Unit 12

Social psychology is a subfield of psychology that explores how psychological processes, like
our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and motives, and behavior are influenced by social context,
which includes interactions with and transactions among people. The goal of the subfield is to
understand our behavior in a social context.

Humans automatically and pervasively form groups from very early on in development. You
learned about categorization, concepts, and the development of schemes in earlier units. The
same principles apply to how we organize information about social groups. From an evolutionary
perspective, it is adaptive to form groups and then identify those groups as friends or foes.

One of the criteria we use to form groups and identify who is a friend or a foe is reciprocity
(‫)عمل متقابل‬.

• If we see that Person A helps Person B, then we assume that Person B will reciprocate.
• On the other hand, if Person A harms Person B, we assume that Person B will harm
Person A.

We may then extrapolate these patterns to everyone in Person A’s group and everyone in Person
B’s group, depending on which group we belong to. We will decide who is a friend and who is a
foe. The preference for positive reciprocity is evident early in development. Watch the
animations of an experimental study that demonstrates this in the unit’s video lecture.

experiment 2: Non-social Interaction (No Faces)

Result:
Infants showed no preference for either the red or green ball
The researches concluded that this result occurred because balls are not social beings and their
interactions are not social interactions
Reinforces the view that infants prefer "helping" over "hindering" in a social interaction as
shown in Experiment 1

Experiment 3: Neutral Observation (Watching)

Result:
Green and red characters were only observers in this experiment
Neither helped nor hindered
Infants showed no preference for green vs. red in this condition
Reinforces the view that infants prefer
"helping" over "hindering" in social interactions as shown in Experiment 1

When we form groups, we tend to identify ourselves as either belonging to the group or not
belonging to the group.

• Groups we identify with are called ingroups, and we generally experience a sense of
pride as a member of the groups we perceive ourselves to belong to.
• We also tend to favour members of our ingroups over groups we do not identify with.
Those groups are called outgroups. Because we do not perceive ourselves as members of
outgroups, we have the tendency to view members of those groups as less varied than
members in our own group. This is known as the outgroup homogeneity effect.

Groups play a powerful role in shaping our thoughts, emotions and actions, in part because of
our desire to be good group members. As a result, people are generally easily influenced by
others, conform to group norms, and obey commands made by authorities.

In the following interactivity, work through each type of social influence that is presented and
ask yourself how you are impacted by the group.

What would you think?

1. Would you be swayed?

Group polarization

Initial attitudes of groups come more extreme over time

Groupthink

-Extreme form of group polarization

-Occurs when a group is under intense pressure, is facing external threats, and is biased in
a particular direction
-The group does not carefully process all the information available to it, dissent is
discouraged, and group members assure each other they are doing the right thing
-Results in bad decisions!

1. ‫آیا شما را تحت تاثیر قرار می دهند؟‬

‫قطبی شدن گروهی‬

‫نگرش های اولیه گروه ها با گذشت زمان شدیدتر می شود‬

 ‫تفکر گروهی‬

- ‫شکل شدید قطبی شدن گروهی‬

- ‫ با تهدیدهای خارجی مواجه است و در جهت خاصی‬،‫زمانی رخ می دهد که گروهی تحت فشار شدید قرار می گیرد‬
‫مغرضانه است‬.
-‫ مخالفت ها دلسرد می شود و اعضای گروه به یکدیگر اطمینان‬،‫گروه تمام اطالعات موجود را با دقت پردازش نمی کند‬
v‫می دهند که کار درست را انجام می دهند‬.
-‫!نتایج تصمیمات بد‬

2. Would you be compliant?

Compliance
-People are compliant, that is they tend to agree to do things requested by others
-Why? To please others and to behave in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and
previous behavior
-Sales techniques capitalize on our tendency to be compliant
Foot-in-the-door effect
-If you agree to a small request, are you more likely to comply with a large and
undesirable request? Yes
Door in the face
-Are you more likely to agree to a small request after having refused a large request? Yes
Low-balling
-You are offered a product for a very low price and agree to buy it but then are told there
are extra fees, do you still agree? Yes

3. would you conform?

3. Why do people conform?

Informational influence
-The example set by others provides information about what to do
-Especially relevant when tasks are difficult or ambiguous
-"They know something I do not."

