Social Psychology
Finishing Prejudice
• Video on school cliques
• Colored Doll Experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG7U1QsU
d1g&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQACkg5i4
AY&feature=fvsr
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul1xsDwNe
uo
Categorizing Race
• On the following slide, there are 20 photos of
people. On a separate sheet of paper, categorize
them into the 5 racial categories currently
recognized by the U.S.:
• American Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black,
Hispanic/Latino, and White.
• There may only be 4 in each category.
• Identify people using the letter/number grid
system.
A
1
2
3
4
B
C
D
E
On the following
slide are the
“answers,” as they
are self-reported by
the people in the
picture.
• American Indian:
C2, C4, D2, D3
• Asian/Pacific Islander:
E2, B2, D1, B3
• Black:
A2, D4, E1, E4
• Hispanic/Latino:
A1, B1, B4, C3
• White:
E3, A3, C1, A4
• What criteria did you use to categorize?
• What was the hardest part about this activity?
• Intro Questions
Attraction
What factors increase the chance
that people will like one
another?
• if they are similar to us (similarity)
• we have frequent contact with them
(proximity)
• those that return our positive feelings
(reciprocal liking)
• those we share intimate and personal
information with (self-disclosure)
Effects of Personal
Appearance
• The attractiveness bias
• physically attractive people are rated higher on
intelligence, competence, sociability, morality
• studies
• teachers rate attractive children as smarter, and higher
achieving
• adults attribute cause of unattractive child’s
misbehavior to personality, attractive child’s to situation
• judges give longer prison sentences to unattractive
people
Effects of Personal
Appearance
• The baby-face bias
• people with rounder heads, large eyes, small
jawbones, etc. rated as more naïve, honest,
helpless, kind, and warm than mature-faced
• generalize to animals, women, babies
Dear Abby
• Complete the worksheet on Dear Abby using
the principles we just talked about.
My research
• TOS
• TRIOS
• Stereotype Threat
• Condom Study
• Face Shape
Your Turn
• Take the Temporal Orientation Scale
Correlations
• Past Oriented People:
• High correlation with depression
• Negative correlation with joviality, selfassurance, well-being, self-esteem,
• High correlation with REGRETS
Present Oriented People
• High correlation with “Mastery of the
Environment”
• High correlation with self-esteem, well-being,
acceptance, and SOMETIMES with regrets
• Very low correlation with depression
Future Oriented People
• High correlation with self-assurance, and LAST
WEEK regrets.
• NO Correlation with autonomy, self-esteem,
and mastery of the environment
• HOWEVER, high correlation with GPA and
standardized tests.
Cultural Orientation
• The United States has a much higher
preoccupation with future orientation. Many
other cultures are present oriented. Their
sense of “time” can be very different.
• “Island time”
Regret
• Research has found that when looking back on
their lives, people regret INACTION more than
ACTION.
• When looking back in the past week, people
regret ACTION rather than INACTION.
How do we get people to
do things for us?
•Compliance Strategies
are methods of getting
others to comply with
one’s wishes.
•Foot-In-The-Door
Phenomenon.
• It suggests that if you
can get people to agree
to a small request first,
they are more likely to
agree to a follow-up
request that is larger.
• "Can I go over to Suzy's house for an hour?"
followed by "Can I stay the night?"
• "Can I borrow the car to go to the store?"
followed by "Can I borrow the car for the
weekend?"
• "Would you sign this petition for our cause?"
followed by "Would you donate to our
cause?"
• "May I turn in the paper a few hours late?"
followed by "May I turn it in next week?"
•Door-In-The-Face Phenomenon
•Strategy marked by first making an
extremely large request that the
respondent will obviously turn down. The
respondent is then more likely to agree
to a second, more reasonable request.
•Will you donate $1000 to our
organization?
Oh. Well could you donate $10?''
•Can you help me do all this work?
Well can you help me with this bit?''
•Another common strategy
is known as the Norms of
Reciprocity. People tend to
think that when someone
does something nice for
them, they ought to do
something nice in return.
•IE. You feel compelled to send
money to the charity
organization that sent you the
free address labels in the mail,
or to vote for the candidate that
handed out the delicious
chocolate chip cookies.
Come up with an
advertisement…
• Come up with a product you want to sell
• Use ALL THREE techniques (separate your
paper into 3)
• Star the one you believe will work best
• Groups of 2-3
How do we explain
the behaviors that
we observe?
