Social Psychology:
Attributions, Attitudes,
Role Playing and
Conformity
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Agenda
1. Bell Ringer: How many waves?
2. Attributing Behavior/Attitudes and Actions
Notes (20)
3. Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment (30)
4. Attributing Behavior Scenarios (15)
5. Stereotypes? Who am I? (10)
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Social Psychology: Unit
Objectives
Define Social Thinking
 Attributing Behavior to Persons
or to Situations
 Attitudes and Actions
Analyze Social Influence
 Conformity and Obedience
 Group Influence
 The Power of Individuals
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What is Social Psychology?
“We cannot live for ourselves alone.”
Herman Melville
Social psychology scientifically studies how we
think about, influence, and relate to one another.
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Social Thinking
1. Does a person’s 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?
Social thinking involves thinking about
others, especially when they engage in doing
things that are unexpected.
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Attributing Behavior to Persons or to
Situations
http://www.stedwards.edu
Attribution Theory: Fritz
Heider (1958) suggested
that we have a tendency
to give causal
explanations for
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).
http://www.bootsnall.org
Dispositions are enduring
personality traits. So, if Joe
is a quiet, shy, and
introverted child, he is
likely to be like that in a
number of situations.
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Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to overestimate the impact of
personal disposition and underestimate the
impact of the situations in analyzing the
behaviors of others leads to the fundamental
attribution error.
Example: You’re teacher is strict and you
assume she is mean. You see her at the mall
one day and she’s laughing with friends – you
are shocked.
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Effects of Attribution
How we explain someone’s behavior affects
how we react to it.
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Attitudes & Actions: How they
impact our behavior
A belief and feeling that predisposes a person
to respond in a particular way to objects, other
people, and events.
If we believe a person is mean, we may feel
dislike for the person and act in an unfriendly
manner.
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Outside influences on our
behavior and attitudes
• External situations, influence behavior.
• Not only do people stand for what they believe
in (attitude), they start believing in what they
stand for.
• Can be positive and negative
Ex:
There’s a new student you’ve been told
she’s a bad person and you believe it even
though you’ve talked to her and she seems
nice.
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Brainwashing
Situation: In the Korean War, Chinese
communists were able to get U.S. Army
poisoners to cooperate by asking them to carry
out small errands. By complying to small
errands they were likely to comply to larger
ones.
Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency
for people who have first agreed to a small
request to comply later with a larger request.
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Actions Can Affect Attitudes
Why do actions affect attitudes? One
explanation is that when our attitudes and
actions are opposed, we experience tension.
This is called cognitive dissonance.
To relieve ourselves of this tension we bring our
attitudes closer to our actions (Festinger, 1957).
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Cognitive Dissonance
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Create your own Example of
Cognitive Dissonance
• Use the examples in your notes as a
guide.
• Be ready to share
• 3 minutes
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Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study
• Use your video questions to discover what
happened in the experpiment.
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Role Playing Affects Attitudes
Zimbardo (1972) assigned the roles of guards
and prisoners to random students and found
that guards and prisoners developed roleappropriate attitudes.
Originally published in the New Yorker
Phillip G. Zimbardo, Inc.
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Agenda
1. Bell Ringer: Attributing Behaviors Review (15)
2. Conformity and Obedience (15)
3. Asch and Conformity Video and Discussion (10)
4. Milgram and Violating Social Norms (article) (15)
5. Situations? What would violate social norms? (10)
Project overview (5)
6. Milgram’s obedience trial. Examining the
participants. (15-20)
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Conformity & Obedience
• Behavior is contagious, modeled by one
followed by another. We follow behavior of
others to conform. Humans want to fit in.
• Other behaviors may be an expression of
compliance (obedience) toward authority.
Conformity
Obedience
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Conformity: Adjusting one’s behavior or
thinking to coincide with a group standard
1.
2.
3.
4.
One is made to feel incompetent or insecure.
The group has at least three people.
The group is unanimous.
One admires the group’s status and
attractiveness.
5. One has no prior commitment to a response.
6. The group observes one’s behavior.
7. One’s culture strongly encourages respect for a
social standard.
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Group Pressure & Conformity
Asch Experiment:
Watch the video and see how people conform.
Would you have spoken up?
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Obedience
Courtesy of CUNY Graduate School and University Center
• Stanley Milgram
designed a study that
investigates the effects
of authority on
obedience.
• A third of the
individuals in
Milgram’s study
resisted social
coercion.
Stanley Milgram
(1933-1984)
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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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Lessons from the Conformity and
Obedience Studies
• In both Asch's and Milgram's studies,
participants were pressured to choose
between following their standards and being
responsive to others.
• In Milgram’s study, participants were torn
between hearing the victims pleas and the
experimenter’s orders.
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Closure:
• What are five qualities that most clearly
define who you are?
• What are the three skills you truly excel at?
• One of the best ways to avoid group
pressure is having a strong self-concept
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