Chapter 13: Social Psychology

Social Thinking

LOQ: What do social psychologists study? How do we tend to explain others’ behavior and our own?

Social psychologists focus on the situation

• They study the social influences that explain why the same person acts differently in different situations

Social Psychology: the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Fritz Heider proposed and attribution theory after studying how people explain others’ behavior

• We can attribute the behavior to the person’s stable, enduring traits (a dispositional attribution), or
• We can attribute it to the situation (a situational attribution).

People do have enduring personality traits. But sometimes we fall prey to the fundamental attribution error

• We overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of situations

David Napolitan and George Goethals showed the fundamental l attribution error in an experiment

• We all commit the fundamental attribution error. Consider: Is your psychology instructor shy or outgoing?

Attribution Theory: the theory that we explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.

Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observers, when analyzing others’ behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

What Factors Affect Our Attributions?

One factor of this culture

• Individualist Westerners more often attribute behavior to people’s personal traits. People in East Asian cultures are somewhat more sensitive to the power of the situation
  • When we explain our own behavior, we are sensitive to how behavior changes with the situation
  • also are sensitive to the power of the situation when we explain the behavior of people we have seen in many different contexts

Two important exceptions to our usual view of our own actions:

• Our deliberate and admirable actions we often attribute to our own good reasons, not to the situation

How Do Our Attributions Matter?

Our attributions—to a person’s disposition or to the situation—have real consequences.

• The way we explain others’ actions can have important real-life effects

Attitudes and Actions

LOQ: How do attitudes and actions interact?

Attitudes are feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects, people, and events

• If we believe someone is threatening us, we may feel fear and anger toward the person and act defensively
• attitudes affect our actions. And our actions affect our attitudes.

Attitude: feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Attitudes Affect Actions

Efforts to persuade generally take two forms:

• Peripheral route persuasion uses attention-getting cues to trigger emotion based snap judgments. Endorsements by beautiful or famous people can influence people’s attitudes, whether the judgment is about choosing a political candidate or buying the latest smartphone
• Central route persuasion offers evidence and arguments that trigger careful thinking. To persuade buyers to purchase a particular phone, an ad might itemize the phone’s great features.

Persuaders try to influence our behavior by changing our attitudes

• situational factors, such as strong social pressures, can override the attitude behavior connection

Attitudes are especially likely to affect behavior when external influences are minimal

• when the attitude is stable, specific to the behavior, and easily recalled

Peripheral Route Persuasion: occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker’s attractiveness.

Central Route Persuasion: occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts.

Actions Affect Attitudes

The Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon

A key ingredient was their use of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon

• They knew that people who agree to a small request will find it easier to comply later with a larger one

This tactic has helped boost charitable contributions, blood donations, and U.S. school desegregation

Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon: the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Role-Playing Affects Attitudes

When you adopt a new role you strive to follow the social prescriptions

• behaviors may feel phony, because you are acting a role, but after a while it becomes a part of you

Philip Zimbardo did an experiment and randomly assigned some volunteers to be guards. He gave them uniforms, clubs, and whistles and instructed them to enforce certain rules.

• Critics question the reliability of Zimbardo’s results even though much of this seems true

Role: a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.

Cognitive Dissonance: Relief From Tension

One explanation is that when we become aware that our attitudes and actions don’t coincide, we experience tension, or cognitive dissonance

• When we become aware that our attitudes and actions don’t coincide, we experience tension, or cognitive dissonance
• To relieve this tension, according to Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, we often bring our attitudes into line with our actions

The attitudes-follow-behavior principle has a heartening implication

• We cannot directly control all our feelings, but we can influence them by altering our behavior.

We can act ourselves into a way of thinking about as easily as we can think ourselves into a way of acting.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent. For example, when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes.

Social Influence

Conformity: Complying With Social Pressures

LOQ: What is social contagion, and how do conformity experiments reveal the power of social influence?

Social Contagion

Social contagion is not confined to behavior

• We take on the emotional tones of those around us
  • natural mimicry enables us to empathize

Social networks serve as contagious pathways for moods

Conformity and Social Norms

Suggestibility and mimicry are subtle types of conformity

People are more likely to conform when we

• are made to feel incompetent or insecure.
• are in a group with at least three people.
• are in a group in which everyone else agrees. (If just one other person disagrees, the odds of our disagreeing greatly increase.)
• admire the group’s status and attractiveness.
• know that others in the group will observe our behavior.
• are from a culture that strongly encourages respect for social standards.

We often avoid rejection or to gain social approval

• We respond to normative social influence in these cases
• When we accept others’ opinions about reality we are responding to informational social influence

Conformity: adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.

Normative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.

Informational Social Influence: influence resulting from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality.

Obedience: Following Orders

LOQ: What did Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us about the power of social influence?

Milgram’s experiments discovered some conditions that influence people’s behavior and obedience was highest when

• the person giving the orders was close at hand and was perceived to be a legitimate authority figure.
• the authority figure was supported by a powerful or prestigious institution. Compliance was somewhat lower when Milgram dissociated his experiments from Yale University.
• the victim was depersonalized or at a distance, even in another room. Similarly, many soldiers in combat either have not fired their rifles at an enemy they could see, or have not aimed them properly.
• there were no role models for defiance. “Teachers” did not see any other participant disobey the experimenter.

