Social psy exam 3

Intragroup behavior

Intragroup behavior

any behavior when we’re embedded in a group

• When embedded within a group we don’t work as hard as we do when doing a task alone

Group Task Types: Additive

Premium is maximizing outputs

• Automatic processing

• Prone to social loafing (free riding)

• Example: paper clips

  • I may not add as many paper clips to a chain but as long as the rest of the people in the group make long chains, our group will be ok and we’ll hit the goal

  • Increase if deindividuation (you don’t know how many widgets each person makes)

  • Increase if diffusion of responsibility

Compensatory

Premium is on maximizing accuracy

• Example: class

  • Groups of students going through tasks to demonstrate additive vs. compensatory

  • Each person individually guesses Drigotas’ weight and then the group score is the average of their guesses

  • The closest the average is to his weight does better than the further away averages

  • Added element of being rewarded for being accurate

  • People might work harder to try to guess weight if they’re individual rather than embedded within a group

• Not as strong social loafing than in additive

  • Controlled processing

Disjunctive

Group is as good as its best member

• Example: class

  • Groups of 5 in class playing trivia math game

  • Talk about it as a group but only submit one answer

  • If you have one group member who is really good at math, your group will do well

  • It doesn’t matter if the rest of the group is terrible at math

• Oftentimes pressures that might not allow that best person to emerge

  • Maybe person really good at math doesn’t have a high social standing

  • If the person who is good doesn’t have a say, the group isn’t going to do well

  • Person in group who thinks they’re good at trivia and really assertive but they actually suck

Conjunctive

Group is as good as its worst member

• Doesn’t matter if ⅘ people in group are super good, if 1 is bad then the entire group is bad

• Example: crew

  • 8-person crew in the water

  • Incentive that for good crew teams, you have to be in rhythm

  • If in the crew, 7 people are really good but 1 person is super off rhythm, the group won’t do well

  • The one person is really holding them back

• Example: mountain climbing

  • Group mountain climbing

  • You’re only going to go as fast as the slowest mountain climber

Group Polarization

Originally called risky shift

• Idea that individual attitudes tend to become more extreme when you’re embedded within a group of like-minded individuals

• Example: risk taking

  • Students asked whether they would rather go work at family business (steady, safe) or do a startup (possibly wealthy, exciting life)

  • Subjects write down what the odds of success that a graduate student should take part in the startup company

  • Researchers knew the students were conservative, not risky so it would have to be like a 65% chance of success for them to go to startup

  • Researchers asked each student what the odds are that the startup is a success

  • Researchers put them into groups of 5 and would say talk about why you chose the odds that you did

  • The groups all agree with each other because the students are like-minded

  • After the group discussion, the researchers ask the students the same question again and the students tended to become more risk-aversive

  • Individual attitude tended to become more extreme when they talked to people with similar situations

• If you’re put into a group of people with the same attitude as you, your attitude will become more extreme

Normative social influence

desire to be liked

Informative social influence

desire to be right

Bennington College study

Super liberal college

• No SAT, all classes pass/fail

• Group polarizatioin

• Measured accepted students political attitudes before and after they went to Bennington

• Measured it a year out of Bennington

• Students leaned liberal when applying to Bennington

• Became even more liberal when at Bennington

  • Normative and informative social influence

• A year later, the students reverted back to their level of liberalism pre-Bennington

  • Not surrounded by social influence

Groupthink

Deterioration(worsening) of decision making that results from structural flaws and in-group pressures, often leading to a disastrous decision

studied archivally, within group making decisions having more people in a group is a good thing

Bay of Pigs invasion

• Under JFK in 60’s

• Fidel Castro started revolution in Cuba in 50’s

• Question about whether US does something to help Cuba

• Bay of Pigs was decision by JFK administration

• Plan went really badly

• Got group of cuban ex-patriots (people who had fled Cuba) and trained them with military personnel in Florida

  • Weren’t really fighters but trained them

• Idea was that these ex-patriots would land in the countryside in Cuba and sneak in and show the Cubans how bad Castro was for the country and sneak in and defeat him

• The ex-patriots landed in a swampy area and were quickly captured by Castro and his followers

• The ex-patriots were marched through the streets and it was humiliating for the US

• Groupthink decision → group came together to make a plan that was a disaster

Challenger

• Decision to launch space shuttle

• Televised all around country

• Decision to actually have the launch go forward was a disaster

• Space shuttle blew up within a few minutes after takeoff on live national television with millions of school-aged kids watching

• The process for making that decision was skewed and it ended up being a disaster

invasion of Iraq post-9/11

• All of the reasons to invade Iraq were false

  • Example: that they had plutonium

• Variables

1. central leader

2. gatekeeper

3. pressure to uniformity

4. pluralistic ignorance

5. self-censorship

central leader

• Somebody at the top who gives the no-go or go for the decision to actually be made

