soxial psyc onwards

Social Psych 11

Holocaust

  • US troops discover their first German concentration camp (Ohrdruf) Buchenwald on April 11th

  • April 16th, 1945- Eisenhower forces nearby townsfolk to view the camps

  • How could this horrible thing even start?

    • Book called the Authoritarian Personality simply said that the Germans are messed up 

Conformity Experiments

  • Solomon Asch (1907-1996)

  • When everyone said the same (wrong answer)

    • Quarter of participants never conformed, the rest did on at least some of the trials

    • 12% conformed on all trials

Obedience Experiments

  • How far would someone go shocking shocking someone

    • 65% would go up to 450 volts

    • Generally compliance decreased if shockers became psychologically closer to the shockers

    • Shockers became psychologically further from the experimenters

    • Teacher was made less authoritative (eg. no lab coat)

    • There were other examples of shockers refusing to continue

    • There was any disagreement between researchers

Our Collective, Human Brain

  • Unlike other animals, humans accumulate culture, not having to learn everything anew each generation 

  • Instead we learn from each other- we download a cultural; inheritance- and the innovate on top of it

  • Human accomplishment is not built on individual genius, but on each being the beneficiaries of the knowledge accumulated by average individuals  that incrementally add up to a shared collective genius

  • This comes with a tradeoff

    • One has to be credulous (for learning) and conformist (in imitating) 


Behaviour in Groups and Group Behaviour

Deindividuation

  • Reduction in self-awareness + Reduction in individual accountability = reduction in personal norm-following

    • Rehm et al. (1987) found that just putting fifth-graders into matching orange t-shirts made them act more aggressive than if they were wearing street clothes

    • Through uniforms and matching drills, etc. militaries suppress individual psychology in order to increase group psychology

  • The Bystander Effect 

    • Often, the more people are around, the less likely any individual is to do something

    • This is known as the bystander effect

      • Diffusion of responsibility

        • “Someone else will do it”

      • Ambiguity of the situation 

        • “Well, no one else is doing anything”

Groupthink Group Polarization

  • Diffusion of responsibility + confirmation bias + conformity + motivated reasoning = groupthink

  • Groupthink is the tendency for groups to easily minimize conflicting opinions and reach a consensus agreement in order to maintain harmony 

  • Groupthink is most likely to occur when the following conditions are present:

    • Overestimation of the group’s power and righteousness

      • 1. An illusion of vulnerability

      • An unquestioned belief in group’s inherent morality                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

    • Closed-mindedness

      • Ignoring or rationalizing away alternatives

      • Stereotyped view of opposition 

    • Pressure toward uniformity

      • Self-censorship

      • Illusion of consensus 

      • Direct pressure to be loyal

      • Mind guards


Thursday March, 6 2025

Social Psych

The law of group polarization 

  • If a group starts leaning in a particular direction, they don’t converge around the middle opinion, but become more extreme after discussion

    • Because people are exposed to more persuasive arguments on one side only

    • People want to be viewed favorably 

    • Repeated exposure and confirmation bias- reinforces existing beliefs  

  • The importance of dissent and diversity

    • Tolerating other opinions to make better decisions 

    • You want disagreement to prevent group polarization and groupthink


  • Enhancement of the self, simplification of the other 

    • Enhancement of self

      • Spotlight effect 

        • Tom gilovich had students show up late to their classes wearing a t-shirt with someones picture on it 

        • He asked them to estimate how many people noticed their shirt

          • People estimated over 50%, but in reality, well under 20% had noticed

          • We all vastly overestimate how much attention people pay to us

          • We think that we are the centre of our universe, but so does everybody else

      • Illusion of transparency

        • We generally overestimate how much our own mental state is known to others

          • Eg. lying 

          • Teaching

            • If something is clear in my head, it’s clear in yours

              • The curse of knowledge: the difficulty in recognizing that others don’t have the knowledge that you already do 

      • Better than average effect

        • 70% of students rate themselves above the median on leadership

        • 68% of profs rate themselves in the tip 25% for teaching ability 

        • 93% of Americans rate themselves above average for driving skill

        • There are several reasons (at least) for this

          • These are ambiguous traits, and people can focus on the particular aspects they are really good at