Lessons From the Conformity and Obedience Studies

LOQ: What do the social influence studies teach us about ourselves? How much power do we have as individuals?

Milgram’s experiments and their modern replications, participants were torn

• Their moral sense warned them not to harm another, yet it also prompted them to obey the experimenter and to be a good research participant
  • With kindness and obedience on a collision course, obedience usually won
• These experiments demonstrated that strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty
  • Milgram saw this as the fundamental lesson of this work

Group Behavior

LOQ: How does the presence of others influence our actions, via social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation?

Social Facilitation

Triplett’s claim—of strengthened performance in others’ presence—is called social facilitation

• further studies revealed that the truth is more complicated
  • The presence of others strengthens our most likely response— the correct one on an easy task, an incorrect one on a difficult task

What you do well, you are likely to do even better in front of an audience, especially a friendly audience

• What you normally find difficult may seem all but impossible when you are being watched

Social Facilitation: improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others.

Social Loafing

Social facilitation experiments test the effect of others

• When they thought they were part of a group effort, the participants produced about one-third less noise than when clapping or shouting “alone.”
  • This diminished effort is called social loafing

When people act as part of a group, they may

• feel less accountable and therefore worry less about what others think.
• view their individual contributions as dispensable.
• overestimate their own contributions, neglecting others’ actions.
• slack off (as you perhaps have observed on group assignments) if they share equally in the benefits, regardless of how much they contribute.
• Unless highly motivated and strongly identified with the group, people may free ride on others’ efforts.

Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.

Deindividuation

The uninhibited behavior that results can range from a food fight to vandalism or rioting

• This is called deindividuation
  • This often occurs when group participation makes people both aroused and anonymous

Deindividuation thrives, for better or for worse, in many settings

• Ex. anonymity of online discussion boards and blog comment sections can unleash mocking or cruel words

Research also shows that interacting with others can similarly have both bad and good effects

Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.

Group Polarization

LOQ: How can group interaction enable group polarization?

A powerful principle helps us understand our increasingly polarized world

• The beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others
  • This process is called group polarization

Group Polarization: the enhancement of a group’s prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group.

Groupthink

LOQ: How can group interaction enable groupthink?

Irving Janis studied the decision-making process leading to the ill-fated invasion

• discovered that the soaring morale of the recently elected president and his advisers fostered undue confidence
  • To describe this harmonious but unrealistic group thinking, Janis coined the term groupthink

Later studies showed that groupthink—fed by overconfidence, conformity, self-justification, and group polarization

• Despite the dangers of groupthink, two heads are often better than one

Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Antisocial Relations

Prejudice

LOQ: What is prejudice? How do explicit and implicit prejudice differ?

In prejudice, the ingredients in this three part mixture are

• negative emotions, such as hostility or fear.
• stereotypes, which are generalized beliefs about a group of people. Our stereotypes sometimes reflect reality
• a predisposition to discriminate—to act in negative and unjustifiable ways toward members of the group. Sometimes prejudice is blatant. Other times it is more subtle, taking the form of microaggressions

Prejudice: an unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.

Explicit and Implicit Prejudice

Psychologists study implicit prejudice by

• Testing for unconscious group associations: Tests in which people quickly pair a person’s image with a trait demonstrate that even people who deny any racial prejudice may harbor negative associations
• Considering unconscious patronization: In one experiment, White university women assessed flawed student essays they believed had been written by either a White or a Black student
• Monitoring reflexive bodily responses: Even people who consciously express little prejudice may give off telltale signals as their body responds selectively to an image of a person from another ethnic group

Targets of Prejudice

LOQ: What groups are frequent targets of prejudice?

Racial and Ethnic Prejudice

Other studies reveal prejudice that is not just subtle, but unconscious (implicit)

• as blatant interracial prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice linger

Our perceptions can also reflect implicit bias

Gender Prejudice

both implicit and explicit gender prejudice and discrimination persist

• In Western countries, we pay more to those (usually men) who care for our streets than to those (usually women) who care for our children.
• Gender bias even applies to beliefs about intelligence
  • people have tended to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers

LGBTQ Prejudice

Explicit anti-gay prejudice, though declining in Western countries, persists

Some evidence from a seurvy of LGBTQ Americans shows that:

• 39 percent reported having been “rejected by a friend or family member” because of their sexual orientation or gender identity
• 58 percent reported being “subject to slurs or jokes”
• 80 percent of LGBTQ adolescents reported sexual orientation-related harassment in the prior year. Gays and lesbians are also America’s most at-risk group for hate crime

Belief Systems Prejudice

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 4 in 10 Americans acknowledged “some feelings of prejudice against Muslims

Roots of Prejudice

LOQ: What are some social, emotional, and cognitive roots of prejudice, and what are some ways to eliminate prejudice?