•You’re in a college library, observing
two workers attempting to move a
rather large filing cabinet. In unison,
the two workers lift up the cabinet.
All four doors fly open and the files
spill out. What’s your first thought?
•Attribution
Theory tries
to explain
how people
determine the
cause of what
they observe.
Dispositional Attribution
• We when observe other people’s
behaviors, we believe that their
success or failure is due to their
long history of personal success or
failure. The individual is given the
credit or blame for the outcome.
• The files fell out because the
workers are dimwits. The files
fell out because the workers
weren’t strong enough. The
files fell out because the
workers were unable to
balance the cabinet. The
workers were inexperienced in
this type of work.
Situational Attribution
• If you believe that a person’s success
or failure is due to a consistently easy
or difficult surrounding situation or
environment. Something outside of
the individual’s control has led to their
success or failure.
• The files fell out because the locks on the cabinets
broke. The files fell out because a student bumped
into one of the workers and caused it to tip. The
bright light from an overhead bulb blinded a
worker and disoriented him. The floor must have
been recently waxed and was slippery.
• Come up with a situation of your own, and
explain how someone might think it is:
• Situational Attribution
• Dispositional Attribution
What might bias our
observations of
behaviors?
•You go to a party and start up a
conversation with someone you
haven’t met before. They don’t talk
much, gaze around the room rather
than look directly at you, and excuse
themselves abruptly. You first thought
about them is….
•Most of you probably said, “What
a jerk”, right?
•Did you consider that maybe they
were just really shy, or that they
just broke up with their significant
other, or that maybe they were
distracted by a minor car accident
they had on the way to the party?
•When looking at the behaviors
of others, people tend to
overestimate the importance of
personal factors, and
underestimate the role of the
environment. This is called the
fundamental attribution error.
•The tendency for people
to overestimate the
number of people who
agree with them is called
the false consensus effect.
•IE. If Brianna hates Psychology, she
assumes that most people also find it
boring, tedious, and utterly useless as
well. If Savanna likes pizza, she
assumes that because it’s so good that
everyone must like it too. She’s
shocked to find people who don’t like
it as much as she does.
•Self-serving bias is the
tendency to take more
credit for good
outcomes than for bad
ones, and vise-versa.
•IE. A star athlete will acknowledge
that his fourth quarter touchdown
won the game. The same athlete
will point out that a tough loss was
a team loss, and that everyone must
step up their game the next time.
He won’t admit that his dropped
pass in the endzone lost the game.
•When attributing
successes or failures,
people tend to believe
that bad things will
happen to bad people,
and that good things
will happen to good
people. This is called
the just-world belief.
•One problem with the just-world
belief is that we often tend to blame
the victims of crimes for their plight.
The guy shouldn’t have been
walking down that dark alley when
he was robbed…the girl shouldn’t
have been wearing that revealing
outfit when she was attacked.
HELP!
• Why might someone help someone else?
• What causes compassion?
• When is the last time you helped someone
else?
•The larger the number of people who
witness a problem, the less likely any
one is going to intervene. This is called
the bystander effect. The larger the
group of people, the less responsibility
any one individual feels to help.
People tend to assume that someone
else will take action so they don’t have
to.
Kitty Genovese
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4S1LLrSzV
E&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OdKow7I
Auw&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIvGIwLcIu
w&feature=related
Bystanders
• Why are bystanders so important?
• What is conformity?
• Why do we conform?
Bullying Campaign
• Kitty and the Bystander Effect
•Researchers have found that simple
task performance improves in the
presence of others. This is called
social facilitation, though if the task is
difficult or not well-rehearsed,
performance is actually hurt by the
presence of others. This is called
social impairment.
•Social loafing is the
phenomenon when
individuals do not put in as
much effort when acting as
part of a group as they do
when they are acting alone.
•Group polarization is the
tendency of a group to make
more extreme decisions than
the group members would
make individually.
•The loss of an
individual’s selfrestraint occurs when
they feel anonymous.
This is called
deindividualization.
You’re prone to do
more extreme things
if you’re an
anonymous part of
the crowd.
•Groupthink occurs when group
members suppress their
reservations about ideas
supported by the group. As a
result, there is a false sense of
unity, and the flaws of the group’s
decision are overlooked.
