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Social Psych

What is it?

What it is

  • It is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
  • Three categories --
  • Social thinking --
  • How we perceive ourselves and others
  • What we believe
  • Our judgments and attitudes
  • Social influence --
  • culture, pressure to conform, persuasion
  • Social relations --
  • prejudice, aggression
  • attraction & intimacy
  • helping

Big Ideas

  • We construct our social reality --- we view the world through the lens of our beliefs and values
  • we want to explain behavior -- how we explain behavior depends on our own psychology

Big Ideas

  • Our social intuitions are powerful but sometimes perilous --
  • A lot of thinking happens "backstage" (unconsciously) -- intuition
  • These intuitions can be really helpful but also very harmful since they are often wrong
  • make decisions based on info that is readily available
  • trust our memories more than we should, mispredict our own feelings, etc.

Big Ideas

  • Social influences shape our behavior --
  • We are shaped by our social and cultural contexts
  • external forces influence behavior

Big Ideas

  • Personal attitudes and dispositions affect behavior -- internal forces
  • personality and our own opinions affect behavior
  • social behavior is biologically rooted --
  • we are bio-psycho-social organisms
  • our social interactions affect physiology

Why we need social psych

Why we need it

  • Might seem trivial and very 'obvious'
  • However, there are many underlying biases that make us think we can easily predict behavior, when in reality this isn't the case
  • social behavior is often counterintuitive
  • folk wisdom/intuition/lay theories = unreliable

Hindsight bias

The "I knew it all along phenomenon"

Hindsight Bias

  • The tendency to exaggerate one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out
  • Outcomes might seem obvious, but they are only obvious once they are known
  • Example -- "Opposites attract" vs "Birds of a feather flock together"
  • Makes people overconfident about the validity of their judgments and predictions

Rightward bias

  • People prefer items placed on the right
  • Order matters

Rightward bias

Elements of Social Psychology research

Research methods

Theories --

  • An integrated set of principles that explain and

predict observed events

  • Good theories effectively summarize many observations and make clear predictions that

can be used

Theories and hypotheses

Hypothesis: a testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events

• Allows us to test a theory

• Gives direction to research

• Can make a good theory practical

Example 1 : Attraction

  • Conceptual -- the desire to connect with a social target
  • Operational -- sitting distance for the social target

Conceptual and operational definitions

Example 2 : Politeness

  • Conceptual -- the quality of being tactful and considerate
  • Operational -- how long participant waits before interrupting the experimenter

Random sample -- a representative group obtained in which every person in the population has an equal chance of being included

Sampling

Avoiding bias

Surveys and questionnaires

  • Surveys and questionnaires must be constructed in such a way that does not bias responses
  • Things that can influence answers --
  • Wording
  • Order of questions
  • Framing -- The way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinions.

Correlational research

Research can be of 3 types:

  • Field research -- Research done in natural, real- life settings outside the laboratory
  • Experimental research -- Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).
  • Correlational -- The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
  • advantage -- often uses real world setting
  • disadvantage -- causation often ambiguous

Correlation does not equal causation

When two variables correlate, any combination of three explanations is possible. Either one may cause the other, or both may be affected by an

underlying “third factor.”

Correlation vs. causation

How is correlation measured?

  • Using the coefficient 'r'
  • r can range from -1.0 to +1.0
  • If r is negative, as one factor goes up the other goes down (negative correlation)
  • 0 indicates no relationship
  • If r is positive, as one factor goes up, so does the other (positive correlation)

Experimental research looks for cause and effect

Experiments show causal relationship between variables

Experimental research

Variables are of two kinds --

  • Independent -- the factor that the experimenter manipulates
  • Dependent -- the variable being measured

Random assignment

Random assignment

  • The process of assigning participants to

the conditions of an experiment such

that all persons have the same chance of

being in a given condition

  • Eliminates extraneous factors

Important concepts

The Self in a Social World

  • Self Concept and how it develops
  • Self esteem
  • Self serving bias
  • Self presentation
  • Self control
  • How we perceive ourselves and our place in the world
  • Self knowledge

Question: Are people really paying as much attention as we think they are?

NO

Spotlights and illusions

  • Spotlight effect -- The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are
  • llusion of transparency -- The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others
  • Our social surrounding affect how self aware we are
  • Social relationships help define our sense of self
  • Self concern motivates our social beahvior

Self concept -- What we believe and know about ourselves

  • Self Schemas -- Mental templates by which we organize our world; an element of our self concept
  • Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self relevant information

Self Concept

  • Our sense of self is influenced by:
  • Social comparisons
  • Other people's judgments
  • Culture
  • Our self knowledge is often flawed

Social comparisons -- evaluating one's opinions and abilities by comparing oneself with others

  • Schadenfruede -- pleasure derived from other people's misfortunes. Other's failures can make us feel better about ourselves
  • Social comparison defines the standard by which we determine our success/failure

Social comparisons

  • Social comparisons can diminish our satisfaction when we believe that other people have more than we do/are doing better than we do

Other people's judgments affect how we see ourselves

Other people's judgments

  • Looking glass self -- we use how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves
  • The way we imagine people see us
  • we may overestimate others' appraisal, inflating our sense of self
  • for example, people tend to think that they are a lot more attractive than they actually are

Our culture influences how we perceive ourselves

  • Individualistic cultures (mostly western cultures) -- people from individualistic cultures tend to prioritize their own goals over group goals, and define one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications

Culture

  • Collectivist cultures (mostly in the east) -- People from collectivist cultures value group identity and goals. People are more self critical in these cultures.
  • There is growing individualism in cultures due to globalization
  • Culture and cognition -- the culture one is from can also affect cognition -- it can influence the way you think about self expression, independence and conflict

Self knowledge -- How well do we know ourselves?

Self Knowledge

  • We often err in our self-predictions
  • Planning fallacy -- Underestimating the amount of time it takes to complete a task
  • We make mistakes while predicting our feelings
  • affective forecasting studies -- mistakes in predicting the intensity and duration of future emotions
  • impact bias -- overestimating the enduring impact of emotion causing events
  • dual attitude system -- differing implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same object

Self esteem -- a person's overall self evaluation or sense of self worth

  • Each person's self esteem is contingent on different things

Self esteem

Most people are extremely motivated to maintain their self esteem

Self esteem motivation

What underlies this motive?

  • seeking approval
  • avoiding social rejection
  • Terror management theory -- Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
  • People with low self esteem tend to be more vunerable to high anxiety, depression, etc. They are also more likely to face
  • People with high self esteem tend to be more resilient, take initiative and have more pleasant feelings
  • However, people with high self esteem can also commit crimes. High self esteem does not necessarily cause better work performance

Tradeoff: low vs high self esteem

The correlation between high self esteem and narcissism

Narcissism

  • Most people with high self esteem value individual acheivment as well as relationships with others
  • However, while narcissists usually have high self esteem, they lack compassion and care for others
  • Narcissisists think they are better than others

Self efficacy -- how competent we feel at a task

Self efficacy

  • Self efficacy leads us to set challenging goals and persist
  • People with strong feelings of self efficacy tend to be less anxious and less depressed
  • Essentially believing you can do something

Main ideas

  • How do we judge our social worlds -- unconsciously and consciously
  • How we perceive our social worlds
  • Explaining our social worlds
  • How our social beliefs matter

Social Beliefs and Judgments

2 brain systems influence our judgments --

  • system 1 -- inutitive, automatic, unconscious
  • system 2 -- deliberate, controlled, conscious

A lot of our judgments happen unconsciously

Judging our social worlds

  • Priming and embodied cognition
  • Intuitive judgements
  • Overconfidence and confirmation bias
  • Heuristics
  • Counterfactual thinking
  • Illusory thinking
  • How moods influence judgments

What is priming?

Priming

  • Priming is the awakening or activation of particular associations in memory
  • Exposure to one stimuli can influence how we respond or react to similar things associated with that stimuli
  • Example -- watching a scary movie alone can later cause us to interpret small noises or disturbances as an intruder, etc.
  • Out of sight isn't always out of mind
  • Embodied cognition -- mutual ifluence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments
  • example -- people who feel hopeless may perceive rooms to be darker

Our intuitions and automatic processing powers are strong

  • Examples of intuition and automatic processing --
  • schemas -- mental images/templates
  • Emotional reactions that happen quickly and without thought
  • Given enough expertise, a person may intuitively know how to solve a problem or how to do something

Intuitive judgments

Note -- intuition is not foolproof and can also often fail

Overconfidence phenomenon -- the tendency to be more confident than correct -- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs

  • Incompetence feeds overconfidence
  • Confirmation bias -- a tendency to look for information that confirms one's preconceptions

Overconfidence

Heuristics: mental shortcuts

Heuristics

  • Heuristic - a thinking strategy that enables quick, effective judgments
  • allow us to make routine decisions with minimal effort
  • two kinds -- representativeness andavailability heuristic

The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.

  • To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category is to use the representativeness heuristic.

Representativeness

A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.

  • Example -- Estimating teen violence after school shootings

Availability

Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn't

Counterfactual thinking

  • The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking
  • ex: losing a loved one in a car accident -- thinking of ways that could be undone, how the outcome could've been completely different, etc.
  • Downward counterfactuals -- thoughts about how the situation could have been worse
  • Upward counterfactuals -- thoughts about how the situation could have been better

Illusory thinking -- searching for order in random events

Illusory thinking

  • Illusory correlation -- perception of a relationship where non exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists
  • Regression toward the average -- the statistical tendency for extreme results or extreme behavior to return to their average

Our moods can affect our judgments

Moods and judgments

  • Good or bad moods can trigger memories of experiences associated with those moods
  • These can affect the way we perceive the world
  • When sad, we see the world as a darker place, when we are happy, the world seems like a happier place
  • We are more likely to use snap judgments and evaluate others based on stereotypes when we are more emotionally aroused

How we perceive the world:

Perceiving our social worlds

  • Our preconceptions guide how we perceive and interpret information
  • Belief perseverance -- persistence of one's initial conceptions, even when the basis for one's belief has been discredited
  • Our memories are not very reliable --
  • misinformation effect -- incorporating misinformation into one's memory of an event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it
  • Reconstructig past behavior and attitudes --
  • the attitudes and feelings we hold at the time of retrieval can influence our reconstruction of memories about past behavior and attitudes

How we explain our social worlds:

Explaining our social worlds

  • Attribution theory -- how we explain people's behaviors
  • The fundamental attribution error and why it might happen

Attributing causality: to the person or the situation

Attribution theory

  • Attribution theory -- The theory of how people explain others’ behavior—for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.