Normative influence
-We have a desire to "fit in" and a desire for approval
-Especially relevant when tasks are easy tasks: "Do not want to stand out "
Social norms
-People follow expected standards of conduct
Conformity is more likely when
-More people are exerting pressure
-The strength of the source is valued
-When physical proximity to those exerting pressure increases
-Pressure to conform decreases if more than one person is the target of pressure

Why do people participate? Deindividuation

Lose of sense of individual identity and normal inhibitions because...
-Anonymity
-Diffusion of responsibility
-Decreased self-awareness often associated with substance use
-Age
Adolescents and young adults more vulnerable
Recall "differential maturity" of limbic and prefrontal cortex!

5. Would you slack off?

Social Loafing ‫طفره رفتن اجتماعی‬
When individuals work in groups, they:
Exert less effort and are less motivated compared to working on the own
Effort decreases as group size increases
Happens with both physical and cognitive tasks
More common in individualistic cultures

6. Would you help?

Bystander intervention effect
-The failure to offer help by those who observe someone in need when other people are
present
Why do people stand by?
Diffusion of responsibility
Ambiguous situations
Feel anonymous and not responsible
Weigh the costs as too high compared to benefits

7. Would you perform better?

Social facilitation vs. Social hindrance
8. Would you obey?
Obedience: cases where persons making requests are perceived as authority figures.

‫ مواردی که افراد درخواست کننده به عنوان شخصیت های مرجع تلقی می شوند‬:‫اطاعت‬.
UNIT 12

In addition to studying how group influence affects whether we help or harm others, we
can also examine harming and helping behavior at the level of the individual. Aggressive
behavior is behavior that involves the intent to harm. It is relatively common in young
children, especially toddlers and preschoolers. Many bite, hit, and pinch each other as
they compete for “resources” or toys in their environment. But with socialization and
brain development, children grow out of these tendencies, and by adulthood aggressive
acts are relatively rare. Adults tend to display their aggression with words and other
symbols, like gestures, that threaten, intimidate or emotionally harm. Aggressive
behavior can be understood from a biopsychosocial perspective.

From the biological perspective, we know that genes and brain development contribute to
aggression. In particular, the MAOA gene has been implicated in aggressive behavior.
The gene can take two forms. When an individual has the form that leads to lower levels
of the enzyme monoamine oxidase, they are at greater risk for aggressive behavior.
MAOA gene has been implicated in regulation of the amygdala, so regulation of
emotions, especially fear and anger, both of which can lead to aggressive behavior, if a
person is feeling threatened. Regulation of emotion and behavior via the prefrontal cortex
is also important for the expression of aggression.
Despite the fact that we have biological tendencies to be aggressive, socialization and
culture plays a role in determining how aggressive particular groups are. Here we see that
violence, as indexed by number of murders, varies widely across countries. Violence also
varies within cultural groups. Over the course of 300 years, Sweden went from being
very violent to a nonviolent culture. In the United States, physical violence is much more
prevalent in the southern states, than in the northern
states.

Identifying people who are aggressive is adaptive, because we can chose to avoid those
people. Identifying helping behavior or other prosocial behaviors that benefit others is
also adaptive. There are several reasons why we help. As already mentioned, helping and
being able to identify helpers contributes to reciprocity, and helps us identify who is a
friend. A little later in development, our moral and social emotions, like empathy,
motivate us to help. We also help for selfish motives, because helping feels good and
relieves negative moods associated with an empathic state.

What about truly altruistic helping? That is, helping that is offered without apparent
reward. The theory of inclusive fitness suggests that we help others, especially those
with shared genes, so those in our families, to benefit the transmission of the wider gene
pool.

Attitudes are peoples’ learned evaluations of objects, events or ideas. They are learned or
socialized through basic learning paradigms you have already studied in previous units.
Our attitudes are stored in our memories and observed in our feelings, thoughts and
behavior, and they can range from approval to disapproval.

One of the simplest ways in which our attitudes are formed is through the mere exposure
effect.The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more we tend to like it. If he is like
most people, former U.S. president Barack Obama will prefer the image on the right, his
mirror image, to the image on the left, his photographic image. There is nothing wrong
with the photographic image.President Obama will simply be more familiar with his own
mirror image. You will probably prefer the image on the left, because you are used to
seeing his photographic image.

Our attitudes can be explicit or implicit.

