Social Psychology Unit 3 PDF
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These notes cover social psychology unit 3, discussing topics like social psychology's important messages, conformity, and compliance. The document analyzes how social norms influence our behaviors and attitudes. It gives helpful examples of conformity and compliance mechanisms, like the foot-in-the-door technique.
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UNIT 3 Social Psychology 10/23/24 Social Psychology’s Important Messages Big lesson #1 ○ We very often underestimate the importance, the power, of the situation on shaping people's behavior. ○ In fact, we so often underestimat...
UNIT 3 Social Psychology 10/23/24 Social Psychology’s Important Messages Big lesson #1 ○ We very often underestimate the importance, the power, of the situation on shaping people's behavior. ○ In fact, we so often underestimate the situation when trying to understand other people's behavior that we have a term for it:fundamentalattribution error Our default is to assume that what we see others doing tells us about WHO THEY ARE as a person (their character) and we overlook context/ situation/ outside forces. Big lesson #2 ○ Dual-process model of human cognition. Explicit route is slower, we are aware of it, deliberate, thoughtful, looking for evidence. Implicit route is fast, automatic, based on associates and rules of thumb/ cognitive shortcuts, pulling info from our LTM immediately, always arriving at an output. ○ An important part of our decision-making and behavior happens at that implicit level (not deliberative, not thoughtful, not conscious). ○ Implicit examples: duck when a ball is coming at your head, think homicides more frequent than suicides, assume things about people because of the way they look. Conformity Conformityrefers to changes in one’s behavior orattitude to fit into a group. ○ Explicit influencerefers to pressures that we areaware of, such as knowing that you've chosen to go to a party because many of your friends are going. ○ Implicit influencerefers to pressures that we arenot consciously thinking about. Several of your good friends don't like someone, you don't know this person well but when you have this person in one of your classes you avoid them. Pulling into the tollbooth line that everyone else is in even when other lanes are open. Just follow along behind everyone else. A type of conformity we all do on a very regular basis: ○ Followsocial norms: a culture’s accepted standardsfor behavior. This often happens at an implicit level. Ex: waiting your turn in line; blowing your nose into a tissue; staring straight ahead in an elevator M uzafer Sherif’s 1936 experiment using theautokineticillusion. Why does this happen? We use each other’s behavior and thoughts as sources of information about what is the right thing to do or think—referred to asinformational social influence. When is it more likely to happen? When we aren’t sure, when something is new to us or ambiguous. The amazing Solomon Asch (1956) studies. ○ No ambiguity. The correct answer was obvious. Control group had no problems. ○ 6 confederates in agreement. ○ ¾ of participants confirmed at least once. Normative social influencerefers to conforming toothers in order to avoid disapproval and social scrutiny. Compliance Frequently we are asked, or we ask others, to comply with some wish or demand. ○ Charities requesting donations, salespeople asking you to buy something.... Compliance: doing something that has been requestedby another. How does one increase compliance with a request? What kinds of techniques work and why? How can we be aware of them so as to avoid hapless agreement? N orm of reciprocity. This is the social rule thatone should repay a favor with another of equal value. This is a potent and pan cultural social rule. How is this used to affect compliance? ○ When someone “does us a favor”, it creates a sense of obligation to acquiesce to any reasonable request he/she might make. ○ Example: random Christmas cards, soft drink experiment. R ejection-then-Retreat: Large request followed bya small one. Why does it work? ○ Related to the norm of reciprocity. Drop in size of request is seen as a concession,which the norm puts pressure on us to reciprocate. ○ Perceptual Contrast:second request seems reasonable/small compared to the first one. Example of R-t-R: Chaperoning juvenile delinquents to the zoo. ○ 17% simply asked to chaperone middle schoolers in trouble with the law, 50% first asked to join their organization and commit to 2 hours a week for 2 years. Foot-in-the-door technique: start with a small requestthat almost anyone would do. Then, at a later time, follow up with the real request. ○ Example: 17% willing to put a gigantic “Drive Carefully” billboard in the front yard. However, if first asked (a week or so earlier) to sign a petition about safe driving then 55% said yes to ugly billboard. Works because initial agreement/commitmentto thefirst small request leads to an adjustment in our understanding of ourselves—”this is an issue I care about.” Particularly if public or effortful. We don’t like to be inconsistent, motivated to keep our actions and our beliefs in-line. A behavior seems right/ a good idea if many others think so. That sure sounds like: ○ Informational socialinfluence in the conformity lit Advertisers use this ALL THE TIME. ○ “Best selling _____.” ○ “Fastest selling _____.” Obedience to Authority (Particular type of Compliance) The famous Stanley Milgram experiments. 1950’s ○ In an attempt to understand how so many people could be capable of brutally and cruelly murdering other human beings (or allowing it to occur) as happened in Nazi Germany. ○ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzd6Ew3TraA Importance of participants’ responses. They did not simply obey with malice, they struggled but wereineffective at disobedience. Why? Arguably KNOW that shocking someone until they yell in pain or go silent is wrong but also taught since young to listen to authority figures. Thus, tension between knowing the right answer and disobeying an authority figure (social norm). Request to deliver volts came in small steps. ○ Foot-in-the-door What about a situation diminishes the effect? ○ Diminish salience/authority of authority figure. ○ Proximity to “victim”. 10/28/24 Social Proof and the Bystander Effect Thebystander effect: What is it? ○ Individuals are less likely (or slower) to help if there are several other people present in anodd/ambiguousemergency situation thanif the person is alone. ○ Kitty Genovese case ○ 2 reasons for this: Diffusion of responsibility- someone else can handleit. Pluralistic ignorance- situation unclear, everyonelooking to see what everyone else is doing. Since no one is doing anything (as they are all looking to see what others are doing) everyone assumes the situation must not be worth intervening in. Other examples: ○ Smoke in room 75% get up and look for help if ALONE 10% if 2 others in the room are actors ○ Staged experiment with participants alone or with 5 other people. If the only person in the lab helped 85% of the time. If 5 other people were available to help, they helped 31% of the time. Social Psychology II 10/28/24 Stereotyping S tereotypes:Beliefs about the characteristics thata particular group of people is thought to hold. It can be true or false, positive or negative. (It is a schema). ○ MIT undergrad ○ Person living on the street ○ Many culturally dominant stereotypes. Prevalent, shared messaging about groups of people. Images in the news, your parents' best friends and the people you never saw at your home, the stories we tell (or rarely tell), our typical heroes and villains… Stereotyping is inevitable.It is part of our normalcognitive architecture.It stems from our necessity to create categories, schemes, to organize and simplify information in our world. It is how information is stored in our long term memories. That is what we mean when we talk about schemas–stores information. Related information is linked, categorized. 10/30/24 Stereotyping: Why? S tereotypes allow us to process information efficiently. They are part of ournormal cognitive architecture. They are not some odd, uglyaspect of human thinking but a part of an efficient system that stores information and allows us to use that information quickly at later points in time. (This does not mean that the content of our stereotypes is socially or morally acceptable!) Stereotypes (these stored assumptions about groups of people) can beactivatedand thenapplied. But they don’t have to be applied. Stereotyping When stereotypes are activated they can lead to (they can be applied): ○ Biased information processing Black or white man shoving the other in video. Black man was considered violent, white man was considered joking. 4th grade Hannah appears to be middle-class or living in poverty. ○ Immunity to disconfirmation Those acting contradictory to a stereotype are seen as the “exception”. Supportive evidence accepted at face value, contradictory evidence is scrutinized. ○ Self fulfilling prophecy Because of our stereotypes we ACT differently toward someone who we think is a member of that stereotyped group. BECAUSE of OUR behavior we elicit different responses from them–responses that may affirm our stereotypes. A classic research example: 1. In study 1, Princeton white students are the participants. Told they are going to interview high school students. High school students were black and white young men (who are part of the study). Researchers looking for nonverbal signs of difference across race. And they found it. More speech errors, ended the interview sooner and sat farther away from black applicants. P rinceton participants as interviewers. (More speech errors, ended the interview sooner and sat farther away from Black applicants.) 