Chapter 16
Social Psychology
I.
Social Thinking
a. Attributing Behavior to Persons or to Situations
i. Attribution theory: we explain someone’s behavior by
crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition
1. Dispositional attribution
2. Situational attribution
3. Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for
observers, when analyzing another’s behavior, to
under estimate the impact of the situation and to
over estimate the impact of personal disposition.
a. Especially strong in individualistic Western
countries
b. We are situational when we explain our own
behavior
ii. Effects of Attribution
1. How do you explain poverty and unemployment?
b. Attitudes and Actions
i. Attitudes Affect Actions
1. Attitudes: feelings, often influenced by our beliefs,
that predispose us to respond in a particular way to
objects, people, and events.
2. Central route persuasion: occurs when interested
people focus on the arguments and respond with
favorable thoughts
3. Peripheral route persuasion: occurs when people
are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker’s
attractiveness
4. Strong social pressures can weaken the attitudebehavior connection
ii. Actions Affect Attitudes
1. Attitudes sometimes follow behavior
2. The Foot-In-the-Door: the tendency for people who
have first agrees to a small request to comply later
with a larger request
a. Door in the face: opposite
3. Role-Playing Affects Attitudes
a. Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison
Experiment
b. Abu Ghraib
4. Cognitive Dissonance: Relief form Tension
a. When we realize our attitudes and actions
don’t match
b. Cognitive dissonance theory: we act to reduce
the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when
two of our thoughts (cognitions) are
inconsistent.
II.
Social Influence
a. Conformity and Obedience
i. Group Pressure and Conformity
1. Solomon Asch (1955)
2. Conditions that Strengthen Conformity
a. One is made to feel incompetence or insecure
b. The group has at least three people
c. The group is unanimous
d. One admires the group’s status and
attractiveness.
e. One has made no prior commitment to any
response
f. Others in the group observe one’s behavior
g. One’s culture strong encourages respect for
social standards
3. Reasons for Conforming
a. Normative social influence: influence
resulting from a person’s desire to gain
approval or avoid disapproval
b. Informational social influence: influence
resulting from one’s willingness to accept
others’ opinions about reality
ii. Obedience
1. Stanley Milgram (1963)
iii. Lessons from the Conformity and Obedience Studies
1. Strong Social Influences can make people conform to
falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty
b. Group Influence
i. Individual Behavior in the Presence of Others
1. Social facilitation: stronger responses on simple or
well-learned tasks in the presence of others
2. What do you well, you are likely to do even better in
front of an audience; what you normally find difficult
may seem all but impossible when you are being
watched
3. Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to
exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward
attaining a common goal than when individually
accountable.
4. Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and selfrestraint occurring in group situations that foster
arousal and anonymity
ii. Effects of Group Interaction
1. Group Polarization: the enhancement of a group’s
prevailing inclinations through discussion within the
group
a. The internet as medium for polarization
III.
2. Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when
the desire for harmony in a decision-making group
overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives
c. The Power of Individuals
i. Social control: power of the situation
ii. Personal control: power of the individual
iii. Minority influence: the power of one or two individuals to
sway majorities
Social Relations
a. Prejudice (prejudgment): an unjustifiable and usually negative
attitude toward a group and its members.
i. Stereotype: a generalized (sometimes accurate but often
overgeneralized) belief about a group of people.
ii. Discrimination: unjustified negative behavior toward a
group and its members
iii. How Prejudiced are People?
iv. Social Roots of Prejudice
1. Social inequalities
2. Us and Them: Ingroup and Outgroup
v. Emotional Roots of Prejudice
1. Scapegoat theory: the theory that prejudice offers
and outlet for anger by providing someone to blame
vi. Cognitive Roots of Prejudice
1. Categorization
a. Other-race effect: the tendency to recall faces
of one’s own race more accurately than faces
of other races
2. Vivid Cases
3. The Just-World Phenomenon: the tendency for
people to believe the world is just and that people
therefore get what they deserve and deserve what
they get
b. Aggression: any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt to
destroy
i. The Biology of Aggression
1. Genetic influences
2. Neural influences
3. Biochemical influences
ii. Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression
1. Aversive Events
a. Frustration-aggression principle: the
principle that frustration creates anger,
which can generate aggression
2. Social and Cultural Influences
3. Observing Models of Aggression
4. Acquiring Social Scripts
5. Do Video Games Teach, or Release, Violence?
c. Attraction
i. The Psychology of Attraction
1. Proximity (geographic nearness)
a. Repeated exposure to stimuli increases out
liking of them (mere exposure effect)
2. Physical attractiveness
a. Very important
3. I
n the eye of the culture
4. Similarity
ii. Romantic Love
1. Passionate Love: an aroused state of intense positive
absorption in another, usually present at the
beginning of a love relationship
2. Companionate Love: the deep affectionate
attachment we feel for those with whom our lives
are intertwined
a. Equity: receive in proportion to what you
give
b. Self-disclosure: the revealing of intimate
details about each other
d. Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of others
i. Bystander intervention
1. Kitty Genovese
2. Bystander effect
ii. The Norms for Helping
1. Social exchange theory (utilitarianism): our social
behavior is an exchange process the aim of which is
to maximize benefits and minimize costs
2. Reciprocity norm: an expectation that people will
help, not hurt, those who have helped them
3. Social responsibility norm
e. Conflict and Peacemaking
i. Social traps: a situation in which the conflicting parities, by
each rationally pursuing self-interest, become caught in
mutually destructive behavior.
1. Prisoner’s Dilemma
ii. Enemy Perceptions
1. Mirror-image perceptions: mutual views often held
by conflicting people, as when each side sees itself as
ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil
and aggressive
iii. Contact
iv. Cooperation
1. Superordinate goals: shared goals that override
difference among people and require their
cooperation
v. Communication
vi. Conciliation