Social Psychology

Social Psychology

• Seeks to understand, explain, and predict how people thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagines, or implied presence of others

Social Cognition

• How we perceive and interpret ourselves and the others in our social world

ABC Model of Attitudes

• Affective

  • How we feel towards the object (eg. I am afraid of tigers)

• Behavioural

  • How we behave toward the object (eg. I run away from tigers)

• Cognitive

  • What we believe about the object (eg. tigers are dangerous)

Pro-War Attitude

• Affective Component Emotions and feelings

  • Fears that the world is a dangerous place with bad people

• Behavioural Component Predispositions to act

  • Supports pro-conflict political candidates

• Cognitive Component Beliefs and ideas

  • Believes war is often a necessary solution to international problems

Developing and Shaping Attitudes

• Parents play role in shaping children's beliefs and opinions about things and people

• Generalize individual experiences into an overall attitude about the value of what we are doing

• Children mature, peers, teachers, media, and social media begin to shape attitudes

• Mere Thought Effect - thinking about something makes is more significant and important to a person

Cognitive Dissonance

• Dissonance - lack of harmony or agreement

• Cognitive dissonance - emotional discomfort as a result to holding contradictory beliefs or holding a belief that contradicts behaviour

• Inconsistency between two more cognitions

  • Beliefs, thoughts, or values

    • Eg. person who values honesty but lies in a situation - inconsistency leads to cognitive dissonance 

• Changing beliefs to justify our action can reduce discomfort

• Used more when our behaviours are very out of character for us

Self-Perception Alternative

• When we are uncertain of our attitudes, we infer what the attitudes re by observing our own behaviour

  • Behavioral observation

  • Inference of attitude

  • Attitude formation 

• Likely used when our attitudes are unclear or ambiguous or when the way we are behaving is only slightly out of character 

Do Attitudes Influence Behaviour?

• Attitudes expressed not necessarily related to how people actually behave

• Attitude specificity - more specific the attitudes, more likely it is to predict behaviour

• Attitude strength - stronger attitudes predict behavior more accurately than weak or vague attitudes

Why We Aren’t Always Honest

• Social Desirability - attitude that mirror what we think others desire in a person

• Social Desirable Responding - tendency to respond in a way we believe will be viewed more favourably by others or conform to social norms, rather than providing honest answer/accurate response

  • Major impact on research

  • More honest when deception can be detected

• Implicit Attitudes - attitude or belief that we are unaware of

  • Assessed through the implicit association test

Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

• Stereotypes - cognitive

  • Fixed overgeneralized and oversimplified beliefs about a person or a group of people based on assumptions about the group

• Prejudice - affective

  • Negative and unjust feelings about individuals based on their inclusion in a particular group

• Discrimination - behaviour 

  • Negative and unjust treatment of individual based on our stereotypes and prejudice

Contributors to Stereotypes and Prejudice

• We identify with a group based on similarities and differences (eg. asians commonly friends with asians)

  • Mere categorization effect

  • us/in-group and them/ out-group

• Evolutionary perspective - stereotypes and prejudice may have had some adaptive value

  • Early humans needed to identify friends or foe

• Realistic conflict theory argues that competition between groups because of conflict over scarce resources

• Social Identity theory - emphasizes social cognitive factors in the onset of prejudice

• Prejudice due to three factors:

1. Social categorization - affiliate with a group to figure out how to act and react in world

2. Social identity - form identity with a group

3. Social comparison - compare the group favourably with other groups, causing a sense of positive well-being by looking at ourselves as superior

Attitudes and the Power of Persuasion

• Central route - focuses on content, factual information, and logic to change attitudes

• Peripheral route - focuses on superficial information to change attitudes

Aids to Persuasion

• The source

  • Is knowledgeable and likeable

  • Is similar to us

  • Presents both sides of an issue

• Appeals to fear

  • Ads make it seem like something bad will happen if don't comply

    • Eg. smoking ads

Opening and Closing Doors

• Foot-in-the-door -get a person to agree to something small so they will agree to something larger later

• Door-in-the-face - ask for something very big knowing you will get turned down, but then ask for the smaller item really wanted

Barriers to Persuasion

• Forewarning an audience that you will be trying to persuade them of something will immediately raise defenses

• Beginning with a weak argument instead of a strong one can make subsequent arguments seem weaker

Dispositional and Situational Attributions

• Attributions - causal explanation of behavior

• Dispositional (internal) attribution - the behaviour was caused because of the person

