Social Interaction and Influence

Lecture 3

Outlook

• What is social psychology?• Types of social influence• Experiments on social interaction and social

influence• Interpersonal interaction

Social Psychology …

… looks at a wide range of social topics, including group behavior, social perception, leadership, nonverbal behavior, conformity, aggression and prejudice.

Social Psychology …

• The horrors of the Holocaust led researchers to study the effects of social influence, conformity and obedience.

Social Influence …

… the influences that people have upon the beliefs or behavior of others.

Major Types of Social Influence

Harvard psychologist, Herbert Kelman identified three major types of social influence: •Compliance

•Identification

•Internalization

Fear and Affiliate-choice Research

• They examined the hypothesis that individuals facing a fear-inducing situation would spend more time affiliating for purposes of social comparison than would individuals facing either embarrassing or ambiguous situations.

The Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954)

• Humans have a drive to evaluate themselves by examining their opinions and abilities in comparison to others.

• Two main types of comparisons exist in social comparison: upward and downward.

Conformity …

…is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by other people.

Asch Conformity Experiment

Milgram Experiment

• The Milgram's experiment was a series of social psychology experiments which measured the willingness of study participants …

• … to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

Milgram Experiment

Friendship and Love

• Absence makes the heart grow fonder• Birds of feather flock together• Like will to like• Men are known by the company they keep• Every Jack must have his Jill• Who keeps company with the wolf will learn

to howl

Zick Rubin’s Research

• He was interested in the connection between love and liking.

• Results: 1)Love is a very intense form of liking 2)Love and liking are different dimensions

Factors of Interpersonal Attraction

• Territory closeness• Physical attractiveness• Competence• Similarity• Mutual openness

Attributional bias …

• … is a term in social psychology that refers to a tendency to attribute one's own action to external causes, while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes.

A friend didn’t show up to a meeting with you.

• What caused your friend not to turn up?• What is the main reason for this event?

• Yourself?• Another person?• Circumstances or chance?