• Example: JFK/head of space challenger mission

gatekeeper

• Someone can control what information gets to the central leader or doesn’t

• Example: gatekeeper only let people who were pro Bay of Pigs plan talk to JFK

  • President had this view that all of his advisors were for the Bay of Pigs plan when they may not have been

• Example: Iraq invasion

  • VP Dick Cheney was the gatekeeper for President Bush

  • Bush only got information that Iraq did have nuclear weapons

  • People who had doubts about the weapons weren’t talking to Bush

pressure to uniformity

• when your feel pressure to go against the group

• Pressure of “you’re rocking the boat”

• Gatekeeper controlled some of the power

• Example: challenger

  • Some people working with the technical stuff on the challenger had issues with the equipment always working

  • The gatekeeper told them they needed to come along and get behind it so the workers would self-censor or feel like they were just wrong

pluralistic ignorance

• Feeling that other people must have more information than you do so they’re more likely to be correct

self-censorship

• If everyone else agrees, you shouldn’t bring up your doubts

• Example: people were asking why non military people were going to Cuba on a mission rather than trained soldiers but they didn’t bring it up so the boat wasn’t rocked

Combating: brainstorming

• Idea generation first , Followed by evaluation

• Example: creativity

  • process is important in terms of creativity

  • Individual creativity

    • Researcher would give subject two objects and ask them to think of as many ways as possible that they could put the objects to use to solve a problem

    • People would come up with as many solutions as they could separately

  • Group creativity

    • Groups would talk and naturally come up with as many ideas as they could

  • Brainstorming

    • Within the creativity process, there is a first phase

    • First phase = idea generation

      • People say any idea that pops into their head and no one says good or bad idea

      • No evaluation

    • If you are free to not worry what people will think about your idea, you just say anything that pops into your head

    • You aren’t stuck going down just one route of thought because you have a ton of routes to go down

    • Wildly more creative than the other two groups

  • Groupthink

    • You won’t have censorship, ignorance, or uniformity when you have brainstorming first

minority influence

pressure to conform when you are in a small group.

resist temptation to conform:

• consistency- if person in minority is consistent with attitude

• confidence- if minority person stated position with confidence that they are correct. makes it harder to make the person change sides

• independence/objectivity- they will not benefit from result/ rational stance no hypocrisy/ objective

leadership

social emotional vs task leaders

heuristic leaders sit at head of table

social emotional leader

good at reading moral, making people feel understood/ seen and heard, empathetic,

task leaders

good at getting people to do task, getting people to focus and get the job done

contingency model

to measure the best leadership depending on the situation, it measure performance

Large group behavior: social dilemma

• = large intragroup issues

  • Conflict where you want to maximize own self interest and interest for group as a whole

    • No selfishness → things work out better for group as a whole

commons dilemma

depletion of natural resources

• Taking from resource that everyone has access to but if people take too much, it can’t be used by anyone

  • Resource will be rapidly depleted which will be no good for anyone

• Built off story of farming in Great Britain in 1800’s in rural communities where grazing wasn’t amazing for the animals so it was hard to feed animals

  • Town would put aside an area called a Commons, a park, where there was great grass for grazing

  • Dilemma → each farmer had to make a decision: do I try to go to this Commons area as often as possible so my animals can eat and get big/healthy or do I not go as often so the grass isn’t overrun and stripped of value so no animals can graze for another couple months

• Whaling industry

  • Each whaling company would want to maximize number of boats in ocean getting whales so they can get more money

  • Too many companies with too many boats → almost extinction of many whale species

  • Each individual whaling company had self-interest of catching whales

  • If too many companies getting boats, whales won’t be able to reproduce as fast level and whaling industry will be ruined for all whaling companies

Public goods dilemma

give to a resource so that it is available to people

• You have to give to a resource in order for that resource to be alive and give to everyone

  • Giving to a resource

  • Giving isn’t selfish, not giving is acting in self-interest

• Public radio/television

  • Anybody can listen to free radio all day long

  • Issue: most public radio/television get money from the public

    • Not the government

  • You can listen to radio all day long and not give any money

  • If too many people do this ^, the resource may go away forever

  • You have to give to the resource for the resource to survive

general social dilemmas

• Situtations in which large intragroup issues have conflict between individual’s self-interest and the good of the group as a whole

• Recycling

  • Important purpose within groups

    • Cut down fewer trees

    • Recycle plastic → don’t need to create as much plastic

    • Materials won’t be dumped in landfills

  • Not pleasant to sort recycling materials from regular materials

  • Not fun to bring recycling to certain container

  • Individual thought that my individual recycling materials don’t matter that much so just putting it in the landfill won’t make a difference

