CHAPTER 1 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY PDF

can you read this chapter for me and help me answer quiz questions: On October 9, 2012, fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was riding the school bus home from a day of exams. Although her school was within easy walking distance of her home, Malala had begun taking the bus because her mother was con...

can you read this chapter for me and help me answer quiz questions: On October 9, 2012, fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was riding the school bus home from a day of exams. Although her school was within easy walking distance of her home, Malala had begun taking the bus because her mother was concerned for her safety. The bus had just passed a checkpoint set up by the Pakistani army, and then turned a corner and driven past a deserted cricket field. At that point, a young man with a long beard stepped in front of the bus and waved it down, asking the driver whether this was the Khushal School bus. This was a strange question because the name of the school was written in large letters on the side of the bus. The young man next told the bus driver he needed information about some of the children, to which the driver responded that the man would have to check with the school’s office. As the first man distracted the bus driver, another young man, whose face was covered with a handkerchief, boarded the back of the bus, and demanded to know which of the children on board was named Malala. Although none of the other girls said anything, several of them looked at her, and she was the only girl on the bus not wearing a cover over her face. The man then pulled out a black pistol and, with his hands shaking, fired three shots in her direction. The first bullet hit Malala in the head and went into her left eye socket. As her body slumped down on top of two other girls, the next two bullets hit one of her friends in the shoulder and another girl in the right arm. The violent attack on Malala was not a complete surprise. She had been targeted by an influential fundamentalist cleric named Maulana Fazlullah, who preached on the local talk radio station. What horrendous crime would justify a religious leader calling for a teenage girl’s assassination? Malala’s offense, as it turns out, was to publicly defend the right of young girls to go to school. Although this might not sound like much of a justification for murder, Fazlullah and his followers believed firmly that it was sinful for girls to receive a formal education— so sinful, in fact, that they were willing to blow up schools and even murder the students who disagreed with them. In the region of Pakistan where Malala was attacked, armed Taliban members regularly patrolled the streets and markets, threatening citizens who wore Western clothing and brutally beating up women who neglected to cover up their faces when they went out in public. Malala chose to defy the Taliban’s education ban, and to do so publicly. Even after she had been threatened numerous times, she continued to speak out about the importance of girls having access to schooling, and to make matters worse, she refused to cover her face when she went out in public. Although she was shot in the head and very nearly died from her wounds, Malala survived. Rather than give up in the face of terrorism, though, she continued to speak out against the Taliban, giving speeches opposing violence and militarism, and in favor of governments spending less of their money on guns and more on books. A year later, she addressed the United Nations, calling for free education for children all around the world. Two years later, Malala became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala’s story raises a number of intriguing questions about the roots of human social behavior. To what extent are the different expectations for girls’ and boys’ behavior the products of local cultural norms as opposed to byproducts of a more universal human nature? What causes some people to engage in aggressive violence, and whole groups to take up arms against one another? Besides raising questions about sexism and violence, Malala’s case also leads us to ponder the positive aspects of human social behavior. What leads some people, like Malala, to be courageous in the face of injustice and repression, and to be willing to dedicate their lives to help others? Although the daily news is filled with stories about conflict and selfishness, every day people all around the world go out of their way to help one another; make one another laugh; cook meals for one another; labor together to uncover scientific discoveries; and inspire one another with creative works of art, music, and architecture. In this book we will explore not only broad questions about human nature, but also everyday mysteries about love and hatred, generosity and aggression, and heroism and betrayal. Why do we react generously and lovingly toward some of the people we meet (and in some situations), but defensively or aggressively toward others? What are the roots of romance versus parental love? How can we get our coworkers to cooperate with us? How can we get along with our romantic partners? Why do some people make better leaders? How are our reactions to other people affected by our cultural background, by our early experiences, by our sex, and by neurochemical events in our brains? Most of us try to solve mysteries like these by devouring news stories and books or chatting with friends about our feelings and opinions. Social psychologists go a step further in their detective work; they apply the systematic methods of scientific inquiry. Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by other people. What does it mean, though, to say that social psychology is “scientific”? 1.1.1 Describing and Explaining Social Behavior We can divide the tasks of a scientific social psychology into two general categories: description and explanation. If we want a scientific account of any phenomenon (bird migrations, earthquakes, or intertribal warfare), we first need an objective and reliable description. For example: How do people really act toward one another? How do they really feel about their friends, neighbors? What do they really believe about controversial topics? Many social behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs are hidden from the public eye, so there are some obstacles to overcome in painting an objective portrait of human social life. Careful description is a first step, but it is not, in itself, enough to satisfy scientific curiosity. Social psychologists also seek to explain why people influence one another in the ways they do. A good scientific explanation can connect many thousands of unconnected observations into an interconnected, coherent, and meaningful pattern. The philosopher Jules Henri Poincaré compared scientific facts to the stones used to build a house, but he also observed that without a theory those facts are merely a pile of stones, rather than a well-formed house. Scientific explanations that connect and organize existing observations are called theories. In addition to organizing what we already know, scientific theories give us hints about where to look next. What causes some people, like Malala Yousafzai, to be especially helpful, and others, like the man who shot her in the head, to be especially violent? Without a good theory, we would not know where to start searching for an answer. Maybe an inclination to help others is caused by the arrangement of the planets under which altruists are born or by something in the water they drank as children. Social psychological theories are more likely to suggest searching elsewhere for the causes of social behavior—in a person’s family background, in the broader culture, or in general predispositions humans share with baboons and other social animals. And, as we’ll see, social psychologists have developed some intriguing research methods designed to sort out those different sources of influence. Finally, scientific theories can help us make predictions about future events and control previously unmanageable phenomena. Scientific theories have led to the electric light bulb, the iPhone, the space shuttle, and the control of diseases such as smallpox. As we will see, social psychological theories have provided useful information about the roots of prejudice, kindness, and love; about why people join rioting mobs or religious cults; and about a host of other puzzling phenomena. 1.1.2 Social Psychology Is an Interdisciplinary Bridge Psychologists aren’t the only ones pondering the mysteries of human social behavior. Anthropologists puzzle over why people in some societies have social customs that would seem radically inappropriate in others (in Chapter 8, we will talk about societies in which one woman marries multiple men, for example). Evolutionary biologists search for common patterns linking human social behavior with the behaviors of chimpanzees, hyenas, and indigo buntings (in Chapter 10, we will see that the hormone testosterone is similarly linked to aggression, and to sex roles, across a wide range of species). Political scientists and historians search for the determinants of warfare and intergroup conflicts, of the sort we will explore in Chapters 11 and 13. And economists search for the roots of people’s decisions about whether to contribute to their group’s welfare, or hoard their resources to themselves, topics we will investigate in Chapters 9 and 13. How do the perspectives of all these disciplines fit together into a bigger picture? How does what you are learning in your biology class link with what you’re learning in your anthropology class? How do the factoids of history connect with recent discoveries in neuroscience? What are the links between geography, economics, and marriage customs? It turns out all these things are profoundly connected, and in ways that affect not only the course of your personal life but also the course of world affairs. Evolutionary biology, neurochemistry, history, culture, and geography all have important implications for how people socially interact with one another, and those social interactions, in turn, affect which moral and religious sentiments are enforced as laws, how children are educated, and even how medical doctors treat their patients. Because all of these influences converge to influence social behavior, social psychologists consider social behavior at many different levels of analysis. For example, one team of social psychologists examined societies around the world and found that cultural differences in friendliness and sociability are linked to geographic variations in disease prevalence—where there is more disease, people have traits that lead them to avoid contact with others (Murray et al., 2010; Schaller & Park, 2011). Other studies we’ll discuss have examined how our relationships with other people can be affected by historical factors, hormone levels, phases of the menstrual cycle, brain activity, and local population density, and how all these influences can, in turn, affect our physical and mental health, as well as our economic behavior and political beliefs (e.g., Apicella et al., 2008; Cantú et al., 2014; Gelfand et al., 2011; Little et al., 2008; Sng et al., 2017; Uskul et al., 2008; Varnum et al., 2014). Thus, social psychology is in many ways the ultimate bridge discipline. Throughout this text, we will encounter many such interdisciplinary bridges, often considering findings that connect culture, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience with applied disciplines from business to law to medicine. Summarize the four major theoretical perspectives of social psychology, and discuss how they work together to explain human social behavior. Social psychological theories have been influenced by intellectual developments ranging from the discovery of DNA to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Four major perspectives (or families of theories) have dominated the field: sociocultural, evolutionary, social learning, and social cognitive.The year 1908 saw the publication of the first two major textbooks titled Social Psychology. One was written by sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, who argued that the wellsprings of social behavior reside not in the individual but in