Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Social Psychology
Chapter 18
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Social Thinking
1. Does his absenteeism signify illness,
laziness, or a stressful work atmosphere?
2. Was the horror of 9/11 the work of
crazed evil people or ordinary people
corrupted by life events?
http://www.stedwards.edu
someone’s behavior,
often by crediting either
the situation or the
person’s disposition.
Fritz Heider
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Attributing Behavior to Persons or to
Situations
A teacher may wonder whether a child’s
hostility reflects an aggressive personality
(dispositional attribution) or is a reaction to stress
or abuse (a situational attribution).
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Attitude
A belief and feeling that predisposes a person to
respond in a particular way to objects, other
people, and events.
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Attitudes Can Affect Action
Not only do people stand for what they believe in
(attitude), they start believing in what they stand
for.
D. MacDonald/ PhotoEdit
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Cognitive Dissonance
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Conformity Obedience
Social Influence
• Social contagion
▫ Chartrand and colleagues (1999)
Demonstrated the chameleon
effect with college students
Automatic mimicry helps people
to empathize and feel what others
feel.
The more we mimic, the greater
our empathy, and the more
people tend to like us.
This is a form of conformity.
The Chameleon Effect
Conformity: Adjusting one’s behavior or
thinking to coincide with a group standard
(Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
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Obedience
People comply to social
Stanley Milgram
designed a study that
investigates the effects of
authority on obedience.
Stanley Milgram
(1933-1984)
Both Photos: © 1965 By Stanley Miligram, from the
film Obedience, dist. by Penn State, Media Sales
Milgram’s Study
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Milgram’s Study: Results
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Individual Resistance
A third of the individuals in Milgram’s study
resisted social coercion.
Group Influence
How do groups affect our behavior? Social
psychologists study various groups:
Social Loafing
The tendency of an individual in a group to
exert less effort toward attaining a common
goal than when tested individually (Latané,
1981).
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Deindividuation
The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint in
group situations that foster arousal and
anonymity.
Mob behavior
Loss of self-awareness and self-
restraint. Deindividuat
Examples: Riots, KKK rallies, ion
concerts, identity-concealed online
bullying.
Happens when people are in group
situations involving: 1) Anonymity and
2) Arousal.
When people of similar views form a group
Group together, discussion within the group makes
Polarization their views more extreme.
Thus, different groups become MORE
different, more polarized, in their views.
Groupthink
A mode of thinking that occurs when the desire
for harmony in a decision-making group
overrides the realistic appraisal of alternatives.
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Social Relations
Social psychology teaches us how we relate to
one another through prejudice, aggression, and
conflict to attraction, and altruism and
peacemaking.
Social Relations
Social Psychologists also study the psychological
components of how people relate to each other.
Examples:
Social
Altruism:
Conflict: When
When we help
and how we
others
make peace
Social Relations
Prejudice
Components of
Prejudice: An Prejudice
unjustified (usually
negative) attitude
toward a group (and its Beliefs
members). (stereotypes)
Discrimination:
Unjustified behavior
selectively applied to Emotions
members of a group. (hostility,
Stereotype: A envy, fear)
generalized belief about
a group, applied to every Predisposition
member of a group. to act (to
discriminate)
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Reign of Prejudice
Prejudice works at the conscious and [more at]
the unconscious level. Therefore, prejudice is
more like a knee-jerk response than a conscious
decision.
How Prejudiced are People?
Over the duration of time many prejudices
against interracial marriage, gender,
homosexuality, and minorities have decreased.
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Levels of Prejudice can Change
Generation Generation
X Y
Baby
Boomers
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Social Relations
Prejudice Remains
Race
Nine out of ten white respondents were slow
when responding to words like “peace” or
“paradise” when they saw a black individual’s
photo compared to a white individual’s photo
(Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003).
Automatic Prejudice
Study: People were more likely to misperceive a
tool as a gun when preceded by an African-
American face, when both were presented quickly
followed by blank screen or “visual mask.”
Not a gun
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Gender
Most women still live in more poverty than
men. About 100,000,000 women are missing in
the world. There is a preference for male
children in China and India, even with sex-
selected abortion outlawed.
Gender
Although prejudice prevails against women,
more people feel positively toward women than
men. Women rated picture b [feminized] higher
(665) for a matrimonial ad (Perrett, 1998).
1. Social Inequalities
2. Social Divisions
3. Emotional Scapegoating
Social Inequality
Prejudice develops when people have money,
power, and prestige, and others do not. Social
inequality increases prejudice.
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Even if people are randomly assigned
Us vs. Them: to groups:
Part of our natural drive to belong
Ingroups, to a group leads to ingroup bias
(favoring one’s own group),
Outgroups misjudging other groups, and
quickly categorizing strangers:
“with me or against me.”
In and Out Groups
Ingroup: People with whom one shares a
common identity. Outgroup: Those perceived as
different from one’s ingroup. Ingroup Bias: The
tendency to favor one’s own group.
9/11
hijackers
© The New Yorker Collection, 1981, Robert Mankoff from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
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Hindsight Bias
After learning an outcome, the tendency to
believe that we could have predicted it
beforehand may contribute to blaming the
victim and forming a prejudice against them.
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The Availability
Heuristic:
Stereotypes are
built on vivid cases
rather than
statistics
Cognitive
dissonance: Thinking Confirmation
“My culture and Habits Bias: we are not
family treats likely to look for
minorities this Reinforcing counterexamples
way, can we be Prejudice to our
wrong?” stereotypes.
Hindsight
Bias: “they
should have
known better,”
blames victims
for misfortunes.
Social Relations
Aggression
Definition: Behavior with the
intent of harming another person.
Aggression can have many
forms and purposes:
Aggression can be physical,
verbal, relational: e.g.
punching, insulting, shooting,
betraying.
Aggression can be planned or
reactive.
Aggression can be driven by
hostile rage or can be a coldly
calculated means to an end.
Social Relations
The Biology of Aggression
There is not one genetically universal
style or amount of aggressiveness in
human behavior
But there are biological factors which
may explain variation in levels of
aggression:
Frustration-Aggression Principle:
After repeated frustrating events,
Anger can build, and find a target, and then:
Aggression can erupt, possibly against someone who
was not the initial cause of the frustration.
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Aversive Events
Studies in which animals and humans experience
unpleasant events reveal that those made
miserable often make others miserable.
Environment
Even environmental temperature can lead to
aggressive acts. Murders and rapes increased
with the temperature in Houston.
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Frustration-Aggression Principle
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Family, Cultural
Models for Aggression
Parents dislike aggressive
behavior in their children,
but unfortunately: They
may have modeled that
behavior, such as yelling, as
their kids watched them
handle frustration.
Some cultures model
aggression and violence as
a solution to personal and
societal injustice.
Models for aggression are
also conveyed through
media, in the form of
social scripts.
Acquiring Social Scripts
The media portrays social scripts and generates
mental tapes in the minds of the viewers. When
confronted with new situations individuals may
rely on such social scripts. If social scripts are
violent in nature, people may act them out.
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Aggression in Media: Social Scripts
Aggression portrayed in
video, music, books, and
other media, follows and Social Scripts: Culturally
teaches a script. constructed directions on how
When confronted with new to act, downloaded from
situations, we may rely on media as a “file” or “program”
social scripts to guide our in the mind.
responses. Many scripts
proscribe aggression.
Effects of Social Scripts
Watchers of TV crime see the world as
Studies: Exposure to more threatening (needing a
one aggressive story aggressive defense?)
increases other forms Randomly assigned to watch explicit
of aggressive behavior. pornography, study participants
suggested shorter sentences for rapists
and accepted the myth that victims
may have enjoyed the rape.
Do Video Games Teach or Release
Violence?
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More Media Effects Video Games
on Aggression and Aggression
Exposure to violence
in media, especially
in pornography,
seems to increase,
rather than release,
male aggressive
impulses. People randomly assigned to play
Media can portray ultraviolent video games showed
minorities, women, increases in hostility
the poor, and others People playing a game helping
with less power as characters, showed increased real-life
being weak, stupid, helping
submissive, and less
human, and thus People have acted out violent acts
deserving their from video games; People playing the
victimhood. most violent games tended to be the
most aggressive; but what came first,
aggressiveness or games?
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Summary
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A Game of Social Trap
By pursuing our self-interest and not trusting
others, we can end up losers.
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Enemy Perceptions –
Mirror-Image
People in conflict form diabolical images of one
another.
http://www.aftonbladet.se
http://www.cnn.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VeU8QQ8LMs
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Rex USA
just due to proximity.
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Physical Who is
Attractiveness rated as
physically
People who are rated as attractive?
physically attractive:
1. Become the objects of
emotional attraction. Standards differ from
culture to culture about
2. Are seen as healthy, what facial and body
happy, successfully, features are desirable.
and socially skilled, Across cultures (suggesting
though not necessarily evolutionary influence):
caring.
Men seek apparent youth
3. Are not any happier and fertility
than the average
person, Women seek maturity,
masculinity, affluence
4. Do not have higher
self-esteem, in fact Both like facial
mistrust praise as symmetry and
being about their averageness
looks. Also attractive: Nice
people, and loved ones.
Psychology of Attraction
2. Physical Attractiveness: Once proximity
affords contact, the next most important thing
in attraction is physical appearance.
• This is part of our series on The Sexiest • Beautiful people tend to bring in more
CEOs Alive. money for their companies, and are
• Studies have shown that attractive therefore seen as more valuable
people are usually hired sooner, get employees and harder workers, according
promotions more quickly, and are to an article in Psychology Today by
paid more than their less-attractive Dario Maestripieri, a professor of
coworkers. comparative human development,
• Attractive people earn an average of 3 evolutionary biology, and neurobiology at
or 4 percent more than people with the University of Chicago. A door-to-door
below-average looks, according to Daniel insurance salesman is better able to sell
Hamermesh, professor of economics at to customers who find him attractive,
the University of Texas at Austin and says Maestripieri, because the
author of the book "Beauty Pays: Why customers will be more likely to
Attractive People Are More Successful.“ buy if they think it will increase
• Researchers have studied the concept of their chances to have sex with him.
beauty as a factor in a person’s success Maestripieri calls this principle “the
over and over again, and in multiple pleasure of dealing with good-
ways. looking people.”
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Similarity breeds
content!
Romantic Love
Passionate Love: An aroused state of intense
positive absorption in another, usually present at
the beginning of a love relationship.
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Romantic Love
Companionate Love: A deep, affectionate
attachment we feel for those with whom our lives
are intertwined.
Then often
has a phase
of
Passionate
Love Made closer
by Equity
and Self-
Disclosure
Often starts
with
attraction, or
friendship
Passionate Love
Compassionate Love
A state of strong Deep, caring,
attraction, interest, affectionate
excitement, felt so attachment/commitme
strongly that people are nt
absorbed in each other
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Bystander Effect
Tendency of any given
bystander to be less
likely to give aid if other
bystanders are present.
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Bystander Intervention
The decision-making process for bystander
intervention.
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Peacemaking
Superordinate Goals are shared goals that
override differences among people and require
their cooperation.
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