C14: Social Psychology

Richard LaPiere

In a survey, found that over 90% of respondents would not serve Chinese people but when tested, only one occasion did this happen. Thus, this finding illustrates that attitudes do not perfectly predict behaviours.

Cognitive dissonance theory

People are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviours. When they do not, they experience unpleasant mental tension or dissonance.

Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith

One group was paid $1 to lie and another $20 to lie. The group paid $1 was found to have significantly more positive attitudes toward the task since they lacked sufficient external motivation to lie and therefore, to reduce the dissonance, they changed their attitudes.

Foot-in-the-door

if you can get people to agree to a small request, they will become more likely to agree to a follow-up request that is larger.

Door-in-the-face

After people refuse a large request, they will look more favourably upon a follow-up request that seems, in comparison, much more reasonable.

Norms of Reciprocity

People tend to think that when someone does something nice for them, they ought to do something nice in return.

Attribution theory

Tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe. It can be a person/situation and stable/unstable attribution.

Harold Kelley

Theory that explains the kind of attributions people make based on 3 kinds of information.

• Consistency - how similarly the individual acts in the same situation over time

• Distinctiveness - how similar this situation is to other situations in which we have watched this individual

• Consensus - how others in the same situation have responded

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The expectations we have about others can influence the way those others behave.

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

Selected a random group of children and informed their teachers that these students were ripe for such intellectual progress. In some way, the teachers’ expectations that these students would bloom intellectually over the year actually caused the students to outperform their peers.

Fundamental attribution error

People tend to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors.

• People do not evidence this same tendency in explaining their own behaviours.

• Far less likely to occur in collectivist cultures than in individualistic cultures

False-consensus effect

Tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them

Self-serving bias

Tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones.

Just-world bias

Belief in a just world in which misfortunes befall people who deserve them, can be seen in the tendency to blame victims.

Stereotypes

ideas about what members of different groups are like, and these expectations may influence the way we interact with members of these groups.

Prejudice

An undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.

* Ethnocentrism - belief that one’s culture is superior to others

Discrimination

involves an action

Out-group homogeneity

People tend to see members of their own group, the in-group, as more diverse than members of the other groups, out-groups.

In-group bias

A preference for members of one’s own group

Contact theory

Contact between hostile groups will reduce animosity, but only if the groups are made to work toward a goal that benefits all and necessitates the participation of all. (such goal is called the **superordinate goal**)

Muzafer Sherif

Camp study illustrates both how easily out-group bias can be created and how superordinate goals can be used to unite formerly antagonistic groups.

Instrumental aggression

When the aggressive act is intended to secure a particular end.

Hostile aggression

No such clear purpose

Frustration-aggression hypothesis

The feeling of frustration makes aggression more likely.

John Darley and Bibb Latane

Explored how people decided whether or not to help others (bystander effect, diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance)

Bystander effect

The larger the number of people who witness an emergency situation, the less likely anyone is to intervene.

Diffusion of responsibility

The larger the group who witness a problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help.

Pluralistic ignorance

People seem to decide what constitutes appropriate behaviour in a situation by looking to others.

Social facilitation

people perform tasks better in front of an audience than they do when they are alone

Social impairment

When the task being observed was a difficult one rather than a simple, well-practiced skill, being watched by others actually hurt performance.

Conformity

Tendency of people to go along with the views or actions of others

Solomon Asch

(studied conformity)

• showed participants lines of varying sizes then asked which line is the longest. Confederates answered before participants. Although their answer was obviously incorrect, approx ⅓ of the participants conformed.

• Studies have shown that conformity is most likely to occur when a group’s opinion is unanimous

Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Studies

focused on participants’ willingness to do what another asks them to do.

• The participant played the teacher and the confederate played the student. Every time a question was answered incorrectly, the participant would have to deliver a shock (shocks increased in intensity). Milgram was interested in how far participants would go before refusing to deliver any more shocks.

• He could decrease participants’ compliance by bringing them into closer contact with the confederates

• Participants who could see the learners gave fewer shocks than participants who could only hear the learners

• The lowest shock rates were administered by participants who had to force the learner’s hand onto the shock plate

• When the experimenter left in the middle and was replaced by an assistant, obedience also decreased.

Norms

Rules about how group members should act

Social loafing

When individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.

Group polarization

tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.

Groupthink

Tendency for some groups to make bad decisions; a kind of false unanimity is encouraged, and flows in the group’s decisions may be overlooked.

Deindividuation

People get swept up by a group and do things they never would have done if on their own (loss of self-restraint). 

Philip Zimbardo

prison experiment (roles, deindividuation) - students played the role of prison guard or prisoner. They took their assigned roles perhaps too well, and the experiment had to end early because of the cruel treatment the guards were inflicting on the prisoners.