  • If a ton of people have this view ^, it’s problematic

    • Recycling isn’t effective

• Beltway

  • In big cities, there’s often a beltway, high highway that goes around the edges of the city, which is a common commuter place

  • Often carpool lanes

    • People with 2+ people in car can go in carpool lanes

  • carpool → more carpools → less pollution

  • Self-interest: traffic is backed up in regular lanes but carpool lanes are moving quickly

    • You’re alone in car but want to get there fast so you go in carpool lane

  • If a lot of people ignore carpool lane rules, there is no purpose to the carpool lane

  • It would also get backed up if everyone ignored rules

• Hopkins

  • Ames Hall → Hodson Hall

  • Path to left to get to Hodson, path to right to get to Hodson, and path straight through grass to get to Hodson

  • Grass is pretty and green

  • Do i want to go around grass area or maximize own self-interst and walk through grass area?

  • Too many people walk through grass every semester and there’s a brown, muddy, ugly path through grass by end of semester

• think too hot to handle

ways to reduce selfish behavior

• normative and informative social influence

• descriptive (information on how people behave) and inductive norms (how people should behave, how do people I care about should behave)

• smaller groups less likely to at selfishly

• de-individuation: identifiability (if you can tie your behavior to identity you are less likely to act selfishly)

• operant conditioning (reward/cost)

• legal measures (often last resort)

Descriptive norm:

• how other people are acting in a situation

  • Everyone’s acting selflessly → makes it easier for someone new to also act selflessly

  • Example: recycling

    • Raised in culture where everyone recycles now

    • You very rarely see people not recycle or throw trash on ground

• Inductive norm:

• we care what people think about us and choose what we do based on what we think others will think

  • If my group is a group of people who will always recycle and will never litter, I will probably act that way as well

• Norms are hard to establish

Normative/informative social influence

• Larger group can put pressures on people to act in a certain way

• Normative social influence if you act in a different way than the group

  • You may alter behavior to fit in

  • Example:

    • Summer in texas droughts

    • Rules about how long you could take shower, you couldn’t water lawn

      • Way to deal with drought

    • One point, person wrote to paper and called out a basketball player whose lawn was green and framed it as this basketball player thinks he’s too good to follow the rules and waters his lawn

      • Shame hime

      • Normative social influence

    • Basketball player reached out to paper and wanted it known that a pipe had burst beneath his lawn so it was leaking thousands of gallons of water below the lawn

      • He wasn’t violating the norm on purpose

      • So he wouldn’t face normative crises of people being upset

  • Informative social influence may cause people to act in a certain way to fit in

    • Example:

      • Oil embargo at Hopkins in 70’s

      • Oil from middle eastern states

      • Oil ban

      • Energy crisis

      • Push to get people to conserve energy

      • In hopkins, push to get people to do this can be seen at light switches where there’s an orange sticker on light switch that says “save energy, turn off the lights”

smaller groups

• Large intragroup behavior issues: just one person in a thousands, you feel like you’re just a drop in the bucket

• If so many people believe this, they feel like they don’t have a big impact and thus don’t follow the rules

• If you break large groups down into smaller groups, its easier to get people to act less selfishly because they feel like they actually have an impact

identifiability

• If people know how you specifically behave, they will know if you act selfishly or not

• if people can tell it was you

• If people are going to know, its more of a restraint on selfishness

• One of reasons that basketball player was so affected by newspaper article about him

operant conditioning

• Reward selfless behavior and have people incur costs if they are violating selfless behavior

• People are more likely to work in support of group if they can see the correct decision to make

  • So easy so not a lot of cost to make the selfless decision

• Rewards tend to work better than costs

legal measures

• If you can establish a norm about how everyone behaves, that tends to be really effective in terms of way people behave

• Repercussions in terms of fine if you act selfishly

• Example:

  • In maine in 70’s and 80’s, there were too many lobster harvesting companies, too many traps being collected too often → in danger of lobsters being extinct

  • They had to resort to legal cost

  • If you got caught with lobsters of certain size and weight (lobsters that hadn’t reached puberty (ability to reproduce)), you would have to pay a hefty fine

  • Had some effect but after a while lobsterman started to figure out that odds of getting caught weren’t high

  • 30,000 boats and 4 patrolmen

    • Lobstermen weighed odds of them getting caught and thought getting lobsters from traps was worth the risk

  • Maine had to up the patrols → patrols did spot checks on boats as well so the odds of getting caught were much higher

  • Lobster species went back to thriving

• Example:

  • Running a red light

  • In your self-interest to go through red light because you want to get to location faster

  • Red light cameras → if you run a red light where there’s a camera, you will get a find

  • Rates of people running red lights dramatically reduced at intersections with cameras → less accidents, less speeding

  • Side effect: rates of running red lights at cameras nearby increased → people who run red lights learned to avoid intersections with cameras and just ran red lights nearby → increase in accidents at other intersections