2.When others (all white) treated this way were judged to be worse candidates than those not treated this way. However, stereotypes can be inaccurate, overused, self-perpetuating andunfold at the implicit level…. The Implicit and the Explicit Two routes to stereotypes. This is a dual process model. ○ Explicit route is slow, we are aware of thinking, it is deliberate, thoughtful, looking for evidence. ○ Implicit route is fast, automatic, based on associations and rules of thumb/ cognitive shortcuts, pulling from our LTM immediately, always arriving at an output. The Implicit P ast experiences (stored knowledge) influences or judgment behaviors in ways that are not introspectively known by us. (Greenwald and Banaji) A benign example: ○ Participants are shown a large list of words early in an experiment. Later asked to finish word fragments. More likely to complete fragments as words read earlier than equally likely words not seen earlier. A not so benign example: ○ The halo effect. What is it ? Rated essays by attractive writers to be better than (the exact same essay) by a less attractive writer. Smaller fines and lower bail amount for attractive defendants in misdemeanor cases. Those who are attractive are rated as “kinder, more interesting, more sociable, happier, stronger, of better character.” ○ Why is this an example of an implicit process? The actual source of your determination (judgment made) is not known to us. 11/1/24 The Implicit and the Explicit Patricia Devine study ○ The idea: prejudiced and unprejudiced people will show implicit stereotyping (like on the IAT) but non prejudiced people will correct for this and not show explicit stereotyping. Because of the culture we live in it is very hard not to learn (know of) certain associations between groups of people and characteristics. This is stored in your LTM. Thus, many stereotypes are activated for most of us at an implicit level, even if we do not want them to be. (homeless and disgust/blame) A non-prejudiced person would then correct for that bias if he/she has time and the mental resources to do so. The Implicit Association Test H ow does it work? A reaction time measure that examines how quickly we categorize certain concepts with good or bad. ○ If we are quicker to pair white-good/black-bad than white-bad/black-good, it suggests that we have a bias in our view of these two categories. One is easier to match with good than the other. The IAT What does it predict? ○ Implicit measure of stereotypes better predicts our implicit outcomes. ○ And explicit better predicts our explicit outcomes. More Implicit Examples V ideo game study in which men pop up out of nowhere holding either a handgun or some other benign object. Race of the men varies. ○ Participants were told to “shoot” if holding a handgun and press a different key if not. ○ Much more likely to shoot the Black figure in error (when not armed) than fail to shoot when Black figure was armed. No difference in these errors when white men. Now what? Where is the hope? S low down, process explicitly. Catch your immediate reactions and review them. Both individually and at the institutional level. Police Departments can alter their training. Job interview processes can be driven by written rubrics, and some of those stated points of excellence can be the desire for a diverse team. Our stored knowledge, our stereotypes,canchange.Implicit thinking is not frozen into the worst of our culture’s messaging. ○ Those who saw famous Black Americans before taking the IAT, showed less or no white preference. Emotions 11/4/24 E lliot had a small portion of frontal lobe brain tissue removed because of a tumor... The neurologist, Dr. Antonio Damasio, interviewed Elliot extensively to try to find the reason for the behavior. ○ Elliot did above average on tests for intelligence,for problem solving, vocabulary, and memory. ○ He could reason about social dilemmas in the lab and come up with multiple, reasonable solutions. ○ So what was the problem with his personal life?! Elliot was speaking about his own personal situation, which should have been deeply sad and horrifyingly frustrating, with no emotion whatsoever. Another clue for Damasio, Elliot watched very upsetting video clips and responded that he knew how he SHOULD feel (used to feel) but now he had no personal, emotional reaction to the videos. Thefunctionalistview of emotion Being a Vulcan is not adaptive ○ As Damasio’s patient Elliot illustrated Emotion is an embodied reaction to