Continuing and Distance Education
Introductory Psychology 1023
Lecture 5: Social Psychology
Reading: Chapter 13
Social Psychology: Why do
people do what they do?
Attributions
• People are motivated to seek causes and
explanations of behavior related to situations and
dispositions
• You ask someone to dance. They say no. Why?
– Because I am a loser (personal attribution)
– Because they are talking to friends or do not like the
music (situational attribution)
• Someone bumps you in line. Why?
– Because they are an !@?&#!!.. This is a fundamental
attribution bias where we over-emphasize internal
causes behavior
– They may have tripped and are not “evil”
Self-serving bias
• Internalize success and externalize blame
• Winning a hockey game because “we’re a good
team”, losing because they were “lucky” or you
“did not get the bounces”
• Self-handicapping is the opposite, e.g., pass a test
because “it was easy”, fail “because I am stupid”
• Just-world hypothesis: People make sense of
senseless events based on their biases, e.g.,
tornado hits a particular region, people say it was
fate and deserved by those people
Bystander studies
• The murder of Kitty Genovese: No one intervened
• The larger the group, the less likely someone will
intervene
– Someone falls down in front of you at the bus stop.
You are more likely to help them if you are alone than
if waiting with other strangers.
• Bystander effect leads to diffusion of
responsibility, bystander apathy
– Observers need to notice and define the emergency,
take responsibility, and act
Deindividuation
• Once a sense of individual identity is lost, internal
constraints against socially prescribed behavior
are reduced
• Negative examples
– Urban riots and angry mobs commit open vandalism
and theft
– Unknown women in hoods act very aggressively
• Positive examples
– Visitor to a small town may be very friendly as they are
unknown
– Talking to strangers on a bus
– Helping in an emergency, as in Swiss Air Disaster
Group Competition
• Unfavorable attitude towards other groups based
on weak or incorrect evidence
• Ethnocentrism: Belief that one’s own cultural
group is superior to others
• Groups compete, even when artificially created,
e.g., summer camp groups or cabins
• Belief that everyone from another group is alike,
e.g., residences
• These issues apply to cultural/ ethnic groups
• Why? Competition, identity, modeling
– Reduced by contact between equals involved in
cooperative activity
Compliance and Obedience
• Compliance: Doing what someone has
asked you to do
– e.g., get on protest bus: what are we
protesting?
• Obedience: Following orders
– e.g., we can be cruel to others when ordered to
be so
• Cults are examples of conformity,
compliance, and obedience out of control
Stereotypes
• Summary impression of a group
– We exaggerate differences between groups, e.g., two
urban gangs feel very different
– Underestimate differences within the other group “They
are all alike”
• Usually strong because we encode information
consistent with our stereotypes, e.g., teenagers
“hang out” in groups
• We often associate with people that hold similar
stereotypes that reinforce one another
Basic principles of a group
•
•
•
•
A number of individuals who interact
Social facilitation: joggers speed up
Social inhibition: first tee in golf
Arousal facilitates well-learned responses but
inhibits novel responses
– Exam stress wipes out newly learned material but can
enhance well-learned strategies and material
– Distraction-conflict: “Hey Mom watch!”
• Conformity: People tend to go along with the
group, want to be liked, get along, identify with
others
Other group processes
• Social loafing: Individual energy expended goes
down as the number of people goes up, e.g., your
science partner “goofs off” in group of 4, but not 2
• Illusion of unanimity: Group polarization, when
in groups, views become extreme
• Conflict resolution: Is this at the expense or
benefit of yourself and the other side?
• Groupthink: Isolated, biased leadership, and high
stress can lead to unusual and close-minded
decisions. Dissenters have pressure to conform