Social Psychology Flashcards

What is Social Psychology?

• The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.
• Focuses on social influences that explain why the same person acts differently in different situations.

Attribution

• Attribution theory: Used to explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.
  • Dispositional attribution: Attributing behavior to internal cause (e.g., trait, motive, attitude).
  • Situational attribution: Attributing behavior to external cause operating within the situation.
• Fundamental attribution error: Tendency for observers, when analyzing others’ behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

Factors That Affect Attributions

• Culture
• Whose behavior
• Exceptions
  • Our deliberate, admirable actions are attributed to our own good reasons, not to the situation.
  • With age, younger selves’ behaviors are attributed to our traits.
• Attributions to a person’s disposition or to the situation have real consequences.

Social Thinking

• Attitudes affect actions
• Attitudes follow behavior
• Situational factors can override the attitude-behavior connection.
• External influences are minimal and when the attitude is stable, specific to the behavior, and easily recalled.
• Actions affect attitudes
  • Foot-in-the-door phenomenon

Attitudes and Actions

• Role-playing affects attitudes.
  • Roles and social prescriptions
  • People differ; person and situation interact.
• Cognitive dissonance theory
  • Attitudes-follow-behavior principle
  • We act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent.

Two Forms of Persuasion

• Peripheral route persuasion
  • Uses attention-getting cues to trigger speedy emotion-based judgments
• Central route persuasion
  • Offers evidence and arguments to trigger careful thinking
  • Works best for people who are naturally analytical or involved in an issue

Social and Cultural Influence

• Norms
  • Rules for expected and acceptable behavior
  • Influence and power of norms
• Social influences
• Culture
  • Behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by group of people and transmitted from one generation to next
  • Preserves innovation; enables division of labor
• Cultural influences

Variations Across Cultures

• Tight cultures vs loose cultures
  • places with clearly defined and reliably imposed norms.
  • places with flexible and informal norms
• Collectivism vs individualism
• Adaptability in cultural variations is found among our beliefs and our values, in how we nurture our children and bury our dead, and in what we wear.

Individualistic Vs Collectivistic Cultures

• Individualistic
  • Focus on “me” as an independent, separate self
  • Western European and English-speaking countries
• Collectivistic
  • Situations focus on “we,” on meeting group standards and accommodating others.
  • Asian, African, and Latin American countries

Conformity

• Natural mimicry
  • Enable ability to empathize
  • Mood linkage
  • Suggestibility
  • Social contagion (chameleon effect)
  • Mood contagion
• Complying with social pressures

Asch’s Conformity Experiments (1955)

• You can view original footage of Ashe’s study here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw
• You can view a replication of Ashe’s study here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qlJqR4GmKw&NR=1

Normative vs Informational Social Influence

• Later research has not always found as much conformity as Asch.
  • Normative social influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval
  • Informational social influence: influence resulting from a person’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality

Conformity Is More Likely When People:

• Are made to feel incompetent or insecure.
• Are in a group with at least three people, especially a group in which everyone else agrees.
• Admire the group’s status and attractiveness.
• Have not made a prior commitment to any response.
• Know that others in the group will observe their behavior.
• Are from a culture that strongly encourages respect for social standards.

Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment

• PSYCHOLOGY’S MOST FAMOUS AND CONTROVERSIAL EXPERIMENTS

Milgram Results (Follow-up Experiment)

• The majority of participants continued to obey to the end.

Conditions That Influenced Obedience (Milgram)

• Person giving orders was close at hand and perceived to be a legitimate authority figure.
• Authority figure was supported by powerful or prestigious institution.
• Victim was depersonalized or at distance.
• No role models displayed defiance.

What Do Social Influence Studies Teach Us About Ourselves?

• Strong social influences induce many people to conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty.
• Great evils often grow out of compliance with lesser evils.
• Social control and personal control interact.
• After the first acts of compliance or resistance, attitudes begin to follow or justify the behavior.
• Minority influence is more likely when a position is held firmly.

Group Behavior

• Group behavior in presence of others
  • Social facilitation
  • Social loafing
  • Deindividuation
  • Group polarization
• The beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others.
• Groupthink (Janis)
  • Mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides realistic appraisal of the alternatives

Behavior in the Presence of Others: 3 Phenomena

• Social facilitation
  • Social context: Individual being observed
  • Psychological effect of others’ presence: Increased arousal
  • Behavioral effect: Amplified dominant behavior, i.e., doing better what one does well, or doing worse what is difficult
• Social loafing
  • Social context: Group projects
  • Psychological effect of others’ presence: Diminished feelings of responsibility when not individually accountable
  • Behavioral effect: Decreased effort
• Deindividuation
  • Social context: Group setting that fosters arousal and anonymity
  • Psychological effect of others’ presence: Reduced self-awareness
  • Behavioral effect: Lowered self-restraint

When People Are Part of a Group, They May

• Feel less accountable.
• View individual contributions as dispensable.
• Overestimate their own contributions.
• Free ride on the efforts of others.

Like-Minded Groups

• If a group is like-minded, discussion strengthens its prevailing opinions.
• Talking over racial issues increased prejudice in a high-prejudice group of high school students and decreased it in a low-prejudice group.
• Like minds polarize.

