Unit 3 PSY 210 - Karla Gingerich PDF

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Karla Gingerich...

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Unit 3: Social Psychology

Introduction to Social Psych Social Psych: study of how others and/or the environment influence individual behavior ● Why does one person act differently in different situations? ● Different from sociology - Emphasis on individual rather than groups ● Different from personality psych - focus on how most people would react in a given situation rather than differences between people Social Psychologists ● Research ● Teach at universities ● Program development/evaluation ● Work as consultants (Advertising, Politics, Military, Schools, Sports) Person vs Situation ● Did your personality or situation cause you to act in a certain way ● Big debate about the extent that situational influences override individual traits ● Kurt Lewin - interactionism: personality and environment work together to predict behavior ○ B = f(P, E) Attribution ● What caused this observable behavior? ● Situational attribution - something external (they cut me off because they are running late) ● Dispositional attribution - something about the person (they cut me off because they are an asshole) ● The fundamental attribution error (FAE) - we are much more likely to make dispositional attributions about others actions Social Norms ● Implicit or unspoken rules ● Direct behavior in situations ● Most people obey them most of the time Deindividuation ● Arousal + decreased SA(self awareness) = more responsive to group norms and behaviors ● Abandon normal self-restraints and inhibition ● Lose feeling of personal responsibility ● Ex: rioting, kids taking unattended candy when anonymous or in a group

Article: Good lamps are the best police ● Experiment 1: cheating ○ Game in a room with lights and in a room with dim lights ● Experiment 2: ○ Online game with and without sunglasses ● Experiment 3: ○ Wearing sunglasses led to selfishness because there was greater perceived anonymity ● Implications ○ The power of situation! ○ Changing the situation can change behavior

The Self Self concept: attitude you have about yourself, your evaluation of yourself ● “The individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person’s attributes and who and what the self is” (Baumeister, 1999) ● Differences in self concept ○ Age, culture ● Development: ○ 18 months: recognize own mirror reflection (rouge test)\ ○ 2 ish years: recognize self in photos, more complex emotions ○ 3-4 years: factual self-descriptions (physical or things they like to do) ○ Elementary school: social comparisons, evaluative descriptions (im good or bad at this) ○ Adolescence: abstract, rich descriptions ● Culture: ○ Individualism: personal self-descriptions, individuality nurtured ○ Collectivism: social self-descriptions, group goals above individual goals ● Self-esteem: feelings of self-worth ○ Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: 10 item self report, 4 point likert scale, global self esteem ○ 3-6 ish: SE is very high ■ Cognitive limitations (egocentrism) ■ High parental support ○ Elementary school: slight decline in SE but still pretty high ■ Peers important ■ Can use life experiences as a gauge ○ Early adolescence: lower SE ■ “Looking glass self” dominates ■ More focus on others evaluations ■ Gender differences become significant

Social Cognition “The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the social world” Cognitive processing ● Two modes: systematic 1 and 2 ○ 2-Controlled (e.g., count the number of people in the room) ■ Conscious ■ Intentional ■ Voluntary ■ Effortful ○ 1-Automatic (e.g., this room feels empty) ■ Non-conscious - unaware ● Preconscious atomaticity ■ Unintentional ■ Involuntary ● Postconscious atomaticity ■ Effortless ● The two work in parallel ● Automatic is in the background, what happens first, we’re naturally lazy thinkers ● Controlled is in the foreground but doesn’t happen as often ○ You direct it ○ Serial ○ Requires motivation and effort ● The two systems influence each other Heuristics ● Heuristics are mental shortcuts ● Availability heuristic ○ People rely on immediate examples that come to mind ○ Judgements weighted toward information that is more vivid/emotional ○ Availability increases with ■ Emotionality ■ Recency ■ Ease of visualization ■ Vividness ● Anchoring Heuristic ○ Humans rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions ○ Anchoring is extremely hard to resist no matter what - absurdness, randomness, and knowledge that it is an anchor have no effect ● Representativeness Heuristic

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Humans tend to judge the probability of an event by finding a “comparable known” If two things seem similar we assume that their probabilities are similar Base rate neglect - ignoring basic rates of how likely/common things are Conjunction fallacy - any one thing on its own is more likely than two things together

