Chapter 15: Social Behavior

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Chapter 15 Social Behavior
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Social Psychology

• Social psychology is the branch of psychology
  concerned with the way individuals thoughts,
  feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others.
• Person perception
• Attribution processes
• Interpersonal attraction
• Attitudes
• Conformity and obedience
• Behavior in groups

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Person PerceptionForming Impressions of Others

• Effects of physical appearance - People tend to
  attribute desirable characteristics such as
  sociable, friendly, poised, warm, competent, and
  well adjusted to those who are good looking.
• Cognitive schemas - organized clusters of ideas
  about categories of social events and people, to
  categorize people into types.
• Stereotyping is a normal cognitive process
  involving widely held social schemas that lead
  people to expect that others will have certain
  characteristics because of their membership in a
  specific group. Gender, age, ethnic, and
  occupational stereotypes are common.
• Stereotypes - Stereotypes may lead people to see
  what they expect to see and to overestimate how
  often they see it (illusory correlation).

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Person PerceptionForming Impressions of Others

• Subjectivity in person perception - evidence for
  the subjectivity of social perception is shown in
  the spotlight effect, or the tendency to assume
  that the social spotlight shines more brightly on
  them than it actually does. Research on the
  illusion of asymmetric insight, or the tendency
  to think that ones knowledge of ones peers is
  greater than peer knowledge of oneself, also
  supports the subjectivity of person perception.
• Evolutionary perspectives - Evolutionary
  psychologists argue that many biases in person
  perception were adaptive in our ancestral past,
  for example, automatically categorizing others
  may reflect the primitive need to quickly
  separate friend from foe

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Figure 15.1 Examples of social schemas
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Attribution Processes Explaining Behavior

• Attributions are inferences that people draw
  about the causes of events, others behavior, and
  their own behavior. Why did your friend turn
  down your invitation? Why did you make an A on
  the test?
• Internal vs external attributions
• - Internal attributions ascribe the causes of
  behavior to personal dispositions, traits,
  abilities, and feelings.
• - External attributions ascribe the causes of
  behavior to situational demands and environmental
  constraints.

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Attribution Processes Explaining Behavior

• Attributions for success and failure
• Bias in attributions
• Fundamental attribution error - an observers
  bias in favor of internal attributions in
  explaining others behavior. In general, we are
  likely to attribute our own behavior to
  situational causes and others behavior to
  dispositional causes.
• Self-serving bias - is the tendency to attribute
  ones success to personal factors and ones
  failure to situational factors.
• Cultural influences - Research indicates that
  there are cultural influences on attributional
  tendencies, with individualistic emphasis in
  Western cultures promoting the fundamental
  attribution error and the self-serving bias.

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Figure 15.2 Weiners model of attributions for
success and failure
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Figure 15.3 An alternative view of the
fundamental attribution error
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Interpersonal Attraction Liking and Loving

• Interpersonal attraction - refers to positive
  feelings toward another (liking, friendship,
  admiration, lust, love).
• Key factors in attraction
• Physical attractiveness - Physical appearance
  influences are significant in attraction and
  love, particularly in the initial stages of
  dating. Being physically attractive appears to be
  more important for females than males.
• Matching hypothesis - proposes that males and
  females of approximately equal physical
  attractiveness are likely to select each other as
  partners.
• Similarity effects - Couples tend to be similar
  in age, race, religion, social class,
  personality, education, intelligence, physical
  attractiveness, and attitudes.
• Similarity causes attraction, particularly
  attitude similarity, although Davis and Rusbult
  (2001) have shown that attraction can also foster
  similarity, with dating partners experiencing
  attitude alignment. Personality similarity has
  been shown to be associated with marital
  happiness.

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Interpersonal Attraction Liking and Loving

• Reciprocity effects - Reciprocity involves liking
  those who show that they like you. When a
  partner helps one feel good about oneself, a
  phenomenon called self-enhancement occurs.
  Studies suggest that people seek feedback that
  matches and supports their self-concepts, as
  well, a process known as self-verification.
• Romantic ideals - In romantic relationships,
  reciprocity often extends to idealizing ones
  partner. People view their partners more
  favorably than the partners view themselves.
  Research on the degree to which a partner matches
  a persons romantic ideal indicates that
  evaluations according to ideal standards
  influence how relationships progress.

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Interpersonal Attraction Liking and Loving

• Perspectives on love
• Passionate vs. companionate love
• Passionate love being a complete absorption in
  another that includes tender sexual feelings and
  the agony and ecstasy of intense emotion.
• Companionate love is warm, trusting, tolerant
  affection for another whose life is deeply
  intertwined with ones own. These may coexist,
  but not necessarily. Cultures vary in their
  emphasis on passionate love as a prerequisite for
  marriage.
• Love as attachment - Hazen and Shavers theory
  suggests that love relationships in adulthood
  mimic attachment patterns in infancy, with those
  with secure attachments having more committed,
  satisfying relationships.

