Psych 1010 Chapter 13 Social Psych - PUNK ROCK PSYCHOLOGY

Social Psychology
• Social psychology
– scientific study of ways in which thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors of one individual are
influenced by real, imagined, or inferred behavior
or characteristics of other people

SOCIAL COGNITION
• Social cognition
– collecting and assessing of information about
other people
– being influenced by other people
– organizing and interpreting information about
them to form first impressions
– understanding their behavior
– determining levels of attraction

Forming Impressions
• schemata
• stereotypes
• primacy effect
• Impression Formation

Forming Impressions
• Schema
– organized set of beliefs and expectations based on
past experience
– presumed to apply to all members of that
category
– influential in information noticed and
remembered

Forming Impressions
• Primacy effect
– earliest impressions
– early information about someone weighs more
heavily than later information in influencing
impression of that person

Self-fulfilling Prophecy
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
– schemata helps create behavior expected from
other people
– process in which person’s expectation about
another elicits behavior from second person that
confirms expectation

Stereotypes
• Stereotype
– set of characteristics presumed to be shared by all
members of a social category
– shapes impressions of others

Attribution
• Attribution theory
– observations about how people go about
attributing causes to behavior

Attribution
• Social interaction is filled with occasions that
invite people to make judgments about causes
of behavior
• When something unexpected or unpleasant
occurs, people wonder about it and try to
understand it

Forming Impressions
• Fritz
Heider
– behavior attributed to either internal or external
causes, but not both

Forming Impressions
• Harold
Kelley
– three kinds of information about the behavior:
distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus

Forming Impressions
•Fundamental attribution error
•tendency to attribute others’ behavior to causes within
themselves
•part of actor-observer bias
•Actor-observer bias
•tendency to explain behavior of others as caused by
internal factors, while attributing one’s own behavior to
external forces

Forming Impressions
• Defensive attribution
– tendency to attribute successes to own efforts or
qualities and failures to external factors
• Just-world hypothesis
– people get what they deserve
– bad things happen to bad people, and good things
happen to good people
– Some confirmed cultural differences

Interpersonal Attraction
• Attraction and tendency to like someone else
closely linked to
– proximity
– physical attractiveness
– similarity
– exchange
– intimacy

Interpersonal Attraction
• Proximity
– most important factor in determining attraction
– more likely and more frequent interaction
– cross-cultural, cross-ethnic agreement suggests
possibility of universal standard of beauty

Interpersonal Attraction
• Physical attractiveness
– influences conclusions reached about person’s
character
– influences presumptions about being intelligent,
interesting, happy, kind, sensitive, moral, and
successful
– influences presumptions about being better
spouses and sexually responsive

Interpersonal Attraction
• Attraction children and parents
• mothers of more attractive infants show
children more affection and to play with them
more

Interpersonal Attraction
• Do you agree?
• Attractive children
– better adjusted
– display greater intelligence
– treated more leniently by teachers
• Attractive adults
– better health
– slightly more intelligent
– self-confident
– more hirable and productive by employers

Interpersonal Attraction
• People usually choose friends and partners
who are
– close to their own level of attractiveness
– Similar in attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds,
and beliefs

Interpersonal Attraction
• Reward theory of attraction
– people tend to like others who make them feel
rewarded and appreciated
– based on the concept of exchange

Interpersonal Attraction
• Exchanges
– work only when fair or equitable
– equitable when individuals receive equally from
each other
– this type of accounting may harm relationship
– relationship is likely to continue when everyone
finds interactions more rewarding than costly

Interpersonal Attraction
• Intimacy
– genuine closeness to and trust in another person
– Intimate communication based on process of
gradual self-disclosure
– pacing of disclosure important

The Nature of Attitudes
• Attitude
– relatively stable organization of beliefs, feelings,
and tendencies toward something or someone
– important because they often influence behavior

The Nature of Attitudes
• Major components
– evaluative beliefs
– feelings about object
– behavior tendencies toward object

The Nature of Attitudes
• Self-monitoring
– tendency for individual to observe situation for
cues about how to react
• Attitudes – behavior relationship not always
straightforward
– high self-monitoring override their attitudes to
behave with others‘expectations

The Nature of Attitudes
• Children
– rewarded when they please parents, and
punished when they displease
– create enduring attitudes through early
experiences
– mimic the behavior of their parents and peers
– shaped by teachers, friends, and even famous
people
– influenced by mass media

Prejudice and Discrimination
• Prejudice
– attitude or unfair, intolerant, or unfavorable view
of group of people
• Discrimination
– behavior or unfair act or series of acts directed
against entire group of people or individual
members of that group

Prejudice and Discrimination
• Prejudice and discrimination do not always
occur together!