Social Inequalities and Divisions

When some people have money, power, and prestige and others do not, the “haves” usually develop attitudes that justify things as they are

• This is a just-world phenomenon
• Stereotypes rationalize inequalities

Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup

• Social definition of who we are also states who we are not.
  • These people are called the outgroup
• An ingroup bias

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 notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for our negative emotions

• One form of evidence for this is that economically frustrated people tend to express heightened prejudice
• The second form is experiments that create temporary frustration and intensify prejudice.

Scapegoat Theory: the theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame.

Cognitive Shortcuts

Our greater recognition for individual own-race faces—called the other-race effect emerges during infancy

• We also have an own-age bias —better recognition memory for faces of our own age group

Other-Race Effect: the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more accurately than faces of other races. Also called the cross-race effect and the own-race bias.

Remembering Vivid Cases

We also simplify our world by employing heuristics—mental shortcuts that enable snap judgments.

• The availability heuristic is the tendency to estimate the frequency of an event by how readily it comes to mind
  • Vivid cases are memorable and they come to mind easily, so it’s no surprise that they feed our stereotypes.

Victim Blaming

Hindsight bias amplifies victim blaming

• It promotes d a blame-the-victim mentality among members of the first group

Aggression

LOQ: How does psychology’s definition of aggression differ from everyday usage? What biological factors make us more prone to hurt one another?

Prejudice hurts, but aggression sometimes hurts more

Aggressive behavior emerges from the interaction of biology and experience

• There are several factors that can cause this

Aggression: any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally.

The Biology of Aggression

Aggression varies too much between culture, eras, and people to be considered an instinct

• biology does influence aggression in 3 levels
  • Genetic, neural, and biochemical

Genetic Influences

Genes influence aggression

• Researchers continue to search for genetic markers in those who commit violent acts
• MAOA gene (sometimes called the warrior gene) helps break down neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin.
  • people who have low MAOA gene expression tend to behave aggressively when provoked

Neural Influences

Aggression is a complex behavior and there is no one spot that controls it in the brain

Biochemical Influences

Our genes engineer our individual nervous systems, which operate electrochemically

• Humans are less sensitive to hormonal changes

Alcohol also unleashes aggressive responses to frustrations

• aggression-prone people are more likely to drink, and to become violent when intoxicated
• slows brain activity that controls judgment and inhibitions.
• ust thinking you’ve imbibed alcohol can increase aggression

Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression

LOQ: What psychological and social-cultural factors may trigger aggressive behavior?

Aversive Events

Aversive stimuli—hot temperatures, physical pain, personal insults, foul odors, cigarette smoke, crowding—can evoke hostility

• This is a good example of the phenomenon of the frustration aggression principle
  • Frustration creates anger which can start aggression

When overheated we think, feel, and act more aggressively

Frustration-Aggression Principle: the principle that frustration—the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal—creates anger, which can generate aggression.

Reinforcement and Modeling

Aggression may naturally follow aversive events, but learning can alter natural reaction

• situations where experience has taught us that aggression pays, we are likely to act aggressively again.

Media Models for Violence

Parents are hardly the only aggression models

• In America, TV, films, video games and the Internet allows access to view violence

Media violence teaches us social scripts

• Watching risk-glorifying behavior increases real-life risk-taking

Social Script: a culturally modeled guide for how to act in various situations.

Do Violent Video Games Teach Social Scripts for Violence?

Research reveals biological, psychological, and social-cultural influences on aggressive behavior

• Complex behaviors, including violence, have many causes, making any single explanation an oversimplification

Historical trends suggest that the world is becoming less violent over time

• aggression arises from the interaction of persons and situations.

Prosocial Relations

Attraction

The Psychology of Attraction

LOQ: Why do we befriend or fall in love with some people but not others?

Proximity

Proximity breeds liking partly because of the mere exposure effect

• Repeated exposure to stimuli increases our liking for them

Mere Exposure Effect: the phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them.

Modern Matchmaking

Online matchmaking definitely expands the pool of potential mates

• Internet friendships often feel as real and important as in-person relationships.

Speed dating pushes the search for romance

• Many people think that 4 minutes is enough time to form a feeling about a conversational partner and to register whether the partner likes them

Researchers have found several findings ober speed dating:

• People who fear rejection often elicit rejection
• Given more options, people make more superficial choices
• Men wish for future contact with more of their speed dates; women tend to be choosier

Physical Attractiveness

Physical attractiveness also predicts how often people date and how popular they feel

• There are three findings that may be reassuring to find the importance of looks unfair and unenlightened
  • People’s attractiveness is surprisingly unrelated to their self-esteem and happiness
  • Strikingly attractive people are sometimes suspicious that praise for their work may simply be a reaction to their looks
  • For couples who were friends before lovers—who became romantically involved long after first meeting—looks matter less

Our feelings also influence our attractiveness judgments

• Most people perceive the person appealing traits as more physically attractive

Similarity

Proximity, attractiveness, and similarity are not the only determinants of attraction

• We like people who like us
  • This is explained with the reward theory of attraction

Romantic Love

LOQ: How does romantic love typically change as time passes?

Passionate Love

Passionate love mixes something new with something positive

• The two-factor theory of emotion explains this intense positive absorption of romantic love and assumes that
  • emotions have two ingredients—physical arousal plus cognitive appraisal.
  • arousal from any source can enhance one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label the arousal.

Passionate Love: an aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a romantic relationship.

Companionate Love

As love matures, it typically becomes a steadier companionate love

• This shift from passion to attachment may have adaptive value
• passion-facilitating hormones (testosterone, dopamine, adrenaline) subsides
  • oxytocin, remains, supporting feelings of trust, calmness, and bonding with the mate

One way to a gratifying and enduring relationship is equity

• When equity exists both partners receive in proportion to what they give and their chances for sustained and satisfying companionate love have been good

Sharing includes self-disclosure

• intimate details about ourselves—our likes and dislikes, our dreams and worries, our proud and shameful moments.

A third key to enduring love is positive support

• Relationship conflicts are inevitable, but hurtful communications are not.

Companionate Love: the deep affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined.

Equity: a condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it.

Self-Disclosure: the act of revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.

Altruism

LOQ: What is altruism? When are people most—and least— likely to help?

Altruism became a major concern of social psychologists after an especially vile act

Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of

Bystander Intervention

Darley and Latané assembled their findings into a decision scheme

• We will help only if the situation enables us first to notice the incident, then to interpret it as an emergency, and finally to assume responsibility for helping
• When more people shared responsibility for helping—when there was a diffusion of responsibility—any single listener was less likely to help.

Hundreds of additional experiments have confirmed this bystander effect

• The presence of bystanders reduces brain activation in the motor cortex, signaling that we don’t need to take action

The odds of helping are highest when:

• the person appears to need and deserve help.
• the person is in some way similar to us.
• the person is a woman.
• we have just observed someone else being helpful.
• we are not in a hurry. we are in a small town or rural area.
• we are feeling guilty.
• we are focused on others and not preoccupied.
• we are in a good mood.

Happiness breeds helpfulness. But it’s also true that helpfulness breeds happiness

• Helping those in need activates brain areas associated with reward
  • This helps explains why People who give money away are happier than those who spend it almost entirely on themselves

Bystander Effect: the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.

Helping—Self-Interest or Socialization?

LOQ: How do social exchange theory and social norms explain helping behavior?

Self-interest underlies all human interactions, that our constant goal is to maximize rewards and minimize costs

• Social psychologists call it social exchange theory
  • If the rewards exceed the costs, you will help
  • Some people s believe we help because we have been socialized to do so

The reciprocity norm is the expectation that we should return help, not harm, to those who have helped us

• Returning favors feels good, making the norm of reciprocity a pleasant strategy to help others

The social-responsibility norm is the expectation that we should help those who need our help even if the costs outweigh the benefits

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

Conflict and Peacemaking

Elements of Conflict

LOQ: How do social traps and mirror-image perceptions fuel social conflict?

To a social psychologist, a conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

• elements of conflict are much the same
• Among these processes are social traps and distorted perceptions.

Social Traps

In some situations, pursuing our personal interests also supports our collective well-being

• In other situations, we harm our collective well-being by pursuing our personal interests
  • These situations are social traps

Social traps challenge us to reconcile our right to pursue our personal well-being with our responsibility for the well-being of all

• Given effective regulations, communication, and awareness, people more often cooperate

Conflict: a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

Social Trap: a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each pursuing their self-interest rather than the good of the group, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.

Enemy Perceptions

Psychologists have noted that those in conflict have a curious tendency to form diabolical images of one another

• These images are called mirror-image perceptions
• Mirror-image perceptions can often feed a vicious cycle of hostility

Perceptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies

Mirror-Image Perceptions: mutual views often held by conflicting people, as when each side sees itself as ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil and aggressive.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment.

Promoting Peace

LOQ: What can we do to promote peace?

Contact

Negative contact increases disliking

• positive contact typically helps

Contact is not always enough

• When such mirror-image misperceptions are corrected, friendships may form and prejudices melt.

Cooperation

Muzafer Sherif settled a conflict and promoted superordinate goals

• reduced conflict was not mere contact, but cooperative contact

A shared predicament likewise can have a powerfully unifying effect on other groups as well.

• During these times cooperation can lead people to define a new, inclusive group that dissolves their former subgroups

The power of cooperative activity to make friends of former enemies has led psychologists to urge increased international exchange and cooperation.

Superordinate Goals: shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.

Communication

Mediators can replace a competitive win-lose orientation with a cooperative win-win orientation that leads to a mutually beneficial resolution

• If the two communicated their motives to one another, they could have hit on the win-win solution of one having all the juice, the other all the peel.

Conciliation

Charles Osgood advocated a strategy of Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction (GRIT)

• When GRIT is applied, one side first announces its recognition of mutual interests and its intent to reduce tension
• It then initiates one or more small, conciliatory acts.

GRIT: Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction—a strategy designed to decrease international tensions.

