Social Psychology

Attitudes

Social Psychology

• how individuals think, feel, and behave in social context

• explores group memberships, social influences, attitudes, prejudice, persuasion, and interpersonal relationships

• integrates scientific research, psychological theory, and empirical methods to understand how people are influenced by, and influence, the social world

Why Study Social Psychology?

• Understanding human behaviour

  • how social factors (family, peers, culture) shape actions and beliefs

• Applications in everyday life

  • improving communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution

  • designing effective health or public policy campaigns

  • crafting persuasive marketing messages

• Broader impact

  • societal issues like prejudice, inequality, and group tensions

  • foster cooperation and prosocial behaviours in communities or workplaces

• Understand why people do what they do in social contexts and to use that understanding to create positive changes at the individual, group, or social level

Attitude

• mental and emotional evaluations about objects or behaviours fundamentally shape how we perceive and respond to the world

• if attitudes underlie behaviour, then by understanding attitudes, we might be able to predict future behaviour, change behaviour

Tri-Partite Model of Attitudes

• Three interconnection components

• often consistent

  • affect = excited about eco-friendly innovations

  • cognition = believes electric cars reduce emissions and save money long term

  • behaviour = more than likely to test drive or purchase an electric car

• but can be inconsistent

  • affect = feel energised and proud when you run

  • cognition = know running helps reduce stress and improve health

  • behaviour = too tired to go for a run

• understanding attitudes requires assessing each component

• predicting behaviour - if beliefs and feelings are strongly positive, people are more likely to perform a behaviour consistent with those positive evaluations

• behaviour chance — interventions need to target one or more components. for instance, a persuasive message might change beliefs, hoping it trickles down to feelings and behaviour

Affect (feelings)

• The emotional reactions or feelings we have toward an object, person, or idea

• Feeling happy or excited when you watch a Bond film

• Shapes Beliefs

Cognition (Belief)

• the thoughts, beliefs, or knowledge we hold about the object, person, or issue

• Believing that Bond films are entertaining because of their action and intrigue

• Influences Behaviour, reinforces feelings

Behaviour (Tendencies)

• the predisposition to act or behave in a certain way toward the object or issue

• choosing to buy tickets for a new Bond movie the moment it’s out

• Reinforces Beliefs and Feelings

Attitudes are not values

• broad, abstract ideals or principles that individuals consider important in life (honesty, achievement, freedom)

• general and enduring, guiding our sense of what is most important or worthy in a wide variety of situations

• attitudes are directed at specific objects, people, or behaviours

  • value = i value equality

  • attitude = i strong support equal pay legislation

Attitudes are not opinions

• verbal or written expressions of our attitudes — what we say we believe or feel about a topic

• attitude is an internal evaluation that can remain unspoken

• sometimes opinions do not match the speaker’s true attitudes

  • opinion = i love classical music

  • attitude = internally, you find classical music relaxing and pleasing

Attitudes are not schemas

• schemas are cognitive frameworks that help us organised and interpret information — tell us what something typically is or does

• descriptive knowledge or mental blueprints for how events or categories operate

• attitudes, by definition, include an evaluation—positive, negative, or ambivalent

  • schema = knowing that beyonce is a signer, dancer, public figure

  • attitude = feeling positively about beyonce and wanting to buy tickets to her concert

Attitude-Behaviour Relationship — Predicting things

• LaPiere travelled across the US with a young chinese couple in the 1930s when anti-chinese sentiments were high. they visited 251 hotels and restaurants, then 6 months later wrote to the same establishments to ask if they would serve chinese guests. All but 1 served them, where as only 1 wrote but that they would serve them (out of 128 responses).

• Wicker (1969) found overall weak correlations between attitudes and behaviours in many studies, suggesting “attitudes do not predict behaviour well” — but there are methodological flaws such as people are different and people measure different things

• Social norms — even if you have a strong attitude about something, the desire to fit in or avoid punishment can override it

• situational constraints — resources & opportunities and time & convenience

• strength of the attitude — attitudes that are strongly held, personally relevant, or accessible in memory tend to predict behaviour more reliably

Principle of compatibility (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974)

• an attitude is more likely to predict behaviour if both are measured at the same level of specificity

• if you want to predict whether someone will recycle plastic bottles at home for the next two weeks, measure their attitude specifically toward recycling plastic bottles at home for two weeks, not their general attitude/value towards saving the environment.

• four components to align

  • action — the specific behaviour (to recycle)

  • target — the object or focus of the behaviour (plastic bottles)

  • context — where the behaviour occurs (your home)

  • time — when the behaviour occurs (over the next two weeks)

Attitude-Behaviour Relationship — Changing things

McGuire’s chain of persuasion (1969)

• A persuasive message must clear multiple hurdles before it can change behaviour

  1. Exposure = individual must notice/attend to the message

  2. comprehension = they must understand what is being communicated

  3. yielding = they must accept or agree with the message (attitude change)

  4. retention = the changed attitude must be remembered over time

  5. action = the individual must actually act in line with the new attitude

• If any step fails, the behaviour wont change

Reasoned Action & Planned Behaviour

Theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)

• Strongest predictor of behaviour is intention to behave

• Intention = conscious plan or decision to/to not engage in a specific behaviour

• Attitude influences behaviour indirectly by influencing intention

• But also subjective norm influences intention

• Attitude

  • overall positive or negative evaluation of performing the behaviour

  • determined by behavioural beliefs and outcome evaluations

• Subjective Norm

  • perceived social pressure to/to not perform the behaviour

  • influenced by normative beliefs and motivation to comply

Theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1985-1991)