the social group. He argued that people were carried along on “social currents,” such as “the spread of a lynching spirit through a crowd... [or] an epidemic of religious emotion” (Ross, 1908, 1–2). Ross analyzed incidents such as the Dutch tulip bulb craze of 1634, in which people sold their houses and land to buy flower roots that cost more than their weight in gold, but that instantly became worthless when the craze stopped. To explain these crazes, Ross looked at the group as a whole rather than at the psyche of the individual group member. He viewed crazes and fads as products of “mob mind... that irrational unanimity of interest, feeling, opinion, or deed in a body of communicating individuals, which results from suggestion and imitation” (Ross, 1908, 65). Like Ross, other sociologically based theorists emphasized larger social groupings, from neighborhood gangs to ethnic groups and political parties (e.g., Sumner, 1906). That emphasis continues in the modern sociocultural perspective—the view that a person’s prejudices, preferences, and political persuasions are affected by factors that work at the level of the group, factors such as nationality, social class, and current historical trends (Cohen, 2015; Gelfand & Kashima, 2016; Heine, 2016). For example, compared to her working-class Irish grandmother, a modern-day Manhattan executive probably has different attitudes about premarital sex and women’s roles in business (Roberts & Helson, 1997). Sociocultural theorists focus on the central importance of social norms, or rules about appropriate behavior, such as Don’t eat with your hands, Don’t wear shorts to a wedding, and so on. At the center of this perspective is the concept of culture, which we can broadly define as a set of beliefs, customs, habits, and languages shared by the people living in a particular time and place. People in Italy and France regard it as appropriate to kiss acquaintances on both cheeks when they meet in public, a custom that can make a visiting American feel awkward—they might be more comfortable with a high five. Of course, not everyone who lives in a particular country has exactly the same set of beliefs and customs. Americans from Alabama versus those living in New York, those who were raised in Hispanic Catholic families versus Eastern European Jewish families, and those who grow up in upper-middle-class versus working-class homes are exposed to somewhat different sets of cultural norms (Cohen, 2015; Cohen & Varnum, 2016; Kraus, Park, & Tan, 2017). Culture includes all the human-engineered features of the environment, from subjective features, such as rules of etiquette, to objective features, such as houses and clothing (Fiske, 2002; Triandis, 1994). The technological features of our culture can have powerful effects on our social behaviors, as evidenced in recent years in the phenomena of iPhones and social networking Internet sites—technologies that profoundly influence how people communicate with one another (Crabb, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Guadagno et al., 2008; McKenna & Bargh, 2000). Each of us has been exposed to different cultural norms depending on our ethnicity, our socioeconomic status, the geographical region in which we were raised, and our religion (Cohen & Varnum, 2016; Johnson et al., 2011; Kraus et al., 2011; Sanchez-Burks, 2002). For example, Americans of European descent tend to place a high value on expressing themselves and making their own personal choices, and they like to “think out loud.” In contrast, Americans of Asian descent tend to place relatively more emphasis on their families’ choices, do not try to draw attention to themselves, and solve problems more effectively if they are permitted to think quietly on their own (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999; Kim, 2002; Kim & Sherman, 2007). In one study, Asian American and European American college students were encouraged to work on problems similar to the one in Figure 1.1 (you can try it yourself, what pattern should appear in the blank box, A, B, or C?). Sometimes the students were encouraged to work silently; at other times, they were asked to talk out loud and describe their thought processes. The European American students did better when they discussed their thought processes out loud, but the exact opposite happened for the Asian American students, who did betterIn one experiment, college students were given a series of 10 items from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. For example, assuming that the set of 9 boxes on the top left is a logical series, which pattern on the top right (A, B, or C) should appear in the blank box? Results depicted in the graph on the right show that European Americans did better when they were encouraged to talk aloud about their thinking processes. In contrast, Asian Americans did better when permitted to work in silence.when they worked in silence. As the study’s author pointed out, American schools often encourage students to think out loud, on the assumption that discussing their thoughts with another person will help the students better solve problems. This educational tactic works for European Americans but can backfire with Asian American students. Consider the case of Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl who was shot in the head for advocating education for women. A psychologist adopting a sociocultural perspective might observe the very different norms governing appropriate female behavior in Pakistan versus Norway and Sweden, for example. In the region of Pakistan where Malala was raised, women were expected not to leave their homes unless their faces were covered and they were accompanied by a male relative. Malala describes one teenage girl who was raped and became pregnant and was then imprisoned for adultery because she could not provide four men who would testify that she was not an adulteress (Yousafzai & Lamb, 2013). When the World Economic Forum recently ranked 144 countries for their degree of gender equality, Pakistan was the second lowest in the world (only Yemen has more inequality between the sexes). Of the top five most sexually egalitarian countries in the world, on the other hand, four were Scandinavian countries (Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden). In Sweden, gender discrimination in the workplace was made illegal 50 years ago, both fathers and mothers are given parental leave to care for children, and almost half of the elected representatives in government are women. Sociocultural theorists also point out that the norms of different societies change over time. Even in Scandinavian countries during the 1800s, sex roles were more rigid, fundamentalist religious values were more widespread, and women did not have the right to vote. Pakistan, on the other hand, has gone in the other direction in recent decades, as fundamentalist religious leaders have encouraged brutal measures such as the bombing of girls’ schools and the beating of women in public, which has in turn discouraged moderate Pakistanis who had previously adopted European attitudes and customs. These cultural changes are not random, and social psychologists have begun to study the factors that lead societies to change in particular ways in response to particular environmental factors such as disease prevalence, population density, and warfare (Sng et al., 2018). For example, there appears to be a link between infectious disease and gender inequality. Societies with more disease have more unequalrelations between men and women, and over time, as rates of infectious disease have changed within a society, changes in gender equality have followed suit (Varnum & Grossman, 2016). As you will see, the study of groups, cultures, and social norms continues as a major thrust in social psychology (e.g., Adams, 2005; Chen, 2008; Matsumoto et al., 2008; Ross et al., 2005; Shiota et al., 2010; Sng et al, 2018). We will consider these sociocultural influences in every chapter of this text.The year 1908 saw the publication of another text called Social Psychology. This one was written by William McDougall, a British psychologist originally trained in biology. McDougall left Oxford to take the William James chair in psychology at Harvard. McDougall (1908) adopted an evolutionary perspective—the view that human social behaviors are rooted in physical and psychological predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. McDougall followed Charles Darwin’s (1873) suggestion that human social behaviors (such as smiling, sneering, and other emotional expressions) had evolved along with physical features (such as upright posture and grasping thumbs). The central driving force of evolution is natural selection, the process whereby animals with characteristics that help them survive and reproduce pass on those traits to their offspring. New characteristics that are well suited to particular environments— called adaptations—will come to replace characteristics that are less well suited to environmental demands and opportunities. Dolphins are mammals closely related to cows, but their legs evolved into fins because that shape is better suited to life under water. Darwin assumed that just as an animal’s body is shaped by natural selection, so is that animal’s brain.Psychologists once assumed that evolution could only produce inflexible “instincts” that were “wired in” at birth and not much influenced by the environment. Scientists now understand that biological influences on behavior are usually flexible and responsive to the environment (e.g., Gangestad et al., 2006; Kenrick & Gomez-Jacinto, 2014; O’Gorman et al., 2008; Robinson et al., 2008). Consider fear, for example. Fear would have helped our ancestors respond rapidly to threats such as poisonous insects, snakes, and other people who might pose a danger to them (Ohman et al., 2001). Because it would exhaust our bodies to be on continuous high alert, though, the so-called fightor-flight response (which makes us want to run or defend ourselves in frightening situations) is exquisitely sensitive to cues that suggest when we are and are not likely to be in danger (Cannon, 1929). Several teams of researchers have applied an evolutionary perspective to help understand the potentially volatile prejudices between people who belong to different groups (e.g., Kurzban & Leary, 2001; Makhanova et al., 2015; Navarrete et al., 2009; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). For example, one team of researchers asked White and Asian Canadian college students to rate their reactions to photographs of Black men (Schaller, Park, & Mueller, 2003). Some of the students did the ratings in a brightly lit room; others were in a completely dark room. In the dark room, men with a chronic tendency to view the world as a dangerous place were particularly prone to see the Black men as threatening. In the ancestral past, it would have been useful for our ancestors to be especially fearful of strangers under certain circumstances. The possibility of dangerous conflict between two different groups of men who encountered one another after dark would have led to wariness on the part of men who found themselves in this type of situation. The researchers note that in modern multicultural societies the tendency to respond with these primitive self-protective reactions can lead to adverse consequences, including bullying, gang warfare, and intergroup conflict. On the one hand, as we noted earlier, sociocultural theorists have been intrigued by differences in behavior from one culture to another. On the other hand, evolutionary theorists are interested in general characteristics of our species, so they have searched for common patterns in human social behaviors around the world (e.g., Dunn et al., 2010; Kenrick & Keefe, 1992; Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Schmitt, 2006b). Men and women in every human society, for example, establish long-term marriage bonds in which the man helps the woman raise a family (Geary, 2000; Hrdy, 1999). This might seem unsurprising until one looks at most of our furry relatives. Mothers in 95 to 97% of other mammalian species go it alone without any help from the male. Why are family values so rare among mammalian males? After fertilization, fathers just aren’t all that necessary if you are a cow or an