Misattribution -- mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source

Misattribution

  • Example -- men commonly attributing a woman's friendliness to sexual interest

Situational attribution -- attributing behavior to the environment

  • Attributing behavior to external causes such as social or physical circumstances

Situational vs. dispositional attribution

Dispositional attribution -- attributing behavior to one's personal disposition and traits

  • Internal causes such as mental state or personality

Spontaneous trait inference --

An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior.

Inferring traits

  • The tendency for observers to overestimate dispositional influences and underestiate situational influences on one's behavior
  • Example -- may infer that people are speeding past on the higheay because they are aggressive rather than them being late for a meeting
  • Why do we make the attribution error
  • Perspective and situational awareness
  • Cultural differences

Fundamental attribution error

How do our social beliefs matter?

Social beliefs

  • Social beliefs and judgments matter because they influence how we feel and act
  • Self- fulfilling prophecy
  • Behavioral confirmation

Self fulfilling prophecy -- a belief that leads to its own fulfillment

Self fulfilling prophecy

  • When our ideas lead us to act in ways that lead to their apparent confirmation
  • Example -- teacher expectations and student performance
  • experimenter bias -- participants living up to what they think their experimenters expect of them

We get what we expect --

Behavioral confirmation

  • Behavioral confirmation -- A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.

Main ideas

Attitudes and behavior

  • Attitudes -- feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events.
  • aka the way we feel about a person or an event
  • How well do our attitudes predict our behavior?
  • Behavior affecting attitudes and WHY

To what extent can our attitudes predict our behavior?

Attitudes predicting behavior

  • Moral hypocrisy -- the disjuncture between attitudes and actions
  • Typically, what we say often differs from what we do
  • So when do our attitudes actually influence behavior?
  • When the influences on what we say and do are minimal
  • When the attitude is specific to the behavior
  • When the attitude is potent

Behaviors ---> attitudes

Behaviors predicting attitudes

  • Role Playing -- stepping into a role and playing the part can change our attitudes to actually fit the part better
  • Saying becomes believing
  • Evil and moral acts -- one evil act can lead us to believing a second one is okay, and treating someone with love can make them more likeable to you
  • Racial and poltical behaviors help shape social consciousness -- we not only stand up for what we beleive in, but also believe in what we have stood up for

Theories:

Explaining why our behavior affects our attitudes

  • Self-perception theory
  • Self-presentation theory
  • Cognitive dissonance

Self perception theory:

Self-perception theory

  • The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us—by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs.
  • Example-- If I see myself act as a leader, I will begin to think of myself as a leader
  • Facial feedback effect -- The tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.
  • Overjustification effect -- The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.

Self presentation-- impression management

self-presentation theory

  • We care about what people think of us
  • First we behave a certain way to make a good impression on others, then we follow through and express attitudes that match those behaviors
  • Self presentation theory says we express attitudes that match our actions in order to seem consistent and maintain a good social image

Cognitive dissonance = self justification

Cognitive dissonance

  • Cognitive dissonance is defined as tension that arises when one is simultaenously aware of two inconsistent cognitions
  • The dissonance leads to attitude change when coupled with insufficient justification for conflicting cognitions
  • Selective exposure -- the tendency to seek information and media that agree with one’s views and to avoid dissonant information.

Comparing the theories:

Comparing the theories

The principle that 'attitudes follow behavior' is supported by all three of these theories

  • Cognitive dissonance does produce arousal --
  • The arousal and discomfort can be physiologically seen as perspiration and increased heart rate
  • Self affirmation theory --
  • people often experience a self-image threat after engaging in undesirable behavior, and
  • they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self
  • aka, threatening people's self-concept in one domain will lead them to compensate by doing good deeds in another domain

Persuasion:

The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors

Persuasion

Main ideas:

  • Paths of persuasion
  • Elements of persuasion
  • How can persuasion be resisted?

Paths of persuasion:

  • The central route -- focusing on the arguments
  • Occurs when interested people focus more on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts
  • The peripheral route -- focusing on cues that trigger automatic acceptance without much thinking
  • occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness

Paths of persuasion

Central route persuasion leads to more enduring change than peripheral route persuasion

The elements of persuasion include:

Elements of persuasion

  • The communicator
  • The message (content)
  • How the message is communicated
  • Audience

The presumed source of a message affects an audience's response

Communicator

  • What makes one communicator more ffective than the other?
  • Credibility -- believability. A credible communicator is perceived as more experienced and trustworthy
  • Sleeper effect -- A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an initially discounted message becomes effective, such as we remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it.
  • Perceived expertise -- helps to seem smart and be knowledgable on the topic
  • Speaking style -- speakng confidently and fluently
  • Perceived trustworthiness -- trustworthiness is higher if the audience believes that the communicator is not trying to persuade them
  • having someone else convey your expertise is helpful

Attractiveness affects how we respond

  • We're more likely to respond to those we like
  • Attractiveness can be defined as having qualities that appeal to an audience. An appealing communicator (often someone similar to the audience) is most persuasive on matters of subjective preference.
  • Can be physical or in terms of similarity

Attractiveness and liking

What's being said?

