Social Psychology WK 3 - Automaticity

South African muder case study

Murder was excused by the result of social influence

Social identity analysis: the study of how environmental/social influences affect how we behave

How do we evade this personal responsibility?

Nuremberg defence or Milgram’s experiment → “I was just following orders” (Obedience)

Conformity

Deindividuation (loss of personal identity, therefore following other people)

Factors to understand social behaviour

Context

Social thinking

Situation

Presence of others

Social cognition

Understanding and interpreting others’ actions

Enables us to take advantage of being a part of groups

We are not entirely in control of our interpretations as biases and implicit attitudes are involved

Social inference

Filling in gaps of our or other people’s behaviour

Different from inference which is based off fact and logic

Applying cognition to social cognition

Involves perception (where/context), attention (what is important), memory (schemas), thinking (biases), language (interpretation)

This social cognition affects our performance:

• Social facilitation and inhibition (Triplett, Zajonc)

• Self-fulfilling prophecy/Pygmalion effect

• Hawthorne effect - performing differently due to being watched

• Demand characteristics

Ways of overcoming the Social Psychology replication crisis

Better measurement methods (measurement validity)

Better experimental conditions (internal validity)

Metanalyses (reliability)

Solving real-life problems (real-world application)

Naive scientist

Uses rational and logical thinking processes based on cause and effect evidence → higher accuracy

Cognitive miser

Uses heuristics and mental short cuts to form quick responses → lower accuracy

Thinking fast and slow (Kahneman, 2011)

System 1 → Quick, instinctive, emotional → lower accuracy

System 2 → Slow, reflective, logical → higher accuracy

Motivated tactician

Flexible thinker who adapts/flips between System 1 and System 2 depending on situational needs

Firstly they have 4 criteria:

• Time

• Cognitive overload

• Importance

• Information

Depending on available resources and situational demands, they either turn to Heuristic processing (System 1) or S

Accessibility

Schemas being at the front of someone’s mind (more accessible), making it easier to make certain inferences

Priming

Certain environmental factors making certain schemas more accessible

Eg. just reading a book about mental illnesses make us more perceptive to mental illnesses

However - there is not a lot of replicability on social priming:

• Money priming effect - Exposure to money makes us more motivated and less prosocial

• Elderly priming effect (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996) - Exposure to elderly stereotypes (slow, forgetful) makes someone as such

• Professor priming effect - (Djiksterhuis & van Knippenberg (1998) - Thinking about a professor makes you do better on a cognitive test
  

Elderly priming effect failure

Originally done by Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1995)

Replicated by Doyen et al (2012)

120 vs 60 original participants

Failed to replicate → experimenter effect

Professor priming effect failure

Djiksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998)

Replicated by O’Donnell (2018)

40 labs cross-culturally (23 passed inclusion criteria)

Failed to replicate

Facial feedback hypothesis failure

Strack, Martin & Strepper (1988)

Replicated by Wagenmakers et al (2016)

• 17 labs, overall failed to replicate effect

Replicated by Coles et al (2022)

• Adversarial replication - Voluntary acts triggered the effects (hormones, saliva etc), but pen-in-mouth didn’t

Power-posing failure

Carney, Cuddy and Yap (2010)

Replicated by Simmons and Simmonsohn (2017)

Hormones did not replicate

Commonalities for failure to replicate

Small samples

Socially complex experimental conditions

• Has to set up an artificial environment with people who are experienced in getting participants to do something for you 

• Might not happen in the normal world - there are lots of other factors contributing to certain behaviours

Selective reporting (only reporting significant results)

What does replicate?

• Self-reference effect

  • Remembering information better when it is reference/has relevance to oneself

• Better-than-average effect

  • Reporting ourselves as better than the average

• Asch’s conformity experiments

• Milgram’s obedience experiments