antelope. Paternal care becomes useful, though, in species like coyotes and human beings, whose young are born helpless (Finkel & Eastwick, 2015; Fletcher et al., 2015; Geary, 2005). Besides the broad commonalities of human nature, evolutionary psychologists are also interested in differences between individuals (e.g., Boothroyd et al., 2008; Feinberg et al., 2008; Jackson & Kirkpatrick, 2008; Jonason, Li, & Buss, 2010). Within any species there are often multiple strategies for survival and reproduction. For example, some male sunfish grow large, defend territories, and build nests, which attract females. Other males are smaller and impersonate females, darting in to fertilize the eggs just as the female mates with a large territorial male (Gould & Gould, 1989). Although people in all societies form some type of long-term parental bond, they also vary considerably in their mating strategies: Some men and women are monogamous, whereas others join in marriages that involve more than one husband, as in Tibet, or more than one wife, as in Afghanistan (Schmitt, 2005a). As we shall see in later chapters, social psychologists are just beginning to explore how biological predispositions and culture interact to shape complex social behaviors, from violence and prejudice to altruism, love, and religiosity (e.g., Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Moon, Krems, & Cohen, 2018; Williams, Sng, & Neuberg, 2016During the decades following 1908, Ross’s group-centered perspective and McDougall’s evolutionary approach declined in popularity. Instead, many psychologists adopted a social learning perspective, which viewed social behavior as driven by each individual’s past learning experiences with reward and punishment (e.g., Allport, 1924; Hull, 1934). On this view, whether we love or hate another person or group of people, whether we are gregarious or reserved, and whether we desire to be a leader or a follower, are all determined by the rewards and punishments we receive from our parents, our teachers, and our peers. We don’t need to learn everything from our own trials and errors, though; we can observe what happens to the other people around us and the people we read about in books and magazines or hear about on television. In a classic series of experiments, Albert Bandura and his colleagues showed how children learn to imitate aggressive behavior after seeing another child or adult rewarded for beating an inflatable Bobo doll (e.g., Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). Bandura expressed concern because his own research had suggested that movies and television often teach young people that violent behavior can be heroic and rewarding. These concerns have been validated by numerous examples of life imitating art. For example, on April 8, 2000, the Arizona Republic reported the story of a group of boys in a local high school who started a “fight club” modeled after one started by Brad Pitt’s character in a 1999 movie of the same name. As modeled by the characters in the movie, the teenage boys would gather together to punch one another in the face (Davis, 2000). In a related vein, as we will discuss in Chapter 10, there is evidence that violent video games, which often give players additional points every time they kill or maim a lifelike opponent, may desensitize young boys to violence and teach them to associate hurting others with rewards (Anderson et al., 2017; Bartholow et al., 2006; Engehardt et al., 2011). What led Malala Yousafzai to take such a courageous stand in favor of girls’ education in Pakistan? A social learning theorist might search for evidence that she had received direct rewards from her parents, teachers, and peers for doing well in school and for speaking out against the Taliban’s policies to restrict women’s rights. She regularly came in at the top of her class, and in 2017 was accepted as a student at Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. A related possibility involves indirect social learning. All her life, Malala had been exposed to role models who championed education. In fact, Malala’s father was the director of the school she attended. And he had himself spoken out publicly against the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ education (to the point where his own life was threatened on numerous occasions). The social learning perspective is similar to the sociocultural perspective in that it searches for the causes of social behavior in a person’s environment. The two perspectives are slightly different in their breadth of focus over time and place, however. Social learning theorists emphasize the individual’s unique experiences in a particular family, school, or peer group. How did Malala’s experiences growing up with an educator for a father shape her behaviors, for example? Sociocultural theorists are not as concerned with specific individuals or their unique experiences but instead look at larger social aggregates, such as Asian Canadians, Hispanic Americans, college students in sororities, Protestants, or members of the upper class (e.g., Cohen, Malka, et al., 2009; Hoshino-Browne et al., 2005; Vandello & Cohen, 2003). How do the general beliefs of fundamentalist Muslims and the history and economy of Pakistan influence the social norms there, for example? Another difference is that sociocultural theorists lean toward the assumption that norms, like clothing styles, can change relatively quickly, whereas social learning theorists have generally assumed that habits learned early inlife may be difficult to break. A sociocultural theorist might point out, for example, that Pakistan and Afghanistan underwent radical changes in just a few years after those countries separated from England and Russia. INVESTIGATION Think of someone whose behavior has been prominent in the news of late. How might this person’s actions be explained differently from the sociocultural, evolutionary, and social learning perspectives? 1.2.4 The Social Cognitive Perspective Despite their differences, the sociocultural, evolutionary, and social learning perspectives all emphasize the objective environment. Each assumes that our social behaviors are influenced by real events in the world. During the 1930s and 1940s Kurt Lewin brought a different perspective to social psychology, arguing that social behavior is driven by each person’s subjective interpretations of events in the social world (Lewin et al., 1939). For example, whether you decide to work toward the goal of becoming class president would depend on (1) your subjective guess about your chances of winning the office and (2) your subjective evaluation of the benefits of being class president (Higgins, 1997, 2012). If you don’t think it would be personally rewarding to be class president, or if you want to be president but don’t expect to win, you won’t bother to run for election—regardless of whether it would objectively be a winnable or enjoyable post for you. By emphasizing subjective interpretations, Lewin did not mean to imply that no objective reality existed. Instead, he emphasized the interaction between the actual events in your life and your interpretations of those events. Lewin believed that a person’s interpretation of any situation was also related to his or her goals at the time. In one study, men viewed photographs of women who were wearing neutral expressions on their faces. The experimental task was to judge whether the women were trying to hide any emotions. If the men had first watched a movie that put them in a romantic frame of mind, the men were more likely to see signs of sexual arousal on the women’s faces, but only if the women were physically attractive (Maner et al., 2005). Thus, facial expressions that were objectively the same were seen very differently, depending on the men’s motivational states. The emphasis on an interaction between inner experience and the outside world led naturally to a close association between social psychology and cognitive psychology (Kihlstrom, 2013; Ross, Lepper, & Ward, 2010). Cognitive psychologists study the mental processes involved in noticing, interpreting, judging, and remembering events in the environment. During the 1950s the advent of computers helped lead a “cognitive revolution”—a rebirth of interest in the workings of the mind. During the 1970s and 1980s an increasing number of social psychologists adopted a social cognitive perspective, which focuses on the processes involved in people’s choice of which social events to pay attention to, which interpretations to make of these events, and how to store these experiences in memory (e.g., Andersen & Chen, 2002; Carlston, 2013; Plant et al., 2004; Roese & Summerville, 2005). Social psychologists have conducted a number of fascinating experiments to explore how your reactions to any social situation can be influenced by cognitive factors, such as what you are paying attention to, and what pops into your memory in a given situation (e.g., Donders et al., 2008; Sharif & Norenzayan, 2007; Trawalter et al., 2008). In one such experiment, high school students were asked how important they thought it was to make a lot of money in their future jobs (Roney, 2003). Some of the students answered the question in a room with members of the opposite sex; some were around only members of their own sex. As you can see in Figure 1.2, the presence of boys made no difference in the way that high school girls answered thequestion. But being around girls led high school boys to inflate the value they placed on wealth. The researcher also found that seeing ads with young, attractive female models (as opposed to ads depicting older people) stimulated college men to rate themselves as more ambitious and to place more value on being financially successful. James Roney, the author of the study, explained the results in terms of a simple cognitive mechanism—seeing attractive young women activates thoughts about dating in young men. This, in turn, triggers associated thoughts about “what women want,” including the tendency for women to place more emphasis on financial success in a mate (e.g., Li et al., 2002; Li, Yong, et al., 2013). One problem we face in processing social information is that there is so much of it. It’s virtually impossible to remember every single person you passed as you walked across campus this morning, much less all the social interactions you had over the last week or the last year. Because we can’t focus on everything we see and hear, social information processing is selective. As we’ll see in later chapters, sometimes we put our minds on automatic, focusing on a superficial detail or two that will help us come to a quick decision about what to do next (such as when you’re in a rush and have to decide whether to give 50 cents to a homeless woman with her hand out). At other times, we pay careful attention to particular details and search, like scientists, for particular types of social information that will allow us to make accurate decisions (when you’re thinking of dating someone, for example) (Gawronski & Creighton, 2013; Strack et al., 2006). Social psychologists have found that people have a very hard time keeping a completely fair and open mind to new social information, even when we’re trying to do so (e.g., Lord, Lepper, & Preston, 1979, 1984; Washburn & Skitka, 2017). Rather than operating like scientists seeking the truth, we often process social information more like lawyers defending a client (Haidt, 2001; Hornsey & Fielding, 2017). Consider this question: What are you like now, and how are you different now from what you were like when you were 16 years old? When one team of researchers asked Canadian college students this question, the students had lots of positive things to say about their present selves and more negative things to say about their former selves. Of course, it might be that people simply become better human beings as they age. When the researchers, however, asked another group of students to rate acquaintances of the same age, the students did not perceive their acquaintances as growing into better and better people (Wilson & Ross, 2001). The tendency to view ourselves (but not others) as having changed “from chumps to champs” fits with a number of other findings suggesting that people tend to process social information in a way that flatters themselves (Greenwald, Banaji, et al., 2002; Kurzban, 2012). In Chapter 3, we will go into detail on the many findings that have been inspired by the social cognitive perspective. Because of the central importance of this perspective in modern social psychology, it will provide an essential component throughout this text as we discuss the many mysteries of social behavior.Perspective What Drives Social Behavior? Example Sociocultural Forces in larger social groups Employees working at IBM in the 1960s wore blue dress shirts (as opposed to white); employees working for Apple in 2018 are more likely to wear colorful T-shirts and jeans to work. Evolutionary Inherited tendencies to respond to the social environment in ways that would have helped our ancestors survive and reproduce Human infants the world over are born with a set of behavioral mechanisms (sucking, crying, cooing) that induce hormonal changes in their mothers, increasing the likelihood they will be nursed and cared for. Social learning Rewards and punishments; observing how other people are rewarded and punished for their social behaviors An African American girl decides to become a writer after watching an inspiring TED talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Social cognitive What we pay attention to in a social situation, how we interpret it, and how we connect the current situation to related experiences in memory If you pass a homeless person on the street, you may be more likely to help if you interpret his plight as something beyond his control and if he reminds you of the parable of the Good SamaritanTable 1.1 summarizes the four major theoretical perspectives in social psychology. Although these perspectives are sometimes viewed as competing, each actually focuses on different parts of the mysteries of social life. Because a single traditional perspective focuses on only part of the picture, we need to combine and integrate the different approaches to see the full picture. The processes of attention and memory studied by cognitive researchers are shaped by people’s learning histories and cultures, which are, in turn, the products of an evolutionary past in which humans have created, and have been created by, their social groups (Kenrick, Nieuweboer, & Buunk, 2010; Klein et al., 2002; Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, Kenrick, et al., 2018). Consider the topic of prejudice—to some extent, prejudices against members of other groups are related to evolved aversions to strangers, who were often sources of physical danger and new diseases for our ancestors (e.g., McDonald et al., 2012; Schaller, Park, & Mueller, 2003). However, aversions to outsiders always involved trade-offs because members of different groups engaged in trade and exchanged mates with one another (Faulkner et al., 2004; Navarette et al., 2007). Hence, human beings have always had to learn who were their friends and who were their enemies, and which members of different outgroups to fear and which to trust (e.g., Phelps et al., 2000). As relationships between different groups change with historical events, the cultural norms also change accordingly. For example, in the 1950s many African Americans were still being denied the right to vote; 50 years later, things changed so much that an African American could become president of the United States. To fully understand the mysteries of social life, then, it is necessary to piece together clues from several different perspectives. Basic Principles of Social Behavior LO 1.3 Describe the five fundamental motives behind goal-oriented social behavior, and explain what is meant by the person, the situation, and person–situation interactions. Despite their differences, all the major perspectives in social psychology share a pair of key assumptions. First, people interact with one another to achieve some goal or satisfy some inner motivation. Cognitive psychologists emphasize conscious goals triggered by the current situation, as when an ad saying “Father’s Day is just around the corner!” reminds you to rush out and buy your father another one of those Hawaiian print ties he appreciated so much last year. Learning theorists emphasize how past rewards encourage us to approach some goals and avoid others. For example, if your parents smile proudly every time you share your toys with your sister but grimace every time you talk about money, you may set the goal of joining the Peace Corps instead of a Wall Street brokerage firm. Evolutionary theorists emphasize social motivations rooted in our ancestral past: People who were motivated to get along with other members of their social groups, for instance, were more likely to survive and pass on their genes than were self-centered hermits. A second common theoretical thread is a focus on the interaction between the person and the situation. All the major perspectives assume that motivations inside each of us interact with events in the outside situations we encounter. For example, the evolutionary perspective emphasizes how internal reactions such as anger, fear, or sexual arousal are triggered by situations related to survival or reproduction (hungry- looking predators or flirtatious glances, for example). Social learning theorists study how learned responses within the individual are linked to rewards and punishments in the social setting. And cognitive theorists examine how a person’s thought processes are linked with moment-to-moment changes in the social situation. Throughout this book, then, we will emphasize two broad principles shared by the different perspectives. 1. Social behavior is goal oriented. People interact with one another to achieve some goal or satisfy some inner motivation. 2. Social behavior represents a continual interaction between the person and the situation. In the following sections, we take a closer look at these two principles. 1.3.1 Social Behavior Is Goal Oriented Goals affect our social behaviors on several levels. At the surface level, any one of us can easily come up with a long list of day-to-day goals: to find out the latest office gossip, to make a good impression on a teacher, or to get a date for next Saturday night. At a somewhat broader level, we can talk about longer term goals: to gain a reputation as someone who gets things done, to be seen as likable, or to find true love. Those broader goals often tie together several other day-to-day goals: Developing a romantic relationship incorporates shorter term goals such as getting a date for Saturday night and being comforted by your partner after an exam. At the broadest level, we can ask about fundamental motives—the ultimate functions of our social behavior (Neel et al., 2016; Kenrick et al., 2010). So, for example, succeeding in your career and making connections with people in high places could both be incorporated into a fundamental motive of “gaining and maintaining status.” To better understand these fundamental motives, let’s consider several that have been investigated by social psychologists. TO ESTABLISH SOCIAL TIES When Malala was growing up, her family would often open their home up to others. She shared her room with a cousin from a rural village that had no school and with another girl whose father had died and left her destitute. Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, had been poor, and had been able to go to college only because another family had allowed him to live with them. In the case of almost every goal you ever reach, you get there more easily when there are others helping you along. Some goals, such as Malala’s father’s dream of building a school (which he could not have done without the support of his friends and neighbors), would not happen at all if not for teamwork. When psychologists enumerate the most basic motives underlying human behavior, the desire to establish ties with other people is usually high on the list (e.g., Bugental, 2000; McAdams, 1990). People are exquisitely sensitive to rejection and go to great lengths to reconnect with others if they feel excluded (Anthony et al., 2007; Maner, DeWall, et al., 2007; Williams & Nida, 2011). One team of researchers observedbrain-wave patterns in people as they played a virtual ball-tossing game with two other players. When the two other players threw the ball to one another and excluded the participant, the person who was ostracized showed a pattern of activity in two different areas of the cortex usually associated with physical injury (Eisenberger et al., 2003). Other research suggests that the agony of social separation can be reduced by opiates, drugs normally used to quell the agony of a bleeding wound (Panksepp, 2005). Why does social isolation tap into the same neural mechanisms as physical pain? Perhaps because, without their friends, our ancestors would not have survived (Hill & Hurtado, 1996; MacDonald & Leary, 2005). Hence social rejection may trigger a primitive physiological emergency reaction. TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES AND OTHERS People gossip, they read profiles of criminal personalities in the newspaper, and they seek feedback from their friends about their chances of getting a date with a charming new classmate. The importance of such information is obvious—by understanding yourself and your relationships with others you are able to manage your life more effectively. Someone who is “out of touch” with these realities will have a harder time surviving in a social group (Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Sedikides & Skowronski, 2000). Because social knowledge is so fundamental to all human relationships, social psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the topic of social cognition (which, as noted earlier, refers to the mental processes involved in attending to, interpreting, and remembering other people). In Chapter 3, we explore this topic in depth, and we return to it throughout the chapters that follow. TO GAIN AND MAINTAIN STATUS J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and its sequels have sold over 500 million copies, and 7 of the top 20 best-selling novels of all time are Harry Potter books. When the story of Harry Potter begins, he is a lowly orphan, an object of scorn and abuse living in a closet under the stairs in his aunt’s house. By the final book’s end, Harry has overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to defeat the forces of evil and become the world’s most powerful and respected wizard. This theme, of rising from desperation to grand success, is enormously popular in literature and movies (think of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars; Percy Jackson from the Lightning Thief; and Jake Sully, the paraplegic who turned into a flying blue superhero in Avatar). Likewise in real life, winning and losing are matters of profound importance, to gradeschoolers competing for places on Little League all-star teams, college students fighting for grades, middle managers striving for executive positions, and senators and governors campaigning to win the presidency. And humans aren’t alone in struggling for status. Baboons are social primates who, like us, pay close attention to where they stand in the social hierarchy. An intensive study of baboons’ physiological responses to social events revealed that a loss of status led to a particularly disruptive set of hormonal alarm responses (Sapolsky, 2001). The advantages of attaining status include not only immediate material payoffs, such as access to food, but also the less tangible social benefits that follow from other people’s (or other baboons’) respect and admiration (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Maner & Mead, 2010). So it makes sense that most of us go to great lengths not only to present ourselves in a positive light to others, but also to convince ourselves that we have reason to hold our heads up high (e.g., Sedikides et al., 2003; Tesser, 2000). Throughout this book, we will see that the motivation to gain and maintain status underlies a wide range of social behaviors. TO DEFEND OURSELVES AND THOSE WE VALUE At the local level, people build fences around their houses, put up Keep Out signs on their streets, join gangs, and buy attack dogs to protect themselves. At the national level, countries build armies to protect themselves against the armies of other countries. People are