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Module 80: Altruism, Conflict, and Peacemaking
Conflict is perceived as an incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas.
People in conflict form diabolical images of one another. These distorted images are so similar that we call them mirror-image perceptions.
A social trap is a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing their self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.
Because people perceive and react to these mirror-image perceptions, they may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies
Module 78: Aggression
Genetic Influences: Animals have been bred for aggressiveness for sport and at times for research. Twin studies show aggression may be genetic. In men, aggression is possibly linked to the Y chromosome.
By pursuing our self-interest and not trusting others, we can end up losers.
Neural Influences: Some centers in the brain, especially the limbic system (amygdala) and the frontal lobe, are intimately involved with aggression.
Genetic Influences
Neural Influences
Biochemical Influences
Three biological influences on aggressive behavior are:
Biochemical Influences: Animals with diminished amounts of testosterone (castration) become docile, and if injected with testosterone aggression increases. Prenatal exposure to testosterone also increases aggression in female hyenas.
Module 77: Prejudice and Discrimination
The general consensus on violent video games is that, to some extent, they breed violence. Adolescents view the world as hostile when they get into arguments and receive bad grades after playing such games.
Four psychological factors that influence aggressive behavior are:
Dealing with aversive events
Learning aggression is rewarding
Observing models of aggression
Acquiring social scripts
Simply called “prejudgment,” a prejudice is an unjustifiable (usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice is often directed towards different cultural, ethnic, or gender groups.
Components of Prejudices:
Aggression can be any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. It may be done reactively out of hostility or proactively as a calculated means to an end.
Prejudice works at the conscious and [more at] the unconscious level. Therefore, prejudice is more like a knee-jerk response than a conscious decision.
Americans today express much less racial and gender prejudice, but prejudices still exist.
Most women still live in more poverty than men. About 100,000,000 women are missing in the world. There is a preference for male children in China and India, even with sex-selective abortion outlawed
Research shows that aggressive behavior emerges from the interaction of biology and experience.
One way we simplify our world is to categorize. We categorize people into groups by stereotyping them.
The tendency of people to believe the world is just, and people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (the just-world phenomenon).
Why does prejudice arise?
Scapegoat Theory - Prejudice provides an outlet for anger [emotion] by providing someone to blame. After 9/11 many people lashed out against innocent Arab-Americans.
The media portrays social scripts and generates mental tapes in the minds of the viewers. When confronted with new situations individuals may rely on such social scripts. If social scripts are violent in nature, people may act them out.
Even environmental temperature can lead to aggressive acts. Murders and rapes increased with the temperature in Houston.
When aggression leads to desired outcomes, one learns to be aggressive. This is shown in both animals and humans.
Ingroup: People with whom one shares a common identity. Outgroup: Those perceived as different from one’s ingroup. Ingroup Bias: The tendency to favor one’s own group.
Cultures that favor violence breed violence. Scotch-Irish settlers in the South had more violent tendencies than their Quaker Dutch counterparts in the Northeast of the US.
Prejudice develops when people have money, power, and prestige, and others do not. Social inequality increases prejudice.
Sexually coercive men are promiscuous and hostile in their relationships with women. This coerciveness has increased due to television viewing of R- and X-rated movies.
Attitudes and Action
Module 75: Conformity and Obedience
Behavior is contagious, modeled by one followed by another. We follow behavior of others to conform.
Other behaviors may be an expression of compliance (obedience) toward authority.
If we believe a person is mean, we may feel dislike for the person and act in an unfriendly manner.
Conformity: Adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
Suggestibility is a subtle type of conformity, adjusting our behavior or thinking toward some group standard.
A belief and feeling that predisposes a person to respond in a particular way to objects, other people, and events.
Tested by Solomon Asch in 1955
Zimbardo (1972) assigned the roles of guards and prisoners to random students and found that guards and prisoners developed role- appropriate attitudes.
One explanation is that when our attitudes and actions are opposed, we experience tension. This is called cognitive dissonance.
Normative Social Influence: Influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid rejection. A person may respect normative behavior because there may be a severe price to pay if not respected.
Baron and colleagues (1996) made students do an eyewitness identification task. If the task was easy (lineup exposure 5 sec.), conformity was low in comparison to a difficult (1/2 sec. exposure) task.
Informative Social Influence: The group may provide valuable information, but stubborn people will never listen to others.
To relieve ourselves of this tension we bring our attitudes closer to our actions (Festinger, 1957).
People comply to social pressures. How would they respond to outright command?
Stanley Milgram designed a study that investigates the effects of authority on obedience.
In both Asch's and Milgram's studies, participants were pressured to follow their standards and be responsive to others.
In Milgram’s study, participants were torn between hearing the victims pleas and the experimenter’s orders.
Our attitudes predict our behaviors imperfectly because other factors, including the external situation, also influence behavior.
In the Korean War, Chinese communists solicited cooperation from US army prisoners by asking them to carry out small errands. By complying to small errands they were likely to comply to larger ones.
Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
Not only do people stand for what they believe in (attitude), they start believing in what they stand for.
Action
Attitude
Attributions of Behavior to Persons or Situations
Social thinking involves thinking about others, especially when they engage in doing things that are unexpected.
A teacher may wonder whether a child’s hostility reflects an aggressive personality (dispositional attribution) or is a reaction to stress or abuse (a situational attribution).
Attribution Theory: Fritz Heider (1958) suggested that we have a tendency to give causal explanations for someone’s behavior, often by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition.
Note: this box is spelled incorrectly- it should be "Dispositional Attribution"
The tendency to overestimate the impact of personal disposition and underestimate the impact of the situations in analyzing the behaviors of others leads to the fundamental attribution error.
Promoting Peace
Social Psychology scientifically studies how we think about, influence, and relate to one another
Module 76: Group Behavior
The tendency of an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal than when tested individually (Latané, 1981).
Social facilitation: Refers to improved performance on tasks in the presence of others. Triplett (1898) noticed cyclists’ race times were faster when they competed against others than when they just raced against the clock
The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
The power of social influence is enormous, but so is the power of the individual.
Non-violent fasts and appeals by Gandhi led to the independence of India from the British.
Group Polarization enhances a group’s prevailing attitudes through a discussion. If a group is like-minded, discussion strengthens its prevailing opinions and attitudes.
A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides the realistic appraisal of alternatives.
Superordinate goals are shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.
Graduated & Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction (GRIT): This is a strategy designed to decrease international tensions. One side recognizes mutual interests and initiates a small conciliatory act that opens the door for reciprocation by the other party.
Communication and understanding developed through talking to one another. Sometimes it is mediated by a third party.
Module 79: Attraction
Altruism- unselfish regard for the welfare of others
The decision-making process for bystander intervention.
Proximity: Geographic nearness is a powerful predictor of friendship. Repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases their attraction (mere exposure effect).
Social Exchange Theory: Our social behavior is an exchange process. The aim is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.
Physical Attractiveness: Once proximity affords contact, the next most important thing in attraction is physical appearance.
Tendency of any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.
Similarity: Similar views among individuals causes the bond of attraction to strengthen.
Passionate Love: An aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a love relationship.
Two-factor theory of emotion