• Situational (external) attribution - the behaviour was caused by the situation

• Fundamental attribution error - the tendency to use dispositional attributions to explain the behaviour of other people

• The Actor-Observer Effect - tendency to make situational attributions about our own behaviour and dispositional attributions about the behaviour of others

Exceptions to the Rule

• Self-serving bias - tendency to attribute successes to internal causes and failures to external ones

  • When do we attribute our behaviour to our disposition versus our situation

  • When do we attribute others’ behavior to their situation rather than their disposition

Norms

• Norms - social rules about how members of a society are expected to act

  • Norms can be explicit (openly stated) or implicit (not openly stated)

• Descriptive norms - agreed on expectations about what members of a group do

• Injunctive norms - agreed-on expectations about what members of a group ought to do

Social Roles

• Social role - a set of norms ascribed to a person’s social position: expectations and duties associated with the individual;s position in the family, at work, in the community, and in other settings

• Positive impact: society functions smoothly

• Negative impact: people are often limited by their prescribed social roles

Stanford Prison The Asch Studies

Conformity

• Tendency to yield to social pressure

Culture and Conformity

• Individualistic cultures

  • Conformity is considered to be a bad thing

  • Members want to stand out and be different

• Collectivistic Cultures

  • Usually value fitting in with other people

  • See virtue in conforming to social norms and view conformity as an indication of maturity, respect for others, appropriate self-control

The Milgram Conformity Experiment (1961)

• Obedience - the act of following direct commands, usually given by an authority figure

Social Relations

• Group - an organized, stable collection of individuals in which the members are aware of and influence one another and share a common identity

• Group dynamics - how membership or participation in a group influences our thoughts and behaviours

Group Size and Productivity

• Additive task - members perform parallel actions

  • Productivity increases with size of group

• Conjunction taks - group is only as productive as its weakest member

  • Larger group might not be more productive

• Disjunction task - when a single solution is required, the most competent group - more likely to have a strong member

• Divisible task - when simultaneous performance of several tasks is needed

  • Larger group with a leader to coordinate tasks is optimal

Social Facilitation

• Improvement in performance because others are watching (eg. scouts watching player)

• Co-action effects: your performance improves just because there are other people doing the same task as you

• Audience effects: your performance is better because you are doing something in front of an audience

  • Sometimes performance is better/ other times worse. Depending on person

• Operates for both physical and mental tasks

Social Loafing

• Less effort when more people are present in group

Other Group Issues

• Group Polarization - initial attitudes become more intense and extreme with group interaction

  • Group as whole tends to move toward more extreme position than any of the individuals held initially

• Groupthink - faculty group decision making as a result of trying too hard to agree

  • Members of groups may suppress opinion or doubts in order to maintain harmony and cohesiveness of group 

Helping Behaviour

Why we help:

• Altruism - self-sacrificing behavior carried out for the benefit of others

• Egoistic helping behaviours - motivated by a desire to reduce one’s own personal distress or to receive award

Why we do NOT help:

• Bystanding effect (apathy) - the more people present, the less likely any one will attempt to step up and help (not wanting to draw attention to self)

• Diffusion of responsibility - we are less likely to assist in a large group because responsibility to help is shared

Bystander Interventions

• To intervene, bystanders must:

1. Notice the event

2. Interpret event as an emergency

3. Feel personal responsibility for acting

4. Consider what form of assistance is needed

5. Implement action

Aggression

• Aggression - broad range of behaviours intended to harm other

• Genetic component

• Associated with high level of testosterone and low levels of serotonin

• Frustration-aggression hypothesis - become more aggressive in response to frustration 

• Gender differences:

  • Women - relational aggression

    • snubbing , gossiping, exclusion from groups

  • Men - direct aggression

    • verbal and physical abuse

Interpersonal Attraction

• 3 levels of attraction:

  • Cognitive, affective, behavioral

• 5 factors linked to liking (attraction and fondness of a person)

  • Similarity, proximity, self-disclosure, situational factors, physical attractiveness

Sternberg Theory of Love

• Consummate love includes elements of intimacy, passion, and commitment 

Sternberg’s Love Triangle

Attachment Styles

• Developed by John Bowlby

• Research based on effects of separation of infants and parents

• Secure Attachment

  • Comfortable with dependence and do not fear becoming too close or being abandoned

• Insecure Attachment

  • Avoidant attachment

    • Uncomfortable being close and have difficulty trusting and depending on others

  • Anxious attachment

    • Insecure and worry that their partner do not really love them and will leave

  • Disorganized or avoidant-fear-ful attachment