• Our explicit attitudes are those that we can report. Our explicit likes and dislikes.
• Our implicit attitudes, on the other hand, are those that influence our feelings and
behaviors, but at an unconscious level. That is, at a level we are not aware of.

A test called the Implicit Association Test has been developed to tap into and reveal our
implicit attitudes. The way it works is that when a word appears on the screen, a person
has to select the word pair on the right or left that goes with it.

Watch the following video clip from Scientific American for a demonstration and
explanation.

Attitude changing :

If you take the implicit associations test, and realize that you hold negative attitudes about a
particular group of people, will you be prompted to change those attitudes and how can you do
that? One of the psychological mechanisms that leads to attitude change is cognitive dissonance.
It is defined as uncomfortable mental state – or tension – resulting from a contradiction
between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior, perhaps your implicit and explicit
attitudes. Like other tensions, we are motivated to reduce tension associated with cognitive
dissonance.

We can reduce cognitive dissonance by changing our attitudes, which are reflected in our beliefs
and desires and actions. Or we can avoid information that is causing the dissonance. We can use
“global warming” as an example for how someone might reduce dissonance, associated with
driving a large vehicle that uses a lot of natural resources and contributes to pollution.

Let’s start with the beliefs, desires and actions that may be informed by a person’s attitudes
towards large vehicles, like SUVs. They may hold the beliefs that SUVs are safe, practical and
cool. You may therefore desire safety, practicality and social status, associated with looking
cool. To satisfy these desires, you may own and drive an SUV. At the same time, you are aware
of the theory and scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming through the
consumption of fossil fuels and the pollution they create. You typically accept other scientific
evidence, like evidence that supports medical treatments. Therefore, you believe that humans are
causing global warming. Your belief that humans are causing global warming and the fact that
you drive an SUV, a vehicle that consumes more fuel and pollutes more than other vehicles, may
cause you to experience cognitive dissonance.

So, what can you do to reduce your global warming related cognitive dissonance?

• First, you could change your actions by choosing a different type of vehicle, like an electric
car or you could drive less.
• You could also shift your desires and beliefs about SUVs to view electric cars, as cool or
preferred for gaining social status.
• You could also shift the relative importance of your beliefs about and desires for an SUV,
placing sustainability of the planet above personal safety, for example.

Or you can just ignore the evidence and pay attention to the minority view that humans are not
causing global warming.

Attitudes are also changed through persuasion, the active and conscious effort to change
attitudes through the transmission of a message. There are three factors that affect the
persuasiveness of a message: the source, the audience, and the content of the message.

Aristotle put it this way: “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word,
there are three kinds.

• The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker.

• The second is on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind.
• The third is on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
Think for a moment about what characteristics of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, worked in
their favour or against them, when they were trying to persuade the American people to vote for
them in 2016. Think about who their respective audiences were and think about the content of
their messages. Hillary Clinton received more votes, but Donald Trump ultimately won the
election, because of the way votes are weighted and counted by geographic region in US
elections. Both had some success in persuading the American public.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model provides a decision tree to understand whether or

not individuals will be persuaded and change their attitudes, when they are presented with
communication intended to persuade them.

The first two components in the model are motivation and ability. If motivated and able
to consider information, people will process the information via the central route, on the
left. As a result, their attitude changes reflect cognitive elaboration. When people are
either not motivated or not able to consider information, they process it via the peripheral
route, on the right. As a result, their attitude changes reflect the presence or absence of
shallow peripheral cues. Motivation and ability are impacted by levels of interest, time
and attention.

The main difference between the central route and the peripheral route is processing
effort. The central route is characterized by high effort processing that is systematic,
reasoned, and based on the strength of the argument. Attitude change that occurs as a
result of these processes tends to be resistant to change. In contrast, processing effort that
characterizes the peripheral route is low or superficial. Heuristics and personal qualities,
like attractiveness and celebrity status, inform attitude change here. Typically, attitudes
adopted via the peripheral route are more easily changed.
Another domain of research in social psychology examines attributions or the explanations we develop
for why events occur or why people act the way they do. Attributions examine how we use information
in social environments to explain causes of events and actions of others. We are motivated to draw
inferences about events in part by a basic need for both order and predictability. Look at this photo. If I
told you that someone just walked into the room where this child was using the computer, to what would
you attribute his response. That is, why do you think he is responding with that particular expression?
When you form your answer, you are making an attribution about
his behavior.