Message content

  • Reason or emotion?
  • Depends on the audience
  • Depends on how initial attitudes were formed
  • initial attitudes formed via peripheral route -- more persuaded by later emotional, peripheral appeals
  • Initial attitudes formed via central route -- more persuaded by later informational, central appeals
  • The effect of good feelings -- Good feelings can enhance persuasion by enhancing positive thinking and linking good feelings with the message

Messages can also be effective by evoking negative emotions

Using emotion -- the effect of arousing fear

  • Playing on fear works best if a message leads people not only to fear but also to perceive a solution and feel capable of implementing it
  • Common appeal used in reducing behaviors such as smoking, drinking and driving
  • Also to increase behaviors such as getting vaccines, mammograms, or breast exams.

Context of a message can make a difference in how persuasive it is

Message context

  • Especially what immediately precedes a message matters
  • Foot in the door phenomenon -- The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
  • Lowball technique -- A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it.
  • Door in the face technique -- A strategy for gaining a concession. After someone first turns down a large request (the door-in-the-face), the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable request.

Two sided appeals: acknowledging the counterargument

One sided versus two sided appeals

  • A message might seem fairer and be more disarming if it recognizes the opposition’s arguments.
  • Two sided appeals can make the communicator seem more honest
  • When a salesperson mentions a negative attribute of a product that was unimportant to the customer, the customer trusts the salesperson more and becomes more likely to buy the product

Primacy versus recency: is first or last more persuasive?

Primacy versus recency

  • Primacy effect -- Other things being equal, information presented first usually has the most influence
  • information presented early is most persuasive
  • first impressions matter
  • Recency effect -- Sometimes information presented last has the most influence
  • less common than primacy effect

Conclusion: for best results -- go first or last not middle

How is it said?

  • Channel of communication: the way the message is delivered -- face-to-face, via film, in writing, or some other way
  • What matters:
  • Active experience or passive reception
  • The more familiar people are with an issue, the less persuadable they are
  • Repetition can make things believable
  • Retractions of previously provided information rarely work -- people tend to remember the original statement

Channel of communication

Personal contact has a stronger effect on us than media

  • Personal contact persuades
  • Example-- the Harry Potter books largey gaining fame due to kids talking to each other about it
  • Word of mouth is powerful

However, media influence is also pretty powerful

Personal vs media influence

  • Two step flow of communication: media influence often occurs through opinion leaders, who in turn influence others
  • Large companies often target these 'influencers/opinion leaders'
  • Media influences can have major indirect effects
  • comparing different media:
  • the more lifelike the medium, the more persuasive the message
  • difficult message -- most persuasive written
  • easy message -- most persuasive videotape

Audience matters

To whom is it said?

  • How old they are --
  • Life cycle explanation -- attitudes change as people get older
  • Generational explanation -- attitudes do not change, but they are different from the ones young people hold today, so generation gaps develop
  • What the audience is thinking --
  • Counterarguments
  • distraction disarms counterarguments
  • uninvolved audiences use peripheral cues
  • People with a higher need for cognition prefer central routes
  • Need for cognition -- the motivation to think and analyze
  • Stimulating thinking makes strong messages more persuasive and weak messages weaker

Ways to stimulate thinking

  • Using rhetorical questions
  • Presenting multiple speakers
  • By making people feel responsible for evaluating or passing along the message
  • By repeating the message, or
  • By getting people's undistracted attention

How can we resist persuasion?

Resisting persuasion

  • Attitude inoculation: Exposing people to weak attacks upon their attitudes so that when stronger attacks come, they will have refutations available.
  • Making people consider counterarguments -- combining strong counterarguments with a 'parasite' similar to the opponent
  • Implications of attittude inoculation -- one way to strengthen existing attitudes is to challenge them, but the challenge must not be so strong as to overwhelm them.

Group:

Two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another and perceive one another as “us.”

Group Influence

  • Social facilitation
  • Social loafing
  • Deindividuation
  • Group polarization
  • Groupthink
  • Influence of the minority -- how individuals influence the group

Social Facilitation -- How are we affected by the presence of others?

Social facilitation

  • Definition -- the strengthening of the dominant response in the presence of others
  • aka boost performance on easy tasks and hurt performance on difficult tasks
  • easy or well learned tasks -- dominant response = perform well (social facilitation)
  • Difficult or unfamiliar tasks -- dominant response = perform poorly (social inhibition)
  • Social arousal caused by increased evaluation apprehension and natural tendency to be socially aroused
  • So the mere presence of others can also socially arouse us

Social loafing: do individuals exert less effort in a group?

Social Loafing

  • Social loafing: The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable.
  • Effort decreases as group size increases
  • Free riders -- people who benefit from the group but give little in return
  • People may, however, exert more effort in a group when the goal is important, rewards are significant, and team spirit exists.
  • Why?
  • No evaluation apprehension = no social arousal = no effort
  • Want to decrease social loafing? Make people accountable

When do people lose their sense of self in groups?

Deindividuation

  • Deindividuation -- Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension; occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms, good or bad.
  • "Doing together what we would not do alone"
  • Affected and enhanced by:
  • Anonymity
  • Group size
  • Arousing and distracting activities
  • Diminished self awareness -- leads to increased responsiveness to the immediate situation

Do groups intensify our opinions?

Group polarization

  • Group-produced enhancement of members’ preexisting tendencies; a strengthening of the members’ average tendency, not a split within the group.
  • If people already favor a decision, they will favor it even more post discussion
  • If people are against a decision, they will be even more against it post discussion
  • Risky shift -- groups tend to make riskier decisions
  • However, risky shift is not universal

  • Normative influence -- We want members of our group to like us, so we express stronger opinions after learning that they agree with us
  • Informational influence -- We might learn about information in favor of our standpoint that we had not previously considered
  • Expressing our views to the group strengthens our own standpoint
  • Pluralistic ignorance - A false impression of what most other people are thinking or feeling, or how they are responding.

Why does group polarization occur?

Groupthink: do groups hinder or assist good decisions?

Groupthink

  • Groupthink refers to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.
  • Suppress dissent in the interest of harmony
  • Groupthink arises when there is
  • An amiable cohesive group,
  • isolation of the group from dissenting viewpoints
  • A directive leader who signals what decision he or she favors

Symptoms of groupthink

Symptoms of groupthink

  • An illusion of invulnerability
  • Excessive optimism and overestimating own might
  • Unquestioned belief in the group's morality
  • Rationalization -- justifying decisions
  • Stereotyped view of opponent
  • Conformity pressure
  • Self-censorship -- individuals withholding or discounting misgivings
  • Illusion of unanimity
  • Mindguards who protect the group from disagreeable opinions

Influence of the minority -- how do individuals influence the group?

Influence of the minority

  • Persistence and consistency --
  • A minority that never wavers is more likely to persuade a majority than a minority that is not set in its views
  • Self confidence -- the minority's confidence and self assurance may prompt the majority to reconsider its position
  • Leadership as minority influence
  • Task leadership
  • social leadership
  • transformational leadership

Prejudice --

A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members.

Prejudice and stereotypes

  • What is the nature and power of prejudice?
  • Social sources of prejudice
  • Motivational sources of prejudice
  • Cognitive sources of prejudice
  • Consequences of prejudice

Prejudice and its types

Nature and power

  • Stereotype -- Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group, often inaccurate and overgeneralized
  • Prejudice is a negative attitude, discrimination is negative behavior
  • Racism and sexism are instituional practices that discriminate, even when there is no prejudice intent
  • Prejudice can be implicit or explicit
  • We can have different explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same target
  • Implicit prejudice can be measured with the implicit association test (IAT)
  • "Old fashioned" vs modern racism
  • Old fashioned --
  • Ascribing negative traits to certain groups and their members
  • Opposing equal rights
  • Modern racism --
  • denying discrimination
  • Opposing efforts that promote equality
  • rejecting minorities for other reasons

Racial prejudice

LGBT prejudice persists as:

LGBTQ prejudice

  • Job discrimination
  • Gay marriage support is mixed but increasing
  • Harassment and homophobic bullying
  • Rejection

Gender stereotypes persist

Gender prejudice

  • Sexism --
  • Benevolent
  • Attitudes about women that seem positively-toned but nevertheless suggest inferiority to men
  • E.g., Women have a superior moral sensibility, women should

be cherished, women deserve protection

  • Hostile sexism
  • Much more openly misogynistic; may portray women as manipulative, angry, seeking to control men
  • E.g., Once a man commits, she puts him on a tight leash, men make better political leaders than women do

Social sources of prejudice:

Social sources

  • Social inequalities: unequal status and prejudice
  • Unequal status breeds prejudice
  • Some people notice and justify status differences more than others
  • Social dominance orientation -- A motivation to have one's group dominate other social groups
  • Socialization -- The social situation breeds and maintains social prejudice in many ways
  • Children are brought up in ways that foster or reduce prejudice
  • Authoritarian personalities are said to be socialized into obedience and tolerance
  • Institutional supports -- social institutions may bolster prejudice through overt policies. Often unintended and unnoticed. Media portrayal can also bolster prejudice

Various theories:

  • Frustration-aggression -- the scapegoat theory -- frustration feeds hostility, and when the cause of the frustration is unknown this anger and hostility is redirected
  • Realistic group conflict theory -- perceiving outgroups as competition for scarce resources
  • Real world implication -- prejudice toward immigrants
  • See Robbers Cave study
  • Social identity theory -- feeling superior to others -- tendency to favor our ingroups
  • ingroup -- "us"-group of ppl with which we share common identity and sense of belonging
  • outgroup -- "them"-group we perceive as distinctly different from ingroup
  • Need for status, self regard, and belonging
  • heightened emotion and reminder of mortality can increase ingroup favoritism and outgroup prejudice

Motivational sources

How does the way we think about the world influence our stereotypes and judgments?

Cognitive sources

  • Categorization: Classifying people into groups
  • Distinctiveness: perceiving people who stand out
  • Attribution
  • Spontaneous categorization- we find it easy to rely on stereotypes and judgments when we are preoccupied, tired, emotionally aroused, or pressed for time
  • Outgroup homogeneity effect -- we perceive outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup members
  • similarities and differences between and within groups are exaggerated
  • Own race bias -- the tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race

categorization

Distinctiveness

  • People pay more attention to distinctive people, which leads them to notice more differences
  • Distinctiveness feeds self consciousness
  • Illusory correlations -- tendency to overestimate the link between variables that are only slightly or not at all correlated
  • tend to overestimate the association when the variables are distinctive an already expected to go together
  • Confirmation bias

Attribution

  • The fundamental attribution error -- attributing someone's behavior to their inner disposition when other situational factors may have played a role
  • Group serving bias -- Explaining away outgroup members’ positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one’s own group).
  • Just world phenomenon -- The tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
  • indifferent to social injustice because they see no injustice

Consequences

  • Self perpetuating prejudgments --
  • We hold prejudgments of people that are self perpetuating -- guide our memory and attention
  • Confirmation bias
  • What happens when we encounter someone who goes against our stereotypes
  • subtyping -- they deviate form our stereotype so we think of them as exception to the rule
  • subgrouping -- they deviate from our stereotype so we form a new stereotype about this subgroup
  • self fulfilling prophecy
  • stereotype threat -- a self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype
  • Reducing streotype threat --
  • eliminate negative stereotypes
  • self affirmation interventions

Can our social behavior influence our gene expression?

