1. Social Facilitation (Chapter 12, Class, D. Mook) PDF

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Taught by Thomas Gilovich, cumulative notes from textbook readings, classroom lectures, and any supplementary documents mentioned in class. ...

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SOCIAL FACILITATION CLASS NOTES Social Facilitation: tendency for people to perform differently with the presence of other people ● Norman Triplett’s first social psychology experiment ○ competition machine in which children reeled in fishing lines as quickly as they could ■ 50% faster with co-actor ■ 25% no difference ■ 25% slower with co-actor ○ effect found with an audience, not just competitors (“co-actors”) ○ with mental, not just motor, tasks ■ Allport (1925) students found more arguments against philosophical statements ○ in other species ■ rats, dogs, pigeons, armadillos eat more alongside others ■ full chicken will eat 70% more when in the presence of co-actors ● consistent contradictions ○ Allport (1925) ■ students found more, but worse quality arguments ○ Allee & Masure (1936) ■ animals were slower to learn some mazes ○ Triplett (1897) ■ 25% performed worse with audience ● Robert Zajonc’s resolution ○ Three Elements (1965) ■ the mere presence of others increases physiological arousal ● why? → system preparedness to react ■ physiological arousal increases the likelihood of the dominant response ● normal tendencies ■ for well-learned tasks, the dominant response is the correct response → performance is facilitated ■ for novel tasks, the dominant response is not the correct response → performance is hindered ○ others influence behavior only through the actor’s awareness of others ○ knowledge of others rather than actual presence is critical ■ holograms, hallucinations, remote monitors would produce the same effects. hidden observers would not. ■ highlights importance of subjective rather than objective reality.

○ “pseudorecognition” paradigm ■ tendency to guess what you’re most familiar with is amplified by presence of others ● cockroach experiment alone coaction runway maze

40.6 110.4

33 129.5

alone audience runway maze

62.5 221.4

39.3 296.6

○ now apply the theory, not the findings, to the real world ■ pool playing study (McMichaels et al., 1982) ● researchers studied pool players and % of shots made, moved closer ○ good players improved with audience ○ poor players underperformed with audience ■ Chris Finnegan, British middleweight gold medalist at the 1968 Olympics ● failed to provide a urine sample for mandatory drug tests ● pee-shy ■ controversy ● Cottrell: Is it the mere presence or another person or someone who may be evaluating us (evaluation apprehension)? ○ pronouncing familiar words alone 9

blindfolded (mere presence) 9

audience 14

● Markus rebuttal (1978) ○ no doubt that evaluation apprehension is important moderator ■ but is mere presence really not enough? ○ familiar: dressing/undressing self ○ novel: dressing/undressing another

Well-Learned Tasks

Alone

Mere Presence

Audience

16.46

13.49

11.70

Novel Tasks

28.85

32.73

33.94

○ Schmitt, Gilovich, Goore, & Joseph (1986) ■ merely present observer blindfolded, head-phoned, and “sleeved” ● non-embarrassing tasks ○ well-learned: typing own name ○ novel: typing a code ● no mirror, camera, etc. in room ● conclusion: evaluation apprehension is not necessary for social facilitation (merely presence) ● implications ○ work groups: structure environment to fit task ■ factories vs ad agencies ● ex. open floor plan for Dunder Mifflin tasks ■ this is the purpose of training ● ex. Navy SEAL ○ perform under pressure ○ good stress versus bad stress (challenge v.s. threat) ■ related to social facilitation effect ■ Blascovitch and Berry-Mendes (2001) Biopsychosocial Model of Performance (depends on personal perception of resources and demands) ● challenge: our resources equal to the demands ○ stimulation of mycardium → increased cardiac output ○ release of epinephrine → vasodilation and decreased blood flow resistance ● threat: demands exceed our resources ○ stimulation of mycardium → increased cardiac output ○ increased adrenal-cortical activity → epinephrine release inhibited, no decreased blood flow resistance, increased BP ■ self-statement condition ● perform better when “I am excited,” worse when “I am anxious,” medium when no self-statement

CHAPTER 12: An Invitation to Social Psychology (pp. 3-12) ● homosexuality once seen as a threat to Western society ○ Alan Turing, founder of computer science ■ arrested for homosexuality in Britain, injected with hormones ■ committed suicide ○ homosexuality only “legalized” in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) ○ APA held homosexuality as mental illness until 1974 ○ “don’t ask, don’t tell” concept until 2011 ○ public opinion only reversed in past few years ● social psychology: the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations ○ Stanford Prison Experiment (1973) by Philip Zimbardo ■ “We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything it touches.” ○ often influences government policy ■ Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ● similar to other fields ○ personality psychology more focused on an individual’s consistent pattern of behavior ○ cognitive psychology more focused on memory and cognitive processes ● situational influences on our behavior are often the results of other people ○ Kurt Lewin ■ founder of modern social psychology ■ ex-physicist, believed that human behavior is function of field of forces ● dispositions + situation → behavior ○ Adolf Eichmann, notorious architect of Hitler’s plan, on trial ■ Hannah Arendt argues that he was only a bureaucrat doing his job ● “banality of evil” : argues that we are all capable of brutality in certain situations ○ Milgram Experiment (1963, 1974) ■ Stanley Milgram ● teacher and learner, increasing electric shocks ○ Seminarians as Samaritans ■ John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973) ■ collected information about students at Princeton Theological Seminary ● found that religious orientation was not good predictor of assistance ● rather, depended on whether or not they were in a hurry ● Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of the personal disposition ○ Lee Ross (1977)

○ dispositions: internal factors, such as beliefs, values, personality traits, and abilities, that guide a person’s behavior ○ channel factors: situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface, but impact behavior greatly (facilitating, blocking, or guiding) ■ coined by Kurt Lewin (1952) ■ e.g. Leventhal (1965) attempting to persuade Yale students to get tetanus inoculations ● lockjaw photos → 3% effective ● map with health center marked → 28% effective ○ channel factor created a concrete plan ■ Obama’s “Get Out the Vote” ● voters called about 1) whether they planned on voting 2) how to get to the polling place 3) transportation help ■ is a part of behavioral economics (subject between social psychology and economics) ● more people will participate in something when asked whether they wanted to opt-out Chapter 12: Groups (445-485) ● Terry Anderson captured in Lebanon, solitary confinement was worse than filth or physical punishment ○ humans historically lived in groups for survival reasons ■ led to psychological need for belonging to a group ● group: a collection of individuals who have relations to each other that make them interdependent to some degree ● Norman Triplett (1989) first to experiment with social facilitation: the positive or negative effect of the presence of others on performance ○ 40 children to reel fishing reels as fast as possible ○ same effects with coacting and with mere observers ○ same phenomenon in animals ○ Contradictions ■ Allport (1920) undergrads provided higher quality philosophical refutations when alone ■ inhibiting on arithmetic problems, memory tasks, maze learning ■ Zajonc’s Theory (1965): ● 1. mere presence of others makes a person more aroused ● 2. increases chances of a dominant response: in a person’s hierarchy of possible responses in any context, the response he or she is most likely to make ● 3. performance is facilitated on simple or well-learned task, but impaired on difficult or novel tasks ● tested with cockroaches, light, and grandstands: accurate ● tested with pool players: accurate ● evaluation apprehension: people’s concern over how others

may perceive or evaluate them ○ experiment with psuedo-recognition test on pronouncing nonsense words ■ alone: medium ■ with 2 observers: increased dominant responses ■ blindfolded observers: medium ○ Hazel Markus (1978): experiment “cancelled,” recorded times for subjects to put on both familiar and unfamiliar clothes ■ mere presence does have the same effect ○ distraction-conflict theory: being aware of another person’s presence creates a conflict between paying attention to that person and paying attention to a task, this causes arousal and produces the effects of social facilitation D. MOOK’S IN DEFENSE OF EXTERNAL VALIDITY External validity: “to what populations, settings, treatment variables, and measurement variables can this effect be generalized?” —Campbell and Stanley, 1967 ● term serves as a serious barrier to thought ○ assumed to be a necessary ideal rather than a limited subset of research ● originally defined with relevance to a particular kind of research: ○ applied experiments, specifically for sampling theory’s application to agricultural research ○ arguments of application do assume that experimental manipulation should represent implementation and target populations ● 4 “threats to external validity” ○ pretest effects on responsiveness ○ multiple-treatment interference ○ sampling bias/unrepresentative sample ■ solution = random sample from population of interest ○ patent artificiality of experimental setting ■ demand characteristics: subtle cues that make participants aware of experimenters’ expectations ● generally, we are not making generalizations, but testing them ○ Harlow’s wire mothers and terry-cloth mothers ■ did not conclude that “wild monkeys would make this choice” ■ argued a theoretical point, that the hunger-reduction interpretation of mother love would not work ● the purpose of experiments is not to generalize or predict real-life behavior in the real world: EXAMPLES ○ purpose 1: asking whether something can happen, not whether or not it typically does ■ person perception studies: Argyle experiment of impressions after

15 seconds or 5 minutes of interacting with someone with glasses, lipstick, or messy hair ● this bias is worth knowing, even under restricted conditions ● tells us about our causal schemata in perception ■ taking the results strictly as we find them ○ purpose 2: might specify that something ought to happen in the lab, then test it ■ Higgins/Marlatt tested tension-reduction view of alcohol consumption by making subjects anxious with threat of electric shock, found that anxious subjects did not drink more ● not meant to be a representative danger: self-doubt is not the same as a fear of electric shock ● rather, says that “the tension-reduction hypothesis, which predicted otherwise, is either false or in need of qualification” ■ applies to the hypothetico-deductive method (scientific inquiry proceeding by using inference to form a falsifiable hypothesis, then modifying and improving theories later on) ■ hypothesis that children acquire grammar through parental reactions, tested by Brown/Hanlon (1970), ● studied, specifically, well-educated families in Boston that allowed psychologists to live with and record them ● cannot use to generalize, but plays a part in establishing the contingencies ■ intended conclusion about a theory, not a population ■ sometimes, unrepresentative samples are of interest ● ex. achievements of mnemonists rather than others ○ purpose 3: demonstrate the power of a phenomenon by showing that it happens even under unnatural lab conditions ■ experimental settings are meant to isolate a factor ■ Milgram (1974) experiment ordering participants to deliver electric shocks in a lab setting ● Argyle argues that stepping into a laboratory means stepping outside of cultural norms and conventions ○ however, then Milgram has succeeded in how easy it is to step out of normal culture in a laboratory setting ● other argument that b/c experiment is taking place in a labm that it might be dangerous ○ purpose 4: to not generalize to real life at all, but to contribute to the understanding of a process ■ dark adaptation occurs first with a cone phase then a rod phase ● Hecht (1934) had a human subject indicating yes/no on seeing a red dot in a dark room ○ meant to dissect the phenomena ● no “checklist” of thinking, a case by case situation for conclusions...