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Figure 15.6 Attachment and romantic relationships
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Attitudes Making Social Judgments

• Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations
  of objects of thought, with cognitive, affective,
  and behavioral components. Attitudes and behavior
  are not as consistent as one might assume, in
  part because attitude strength varies, and in
  part because attitudes only create
  predispositions to behave in certain ways.
• Three components
• cognitive, affective, and behavioral -
• Factors in changing attitudes
• source, message, and receiver
• A source of persuasion who is credible, expert,
  trustworthy, likable, and physically attractive
  tends to be relatively effective in stimulating
  attitude change.
• Although there are some situational limitations,
  two-sided arguments and fear arousal are
  effective elements in persuasive messages.
  Repetition is helpful, but adding weak arguments
  to ones case may hurt more than help.
• Persuasion is undermined when a receiver is
  forewarned, when the sender advocates a position
  that is incompatible with the receivers existing
  attitudes, or when strong attitudes are targeted.

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Attitudes Making Social Judgments

• Theories of attitude change
• Learning theory - Attitudes may be shaped through
  classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and
  observational learning.
• Dissonance theory - asserts that inconsistent
  attitudes cause tension and that people alter
  their attitudes to reduce cognitive dissonance.
• Elaboration likelihood model - holds that central
  routes (when people carefully ponder the content
  and logic of persuasive messages) to persuasion
  yield longer-lasting attitude change than
  peripheral routes (persuasion depends on
  nonmessage factors such as attractiveness of the
  source).

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Figure 15.7 The possible components of attitudes
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Figure 15.8 Overview of the persuasion process
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Figure 15.10 Design of the Festinger and
Carlsmith (1959) study
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Figure 15.11 The elaboration likelihood model
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Conformity and Obedience

• Conformity involves yielding to social pressure.
• Solomon Asch (1950s)
• subjects were asked to make unambiguous
  judgements, indicating which of three lines on a
  card matched an original standard. The task was
  easy, and seven subjects were asked one at a time
  to make their judgments aloud. Only the 6th
  subject was a real subject, the others gave wrong
  answersAsch wanted to see how often people
  conformed, and gave an answer they knew was
  wrong, just because everyone else did. He found
  that on average, they conformed 37 of the time
  however there was considerable variability among
  subjects (some never caved at all).
• Group size - larger groups increasing conformity
• Group unanimity - if just one other person does
  not go along with the group (a dissenter),
  subjects are significantly less likely to
  conform.

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Conformity and Obedience

• Obedience a form of compliance that occurs
  when people follow direct commands, usually from
  someone in a position of authority.
• Stanley Milgram (1960s)
• I was just following orders
• Presence of a dissenter
• His experiment consisted of 40 men from the local
  community recruited to participate in a
  psychology experiment, supposedly on the effects
  of punishment on learning. The men were given
  the role of teacher in the experiment, while a
  confederate was given the role of learner.
• The teacher was seated before an apparatus that
  had 30 switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts,
  with labels of slight shock, danger severe
  shock, and XXX etc. Although the apparatus looked
  and sounded real, it was fake. The learner was
  never shocked.
• Milgram found that 65 of the men administered
  all 30 levels of the shock, even though they
  displayed considerable distress at shocking the
  learner.
• Subsequent studies (and there were many)
  indicated that, like in Aschs study, if an
  accomplice defied the experimenter and supported
  the subjects objections, they were significantly
  less likely to give all the shocks (only 10).
• Milgrams experiments were extremely
  controversial, as his method involved
  considerable deception and emotional distress on
  the part of subjects.

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Behavior in GroupsJoining with Others

• A group consists of two or more individuals who
  interact and are interdependent.
• The bystander effect
• people are less likely to provide needed help
  when they are in groups than when they are alone.
  Reviews of studies on over 6,000 subjects in a
  variety of helping situations indicate that
  subjects who are alone help about 75 of the
  time, while subjects in the presence of others
  help about 53 of the time. The only variable
  shown to significantly impact the bystander
  effect is ambiguity of the need for help. The
  less ambiguous the need for help, the more likely
  someone is to give it.
• Diffusion of responsibility - When the
  responsibility is divided among many, everyone
  thinks that someone else will help.

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Behavior in GroupsJoining with Others

• Productivity decreases as group size increases.
  This is believed to be due to two factors loss
  of efficiency resulting from a loss of
  coordination of effort and social loafing.
• social loafing - a reduction in effort by
  individuals when they work in groups as compared
  to when they work alone.
• Decision making in groups
• Group polarization - occurs when group discussion
  strengthens a groups dominant point of view and
  produces a shift toward a more extreme decision
  in that direction.
• Groupthink - occurs when members of a cohesive
  group emphasize concurrence at the expense of
  critical thinking in arriving at a decision.
  Research indicates that cohesiveness (strength of
  the liking relationships linking group members)
  is a significant contributor to groupthink.

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Figure 15.16 Group polarization
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Figure 15.17 Overview of Janiss model of
groupthink