Week 7-10 Study Guide Answers

1. Describe Asch’s conformity experiments and the main findings. Do people actually change their perceptions in response to conformity pressure, or just their self-reports?
Asch’s experiments showed people conformed to a wrong majority about 33% of the time (Asch, 1955; Franzen & Mader, 2023; Lecture 18). People didn’t actually change their perceptions—they changed their public responses to avoid standing out (Lecture 18).

2. How big does the majority group need to be to maximize people’s tendency to conform?
Conformity peaks when the group size is about four (Lecture 18).

3. Know how the confidentiality of your responses, the presence of an ally, and group membership affect conformity.
Public responses show more conformity (4.4 errors), while private responses show much less (1.5 errors) because of reduced social costs (Lecture 18). Having an ally cuts conformity by providing social support (Lecture 18).

4. How did the results of the conformity experiment differ when the majority consists of people from your ingroup rather than from your outgroup?
People conform more to an ingroup majority (50% errors) than an outgroup (15% errors) because social costs of dissent are higher with an ingroup (Lecture 18).

5. What are the costs of dissent in the conformity experiments, and how do these costs influence how minority decision-makers behave when making public versus private choices?
Public dissent risks losing respect and acceptance (Lecture 18). Minority decision-makers conform more in public to avoid these social costs, especially in ingroups.

6. What is the canonical finding of Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment, and how does this finding diverge from what psychiatrists and students hypothesized would happen?
Milgram found 65% of subjects delivered the maximum shock, far higher than predicted by psychiatrists and students (Lecture 19).

7. In Jerry Burger’s replication attempt of the Milgram experiments, what was the modeled refusal condition? How did the levels of obedience in the modeled refusal condition differ from the base condition and from Milgram’s original results?
Burger (2009) used a confederate who refused at a low shock level (modeled refusal). Obedience in that condition dropped to 63%, close to Milgram’s original 65% finding (Lecture 19).

8. How do men and women differ in their responses to Milgram’s experiments? What about people who thought they had personal responsibility, or people who asked about the learner’s well-being?
No significant sex differences (Lecture 19). People who felt personally responsible or cared about the learner’s wellbeing resisted more.

9. How does identification with the goals of the experimenter/learner affect obedience?
Obedience rises with identification with the experimenter’s goals and drops with identification with the learner (Lecture 19).

10. Describe the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. How does this model describe how the content of persuasive messages (arguments vs. cues) is processed?
ELM says persuasion uses central (arguments) or peripheral (cues) routes. Central = deep thinking, peripheral = surface-level cues (Lecture 20).

11. Be prepared to distinguish between peripheral and central route processing.
Peripheral = cues (e.g., attractiveness). Central = argument strength and quality (Lecture 20).

12. What are the conditions under which we are most likely to process a communication using central route processing rather than peripheral?
Central processing is more likely when the topic is personally relevant, important, and the person has the ability/motivation to think (Lecture 20).

13. How do ability and motivation to elaborate (for example, as measured by the Need for Cognition Scale or the Cognitive Reflection Test) influence how persuasive messages are processed?
People high in need for cognition and cognitive reflection are more likely to process centrally and less likely to be swayed by superficial cues (Lecture 20).

14. How did Pennycook and Rand (2019) investigate the role of central vs peripheral processing when making judgments about news headline accuracy? What conclusions can be drawn from this study?
They found that people with high cognitive reflection judged fake news as less accurate, regardless of political bias (Lecture 20).

15. What’s the door-in-the-face effect?
After refusing a big request, people are more likely to comply with a smaller one—due to a norm of reciprocity (Lecture 20).

16. Know about your risks of encountering violence in San Diego, the United States, and globally? How do these rates compare to historic rates of violence?
San Diego’s violent crime is below average for CA; globally, the US is about average (83rd worldwide) but rates have risen since 2020 (Lecture 21).

17. Professor McCullough used a model of aggression that includes cues, internal states, cognitive control, and learned and unlearned aggressive behaviors to organize his lectures on aggression. Be prepared to describe some of the model’s basic features and how it can organize some of what we know about aggression in both humans and sparrows.
The model: cues trigger internal states, cognitive control modulates them, and learned/unlearned responses emerge (Lecture 22).

18. What is the weapons effect? Do weapons increase violence and the accessibility of cognitive states associated with violence?
Weapons prime aggressive thoughts and make violence more likely (Berkowitz & LePage, 1967; Lecture 22).

19. Do violent video games cause aggression?
Evidence is mixed; games may slightly increase aggression in labs but real-world effects are uncertain (Lecture 22).

20. What is the Dictator Game? What result do researchers most commonly find when people play it?
One person decides how to split money with another; most give about 30%, mixing fairness and self-interest (Lecture 23).

21. Explain the four motivations for prosocial behaviors – egoism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism.

• Egoism: self-interest

• Altruism: welfare of others

• Collectivism: helping your group

• Principlism: moral principles (Lecture 23).

22. How do different ways of “framing” affect people’s decisions in the dictator game?
Framing as about stealing vs. giving changes generosity—“moral” frames boost sharing (Lecture 23).

23. Explain the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
Empathy for someone’s suffering leads to a selfless motivation to help (Lecture 23).

24. Explain the rationale and results of Daniel Baston’s experiments that featured experimental manipulations of empathy and the opportunity to escape from helping.
Batson’s studies showed that people with high empathy helped even when escape was easy, supporting true altruism (Lecture 23).

25. What is Peter Singer’s Shallow Pond Argument? Explain the argument and its relevance to prosocial behavior.
Singer says if you’d help a drowning child nearby, you should help distant strangers too—prosocial behavior shouldn’t be limited by distance (Lecture 23