Chapter 16 Social Psychology Notes
The Colour of The Dress
Gold and white or blue and black?
Remember that this phenomenon happens because of the constancies that occur around the object.
Remember the cube and the orange square in the shaded section, but when the shadow and the rest of
the cube is removed it is actually brown.
Even though you know what is happening you can’t change the way you see it
With regards to sensation and perception this is a bottom up process where you extract information
from the world and then the brain makes interpretations of the information.
The dress. It isn’t fully black. The idea is whether or not you perceive the dress to be in a shadow or in
light. The lightning is ambiguous. If you perceive it in shadow then you will see lighter colours – white
and gold. If you perceive it in light then you will see darker colours – black and blue.
It is the same stimulation on retina but make the interpretation on retina is different.
Most people see it is blue and black.
Social Psychology
About 90% of people are followers and about 10% are leaders
Concentration camps during WWII sent the Jewish, Gypsy, Poland, and Germans speaking against the
Reich.
Some could have got out of the camps as there were not many guards – but some will die in the escape.
But because no one wants to take the shot no one wanted to escape and it became easy to control
people. The fear was simply utilized.
Jane Elliot: Blue eyes vs Brown eyes Experiment on Discrimination and Racism
The experiment was that in her third grade class she said the blue-eyed people were better than browneyed people and gave the blue eyed people various extra privilege (like extra recess).
She found that the students were quick to discriminate even when the next week she said that browneyed people were better than blue-eyed
YorkU Horrendous Incident on the Picket Lines
The situation was that someone came out of their car to swear at the picketers and knock down barriers
blocking the road.
Even with something as minor as what is happening – that much can come out of people. When it
comes to human nature and personality there is darkness in us and most of us know it is there.
But this kind of behaviour comes out from not being denying that you have that darkness and then it out
comes out in a stressful event.
Social Cognition and social Influence
These were examples of social influence - this is the bearing that the social reality has on you (ex: blue
eye and brown eye experiment).
I.e. - Do you conform, do you obey, do you help strangers in a group setting?
Social cognition – this is making sense of our social environment and how we read others, interpret
behaviours and form behaviours
Social Cognition
How to form perceptions of others we have those shortcuts. There are some categorizations. Fairly
often those evaluations are due to their goals. Sometimes their interaction with other people is goaloriented.
Schemas
For example there is a professor schema and a university student schema
If you behave out of the schema you behave out of the social norm
We evaluate people in a blink of an eye without considering their circumstance. And often you perceive
others in the same way you do yourself.
Implicit Personality Theory
We tend to associate certain characteristics together
We infer the characteristics based on the cues that are related to it
Attraction and Beauty
Mere exposure effect - if meet them readily you will like it more. The first you hear it may not like it.
Then hear it again then you likely.
In China the female beauty style is to have small feet.
Aboriginal woman would wear neck braces to elongate their neck because that was considered beautiful
But sometimes it ends up leading to a handicap (Chinese woman couldn’t walk and aboriginal woman
would have to wear the brace or else their neck would collapse)
It is a similar situation with tattoos. Some people think it is stylish others think it is an indication that the
individuals belongs to a tough crowd.
We perceive young as beautiful
Physical Attractiveness
Implicit cultural message is that beautiful is good
Attractive people are more likely to attribute their success to their looks and that other people could not
succeed because they did not have these good looks.
Parents take care of your better looking child (on average)
And when people asked to judge attractiveness from 1-7 (like we did in an earlier class) we are pretty
harsh
We find beauty in averageness. What we find attractive is eyes not too wide or close and nose and face
just right.
Symmetry is another factor – we think symmetrical faces
The beautiful male face is actually very similar to the beautiful female face.
Marriage
The idea of love and young love in the past was abnormal and really only took off in the last few
decades. Marriage was for much more practical reasons.
People in China even had marriages with ghosts to ward off evil spirits and to preserve lineage.
Love has a lot to do with proximity. That’s why many people fall in love with people you have met at
school or work as they were close.
Matching phenomenon people match in terms of attractiveness – attractive people often fall in love
with other attractive people. And if that is not the case many people would think that the
unattractiveness person has something like wealth or power.
Even friends match in terms of attractiveness to some extent on average.
Love
Security attached – positive views of themselves and their partner and relationship’s they feel
comfortable with intimacy and independence
Anxious-preoccupied – seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from partners and
become overly dependent. They are less trusting and have less positive views of themselves and
partners and may exhibit high levels of stress, worry, and impulsiveness in the relationships
Dismissive-avoidant – they view themselves as self-sufficient and invulnerable to attachment feelings
and tend to supress feelings and distant themselves from partners who they have poor opinion of
Fearful-avoidant – mixed feelings of close both desiring and feeling uncomfortable with emotional
closeness. They view themselves as unworthy.