extremely motivated to defend themselves when their reputations, their resources, or their families are threatened. People can recognize an angry expression in just a fraction of a second and do so significantly faster if the angry expression is on a man’s face (Becker et al., 2007). Why? Men, such as the fanatic who shot Malala, generally pose more of a physical threat than do women, and this threat is particularly pronounced if those men are strangers or members of outgroups (Ackerman, Shapiro, et al., 2006; McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012; Neel et al., 2012).The motivation to defend ourselves can have obvious benefits, promoting our survival and that of our family members, but it can also lead to escalating violence and racism (Duntley, 2005; Schaller, Park, Mueller, et al., 2003). We will discuss the sometimes frightening power of self-protective motivation in the chapters that deal with aggression, prejudice, and intergroup conflict. TO ATTRACT AND RETAIN MATES Rajinder Singh, sixth maharajah of the state of Patiala in India, took 350 spouses; most North Americans will take at least one. People often go to great lengths to find and keep these partners, writing lengthy love letters, having long phone calls at 2 a.m., or joining dating apps. An initial flirtation with a pleasant acquaintance in your psychology class could lead to feelings of attraction, romantic love, and even a lifelong family bond. From an evolutionary perspective, these are all connected (Kenrick, Maner, & Li, 2016). Indeed, evolutionary theorists believe that the goal of reproduction underlies all the other social goals. From this perspective, we affiliate, we seek social information, we strive for status, and we act in aggressive and self-protective ways all toward the ultimate end of reproducing our genes (Buss, 2015; Hill et al., 2012; Neuberg et al., 2010). INVESTIGATION Recall one pleasant and one unpleasant interaction you’ve had with another person or group. How do those interactions link with the different goals we just discussed? 1.3.2 The Interaction between the Person and the Situation If an attractive stranger on your left begins to flirt with you, you may stop trying to impress your boss, who is standing on your right. If you later notice that a third person—a large male dressed in a motorcycle jacket—has started to sneer at you and to stand possessively close to the flirtatious stranger, you may shift to thoughts of self-protection. In contrast, a coworker who is a more devoted social climber may be so desperately trying to impress the boss as to be oblivious to flirtation opportunities or physical dangers. In other words, the fundamental motives and specific goals active at any one time reflect the continual interaction between factors inside the person and factors outside in the world. Because we will examine these interactions in some detail throughout this book, let us briefly consider what we mean by “the person” and “the situation” and how the two become interwoven through “person–situation interactions.” PERSON THE PERSON When we talk about the person, we will typically be referring to features or characteristics that individuals carry into social situations. If asked to describe yourself, you might mention physical characteristics (your height or your sex, for example), chronic attitudes or preferences (your tendency to vote Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, for example), and psychological traits (whether you are extraverted or introverted, emotional or calm, and so on). These characteristics may be based on genetic or physiological factors that make you different from others, or they may be based on past learning experiences and maintained by particular ways you have of thinking about yourself or the other people you encounter on a day-to-day basis. Other aspects of the person may be more temporary, such as your current mood or sense of self-worth. Throughout the text, when we want to focus specifically on a feature of the person, we will signify this by adding the word PERSON before the header.SITUATION THE SITUATION When we talk about the social situation, we are referring to events or circumstances outside the person. These can range from fleeting events in the immediate social context (as when a stranger winks at you) to long- lasting influences, such as growing up on an isolated rural farm in Iowa or in a multiethnic neighborhood in New York City. When we want to focus specifically on a feature of the situation, we will signify this by adding the word SITUATION before the header. INTERACTION PERSON–SITUATION INTERACTIONS Neither the person nor the situation is a fixed entity. As William James observed, “Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends” (1890, p. 294). Different social situations trigger different goals—sometimes we want to be liked, sometimes we want to be feared, and so on (Dunning, 2015; Griskevicius, Tybur, et al., 2009). Because there is often quite a bit going on in a single situation, your goal at any given moment may depend on what you are paying attention to. And depending on your current goals and your lifelong traits, you may respond differently to a situation from the way others do (e.g., Graziano et al., 2007). Think of a party where some people are dancing, some are having a philosophical discussion, and still others are sharing raunchy jokes. As we discuss in detail in Chapter 2, people and situations interact in several different ways. For example, we tend to interpret ambiguous situations in ways that fit with our personal motives (Dunning & Balcetis, 2013; Huang & Bargh, 2014; Krems et al., 2015). Whether you think someone was flirting with you or just being friendly depends on your sex and whether you are in a romantic frame of mind (Maner et al., 2005). Our personalities also affect which situations we choose to enter (Roberts et al., 2003; Snyder & Ickes, 1985). If you are an introvert, you might decline an invitation to a party; an extravert might crash the party, even if he wasn’t invited. Just as people choose their situations, so social situations may choose certain types of people to enter them. The high school freshman who is taller than average may be recruited for basketball training, for example, whereas a friend who is better than average at math and science may be recruited for honors classes. And small initial differences between people may get magnified by situations (such as basketball training sessions and honors classes). Thus situation and person shape and choose one another in a continuing cycle. When we want to focus specifically on a person–situation interaction, we will signify this by adding the word INTERACTION before the header. How Psychologists Study Social Behavior LO 1.4 List the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different descriptive methods (e.g., naturalistic observation, case study) and experimental methods, and explain why researchers find value in combining different methods. Scientific research is a bit like detective work. A detective begins with a mystery and a set of procedures for solving that mystery: interview witnesses, look for a motive, try to rule out various suspects, examine the material evidence, and so on. There are pitfalls at every step: Witnesses may lie or base their testimony on unfounded assumptions, some motives may be hidden, and the evidence may have been tampered with. Like detectives, social psychologists begin with mysteries. We opened this chapter with several: What are the roots of violence? Why do some people make better leaders? How can we get along with our romantic partners? Social psychologists have a set of procedures for solving such mysteries and, like detectives, they must also be aware of potential pitfalls involved in using these procedures.Psychologists begin their detective work with hypotheses—educated guesses about how the evidence is likely to turn out. If you wanted to search for evidence about some interesting social behavior, you might start with one of the theoretical perspectives we discussed earlier. For example, adopting a social learning perspective on Malala’s social activism and support for education, you might note that her father had himself been an outspoken advocate for women’s education in Pakistan. An alternative hypothesis is that people inherit genetic tendencies toward altruism from their parents. Not all social psychological hypotheses are logically derived from a scientific theory. You might draw an interesting hypothesis from an odd event that seems to contradict common sense, such as when a person becomes more committed to a religious cult after the leader’s predictions about the end of the world do not come true (Festinger et al., 1956). Or you might search for exceptions to some established psychological principle, such as when a reward causes a child to stop working on a task (e.g., Deci et al., 1999; Lepper et al., 1973). Social psychologist William McGuire (1997) enumerated 49 different ways to go about generating a research hypothesis. Many people stop looking once they come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for why another person appeared generous, zealous, aggressive, or loving. But concocting a plausible-seeming hypothesis is only the beginning of a scientific search. Sometimes even the most plausible hypotheses prove to be dead wrong. For example, raising students’ self-esteem has been touted by educators and politicians as a cure for everything from premarital sex to assault, rape, and murder (see Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). On the surface, it seems quite reasonable that people who feel bad about themselves might be more likely to act out in a sexual or violent way, perhaps to boost their fragile self-esteem. But when psychologists look at the actual research evidence, it appears that the hypotheses about the dangers of low self-esteem, however logical they sound, are often wrong. After reviewing the research evidence on self-esteem, social psychologists Roy Baumeister, Brad Bushman, and Keith Campbell (2000) concluded that we have little to fear from people with low self-esteem and more to fear from those who have an inflated view of themselves. These contrary findings make sense if we think of low self-esteem as humility and high self-esteem as conceit and arrogance. The detective tools psychologists use to gather data about their hypotheses can be roughly divided into two categories: descriptive and experimental. Descriptive methods are used to measure or record behaviors, thoughts, or feelings in their natural state. When psychologists use descriptive methods, they hope to record behaviors without changing them in any way. Experimental methods, in contrast, are used to uncover the causes of behavior by systematically varying some aspect of the situation. 