• Extends the theory of reasoned action

• adds perceived behavioural control

• how much control (perceived and actual) a person thinks they have over performing a behaviour

• if you believe you can do something, you’re more than likely to form a strong intention to do it

Measuring Attitudes

• Ask them (self report)

  • willingness to accurately disclose = social desirability

  • ability to accurately disclose = lack of introspective insight

  • awareness = unconscious attitudes/beliefs

• Watch what they do (behaviour)

  • willingness to accurately disclose — social desirability

  • difficult to monitor and interpret

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

• Reaction-time based measure designed to detect implicit attitude — automatic or unconscious evaluations — that people might be unaware of or be unwilling to reveal in explicit self reports

• Present stimuli and have participants categorise them as fast and accurately as possible

• two stimuli, two levels each

• Shortcomings

  • A strong implicit bias does not necessarily match a person’s stated beliefs or how they act

  • influenced by cultural norms, media exposure, or recent experiences

  • IAT scores can fluctuate over time (Test-Retest Reliability)

  • extent to which IAT results predict real-world behaviors is debated (Predictive Validity)

• Example – gender/career IAT

  • Present 1 word at a time – the word could be a name or an object

  • The name could be male or female and the object could be something you would use at home or at work

  • If the word is male OR something you use at work – press the LEFT button as fast as possible

  • If the word is female OR something you use at home – press the LEFT button as fast as possible

  • Now reverse the pairings

  • If the word is female OR something you use at work – press the LEFT button as fast as possible

  • If the word is male OR something you use at home – press the LEFT button as fast as possible

  • Compare RTs with for the different pairings

  • Faster when things are ‘congruent’ – implicitly associated

Prejudice and Stereotyping

Intro

• Knowing the factors that are associated with prejudice would enable us to work out a way to reduce prejudice in our society

• Perry and colleagues’ 2012 research shows (Perry, Pullen & Oser, 2012), people living with chronic stress from their experience of sexism and racism have been found to be more at risk of taking their own lives.

Part A — Three Components of Prejudice

Cognitive component

• Beliefs, often about a group, and most commonly represented in the form of a stereotype

• Stereotype = simplified idea of what a group of people are like, often a gross exaggeration of something

• Hard to avoid stereotyping

• In the context of grouping things into schemas to process information, our ability to stereotype people, based on the typical characteristics that are associated with different groups of people, can be very helpful when it comes to getting through our day

• However, stereotyping becomes dysfunctional when our initial judgement about a group is negative––when our initial judgement about a group is based on something other than what is actually true in reality.

Affective component

• Negative feelings about another group, whether dislike, resentment, or disgust

Behavioural component

• Discrimination; people who are the target of prejudice are being denied opportunities

Kernel of Truth Argument

• LeVine & Campbell (1972)

• Suggests that at their heart, the stereotypes are somewhat true and based on reality

• Theres a seed of truth, but the stereotype is a great exaggeration of that seed

• Usually must be evidence based however

Behavioural Interpretation and Sub-typing

• I’m sure you can think of somebody who you think is arrogant. If you decide that this person thinks they’re better than you, no matter what the actual behaviour of that person, you are likely to still perceive this person as arrogant. You start to see evidence for your assumption.

• Sometimes people violate the stereotype, but that doesn’t remove them from the stereotype—they instead go into a subtype of it

Media

• Obviously, media influence can be explicit, but sometimes it influences stereotypes in subtle ways too.

• The explicit ways media can influence stereotypes is how they choose to frame ambiguous behaviour.

• Sometimes the media portrays stereotyping in really subtle ways. This is called “face-ism.”

• Face-ism refers to the difference in the way men and women are portrayed in photographs.

• In the media, photographs of women tend to focus on their body, whereas photographs of men tend to focus on their face (Archer, Iritani, Kimes, Barrios, 1983).

• Photographs of men tend to be closely cropped to head and shoulder, signalling ambition, intelligence, and social prominence. Showing more of a woman’s body subtly indicates they’re valued more for the way they look than for their intelligence.

Racial Stereotyping

• Gaertner & Dovidio in 1986, argued in their theory of aversive racism that most people are motivated to maintain a non-prejudiced self-image––they find racial prejudice aversive, and endorse fair treatment of all groups, and fear appearing prejudiced.

• However, many of these people do subconsciously harbour negative feelings toward those from minority groups. And discrimination leaks out in situations where behaviour can be justified as non-prejudiced

• One prevailing stereotype of the Black communities in Australia, the USA and Europe is that they are relatively aggressive and inclined to criminal behaviour. When people view others through the lens of the stereotype, neutral and unthreatening behaviour can be re-interpreted as sinister and aggressive.

Fear of Reporting Discrimination

• One of the stereotypes of minorities is that they like to speak up about experiencing discrimination. The stereotype is that minorities who attribute failures due to discrimination are less likeable than those who “take it on the chin”.

Stereotype Threat

• Stereotype threat is when people feel that they are at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group.

• If those belonging to negatively stereotyped groups are confronted with stereotypes associated with their group, it’s likely that they will become anxious about what they’re doing, which then may affect their ability to perform well in a task.

• So, depending on what people think the outcome is going to be, they create a reality through their performance.

Self-fulfilling Prophecies

• Self-fulfilling prophecies refer to times when our expectations of a person changes the way we interact with them, which then changes their behaviour in line with our expectations.