Social relationships and health

  • From a health psychology perspective, yes
  • In fact social behavior can affect
  • gene expression
  • sympathetic nervous system activation
  • HPA axis alteration
  • systemic inflammation
  • immune function
  • disease risk
  • mortality risk
  • social relationships can influence health through two primary pathways --
  • social relationships -> cognitive benefits --> health behaviors
  • social integration --> emotional regulation --> health behaviors and physiological pathways
  • Structural --
  • # of network ties
  • network diversity
  • social network composition
  • contact frequency
  • functional --
  • support
  • conflict
  • loneliness
  • Experiment -- # of network ties and common cold severity
  • exp showed that ppl with fewer network ties had more severe colds (measured objectively through mucous weight and subjectively through self reports)
  • experiment -- Marital relationships, wounds, and inflammation

Assessing social relationships

Considering social relationships across the lifespan

  • Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST)
  • Goal shifting
  • Older individuals spend more time with close ones
  • Beneficial and purposeful process
  • Affective rewarding goals go from low to high priority throughout lifespan
  • Knowledge seeking goals go from high to low priority thorughout lifespan
  • Our circle gets smaller as we get older

Social relationships and health

  • Bad social relationships -- damage health
  • Good social relationships -- promote health
  • 3 ways --
  • physiological
  • positive social ties reduces an individual's stress response
  • behavioral
  • People in our lives can encourage health promoting behaviors while discouraging harmful behaviors
  • psychosocial
  • good social ties --> psychological well being --> personal control --> attach meaning to their relationships --> not so likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors

What is aggression?

Aggression

  • Aggression -- physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone
  • Can be physical (hurting someone's body) or social (hurting someone's feelings or threatening their relationships) social aggression also includes cyberbullying and some forms of inperson bullying
  • Hostile aggression -- Aggression that springs from anger; its goal is to injure.
  • Instrumental aggression -- Aggression that aims to injure, but only as a means to some other end.
  • Three main theories --
  • Aggression as a biological phenomenon
  • instinctive behavior and evolutionary psychology
  • Neural influences
  • Genetic influences
  • Biochemical influences
  • Frustration -- aggression as a response to frustration
  • Frustration aggression theory
  • Relative deprivation
  • Learned behavior
  • Albert Bandura -- social learning theory of aggression
  • By experience and by observing others’ success, we sometimes learn that aggression pays

Theories of aggression

Alcohol, hormones, poor diet, etc.

Biochemical influences

  • when threatened: dose of testosterone increased aggression. When not threatened, dose of testosterone increased generosity
  • Temperature increases --> more violent crimes recorded during hotter temps
  • Alcohol consumption associated with higher levels of aggression, especially in men
  • Alcohol unleashes people's aggression by:
  • reducing self awareness
  • focusing attention on provocation
  • there is already a mental association of alcohol with aggression
  • Hormones -- aggressiveness positively correlates with the hormone testosterone
  • Bad diets also correlate with higher aggression
  • Biology and behavior interact --- it works both ways
  • physical pain or discomfort --> aggression

Frustration--Aggression theory (designed to explain hostile aggression, not insturmental)

Frustration aggression theory

  • Frustration -- the blocking of goal directed behavior. Frustration grows when our motivation to achieve a goal is very strong, when we expected gratification, and when the blocking is complete.
  • Frustration triggers a readiness to aggress
  • Displacement -- The redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration
  • The presence of aggressive cues also contributes to aggression -- shotgun vs badminton raquet experiment
  • Relative deprivation -- frustration arises from the gap between expectations and attainments
  • explains why countries with income inequality have higher crime rates and lower happiness

Social learning theory -- Bandura

  • Media violence also connects to aggression
  • Experiments have shown that media violence and violent vidoe games are positively correlated with aggression

Aggression as learned social behavior

  • Social learning theory
  • The theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded and punished
  • Bobo Doll experiment --
  • Kids watched adult play with toys
  • IV -- Adults' nonviolent behavior toward bobo doll
  • DV -- Kids' behavior toward the bobo doll
  • Results -- performed similar actions and said same things
  • Engaged in novel forms of aggression

Influences on aggression

Influences on aggression

  • Aversive incidents -- pain, heat, attacks can all lead to aggression
  • Arousal, either sexual or emotional can heighten emotions like anger and make one more aggressive if triggered
  • Aggression cues
  • media influences
  • desensitization
  • social scripts
  • cognitive priming
  • Catharsis -- Emotional release. The catharsis view of aggression is that the aggressive drive is reduced when one “releases” aggressive energy, either by acting aggressively or by fantasizing aggression.
  • Does catharsis work? Bushman study
  • enacting revenge does not make us feel as good as we think it might
  • only makes us hold onto anger longer
  • aka catharsis does not work only backfires
  • Social learning approach --
  • reward cooperative, non aggressive behavior
  • teach how to deal with frustration and resolve conflict
  • encourage reduction of violent media consumtion
  • consume pro social media

Ways to reduce aggression

  • Altruism -- A motive to increase another’s welfare without conscious regard for one’s self-interests.
  • Prosocial Behavior: positive, constructive, helpful social behavior

Helping

Why we help

Evolutionary psychology -- kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, group selection

Why do we help?