Social Thinking

LOQ: What do social psychologists study? How do we tend to explain others’ behavior and our own?

Social psychologists focus on the situation

• They study the social influences that explain why the same person acts differently in different situations

Social Psychology: the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Fritz Heider proposed and attribution theory after studying how people explain others’ behavior

• We can attribute the behavior to the person’s stable, enduring traits (a dispositional attribution), or
• We can attribute it to the situation (a situational attribution).

People do have enduring personality traits. But sometimes we fall prey to the fundamental attribution error

• We overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of situations

David Napolitan and George Goethals showed the fundamental l attribution error in an experiment

• We all commit the fundamental attribution error. Consider: Is your psychology instructor shy or outgoing?

Attribution Theory: the theory that we explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.

Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observers, when analyzing others’ behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

What Factors Affect Our Attributions?

One factor of this culture

• Individualist Westerners more often attribute behavior to people’s personal traits. People in East Asian cultures are somewhat more sensitive to the power of the situation
  • When we explain our own behavior, we are sensitive to how behavior changes with the situation
  • also are sensitive to the power of the situation when we explain the behavior of people we have seen in many different contexts

Two important exceptions to our usual view of our own actions:

• Our deliberate and admirable actions we often attribute to our own good reasons, not to the situation

How Do Our Attributions Matter?

Our attributions—to a person’s disposition or to the situation—have real consequences.

• The way we explain others’ actions can have important real-life effects

Attitudes and Actions

LOQ: How do attitudes and actions interact?

Attitudes are feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose our reactions to objects, people, and events

• If we believe someone is threatening us, we may feel fear and anger toward the person and act defensively
• attitudes affect our actions. And our actions affect our attitudes.

Attitude: feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.

Attitudes Affect Actions

Efforts to persuade generally take two forms:

• Peripheral route persuasion uses attention-getting cues to trigger emotion based snap judgments. Endorsements by beautiful or famous people can influence people’s attitudes, whether the judgment is about choosing a political candidate or buying the latest smartphone
• Central route persuasion offers evidence and arguments that trigger careful thinking. To persuade buyers to purchase a particular phone, an ad might itemize the phone’s great features.

Persuaders try to influence our behavior by changing our attitudes

• situational factors, such as strong social pressures, can override the attitude behavior connection

Attitudes are especially likely to affect behavior when external influences are minimal

• when the attitude is stable, specific to the behavior, and easily recalled

Peripheral Route Persuasion: occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker’s attractiveness.

Central Route Persuasion: occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts.

Actions Affect Attitudes

The Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon

A key ingredient was their use of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon

• They knew that people who agree to a small request will find it easier to comply later with a larger one

This tactic has helped boost charitable contributions, blood donations, and U.S. school desegregation

Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon: the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Role-Playing Affects Attitudes

When you adopt a new role you strive to follow the social prescriptions

• behaviors may feel phony, because you are acting a role, but after a while it becomes a part of you

Philip Zimbardo did an experiment and randomly assigned some volunteers to be guards. He gave them uniforms, clubs, and whistles and instructed them to enforce certain rules.

• Critics question the reliability of Zimbardo’s results even though much of this seems true

Role: a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.

Cognitive Dissonance: Relief From Tension

One explanation is that when we become aware that our attitudes and actions don’t coincide, we experience tension, or cognitive dissonance

• When we become aware that our attitudes and actions don’t coincide, we experience tension, or cognitive dissonance
• To relieve this tension, according to Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, we often bring our attitudes into line with our actions

The attitudes-follow-behavior principle has a heartening implication

• We cannot directly control all our feelings, but we can influence them by altering our behavior.

We can act ourselves into a way of thinking about as easily as we can think ourselves into a way of acting.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent. For example, when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes.

Social Influence

Conformity: Complying With Social Pressures

LOQ: What is social contagion, and how do conformity experiments reveal the power of social influence?

Social Contagion

Social contagion is not confined to behavior

• We take on the emotional tones of those around us
  • natural mimicry enables us to empathize

Social networks serve as contagious pathways for moods

Conformity and Social Norms

Suggestibility and mimicry are subtle types of conformity

People are more likely to conform when we

• are made to feel incompetent or insecure.
• are in a group with at least three people.
• are in a group in which everyone else agrees. (If just one other person disagrees, the odds of our disagreeing greatly increase.)
• admire the group’s status and attractiveness.
• know that others in the group will observe our behavior.
• are from a culture that strongly encourages respect for social standards.

We often avoid rejection or to gain social approval

• We respond to normative social influence in these cases
• When we accept others’ opinions about reality we are responding to informational social influence

Conformity: adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.

Normative Social Influence: influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.

Informational Social Influence: influence resulting from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality.

Obedience: Following Orders

LOQ: What did Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us about the power of social influence?

