Transcript Unit 13 PowerPoint - San Diego Unified School District

Social Psychology
Unit 13
Topics in Social Psychology
• Attitude and Behavior
• Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination
• Aggression and Anti-social behavior
• Attraction
• Influence of others on our behavior
• Group Dynamics
Social Psychology
• Social Psychology is a field devoted to studying the way
people relate to others
• Social Cognition is a study of how people think about
themselves and others.
• Throughout our lives, we go about our days making
observations which eventually lead to predictions about
what will happen next, so we can act accordingly
Attitude Formation and Change
• One of the biggest focuses in Social Psychology is how
we formulate our attitudes, and how they can change.
• An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings. We have
attitudes about a great deal of things such as groups
od people, events, places, lifestyles, etc.
• We have positive and negative attitudes about certain
aspects of our environment.
Attitude
• An area greatly dedicated to affecting people’s attitudes is
advertising.
• Companies seek to find out how to have people develop a positive
attitude about their product.
• One method of advertising stems from capitalizing on the mere
exposure effect. It states that, generally, the more we are exposed
to something, the more we come to like it.
•
So, when you go to the store, you are more likely to pick the
product that has been shown to you a great deal of times.
Persuasive Messages
• Methods with which to persuade our opinion or attitude about something
are two-fold
• The central route to persuasion involves deeply processing the content of
the message. What it is about THIS product that is better than THAT
product.
• The peripheral route to persuasion includes all other aspects of the
message such as quality of the marketing campaign, the speaker, the
shininess of the product
• Actors, athletes and models are all useful communicators of messages
Likelihood of Persuasion
• Studies have shown that educated people are
less likely to be persuaded by advertisements.
• Furthermore, the higher the level of education,
the better it is to show both sides of an argument
in attempting to persuade people
• For the less educated, one sided arguments are
much better.
Attitude and Behavior
• Research has shown that relationships between attitudes and
behavior are often greatly contrasted.
• However, our minds feel tension when our attitudes don’t match
our behavior. This is stated by the cognitive dissonance theory. We
seek consistency in our thoughts and attitudes.
• If we know smoking is bad for us, yet we are addicted to it, we may
either quit smoking (matching attitude and behavior) or we can
convince ourselves smoking really isn’t that bad,
Compliance Strategies
• We also use strategies to get people to comply with our
wishes. We often use a few different methods:
• The foot in the door phenomenon based on the idea that if
you can get someone to agree to a small request early on,
they are more likely to agree to a bigger request later.
• (ex: You want $20, ask for $5 now, and $15 later)
Compliance Strategies
• The door in the face strategy is asking for an unreasonable
request first, like $100, and then moving it down to $20.
• You wanted $20 all along, but giving you $20 seems much
better after first being asked for $100
• The Norms of reciprocity idea is based of the theory that we
feel compelled to do something nice for someone who has
done something nice for us.
Attribution Theory
• Another idea within the field of Social cognition is
Attribution Theory which tries to explain how people
determine the cause of something they observe.
• We can either attribute our observations to Personal
(dispositional) factors or Situational factors. These
attributions can either be stable or unstable.
Attribution Theory
• Say that your friend Mark does well in his basketball
game. If you think to yourself that Mark did well in his
game because he is good at basketball, you have
made a person (dispositional) attribution.
• If you think to yourself, Mark did well because they
were playing an easy team, you made a situational
attribution. (Mark did well because of the situation)
Attribution Theory
• Additionally, your attributions can be stable or unstable
• If you feel that Mark has always shown great talent in
basketball and that is why he did well, you have made a
person-stable attribution.
• If you think that Mark did well at his game because he
practiced his techniques and shots a ton in the days
leading up to the game, you have made a person-unstable
attribution.
Attribution Theory
• Now, you may put more weight onto the situational
context.
• If you think Mark did well because the team he played is
ALWAYS bad, you have made a Situational-stable
attribution.
• If you think Mark did well because the team he played was
good, but had a really off night, you made a Situationunstable attribution.
Attribution Theory
• Researcher Harold Kelley offered a 3-factor theory that explains the kind
of attributions we make based on 3 kinds of information: Consistency,
Distinctiveness and Consensus
• Consistency: how the individual acts in the same situation. How does
Mark normally play against THIS team?
• Distinctiveness: How similar this situation actually is to others we have
seen. Is this team comparable to other teams mark has played and done
well against? Does mark normally play well in games?
• Consensus: How others have fared in this situation. Have other people
played well against this team?
Attributional Biases
• We often make mistakes in our attributions due to preconceived notions
about people.
• Even the expectations we have of other can influence the way we, and the
other person behaves. This is called a Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Your friends tell you the Calculus teacher is mean so you go into their
class with a grumpy, bad attitude which elicits a poor attitude from the
teacher.
• However, If your friends tell you the teacher is awesome and nice, you go
in with a good cheerful attitude and the teacher responds positively
Attributional Biases
• One of the most common errors in Attribution is the
Fundamental Attribution error. (Tendency to overestimate
dispositional/personal factors & not consider the situation)
• Ex: You sit next to a man on the bus. He is quiet and doesn’t
say hello back to you. You assume he is a jerk. However,
you didn’t consider the fact he is on his way home from the
hospital where he was tending to his sick wife.
Attributional Biases
• False-consensus effect: Overestimating the amount of
people who share the same opinion/beliefs as you.
• Self-serving bias: Tendency to take more credit for
good outcomes than bad ones
• Just-world bias: Belief in our world as just. Bad things
happen to bad people. People deserve what they get.
Stereotypes
• We all have ideas about what members of different groups are like.
These ideas/expectations may influence how we interact with
these groups. These ideas we have are called Stereotypes.
• Stereotypes can be positive or negative and are applicable to
almost any group of people in terms of race, ethnicity, gender,
geographic, religious, etc.