Aggression and Prosocial Behaviours

Aggression

• Any behaviour intended to harm another individual — physical and psychological aggression

  • Direct/physical (violence assault)

  • Verbal (threats, insults)

  • Relational/indirect (gossip, exclusion, cyberbullying)

• Multifaceted causes

  • Biological factors (genetics, brain chemistry)

  • Psychological factors (personality, exposure to violence)

  • Environmental factors (alcohol, group dynamics)

Biological Factors

• Twin studies — identical twins often show more similarity in aggression levels than fraternal twins, implying a genetic component

• Testosterone — often associated with aggression but complex-testosterone can amplify existing social motivations rather than directly ‘cause’ aggression in isolation

• Serotonin—low levels linked with impulsive aggression-reduced capacity for emotional regulation and impulse control

• Amygdala — over activation or hyper-responsiveness can contribute to heightened aggression

• Prefrontal cortex — reduced activity or damage can impair decision making, self-control, and emotional regulation

• Certain mental health issues or personality disorders might amplify the effects of genetic or brain chemistry vulnerabilities

• While biology can prime someone for more intense reactions, environmental and social triggers like exposure to violence or a lack of prosocial role models often determine how (or whether) these biological predisposition manifest

• Real-world aggression typically reflects both biological predispositions and environmental influences (stressful family life, media violence, social rejection)

Psychological Factors

• Trait hostility/Irritability — higher baseline of anger or irritability — interpret ambiguous cues as hostile

• Impulsivity and poor self-control — act on anger before considering consequences — reactive (heat-of-the-moment) aggression

• Narcissism and fragile self-esteem — react if inflated self-image is threatened — ‘narcissistic rage’

• Psychopathy — less empathy and remorse — planned, instrumental aggression

• Early childhood violence — children who witness or experience violence at home (harsh physical discipline, domestic violence) can learn that aggression is appropriate conflict-solving methid

• Violent media — may increase aggression through desensitisation, normative beliefs, imitation

• Community and Cultural — living in a high-violence neighbourhood or participating in groups that glorify aggression can reinforce ideas that aggression is an effective means of resolving conflict

• Personality traits like high hostility, impulsivity, or low empathy can incline someone toward aggression but do not make aggression inevitable

• Exposure to violence through family, peers, or media can reinforce or normalise aggressive behaviour, especially when pro-social alternatives are not modeled

• A person’s environment and personal thought processes (hostile attribution bias) often interact with inherited or stable traits to shape how aggression manifests

Environmental Factors

• Steele & Joseph (1990) — study on influence of alcohol

• Capacity to think about longer-term or abstract consequences while focusing on immediate cues

• Alcohol condition and a sober/control condition — measured attentional focus, impulsivity, and decision-making

• Scenarios or tasks designed to induce a conflict between an immediate urger (aggression, sexual arousal, or risk-tasking) and long-term considerations (moral constraints, social norms, personal values)

Environmental Factors — Alcohol

• People under the influence of alcohol showed greater sensitivity to cues that were immediately in front of them—like insults or provocations—while discounting the future repercussions or social risks

• Often resulted in increased impulsive or aggression behaviour because participants were less likely to inhibit a strong initial impulse

• Alcohol-induced aggression not simply from drunken ‘loss of control’

• Cognitive narrowing that fails to integrate important inhibitory cues

• Amplifies immediate motivations (anger, lust, risk-taking)

• Shove aside the bigger-picture thoughts (consequences, moral judgments)

Environmental Factors — Groups

• In a crowd, personal identity can become submerged under a collective identity, often loosening moral judgment

• Emotions and behaviours spread more easily in groups as we look to others for cues on how to act in ambiguous or tense situations

• Each individual feels less personally accountable

• The presence of a charismatic leader or strong group identity can amplify

Psychological Aggression

• Behaviours that harm another person’s mental or emotional well-being rather than inflicting physical injury

  • Verbal abuse — insults, put-down, threats, name-calling

  • Relational (indirect) aggression — spreading rumours, gossiping, silent treatment, turning peers or coworkers against someone

  • Cyberbullying — using digital platforms (social media, messaging apps) to harass, threaten or humiliate

Ostracism

• Individuals or groups purposely ignore or exclude someone from social interactions

• Humans evolved to be highly sensitive to social rejection — negative experiences can be suprisingly high, even if its from strangers or brief encounters

• Anxiety, reduced mood, frustration, depression, loneliness, retaliatory aggression

Reduce, manage, and prevent aggression

• Developing empathy — perspective-taking, emotional literacy, modelling behaviour

• Improving communication skills — active listening, conflict resolution, anger management

• Environments that reduce aggression triggers — physical space, design, rules and norms, positive social climate, lower alcohol use

Prosocial Behaviour

• Voluntary action intended to benefit or help another person or group

  • sharing resources

  • offering emotional support

  • volunteering

  • stepping in to assist someone in distress

• Prosocial behaviour is any voluntary act performed to benefit another, influenced by multiple factors—evolutionary, psychological, cultural.

• Motivations range from self-serving (social exchange, mood management) to other-oriented (empathy-altruism).

• Situational influences (time pressure, presence of others, clarity) and personal factors (empathy, mood, personality) critically determine whether someone steps in to help.

• Fostering helping behaviours involves education, modelling, clear norms, and supportive environments that make acting prosocially easier and more rewarding.

Why?

