6- social thinking

Social psychology

Study of how the social world affects our thoughts and behaviors as individuals and in groups; emphasizes power of the situation.

Personality vs social psych

Personality: how people are stable across situations. Social: how situations change people in similar ways.

Fundamental attribution error

Tendency to overestimate dispositional (trait) causes and underestimate situational causes of others’ behavior.

Attitude

A belief or feeling that predisposes us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, or events.

Cognitive dissonance

Discomfort caused by inconsistency between attitudes and behavior; we are motivated to reduce it. (Festinger)

$1 vs $20 study result

Participants paid $1 later rated the boring task as more enjoyable than those paid $20.

Why $1 changed attitudes

$1 is too little external justification → people change their attitude (“I guess it was fun”) to reduce dissonance.

Why $20 did not change attitudes

$20 provides enough external justification (“I lied for the money”), so no need to change true attitude.

Reducing dissonance: 2 main ways

(1) Change your attitude; (2) Justify or explain your behavior.

Reinforcement vs dissonance

Reinforcement ($20) increases behavior but doesn’t make you like it; dissonance ($1) can make you like the behavior.

Conformity (Asch)

Adjusting behavior or thinking to match a group standard, even when the group is clearly wrong.

Factors increasing conformity

Feeling insecure, group ≥ 3 people, unanimous group, high-status group, no prior commitment, being observed, culture valuing social standards.

Social loafing

Tendency to put in less effort when working in a group than when individually accountable.

Group polarization

Like-minded groups become more extreme in their opinions after discussion.

Deindividuation

Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.

Groupthink

Faulty decision making in groups driven by desire for harmony; suppressing dissent leads to poor decisions.

Obedience question

Why do ordinary people sometimes intentionally harm or kill innocent others?

Milgram’s obedience setup

“Teacher” (real participant) gives electric shocks to “learner” (confederate) for wrong answers; shocks increase by 15V each time.

Milgram’s key finding

~65% of participants continued to the max shock level

Situational factors affecting obedience

Prestige of setting, presence of dissenting peers, and contradictory authorities all change obedience rates.

Obedience in rundown building

Moving from Yale to a rundown building lowered obedience to ~48%.

Obedience with dissenting peers

When two others refuse to continue, obedience drops to ~10%.