Chapter 14

1. Chapter 14 Social Psychology

2. Social Psychology: Individuals Among Others • The ways in which the environment influences behavior and mental processes. • Social psychology studies the nature and causes of behavior and mental processes in social situations.

3. Attitudes • Attitudes are comprised of: • Cognitive evaluations. • Feelings. • Behavioral tendencies. • Attitudes are learned, and they affect behavior. • Attitudes can change, but not easily.

4. Attitudes • The definition of attitude implies that our behavior is consistent with our cognitions. • The links between attitudes (A) and behaviors (B) tend to be weak to moderate. • A number of factors influence the likelihood what we can predict behavior from attitudes: • Specificity: We can better predict specific behavior from specific attitudes than from global attitudes. • Strength of attitudes. • Vested interest. • Accessibility: brought easily to mind. • Attitudes with a strong emotional impact are more accessible.

5. Attitudes • Origins of Attitudes. • Attitudes are learned or derived from cognitive processes. • Attitudes can be acquired by observing others. • Cognitive Appraisal. • We judge new ideas in terms of how much they deviate from out existing attitudes.

6. Attitudes • The Persuasive Message • Research suggests that familiarity breeds content, not contempt. • The more complex the stimuli, the more likely it is that frequent exposure will have favorable effects. • Forewarning creates a kind of psychological immunity. • Product claims that admit their product’s weak points in addition to highlighting its strength are most believable. • Fear appeal seems to work.

7. Attitudes • The Persuasive Communicator • Persuasive communicators are characterized by expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, or similarity to their audience. • Selective avoidance and selective exposure. • People tend to seek communicators whose outlook coincides with their own. • The Context of the Message • When we are in a good mood, we apparently are less likely to evaluate the situation carefully. • Agreement and praise are more effective ways to encourage others to embrace your views.

8. Attitudes • The Persuaded Audience. • People with high self-esteem and low social anxiety are more likely to resist social pressure. • The Foot-in-the-Door Technique. • Research suggests that people who accede to small requests become more amenable to larger ones for a variety of reasons including: • Conformity. • Self-perception as the kind of people who help in this way.

9. Social Perception • Factors that contribute to social perception include: • Primacy and Recency Effects • First impressions are important. • People tend to infer traits from behaviors. • Attribution Theory • An attribution is an assumption about why people do things. We make inferences about the motives and traits of others through observation of their behavior.

10. Social Perception • Dispositional and Situational Attributions. • Dispositional attributions ascribe a person’s behavior to internal factors such as personality traits and free will. • Situational attributions attribute a person’s actions to external factors such as social influence or socialization.

11. Social Perception • The Fundamental Attribution Error. • In individualistic cultures, we tend to attribute other people’s behavior primarily to internal factors such as personality traits, attitudes, and free will. • People tend to focus on the behavior of others rather than on the circumstances surrounding their behavior.

12. Social Perception • The Actor-Observer Effect. • The tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to dispositional factors and our own behavior to situational influences.

13. Social Perception • The Self-serving Bias. • people are likely to ascribe their successes to internal, dispositional factors but their failures to external, situational influences. • There are exceptions to the self-serving bias: • When we work in groups we tend to take credit for the group’s success but to pin the blame for failure on someone else. • Depressed people are more likely to ascribe their failures to internal factors, even when external factors are mostly to blame. • Gender bias: Men are more likely to interpret a woman’s smile or friendliness toward a man as flirting.

14. Social Perception: Body Language • Body language is nonverbal language; it refers to the meanings we infer from the ways in which people carry themselves and the gestures they make. • Touching

15. Social Perception: Body Language • Gazing and Staring • When other people look us squarely in the eye we may assume that they are being assertive or open with us. • Avoidance of eye contact may suggest deception or depression. • A hard stare is interpreted as a provocation or a sign of anger.

16. Figure 14.1Diagram of an Experiment in Hard Staring and Avoidance In the Greenbaum and Rosenfeld (1978) study, the confederate of the experimenter stared at some drivers and not at others. Recipients of the stares drove across the intersection more rapidly once the light turned green. Why?

17. Interpersonal Attraction: Physical Attractiveness • Many aspects of beauty appear to be cross-cultural. • In one study, men found attractive the following qualities: • Large eyes. • High cheekbones. • Narrow jaws. • In a study on what women find attractive the researchers discovered that tallness was an asset. • Preferences for body weight and shape may be more culturally determined. • “Pretty Is as Pretty Does?” • Both men and women are perceived as more attractive when they are smiling. • Women tend to prefer men who are outgoing, self-assertive, and self-confident. • Men tend to respond negatively to women who show self-assertion and social dominance.

18. Figure 14.3Can You Ever Be Too Thin? Research suggests that most college women believe that they are heavier than is ideally attractive. However, men actually prefer women to be a bit heavier than women assume the men would like them to be. And what of the college men? They tend to believe that their physiques are just about where they should be; college women, however, would prefer them to be somewhat slimmer.

19. Interpersonal Attraction: The Matching Hypothesis • People tend to date people who are similar to themselves in physical attractiveness. • One motive for this seems to be fear of rejection by more attractive people. • Research findings show that: • Nearly 94% of single European American men have European American women as partners. • About 82% of African American men have African American women as partners. • About 83% of the women and men in the study chose partners within five years of their own age and of the same or a similar religion.

