into the neat categories of the behaviorist. To avoid feeling like a fool for undergoing severe hazing to join a fraternity, a new member is likely to justify his decision by distorting his interpretation of his fraternity experience. In other words, he will try to put a positive spin on his experiences. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Suffering and Self-Justification
Experiments demonstrated that the more unpleasant the procedure the participants underwent to get into a group, the better they liked the group. The important points to remember here are: (1) That human beings are motivated to maintain a positive picture of themselves, in part by justifying their past behavior, and (2) That under certain specifiable conditions, this leads them to do things that at first glance might seem surprising or paradoxical. See Aronson & Mills (1959); Gerard & Mathewson (1966). For example, they might prefer people and things for whom they have suffered to people and things they associate with ease and pleasure. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

The Social Cognition Approach: The Need to Be Accurate
The Social Cognition perspective is an approach to social psychology that takes into account the way in which human beings think about the world. Individuals are viewed as trying to gain accurate understandings so that they can make effective judgments and decisions that range from which cereal to eat to whom they will marry. In actuality, individuals typically act on the basis of incomplete and inaccurately interpreted information.

SOCIAL COGNITION The social cognition perspective views people as amateur sleuths doing their best to understand and predict their social world. Social Cognition How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions. See Fiske & Taylor (1991); Markus & Zajonc (1985); Nisbett & Ross (1980). It is almost never easy to gather all the relevant facts in advance. Moreover, we make countless decisions every day. Even if there were a way to gather all the facts for each decision, we simply lack the time or the stamina to do so. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD
Our expectations can even change the nature of the social world. Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) found that a teacher who expects certain students to do well may cause those students to do better – A self-fulfilling prophecy . Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) told teachers that according to a certain test, a few specific students were “bloomers” who were about to take off and perform extremely well. Actually, the children labeled as bloomers were chosen at random. At the end of the year, the bloomers were performing extremely well. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD
How does such a self-fulfilling prophecy come about? Teaching expecting specific students to perform well often: More attention to them, Listen to them with more respect, Call on them more frequently, Encourage them, Try to teach them more challenging material. This, in turn, helps these students feel: Happier, More respected, More motivated, and smarter. This has been replicated a number of times in a wide variety of schools (Rosenthal, 1995). Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Additional Motives A variety of motives influence what we think, feel, and do: Biological drives (e.g., hunger & thirst), Fear, Desire for rewards (e.g., love, favors), Need for control. We want to reiterate what we stated earlier: The two major sources of construals we have emphasized here—the need to maintain a positive view of ourselves (the self-esteem approach) and the need to view the world accurately (the social cognition approach)—are the most important of our social motives, but they are certainly not the only motives influencing people’s thoughts and behaviors. Still another significant motive is the need for control. Research has shown that people need to feel they exert some control over their environment (Langer, 1975; Taylor, 1989; Thompson, 1981). When people experience a loss of control, such that they believe they have little or no influence over whether good or bad things happen to them, there are a number of important consequences; we will discuss these further along in this book.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Why study social influence? We are curious. Some social psychologists contribute to the solution of social problems. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social psychologists have always been interested in social challenges: Reducing hostility and prejudice, and increasing altruism and generosity. Contemporary social psychologists have broadened the issues of concern: Conservation, Safe sex education, TV violence, Negotiation strategies, Life adjustments (college, death of loved one).

Social psychologists realized that in AIDS education, arousing fear would not help with most people. Most people do not want to think about dying or contracting horrible illness when ready to have sex. Many people feel that interrupting the sexual act to put on a condom tends to destroy the mood. Given these considerations, when people have been exposed to frightening messages, instead of engaging in rational problem-solving behavior, most tend to reduce that fear by engaging in denial: “It can’t happen to me,” “Surely none of my friends have AIDS,” etc. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

The denial stems not from the desire to be accurate but from the need to maintain one’s self-esteem. If people can convince themselves that their sexual partners do not have AIDS, they can continue to enjoy unprotected sex while maintaining a reasonably good picture of themselves as rational beings. By understanding how this process works, social psychologists have been able to contribute important insights to AIDS education and prevention. Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology Throughout this book, we will examine many similar examples of the applications of social psychology. aggression altruism attitudes attribution attraction authority research ethics deception gender emotion decisions social cognition social influence social interaction social dilemmas social norms social support groups prejudice decisions obedience conformity courtrooms and much more! Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Social Psychology Elliot Aronson Timothy D. Wilson Robin M. Akert
6th edition Elliot Aronson University of California, Santa Cruz Timothy D. Wilson University of Virginia Robin M. Akert Wellesley College slides by Travis Langley Henderson State University

Social Psychology Elliot Aronson Timothy D. Wilson Robin M. Akert

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