Social Psychology

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Social Psychology
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Social psychology

• Two major assumptions
• Behavior is driven by context
• Subjective perceptions guide our behavior

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Conformity and obedience

• Social norms
• Your example?
• Milgram
• Conclusions
• Anxiety prevents us from breaking norms
• We need to justify our actions
• Context directs our feelings and behavior

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Conformity and obedience

• Would you resist group pressure?
• Studies say Probably not.

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Asch study

• Demonstrates suggestibility as a form of
  conformity.

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Milgram study

• Subjects believed they were participating in a
  study on the effects of punishment on learning
• Shock was delivered for each mistake made
• Each shock was larger than the previous one
• Milgram found that obedience is highest when
• Authority figure is nearby
• Authority figure is convincing and associated
  with a powerful institution
• Victim is depersonalized and/or distant
• Disobedience has not been modeled by others

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Conformity and obedience

• Conditions that strengthen conformity
• One is made to feel incompetent or insecure.
• The group has at least three people.
• The group is unanimous.
• One admires the groups status and
  attractiveness.
• One has no prior commitment to a response.
• The group observes ones behavior.
• Ones culture strongly encourages respect for a
  social standard.

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Conformity and obedience

• Why do we conform?
• To be liked
• To be right
• To be alike

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Group influence

• Individual behavior is influenced by the presence
  of others
• Social facilitation
• Social loafing
• Disindividuation

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Group influence

• Individual behavior may also influence the
  behavior of the group

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Group influence

• Group behavior is influenced by the interactions
  within a group
• Group polarization
• Groupthink

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Social relations

• How we relate to one another through a variety of
  attitudes and actions

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Prejudice

• An unjustifiable, most unconscious, attitude
  toward a group and its members
• Beliefs
• Emotions
• Predisposition to act
• Discrimination behavior
• How common is prejudice?
• Implicit association test

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Social roots of prejudice

• Social inequalities increase prejudice
• Social divisions increase prejudice
• Emotional scapegoating

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Cognitive roots of prejudice

• Categorization
• Availability heuristic
• Just-world phenomenon

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Attraction

• Influenced by
• Proximity
• Physical attractiveness
• Similarity

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Romantic love

• Passionate love
• Companionate love

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Social thinking

• Attribution theory - our interpretation about the
  cause of someone elses behavior
• Dispositional attribution
• Situational attribution
• Fundamental attribution error
• Self-serving bias

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Attitudes and actions

• Attitudes are beliefs that influence who we feel
  and act
• Attitudes direct our behavior
• Our actions can also direct our attitudes

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Zimbardos Stanford Prison Experiment

• Examined the effects of role playing on attitudes
  and behavior
• Arbitrarily assigned volunteers to play the role
  of prisoner or prison guard
• Demonstrated that role playing can have a strong
  effect on beliefs

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Cognitive dissonance

• Tension that results from opposition between
  actions and beliefs

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Foot-in-the-door phenomenon

• Strategy for gaining compliance
• People who agree to a small request will later
  agree to a larger request
• Charities
• Alliances

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Can attitudes be legislated?

• Can peoples beliefs be changed by creating laws
  that enforce specific behaviors?