Biases ● Negativity bias ○ Pay more attention to and give more weight to negative information ○ Loss aversion: losses feel worse than gains feel good ○ Endowment effect: things we own are perceived as more valuable ● Optimism bias ○ Positive events are overestimated ○ Negative events are underestimated ● Planning fallacy ○ Thinking we can get more done in the allotted time than we actually can ● Sunk cost fallacy ○ Sunk cost: money, time, effort we have put in that we cannot get back ○ If we’ve sunk any cost we will continue to put in our resources because we dont want to “waste” any of what we’ve already invested ● Confirmation Bias ○ We look for and notice any information that will verify our beliefs ● Counterfactual thinking ○ Tendency to create alternatives to events that have already happened ○ Downward: imagine how it could have been worse ○ Upward: imagine how it could have been better ● Illusory thinking ○ Illusory correlation: associate random events together when they are not actually correlated ○ Illusion of control: idea that chance events are subject to our influence

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Verbal communication Nonverbal communication environment

Self-presentation ● ● ● ● ●

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Behavior intended to create, modify, or maintain an impression of ourselves in the minds of others Conscious or unconscious A reason why public and private behavior differ The hand washing study - when there was somebody else in the bathroom people washed their hands way more Functions: ○ Facilitate social interaction ○ Social acceptance ○ Self-enhancement Self-Handicapping ○ Put up barriers to success ○ Explain away failure ○ Protect our self esteem ○ Behavioral vs. verbal ■ Usually men are more likely to behaviorally handicap Self-Monitoring ○ Reliance on internal or external cues to guide behavior ○ High self-monitors: skilled social actors, more likely to change behavior situationally ○ Low self monitors: less attentive to social cues, more consistent across situations

How we view others Facebook: ● 58% 18-34 yr olds are active on FB, and 94% of college students ● 358 friends on average ● Avg. female user: 10 hrs a week ● Avg. male user: 7.5 hrs a week ● About 70% report “lurking” ● Relationship Satisfaction: ○ Males who are satisfied usually have partnered status ○ Females who are satisfied usually have profile pic with partner ● Jobs: ○ Observers browsed employed college student profiles for 5-10 min and judged FFM traits ○ Students completed personality and IQ test ○ Observers judgments of personality were more predictive of job performance 6 months later ● Why so popular? ○ Perhaps evolutionary psychology ○ We are unusually social animals

○ Social significance of gossip ○ Online social networking = efficient gossip engine ● OSN could be increasing the size of our effective friend groups ● OSN could change the way we operate as social creatures *Article* ● Idealized virtual-identity hypothesis - we will cherry pick how we present ourselves ● Extended real life hypothesis - we will present ourselves as we actually are ● The extended real-life hypothesis was supported ● Accuracy was strongest for extraversion and openness but lowest for neuroticism

Social Influence Conformity *change in attitude or behavior as a result of social pressure, pressure to behave in ways consistent with social norms* ● Injunctive social norms: what we should be, ought to be doing ● Descriptive social norms: what people are actually doing ● Opinion of conformists: usually negative, sometimes positive when it comes to community, responsiveness, being a team player ● We engage in conforming behavior much more often than we think we do ● Introspection illusion: we believe that social influence affects others more than it affects us, we underestimate the extent to which others’ actions influence us ● Asch’s research on conformity - judging line lengths ● 2 main motives: ○ Informational: The group is right and I am wrong - want to be right ○ Normative: I am right but I don’t want to rock the boat - want to be liked ● Situations where we are more likely to reform ○ Crisis ○ When others are experts ○ When it is important to be accurate ● Influential factors ○ Group size: at least 3 people ○ Unanimity ○ Accountability (negatively correlated with conformity) ○ Social power (negatively correlated) ○ Public vs private ○ Age (younger are more likely to conform) ○ Gender ■ Research used to show that women conformed more but now there is no difference ■ Research used to be more bias and women had different societal expectations Compliance

*getting others to say “yes” to requests* ● Friendship/Liking ○ What leads us to like others? ■ Attractiveness ■ Similarities ● Incidental similarity ■ Flattery ■ Contact/exposure ● Commitment/Consistency ○ Foot-in-the-door technique (consistency): small requests first, bigger requests to follow ○ Lowball (commitment): good deal is offered, but then it is changed (ex: car salesman ○ Labeling (consistency): tell them these good traits about them and them ask them to do something that falls in line with those traits ● Reciprocity: you get someone to feel like they owe you, guilt induction ○ Door-in-the-face technique: big request first, small request next - they feel bad that they’ve said no ○ “That’s not all” technique: before they say no, throw in something else ● Scarcity: making it seem like it is a special opportunity ○ Playing hard to get: romance, jobs ○ Deadline technique: limited time to take advantage of an offer ● Social validation ○ More likely to comply if we think it’s something that people similar to us are doing ○ Use social cues ■ Laugh track ○ Most powerful under conditions of uncertainty ■ Ex: jonestown ○ Similarity is also powerful ● Authority ○ We tend to obey authority ○ Symbols (famous actor who was a doctor on tv) ○ Clothes ○ Titles Obedience ● Directly ordering/demanding ● Less frequent than conformity/compliance ● Even if people have power most people prefer to request than to demand ● Milgram’s obedience experiment - delivering excessive shocking just because told to ● Why do we obey? ○ Deindividuation - no longer the one responsible ○ Foot in the door ○ Legitimacy of authority figure ○ Proximity to authority figure

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Distance from victim Lack of role models of defiance

Discrimination & Stereotype Threats ●

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Stereotype: beliefs about the characteristics of an individual based on group membership ○ Can be positive or negative Discrimination: an unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members that is based solely on group membership Prejudice: negative emotional responses to people based on group membership ○ How to study ■ Explicit (ex: survey) - people usually lie or answer inaccurately because they’re not aware of their prejudice ■ Implicit (ex: IAT) ■ Social dominance orientation: desire for group based dominance and hierarchy in a social system ● High: hierarchy enhancing ● Low: hierarchy attenuating ● Influences on SDO: dominant groups (+ corr), openness&agreeableness (- corr), men (+ corr) Stereotype threat: a situational predicament in which an individual is at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about a group the individual belongs to ○ Blatant cue: specifically involve a negative stereotype about an individual’s ingroup ○ Moderately explicit cue: group differences are conveyed but the nature of those differences are not ○ Indirect/subtle cue: test taking experience is manipulated in some way without explicitly stating group differences ■ Make individuals aware of their group membership (ex: filling out demographic info before a test) ■ Draw attention to the evaluative nature of the task (ex: either “natural ability” evaluation or “sports IQ” evaluation) ○ Stereotype boost: individuals who are exposed to positive stereotypes affiliated with their in-group can experience an increase, or “boost,” in performance ○ Stereotype lift: individuals who are exposed to negative stereotypes about another group (related to a particular domain) experience an increase in performance in that domain

Aggression ● ● ●

Harm occurs An intentional behavior Can take different forms ○ Physical

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○ Psychological Victim wants to avoid such harm

Types of aggression ● Physical ● Verbal ○ Yelling, swearing, insults, etc. ● Hostile - reactive, impulsive, emotional quick response ● Instrumental - aggressive act is a means to an end ○ War ○ Kid hitting another kid to get there toy Are we inherently aggressive? ● Young children (2-3) demonstrate the most physical aggression ● 25% of interactions with this age group involve physical aggression from them Social Influences ● Social exclusion ○ Study: participants excluded from a game, exposed to aversive noises ■ Results: gave more hot sauce to other “participant” knowing he didn’t like hot sauce ○ Triggered “hostile cognitive mindset” ● Observational learning ○ Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment (1963) ● Media ○ Highly debated ○ Video games - meta analysis of 54 samples showed correlation of r=.19 between aggressive cognitions, emotions and behaviors ■ Too many other questions and factors to make serious claims Cultural Influences ● Different places had differing acceptance attitudes towards aggression? ○ America has higher tolerance for physical aggression ○ Japan has higher tolerance for direct verbal aggression ● USA ○ “Culture of Honor” ○ Southerners tend to respond more aggressively when insulted Situational Influence ● Temperature - hot weather, hot classrooms, hot cars increase likelihood of aggression ● Pain ● Loud/aversive noise ● Unpleasant odor ● Weapons

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Alcohol

Personality Influences ● Traits: ○ Emotional dysregulation ○ Irritability ○ Rumination ● Big 5 ○ Low A ○ High N ● Self-esteem: ○ Those with higher SE are more likely to show aggression ○ Unstable or volatile SE also related Gender Differences ● No differences in overall levels ● Men are more likely to self report aggression

Prosocial Behavior Altruism: driven by empathy/compassion, no benefit in return Egoism: driven by an obvious reward or a less obvious one, something expected in return ● ● ●

Reciprocity norm: maintain fairness in relationships Social Justice Norm: someone deserves help because of unfortunate circumstances Social responsibility norm: others are dependent on us

Diffusion of Responsibility: ● Kitty genovese ● Other people being around makes people less likely to take action ● Smoky room study Mental Process of helping ● Notice ● Interpret as emergency ● Assume responsibility ● Assess knowledge and skills ● Decide to help Characteristics that increase likelihood of getting help: ● Female ● Similarity (gender, ethnicity, etc.)

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Seem deserving Physical attractiveness

Individual differences in giving help: ● Gender: ○ Children: girls slightly more likely to help ○ Adults: depends on the situation ○ Men help more with emergencies, danger, strangers ○ Women help more with less danger (kids/elderly), routine or long term, social/emotional support ● Culture: ○ *Article* ○ Biggest predictor of helping behavior: low population density ○ Cultural characteristics: collectivist, less productive economy, slower paced cities...