1.4.1 Descriptive Methods Before we can understand the causes of any phenomenon, it helps to have a careful description of what it is we’re talking about. Social psychologists use five major types of descriptive methods: naturalistic observation, case studies, archives, surveys, and psychological tests. NATURALISTIC OBSERVATION Perhaps the most straightforward descriptive method is naturalistic observation. It involves, quite simply, observing behavior as it unfolds in its natural setting. As one example, psychologist Monica Moore (1985) went to a setting where she expected women to naturally show a lot of nonverbal flirtation behaviors—a singles bar. Sitting out of view, she counted various gestures displayed by women toward men and compared these to behaviors displayed in a library or women’s center meeting. Women flirting with men in the singles bar gestured in certain ways that were very uncommon in the other settings. For instance, a woman in the bar would frequently glance at a man for a few seconds, smile, flip her hair, and tilt her head at a 45-degree angle so her neck was exposedNaturalistic observation has a number of advantages as a research method. Behavior in a natural setting is spontaneous rather than artificial and contrived. In contrast, imagine the difficulties of asking students to demonstrate flirtation gestures in a laboratory. For one thing, people might not be consciously aware of the bodily movements and gestures they make when they are actually flirting. For another, people might feel too uncomfortable to flirt when they know researchers with notepads are watching them. Despite its strengths, naturalistic observation also has its pitfalls. Researchers need to ensure that their subjects do not know they are being observed. Otherwise, they might not act normally. As we discuss in the chapter on social influence, social psychologists have discovered some clever ways to observe behavior without making people self-conscious. Another problem with naturalistic observation is that some behaviors researchers want to study are rare. Imagine waiting around on a street corner for a homicide to occur. Even in the worst of neighborhoods you would spend a long time waiting for your first observation. A final problem is that, unless the observation is conducted very systematically, biased expectations may lead the observer to ignore some influences on behavior and exaggerate others. A researcher’s hypothesis may lead that researcher to search for supportive information but fail to notice inconsistent evidence. This problem is called observer bias. For instance, if you expected to see flirtatious behaviors in a bar, you might misinterpret a woman’s hair-flip as flirtation, when all she was really trying to do was keep her hair from falling into her beer mug. CASE STUDIES Another observational method is the case study, an intensive examination of one individual or group. A researcher could study a completely normal individual or group but often selects a case because it represents some unusual pattern of behavior. Imagine that you were interested in studying how people respond when they are catapulted from social obscurity into the ranks of the rich and famous. If you sampled a random group of the population at a shopping mall or in a psychology class, you might not find anyone famous. However, you could interview J.K. Rowling or Malala Yousafzai. Psychologists sometimes use case studies when they want to better understand a rare or unusual individual or group. For example, social psychologist Mark Schaller (1997) was interested in studying what happens to people’s feelings about themselves when they suddenly become famous. Schaller examined case materials from the lives and writings of several famous individuals, including rock star Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide at the peak of his fame during the 1990s. As Cobain’s story illustrates, the case materials suggested that fame isn’t always good fortune and can actually lead some people to unpleasantly high levels of self-concern. Case studies can be rich sources of hypotheses. For example, psychologists have proposed many hypotheses about why Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear, wrapped it, and presented it as a gift to a prostitute (Runyan, 1981). According to one hypothesis, he did it to express his anger because she had slept with his friend Paul Gauguin. According to another, he did it because he had unconscious homosexual feelings toward Paul Gauguin and wanted to symbolically emasculate himself because he felt guilty about those feelings. Unfortunately, psychologists who limit themselves to case study material often allow their hypotheses to bias their search through the evidence in a person’s life, picking and choosing events to support their favored hunch (Runyan, 1981). On the basis of a single case study, we simply have no way of telling which events in the case have actually caused the event of interest and which are irrelevant. A case study can suggest any number of interesting hypotheses. It cannot, however, tell us much about why an event occurred. Another problem in using case studies has to do with generalizability, the extent to which a particular research finding applies to other similar circumstances. After examining only a single case, such as Vincent van Gogh or Malala Yousafzai, we simply cannot know which of the specifics generalize to other similar cases. ARCHIVES One solution to the problem of generalizability is to examine a number of similar cases. Consider a study of police reports for 512 homicides committed in Detroit during 1972. Here is one: Case 185: Victim (male, age 22) and offender (male, age 41) were in a bar when a mutual acquaintance walked in. Offender bragged to victim of “this guy’s” fighting ability and that they had fought together. Victim replied “you are pretty tough” and an argument ensued over whether victim or offender was the better man. Victim then told offender “I got mine” (gun) and the offender replied “I got mine too,” both indicating their pockets. The victim then said “I don’t want to die and I know you don’t want to die. Let’s forget about it.” But the offender produced a small automatic, shot the victim dead, and left the bar. (Wilson & Daly, 1985, p. 64)1 Although the details of this particular case may be unique, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly found a number of similar details across the hundreds of homicide cases they examined. First, offenders and their victims tended to be males, particularly males in their early twenties. Second, the homicides were often instigated by a conflict over social dominance. Wilson and Daly’s study of homicides is an example of the archival method, in which researchers test hypotheses using data that was originally collected for other purposes (police reports, marriage licenses, newspaper articles, and so on). Another archival study found that during George W. Bush’s first term as U.S. president (during which he initiated wars with Afghanistan and Iraq) people became more supportive of him after government-issued terror warnings (Willer, 2004). Still other studies have looked at the relationship between daily temperatures in a given city and the number of violent crimes reported on the same day (e.g., Bell, 2005; Cohn & Rotton, 2005; Rinderu, Bushman, & Van Lange, 2018). The advantage of archives is that they provide easy access to an abundance of real-world data. The disadvantage is that many interesting social phenomena do not get recorded. Both the beginning and end of a 2-month-long marriage make it to the public records. However, a 5-year-long live-in relationship that breaks up over an argument about whom to invite to the wedding never registers in the archives. SURVEYS Some very interesting behaviors are unlikely to be recorded in public records or to be demonstrated in natural settings. For instance, back in the 1940s biologist Alfred Kinsey became curious about the prevalence of sexual behaviors such as masturbation and premarital intercourse. Because these behaviors are rarely done in public, naturalistic observation would not do. Likewise, individual case studies of convicted sex offenders or prostitutes, for example, would be uninformative about normal sexual behavior. Kinsey, therefore, chose the survey method, in which the researcher simply asks respondents a series of questions about their behaviors, beliefs, or opinions. The survey has one very important advantage: It allows a researcher to collect a great deal of data about phenomena that may rarely be demonstrated in public. Like other methods, surveys have drawbacks. First, the respondent may not give accurate information, because of either dishonesty or memory biases. For instance, it is puzzling that men answering surveys often report more heterosexual experiences than do women. Heterosexual men in Britain, France, and the United States report 10 to 12 sexual partners in their lives, whereas women in all these countries report just over three (Einon, 1994). The discrepancy could be due to social desirability bias, or the tendency for people to say what they believe is appropriate or acceptable (whether it is true or not). Sexual activity is more socially approved for men (Hyde, 1996). Hence men may thus be more inclined to talk about their sexual escapades or more likely to remember them, or women may be inclined to downplay theirs (Alexander & Fisher, 2003). Another potential problem with the survey method is obtaining a representative sample. A sample is representative when the participants, as a group, have characteristics that match those of the larger population the researcher wants to describe. A representative sample of North American executives would include percentages of men, women, Blacks, Hispanics, Canadians, Midwesterners, and Southerners that reflect the total population of executives on the continent. A small group of male bank executives from Toronto or of Hispanic female executives in the New York fashion industry would not represent North American executives as a whole. The sample for Kinsey’s sex survey was composed largely of volunteers from community organizations, which means that many segments of U.S. society were not well represented. Kinsey’s survey may have also faced a problem in which some people selected themselves into, or out of, his sample. Many potential respondents are simply unwilling to volunteer to discuss topics such as their sex lives. Others might relish the opportunity to regale the survey researchers with their wild erotic experiences. If those who do or do not participate are different from the norm in their sexual activities, the researcher might draw erroneous conclusions about the whole population. Carefully constructed surveys can reduce some of these problems. But not all surveys are to be trusted, particularly when they allow subjects to select themselves for participation. PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS Are some people more socially skillful than others? Are some people inclined to think critically before allowing themselves to be persuaded by an argument? Psychological tests are instruments for assessing differences between people in abilities, cognitions, or chronic motivations. They differ from surveys in that surveys typically aim to get at specific attitudes or behaviors, whereas tests aim to uncover broader underlying traits. Most of us have taken a variety of psychological tests. College aptitude tests (such as the SATs) are designed to distinguish people according to their ability to do well in college. Vocational interest tests (such as the Strong Vocational Interest Blank) are designed to distinguish people in terms of their likely enjoyment of various professions. Psychological tests are not always perfect indications of the things they are designed to measure. A test of “your ability to get along with your lover” published in a popular magazine, for example, may be a poor predictor of your actual skills at relationships. There are two criteria a psychological test must meet before it is useful— reliability and validity. Reliability is the consistency of the test’s results. If a test of social skills indicates that you are highly charismatic the first time you take it but socially inept when you take it a week later, your score is unreliable. To measure anything, it is essential that the measurement instrument be consistent. Some psychological tests, such as the famous Rorschach inkblots, do not provide very reliable measurements; others, such as IQ tests, yield much more consistent scores. Even if a test is reliable, however, it may not be valid. Validity is the extent to which the test measures what it is designed to measure. To use a rather unlikely example, we could theoretically use eye color as a measure of desirability to the opposite sex. Our test would be very reliable—trained observers would agree well about who had blue, hazel, and brown eyes, and subjects’ eye color would certainly not change very much if we measured it again a month or two later. Yet eye color would probably not be a valid index of attractiveness—it would probably not relate to the number of dates a person had in the last year, for instance. However, if judges rated the attractiveness of the whole face, or a videotape of the person engaged in conversation, the scores might be a little less reliable but more valid as predictors of dating desirability. Reliability and validity can be issues for all methods. For instance, archival records of men’s and women’s age differences at marriage are reasonably consistent across different cultures and time periods (Campos et al., 2002; Kenrick & Keefe, 1992; Sohn, 2017). Hence they give a reliable estimate (several times as many women as men get married in their teens, for example). Yet the marriage records from one month in one small town would probably be unreliable (perhaps two teenage boys and only one teenage girl got married that particular month). With regard to validity, three different environmental surveys might agree that people are doing morerecycling and driving less. Yet those survey responses, though reliable, might not be valid: People might consistently misrepresent their recycling or driving habits. It is thus important to ask about any research study: Are the results reliable? That is, would we get the same results if the measurement was done in a different way or by a different observer? And are the results valid? That is, is the researcher really studying what he or she intends to study? INVESTIGATION Imagine that you work for a magazine and you have been assigned to write a series of articles on how a particular interesting group of people (Utah polygynists, New York gang members, or Hollywood superstars, for example) differs from the prototypical American suburbanite. Which of the different descriptive methods could you use to address this question, and what problems would you run into in drawing confident conclusions? 