Milgram’s experiments discovered some conditions that influence people’s behavior and obedience was highest when

• the person giving the orders was close at hand and was perceived to be a legitimate authority figure.
• the authority figure was supported by a powerful or prestigious institution. Compliance was somewhat lower when Milgram dissociated his experiments from Yale University.
• the victim was depersonalized or at a distance, even in another room. Similarly, many soldiers in combat either have not fired their rifles at an enemy they could see, or have not aimed them properly.
• there were no role models for defiance. “Teachers” did not see any other participant disobey the experimenter.

Lessons From the Conformity and Obedience Studies

LOQ: What do the social influence studies teach us about ourselves? How much power do we have as individuals?

Milgram’s experiments and their modern replications, participants were torn

• Their moral sense warned them not to harm another, yet it also prompted them to obey the experimenter and to be a good research participant
  • With kindness and obedience on a collision course, obedience usually won
• These experiments demonstrated that strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty
  • Milgram saw this as the fundamental lesson of this work

Group Behavior

LOQ: How does the presence of others influence our actions, via social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation?

Social Facilitation

Triplett’s claim—of strengthened performance in others’ presence—is called social facilitation

• further studies revealed that the truth is more complicated
  • The presence of others strengthens our most likely response— the correct one on an easy task, an incorrect one on a difficult task

What you do well, you are likely to do even better in front of an audience, especially a friendly audience

• What you normally find difficult may seem all but impossible when you are being watched

Social Facilitation: improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others.

Social Loafing

Social facilitation experiments test the effect of others

• When they thought they were part of a group effort, the participants produced about one-third less noise than when clapping or shouting “alone.”
  • This diminished effort is called social loafing

When people act as part of a group, they may

• feel less accountable and therefore worry less about what others think.
• view their individual contributions as dispensable.
• overestimate their own contributions, neglecting others’ actions.
• slack off (as you perhaps have observed on group assignments) if they share equally in the benefits, regardless of how much they contribute.
• Unless highly motivated and strongly identified with the group, people may free ride on others’ efforts.

Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.

Deindividuation

The uninhibited behavior that results can range from a food fight to vandalism or rioting

• This is called deindividuation
  • This often occurs when group participation makes people both aroused and anonymous

Deindividuation thrives, for better or for worse, in many settings

• Ex. anonymity of online discussion boards and blog comment sections can unleash mocking or cruel words

Research also shows that interacting with others can similarly have both bad and good effects

Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.

Group Polarization

LOQ: How can group interaction enable group polarization?

A powerful principle helps us understand our increasingly polarized world

• The beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others
  • This process is called group polarization

Group Polarization: the enhancement of a group’s prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group.

Groupthink

LOQ: How can group interaction enable groupthink?

Irving Janis studied the decision-making process leading to the ill-fated invasion

• discovered that the soaring morale of the recently elected president and his advisers fostered undue confidence
  • To describe this harmonious but unrealistic group thinking, Janis coined the term groupthink

Later studies showed that groupthink—fed by overconfidence, conformity, self-justification, and group polarization

• Despite the dangers of groupthink, two heads are often better than one

Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Antisocial Relations

Prejudice

LOQ: What is prejudice? How do explicit and implicit prejudice differ?

In prejudice, the ingredients in this three part mixture are

• negative emotions, such as hostility or fear.
• stereotypes, which are generalized beliefs about a group of people. Our stereotypes sometimes reflect reality
• a predisposition to discriminate—to act in negative and unjustifiable ways toward members of the group. Sometimes prejudice is blatant. Other times it is more subtle, taking the form of microaggressions

Prejudice: an unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.

Explicit and Implicit Prejudice

Psychologists study implicit prejudice by

• Testing for unconscious group associations: Tests in which people quickly pair a person’s image with a trait demonstrate that even people who deny any racial prejudice may harbor negative associations
• Considering unconscious patronization: In one experiment, White university women assessed flawed student essays they believed had been written by either a White or a Black student
• Monitoring reflexive bodily responses: Even people who consciously express little prejudice may give off telltale signals as their body responds selectively to an image of a person from another ethnic group

Targets of Prejudice

LOQ: What groups are frequent targets of prejudice?

Racial and Ethnic Prejudice

Other studies reveal prejudice that is not just subtle, but unconscious (implicit)

• as blatant interracial prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice linger

Our perceptions can also reflect implicit bias

Gender Prejudice

both implicit and explicit gender prejudice and discrimination persist

• In Western countries, we pay more to those (usually men) who care for our streets than to those (usually women) who care for our children.
• Gender bias even applies to beliefs about intelligence
  • people have tended to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers

LGBTQ Prejudice

Explicit anti-gay prejudice, though declining in Western countries, persists

Some evidence from a seurvy of LGBTQ Americans shows that:

• 39 percent reported having been “rejected by a friend or family member” because of their sexual orientation or gender identity
• 58 percent reported being “subject to slurs or jokes”
• 80 percent of LGBTQ adolescents reported sexual orientation-related harassment in the prior year. Gays and lesbians are also America’s most at-risk group for hate crime

Belief Systems Prejudice

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 4 in 10 Americans acknowledged “some feelings of prejudice against Muslims

Roots of Prejudice

LOQ: What are some social, emotional, and cognitive roots of prejudice, and what are some ways to eliminate prejudice?