• Evolution — help relatives because of shared genes and kin selection

• Reciprocal Altruism — non-relatives might return the favour in the future

• Person rewards — feeling good, social approval, reduced guilt

• Empathy-Altruism hypothesis — feel empathy we may help purely out of genuine concern

• Negative-State relief model — alleviate own unpleasant emotional states (guilt, sadness) triggered by seeing someone in need

Situational Factors

• Time pressures — shows that people in a hurry are significantly less likely to help, even if they otherwise consider themselves compassionate

• Clarity of the situation — people are more likely to help if they clearly recognise a situation as urgent or an actual emergency

• Attraction, similarity, and relationship — we are more inclined to help people whom we perceive as similar to us, or those we like. Strong personal relationships (friends, family) typically elicit more helping

Bystander Effect

• Failure of prosocial behaviour due to groups

• Diffusion of Responsibility — in a crowd, each person assumes someone else will (or should) act, leading everyone to do nothing

• Pluralistic ignorance — if no one else seems alarmed, individuals may conclude that ‘this might not be a real emergency’, suppressing their own inclination to help

• Evaluation Apprehension — fear of acting inappropriately or being judged if it turns out the situation isn’t truly serious

  • Knowing about this makes you less likely to do it

Encouraging Prosocial Behaviour

• Modeling and Observation

  • People, especially children, who observe others helping are more than likely to help

  • Public recognition of altruistic acts can reinforce norms that helping is valued

• Social norms campaigns

  • reminding people of strong social norms or highlighting real examples of community kindness can galvanise prosocial behaviour

• Education and Awareness

  • Teaching empathy, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution skills can foster a sense of responsibility to help others

  • Workships and training (first aid, bystander intervention programs) improve confidence and clarify how to help effectively

• Reducing Ambiguity

  • Clear signage (’if you see harassment, speak up’) or structured volunteer opportunities can lower the uncertainty barrier and encourage action

Social Cognition

Models of Impression Formation

• Impressions are important, they help people navigate social settings & evaluate people who communicate with or to them

Algebraic Model

• Anderson (1965) main proponent

• Impressions were formed on the basis of the mechanical combination of information that we know about a person

• Three ways information could be combined:

  1. summative model → impression formed by adding up reactions or likability ratings

  2. averaging model → impression formed by averaging likability ratings, sum of ratings divided by number of ratings

  3. weighted averaging model → each attribute a person possesses is weighted on how important, then average it all

• Weighted averaging way of forming impressions was found to be the best match, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the process they use to arrive at those impressions

Configurational Model

• Based on Gestalt principles = the idea that the whole isgreater than just the sum of the parts

• people combine information they receive about someone into an overall impression that is quite different from the simple sum of reactions to individual items of information

Asch’s Model of Impression Formation

• Giving meaning to the other traits that are presented — peripheral traits

• Impressions were based on an emergent pattern that depends on the total context of the information you have access to

Schemas

• Schemas are cognitive structures that represent our knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, formed on the basis of past experience and theories for why things are the way they are

• Social categories used to form impressions depending on the target

• A stereotype is just a schema associated with a social category

• Schemas represent what we believe to be characteristics that go together to form a certain type of personality

• Self schemas tend to be more complex and include information about what we would like to become in the future

Social judgements and Heuristics

• Social judgements are made by people to the judgements that you would expect from a rational model of inference

• A rational model of inference would predict that we systematically combine the information that we have access to when arriving at social judgement

Heuristics

• Availability Heuristic

  • People judge an event’s frequency by the ease with which they can bring examples of the event to mind

  • Estimate the likelihood of an event’s occurrence based on how easily we can think of examples of that event

• Representative Heuristic

  • People often try to categorise each other into social groups to help us make sense of the social world

  • Representative Heuristic helps us estimate the likelihood that somebody belongs to a group by comparing the features of that person to the prototype for that group

  • We use it to represent what people from the category is like

Attribution theory

• The way we perceive the social world is motivated by the ability to predict and control the social environment

• Attribution is inferring the cause of the behaviour

• A person attribution is when we attribute the cause of the behaviour to the person performing the behaviour — we would make this when there is information about a low level of consensus in performing the behaviour

• According to Heider, people try to attribute a behaviour to a cause that is either external or internal to the actor

  • An external cause could be a stimuli that was in the environment, or situational causes according to Heider. We learn the sorts of behaviours that most people perform in different situations

  • An internal attribution is when a behaviour is different from what is expected in a scheme, or dispositional factors according to Heider.

• Covariation principle = we attribute a behaviour to the cause with which it co-varies over time

  • Consensus information = whether other people perform the same behaviour or not

  • Distinctiveness information = whether the behaviour is only performed towards this particular target or person, or whether its performed towards other targets as well

  • Consistency Information = whether the behaviour is performed all the time or not

• Situational Attribution = behaviour is enacted towards this target but not other targets. made when that behaviour is due to something in the context or situation when there’s low consistency in performing the behaviour

Errors in Attribution

• Systematic biases

• Fundamental attribution errors (Ross 1977) = tendency to attribute another person’s behaviour to his or her own dispositional qualities, rather than to the situation that the behaviour is performed in

  • Also known as correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones, 1976) = Not very fundamental, related to the culture we grow up in as there is some evidence that it is more prominent in individualistic compared to collectivist cultures

• Actor-observer bias = describes the difference in how we think about our own behaviours compared to the behaviour of others

  • Jones and Nisbett (1971) hypothesised that we tend to attribute our own behaviours to external factors and others’ behaviours to internal causes

  • Different from the fundamental bias as it is about what people see as the cause of their own versus others’ behaviour (whereas fundamental explains how people infer dispositional attributions from the behaviour of others)

• Self-serving bias = tendency to attribute success to stable, internal factors and failures to temporary, external factors. serves two purposes

  1. self-presentation effect = self-serving attributions to make us look better to other people. biases are present when people make their attributions in private and so can’t be trying to impress anyone else

Persuasion 1

Persuasion

• The process of influencing people’s attitudes, beliefs, or behaviours through communication

• Used in various contexts — advertising, politics, personal relationships, social movements

• Can be intentional (adverts) or unintentional (peer pressure)

• Revolves around ‘how can you get people to do things?’

• Compliance — changing behaviour in response to a request, without necessarily changing attitudes

Empowerment

• Understanding persuasion empowers individuals to be more effective communications and more discerning consumers of information

• Defensive capability — recognise and resist unwanted or manipulative attempts, crucial for navigating a world full of advertising, propaganda, and social pressures.

• Positive uses — encouraging healthy behaviour, promoting social change, enhancing education and training, strengthen relationships and resolve conflicts, ability to persuade effectively is a valuable skill in professional and personal contexts

Traditional Persuasion Models

McGuire’s Chain of Persuasion (1960s)

• What must happen for persuasion to work

• What does a message delivery need to look like — process model

• For a message to change someone’s behaviour, it has to pass through a series of stages

• Presentation → attention → comprehension → yielding → retention → behaviour

• Useful for designing public campaigns, educational materials

• Step by step blueprint allowing strategic message planning and systematic troubleshooting — practical

Cognitive Response Model (Brock, late 1960s)

• What you think about the message matters most

• Instead of focusing on message delivery, look at what’s happening inside the mind of the person receiving the message

• When we hear a persuasive message, we generate cognitive responses (supportive or counter-arguments)

• These thoughts determine whether persuasion succeeds or fails

• It’s not just what’s said—it’s what we think about what’s said

• Useful for understanding resistance, designing persuasive techniques

Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1980s)

• Two routes—deep vs superficial

• Beyond just considering internal thoughts, look at the depth of thinking or processing of the messages

• 2 main routes — dual process

  • central routes — deep thinking, logic, evidence

  • peripheral route — surface cues like attractiveness, repetition, or slogans

• Useful for marketing, health campaigns, attitude change

Contemporary View

• Robert Cialdini (2007)

  • If people’s livelihoods depended on getting others to say ‘yes’, then the techniques they used must be highly refined and effective

  • Natural selection of influence

    • some professions operate under competitive pressure

    • only most effective persuasion strategies survive over time

    • observing to identify the psychological rules that make people comply

  • three years working undercover as salespeple, fundraisers, markerters, etc

Cialdini’s Six Principles of Compliance

• Explaining how people are persuaded to comply without any deep processing

• Grounded in real-life compliance tactics

• automatic, fast, low-effort influences on behaviour

• Focus on social norms, heuristics, and automatic triggers of compliance

• Shifts ‘how to change attitudes’ to ‘how to nudge people to say yes’

• Behaviour change can occur without attitude change

1. Reciprocation

• we feel obligation to return favours

• powerful social norm

• most foundational of the 6 in terms of our social and evolutionary psychology

• deeply ingrained, culturally universal, and governs much of our interpersonal, economic, and political behaviour

• builds trust, cooperation, and social stability

• encourages mutual aid without needing simultaneous exchange

• violation leads to shame, guilt, or social punishment

• Regan (1971) showed that even small, unsolicited favours can dramatically increase compliance. Participants were more likely to buy raffle tickets from someone who had earlier given them a soft drink, even if they didn’t like that person

• Berry and Kanouse (1987) mailed physicians a long questionnaire with either $20 cheque as an upfront gift or a $20 cheque on completion. gift - 78%, completion - 66%

• Free samples, free trials, and small gifts are designed to trigger a feeling of obligation

• Can’t give a gift, give a concession — door in the face technique, ask for something crazy then fallback to something much more reasonable

• Fake concession — “let me check with my manager… okay, just for you..”

• Relationships — “they were there for me — i’ll be there for them”

• Con artists — small favours to gain trust and leverage

2. Consistency

• we want to act in ways that are consistent with our past behaviour or commitments

• desire to be consistent with our past behaviours and commitments

• drive to behave in ways that are aligned with our prior beliefs, values, or actions

• self-perception — we want to be seen (and see ourselves) as reliable, rational, and principled; stable

• Consistency is a shortcut for decision-making — it reduces uncertainity and conserves mental effort

• Once we’ve made a decision, we’re more likely to stick with it, even if new reasons arise not to

• Freedman and Fraser (1966) contacted participants by phone — “would you be willing to answer a short phone, survey about household products?” Small request — 2 mins, mininal effort, low cost — nearly everybody said yes. Few days later “would you allow a team of researchers to come to your home and inspect your cleaning products, detergent, and soap cabinets for a 2-hour interview?” Big request. Compliance with the big request more than double when preceded by the small request

• Foot in the door technique — get a small non-committal agreement - “join a mailing list” then more likely to agree to a bigger ask later (buy the product, sign up for a subscription)

• Low-balling — you agree to deal based on attractive terms. Later, the terms change (hidden fees appear), but you still go ahead because you’ve already committed

• Bait and switch — you’re lured in with a great deal, but it’s unavailable when you arrive. You’re offered a worse alternative, but you take it to stay consistent with your intention to buy.