The Nature of Attitudes
• Ultimate attribution error
– tendency for person with stereotyped beliefs
about particular group of people to make internal
attributions for shortcomings and external
attributions for successes
• Stereotyped beliefs and prejudiced attitudes
– strong emotions, such as dislike, fear, hatred, or
loathing and corresponding negative behavioral
tendencies such as avoidance, hostility, and
criticism

Source of Prejudice
• Frustration-aggression theory
– prejudice result of frustrations
– hostility displace onto those “lower” on social
scale
– prejudice and discrimination result
– victims of displaced aggression blamed for
problems of times

Source of Prejudice
• Authoritarian personality
– source of prejudice in bigots
– cognitive misers
– oversimplification
– association with prejudiced people

Source of Prejudice
• Racism
– belief that members of certain racial or ethnic
groups are innately inferior

Source of Prejudice
• Strategies for reducing prejudice and
discrimination:
– recategorization
– controlled processing
– improving contact between groups

Changing Attitudes
• To be persuaded, person must:
– pay attention to message
– comprehend it
– accept it as convincing

Changing Attitudes
• Comprehending and accepting the message
– influenced by message itself and way in which it is
presented

Changing Attitudes
• Communication model of persuasion
spotlights four key elements to achieve these
goals:
– source
– message itself
– medium of communication
– characteristics of the audience

Changing Attitudes
• Cognitive dissonance
– perceived inconsistency between two cognitions
– creates unpleasant psychological tension, which
motivates attempt to resolve dissonance
– sometimes changing attitude is easiest way to
reduce discomfort

Changing Attitudes
• Other ways to reduce cognitive dissonance
– increase number of consonant elements
– increase thoughts consistent with one another

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
• Social influence
• process by which others affect perceptions,
attitudes, and actions

Cultural Influences
• Culture exerts an enormous influence on
attitudes and behavior, and culture is itself a
creation of people.
• Can you name any of these influences on
attitudes?

Cultural Influences
•Culture influences
•formal instruction
•modeling and imitation
•acceptance of cultural truisms
•norms

Cultural Influences
• Cultural assimilator
– strategy for perceiving the norms and values of
another group
– technique for understanding other cultures

Conformity
• Something to consider.
– Accepting cultural norms should not be confused with
conformity.

Conformity
• Conformity
– conflict between individual and group that is
resolved when individual preferences or beliefs
yield to norms or expectations of larger group

Conformity
• Asch
– conducted the first systematic study of conformity
– demonstrated that under some circumstances,
people will conform to group pressures even if this
action forces them to deny obvious physical
evidence

Asch’s Experiment on Conformity

Conformity
• Factors influencing likelihood that person will
conform
– characteristics of the situation
– characteristics of the person
• Situational factors include
– size of the group
– degree of unanimity
– the nature of the task
• Personal characteristics
– influence conforming behavior

Conformity
•The more a person is:
•attracted to group
•expects future interaction with its members
•holds a position of relatively low status
•does not feel completely accepted
•the more that person tends to conform

Compliance
• Compliance
– change of behavior in response to explicitly stated
request
– foot-in-the-door effect
– lowball procedure
– door-in-the-face effect

Obedience
• Obedience
– compliance with direct order, generally from
person in authority, such as police officer,
principal, or parent

Obedience
• When ordered to do something and left alone
– less likely to obey than if watched
– see self as agent of another person’s wishes and
not responsible for obedient actions or their
consequences

Deindividuation
• Deindividuation
– people respond as anonymous parts of larger
group, not as individuals
• Contributing factors
– anonymity
– mob behavior
– snowball effect

Altruistic Behavior
• Altruistic behavior
– helping behavior not linked to personal gain
• Helping behavior influenced by two sets of
factor
– those in situation
– those in individual

Altruism
•Bystander effect
•likelihood person will help someone else in
trouble decreases as number of bystanders
present increases
•Ambiguity
•any factors that make it harder for others to
recognize genuine emergency reduce probability
of altruistic actions

Groups and Decision Making
• There is a tendency in American society to
turn important decisions over to groups

Groups and Decision Making
• Many people trust group decisions more than
decisions made by individuals
– Dynamics of social interaction within groups
sometimes conspire to make group decisions less
sound than those made by individuals

Groups and Decision Making
• Polarization
– tendency for people to become more extreme in
their attitudes as a result of group discussion
• Risky shift
– one aspect of polarization

Groups and Decision Making
• Factors that influence group effectiveness
– fit between requirements of task and skills of
group members
– the ways in which group members interact
– group size
– cohesiveness of the group

Groups and Decision Making
• High cohesiveness
– people in a group like one another and feel
committed to goals of group,
– can undermine quality of group decision making

Groups and Decision Making
•Groupthink − a process that occurs when members of a group:
•like one another
•have similar goals
•are isolated, leading them to ignore alternatives and not
criticize group consensus

Leadership
• Leaders are important to the effectiveness of a
group or organization
– great-person theory
– right person in right place at right time theory

Leadership
• Fred Fiedler
– contingency theory of leader effectiveness
– transactional view of leadership

Leadership
• Fiedler’s theory and personal characteristics of
leaders
– task oriented
– relationship oriented
– contingency view of leadership
– no such thing as ideal leader for all situations

Leadership
• Most effective leadership style depends on
three sets of situational factors:
– nature of task (clearly structured or ambiguous)
– relationship between leader and group (good or
bad personal relations with group members)
– leader’s ability to exercise great or little power
over group

Leadership
• Sternberg
– systems approach to understanding leadership
– certain essential traits necessary for effective
leadership: wisdom, intelligence, and creativity,
synthesized (WICS)

Leadership
Across Cultures
• Emphasis on the importance of individual
leaders applies in individualistic cultures like
U.S.
• In collectivist cultures cooperation and
interdependence among group members
valued

Leadership
• Women in leadership positions
– Leadership styles of men and women can vary
considerably
– Women tend to have a more democratic,
collaborative, and interpersonally oriented style of
managing