Intergroup behavior

behavior between groups

• Discontinuity effect

• Intergroup behavior is much more competitive than inter-individual behavior

• Example:

  • Two groups doing some sort of task and making decisions that affect each group, interactions are more competitive

  • Two individuals are less competitive and cooperate more

• Often represented by Prisoner’s Dilemma game

  • Notion that you have to choose between a behavior that will only benefit your group or will benefit all groups

  • • People are randomly assigned to groups

    • Groups take turns in room

      • One person from each group looks at matrix and decides what they want to do

      • They go back to group and group makes a decision

    • Series of trials to figure out if group wants to choose X or Y

    • Within each square, number at top represents what group A would get and lower number represents what group B would get in terms of acquiring points

you are more competitive in a group than individually

Prisoner’s Dilemma game PDG

• People are randomly assigned to groups

• Groups take turns in room

  • One person from each group looks at matrix and decides what they want to do

  • They go back to group and group makes a decision

• Series of trials to figure out if group wants to choose X or Y

• Within each square, number at top represents what group A would get and lower number represents what group B would get in terms of acquiring points

• If both groups choose A, both groups get 3 points

• If both groups choose Y, both groups get 1 point

• If group A chooses Y and group X chooses X, group A gets 5 points and group B gets 0 points

• If group A chooses X and group B chooses Y, group A gets 0 points and group A gets 5 points

• You’ll have number of iterations where they’ll choose X or Y

  • You often don’t tell groups how many iterations there will be

• The groups figure out that XX will get them the most points in the long run

  • Individuals usually choose X

  • Groups tend to choose Y about 50% of the time

    • Once one group screws over the other group, they don’t have trust and won’t both choose X to help each other

• Best case: both choose X

• Group may choose Y for a few reasons:

  • Might try to choose Y and fool the other group into choosing X out of greed or wanting to win

  • Might choose Y out of fear of the other group choosing Y so they don’t want to choose X and get no points

    • Would rather get 1 than 0 points

Another version: PDG Alt

• If group A or group B chooses Z, both groups automatically get 2 points

  • X is still cooperative choice

    • Individuals choose this most often still

  • Fearful that other group is going to try to mess with you, best strategy is choosing Z because you are guaranteed 2 points

    • Groups most often pick this

  • Y is out of greed vs. Z is out of fear

reasons for intergroup behavior

• Schemas of fear & greed

• Social support for greed

• Diffusion of responsibility

• Deindividuation

• Reciprocity effects

• Ingroup-outgroup bias

• Social identity theory

Schemas of fear & greed

• Form by time we’re in elementary school

• Intergroup behavior is going to be comeptitive

  • It’s ok to be greedy in group competition

  • We start to expect other groups to be greedy so we also expect fear

• Individual behaviors don’t have schemas of competitiveness

  • No greed or fear

• Social support for greed

• something van happen within the group

• someone the group will float greed, can’t happen when ur alone

• what confederate suggested altered groups behavior\

  in a group greed is more encouraged, you are mrelikey to have greed if those around you have it too

• Not in individuals

• Example: three person groups

  • Two people are real and one person is a confederate

  • Confederate has three conditions:

    • Control - confederate doesn’t say anything of value in group

    • Social support for greed - confederate suggests we can convince other group to choose X and we’ll choose Y so that we get 5 points and they get 0

      • Suggests it’s ok to be greedy

      • Positive effect → group becomes more competitive

      • Makes other two people latch onto the idea once someone says it out loud

      • Up to 70% competitive behavior

      • Can’t happen in individuals

    • Fear - confederate suggests the other group may try to get their group to pick X so they can pick Y and get 5 points while our group gets 0

• Diffusion of responsibility

• when responsibility of the groups actions is spread out and not only on one idv.

• Responsibility is diffused among members of groups

• In individuals, responsibility is 100% on you

• If group A screws over group B

  • Oftentimes group A spokesperson will tell group B spokesperson that he didn’t want to screw them over and it was the other two people in group A that made the decision

• Deindividuation

• behavior can’t be tied to identity→ non-normative behavior can be good or bad

  example- yelling or jumping

• Reciprocity effects

• getting payback after being screwed over

• Once one group chooses Y and convinces the other group to choose X, there is a strong chance the screwed over group will try to choose Y and convince the other group to choose X right after

• If someone screws me over, I’ll screw them over again right after

• Doesn’t happen as much with individuals

  • If screwing someone over happens with individuals, the individual who did the screwing will often apologize and tell the other person they can have 5 points now

    • They go back to trusting each other

• Ingroup-outgroup bias

• Tendency to think of positive things about your group

• Tendency to think of negative things about other groups

• If my group is better than the other group, of course it’s ok for us to get all of the good outcomes