The Internet as Social Amplifier

• Internet connects like-minded people.
• Connections can bring emotional healing & strengthen social movements.
• Electronic communication & social networking encourage people to isolate themselves from those with different opinions.
• Share political content with like-minded others.
• Like-minded separation + conversation = group polarization

Prejudice

• Components
  • Negative emotions
  • Stereotypes
  • Predisposition to discriminate
• Prejudice - prejudgment; unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group and its members

Explicit vs Implicit Prejudice

• Explicit: Clear awareness
  • On the radar screen of our awareness
• Implicit: Unthinking response
  • An unthinking knee- jerk response (below the radar)
  • Unaware of how our attitudes are influencing our behavior
• Focus of implicit research studies
  • Testing for unconscious group associations
  • Considering unconscious patronization
  • Monitoring reflexive bodily responses

Targets of Prejudice

• Racial and ethnic prejudice
  • Overt interracial prejudice wanes; subtle prejudice lingers.
  • Colorism
  • Criminal stereotypes
  • Medical care
  • Implicit Association Test

Gender and LGBTQ+ Prejudice

• Sharp decline of overt gender prejudice; but both implicit and explicit gender prejudice and discrimination persists.
• Work and pay; leadership; perceived intelligence; masculine norms
• Gender prejudice
• Cultural variation, but explicit prejudice in most of the world; higher negative mental health consequences
• Laws that promote acceptance of gay, lesbian, and transgender people reduce bias.
• LGBTQ+ prejudice

Social Inequalities and Divisions

• Just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
• Ingroup - “us”—people with whom we share a common identity
• Outgroup - “them”—those perceived as different or apart from our ingroup
• Ingroup bias - the tendency to favor our own group

Negative Emotions

• Scapegoat theory: proposes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for our negative emotions
• Social trends: Economically frustrated people tend to express heightened prejudice.
• Research: Experiments that create temporary frustration intensify prejudice.

Cognitive Shortcuts

• Cognitive shortcuts: categorization by gender, ethnicity, race, age, and other factors may lead to stereotype.
• Outgroup homogeneity (uniformity of attitudes, personality, and appearance)
• Other-race effect (cross-race effect/own-race bias) - the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more accurately than faces of other races.

Aggression

• Includes any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone, whether done out of hostility or as a calculated means to an end (psychology)
• Emerges from the interaction of biology and experience

Biology of Aggression

• Genetic influences
  • Twin studies
  • Genetic markers (Y chromosome; monoamine oxidase [MAOA])
• Neural influences
  • Animal and human brains have neural systems that, given provocation, will either inhibit or facilitate aggression (amygdala; frontal lobes).
• Biochemical influences
  • Hormones (testosterone)
  • Alcohol

Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression

• Aversive events
• Frustration-aggression principle
• Reinforcement and modeling
• Differences in how cultures model, reinforce, and evoke violent tendencies
• Media models for violence
  • Television, films, music, video games, and internet
• Social scripts: a culturally modeled guide for how to act in various situations.

Biopsychosocial Model

• Biological influences:
  • heredity
  • biochemical factors, such as testosterone and alcohol
  • neural factors, such as a severe head injury
• Psychological influences:
  • dominating behavior (which boosts testosterone levels in the blood)
  • believing that alcohol has been ingested (whether it has or not)
  • frustration
  • aggressive role models
  • rewards for aggressive behavior
  • low self-control
• Social-cultural influences:
  • deindividuation, or a loss of self-awareness and self-restraint
  • challenging environmental factors, such as crowding, heat, and direct provocations
  • parental models of aggression
  • minimal father involvement
  • rejection from a group
  • exposure to violent media

Attraction

• Psychology of attraction
• Proximity
  • Mere exposure effect: tendency for repeated exposure to novel stimuli to increase our liking of them
• Modern matchmaking
  • Online matchmaking (expands/extends diversity of pool)
• Physical attractiveness
  • Predicts dating frequency & feeling of popularity
  • Personality impressions
  • Influenced by culture
• Similarity
  • Influences likelihood that relationship will endure

Romantic Love

• Aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a romantic relationship
  • Passionate love
• Two ingredients of emotion:
  • Physical arousal plus cognitive appraisal
  • Two-factor theory of emotion

Companionate Love

• Deep, affectionate attachment; adaptive value
• Testosterone, dopamine, and adrenaline levels subside; oxytocin remains
• Equity
• Self-disclosure
• Self-disclosing intimacy + mutually supportive equity = enduring companionate love

Altruism

• Unselfish concern for the welfare of others
• Bystander intervention
  • Helping someone depends on the characteristics of the person, situation, and internal state.
• Bystander effect
  • Tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.
  • Situational factor influence à presence of others

Why Do We Help?

• Social exchange theory: the theory that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs
• Reciprocity norm: an expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them.
• Social-responsibility norm: an expectation that people will help those needing their help

Destructive Processes

• Conflict = involves perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas
  • Can create either a positive change or a destructive process
• Social traps: involve the right to pursue personal well-being versus responsibility for the well-being of all
• Mirror-image perceptions: when each side sees itself as ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil and aggressive.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment