Social Psych Notes

Introduction:

Social Psychology – the study of how we think and behave in social situations; i.e. in
interactions with 1 or more other people.

Important and interesting because we are almost always interacting with other people

Social Cognition – how we think about ourselves and others. Related to how we form
prejudices, make judgements about others, or become attracted to others

Social Influence – how do others influence our behaviour? Can our behaviour be
influenced by others for good or bad?

Attitudes and Attitude Change:

Attitudes – evaluative, sometimes emotionally charged, beliefs, about people, places,

things, etc. include your preferences, attitudes towards people you like / don’t like, foods
you prefer, etc.

Are sometimes emotional. e.g. fears of things (attitude towards horror movies), anger
towards something will likely result in a bad attitude towards that thing.

Attitudes can be learned through classical, operant, and observational / social learning.

Attitudes can be linked to behaviour.

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Attitude-Behaviour Inconsistency – when our actions and our attitudes don’t match well.
We find these mis-matches uncomfortable (unpleasant feeling called “dissonance”) so we
are likely to change either out behaviour or the attitude.

Applications of Attitude-Behaviour Inconsistency:

- paying more for something will make you tend to like it more. “Smart people
don’t pay too much for things, so this thing must be really worth what I paid.”

- painful or embarrassing initiations into groups make you like the group more
and makes you a more loyal group member. “It would be dumb to go through that
experience to join a crappy group, so this must be a great group! I made a good
decision joining them!”

If dissonance causes a change in attitude, it’s from WITHIN the person.

If someone else tries to change our attitudes, it’s persuasion (from OUTSIDE)

We face a lot of sources of attempted persuasion every day: from family, friends, media,
politicians, advertisements, etc. Some are successful, some are not.
Two ways to try to persuasion:
- central route to persuasion – where we evaluate the argument critically and
carefully, weighing the evidence,. Requires more motivation and mental/cognitive work.

- peripheral route to persuasion – where we rely on superficial characteristics of

the attempt, including the following:

- communicator variables: how attractive, credible seeming, effective communicator is

the message coming from. (ads will often use celebrities or someone dressed as a doctor
to try to sell us things)

- message variables: messages that don’t seem like attempts to persuade us work better
(sneaky attempts) and messages that also address possible downsides work better.

- Audience variables:

Intelligence level: for complex, valid arguments high IQ are more convinced;
for the peripheral route though, lower IQ tend to be more easily convinced.

Self-esteem level: people of very high or low self-esteem tend to be hard to

persuade. people with moderate self-esteem levels tend to be more persuadable.

Age: adolescents tend to be more persuadable, as they explore attitudes and figure
out who they will be as adults. Adults tend to have more stable attitude sets and
are therefore less persuadable.

Generally people are more persuaded by peripheral routes than central ones.
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Mood: people in very good moods seem to be more easily persuaded (they don’t
want to use the central route, possible damaging their good mood?); but people in
bad or neutral moods are less easily persuaded.

How We Form Impressions of Others:

Impression Formation - study of how we understand and make judgments about others

We automatically form impressions of people and try to understand why they act as they
do.

Attribution – assigning a cause to someone’s behaviour (our ideas about WHY someone
acts as they do). There are 2 kinds of attributions:

1. trait attribution – attribute to person’s nature or personality (“This person is a

unfriendly person, shy person, generous person, etc”)

2. situational attribution – attribute to an environmental cause (“Maybe they’re

unfriendly because they’re having a bad day for some reason.”)

Heuristics and Biases in Attribution:

We are cognitive misers (we try to conserve our cognitive resources; don’t think too hard
if we don’t have to).

Heuristics are shortcuts we can use to save thinking energy (cognitive energy). They
don’t always lead to correct conclusions though….

Fundamental attribution error – tendency to attribute behaviour to people’s

personality/nature (trait attribution) and discount situational explanations. (This is more
likely to happen in individualistic cultures like those from North America and Europe)

Actor / Observer Bias – tendency to more likely take situational factors into account
when making attributions for our OWN behaviour. This can be positive or negative.

e.g. A on exam – that test was easy (rather than I’m smart)
yell at your friend – had a bad day…

Self-serving Bias – tendency for people to make trait attributions for their successes, and
situational attributions for their failures.

e.g. do well on a test – “I’m smart!”

do poorly on a test – “That test was poorly constructed or too hard!”

Self-serving bias helps to protect our self-esteem.

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Prejudice:

Stereotypes - knowledge stored about some group (e.g. about a group of people); Widely
held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
We make assumptions based on these.

Prejudice - pre-judging, or judging based on stereotypes without gathering evidence

about the person; unfairly applying stereotypical assumptions to all members of a group
regardless of their individual characteristics.

Discrimination – acting differently towards people because of a prejudice you hold;

treating people differently based on your assumptions about a group of people.

Stereotype Threat – effect of worries about prejudiced expectations from competition or

audience that a person won’t do well will cause them to actually do worse than usual. For
example, because a woman athlete is nervous and worried that the people watching will
expect her to do poorly, her performance will be affected. This has been supported by
research evidence.

In-group Bias – we tend to like people who are in our groups more than those who are
not. e.g. we like people more who are in our family, go to our school, come from our
country, etc.

In-group – the groups to which you belong.

Out-group – the groups to which you don’t belong.

Outgroup Homogeneity Bias – our tendency to see out-group members as being very
similar to each other. We expect them to act and even look similar to each other.

Realistic-conflict Theory – the idea that prejudice is created by competition for scarce
resources. e.g. some might be prejudiced against foreign groups (out-groups) if they
believe they will take valuable resources like jobs from the in-group.

Contact Hypothesis – the theory that contact between groups is an effective means of
reducing prejudice between them. It turns out that contact ALONE isn’t enough, it has to
be contact where the two groups need to cooperate together to achieve a shared goal.

Nature of Attraction:

Attraction – how we feel about our friends and significant others; i.e. the emotional /
affective part of the attitudes we hold towards our friends and people we’d like to date /
marry, etc.
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Proximity is one factor in attraction. Mere exposure effect – just being around a person
or thing makes us more likely to like it. We’re more likely to be friends and get in
relationships with those who work / live close to us, and even likely to be friends and date
the people we sit close to in class!

Two sayings in English:

“Birds of a feather flock together” – similar people like each other

“Opposites attract” - people who are different like each other

So which is right? Turns out usually it’s birds of a feather! We tend to like those who are
similar to us in many ways (similar age, socioeconomic status, education, intelligence,
race, religion, attitudes, power, physical attractiveness, etc)

Maybe explained by balance theory: theory that when we are attracted to people who do
not share our attitudes, we feel dissonance, which motivates us to change in some way to
reduce the dissonance. (either changing our attitude, or more likely by changing how
attracted to the person we are). This might lead us to tend to like those who are similar to
us.

Physical attractiveness – One of the first things we notice about potential romantic
partners.

Attractive people are perceived to be more interesting, sociable, kind, sensitive, and
nurturing.

Men seem to place more emphasis on physical attractiveness when choosing friends and
romantic partners than women do (though women also put a lot of emphasis on it)

Matching hypothesis – the theory that we are generally attracted to people whose level of
physical attractiveness is similar to our own. Seems to be true for dating / married
couples, but also for people who are just friends.

Groups and Group Influence:

Joining groups can fulfill social needs, like the need for companionship, sense of
belonging, and can provide a sense of security. Can also give us sense of social identity,
helping us to know who we are. Finally, can give us information and help us achieve our
goals.

Groups we are members of have some power / influence over our behaviour.
Groups have norms – rules / expectations for how group members should behave. We
tend to follow these rules because we value our group memberships, and don’t want to
anger other members or lose our membership.
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Group Cohesiveness – degree to which members of a group value their group

membership; highly cohesive groups are tight-knit and tend to hold members well.

Group Conformity – behaving in accordance with group norms: highly cohesive groups
can promote conformity.

Group Conformity Study: (Solomon Asch, 1951)

showed a “test line” and 3 “comparison lines” and asked participants “Which of
the comparison lines is the same as the test line?”

However, before participants answered, 8 confederates (people secretly working

for the experimenter) answered the question WRONG.

Would people answer correctly, or follow the others and answer wrong?

74% of the people answered wrong (following the group) at least once during the
experiment.

Asch did more experiments to find out what makes conformity stronger or weaker.

- having at least 1 person who answers correctly increased participants’ correct

answers

- more people against you increases conformity

- if you’re anonymous, conformity decreases A LOT. (Which is one reason why

Dan makes class feedback forms anonymous).

- if we don’t feel confident in ourselves conformity increases.

Two kind of Conformity:

Normative Conformity – when members change their behaviour to meet group norms,
but are not actually persuaded to change their beliefs and attitudes.

Informational Conformity – when conformity pressures actually persuade group members

to adopt new beliefs and/or attitudes.

Stanford Prison Experiment (Philip Zimbardo, 1971)

Another really important psychology study. 24 males volunteered, and were
assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a mock prison created in the basement
of one of the buildings at Stanford.
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Participants wore uniforms which increased anonymity, prisoners were refered to

by numbers, it was conducted in the basement away from the outside world and
its norms, and there was no strong leader who argued for prisoners’ fair treatment

Guards soon started to act in abuse ways towards prisoners, who became docile
and depressed. Study was ended early (before 1 week went by) because of the
poor treatment of the prisoners (study was planned to go on for 2 weeks).

Partly explained by deindividuation – a state in which the person’s behaviour becomes

more controlled by the external norms of the group or role than by the person’s own
internal values and morals.

Decision making in groups:

groupthink – a situation in which a group fixates on one decision, and members blindly
assume that it is the correct decision (or are too afraid to propose alternate options)

groupthink is more likely / more strong when the group is isolated from outside opinion,
strongly cohesive, has strong dictatorial leadership, or has a lot of stress.

can be a big problem in politics, where huge important decisions need to be made, that
can affect many people’s lives.

Requests and Demands: Compliance and Obediance:

Compliance and obedience are related but a little different

Compliance – giving in to a simple request; when someone asks you to do something and
you do it (comply).

Obedience – yielding to a demand someone makes of you; when someone TELLS you to
do something and you are obedient.

We are asked to comply all the time. People try to get us to buy things, teachers and
parents ask us to do things, doctors try to get us to follow instructions, etc.

Compliance techniques: there are some ways to try to get people to comply:

foot-in-the-door compliance – increasing compliance by first asking people to give in to a

small request. If they comply with the first small one, they are more likely to comply with
the larger second one.

it will probably be more difficult to refuse a request to borrow 5,000 won if you
recently lent the friend 1000 won. The first “yes” makes the second one more
likely.
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door-in-the-face compliance – increasing compliance by first asking people to give in to a

very large request, and then after they refuse, asking them to give in to a smaller request.

if you ask a friend if you can borrow 100,000 won, then after they say no you ask
for 10,000 won, the second request is more likely to be accepted because it seems
more reasonable compared to the first. (perceptual contrast – the change in
perceived reasonableness in comparison to the larger request; 10,000 seems more
reasonable after 100,000 than it would if they ONLY asked for 10,000)

reciprocity – the social norm that states that we should treat others as they treat us.

might help explain door-in-the-face compliance because the other person made a
concession by making the request more reasonable. therefore maybe we should
make a concession as well, and give in to the more reasonable demand.

Obedience:
How could people do horrible things to people, like was done during the Holocaust for
example.

Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Studies of the 1960s tried to answer this.

Brought in participants who thought they were doing a study on learning. Were
told by experimenters to shock “learners” (who were really confederates, and who
weren’t really shocked) whenever they got answers wrong. The “learners” were in
a different room (next door) and would complain of pain and scream and bang on
the wall.

Even though the participants would show signs of distress and question the
experimenter, most of them (65%) actually shocked the people all the way up to
the full shock level (450 volts). The person wasn’t really hurt, but this showed
that an authority figure could quite easily get people to comply and hurt other
people.

Factors that affect obedience:

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Slippery Slope – the use of foot-in-the-door compliance to get people to obey increasing
demands. (starting with the low 15 volt shock, people are slowly brought up to the higher
levels, and because they obeyed earlier they are more likely to obey later.)

psychological distance – the degree to which one can dissociate oneself from the
consequences of his / her actions. e.g. if the person is IN the room with you and you can
see the pain (it’s faked pain, but you don’t know that) you are more likely to disobey the
experimenter.

Destructive obedience – obedience to immoral, unethical demands that cause harm to

others. (to distinguish it from other obedience, which is usually a good thing; not all
obedience is bad (e.g. obeying the laws of your country, assuming they are moral)

Aggression:

Aggression - an act that is intended to cause harm to another person

Instrumental Aggression – aggression used to facilitate the attainment of a goal. e.g.

beating up some girl/boy and stealing their boyfriend / girlfriend, or robbing someone
with physical force to get money.

Hostile Aggression – an aggressive act motivated only by the desire to hurt someone.

Males tend to be more physically aggressive than females, though females often use more
relational aggression (which is harm caused by damage to relationships or social status;
e.g. forcing a friend out of the group or spreading rumours about them).

Aggression may be connected to physical size, brain damage (sometimes due to child
abuse) and also possibly the neurotransmitter serotonin.

low levels of serotonin is connected to higher aggression levels, which may be because
people with low levels of serotonin have trouble controlling their behaviour (e.g.
obsessive – compulsive disorder). Therefore, people with low levels of serotonin might
have trouble controlling aggressive impulses.

Aggression and learning:

Remember Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments; children acted aggressively
towards dolls by mimicking an adult model. We may learn some aggression by
mimicking models in our environment, on tv, in video games, etc.

might especially be because in media often violence goes unpunished, and doesn’t result
in serious consequences for the victim.
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Being aggressive and watching aggressive/violent media is correlated, but remember that
correlation DOES NOT mean causation. It’s not clear that watching violent TV causes
aggressive behaviour…

Frustration-aggression hypothesis – the idea that we tend to act aggressively when

frustrated. Often, but not always, the aggression is towards the source of our aggression.
This is good to understand so that we can try to avoid being aggressive towards innocent
bystanders (like our friends) when we are feeling frustrated.

Helping Behaviour:

Altruism / altruistic behaviour – willingness to help others without any benefit or reward
for ourselves.

Murder of Kitty Genovese – 28 year old woman, who was murdered in New York close
to her home. 38 neighbours at least heard some problem; some heard her screaming. She
was killed by her attacker, and the attack lasted about 30 minutes. No one was successful
in getting help for her (police, or helping her themselves).

Psychologists have studied this case because of the shock it made when it was reported in
newspapers.

It’s been found that people are LESS likely to help if there are more people around
(bystander effect)

Responsibility is diffused or diluted – we believe “someone else will / can help, so I don’t
have to”

also Puralistic Ignorance – we look to other’s reactions to decide if it’s a situation where
we really need to help. If no one else is helping, we may decide that help isn’t really
needed. “This situation must not be really serious because no one else is rushing to help”

(A similar thing happens when a fire alarm goes off. We look at how others react, and if
they don’t seem concerned or keep doing what they’re doing we assume it’s not a real
fire and do the same)

Another possible explanation in this case is that people might have ASSUMED that
because there were so many people around, that someone else must have already called
the police.

Other factors that might effect helping behaviour:

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Increasing a person’s feelings of responsibility will help make them more likely to help.
If you need help, try singling out one person to help you. “You there in the green jacket,
can you help me?”

Don’t let all the obedience and helping behaviour research depress you. Psychologists
have also found lots of examples of people helping others when they don’t have to, and
being very altruistic. ^^