• Tends to happen in groups over with individuals

Social identity theory 🫡🫡

• Part of our self-esteem comes from the groups that we belong to 🫡🫡🫡

• It’s ok for us to think that our group deserves more because we have this ingroup-outgroup bias but also because self-esteem is tied to group so we want group to do better

• Minimial group paradigm

  • If you randomly assign people ot group A and B, people will automatically say their group is better even though they were randomly assigned to the group

  • Social identity theory says this occurs because a person’s group becomes tied to their self-esteem

• Study: 100 subjects randomly assigned to group A and B

  • Researchers randomly pick people in each group to give $100 to any subject except themselves

  • The people give the money to members in their group

    • Automatically try to benefit their group

    • Naturally think about us versus them

Reduction of Intergroup competition

• simple contact effects

• Robert cave study

  • higher level goals

• jigsaw classroom

  • interdependence

• positive intergroup examples

simple contact effects

• Belief that one of the problems of having people going to school with only their own race is that they will start to believe that the only people like them are members of their own race

• Beneficial to have desegregation is we have to interact with people of other groups

  • You can start to identify you have more similarities than differences

• Breaks down ingroup-outgroup bias

  • Breaks down competition

• Isn’t very effective

• Robert cave study

• Summer camp with assorted cabins

• Social psychologist studied 10 year old boys

• Tried to recruit kids very similar in demographic to go to this camp

• Wanted to see if in this kids there could be intergroup competition

• Researchers found that it was very easy to create intergroup competition

• One of the first thing that happened at the camp is the boys were split into groups and they got to name their groups

  • Developing social identities with names

  • They thought differently with names

• Groups lived in housing together

• Activities with groups competing with each other

• Trophy that the winner of the day’s competition could take to cabin

• Led to more competition, kids sat in different groups in lunch room, extracurricular competitive activities (stealing the trophy, vandalism)

• The social psychologists now tried to reduce this through simple contact

  • No segregation

  • Kids were forced to do mixed group activities

  • Trying to test simple contact theory

  • Didn’t work

  • Still same competitive behavior

• higher level goals

• when something bigger than intergroup completion effects both groups

• Researchers created situations where groups would have to come together to solve problems that would help everyone

• One day, the water truck that brought the camp water purposely went into a ditch so the campers had to get tools to help save the water truck

• Some tools were with one group and some tools were with another group

• Both groups had to come together to solve the higher level problem of getting the water truck out of the ditch

• When groups had to come together for common goal, competition went down

jigsaw classroom

• Interdependence

• Educational benefits of having nontraditional environment in education and intergroup competition

• Increase levels of comprehension but also reduce some intergroup demographic competition

• In jiggsaw classroom, kids are broken down into small groups and group is given an assignment

  • Each kid within group is given a topic that they have to do research on and teach their group about

  • Kids become interdependent on each other and they have to work together

  • Kids relying on eachother reduces competition within demographics if mixed races have to work together

  • Academic performance also improved

positive intergroup examples

• Researchers ran study on an afternoon Saturday - 5 hour study

• Researchers randomly assigned kids to green group and blue group

  • Were given green or blue groups

  • People naturally started being competitive

• In order to reduce intergroup competition, somewhere along the line within each group they had measures of who liked who and who could be a leader for each group

• They made a big show of taking the leader from each group and had the leaders do a task together

  • The task was cooperative and the leaders had to rely on each other to solve

• Researchers tried to see if after this task, would having this positive example of two leaders doing something together that went well change the opinions of the groups themselves

• Groups were less competitive after this

  • Less ingroup bias

Interpersonal attractions

the attraction between people which leads to the development of platonic or romantic relationships.

first impressions have an enormous impact on how you preserve the person because that first meeting lingers

• primacy effect

• conformation bias

• overconfidence

• but… “the liking gap”

• primacy effect

things that come first given more weight

conformation bias

ignore things that are inconsistent with schema, follows schema categorize quickly

overconfidence

more confident about impression of someone than we should

• when people's subjective confidence in their own ability is greater than their objective (actual) performance

but… “the liking gap”

knowledge gained from first expression lead to how you feel/act/interact with person in future

interpersonal attraction orientations: physiological approaches

• Pheromones

• arousal as cue

• misattribution of arousal

  • bridge study

  • lingerie slides

  • “secrets”