  • Social exchange theory and social norms
  • The theory that human interactions are transactions that aim to maximize one’s rewards and minimize one’s costs.
  • People may help to increase positie emotion OR to reduce negative emotion -- Negative state relief hypothesis
  • To alleviate guilt
  • Happy people re helpful people
  • Social norms --
  • reciprocity norm -- An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them.
  • Social capital -- The mutual support and cooperation enabled by a social network.
  • Social responsibility norm -- An expectation that people will help those needing help

Genuine altruism and empathy

Helping behavior affected by:

When will we help

  • Bystander effect -- as number of bystanders inceases, helping decreases. WHY?
  • less likely to notice
  • less likely to interpret the event as an emergency
  • less likely to assume responsibility
  • Whether others help or not --
  • prosocial models promote altruism
  • Similarity
  • Time pressures
  • How to get help in a crowd?
  • Reduce ambiguity -- make it clear that help is needed
  • Single out an individual and reduce diffusion of responsibility
  • Indicate what is needed -- tell them what to do
  • Guilt and concern for self image can make people want to help --
  • Cialdini and Schroeder -- ask for a contribution so small that it would be embarassing to say no
  • Socializing altruism --
  • teaching moral inclusion
  • modeling altruism
  • Attributing helpful behavior to altruistic motives
  • Overjustification effect -- The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.

How to increase helping

Peace and conflict

Conflict and Peacemaking

  • Conflict -- a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals
  • Peace -- A condition marked by low levels of hostility and aggression and by mutually beneficial relationships.
  • Wheel of conflict --
  • Human needs are at the core of all conflicts
  • Needs are embedded in contextual factors that generate and escalate conflict
  • Social dilemmas --
  • Social trap -- a situation in which conflicting parties pursue their own self-interest and become caught in mutually destructive behavior.
  • Fundamental attribution error, evolvong motives, mon zero sum games
  • Competition -- Hostilities arise when groups compete
  • Misperceptions --
  • Self-serving bias
  • Tendency to self-justify
  • Fundamental attribution error
  • Preconceptions
  • Groups polarize
  • Groupthink
  • Ingroup bias
  • Persistent negative stereotypes of the outgroup

What creates conflict?

  • Perceived injustice also contributes to conflict
  • A paradox in which two individuals acting in their own self-interests do not produce the optimal outcome
  • Two prisoners getting caught and both guilty
  • Upon questioning,
  • Scenario 1 -- Person A confesses and Person B does not. Person A gets off better and Person B gets more severe punishment.
  • Worst for person who does not confess
  • Scenario 2 -- BOTH confess, both receive moderate sentences
  • Scenario 3 -- Neither confess, both receive a light sentence

Prisoner's dilemma

  • When individuals consume more than their share of a resource, with the cost of their doing so dispersed among all, causing the ultimate collapse—the tragedy—of the commons
  • “Commons” is therefore any shared resource, such as air, water, energy sources, and food supplies
  • Finite amount of resources
  • One person takes more for themselves
  • Leaving less for others... and less for themselves in the long run

Tragedy of Commons

Mirror Image perceptions

Mirror image perceptions --

Reciprocal views of each other often held by parties in conflict; for example, each may view itself as moral and peace-loving and the other as evil and aggressive.

For example, each may view itself as moral and peace-loving and the

other as evil and aggressive

•AKA: enemy perceptions

Conflict is experienced along three dimensions

How we describe the conflict gives insight into how we

are primarily experiencing it

Simplistic thinking -- rational thinking becomes more difficult as tensions arise

1. As behavior:

  • Often the precipitating event; the behavior that one or both parties engaged in that initiated or perpetuated the conflict.

2. As perceptions:

  • The belief by at least one person that there is an incompatibility, disagreement, or conflict.

3. As feelings:

  • An emotional reaction to a situation or interaction. Conflicts often exist because one feels hurt, angry, disappointed, etc.

How we experience

conflict

In conflict situations, we quickly climb a “ladder of assumptions”

  • Rung 1 -- Facts - the portion of the event that we are able to take in
  • Rung 2 -- Interpretations - how we interpret the facts we perceive
  • Rung 3 -- Motives -- the motives/attitudes we attribute to the other person
  • Rung 4 -- generalizations -- the way we categorize the other person

Ladder of Assumptions

  • Arbitration -- Resolution of a conflict by a neutral third party who studies both sides and imposes a settlement.
  • Conciliation

How can we prevent conflict?

  • Contact
  • Cooperation
  • common external threats build cohesiveness
  • superordinate goals foster cooperation
  • Superordinate goal -- A shared goal that necessitates cooperative effort; a goal that overrides people’s differences from one another.
  • Communication
  • Bargaining -- Seeking an agreement to a conflict through direct negotiation between parties.
  • Mediation -- An attempt by a neutral third party to resolve a conflict by facilitating communication and offering suggestions.