3. Social proof

• we look to what others are doing when unsure

• see persuasion 2

4. Liking

• we are more likely to say yes to people we like

• see persuasion 2

5. Scarcity

• We value things more when they seem limited or rare

• see persuasion 2

6. Authority

• we tend to obey those we see as knowledgable or in charge

• see persuasion 2

Persuasion 2

Principle of Social Validation

• People prefer to use objective cues to make evaluations of themselves, but in cases where that is impossible, they rely on a social comparison instead by looking at what those similar to them are thinking and doing.

• Third of six influence principles

• More willing to comply with a request for behaviour if it is consistent with what others are thinking or doing

The List Technique

• Asks for a request only after a target person has been shown a list of others who have already agreed to the same request

• Pressures of conformity — tend to go along with what other people are doing either because we are not sure what the appropriate behaviour is or because we don’t want to stand out from the group

Conformity

• Happens when people give in to real or imagined social pressure

• Asch’s 1995 study — 7-9 people and only one was unaware of the task (not a confederate) and the confederates gave the wrong answer for 12 out of 18 matches in earshot of the real participant, and they went along with the group

  • Informational influence; thought themselves to be wrong so they went along with the group.

• Done to avoid being wrong, ridiculed, or socially sanctioned

  • Normative influence

• Pressure of conformity influences some cultures more than others

  • North American and Western European participants in a study conformed less than those from Eastern cultures

Friendship and ‘liking’

• Friendships and interpersonal liking can be a strong influence on how much one can be persuaded

• People are more willing to comply with requests of friends or other well liked individuals

• Physical attractiveness creates liking — people generally see attractive people as more talented, kind, honest, and intelligent. They are also more persuasive at changing attitudes and getting agreement.

• Similarity between oneself and others creates liking — people like those who are similar to them

Scarcity

• Scarcity of something, or how available it is, influences how much someone wants it

• Can influence preferences or persuade someone because they can make one think that others value a particular product and that it is in high demand

• Opportunities seem more valuable to use when they are less available

  • things that are difficult to get are typically better than things that are easier to get

  • psychological reactance — as things become less available, people lose freedoms, and people don’t like this, causing them to react against the interference by trying to possess the thing even more

Authority

• People are more likely to follow the commands of people in more power and even in uniforms/suits

• Following authority isn’t a bad thing, but it is when someone follows the commands of an authority figure without thinking, and one might behave inappropriately or hurt someone else with no meaning to

Milligram Study

• Stanley Milligram (1963)

• Obedience — the study centered around two people in a lab where one was a learner (confederate) and the other was the teacher. When the learner got something wrong, the teacher had to give them an electric shock (15-415 volts). The shocks weren’t real, but the teacher didn’t know that, and most went to the extreme volts, some even all the way

• Milligram observed how most, if not all, the participants when giving the shocks became upset and distressed. They felt guilt, but they were polite and found it hard to say no to an authority figure in the white lab coat.

• The power of commitment — humans find it hard to draw the line when they are committed to something, especially if is not ‘their something’. The belief that the authority figure would take responsibility for actions is a large factor in this. ‘It’s not up to me, it’s not up to my morals, I’m just following orders’.

• If the consequences of your actions are in your face and you can see the pain, you’re less likely to follow orders.

Non-verbal communication

Non-verbal Communication

• Any form of communication that doe not use words

  • Body language — gestures, posture, facial expressions

  • Vocal cues — tone, pitch, volume

  • Interaction — touch, eye contact, interpersonal distance

  • Dress — clothing, general-look

• Intentional and unintentional, conveying messages regardless of the sender’s intent

• Enhances and complicates our verbal messages

  • conveys emotions or intentions powerfully and convincingly

  • can reveal unspoken emotions (joy, boredom, anger)

  • can reveal unspoken intentions (competition, flirtation, or fear)

  • plays a significant role in miscommunication as interpretations can be highly subjective

• 93% of communication is nonverbal (Mehrabian, 1972)

  • very artificial set up

  • Trimboli & walker (1987) — when participants didn’t know an experiement was about nonverbal signals - much lower

  • Argyle (1988), have put the estimate at around 80%

  • Burgoon, Guerrero, and Floyd (2016) suggest 60-66% might be more realistic

• 60—66% of communication is nonverbal

  • context matters - the amount we rely on nonverbal cues varies by situation

  • sometimes the words are everything

  • sometimes we barely hear the words and it’s all nonverbal

Context — Social

• informational or task-focused contexts — more about the words

  • lecture — exact content is what matters

  • nonverbals — hand waving, speech variation — keep engagement and highlight the verbal content

• high emotional or relational context — more about the nonverbals

  • is my teenager mad at me?