  • shock study

Pheromones

• We are a mammal species

• We have pheromones that show whether we are ready to mate

• Predictor of interpersonal attraction

  • Cologne-perfume industry wants you to believe this is true

• Research isn’t strong about whether it actually affects behavior

• Role of pheromones in women’s menstrual cycles

  • Women get on same menstrual cycle because of pheromones

arousal as cue

• Autonomic nervous system to show you’re attracted to someone

  • Rush of adrenaline, increase breathing, fight or flight behavior

  • Physiological arousal that a person is the cause of

Misattribution of arousal: bridge study

• Study in national park outside of Vancouver, Canada

• River in park where you can go to either side of river

• One side - wooden wire rickety bridge over a deep gulch in river

• Other side - newer bridge (more safe) over less of a pretty drop in river

• They placed a woman in the middle of each bridge

• This woman would stop men crossing the bridge

  • Random assignment and other conditions on who she would stop

• She would ask men about their experience at the park as a survey from the park

  • Questions about the park

• When the man got to the end of a bridge, a park ranger would show up and say oh I saw you talking to her… would you answer some questions about her performance and would also ask questions about her appearance

• Men on rickety bridge found the women significantly more attractive than the men on the sturdy bridge

  • Rickety bridge → bridge is swaying → automatic nervous system arousal from fear → stopped by woman on bridge → confuse arousal for attraction

• lingerie slides

• Men given cover story about why they would be coming in and rating slides

• Men are hooked into things that they are told will measure their physiology

  • Heart rate, skin conductance, breathing

• Men are given headphones and told that they’re hearing their own heart beating

• Show you slides of women in lingerie

• Experimenter is controlling the heart beat, it’s not actually the mans

• Randomly assigned the slide that the man supposedly had a heart rate increase to

• The researchers bring back the men a week later and say oh we’re sorry we forgot to collect ratings of slides

• The men rate the slide that they thought their heart beat faster on as the most attractive

  • Even though the slide was randomly assigned to them

• “secrets”

• Having to keep a relationship a secret can dramatically increase interpersonal attraction

• Secrets are exciting → you feel energized → misattribution of arousal

• Example: sensory perception study

  • You are randomly paired up with opposite sex person

  • Everyone is heterosexual

  • One person is given a blue star or red square and they are told to concentrate so much on it that their partner can use sensory perception to know what you’re thinking

  • Condition:

    • Both conditions: Told that they want to increase physical contact because it may increase ESP accuracy

      • Touch feet below the table

    • One condition: told that everyone will know they’re touching feet under the table

    • Other condition: told that they need to keep it a secret that they’re touching feet under the table from the other couple in the room doing the same task

  • The touching feet but everyone knows about it show same levels of attraction as control group (not touching feet)

  • The pair that had to keep feet-touching a secret tended to find each other much more attractive

learning theory

• rewards and punishment

• gain-loss hypothesis

• Reciprocity effects

• flattery effects

• social exchange theory

how information is received and processed

• rewards and punishment

• We tend to like people who we are rewarded for being around

• If it’s not pleasing to spend time with someone, we are less likely to want to be around them

• Increase attraction for people who interacting with is pleasing

• gain-loss hypothesis

• Winning somebody over tends to make us more attracted to them

• More troubled by losing somebody’s affection versus if they always didn’t like us

• ex: is Mary like you 3 and Jane likes you 7 but after meeting and spending time together Mary like you 8 and Jane likes you 8 you are more attracted to Mary

  gaining someone

• Reciprocity effects

• If someone likes me, I’m more likely to like them

• flattery effects

• We like people who flatter us

• Even if there is a hint that the flattery is insincere, it still works

• we like compliments

social exchange theory

• Looks at rewards and costs that you might incur by hanging out with somebody

• pros and cons of an interaction with someone

• Cognitive estimate of likelihood of receiving the rewards or incurring the costs

• Potential rewards and potential costs can influence behavior

• Example:

  • Men will only ask a woman on a date if they are 75% sure that she’ll say yes

  • Less then 75% even if potential rewards are great → less likely to ask her out

• example

  • motor coordination

  • men and woman are sorting papers, the men are told that the woman are either single and ready to mingle or in a committed relationship. they are then put in a room to sort and the card gall on the woman’s table.

  • men are more likely to help the woman that is single than the one in a relationship

interpersonal attraction- contact effects

• proximity

• familiarity

proximity

• We’re more likely to have interactions with people who are close by

• can also increase the amount you dont like someone/ something

• MIT study

• ex2: Chinese sysmbol study: the Chinese symbol you see more often in the slides you tend to like more

MIT STUDY

• Famous study done post-WWII with GI Bill

• Young people forego college to go fight in WWII

• When they came back from war, GI Bill said they could be given scholarship money to go to college

• At MIT, dramatic growth in student body caused lack of student housing room

• Created new housing → similar to motel

• Social psychologist said this would be a good way to look at proximity

• MIT had new quad of dorms - four dorms around a quad

• Sociometric measures of who you interacted with and how much you liked them

• People who lived at bottom level of two-split level dorms were at base of stairs for people on second level → they were liked the most

• Also tended to like people within our dorm the most

• Everybody who lived upstairs were more likely to run into the people living downstairs because they had to go past that doorway all of the time