20. Interpersonal Attraction: Reciprocity • Reciprocity is a powerful determinant of attraction. • We tend to return feelings of admiration. • We tend to be more open, warm and helpful when we are interacting with strangers who seem to like us.

21. Love • Triangular model of love proposed by Sternberg includes three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. • Intimacy • Passion • Commitment • Passion is the most crucial in short-term relationships. • Intimacy and commitment are more important in enduring relationships.

22. Figure 14.4The Triangular Model of Love According to this model, love has three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. The ideal of consummate love consists of romantic love plus commitment.

23. Love • The ideal form of love combines all three and is called consummate love. • Romantic love is characterized by passion and intimacy. • Passion involves fascination, sexual craving, and the desire for exclusiveness. • Intimacy involves caring-championing the interests of the loved one, even if it entails sacrificing one’s own.

24. Social Influence • Social influence focuses on ways in which people alter the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of others. • Obedience to Authority:The Milgram Studies • Subjects in the study were designated as the “teacher” and delivered shocks to the “learners” (there really were no shocks). • Results indicate that of the 40 men in the project 65% complied with the scientist throughout the study.

25. Figure 14.5The “Aggression Machine” In the Milgram studies on obedience to authority, pressing levers on the “aggression machine” was the operational definition of aggression. When the “learner” made an error, the experimenter prodded the “teacher” to deliver a painful electric shock.

26. Social Influence • Why Did People in the Milgram Study Obey the Experimenters? • Socialization: • people are taught from a young age to obey authority figures. • Lack of social comparison. • Perception of legitimate authority. • The foot-in-the-door technique. • Inaccessibility of values. • Buffers in the experiment.

27. Social Influence • Conformity: We conform when we change our behavior in order to adhere to social norms. • The Asch Line Study. • One subject and the rest are confederates. Does the subject conform to the group though they are obviously wrong? • 75% agreed with the majority’s wrong answer at least once. • Factors That Influence Conformity: • Belonging to a collectivist rather than an individualist society. • The desire to be liked by other members of the group. • Low self-esteem. • Social shyness. • Lack of familiarity with the task.

28. Figure 14.6Cards Used in the Asch Study on Conformity Which line on card B—1, 2, or 3—is the same length as the line on card A? Line 2, right? But would you say “2” if you were a member of a group and six people answering ahead of you all said “3”? Are you sure?

29. Group Behavior • Social Facilitation • the effects on performance that result from the presence of others. • The presence of others increases our levels of arousal and motivation. • At high levels of arousal our performance of simple tasks is improved. • Our performance of complex responses may be impaired. • Evaluation apprehension: Our performance before a group is affected not only by the presence of others but also by concern that they are evaluating us.

30. Group Behavior • Social loafing • impaired performance because of the group. • Diffusion of responsibility: each person may feel less obligated to help because others are present.

31. Group Behavior • Group Decision Making • Social decision schemes are rules that govern much of group decision making. Examples include: • The majority wins scheme. • The truth wins scheme. • The two-thirds majority scheme.

32. Group Behavior • Group Decision Making • Polarization and the “Risky Shift”. • Polarization: is the group effect of taking an extreme position. • Groups tend to take greater risks than those their members would take as individuals.

33. Group Behavior • Groupthink: • members tend to be more influenced by • group cohesiveness • a dynamic leader • threat is a source of stress =>group members tend not to consider all their options carefully. • Contributions to groupthink flaws include: • Feelings of invulnerability. • The group’s belief in its rightness. • Discrediting of information contrary to the group’s decision. • Pressures on group members to conform. • Stereotyping of members of the out-group.

34. Group Behavior • Mob Behavior and Deindividuation • Deindividuation is a state of reduced self-awareness and lowered concern for social evaluation. • Many factors lead to deindividuation including: • Anonymity. • Diffusion of responsibility. • Arousal due to noise and crowding. • Focus on emerging group norms rather than on one’s own values. • Under these conditions crowd members behave more aggressively than they would as individuals.

35. Altruism and the Bystander Effect • Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others. • Many factors contribute to helping behavior: • Being in a good mood. • Empathic personality. • Believe that an emergency exists. • Assume the responsibility to act. • Know what to do. • Victim characteristics: (unaccompanied) female, friend/acquaintance, perceived similarity.

36. LIFE CONNECTIONS: Understanding and Combating Prejudice • Prejudice is an attitude toward a group that leads people to evaluate members of that group negatively-even though they have never met them. • Cognitively, prejudice is linked to expectations that members of the target group will behave poorly. • Emotionally, prejudice is associated with negative feelings such as fear, dislike, or hatred. • Behaviorally, prejudice is connected with avoidance, aggression and discrimination. • Discrimination: negative behavior that results from prejudice.

37. LIFE CONNECTIONS: Understanding and Combating Prejudice • Stereotypes: are prejudices about certain groups that lead people to view members of those groups in a biased fashion. • Some stereotypes are positive rather than negative. • Attractiveness is positively correlated with popularity, social skills, and sexual experience. • Attractive people are more likely to be judged innocent of crimes in mock jury experiments. • When they are found guilty they are given less severe sentences.