Social Inequalities and Divisions

When some people have money, power, and prestige and others do not, the “haves” usually develop attitudes that justify things as they are

• This is a just-world phenomenon
• Stereotypes rationalize inequalities

Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup

• Social definition of who we are also states who we are not.
  • These people are called the outgroup
• An ingroup bias

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 notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for our negative emotions

• One form of evidence for this is that economically frustrated people tend to express heightened prejudice
• The second form is experiments that create temporary frustration and intensify prejudice.

Scapegoat Theory: the theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame.

Cognitive Shortcuts

Our greater recognition for individual own-race faces—called the other-race effect emerges during infancy

• We also have an own-age bias —better recognition memory for faces of our own age group

Other-Race Effect: the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more accurately than faces of other races. Also called the cross-race effect and the own-race bias.

Remembering Vivid Cases

We also simplify our world by employing heuristics—mental shortcuts that enable snap judgments.

• The availability heuristic is the tendency to estimate the frequency of an event by how readily it comes to mind
  • Vivid cases are memorable and they come to mind easily, so it’s no surprise that they feed our stereotypes.

Victim Blaming

Hindsight bias amplifies victim blaming

• It promotes d a blame-the-victim mentality among members of the first group

Aggression

LOQ: How does psychology’s definition of aggression differ from everyday usage? What biological factors make us more prone to hurt one another?

Prejudice hurts, but aggression sometimes hurts more

Aggressive behavior emerges from the interaction of biology and experience

• There are several factors that can cause this

Aggression: any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally.

The Biology of Aggression

Aggression varies too much between culture, eras, and people to be considered an instinct

• biology does influence aggression in 3 levels
  • Genetic, neural, and biochemical

Genetic Influences

Genes influence aggression

• Researchers continue to search for genetic markers in those who commit violent acts
• MAOA gene (sometimes called the warrior gene) helps break down neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin.
  • people who have low MAOA gene expression tend to behave aggressively when provoked

Neural Influences

Aggression is a complex behavior and there is no one spot that controls it in the brain

Biochemical Influences

Our genes engineer our individual nervous systems, which operate electrochemically

• Humans are less sensitive to hormonal changes

Alcohol also unleashes aggressive responses to frustrations

• aggression-prone people are more likely to drink, and to become violent when intoxicated
• slows brain activity that controls judgment and inhibitions.
• ust thinking you’ve imbibed alcohol can increase aggression

Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression

LOQ: What psychological and social-cultural factors may trigger aggressive behavior?

Aversive Events

Aversive stimuli—hot temperatures, physical pain, personal insults, foul odors, cigarette smoke, crowding—can evoke hostility

• This is a good example of the phenomenon of the frustration aggression principle
  • Frustration creates anger which can start aggression

When overheated we think, feel, and act more aggressively

Frustration-Aggression Principle: the principle that frustration—the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal—creates anger, which can generate aggression.

Reinforcement and Modeling

Aggression may naturally follow aversive events, but learning can alter natural reaction

• situations where experience has taught us that aggression pays, we are likely to act aggressively again.

Media Models for Violence

Parents are hardly the only aggression models

• In America, TV, films, video games and the Internet allows access to view violence

Media violence teaches us social scripts

• Watching risk-glorifying behavior increases real-life risk-taking

Social Script: a culturally modeled guide for how to act in various situations.

Do Violent Video Games Teach Social Scripts for Violence?

Research reveals biological, psychological, and social-cultural influences on aggressive behavior

• Complex behaviors, including violence, have many causes, making any single explanation an oversimplification

Historical trends suggest that the world is becoming less violent over time

• aggression arises from the interaction of persons and situations.

Prosocial Relations

Attraction

The Psychology of Attraction

LOQ: Why do we befriend or fall in love with some people but not others?

Proximity

Proximity breeds liking partly because of the mere exposure effect

• Repeated exposure to stimuli increases our liking for them

Mere Exposure Effect: the phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them.

Modern Matchmaking

Online matchmaking definitely expands the pool of potential mates

• Internet friendships often feel as real and important as in-person relationships.

Speed dating pushes the search for romance

• Many people think that 4 minutes is enough time to form a feeling about a conversational partner and to register whether the partner likes them

Researchers have found several findings ober speed dating:

• People who fear rejection often elicit rejection
• Given more options, people make more superficial choices
• Men wish for future contact with more of their speed dates; women tend to be choosier

Physical Attractiveness

Physical attractiveness also predicts how often people date and how popular they feel

• There are three findings that may be reassuring to find the importance of looks unfair and unenlightened
  • People’s attractiveness is surprisingly unrelated to their self-esteem and happiness
  • Strikingly attractive people are sometimes suspicious that praise for their work may simply be a reaction to their looks
  • For couples who were friends before lovers—who became romantically involved long after first meeting—looks matter less

Our feelings also influence our attractiveness judgments

• Most people perceive the person appealing traits as more physically attractive

Similarity

Proximity, attractiveness, and similarity are not the only determinants of attraction

• We like people who like us
  • This is explained with the reward theory of attraction

Romantic Love

LOQ: How does romantic love typically change as time passes?