• Being in same space at same time → liking people

• We tend to form relationships with people we interact with

• We tend to like people the more often we see them

• Pleasant feelings become heightened by proximity

• Unpleasant feelings become heightened by proximity

familiarity

• Notion that we tend to be inclined to like somebody who reminds us of someone we had a good relationship with in the past

• Example: interview

  • Going into an interview where you’re interviewed by a panel

  • If an interviewer reminds you of someone you know and like, you become less stressed during interview

• Danger: ignore bad things about a person because they remind you of someone else who is a good person

  • Example:

    • Fifth grade girlfriend

    • Family moved away to new community and he starts middle school

    • He quickly latches onto a girl who reminded him of the girl he ‘dated’ in fifth grade

    • Took him a while to realize the whole reason he liked her was because she reminded him of his fifth grade girlfriend

interpersonal attraction- trait approaches- physical appearance

People make a lot of other positive assumptions about people who are physically attractive

Physical attractiveness plays a big role in a lot of things it probably shouldn’t play a role in

• computer dance study

• first impressions

• social interactions

• little kids

• matching hypothesis

• similarity

• positive effects

• small imperfection

• computer dance study

• Done at large midwestern state school

• Researchers set up study where they could compare similarity of personality in terms of predicting interpersonal attraction

• Over summer, sent all freshmen packet of surveys that measured things about them

• When freshmen got to campus, they were invited to take part in school-sanctioned dance

  • Were told that one rule about dance was that they were assigned a person that they would have to spend first hour of dance with

• When you got to dance, they took you aside and took your photo

• Sent these photos off to another university where freshmen at that university made ratings of physical appearance

  • Not really a thing as types

  • Correlation between how everyone else rated you would be 0.6-0.65 - positive correlation

  • Less correlation between how you rate yourself versus how everyone else rates you

• You were randomly matched up with someone and you have to go into dance with that person and stay with them for first hour

• After the hour, lights come on and the researchers say everyone goes on their own and fills out questionnaire about dance

  • Hidden questions about whether they like the person who they spent the first hour with

• You wear physical appearance on sleeve whereas you can’t figure out personality in an hour

• Halo effect → physical appearance was main cause of whether the person liked the person they were with

• Demographic or attitude similarity didn’t predict that much on the qeustionnaire

• first impressions

hiring, jury’s, teacher rating

• Physically attractive people are more likely to get job

• Physically attractive professors get better teacher ratings

• Physically attractive people are more likely to get away with a crime

  • UNLESS they use their physical attractiveness to commit the crime

• Our perception is based on appearance and this perception lasts longer than we should

  • As we get to know the person, we have confirmation bias because they’re attractive

  • Can affect first impressions and lingering impressions

• social interactions

• Physical attractiveness has implication on quantity and quality of interactions

• Diary record sheet

  • People in study got photos taken and they were sent to other university for students to rate the pictures for physical attractiveness

  • People in study were asked to keep diary record sheet of every interaction they had that lasted 10 minutes or more for 10 days

  • The thing that best predicted quantity and quality of conversations was physical attractiveness

  • Physically attractive women had more opposite sex conversations

    • Interactions tended to be more satisfying

  • More attractive women tended to be initiated into conversation by opposite sex whereas less attractive women initiated the conversation with opposite sex

  • Less attractive men basically only interacted with other men

• little kids

  • (Moms, teachers, persuasion techniques)

• Being attractive starts from a really early age

• Example: moms

  • Researchers got ratings of how much each mother said they loved their baby days after the babies were born

  • Independent measures of physical attractiveness ratings of those babies

  • Measured how much mother spent time with newborn infant

  • All moms say they love their baby 100% but the best predictor of how much time mom would spend with infant was related to physical attractiveness of baby

• Example: teachers

  • Teachers are more likely to call on attractive kids and give them positive encouragement

  • Kids can start to notice that attractive kids get different interactions

• Example: persuasion techniques

  • Third graders’ effectiveness in persuasion techniques

  • Third graders were given a healthy cookie and they were told to try to convince their classmates to try the cookie

  • Attractive little girls just smiled and said “would you eat this?” as a technique and kids would eat it

  • Less attractive little girls got just as many people to eat the cookie but used different strategies: about strong arguments to convince them

  • Attractive little boys would use their charm to get kids to eat the cookie

  • Less attractive little boys say “try this or i’ll hit you”

• matching hypothesis

We tend to wind up with romantic partners who are about same level of physical attractiveness as we are

• One theory: we learn our marketplace and learn how attractive we are and by being with someone at same level, same levels of security and less problems

• Another theory: everybody seeks out most attractive people and because everyone is trying to match with same people, the attractive people pair off first

  • Least attractive people find eachother in the end

ex: card game

we try to match up to our card without knowing what are card is

if u are the ace everyone want to come up to you which lets you know that you are the ace

• similarity

• Similarity breeds attraction

  • We like people similar to ourselves

• Demographics & attitudes; not personality

  • Tend to like people of same race, socioeconomic background, etc.

