Social Psychology (Chapter 8)

1. Social Psychology (Chapter 8) Second Lecture Outline: Attibutions and Attitudes Attitude change Conformity

2. Social Cognition: • How we perceive and interpret information from ourselves and others • What attributions are made below?

3. Attributions • People are motivated to seek causes and explanations of behavior related to situations and dispositions • You ask someone to dance. They say no. Why? • Because I am a loser (personal attribution) • Because they are talking to friends or do not like the music (situational attribution) • Someone bumps you in line. Why? • Because they are an !@?&#!!.. This is a fundamental attribution bias where we over-emphasize internal causes behavior • They may have tripped and are not “evil”

4. Self-serving bias • Internalize success and externalize blame • Winning a hockey game because “we’re a good team”, losing because they were “lucky” or you “did not get the bounces” • Self-handicapping is the opposite, e.g., pass a test because “it was easy”, fail “because I am stupid” • Just-world hypothesis: People make sense of senseless events based on their biases, e.g., tornado hits a particular region, people say it was fate and deserved by those people

5. Attitude • Who here has had a market survey conducted over the telephone? What kinds of questions? What products or issues? • All assessed attitudes, defined as learned, stable, relatively enduring evaluation of a person, object, or idea • Cognitive, behavioral, and affective components

6. Aspects of attitudes • Cognitive dissonance: Attitudes conflict, therefore must change to create balance • O.J. Simpson: Positive (great football player) vs. negative (domestic violence history), therefore you think either he is innocent or you now hate him • Observational learning or modelling • Michael Jordon wears Nike shoes • But Joe DiMaggio and coffee makers? • Beer commercials at the beach: Classical conditioning or modeling?

7. Attitude change • Central route: provide a direct argument • Cigarette packaging (the latest: smoking causes impotence] • Physical fitness ads “participaction” • Direct appeals for votes during elections • Peripheral route: indirect messages • Smoking posters in doctor’s offices • Seeing active adults • “Photo-ops” kissing babies, no silly hats

8. Credibility and likability: Who would you hire to be in your running shoe commercial? Why?

9. Coercive Attitude change: Cults, pressure sales tactics • Person is put under physical or emotional distress, e.g., eat, sleep, activity disrupted • Problems are reduced to a single issue which is repeated, e.g., do you want to be happy? Have a clean house? • Leaders offer unconditional love, acceptance, and attention • New identity results from group or purchase of product, e.g., cult identity, “new product owner”, “Crotch-laker” • Entrapment: Foot-in-the-door technique, e.g., criticise your country, let sales-person in your door • Access to other information is controlled, e.g., cults are isolated, sales have to be “right now”, “in the next 50 seconds”

10. In the early 1970's, two individuals (my task partner and myself) from the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the Kingdom of Heaven) incarnated into (moved into and took over) two human bodies that were in their forties. I moved into a male body, and my partner, who is an Older Member in the Level Above Human, took a female body. (We called these bodies "vehicles," for they simply served as physical vehicular tools for us to wear while on a task among humans. They had been tagged and set aside for our use since their birth.) -- Website excert On its own, is this information persuasive?

11. Certain psychological themes which recur in these various historical contexts also arise in the study of cults. Cults can be identified by three characteristics: 1.a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power; 2.a process called coercive persuasion or thought reform; 3.economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

12. Basic principles of a group • A number of individuals who interact • Social facilitation: joggers speed up • Social inhibition: first tee in golf • Arousal facilitates well-learned responses but inhibits novel responses • Exam stress wipes out newly learned material but can enhance well-learned strategies and material • Distraction-conflict: “Hey Mom watch!” • Conformity: People tend to go along with the group, want to be liked, get along, identify with others

13. Other group processes • Social loafing: Individual energy expended goes down as the number of people goes up, e.g., your science partner “goofs off” in group of 4, but not 2 • Illusion of unanimity: Group polarization, when in groups, views become extreme • Conflict resolution: Is this at the expense or benefit of yourself and the other side? • Groupthink: Isolated, biased leadership, and high stress can lead to unusual and close-minded decisions. Dissenters have pressure to conform