  • facial expression, stance, tone of voice, eye contact tell me everything

Context — Developmental

• Very young children rely heavily on the literal meaning of words

• still developing the ability to interpret tone, facial cues, or sarcasm

• as grow become more skilled at catching nonverbal ‘undercurrents’

• 10-year-old might already detect sarcasm or sense parental frustration even if the parent says ‘i’m not mad’

Context — Cultural

• Some cultures prioritise modesty and politeness in public, encouraging people to minimise negative expressions like anger or disgust in group settings

• Others are more comfortable with visible emotion, allowing raised voices or expressive gestures as a normal part of conversation

• When cultures with differing norms mix, each side may over-or-under-interpret the other’s signals if they don’t realise how contextually driven those gestures and expressions are

Gestures

• Hand and arm movements that convey messages (sometimes head)

• Among the most noticeable elements of nonverbal communication

• Powerful way to enhance communication, express emotions, regulate interactions, substitute speech

• Emblems, illustrators, regulators, adaptors

• Cultural variations

• Context — why and when a gesture is used can determine whether it’s received as friendly, neutral, or hostile

• Single gesture can be ambiguous — look for clusters of signals

• Public speaking — watch for unintended gestures and plan purposeful ones

Emblems

• Have a direct verbal translation (in a particular culture) and can be used independently of speech

• Waving ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in many western cultures

• thumbs-up to indicate approval

• the ok circle with thumb and index finger

• closet gestures to words — clear and standardised meaning

Illustrators

• Accompany speech to illustrate or emphasise what is being said

• Don’t have an independent meaning if you mute the sound

• help us visualise or feel the emotional content

• hand movements to show the size or shape of an object (it was this big)

• The finger stab or pointed finger to convey emphasis or aggression

• the hand purse (fingers pinched, palm up) to highlight an important point

• Frick-horbury & guttentag (1988) — how gestures facilitate speech production and fluency

  • Participants were typically asked to describe or recall certain items or narratives

  • In one condition, allowed to gesture freely while speaking

  • In the other, gestures were restricted

  • Participants with unrestricted hand gestures retrieved and subsequently recalled significantly more words than participants whose hands were restricted

Regulators

• Subtle gestures that help guide the flow of conversations — like a nonverbal traffic signal

• Raising a hand slightly to indicate you want to speak in a group discussion

• Giving a small head nod to show you’re listening and encourage the speaker to continue

• Putting a hand up (palm out) to indicate hold on or a desire for the other person to pause

• maintain conversational turn-taking and smooth out social interactions

Adaptor

• Unconscious or semi-conscious gestures that serve a personal need or help manage emotions

• Fidgeting with a pen, hair-twisting, tapping a foot

• self soothing gestures

• unintentional — reflect internal states like nervousness, boredom, or impatience — broadcasts how we really feel

Facial Expressions

• Darwin (1872) — facial expressions of emotions are biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive

• facial expressions are often the first thing we notice when we look at someone

• human face can shift expressions in fractions of a second, allowing us to rapidly communicate (and perceive) emotions

• emotional billboard — face frequently broadcasts our internal states: joy, anger, sadness, surprise

• Ekman identified six basic emotions with distinct facial expressions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger

• basic emotions are generally recognised across cultures

• hardwired but cultural norms modulate display — when, where, and how strongly to show them

• experiment — participants from japan were as likely as americans to display disgust or anger when alone, but suppressed these emotions in the presence of an experimenter

Happiness

• Key cues = upturned mouth (smile), crinkling around the eyes

• Possible functions = social bonding, signalling friendliness, and positive intent

• Masking & Fakery = people often fake smiles to appear polite, genuine smiles involved both the mouth and the eye region more intensely

Sadness

• Key cues = drooping eyelids, inner corners of the eyebrows raised, slight downturn of the lips

• Why it’s subtle = adults rarely display downturned mouths; sadness is often read more from the eyes and brow

• Evolutionary angle = signalling a need for social support; helps garner empathy or assistance from others

Surprise

• Key cues = raised eyebrows, mouth open in an ‘o’ shape, eyes wide

• Duration = often a very quick expression that morphs into something else (like relief or fear)

• Overlap with fear = the immediate wide-eyes are similar; context often clarifies which emotion is being shown

Fear

• Key cues = wide eyes, raised brows, mouth partly open — similar to surprise but usually with more tension in the mouth around the eyes

• Evolutionary function = readiness for fight-or-flight, more visual input, quick intake of breath

• Common confusions = mix up fear and surprise, thought fear typically appears tenser

Disgust

• Key cues = wrinkling of the nose, raising of the upper lip, sometimes a gag-like movement

• Why it exist = possibly evolved to protect us from ingesting toxins or harmful substances (we physically recoil)

• Social dimensions = can also convey moral revulsion, not just physical

Anger

• Key cues = narrowed or hard eyes (lowered brow), flared nostrils, tightened jaw or lips

• Function - in evolutionary terms, signals threat or readiness to confront

• Cultural considerations = some cultures accept open anger expression; others strongly discourage public outbursts, leading to more ‘tight-lipped’ anger displays

Micro-Expressions

• Brief, involuntary facial expressions

• Ekman — 1/25 and 1/5 of a second and potentially reveal hidden feelings

• Training programs suggest learning to spot micro-expressions aids in detecting deception or unspoken emotions — everyday accuracy debated

• Very difficult to spot without specialised training or video replay

• Everyday life — rely on the overall pattern of facial cues, tone of voice, and context

Detecting Deception

• Eye contact — studies show liars sometimes increase eye contact to compensate for this stereotype

• Fidgeting or restlessness — may move less, not more

• Speech disturbances — sometimes liars exhibit more speech hesitations or ‘um’s/’ah’s, especially if the lie is complex. In other cases, liars may speak smoothly and quickly, showing fewer disturbances

• Emotional approach — Ekman found lying triggers emotions, physiological arousal, and these can leak through nonverbal behaviours: tremors in the voice, micro-expressions, etc

• Cognitive Approach — Burgoon found lying is cognitively complex - slower speech, longer pauses, fewer gestures

• Self-presentation approach — liars try to control expressions and body language-rigid or inhibited behaviour-and appear unnaturally still or too controlled