something in our environment (real or imagined). It leads to a set of relatively brief physiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes. ○ Embodied: like activation of the sympathetic nervous system, hormone changes, nonverbal changes (like blushing, and distinct facial expressions) T hese specific emotions (anger, gratitude, shame) motivate us to act in ways that help solve physical and social problems—they are useful! From a functionalist perspective: An example. E mbarrassment is the emotion felt when one has botched a social interaction (Keltner, 1995; Keltner & Buswell, 1997). ○ Leads to corrective behaviors ○ Has particular nonverbal display ○ Functions to diminish negative effects of actions How are emotions useful: a theoretical example. D amasio’sSomatic Marker Theory:ability to pair eventswith emotional reactions (learn/ predict how an event will make you feel). This FLAGS things for us–important, don't do that or do that. Self regulation, social and moral decisions are greatly affected by our embodied reactions (emotional reactions) to a choice and its potential outcomes. Gambling experiment example: ○ Patients like Elliot with damage to the brain (deficit in feeling) and people without brain damage who can feel. Told they're gonna play a card game and the goal is to leave with as many points as possible to win money. They have cards that can be turned over and tell them whether they are winning or losing. Periodically he stops them and asks how they're feeling. People with brain damage have no physiological response and keep randomly picking. Those that can feel showed physiological responses and recognized which sets of cards were bad and avoided them. E conomist Robert Frank wrote “Passions within Reason”in order to explain one way in which our emotions guide our best practices. He focused on two main points related to The Commitment Problem: ○ 1) Our emotions help buildcommitmentandtrustbetweenus and others. Guilt, love, gratitude…these bind us to others such that we forgo immediate rewards for the better long term outcomes of commitment. ○ 2) Our emotions communicate to others that we are trustworthy and would make good relationship partners. 11/6/24 Emotion Regulation Most of us are capable of regulating our emotions when we need to. ○ Keep our anger in check ○ Avoid certain situations to begin with ○ Try to reconceptualize bad or sad news so we can deal with it But we also tend to be wrong about what regulatory strategies actually work best R esearch has shown thatwriting about difficult emotionalexperienceshelps us regulate our emotions. ○ Gain insight ○ Cuts back on emotions bleeding over into unrelated domains Reappraisalcan be highly effective. ○ View an incident in a different way in order to decrease its negative impact. This strategy works early in the flow of the experience. Celebrate, savorgood experiences. Many of us overlookthis! As opposed torumination, which is a poor strategyfor dealing with emotions. ○ Does not lead to insight ○ Does not lead to perspective Suppression, which is also a poor way of dealing/copingwith emotions. ○ Suppression means trying not to respond to an emotion, not show that one is feeling it. ○ This leads to greater sympathetic arousal, poorer memory for social details and worse interpersonal outcomes. Coping Strategies for stressful situations C oping is a more general term that refers to both emotional and nonemotional strategies for dealing with stressors. Emotion-focused coping: try to prevent an emotionalreaction to the stressor. ○ Avoidance, distraction ○ When have little control over the situation this can be helpful ○ But it can be problematic because it does not lead to solving a problem. Problem-focused coping: taking direct steps to alleviatethe stressor. ○ Generate solutions ○ Use this when we have control over the stressor “Basic” Emotions everyone has: Yes or No? P aul Ekmanhas argued that there are about 7 emotionsthat are biologically innate, hard-wired in humans. These emotions, he argued, are adaptive responses to the environment, motivating certain behavioral outcomes, including particular nonverbal expressions. Across cultures we all feel them and express them in recognizable ways. Universal Facial Expressions for the “Basic” Emotions? Ekman thought there were particular facial expressions for these: ○ Anger, sadness, happy/joy, surprise, contempt, disgust, fear. The research he conducted? ○ Participants from many different cultures showed pictures of emotional expressions. Ask them to pick the emotional word that describes face. ○ Very consistent agreement about what the face shows. More recent research suggests the number may be closer to 16, not 7, that are experienced and shown quite universally. (awe, doubt, contentment, triumph).
