• Social cognition, Schemas and Impression formation
• Attribution, attribution process, factors affecting attribution • Biases in attribution: Fundamental attribution error, Actor Observer Bias, Self Serving Bias, Assumed Similarity Bias • Other biases while judging others: Halo effect, Projection, Selective Perception, Contrast effect, Stereotyping
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Topics covered • Attitude, components of attitudes and cognitive dissonance • Persuasion: Message Source, Types of Arguments and Targets • Social influence: • Conformity and Solomon Asch’s Experiment • Compliance: Foot in the door, door in the face, low ball, not so free sample, that’s not all • Obedience • Stereotype, Prejudice and Discrimination: techniques to reduce it
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Social Cognition
• Social cognition is how we think about and interpret
ourselves and others • It is a cognitive process by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves • Social cognition involves processes that underlie our understanding of the social world
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Schema • Schemas are sets of cognitions about people and social experiences • Schemas organize information stored in memory • Give us a framework to recognize, categorize, and recall information relating to social stimuli such as people and groups • Think of a “Lecturer” for instance and describe a number of characteristics for this professional
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Impression formation • Impression formation is about how we perceive another person. • It is the process by which an individual organizes information about another person to form an overall impression of that person • Central traits: Traits utilized to form an overall impression of others. The presence of a central trait alters the meaning of other traits. • How would you perceive a person when you are told he is “a rather warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined,” and told a second group that he was “a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined.” (Kelly, 1950)
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Meaning of Attribution in Perception • “the act of saying what is the origin or cause of something” (Cambridge Dictionary) • Attribution is a tendency to explain the ways in which we judge people depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior in determining whether it is related to a person’s traits or situational factors. • Situational causes: A cause of behavior that is brought about by something in the environment • Dispositional causes: A cause of behavior that is prompted by the person’s disposition (his or her internal traits or personality characteristics)
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Attribution Process
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Attribution Process
• The kind of explanation we come up with depends on
• time available to us • our cognitive resources, and • our degree of motivation to come up with an accurate explanation
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Factors Affecting Attribution
Distinctiveness: shows different behaviors in
different situations i.e. usual or unusual behavior, when high external attribution Consensus: response is the same as others to same situation, when high external attribution Consistency: responds in the same way over time, when high internal attribution
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Biases or Errors in Attribution • Fundamental Attribution Error • Actor Observer Bias • Self serving bias • Halo Effect • Assumed similarity bias • Selective perception • Projection • Contrast effect • Stereotyping
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Fundamental Attribution Error • When it comes to other people, we tend to attribute causes to internal factors such as personality characteristics and ignore or minimize external variables which is known as fundamental attribution error • For example, someone who is often late to school is too lazy to rise early (a dispositional cause) rather than he/she studies till late night. • The fundamental attribution error explains why people often blame other people for things over which they usually have no control. • The term blaming the victim is often used by social psychologists to describe a phenomenon in which people blame innocent victims of crimes for their misfortune i.e. rape victims prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 12 The Actor-Observer Bias • When it comes to explaining our own behavior, we tend to have the opposite bias of the fundamental attribution error. • When something happens us, we are more likely to blame external forces than our personal characteristics. • This tendency is known as the actor observer bias.
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Self Serving Bias • Tendency to attribute personal success to personal factors (skill, ability, or effort) and to attribute failure to factors outside oneself. • When their teams win, coaches usually feel that the success is due to their coaching. But when their teams lose, coaches may think it’s due to their players’ poor skills. • Similarly, if you get an A on a test, you may think it’s due to your hard work, but if you get a poor grade, it’s due to the professor’s inadequacies.
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Halo effect • Hari is intelligent and kind. Is he also hard working? • Halo effect: Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic. • A phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a person has positive/negative traits is used to infer other uniformly positive/negative characteristics or vice versa. • However, because few people have either uniformly positive or uniformly negative traits, the halo effect leads to misperceptions of others
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Assumed Similarity Bias • The tendency to think of people as being similar to oneself, even when meeting them for the first time • How similar to you—in terms of attitudes, opinions, and likes and dislikes—are your friends and acquaintances? • Most people believe that their friends and acquaintances are fairly similar to themselves. • But this feeling goes beyond just people we know • Given the range of people in the world, this assumption often reduces the accuracy of our judgments
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Selective perception • The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.
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Projection • Attributing one’s own characteristics to other people.
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Contrast effect • Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics.
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Stereotyping • Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.
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Social Perception and Behavior • Attitude and cognitive dissonance • Persuasion • Social influence • Prejudice and techniques to reduce it
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An Attitude is • An attitude can be defined as a tendency to respond positively or negatively toward a certain idea, person, object, or situation • For example, you probably hold attitudes toward the prime minister of Nepal (a person), abortion (a behavior), affirmative action (a belief), or gender (a concept) • It is a learned tendency to evaluate some object, person, or issue in a particular way; such evaluations may be positive, negative, or ambivalent.
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Components of Attitudes also known as ABC Model • Affective Component: It is the way a person feels toward the object, person, or situation. Affect is used in psychology to mean “emotions” or “feelings,” so the affective component is the emotional component. For example, some people might feel that Folk music is fun. • Behavior Component: It is the action that a person takes in regard to the person, object, or situation. For example, a person who feels that Folk music is fun is likely to tune in a radio program which is playing folk music, buy rap music CDs, or go to a folk music concert. • Cognitive Components: it is the way a person thinks about himself, an object, or a situation. These thoughts, or cognitions, include beliefs and ideas about the focus of the attitude. For example, the folk music lover might believe that it is superior to other forms of music. prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 23 Attitude Formation • Direct contact with the person, object: One way in which attitudes are formed is by direct contact with the person, idea, situation, or object that is the focus of the attitude. • Direct instruction parents and others: Another way attitudes are formed is through direct instruction, either by parents or some other individual. • Interaction with others: Sometimes attitudes are formed because the person is around other people with that attitude. • Vicarious learning (by observing others): Many attitudes are learned through the observation of other people’s actions and reactions to various objects, people, or situations.