1.4.2 Correlation and Causation Data from descriptive methods can reveal correlation, or the extent to which two or more variables occur together (psychologists use the term variable to refer broadly to any factor that fluctuates, such as daily temperature, people’s height, hair color, the size of a crowd, or the amount of alcohol consumed on different college campuses). Leon Mann (1981) was interested in investigating which variables might be linked to the puzzling phenomenon of suicide baiting, in which onlookers encourage a suicidal person to jump to his or her death. In one case, a nighttime crowd of 500 onlookers not only urged Gloria Polizzi to jump off a 150-foot water tower but also screamed obscenities and threw stones at the rescue squad. Using newspaper archives to study the topic, Mann discovered that suicide baiting was correlated with the size of the crowd. As crowds got larger, they were more likely to taunt someone perched on the edge of life. A correlation between two variables is often expressed mathematically in terms of a statistic called correlation coefficient. Correlation coefficients can range from +1.0, indicating a perfect positive relationship between two variables, through 0, indicating absolutely no relationship, to –1.0, indicating a perfect negative relationship. A positive correlation means that as one variable goes up or down, the other goes up or down with it. As crowds got larger, for example, the amount of suicide baiting increased. A negative correlation indicates a reverse relationship—as one variable goes up or down, the other goes in the opposite direction. For instance, women who are more committed to, and more satisfied with, their current partners generally spend less time paying attention to other attractive men (Lydon & Karremans, 2015; Maner et al., 2003; Miller, 1997). Correlations can provide important hints, but they do not enable a researcher to draw conclusions about cause and effect. Consider the case of crowd size and suicide baiting. Large crowds are associated with many forms of otherwise inappropriate behavior, as can often be observed at a rock concert or a Halloween block party. It seemed plausible to conclude, as Mann did in his study of suicide baiting, that large crowds led onlookers to feel anonymous. This, in turn, could reduce their concern about being identified as the perpetrators of such a cruel and nasty deed. However, it is important to keep in mind that correlation does not equal causation. Why doesn’t correlation equal causation? For one thing, it is always possible that the presumed direction of causality is reversed—that B causes A rather than A causing B (see Figure 1.3). For instance, once the suicide baiting started, it may have been reported on the radio, inspiring nearby listeners to go view the spectacle (thus suicide baiting would have caused crowds rather than the other way around). Another problem is that correlations can be found when there is no causal relationship at all, as whena third variable C is causing both A and B. For instance, Mann also found that suicide baiting occurred more frequently at night. Perhaps people are more likely to be drinking alcohol at night, and drunks are more likely to be gregarious (hence to join crowds) and unruly (hence to taunt potential suicides). If so, neither darkness nor the size of the crowd was a direct cause of suicide baiting; each was related only incidentally. Because of the different possible connections between correlated variables, then, it is difficult to draw clear causal conclusions from correlations. To make conclusions about cause and effect, researchers turn to the experimental method, in which variables are teased apart from the other factors that normally co-occur with them. 1.4.3 Experimental Methods When using descriptive methods, researchers try to avoid interfering with the phenomenon they are studying. A researcher using naturalistic observation hopes his subjects don’t notice that they are being observed, for example, and a survey researcher tries not to word questions so as to lead people to misrepresent their true feelings or behaviors. In an experiment, however, the researcher actually sets out to alter people’s behavior by systematically manipulating one aspect of the situation while controlling others. When he boarded the school bus to shoot Malala Yousafzai and two other teenage girls, the would-be assassin had his face covered with a handkerchief. Does being anonymous increase the inclination to act in a violent manner? If a researcher wanted to know whether anonymity actually causes people to act more aggressively, that researcher could vary the situation so that some people felt especially anonymous while others felt especially identifiable. In fact, Philip Zimbardo (1969) did just that while asking students in a laboratory experiment to deliver electric shocks to a fellow student. Half the participants wore name tags and remained in their own clothes and were thus made easily identifiable. To make the other participants anonymous, they were outfitted with oversized white coats and hoods that completely covered their faces. These anonymous subjects delivered twice as much shock as did those who were left identifiable. MANIPULATING VARIABLES The variable manipulated by the experimenter is called the independent variable. In Zimbardo’s experiment, the independent variable was the type of clothing worn (anonymous versus identifiable). The variable that is measured is called the dependent variable. In this case, the experimenter measured the amount of shock delivered by the subject. There are several things to note about experiments. A key feature of Zimbardo’s experiment is that participants were randomly assigned to the anonymous and nonanonymous conditions. Random assignment means each participant has an equal probability of being in the different conditions. By assigning participants to the two groups on the basis of a coin flip, for instance, a researcher reduces the chances that the groups are different in terms of mood, personality, social class, or other factors that might affect the outcomes. In this way the researcher minimizes any systematic differences between the groups, such as those that might have characterized suicide observers in nighttime versus daytime crowds. Although large suicide-baiting crowds could have differed fromsmall nonbaiting crowds in other ways related to antisocial tendencies, such systematic differences are not a problem when participants are randomly assigned. In Zimbardo’s study, the only differences among subjects were due to random variations in the population (which are reduced in importance as the experimenter runs large groups of subjects). It was also important that only the anonymity of clothing (the independent variable) varied from one group of subjects to another. All other aspects of the situation were the same—the experimenter, the setting, the victim, and the task. This also reduces the likelihood that these other variables might have influenced the antisocial behavior. Finally, aggressiveness was measured in an identical fashion for the high- and low-anonymity subjects, enabling the experimenter to quantify reliably the exact amount of shock that the different subjects delivered in each condition. By randomly assigning subjects and controlling extraneous variables, the experimenter gains an important advantage—the ability to make statements about causal relationships. Zimbardo could be fairly confident that it was something about his manipulation of anonymity, rather than something about the different subjects in the anonymous condition, that led to the higher level of aggression. POTENTIAL LIMITATIONS OF THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD Despite its advantage over descriptive methods in making causal statements, the experiment has its own drawbacks. For one, the laboratory settings used in most experiments are artificial. Is the anonymity created by wearing a big coat and hood really the same as that experienced in a large crowd on a dark night? Is the tendency to deliver shock really the same as the tendency to throw rocks at suicide rescue squads? We discussed the concept of validity in psychological tests—whether a test measures what it intends to measure. The same question can be asked of experiments (Aronson et al., 1998). Internal validity is the extent to which an experiment allows confident conclusions about cause and effect. Was the independent variable the sole cause of any systematic variations in the participants’ behaviors? Imagine if, in Zimbardo’s deindividuation experiment, all the subjects in the anonymous condition were met by an obnoxious male experimenter, whereas all the subjects in the nonanonymous condition were met by a pleasant female. If the subjects in the anonymous condition behaved more aggressively, we would not know whether it was because the subject was anonymous or because the experimenter was obnoxious. A variable that systematically changes along with the independent variable is called a confound. In this imaginary case, the sex and temperament of the experimenter are both confounded with anonymity. Such confounding variables are like the invisible third variables in correlations—they make it difficult to know what caused the subject’s behavior. External validity is the extent to which the results of an experiment can be generalized to other circumstances. We mentioned earlier that studying a single case raises a problem of generalizability. The same problem comes up with regard to laboratory experiments as well. Does delivering shock in an anonymous laboratory experiment tap the same processes as being in a large mob on a dark night, for instance? Perhaps not. Certainly, no two situations are identical, but experimenters try to pick variables that tap the same mental and emotional processes as those operating in the wider world. One problem in generalizing from laboratory studies to natural behavior is that participants know they are being observed in the lab. As we noted with naturalistic observation, people sometimes act differently when they know they are being watched. Demand characteristics are cues in the experiment that make subjects aware of how the experimenter expects them to behave. Experimenters try to avoid this problem by distracting participants from an experiment’s true purpose. For instance, an experimenter would not tell subjects, “We are examining how long you hold down the shock button, as an index of hostility.” Instead, the experimenter would offer a plausible reason for administering shock—to study how punishment affects learning, for example. This shifts attention from the participant’s use of shock to the recipient’s “learning responses.” As you will see, social psychologists have developed some rather skillful methods of engaging subjects’ natural reactions. But it is always important to be on the lookout for these possible confounds. For example, do you think that having students in the anonymity experiment wear oversized white coats and hoods (not unlike those worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan) might have communicated an expectation to act antisocially? FIELD EXPERIMENTS One way to overcome the hurdles of artificiality and demand characteristics is to bring the experiment out of the laboratory and into an everyday setting. This approach of using experimental manipulations on unknowing participants in natural settings is called field experimentation. Consider a study in which the researchers took advantage of a naturally occurring manipulation of anonymity—the disguises worn by Halloween trick-or-treaters (Diener et al., 1976). Participants were children in costumes who arrived to trick-ortreat at a house in Seattle. The trick-or-treaters were greeted by a research assistant who pointed to a bowl of candies alongside a bowl of pennies. She told them to take one of the candies each and then she hurried off, claiming to be busy. Unbeknownst to the children, the researchers were watching from a hidden location and recording whether the little angels and superheroes took extra candies or filched some coins from the money bowl. What made this an experiment is that the researchers randomly assigned groups of children to different levels of anonymity. Anonymity was manipulated by the way in which the experimenter greeted the children. In half the cases, she asked each child his or her name, thus removing the identity shield of the costume. In the other half, she allowed them to remain anonymous. The results supported the correlational findings obtained by Mann and the laboratory findings obtained by Zimbardo. When left anonymous, the majority of little devils grabbed more than they had been told to take. When they had been asked to identify themselves, however, most of them acted more angelically. 