Obedience Studies Quiz

Social Psychology Lecture Overview

• Social Psychology studies how individuals think about, influence, and relate to one another.
• Three key areas are social thinking, social influence, and social relations.

What is Social Psychology?

• A scientific study of how people think, influence, and relate to one another.
• Social psychologists examine social influences, and why the same person can act differently in different situations.
• They utilize scientific methods to study how people think, influence, and relate to one another.

Social Thinking: Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory explains how people explain the behavior of others.
• It involves attributing behavior to either internal (dispositional) or external (situational) factors.
• Internal attribution is when a behavior is attributed to the person's personality, while external attribution is when a behavior is attributed to situational factors.

Social Thinking: Fundamental Attribution Error

• Observers underestimate the impact of the situation (external factors) and overestimate the impact of personal disposition (internal factors).
• This error makes people more likely to attribute others' actions to their personalities rather than the situation.

Social Thinking: Attitudes and Actions

• Attitudes are feelings influenced by beliefs that predispose us to respond to people, objects, and events in a particular manner.
• Attitudes are likely to affect behavior when external influences are minimal and when the attitude is stable, specific to the behavior, and easily recalled.

Social Thinking: Cognitive Dissonance

• Cognitive dissonance is when our beliefs and actions don't align.
• People experience discomfort when they hold conflicting beliefs or when their actions contradict their beliefs.
• People will try to reduce dissonance in order to relieve discomfort (e.g., by changing a belief or behavior).
• Methods of dissonance reduction include changing beliefs, changing behaviors, and changing perceptions of their actions.

Social Influence: Conformity and Social Norms

• Conformity is adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.
• The Asch conformity experiment found that individuals often conform to group pressure, even when the group's answer is clearly incorrect.
• Factors influencing conformity include group unanimity, group size, and the presence of a social role model.
• Informational social influence occurs when people accept others' opinions as new information, while normative social influence is the influence resulting from a desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.
• Cultural factors influence conformity: collectivist cultures tend to have higher conformity rates than individualist cultures.

Social Influence: Obedience

• Obedience is following orders.
• Milgram's obedience experiment demonstrated strong social pressure to obey authority figures, even when the task was questionable.
• Factors that affect obedience include closeness to the authority figure, institutional legitimacy/prestige of the authority figure and perceived depersonalization of the victim. The absence of moral role models in the situation also plays a role.

Social Influence: Group Behavior: Social Facilitation

• The presence of others arouses people, leading to better performance on well-learned tasks and worse performance on difficult tasks.

Social Influence: Group Behavior: Social Loafing

• Social loafing is the tendency for people to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward a common goal than when individually accountable.
• Factors that contribute to social loafing include feelings of reduced accountability.

Social Influence: Group Behavior: Deindividuation

• Deindividuation is a loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
• This can lead to extreme behavior that individuals would not normally exhibit on their own.

Social Influence: Group Behavior: Group Polarization

• Group discussions with like-minded others tend to strengthen members' prevailing beliefs and attitudes.

Social Influence: Group Behavior: Groupthink

• Groupthink is a mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony and agreement in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.
• Groupthink leads to poor decisions and errors in judgment.

Social Relations: Attraction

• Proximity, physical attractiveness, and similarity are key factors influencing attraction.

Social Relations: Love

• Passionate love is an aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, common at the beginning of a romantic relationship; while companionate love is mutually supportive, fulfilling and enduring. These factors are crucial for a satisfying relationship.

Social Relations: Altruism

• Altruism is unselfish concern for another's welfare; it sometimes involves putting one's own life in danger to help another person.

Social Relations: Bystander Intervention

• The bystander effect is the tendency for a bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present due to a diffusion of responsibility.
• Factors that increase the likelihood of getting help include the victim being a woman, similar to the potential helper (in age, race, ethnicity etc), the potential helper not being preoccupied, or having a general good mood.
• When an incident/event is noticed, interpreted as an emergency, and/or a bystander feels a responsibility to intervene, there is a greater likelihood of someone getting help.

Social Relations: Why We Help?

• Social exchange theory suggests that helping is a cost-benefit analysis where people help when perceived benefits outweigh costs.
• Reciprocity norm is the expectation that we should return help to those who have helped us.
• Social responsibility norm is the expectation that people should help those in need, regardless of personal cost.