Transcript Introduction to Psychology - Pascack Valley Regional High

Social Psychology: The power of groups
 Th
The study of the
manner in which the
personality, attitudes,
motivations, and
behavior of the
individual influence
and are influenced by
social groups.
Cultural influence
 Culture dictates how you dress.
 Culture specifies what you eat and do not eat.
 People from different cultures seek different amounts of
personal space.
 Cultural truisms:
 Norms:
Chameleon Effect
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles
/199911/were-all-copycats
Conformity
 Conformity: voluntarily yielding to social
norms, even at the expense of one’s
preferences.
Conformity: The Asch Experiment
The more difficult the decision, the
greater the conformity.
50%
Difficult judgments
40
Conformity highest
on important
judgments
30
20
10
Easy judgments
0
Low
High
Importance
Obedience
Obedience: change of behavior in
response to a command from another
person, typically an authority figure.
Factors that increase obedience:
Obedience: The Milgram
Experiment
A good impact of being in a
group: social facilitation
 At times, people will improve their performance of tasks in the
presence of others
 Occurs with simple or well-learned tasks but not with tasks that are
difficult or not yet mastered
 Expert pool players who made 71% of shots by themselves make 80%
when 4 people are watching; poor pool players who made 36% alone
made 25% when watched.
 Laughter: comedy CDs that are mildly amusing in an uncrowded room
seem funnier in a densely packed room (i.e. laugh tracks on TVs): “a
good house is a full house”
 Driving: After a light turns green, drivers take 15% less time to travel
the first 100 yards than when alone
 Can you think of activities that you do better when others are
watching?
Social Facilitation in sports
The bad: social loafing
 The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort
when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common
goal than when working individually.
 Ingham’s 1974 “tug of war” experiment:
The bad: bystander effect
 We only help when a situation
enables us to notice a situation,
interpret it as an emergency, and
assume responsibility
 Diffusion of responsibility:
 http://www.trutv.com/library/crim
e/serial_killers/predators/kitty_ge
novese/1.html
 Have you ever seen a car accident
or other bad event and hesitated
before getting involved, or
decided not to get involved at all?
The bad: deindividuation

Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint
in group situations that foster arousal and
anonymity.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/national/daily/july99/woodstock29.ht
m
What other kinds of things will people do
when they are in a crowd or a mob?

The bad: group polarization
 Over time, initial
differences between
different groups tends
to grow
 Do you spend most of
your time with people
who have the same
opinions, or do you
seek out differences?
Group polarization
The bad: groupthink
 When the desire for
harmony in a decisionmaking group overrides
realistic appraisal of
alternatives: Challenger,
Bay of Pigs, Iraq War, etc.
 Can you think of other
examples?