Triangle Theory of Love (refer to image in lecture slides)
There are three corners in the theory. Passion, intimacy, and commitment
There are all different types of love but they are all laid out and a combination of these aspects
For example:
If it is only intimacy it is liking
If it is passion only it is infatuation
If it is only commitment it is called empty love (like an arranged marriage)
The best is to have all of it, but it doesn’t last forever
Attribution Error
Attribution – We have a tendency to give causal explanation for someone’s behaviour - we credit
someone else or another thing for our own behaviour
So the idea is you will see a bigger picture and how the life
First tendency to think with the YorkU incident is that the person is such an idiot to do that at the picket
line
We assume that this one event mirrors their disposition
Maybe he was rushing somewhere or anxious about a meeting for job and was getting delayed
So the idea and someone cuts in front of you
Make a situational attributional
Maybe they have a bad situation and not get angry
But we often attribute that this one event is representative of their entire disposition.
There is also another tendency we have – we have a tendency to think that the world is a just place.
Is something bad happens to someone we think that they had it coming. But bad things absolutely
happen to good people.
Another example is that we should avoid toxic people and depressed people as we think it is their own
doing because they are selfish
Overall, we have tendency to blame the victim (defensive attribution)
Homeless people
When homeless people ask for change …
Some people pretend that they don’t see them
People are afraid of unpredictable people
Now if you had to ask for change 98% of the class said it would be hard for them to do it
Like with kid with the mountain in the previous chapters they cannot see the perspective of the person.
But majority of people do not grow out of this attributional error – we do not often put ourselves in
their shoes.
Individualistic vs. Communalism
The world is becoming more individualistic
China is more collectivist
Intermediate would be Eastern Europe and Israel
Individualistic create more situational attributions like people are in charge of destiny
But collectivism say that fate is in charge of destiny
It is not a good feeling to have no control over things
Attributions are our predispositions to evaluate some people, groups, or issues, places, things in a
particular way and it has cognitive which is emotional and behaviour aspects
Do you believe is it your actions that follow from behaviour/attitudes?
Or is it attitudes that follow from your actions?
We believe it is our attitudes that determine our behavior.
We don’t do that – Often times we will revise our attitudes to match our actions
For example. The person to give in and drink and drive will change their attitudes. They would not have
such a strong stance against it
Like if you watch porn. If you never did most people would think it is such a dreadful thing. But after you
watch it, you will think less negatively about it.
But it doesn’t often work the other way around - that it is a good thing and you will think better of it.
The foot in the door phenomenon
First they will say to sign a petition or do something
Start with a tiny request. And once they agree to that request you follow up with a donation request or
larger request. And those who give in to the small request are more likely to give into the larger request.
Cognitive Dissonance
We are not very good with dealing with the state of cognitive dissonance - if you do something but this
is against your beliefs and have those urges that you can’t helped and clashes with believes. It creates a
state of tension.
You end up engaging in it and it creates an unpleasant situation and make attitudes to match it
Avoiding dissonance information
We don’t like to listen to the views of the other side
For example people will tune to certain stations or read certain newspapers
The other side they make you angry and you avoid it
The people who should listen do not listen and those people who end up getting the audience are those
who believe in it: preaching to the converted
Prejudice and Discrimination
Prejudice is a negative attitude towards people who belong a specific social group
Discrimination is a behaviour that results from prejudice
The classic one is attitudes toward black people
IAT Test
Test attempted to make associations between black faces and white faces by associating a good or bad
word with a white or black face.
Some people would have to match bad words to black people and good words to white people and
others were the other way around.
It tested your reaction times and checks to see if you are implicitly racist. For example those who are
prejudiced against black people will react more quickly if they have to associate a bad word with a black
person and good word with a white person.
It proved that most people are implicitly racist toward black people – including black people
The reason for this is there is so much stipulation in the world and the media that actually strengths the
relationships
They show videos of amazing black athletes or researchers to expose them to good black people and
accomplishments of black people
Even with one exposure they were able to reduce that amygdala, emotional, fear-based reaction
(See graph of changes of prejudice in lecture slides)
And it changes in recent years to vote for a woman president and prejudice against woman and blacks
have fallen sharply and keeping minorities out of their neighbourhoods have fallen as well
Stereotypes
A stereotype is the categorization of groups of people. And there is no truth to stereotypes
If there is a big group of people and try to make generalized statements about they are lazy or they are
hard-working or they are good in sports and are intelligent. We can’t. There is variability in each ethnic
group (remember the bell-curve). Some people are good at some things and others are average and
others are bad.
However there are some differences overall. Like Asian people are good at rock climbing because their
average body type is a perfect body to have at rock climbing – especially Asian woman.
There is a difference overall but it doesn’t apply to every single person
Males are better at math on average but now it is questioned.
It is all based on variation and averages
Another stereotype is we often connect Islam with Terrorism. But we do so at the cost of accuracy
There are many Islam people and far less terrorists. But there are even less terrorists who are Islam.
Many terrorists do not believe in religion.
Even 60 years ago there as prejudice against left-handedness
And we tried to change the way the child would write but that only causes other problems
In-group/Out-group bias
It is a natural tendency to appreciate someone more because they belong to your group (the in-group).
As such out-groups are not appreciated as much.
For example a similar paper written by a York Student and a UofT student was presented to York
individuals judged the York paper better than the UofT student.