Relationships and Attraction

Relationships & Attraction

Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love

• Love is composed of passion, intimacy, and commitment.
• Passion is the physical attraction and sexual desire.
• Intimacy is the emotional closeness, trust, and sharing.
• Commitment is the decision to maintain love over time.
• Consummate love includes passion, intimacy, and commitment, which is considered the ideal form of love.

Additional Concepts in Attraction

• The halo effect is the tendency to assume attractive people have other positive qualities.
• The "beauty is good" corollary assumes physically attractive individuals are inherently better.
• Similarity, reciprocity, proximity, and physical attraction cause attraction.
• Similarity involves being drawn to people with shared interests, values, or backgrounds.
• Reciprocity means we like people who show they like us.
• Proximity refers to physical closeness or frequent contact.
• Physical attraction involves initial appeal based on appearance and presentation.

Conformity & Obedience

Conformity

• Conformity means adjusting behavior or beliefs to match a group.
• Normative social influence means conforming to gain acceptance or avoid rejection.
• Informational social influence means conforming due to the belief that the group has accurate information.

Key Studies

• Asch’s line comparison study showed individuals often conform to group pressure, even if the group is wrong.
• The Stanford prison experiment demonstrated situational roles and authority can lead to abusive behavior.

Obedience

• Obedience means following orders from an authority figure.
• The Milgram shock experiment showed people are likely to follow authority even against their conscience.

Compliance & Persuasion Techniques

• Foot-in-the-door involves gaining agreement with a small request before asking for a larger one.
• Door-in-the-face involves starting with a large request likely to be rejected before making a smaller, reasonable request.
• The central route persuasion is based on logical arguments and factual information.
• The peripheral route persuasion relies on superficial cues, like the speaker’s attractiveness or emotional appeal.

Altruism

Key Concepts

• The bystander effect is where individuals are less likely to help in an emergency when others are present.
• The Kitty Genovese case spurred research into bystander inaction showing diffusion of responsibility can prevent intervention.
• Darley and Latané’s "seizure experiment" showed the likelihood of help decreases as the number of bystanders increases.
• Diffusion of responsibility means each person feels less personal responsibility to act when many people are present.

Group Interactions

Decision-Making and Cooperation

• The prisoner’s dilemma shows why individuals may not cooperate due to a lack of trust, even when cooperation is in everyone’s best interest.
• Social traps are situations where individuals acting in their self-interest lead to worse outcomes for the group.

Group Dynamics

• Individualist cultures emphasize personal achievement, while collectivist cultures emphasize group well-being.
• Groupthink can result in poor decision-making, as dissenting opinions are suppressed due to a drive for harmony.
• Group polarization is when group discussions lead to more extreme positions.
• Deindividuation is the loss of self-awareness and personal accountability in a group, leading to atypical behavior.

Performance in Groups

• Social facilitation is the tendency to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of others.
• Social inhibition is the tendency to perform worse on new tasks when others are watching.
• Social loafing is when individuals put in less effort when working in a group compared to working alone.

Attribution and Attitudes

Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory explains the causes of behavior by attributing them to internal dispositions or external situations.
• Situational attribution means behavior is caused by external situations, while dispositional attribution means it is caused by internal traits.
• The actor-observer bias is where we attribute our own behavior to situational factors, but others’ actions to their character.
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overemphasize personality traits and underestimate situational influences when judging others.
• The self-serving bias involves attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.

Additional Concepts

• The just-world phenomenon is the belief that people get what they deserve, leading to victim blaming.
• The illusion of control is the belief that we have more influence over events than we do.
• Self-handicapping involves creating obstacles to success to have an excuse for potential failure.

Attitudes

• Explicit attitudes are conscious beliefs that we can report.
• Implicit attitudes are unconscious biases that influence our behavior without our awareness.
• Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs, leading to changes in attitudes.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms existing beliefs.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy is when our expectations about someone cause us to act in ways that bring about those expected behaviors.

Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Key Concepts

• The blue eyes, brown eyes experiment showed how easily people can be made to discriminate based on arbitrary characteristics.
• Discrimination is the unfair treatment of individuals based on characteristics such as race, gender, or age.
• Schemas are mental frameworks that help us organize information but can lead to stereotypes.

Social Group Biases

• In-group bias is the tendency to favor members of our own group.
• Outgroup homogeneity bias means seeing members of other groups as more similar than they are.

Group Conflict and Resolution

• The Robber’s Cave study showed intergroup conflict arises from competition for limited resources and how superordinate goals can reduce this conflict.
• Realistic conflict theory explains intergroup conflict based on competition over resources.
• Superordinate goals require cooperation between groups, which can reduce tensions.
• Ethnocentrism is believing one’s own culture or group is superior to others.
• Scapegoating involves blaming a person or group for problems, often to deflect responsibility.
• The mere exposure effect is the tendency to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar.