Chapter 14: Psychology in
Our Social Lives
“We must learn to live together as brothers
or perish together as fools.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Amber Gilewski
Tompkins Cortland Community College
Attribution Processes:
Explaining Behavior
• Attributions – inferences made about the causes
of events and behaviors
– Internal vs. External: causes related to personal
dispositions vs. situational/environmental causes
• Biases in attributions
– Fundamental attribution error - observers’ bias
in favor of internal attributions in explaining
others’ behavior
More Biases in Attribution
– Defensive attribution – tendency to blame victims
for their misfortune
– Self-serving bias - tendency to attribute one’s
success to personal factors & failure to situational
factors
• Cultural influences
-Western cultures: fundamental attribution
bias & self-serving bias
-Japanese culture: self-effacing bias; more selfcritical & accept more personal responsibility
Yielding to Others: Conformity
• Conformity – Solomon Asch (1950s)
– Classic experiment: participants asked to judge
length of 3 lines; actually testing conformity to see
if others would answer similarly; 76% conformed at
least once
• Group size: larger groups influence conformity
• Group unanimity: strongly influences
conformity; people may also follow lead
of a dissenter
• Replication study findings: less conformity
now, individualistic societies conform less,
people conform more in certain situations,
variety of reasons for conformity, positive &
negative sides to conformity, suppresses critical
thinking
Yielding to Others: Obedience
• Obedience – Stanley Milgram (1960s)
– Controversial landmark experiment: learner &
teacher; administering shocks for incorrect
answers; actually testing obedience; 65%
administered all shocks
• Would people obey an authority figure & violate
their own ethical standards?
• Subsequent study findings: people would
disobey under certain conditions, but NOTHING the
victim did made any difference
• Conclusions: obedience relates to situation, not
personality & relationship to authority influences it
• Evaluating the study: very controversial due to
deception and psychological distress; personality
traits may be related to obedience; invalid to
compare to Nazi ideology; made us more aware of
uncritical obedience & its implications
Power of the Situation: SPE
• Philip Zimbardo (1971)
Stanford Prison Experiment
– Students were assigned roles of prisoners
or guards
– Conducted in basement of psychology dept.
@ Stanford University
– Was supposed to last 2 weeks
– Had to be ended after 6 days – Why?
– Similarity with Abu-Ghraib prison scandal in
Iraq
Behavior in Groups
 The bystander effect - Darley and Latane (1968)
-Less likely to help when part of a group vs. alone
-Ambiguity also plays a role
 Diffusion of responsibility – everyone thinks
someone else will help; each person feels less
responsible
 Highly emotional crowds may induce “mob
behavior”
 Deindividuation
– Reduced self-awareness and lower concern of
social evaluation
Altruism and the Bystander Effect
• Factors that influence decision to help
– Good mood
– Empathic
– Believe an emergency exists
– Assume responsibility to act
– Know what to do
– Know the people who need help
– Similarity to people who need help
Behavior in Groups
• Group productivity and social loafing: productivity
goes down as group size increases; reduced effort
working in groups vs. alone
• Decision making in groups
-Polarization: extreme decisions influenced by
discussions of dominant view
• Groupthink
- group has an illusion of invulnerability
- group self-censors
- group pressures dissenters to conform
- group creates an illusion of that they are unanimous