Social Psychology - Module 7 Lecture Notes

The Science and Focus of Social Psychology

Social psychology is defined as the scientific study of how individuals think about, influence, and relate to one another. It operates under the guiding principle, as articulated by Herman Melville, that "We cannot live for ourselves alone."

Major areas of focus within the field include:

Social Thinking: Examining how we attribute behavior to persons or situations and the relationship between attitudes and actions.
Social Influence: Investigating conformity, obedience, group influence, and the impact of the individual.
Social Relations: Studying prejudice, aggression, attraction, altruism, and methods of conflict and peacemaking.

Social Thinking and Attribution Theory

Social thinking involves the cognitive processes we use to understand others, particularly when they perform unexpected actions. A core component of this is describing the causes of behavior.

Attribution Theory Proposed by Fritz Heider ( $1958$ ), this theory suggests people typically explain behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.

Dispositional Attribution: Attributing behavior to enduring personality traits. For example, a teacher might assume a child's hostility is due to an "aggressive personality."
Situational Attribution: Attributing behavior to external factors or environments. For example, the same teacher might consider if the child's hostility is a reaction to stress or abuse.
Dispositions: These are considered enduring personality traits. If an individual is consistently quiet, shy, and introverted, they are likely to exhibit these traits across numerous situations.

The Fundamental Attribution Error This is the tendency for observers to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of situational factors when analyzing the behavior of others.

Example: We may perceive someone like "Joe" as quiet and shy most of the time (disposition), yet fail to realize that when he is with his friends, he is loud, talkative, and extroverted (situation).

Effects of Attribution The way we explain behavior significantly dictates our reaction to it:

Negative Behavior Context: If a driver cuts us off, a situational attribution ("Maybe that driver is ill") leads to a tolerant reaction, such as proceeding cautiously. Conversely, a dispositional attribution ("Crazy driver!") leads to an unfavorable reaction, such as speeding up or offering a "dirty look."

Attitudes and Actions

An attitude is a belief and feeling that predisposes an individual to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Directional Example: If we believe someone is mean, we may feel dislike and consequently act in an unfriendly manner.

