Psych Lecture #18: From 'Person' to 'People': Group Behavior

Is bystander effect stronger in smaller or larger groups?

What is the concept called?

Bystander effect is stronger in larger groups.

This is sometimes called diffusion of responsibility.

A study on bystander effect:

In a small group (just one other person), the participant will intervene __% of the time.

100%

A study on bystander effect:

In a large group (four other people), the participant will intervene __% of the time.

about 60% of the time

Does it generally feel “good” or “bad” when you share something in common with another person?

It generally feels “good” when you share something with another person (e.g. nationality, religion, sports teams, etc.).

What is minimal group paradigm?

A research method that tests the minimum conditions needed for people to show prejudice/bias between groups

What did the minimal group paradigm study show?

No matter how arbitrarily the groups are formed, participants tend to favor people in their own group while enjoying failures of the outgroup.

Why do people exhibit bias between groups?

Explain.

Humans have a tendency to categorize, because categorization is helpful, efficient, and fast when it comes to making decisions.

What is “Thin Slicing”?

a mental strategy for making a very quick judgement/decision using very little information

How “thin” of a slice is needed to create a (not baseless) judgement of someone?

Why might example 1 (lecture video and course evauations) not be an accurate portrayal of the effectiveness of thin slicing?

a thin slice of 6 seconds watching a silent video

• This was enough to somewhat accurately judge if someone is a good lecturer (based on correlating the snap judgements to course evaluations)

• It is also enough to make judgements on other aspects of people; e.g. talkativeness, politics, lying, psychopathology, and “gaydar” (or “straighdar”)

Rather than accuracy, it is possible this is a result of stickiness or self-fulfillment.

Implicit vs Explicit Biases

Explicit bias is something people are actively aware of and may even express.

On the other hand, implicit bias is bias you don’t outwardly express or that you even know exists.

How does the implicit association test reveal implicit associations?

People tend to categorize paired concepts more quickly if they held an implicit association between the concepts

A study had participants choose students to recruit by presenting their qualifications and subtly communicating each student’s race (by presenting them in a fraternity or in the Black Student Union).

What were the results of this study?

When students had similar qualifications, participants tend to hire students in fraternities over students in the BSU.

When students had very different (strong vs weak) qualifications, race didn’t have a very strong effect.

Prisoner’s Dilemma: What is the most logical decision to make and why?

When might this not be the case?

Defecting benefits the prisoner no matter what decision their partner makes.

If the “game”/situation is played multiple times (Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma).

Public goods game: Each player receives 20 tokens and can decide how much to keep or contribute to a shared pot (that will multiply all tokens and allot the tokens equally).

When there is more time pressure (less time to make a decision), do participants tend to be more generous or more greedy?

What is this phenomenon called?

People tend to be more generous when there is more time pressure.

This is called “spontaneous giving and calculated greed”.