Social Psychology

Finishing Prejudice• Video on school cliques• Colored Doll Experiment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG7U1QsUd1g&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQACkg5i4AY&feature=fvsr

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul1xsDwNeuo

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 B C D E

1

2

3

4

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

AttractionWhat 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, self-

assurance, 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=z4S1LLrSzVE&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OdKow7IAuw&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIvGIwLcIuw&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 self-restraint 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

Comparison linesStandard lines1 2 3

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=TYIh4MkcfJA&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

150

300

330

“Ugh! Hey this really hurts.”

“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.”

(agonized scream) “I absolutelyrefuse to answer any more.Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out.”

(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

XXX(435-450)

Percentageof subjects

who obeyedexperimenter

100908070605040302010

0

Slight(15-60)

Moderate(75-120) Strong

(135-180)

Verystrong

(195-240)Intense

(255-300)

Extremeintensity(315-360)

Dangersevere

(375-420)Shock levels in volts

The majority ofsubjects continued to obey to the end

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=0gPYCRfHg3Q

Stanford Prison Experiment

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkmQZjZSjk4

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/cognitive-dissonance.html

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=korGK0yGIDo

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