Bidirectional Influence

Attitudes Affect Actions: Our internal attitudes predict behaviors, though imperfectly. External social pressures often intervene. In $1992$ and 200 Iraq occurred because Democratic leaders in Congress supported the invasion due to public pressure despite having private reservations.\n2. **Actions Affect Attitudes:** People not only stand for what they believe; they begin to believe in what they stand for. Cooperative actions can foster mutual liking and altered beliefs.\n\n**The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon**\nThis describes the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. \n* **Historical Case:** During the Korean War, Chinese soldiers gained cooperation from US Army prisoners by starting with small errands. Complying with these small tasks made the prisoners more likely to comply with much larger demands later.\n\n**Role-Playing and Attitude Modification**\nTaking on a role can lead to the development of role-appropriate attitudes. \n* **The Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1972 $):** Randomly assigned students to be "guards" or "prisoners." Within only$ 2 $days, guards developed cruel, degrading routines and disparaging attitudes. Prisoners either rioted, broke down, or became passively resigned. The study, meant to last a month, was terminated after only$ 6 days.\n* **Real-world Application:** These observations partially explain the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, where ordinary soldiers violated the Geneva Convention.\n\n# Theory of Cognitive Dissonance\n\nWhy do actions affect attitudes? Leon Festinger's theory suggests that when our attitudes and actions are inconsistent, we experience an unpleasant state of tension called **cognitive dissonance**. To relieve this tension, we align our attitudes with our behavior.\n\n**Case Examples:**\n* **Fiona:** Fiona believes tuition is too high, but her behavior involves promoting a fundraiser for the school. To resolve the tension of being inconsistent, she changes her belief to "Maybe the school has a point."\n* **Smoking:** A person knows smoking is unhealthy (belief) but continues to smoke (action). To solve the dissonance, they must either:\n 1. **Change Action:** Stop smoking.\n 2. **Change Belief:** Conclude that the research on smoking is not conclusive.\n\n# Social Influence: Conformity and Obedience\n\nSocial influence study is one of social psychology's greatest contributions, looking at how attitudes and decisions are molded by others.\n\n**Conformity**\nConformity is the adjustment of behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. \n* **The Chameleon Effect:** Automatic mimicry (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).\n* **Solomon Asch's Line Study (1955 $):** Subjects were asked to match a standard line with three comparison lines. Individually, subjects were correct$ 99\% $of the time. When confederates purposely chose the wrong line, subjects conformed to the wrong answer$ 36\% of the time.\n\n**Conditions that Strengthen Conformity:**\n* Feeling incompetent or insecure.\n* The group has at least 3 people.\n* The group is unanimous.\n* One admires the group's status and attractiveness.\n* One has no prior commitment to a response.\n* The group observes one's behavior.\n* The culture encourages respect for social standards.\n\n**Reasons for Conforming:**\n* **Normative Social Influence:** Influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid rejection.\n* **Informational Social Influence:** Influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality, especially in ambiguous situations where others are perceived to have more information.\n\n**Obedience**\nStanley Milgram (1963) designed a study to test responses to outright commands from authority.\n* **Experiment Setup:** Subjects (teachers) were ordered to deliver electric shocks to learners (confederates) for wrong answers. Shocks ranged from 15 $to$ 450 volts.\n* **Results:** The majority of subjects continued to obey to the end (450 volts), despite the learner's cries of pain.\n* **Highest Obedience Conditions:**\n 1. Authority figure was close and perceived as legitimate.\n 2. The authority was supported by a prestigious institution (Yale).\n 3. The victim was depersonalized or in another room.\n 4. There were no role models for defiance.\n* **Ethical Aftermath:** Milgram’s use of deception and stress led to modern ethical guidelines. Surprisingly, only one subject regretted participating, and a psychiatrist found no long-term emotional after-effects in the 40 most stressed subjects.\n\n# Group Influence\n\n**Individual Performance in Groups**\n* **Social Facilitation:** Improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others. Triplett (1898) found cyclists were faster against others than against the clock.\n* **Social Loafing:** The tendency for individuals in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than when performing individually (Latané, 1891).\n* **Deindividuation:** The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity (e.g., mob behavior).\n\n**Group Decisions and Interaction**\n* **Group Polarization:** The enhancement of a group's prevailing attitudes through discussion within the group. If a group is like-minded, discussion makes their opinions more extreme.\n* **Slut Shaming Example:** This form of bullying among females is exacerbated by group polarization. Opinions become more extreme when multiple women attack the same target (Marino & Scales, 2018). Research indicates white women engage in this more frequently, and upper-class white women are least affected due to social power (Stiles & Scales, 2022).\n* **Groupthink:** A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives (Janis, 1972). \n * Examples: Attack on Pearl Harbor, Kennedy/Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate Cover-up, Chernobyl Disaster.\n\n# The Psychology and Roots of Prejudice\n\nPrejudice is an unjustifiable, usually negative, attitude toward a group and its members, involving stereotypes (beliefs), negative emotions (hostility/fear), and a predisposition to discriminate (action).\n\n**Prejudice vs. "Isms"**\n* **Prejudice:** Personal beliefs and emotions of an individual.\n* **Racism/Sexism:** Defined as "prejudice plus power." These are institutional and supported by political or economic power, allowing prejudice to manifest as a cultural or social phenomenon.\n\n**Social Roots:**\n* **Social Inequality:** Prejudice develops when some have money, power, and prestige and others do not.\n* **Ingroup and Outgroup:** We favor our "Ingroup" (people with whom we share an identity) and exhibit "Ingroup Bias," while perceiving the "Outgroup" as different.\n\n**Emotional and Cognitive Roots:**\n* **Scapegoat Theory:** Prejudice provides an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame (e.g., lashing out against Arab-Americans after 9/11).\n* **Stereotyping:** We simplify the world by categorizing people. This leads to the "outgroup homogeneity effect" (e.g., thinking all people of a foreign group look alike).\n* **The Just-World Phenomenon:** The tendency to believe the world is just and people get what they deserve. This leads to "blaming the victim."\n* **Hindsight Bias:** After an outcome, believing one could have predicted it, often used to justify why a victim (e.g., in rape trials) "deserved" the incident based on their behavior or dress.\n\n# Aggression\n\nAggression is physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. It can be reactive (hostile) or proactive (calculated).\n\n**Biological Influences:**\n* **Genetic:** Animal breeding and twin studies suggest aggression is hereditable. Linked to the Y chromosome in men.\n* **Neural:** Controlled by the limbic system (amygdala) and inhibited by the frontal lobe.\n* **Biochemical:** High testosterone and alcohol levels correlate with increased aggression. Castration makes animals docile; prenatal testosterone increases aggression in female hyenas.\n\n**Psychological and Social Influences:**\n* **Aversive Events:** Suffering (pain, insults, crowding, heat) makes people more likely to make others miserable. Houston murder/rape rates increase with temperature.\n* **Frustration-Aggression Principle:** Frustration—the blocking of a goal—creates anger, which generates aggression.\n* **Social Learning:** If aggression is rewarded, it is repeated. Cultures of violence (e.g., Scotch-Irish settlers in the US South) breed higher violent tendencies.\n* **Media and Social Scripts:** The media provides "mental tapes" or scripts for how to act. Violent scripts or R/X-rated movies depicting sexual coerciveness can lead individuals to act out these behaviors. Violent video games are generally thought to breed violence in adolescents.\n\n# Attraction, Altruism, and Conflict\n\n**Attraction**\n1. **Proximity:** Geographic nearness is the best predictor of friendship. The **mere exposure effect** dictates that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking.\n2. **Physical Attractiveness:** The primary factor once proximity allows contact.\n3. **Similarity:** Similar views strengthen bonds; "similarity breeds content."\n\n**Romantic Love**\n* **Passionate Love:** An aroused state of intense positive absorption, explained by the two-factor theory of emotion (Physical arousal + cognitive label).\n* **Companionate Love:** A deep, affectionate attachment for those with whom lives are intertwined.\n\n**Altruism**\nAltruism is the unselfish regard for the welfare of others. Facilitated by:\n* **Equity:** Receiving from a relationship in proportion to what you give.\n* **Self-Disclosure:** Revealing intimate aspects of yourself.\n* **Bystander Effect:** People are less likely to help if others are present. The decision to help involves: 1. $Noticing the incident,$ 2. $Interpreting it as an emergency, and$ 3.$$ Assuming responsibility.

Conflict and Peacemaking

Conflict: Perceived incompatibility of actions/goals.
Enemy Perceptions: Conflicting parties form mirror-image, diabolical images of each other (e.g., polarized political memes or religious intolerance).
Superordinate Goals: Shared goals that override differences and require cooperation to achieve (as seen in the independence movement of India led by Gandhi).