• Many Psychologists believe stereotypes are just schemata about
groups. Others believe stereotypes are harder to change than
schemata.
Prejudice
• Having negative stereotypes against a specific group can
lead to prejudice. Prejudice is an undeserved, generally
negative, attitude toward a group of people.
• Prejudices arise when stereotypes are uncritically applied
to all members of a group.
• If you stereotype French people as pompous or
Southerners as unintelligent, it can lead to a negative
attitude about these groups. This leads to discrimination.
Discrimination
• Whereas prejudices and stereotypes are attitudes and
beliefs, Discrimination is an action against a group.
• If I think all French people are pompous I have
stereotypes them. If this leads to me having a negative
attitude against them, I am prejudiced.
• However, if I act on this and refuse to hire a French
person, I have discriminated against them.
Ethnocentrism
• A person who is Ethnocentric has a belief that their own
culture, whether racial, geographic or religious is superior
to others.
• People become so used to their own cultures that they
often believe them to be the “norm” by which other
cultures should be judged.
• We can look down on others for not voting the same,
worshipping the same god or having a different skin color.
Group Bias
• Often times we have the tendency to see our own group
(in-group) as more diverse than others (out-groups)
• This is known as out-group homogeneity.
• We may tend to look at other cultures as having members
that are all the same.
• We also show a preference for our own groups. We tend to
view ourselves as generally good. This is called the in-group
bias.
Origins of Stereotypes and
Prejudice
• Many theories exist on why we develop prejudices.
• Some researchers believe we magnify the difference
between our own group and others as a way of
cognitively categorizing our world.
• Others believe that we develop prejudices through
modeling. Children with prejudiced parents tend to
raise children with similar prejudices.
Combating Prejudice
• One idea on how to reduce prejudice is the Contact
theory. This is the idea that hostility will be reduced
with contact between two opposing groups as long as
these groups are working towards a mutual goal know
as a Superordinate goal.
• This is often used in schools in attempts to have multicultured groups of students work together on a task.
Aggression and Anti-social
Behavior
• One topic of great interest to social psychologists is the study of
Aggression and Anti-social behavior.
• Aggression is separated into two categories: Instrumental and Hostile.
• Instrumental aggression is when the aggression is intended to secure a
particular end(beating up a kid so you can have his lunch money)
• Hostile aggression is aggression for the sake of aggression. No clear
purpose exists
Aggression
• Freud suggested that aggression is linked to the
Thanatos(death instinct)
• Frustration-aggression hypothesis argues there is a link
between feelings of frustration and aggressive
behavior.
• Additionally, many psychologists believe aggression
stems from modeling (Bandura, Bobo)
Pro-social Behavior
• Studies have also been conducted on people’s willingness
to help one another. This is termed Pro-social behavior.
• Bystander intervention, an area of great research, is
studied to determine how more or less likely people are to
help someone in trouble.
• Psychologists have studied crimes in the view of public to
determine who helps, doesn’t help and why.
Pro-social Behavior
• Interestingly, the more people around to view a crime
happening, the less likely one is to help. This is known as the
bystander effect.
• The larger the group witnessing the crime the less
responsibility we, as individuals feel. This is called Diffusion of
responsibility.
• Pluralistic ignorance is when we decide what is appropriate
behavior by looking at others. If no one is acting, we deem
that appropriate.
Attraction
• Social Psychologists are also interested in what
increases the chances that people will like one
another.
• Generally, people like those who are similar to
them (similarity), people who they are frequently
in contact with (proximity) and people who return
the feelings (reciprocal liking).
Attraction
• Obviously, people who are physically attractive
attract more attention.
• Additionally, people who are attractive tend to
experience more social benefits than others.
• Attractive people, especially men, tend to be
looked at as competent in the workplace and as
possessing better qualities.
Love
• Love has long been a difficult concept to quantify.
Romantic love has been shown to correlate with
interpersonal attraction, heightened arousal and
sexual desires.
• We often self-disclose with those we love. This is the
sharing of bits of personal information. It should be
reciprocal. Relationships that lack self-disclosure can
be filled with anxiety, unhappiness and loneliness.
Social Influence on Behavior
• Our behaviors can be affected by another’s actions or even
someone else’s presence.
• Many studies have shown that some people perform better at
tasks when there are others watching them than they would have
done alone. This is known as Social Facilitation.
• However, the more increasingly difficult the task, the actual
performance suffers. This is called Social impairment.
Conformity
• Conformity is the tendency to go along with the
actions of others.
• Solomon Asch (3 vertical line study)
• Asch asked people to determine the longest line.
There were 3 people in a room. 2 were actors. People
not in on experiment, the majority of the time
conformed to the incorrect answers of the group.
Stanley Milgram
• Stanley Milgram created a very controversial
experiment involving participants giving
electric shocks to people when told to do so.
• Results of this experiment were “Shocking”
Group Dynamics
• All of us are members of groups. Often our groups have
norms and roles.
• One way people take advantage of being part of a group is
through Social loafing. This is individuals may not put in as
much effort for a task as they would alone.
• One explanation for this is that your individual efforts are
less discernable when you are part of a group.
Group Dynamics
• Group Polarization is the tendency of groups to make more
extreme decisions than they would likely make as
individuals.
• Diffusion of responsibility plays a role into why groups
make such extreme decisions.
• Groupthink is a similar phenomenon in which groups make
bad decisions due to group members suppressing
reservations they may have about a decision.
Group Dynamics
• When people get swept up in sort of a mob mentality they
do things they wouldn’t normally do, like looting or rioting.
• This is due to the members feeling anonymous and less
responsible for their actions. This is known as deindividuation.
• One additional sketchy experiment was the Stanford
Prison experiment conducted by Philip Zambardo.