• Meta-analyses by Bond & DePaulo show that without specialized training, most people detect lies at only about chance level

• Police officers and others who regularly deal with deception often believe they’re highly skilled

• Research (e.g., Kraut & Poe, 1980) indicates they’re usually no better than the general public

• Certain specialized groups (e.g., Secret Service agents) with intense, relevant training may do better than average

• High stakes - easier to spot due to high emotional load

• Complexity - slip up when forced to maintain complex narratives over time

• Prior Knowledge – knowing the person well gives you a baseline to compare to

• Bias - strong desire to believe or disbelieve can lead you to see cues where there are none or miss clear cues

The Self

Origins of ‘the self’

• One school of thought people create their own self, that it is by the choices you make

• Existentialism emphasised that you are defined by the decisions and actions that you do, while others just say you’re born that way, with certain predispositions and tendencies that dictate the path you will take.

• Sociology says that you are a product of your times and your circumstances, that your society creates you.

• You are you due to what society made possible for you and what you chose among those choices, and how you reacted within that framework

The Human Self

• Humans make choices and incorporate all sorts of abstract principles such as moral rules and responsibilities, religious prescriptions, financial calculations, and so on, and all of these go into their behavioural choices

• Actively self-serving creatures, in our thoughts, feelings, and deeds, while also being self-sacrificial

Self Knowledge

• Privileged access — the idea that you know yourself better than anyone else. Tenuous and relative idea as we know a lot about ourselves, but we may also be biased

• This is a challenge for psychology as when asking questions about oneself, only you know what is correct or incorrect. Thats why psychologist tend to ask questions that can be measured directly or corroborated

Positive Illusions

• People think they are better than they actually are; they generally overestimate the positivity of their lives

• People with depression tend to be more accurate with describing themselves.

• First illusion — rating your abilities and your successes as higher than they really are. You downplay your faults and your failures, and you overestimate all your good points.

• Second illusion — overestimate how much control we have over life. People tend to think they can steer their fate and produce the results that they want. They can get where they want to go. They can take charge. When people estimate how much they are in control of their own fates, they overestimate how much control they actually have

• Third illusion — optimism. People are unrealistically optimistic. They think good things are more likely to happen to them than to the average person and bad things are less likely to happen.

Sustaining Positive Illusions

• People tend to end up with a more favourable view of themself than the facts would seemingly dictate

• People tend to attribute success internally and failure they attribute eternally to other factors. They then base your self-esteem on what’s attributed to yourself so that’s mainly based on your successes.

Selective Criticism and Memory Bias

• Dismissing your failures and making excuses for them while taking your successes to heart is a pathway to self-deception

• Selective criticism helps sustain positive illusions, criticising bad news while accepting good news with no criticism

• Enables you to weed out information you don’t like and thus build your self0esteem on a positive view

• Memory bias occurs when people forget bad things and remember the good. You don’t repress it in the sense that you push the thought into the unconscious (freud’s theory), but instead it came through your conscious mind and you just don’t think about it very much

Comparisons

• ‘it could have been worse’

• People will typically compare themselves to others that are similar but a bit worse off than themselves

Consensus and Uniqueness

• False consensus = Overestimate how many other people are the same as you

  • Used with opinions = people who have similar opinions will agree with you, leading you to believe that many people agree with you.

• False Uniqueness = underestimating how many people are the same as you

  • You can make yourself feel better than others even if you recognise exactly where you stand by distorting how similar you are to other people (more common in those with high self esteem)

Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem is essentially a matter of how you evaluate yourself

• Not many people have really negative views of themselves, whereas there are many who think really highly of themselves, and others more in the middle

• Mentally healthy people tend to have somewhat high self-esteem. They tend to overestimate their good characteristics and have these positive illusions

• Depression goes with low self-esteem — people suffering from depression tend not to have so many positive illusions

What is ‘good’ high self-esteem?

• Self esteem can help people improve, but you must not mistake correlation for causation — self esteem may be linked to good grades but it probably doesn’t cause the high marks, in fact, its more likely that the good grades cause the high self esteem

Benefits: Initiative

• High self esteem bolsters initiative — people with high self esteem think they are right, they know what’s what, and are more likely to act on what they think

• In contrast, people with low self-esteem don’t have the same faith in themselves

Benefits: Happiness

• High self-esteem are generally happier than people with low self-esteem

• When times are hard or stressful, high self-esteem gives you a little more resilience, it makes you feel better

• Low self-esteem is intertwined deeply with depression, and it seems low self-esteem comes first or is an early warning sign or make you more vulnerable to depression. But then depression makes it worse.

Why do people care about self-esteem?

• Something that keeps track of something that is important; could be a measure of whether other people will like you, whether you’re appealing, if you have social acceptance and status

• As social creatures, humans are concerned about reputations and whether they fit in.

• Self deception may be helpful toward fooling others to think well of you. May also become a means of persuading others.

Theories about low self-esteem

• Self-esteem scores are spread along the range, with lots of people in the middle rather at low or high

• People understand why people have high self-esteem as it ultimately helps them achieve an end goal, but people with low self-esteem confuse psychologists—do they not know what they want?

• ‘Self concept confusion’, theory by Jennifer Campbell, is the theory that people with low-self esteem just don’t know themselves. They have a more garbled self-concept than a clear view of one self as a bad person. More oriented toward protecting themselves from failure than toward trying to achieve success

• Absence of positive self-image may be one consequence of confusion, but confusion is the deeper reason for low self esteem.