Early work by Heider on Attribution Theory examined where people locate the cause of others’
behavior. People do behave in particular ways because of personal internal attributes or because
of environmental or situational attributes. Weiner developed this theory further by noting that
attributions can be more or less stable and more or less controllable. For example, a stable,
uncontrollable person attribution for the child in the photo would be to attribute the fact that he is
crying to his personality, and say that he is a sensitive child who cries a lot. An unstable and
uncontrollable situational attribution would be to attribute his crying to hurting himself on the
playground equipment that was broken.

Our attributions can be error-prone and biased, often because we lack information, time or
motivation to process all of the details of a situation. Instead, we use heuristics and short-cuts.
Two examples are the positivity bias, which leads us to view others favorably, in general. And
the negativity bias, that leads us to weigh negative information about other’s more heavily than
information about positive traits. As a result of the negativity bias, we view their behavior as
consistently annoying or negative in some other way.
One particular bias that has been found to be particularly robust is the fundamental attribution
error. In explaining other people’s behavior, the tendency to overemphasize personality traits
and underestimate situational factors is robust. This is explained by the actor-observer
discrepancy.

• When you are the actor in a situation, you pay more attention to the situation and view your
own behavior as situation dependent.
• In contrast, when you are an observer of a particular situation, you pay more attention to
people and that leads you to attribute others’ behavior to internal dispositions.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is adaptive, because it creates the impression that the
world and people are stable and predictable. In that way, it is easier to form our ingroups and
outgroups, and identify our friends and foes.

However, systematic attribution errors can lead to stereotypes. Recall that stereotypes are
cognitive schemas that organize information about people on the basis of group membership.
Stereotypes may be positive, neutral or negative. Negative stereotypes can lead to prejudice,
when negative attitudes are linked to the stereotypes, and they can lead to discrimination, if
people act on those attitudes and treat others unjustly.

For example, if someone holds particular stereotyped views that women are less capable, for
example, say they attribute a woman’s success on a math test to luck or chance, they may hold
more generally biased attributions about success, based on this stereotype and discriminate
against women in the workplace as a result.

Why do we form relationships?

The last topic that falls within the sub-discipline of social psychology is relationships. In this
context, the term “relationships” refers to connections with friends and romantic partners. Social
psychologists are interested in how we form and maintain these relationships.

Proximity and Familiarity

One of the mechanisms that promotes relationship formation is proximity. Because we tend
to like familiar things, we are more likely to form relationships with people we interact
with regularly. Perhaps you have made friend at the bus stop, because you see this person
every day.

Birds of a Feather

We also form relationships with people who are similar to us in terms of attitudes, values,
interests, backgrounds, personalities and even physical qualities. This is known as the
matching principle. The most successful romantic couples tend to be the most physically
similar!

Personal Characteristics

We also form relationships based on the personal characteristics of individuals. We tend to

like people, who exhibit admirable personality characteristics like those listed on this table.

Physical Attractiveness

Physical attractiveness also contributes to relationship formation, despite the fact that
standards of beauty vary, humans tend to associate other good qualities with whatever their
definition of attractiveness is. In terms of heterosexual romantic relationships and mate
selection, men tend to seek physical attractiveness, and women tend to seek status. From
an evolutionary view in both cases, both parties are attracted to characteristics in the other
that convey advantages with regards to survival and reproduction.

Love is an important component of romantic relationships.

• Passionate love is a state of intense longing and sexual desire that characterizes the early stages of
romantic relationships.
• Companionate love is a strong commitment to care for and support a partner that characterizes later
stages of romantic relationships. In most enduring relationships, passionate love evolves into
companionate love.

Despite best efforts and love, many romantic relationships fail. Relationship dissolution often results from
poor communication skills that map on to four negative interpersonal styles of interacting. Couples, that
are overly critical, hold their partners in contempt, are defensive with one another, and who mentally
withdraw from the relationship are more likely to fail. Partners in successful relationships tend to have
communication styles that express concern for each other even, while they are disagreeing. For example,
they may deliver criticism lightheartedly and playfully.

Happy couples differ from unhappy couples in their attributional styles. Happy couples make partner-
enhancing attributions. They overlook negative behavior, and generally respond constructively to
problems, a process called accommodation, whereby each member of the couple accommodates the
needs of the other.