Passionate Love

Passionate love mixes something new with something positive

• The two-factor theory of emotion explains this intense positive absorption of romantic love and assumes that
  • emotions have two ingredients—physical arousal plus cognitive appraisal.
  • arousal from any source can enhance one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label the arousal.

Passionate Love: an aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a romantic relationship.

Companionate Love

As love matures, it typically becomes a steadier companionate love

• This shift from passion to attachment may have adaptive value
• passion-facilitating hormones (testosterone, dopamine, adrenaline) subsides
  • oxytocin, remains, supporting feelings of trust, calmness, and bonding with the mate

One way to a gratifying and enduring relationship is equity

• When equity exists both partners receive in proportion to what they give and their chances for sustained and satisfying companionate love have been good

Sharing includes self-disclosure

• intimate details about ourselves—our likes and dislikes, our dreams and worries, our proud and shameful moments.

A third key to enduring love is positive support

• Relationship conflicts are inevitable, but hurtful communications are not.

Companionate Love: the deep affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined.

Equity: a condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it.

Self-Disclosure: the act of revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.

Altruism

LOQ: What is altruism? When are people most—and least— likely to help?

Altruism became a major concern of social psychologists after an especially vile act

Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of

Bystander Intervention

Darley and Latané assembled their findings into a decision scheme

• We will help only if the situation enables us first to notice the incident, then to interpret it as an emergency, and finally to assume responsibility for helping
• When more people shared responsibility for helping—when there was a diffusion of responsibility—any single listener was less likely to help.

Hundreds of additional experiments have confirmed this bystander effect

• The presence of bystanders reduces brain activation in the motor cortex, signaling that we don’t need to take action

The odds of helping are highest when:

• the person appears to need and deserve help.
• the person is in some way similar to us.
• the person is a woman.
• we have just observed someone else being helpful.
• we are not in a hurry. we are in a small town or rural area.
• we are feeling guilty.
• we are focused on others and not preoccupied.
• we are in a good mood.

Happiness breeds helpfulness. But it’s also true that helpfulness breeds happiness

• Helping those in need activates brain areas associated with reward
  • This helps explains why People who give money away are happier than those who spend it almost entirely on themselves

Bystander Effect: the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.

Helping—Self-Interest or Socialization?

LOQ: How do social exchange theory and social norms explain helping behavior?

Self-interest underlies all human interactions, that our constant goal is to maximize rewards and minimize costs

• Social psychologists call it social exchange theory
  • If the rewards exceed the costs, you will help
  • Some people s believe we help because we have been socialized to do so

The reciprocity norm is the expectation that we should return help, not harm, to those who have helped us

• Returning favors feels good, making the norm of reciprocity a pleasant strategy to help others

The social-responsibility norm is the expectation that we should help those who need our help even if the costs outweigh the benefits

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

Conflict and Peacemaking

Elements of Conflict

LOQ: How do social traps and mirror-image perceptions fuel social conflict?

To a social psychologist, a conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

• elements of conflict are much the same
• Among these processes are social traps and distorted perceptions.

Social Traps

In some situations, pursuing our personal interests also supports our collective well-being

• In other situations, we harm our collective well-being by pursuing our personal interests
  • These situations are social traps

Social traps challenge us to reconcile our right to pursue our personal well-being with our responsibility for the well-being of all

• Given effective regulations, communication, and awareness, people more often cooperate

Conflict: a perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas

Social Trap: a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each pursuing their self-interest rather than the good of the group, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.

Enemy Perceptions

Psychologists have noted that those in conflict have a curious tendency to form diabolical images of one another

• These images are called mirror-image perceptions
• Mirror-image perceptions can often feed a vicious cycle of hostility

Perceptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies

Mirror-Image Perceptions: mutual views often held by conflicting people, as when each side sees itself as ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil and aggressive.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment.

Promoting Peace

LOQ: What can we do to promote peace?

Contact

Negative contact increases disliking

• positive contact typically helps

Contact is not always enough

• When such mirror-image misperceptions are corrected, friendships may form and prejudices melt.

Cooperation

Muzafer Sherif settled a conflict and promoted superordinate goals

• reduced conflict was not mere contact, but cooperative contact

A shared predicament likewise can have a powerfully unifying effect on other groups as well.

• During these times cooperation can lead people to define a new, inclusive group that dissolves their former subgroups

The power of cooperative activity to make friends of former enemies has led psychologists to urge increased international exchange and cooperation.

Superordinate Goals: shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.

Communication

Mediators can replace a competitive win-lose orientation with a cooperative win-win orientation that leads to a mutually beneficial resolution

• If the two communicated their motives to one another, they could have hit on the win-win solution of one having all the juice, the other all the peel.

Conciliation

Charles Osgood advocated a strategy of Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction (GRIT)

• When GRIT is applied, one side first announces its recognition of mutual interests and its intent to reduce tension
• It then initiates one or more small, conciliatory acts.

GRIT: Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction—a strategy designed to decrease international tensions.