There are different approaches to conflict --

  • there is no one right or ideal way
  • However, there are ways that are generally more constructive
  • than others

What is conformity?

Conformity and obedience

  • Conformity -- A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure.
  • Acceptance -- conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with social pressure.
  • Compliance -- conformity that involves publicly acting in accord with an implied or explicit request while privately disagreeing.
  • Obedience -- A type of compliance involving acting in accord with a direct order or command.

What breeds obedience?

  • victim's distance -- distance negates responsibility
  • Closeness and legitimacy of the authority
  • institutional authority
  • Sherif's studies of norm formation --
  • using the autokinetic phenomenon to answer questions about people's suggestability
  • Mass hysteria -- Suggestibility to problems that spreads throughout a large group of people.
  • Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh -- the chameleon effect
  • Asch's studies of group formation
  • Milgram's obedience studies -- administering electrical shock
  • questionable ethics

Classic conformity and obedience studies

Factors predicting conformity

What predicts conformity?

  • Group size -- people conform most when three or more people model the behavior or belief.
  • Unanimity -- Conformity is reduced if the modeled behavior or belief is not unanimous—if one or more people dissent.
  • Cohesiveness -- A “we feeling”; the extent to which members of a group are bound together, such as by attraction to one another.
  • Status -- The higher the status of those modeling the behavior or belief, the greater likelihood of conformity.
  • Public response -- People also conform most when their responses are public (in the presence of the group).
  • Prior commitment -- A prior commitment to a certain behavior or belief in- creases the likelihood that a person will stick with that commitment.
  • Normative influence -- Conformity based on a person’s desire to fulfill others’ expectations, often to gain acceptance.
  • Informational influence -- conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality provided by other people.

Why conform?

  • People who seek to please others and are comfortable following social rules (those high in agreeableness and conscientiousness) are the most likely to conform.
  • Although conformity and obedience are universal, different cultures socialize people to be more or less socially responsive.
  • Social roles involve a certain degree of conformity, and conforming to expectations is an important task when stepping into a new social role.
  • However, when social coercion becomes blatant, people often experi- ence reactance—a motivation to defy the coercion in order to maintain their sense of freedom.
  • We act in ways that preserve our sense of uniqueness and individuality. In a group, we are most conscious of how we differ from the others.

Who conforms?

Attraction and intimacy

  • We all have a need to belong
  • When it is thwarted, such as through exclusion or ostracism, people feel stressed and lose self-control. Social pain mimics physical pain.
  • Ostracism hurts even when it comes from a despised group, even when it’s expected, and even when it’s online or via social media.

What leads to friendship and attraction?

  • Proximity -- geographical nearness powerfully predicts liking
  • Interaction
  • Anticipation of interaction
  • Mere exposure -- The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them.
  • Physical attractiveness -- physical appearance matters
  • Attractiveness is a good predictor of how often men or women date
  • The matching phenomenon -- The tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a “good match” in attractiveness and other traits.
  • Physical attractiveness stereotype -- The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: What is beautiful is good.
  • Beauty standards change and vary from place to place, but in general there are a few characteristics that people consider attractive. (symmetrical face, etc)
  • Similarity versus complementarity --
  • likeness begets liking (birds of a feather flock together)
  • perceived similarity also matters
  • dissimilarity breeds dislike
  • complementarity -- The popularly supposed tendency, in a relationship between two people, for each to complete what is missing in the other.
  • Complementarity may develop as a relationship progresses, but people are still prone to prefer those that are similar to them
  • Liking is usually mutual
  • One person’s liking another can cause the other to return the appreciation
  • Attribution --
  • flattery is good but not when its too often or insincere
  • Ingratiation -- The use of strategies, such as flattery, by which people seek to gain another’s favor.

Liking those who like us

  • Reward theory of attraction-- The theory that we like those whose behavior is rewarding to us or whom we associate with rewarding events.
  • If others have similar opinions, we feel rewarded because we presume that they like us in return.
  • Proximity is rewarding. It costs less time and effort to receive friendship’s benefits with someone who lives or works close by.
  • If others have similar opinions, we feel rewarded because we presume that they like us in return

Relationship rewards

Two distinct kinds -- passionate love and companionate love

Love

Passionate love --

A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate lovers are absorbed in each other, feel ecstatic at attaining their partner’s love, and are disconsolate on losing it.

  • Two factor theory of emotion -- arousal x its abel = emotion
  • love varies across cultures and gender

Companionate love -- The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.

  • Pasionate love may grow weaker and fade over time, but companionate love stays storng

What enables close relationships?

  • Equity --
  • A condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it.
  • Long term equity and perceived equity can lead to long lasting relationships
  • Self disclosure -- Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.
  • Disclosure reciprocity - The tendency for one person’s intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of a conversational partner.
  • Attachment --
  • Strong social attachment is a strong survival impulse
  • Attachment styles --
  • Secure attachment - attachments rooted in trust and marked by intimacy.
  • People with secure attachment styles tend to have satisfying and enduring relationships
  • Insecure attachment --
  • Avoidant attachment - attachments marked by discomfort over, or resistance to, being close to others. An insecure attachment style.
  • Anxious attachment - attachments marked by anxiety or ambivalence. An insecure attachment style.
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