1.4.4 Why Social Psychologists Combine Different Methods Table 1.2 summarizes the different methods and their main strengths and limitations. If each method has weaknesses, is the pursuit of social psychological knowledge hopeless? Not at all. The weaknesses of one method are often the strengths of another. For instance, experiments allow researchers to make cause–effect conclusions but have problems of artificiality. In contrast, archival methods and naturalistic observations do not allow cause–effect conclusions (because they are correlational), but the data they provide are not at all artificial. By combining the different methods, social psychologists can reach more trustworthy conclusions than any single method can provide (McGrath et al., 1982). Consider a program of research that used multiple methods to examine the hypothesis that giving to others makes us happier (Aknin et al., 2013; Dunn & Norton, 2013). Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues first conducted a survey to test this hypothesis (Dunn et al., 2008). In an initial correlational study, they asked a nationally representative sample of 632 Americans to rate their general happiness and to estimate what percentage of their income they spent on bills, on themselves personally, on gifts for others, and on donations to charity. Spending money on gifts for themselves was not related to respondents’ happiness, but spending on other people was. Because this result is a correlation, we can’t be sure whether spending on others caused people to be happier or whether unhappy people simply tend also to be less generous (and might be made even less happy if they spent money on others). The researchers then conducted a longitudinal study of people who received an unexpected bonus at work and measured their happiness both before the bonus and six to eight weeks later. Those who had spent more of their bonus on other people experienced a significant boost in able 1.2 Summary of Research Methods Used by Social Psychologists Method Description Strengths Weaknesses Descriptive Correlational Methods Naturalistic observation Inconspicuous recording of behavior as it occurs in a natural setting Example: Moore’s study of flirtation behavior in women Taps into people’s spontaneous real-world behaviors Doesn’t rely on people’s ability to report on their own experiences Researcher may interfere with ongoing behavior. Some interesting behaviors are very rare. Researcher may selectively attend to certain events and ignore others (observer bias). Case studies Intensive examination of a single person or group Example: Schaller’s study of fame and self-awareness Provides a source of hypotheses Allows study of rare behaviors  Observer bias Difficult to generalize findings from a single case Impossible to reconstruct causes from complexity of past events Archives Examination of public records for multiple cases Example: Wilson and Daly’s study of police homicide reports Easy access to large amounts of prerecorded data Many interesting social behaviors are never recorded. Surveys Researcher asking people direct questions Example: Kinsey’s study of sexual behavior Allows study of difficult-toobserve behaviors, thoughts, and feelings People who respond may not be representative. Participants may be biased or untruthful in responses. Psychological tests Researcher attempting to assess an individual’s abilities, cognitions, motivations, or behaviors Example: Strong Vocational Interest Blank; SATs Allows measurement of characteristics that are not always easily observable Tests may be unreliable (yielding inconsistent scores). Tests may be reliable but not valid (not measuring the actual characteristic they are designed to measure). Experimental Methods Laboratory experiment Researcher directly manipulating variables and observing their effects on the behavior of laboratory participants Example: Zimbardo’s study of aggression and anonymity Allows cause–effect conclusions Allows control of extraneous variables Artificial manipulations may not represent relevant events as they naturally unfold. Participants’ responses may not be natural because they know they are being observed. Field experiment Same as laboratory experiment but subjects in natural settings Example: Diener et al.’s study of trick-or-treaters Allows cause–effect conclusions Participants give more natural responses. Manipulations may not be natural. Less control of extraneous factors than in a laboratory experimenthappiness; those who had spent more on themselves did not. This longitudinal study allowed the researchers to control for initial levels of happiness, but it still does not nail down a cause-and-effect relationship (besides chronic happiness levels, there might have been something else different about the people who chose to spend their money on others). So the researchers conducted an experimental study in which they asked a group of college students to rate their happiness in the morning, then gave them an envelope containing $5 or $20, and randomly assigned them to spend the money either on themselves or on others (by buying someone a gift or giving the money to charity). At the end of the day, the students again reported how happy they were. Those who had spent their money on themselves had not changed since the morning, but those who spent their money on others were happier. Interestingly, when asked to predict what would make them happier, other students (incorrectly) thought that they would be happiest if they got $20 to spend on themselves. Perhaps, one could argue, the experiment was not natural because participants might have guessed that the researchers were interested in their happiness and had obviously given them money between two measurements of happiness. However, because the results converge nicely with theother two correlational studies, showing a similar relationship in natural contexts, the researchers could be much more confident than if they had used only one method. THE RESEARCHER AS A DETECTIVE The psychologist’s situation is analogous to that of a detective confronted with stories from several witnesses to a murder, each less than perfect. The blind woman overheard the argument but couldn’t see who pulled the trigger. The deaf man saw someone enter the room just before the murder but didn’t hear the shot. The child was there to see and hear but tended to mix up the details. Despite the problems presented by each witness, if they all agree that the butler did it, it would be wise to check his fingerprints against those on the gun. Like the detective, the social psychologist is always confronted with bits of evidence that are, by themselves, imperfect but together may add up to a compelling case. Just as detectives go back and forth between evidence and hunches—using evidence to educate their hunches and hunches to lead the search for new evidence— so, too, social psychologists go full cycle between the laboratory and the natural world (Cialdini, 1995). Evidence from descriptive studies conducted in the real world leads to theories that researchers test with rigorous experiments. The results of these theory-testing experiments lead back to new hunches about natural events in the real world. By combining different kinds of evidence, then, it is possible to come to more confident conclusions. REPLICATION, ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS, AND SCIENTIFIC SKEPTICISM As we have noted, there are strengths and weaknesses to every research method, and there are often several alternative explanations for any given finding. A central part of scientific research is to think critically not only about untested ideas but also about research findings. Because there are thousands of researchers asking questions about social behavior, some of the findings from particular studies may be random. There are numerous ways of dealing with these issues (Dovidio, 2016; Stroebe & Strack, 2014). For instance, psychologists can use the technique of meta-analysis, which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 10, to statistically pool the results of multiple studies on the same topic (e.g. Eagly & Johnson, 1990; Malouff & Schutte, 2017). Presumably the error in any given study will wash out over numerous studies. As an educated person, it is important to maintain a critical attitude and not to blindly accept generalizations stated by “experts” on television, in newspapers, or in online media. It is always important to ask: How strong is the evidence for what this expert is saying? Does the evidence replicate across multiple studies and multiple methods? At the same time, it is important to keep your own biases in check. There is a strong tendency to be more skeptical of findings that disagree with what we want to be true (Lord et al., 1979; Washburn & Skitka, 2017). One should be especially skeptical of people whose vested interests motivate them to draw conclusions that run counter to all the scientific evidence on a topic, as when Scott Pruitt, an outspoken opponent of environmental protections, and champion of the oil industry, used his appointment as Donald Trump’s director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to raise doubts about research on global warming (opposing the conclusions of virtually all the scientists who had worked on this topic). Social psychological principles can be helpful not only in understanding our biased processing of scientific findings but also in overcoming those biases (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017; Kenrick, Cohen, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2018).INVESTIGATION You are a member of a research team, and you’ve been assigned to answer the following questions: How does alcohol affect our memory for the faces of new people we meet? How would you use a correlational approach to explore this question? How would you use an experimental approach? What are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of each approach likely to be?In reading about Zimbardo’s study of aggression and anonymity, you might have wondered how the participants ended up feeling about themselves after delivering shocks to fellow students. Unlike research in geology or chemistry, social psychological research is conducted with living, breathing, feeling human beings (and sometimes other living creatures). This makes it important to consider another question: Is the research ethically justifiable? ETHICAL RISKS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH Consider some of the research that we, the authors of this text, have conducted. One of us induced students to give up some of their blood using the following deceptive technique: “Would you be willing