Conformity
• Adopting attitudes or behaviors of others because
of pressure to do so; the pressure
can be real or imagined
• 2 general reasons for conformity
• Informational social influence—other people can
provide useful and crucial information
• Normative social influence—desire to be accepted
as part of a group leads to that group having an
influence
Asch’s Experiments
on Conformity
Previous research had shown people will
conform to others’ judgments more often
when the evidence is ambiguous
Asch’s Experiments
on Conformity
• All but 1 in group was
confederate
• Seating was rigged
• Asked to rate which line
matched a “standard” line
• Confederates were
instructed to pick the
wrong line 12/18 times
1
Standard lines
2
3
Comparison lines
Asch’s Experiments
on Conformity
• Results
• Asch found that 75% participants conformed to at least
one wrong choice
• subjects gave wrong answer (conformed) on 37% of the
critical trials
• Why did they conform to clearly wrong choices?
• informational influence?
• subjects reported having doubted their own perceptual
abilities which led to their conformance – didn’t report
seeing the lines the way the confederates had
Asch’s Conformity Test
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4Mkcf
JA&feature=related
Obedience
• Obedience
• compliance of person
is due to perceived
authority of asker
• request is perceived as
a command
• Milgram interested in
unquestioning
obedience to orders
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
Basic study procedure
• teacher and learner
(learner always
confederate)
• watch learner being
strapped into chair
• learner expresses concern
over his “heart condition”
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
•Teacher goes to another room with
experimenter
•Shock generator panel – 15 to 450
volts, labels “slight shock” to “XXX”
•Asked to give higher shocks for every
mistake learner makes
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
• Learner protests
more and more as
shock increases
• Experimenter
continues to request
obedience even if
teacher balks
120 “Ugh! Hey this really hurts.”
150 “Ugh! Experimenter! That’s all.
Get me out of here. I told you
I had heart trouble. My heart’s
starting to bother me now.”
300 (agonized scream) “I absolutely
refuse to answer any more.
Get me out of here. You can’t hold
me here. Get me out.”
330 (intense & prolonged agonized
scream) “Let me out of here.
Let me out of here. My heart’s
bothering me. Let me out,
I tell you…”
Obedience
•How many people would go to
the highest shock level?
•65% of the subjects went to the
end, even those that protested
Obedience
Percentage
of subjects
who obeyed
experimenter
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
The majority of
subjects continued
to obey to the end
Moderate
Very
Extreme
XXX
Slight (75-120) Strong
strong Intense intensity Danger (435-450)
(15-60)
(135-180) (195-240) (255-300) (315-360) severe
(375-420)
Shock levels in volts
Explanations for
Milgram’s Results
•Abnormal group of subjects?
• numerous replications with variety of
groups shows no support
•People in general are sadistic?
• videotapes of Milgram’s subjects show
extreme distress
Explanations for
Milgram’s Results
•Authority of Yale and value of science
•Experimenter self-assurance and
acceptance of responsibility
•Proximity of learner and experimenter
•New situation and no model of how to
behave
Milgram’s Study
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gPYCRfH
g3Q
Stanford Prison
Experiment
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkmQZjZSj
k4
Torture
• Dehumanization: Making it seem as though
you are shooting at/hurting someTHING rather
than someONE.
• Abu Ghraib- What is it?
• Grab a book, open up to page 462, we will read
about it together.
Hindsight Bias
• …is 20/20
• Do you think opposites attract, or we like
those who are similar to us?
• Studies have shown that opposites do, in fact,
attract.
• What evidence can you give me to support that
conclusion?
• Oops, my bad. I meant… Birds of a feather
stick together.
• That’s the real answer… but it was very easy
for many of you to believe the other was true
after I gave you the conclusion.
•An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings
•One reason that attitudes are difficult to
change is due to the Cognitive
Dissonance Theory. The theory is based
on the idea that people are motivated to
have consistent attitudes and behaviors,
and when they do not, they experience
unpleasant mental tension (dissonance).
Cognitive Dissonance
• Unpleasant state of psychological tension or
arousal that occurs when two thoughts or
perceptions are inconsistent
• Attitudes and behaviors are in conflict
• it is uncomfortable for us
• we seek ways to decrease discomfort caused by
the inconsistency
Cognitive Dissonance
Study
• http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitivedissonance.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=korGK0yGI
Do
Create Your Own
Experiment
• Must deal with 1 thing we have covered in this
chapter
• Hypothesis, Method, Expected Results,
Conclusion
• Will be worth product points