          • People are told about their successes more often than their failures

          • Self-serving bias 

            • Attributing success to internal/dispositional factors

            • Attributing failures to external/situational factors

            • But other people’s successes and failures are always due to internal factors

    • Simplification of the other

      • Other people's successes and failures are always due to internal factors

      • The fundamental attribution error

        • Overvaluation internal/ disposition factors when explaining the behaviour of others, and discounting the situation 

  • Simplification of the other vs enhancement of self

    • Robber’s Cave Experiment

      • Shows that opposite sides will come together to fight a third enemy =, but if not, will oppose each other increasingly

      • Common enemies bring people together 

  • Simplification of the other vs enhancement of self

    • Henri Tajfel

      • Social identity theory

      • We naturally split the world into us vs them 

      • We derive self-esteem by seeing our own group as good, but also better than the other

      • This results in us not just wanting to help our group, but also to hurt the other group

      • We build an us vs them 


Tuesday March, 11 2025

Consequentialist Punishment

  • Utilitarian goals- the ultimate evolved reason for our drive to punish

    • Prevention

    • Deterrence

    • Incapacitation

    • Rehabilitation

  • Retributive punishment- the proximate emotional reason for our drive to punish

    • Because they deserve it 

    • Just deserts

    • Punishment for his own sake

Judgement and Decision Making

  • Three revolutions Freud thought were important “humans aren’t special” 

    • Copernicus’ Heliocentrism 

    • Darwin’s evolution

    • Freud’s unconsciousness

  • Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman

    • Founded this field

    • “Our brains are not built for the truth”

  • Cognitive biases

    • We take cognitive shortcuts to adaptively and efficiently process information 

  • Availability heuristic

    • Are there more dogs or ducks on leashes?

      • Dogs on leashes come to mind more easily than ducks on leashes

    • Are there more words in English with words that start with r or have r as third letter

      • Easy to think of more words that start with r so most will say first while it is actually the third 

    • We have the tendency to underestimate majority group and overestimate minority groups

  • Survival Bias

    •  Logical flaw in selectively considering the cases that survived, and ignoring the cases that didn’t

    • “Music back in the day was so much better than crap from today”

  • Base Rate Fallacy 

    • Tendency to rely on how well he represents their schema for each group, rather than concentrate on base rates of each group

Thursday March, 11 2025

Judgement and Decision Making 

Representativeness Heuristic and the base rate fallacy 

  • Ex. 

    • Likelihood of having a disease: 1 in 1000

    • Blood Test:

      • 0% false negative rate

      • 5% false positive rate

      • Blood test came back positive. What is the likelihood that you have the disease?

      • Average guess in 50-90% among med students 

    • In 1000 people, you will have 1 true positive and 50 false positives

    • 1/50 = 2% your actual likelihood of getting the disease even if you tested positive

Anchoring Bias

  • Relying heavily on an initial piece of information in decision making

    • Listing prices on houses 

  • Anchoring exists because inn uncertain situations, we rely (heavily) on comparison


Motivation Biased Errors

Cognitive Dissonance 

  • The discomfort caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously

  • Usually results in a motivational drive to reduce dissonance- often by forcing the changing of one attitude

  • Festinger and Carlsmith (1956)

    • Group 1 and 2 did tedious tasks then persuaded someone else to do the tedious task

    • Group 1 paid $20 and group 2 got paid $1

      • Underpaid group rates the task higher, because they need to ease the cognitive dissonance of convincing the other guy to do a crappy task. Since they have littler internal justification (ie. money), they internalize the justification

  • The Overjustification Effect

    • Giving someone an external reward to do something they like ‘crowds out’ the internal reward

      • Girl likes playing piano, so you pay her a dollar every time she practices

      • She enjoys playing piano less because her motivation is the money 

    • Ben Franklin Effect 

      • Said doing someone a favour makes you like them more because you have to justify why you did them the favour in the first place

  • Solution Aversion

    • Denying problems when we don't like a solution 

  • Belief in a just word

    • The world is fundamentally just 

    • Bad things happen to bad people (not good people) to ‘agree’

  • Optimism bias

    • Our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events, and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events

    • Planning fallacy: we constantly underestimate how much time we’ll need to complete a task          

  • Loss aversion

    • Losses are psychologically more. powerful than gains

    • Losses can hurt 2.4 as much as gains


  • endowment effect 

    • Merely owning something makes us value it more, we don’t want to lose it