  • Tend to like people with similar attitudes about things (people who like the same things)

demographics

we like people around the same age as us or ethnically, socioeconomic status, religion, proximity , that is the same as us

not as powerful attitudes

attitudes

very powerful

we like people if they like/dislike what we like/dislike which makes interactions easier/better

• positive effects

• Tend to like people who are positive, happy, smile more often, laugh more often, optimistic

• We tend not to like people who are negative as much

• Stable personality traits: big 5 personality traits

• High in neuroticism → self absorbed, complain more, more negative

  • Bad first impressions

small imperfection

• We like people to be polished, engaging, attractive, positive characteristics but we dont like it if they are too perfect

• We also like it that people have some small imperfection that makes them more relatable

• Example:

  • Person does lecture and is perfect

  • Same person does lecture and perfect except they spill a cup of water during their lecture

    • Fluster of embarrassment that they spilled water

  • The people who saw the perfect lecture didn’t rate the person as high as the people who saw the water spill

• ex2: its like the movie I saw where they gut was hot and perfect and then he told the girl that he has a webbed toe.

Evolutionary Approach- macro level theory

• Says we are a species with goal to survive and reproduce and we have an impact on the species by having our genes passed down

• Survival & reproduction

• “Differential parental investment”

• Mate preferences: gender differences

Survival & reproduction

• Things that increase survival and reproduction

• Two main issues of survival and reproduction are key issues in aspects that are motivating in human behavior

• Evolutionary psychologists talk about different roles men and women play in reproduction and how it can lead to differential parental investment

• “Differential parental investment”

• Men can have children throughout their lifespan, can have as many kids with many different partners in shorter period of time, are less sure of their paternity

• Women are absolutely sure of their maternity, have a limited fertility window, go through dramatic physical changes to experience childbirth, historically death in childbirth has been high

• Women are more heavily invested in any offspring because they know it’s their child and they can only have so many children and they went through dramatic physical changes for this child

• Because of this, there are gender differences in behavior and who we are attracted to as mates

how invested you are to ur child based on ur sex

• Mate preferences: gender differences

• Study in 38 different countries around world

• Had people rank preferences in order of mating partner

• For top things, there aren’t really gender differences

  • Someone who loves them, is kind to them, etc.

• Only two gender differences in terms of what men wanted vs what women wanted

  • Men more than women tended to rank physical attractiveness as being more important than women did

    • Physical appearance is historically a sign of good genes

  • Women rated having resources, making money, power, etc., as being more important to them than men did

    • Women do care about physical attractiveness just not as much as men

    • Women care more about resources because women are sure that a kid is theirs and they are heavily invested in thier kids so they want somebody there who can provide resources to ensure the survival of the baby

  • This flows out of differential parental investment

• Terrible gender stereotypes in this

• Can twist evolutionary approach for men to explain why they cheat and why women shouldn’t

• Macrotheory: it can talk about these trends at a species-level scale but isn’t good at explaining why one person winds up with another

  • Can’t predict any individual preference

interpersonal relationships - orientations

• evolutionary approaches

• social cognitive approaches

• interdependence approach

• investment model

evolutionary approaches

• “Differential parental investment”

• close relationships:theoretical orientations

gender differences -

• mate prefs.

• denigration of rivals

• jealousy: physical vs. emotional

• male sexual jealousy and homicide

• step and adoptive children and abuse

gender differences: Mate preferences

• Men can have many children as possible, less sure of paternity

• Men can be as invested or less invested as they want

• Women are more invested in offspring

Denigration of rivals

how men and woman push down rivals/competition

• Women value resources more than men

• Men value looks more than women

• Men and women use different strategies to make rivals look worse

  • Men say he doesn’t have resources

  • Women say they aren’t physically attractive and are promiscuous

Jealously: physical vs. emotional jealousy

what upsets you based on gender

men get more upset if partner had sex with other man than if their partner falls in love

• takes maternity away

women get more upset if their partner falls in love with someone else than id they have sex

• takes resources away

Male sexual jealously and homicide

• Overwhelming reaosn why women are murdered revolves aorund male sexual jealously

• Women most likely to be murdered by someone she had a sexual relationship with

• Cause if often the male feeling like she has strayed or is leading to be with someone else

Step and adoptive children and abuse

rate of physical abuse is higher for kids not genetically related vs. genetically related to them

• Kids are much more likely to be abused by parents than genetically linked children

• If this kid doesn’t share your genes you’re not as heavily invested in the child

social cognitive approach - cognitive approaches

• Attachment Theory (Bowlby)

• strange situation test