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Cognitive Dissonance • It explains the Link Between Attitudes and Behavior • Cognitive dissonance: Occurs when a person holds two contradictory attitudes or behaviors or thoughts (cognitions) • Leon Festinger (1957) experiment
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How Dissonance is Reduced? • Modifying the cognition • Changing the importance of a cognition • Adding cognitions • Denial
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Persuasion: a method of changing attitude???
• Persuasion is the process by which one person tries to change the
belief, opinion, position, or course of action of another person. It depends on a number of factors: • Message source: The characteristics of a person who delivers a persuasive message, known as the attitude communicator i.e. physically and socially attractive, expertise and trustworthiness • Characteristic of the message i.e. What the message is like i.e. One-sided argument, Two-sided argument or Fear-producing message • Characteristics of the Target i.e. central route of processing or peripheral route of processing i.e. Intelligence person or Gender
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Figure: Routes to persuasion i.e. central or peripheral
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Social Influences • Conformity • Compliance • Obedience
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In 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, ordered his followers to drink poisoned drinks or shoot each other. Of the cult members, 640 adults died and 274 children were either killed by their own hands or those of their parents. prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 30 Social Influence
Social Influence is the process
through which the real or imagined presence of others can directly or indirectly influence the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of an individual.
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Conformity • Conformity is a change in behavior or attitudes brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or standards of other people because of real or imagined group pressure • Pressures to conform can be painfully strong • The classic demonstration of pressure to conform comes from a series of studies carried out in the 1950s by Solomon Asch (Asch, 1951).
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Solomon Asch’s study on conformity
More than 1/3 of participants
conformed and went along with the group’s wrong answers prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 33 Important Variables Producing Conformity • The characteristics of the group: The more attractive a group is to its members, the greater its ability to produce conformity. • A person’s relative status, i.e. lower a person’s status in group, greater the power of the group over that person’s behavior. • The situation in which the individual is responding: Conformity is considerably higher when people must make a response publicly. • The kind of task: People working on tasks and questions that are ambiguous (having no clear answer) are more susceptible to social pressure. • Unanimity of the group: Conformity pressures are most pronounced in groups that are unanimous in their support of a position. prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 34 Conformity and Groupthink • Groupthink is a type of thinking in which group members share such a strong motivation to achieve consensus that they lose the ability to critically evaluate alternative points of view. • Groups limit the list of possible solutions to just a few • They spend relatively little time considering any alternatives once the leader seems to be leaning toward a particular solution. • Group members may completely ignore information that challenges a developing consensus.
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Zimbardo Study on accepting social roles • Zimbardo prison study: two-week study at Stanford • Half were assigned role of “guard” • Half were assigned role of “prisoner” • The study was stopped after only six days because “guards” abused their role of power and “prisoners” suffered severe psychological responses.
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Compliance: Submitting to Direct Social Pressure • In some situations social pressure is much more obvious with direct, explicit pressure which is known as compliance. • Several specific sales tactics represent attempts to gain compliance. • Among the most frequently employed are: • Foot-in-the-door technique • Door-in-the-face technique • That’s-not-all technique • Not-so-free sample • Lowball technique prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 37 Obedience: Obeying Direct Orders
• Obedience is a change in behavior due to the commands of
others. • Stanley Milgram’s study on obedience study in the 1960s • Participants were placed in a situation in which they were told by an experimenter to give increasingly stronger shocks to another person as part of a study on learning.
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Milgram’s Study on Obedience • Milgram study : would participants assigned as “teachers” obey the experimenter’s commands to shock the “learners” for wrong answers?
• 25% of people surveyed said
they would shock past 150 volts • Some 65 percent of the participants eventually used the highest setting on the shock generator, 450 volts, to shock the learner. prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay Milgram’s Studies
• Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority
figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. • Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. • People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. • This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.
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Prejudice and Discrimination
• Stereotypes • Prejudice • Discrimination
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Stereotypes • Stereotypes are generalized beliefs and expectations about social groups and their members • Stereotypes may be negative or positive which grow out of our tendency to categorize and organize the vast amount of information we encounter in our everyday lives. • It is also the cognitive component of prejudice • Prejudice includes thoughts (stereotypes), feelings, and behavioral tendencies (possible discrimination) • Common stereotypes and forms of prejudice involve race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. • Even people who on the surface appear to be unprejudiced may harbor hidden prejudice.
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Prejudice • Prejudice are the negative (or positive) evaluations of groups and their members • Stereotypes can lead to prejudice. • Prejudice includes thoughts (stereotypes), feelings, and behavioral tendencies (possible discrimination) • Common stereotypes and forms of prejudice involve race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. • Even people who on the surface appear to be unprejudiced may harbor hidden prejudice.
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Discrimination • Discrimination is a negative behavior toward members of a particular group • Discrimination can lead to exclusion from jobs, neighborhoods, or educational opportunities, and • May result in members of particular groups receiving lower salaries and benefits. • Untouchability in case of Nepal.
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Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination • Increasing contact between the target of stereotyping and the holder of the stereotype. • Making positive values and norms against prejudice more conspicuous: communicating what is desirable and what is not • Providing information about the targets of stereotyping • Educating for Tolerance • Reducing stereotype threat: programs for inclusion