Chapter 12Social Psychology

©2013 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Gazzaniga • Heatherton • Halpern

FOURTH EDITION

Psychological Science

Chapter 12: Social Psychology

• What happened at Abu Ghraib?• The case of Abu Ghraib challenges many

commonsense notions about human nature and forces us to consider questions about humanity’s dark side

• Is something wrong with people who humiliate, beat, rape, torture, and murder others?

• Or are they just normal people caught up in overwhelming situations that shape their actions?

12.1 How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others?

• Identify the goals of social psychology.• Discuss the role that nonverbal behavior plays in

impression formation.• Define the fundamental attribution error and the

actor/observer discrepancy.• Describe the functions and self-fulfilling effects of

stereotypes.• Distinguish between prejudice and discrimination.• Distinguish between ingroups and outgroups.• Discuss strategies to inhibit stereotypes and reduce

prejudice.

“Show Your Pride” Scientists are finding more and more that different types of nonverbal communication have consistent defining characteristics. As this ScienCentral News video reports, researchers hope this will lead to a way to improve human communication.

How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others?

• Social psychology is concerned with how people influence other people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions

• We constantly make social judgments and automatically classify people into social categories

• Social psychologists have shown that our long-term evaluations of people are heavily influenced by our first impressions

Nonverbal Actions and Expressions Affect Our First Impressions

• How you initially feel about others will be determined mostly by their nonverbal behavior (i.e., facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and movements)

• Thin slices of behavior: Seconds-long observations offer powerful cues for impression formation– Participants viewed soundless 30-second film clips of college

teachers lecturing and then were asked to rate the lecturers’ teaching ability

– Ratings corresponded very highly with the ratings given by the instructors’ students (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993)

“Voting Influence”Researchers have discovered that where you vote can influence how you vote. They found that images that surround you, what consumer researchers call “cues,” could influence your decisions.

Facial Expressions• The first thing we notice about another person is

the face– Human babies less than an hour old prefer to look

at and will track a picture of a human face rather than a blank outline of a head (Morton & Johnson, 1991)

• The face communicates information such as emotional state, interest, and distrust

• Eye contact is important in social situations, though how we perceive it depends on our culture

We Make Attributions About Others

• We constantly try to explain other people’s motives, traits, and preferences

• Attributions: explanations for events or actions, including other people’s behavior

• We are motivated to draw inferences in part by a basic need for both order and predictability

• Just World hypothesis: When bad things happen to people, we make sense of it by blaming the victim—victims must have done something to justify what happened to them

Attributional Dimensions • Fritz Heider distinguished between two types of

attributions:– Personal/internal or dispositional attributions: refer to

things within people, such as abilities, moods, or efforts– Situational/external attributions: refer to outside events,

such as luck, accidents, or the actions of other people

• Bernard Weiner noted that attributions can vary on other dimensions: – They can be stable over time (permanent) or unstable

(temporary)– They can be controllable or uncontrollable

Attributions About the Self • We tend to have a self-serving bias in making

attributions about our own behavior:– We attribute our failures to situational, unstable, or

uncontrollable factors in a way that casts us in a positive light– We attribute our successes to personal, permanent factors in

a way that gives us credit for doing well• Example: If you fail a test, you may blame your poor

performance on your not getting enough sleep or on the professor’s creating a bad exam; if you do well on a test, you may attribute that good performance to your being smart

Attributional Bias• People tend to be systematically biased when they

process social information• Fundamental attribution error: pervasive tendency to

overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of a situation when explaining another’s behavior– Began as the correspondence bias: We expect others’

behavior to correspond with their beliefs and personalities

• Actor/observer discrepancy: When interpreting our own behavior, we tend to focus on situations; when interpreting other people’s behavior, we tend to focus on dispositions

Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Characterization

• Stereotypes: cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the basis of their membership in certain groups– Allow for easy, fast processing of social information– Occur automatically, largely outside of our awareness– Affect impression formation

• Stereotypes are self-maintaining: They direct our attention toward information that confirms them and away from disconfirming evidence– subtyping: When we encounter someone who does not fit a

stereotype, we put that person in a special category rather than alter the stereotype

Self-Fulfilling Effects• Self-fulfilling prophecy: tendency to behave in ways that

confirm our own or others’ expectations– Teachers’ expectations of students’ success/failure can impact

those students’ performances (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; McKown & Weinstein, 2008)

– Women performed more poorly on a math test when they were initially reminded of their sex (Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999)

• Effects of stereotype threat reflect three interrelated mechanisms: – physiological stress – thinking about one’s performance is distracting– suppressing negative thoughts/emotions requires a great

deal of effort

Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice• Stereotypes may be positive, neutral, or negative• Negative stereotypes can lead to:– prejudice: negative feelings, opinions, and beliefs

associated with a stereotype;– discrimination: inappropriate and unjustified

treatment of people as a result of prejudice• Why do stereotypes lead to prejudice and discrimination?

– Personality factors– People treat others as scapegoats to relieve stress– People discriminate against others to protect their own self-

esteem– We favor our own groups and stigmatize those who pose threats

to our groups

Ingroup/ Outgroup Bias • Groups to which we belong are ingroups; those to which

we do not belong are outgroups– Outgroup homogeneity effect: Once we categorize others as

ingroup or outgroup members, we tend to view outgroup members as less varied than ingroup members

– Ingroup favoritism: We are more likely to distribute resources to ingroup members than to outgroup members. We are more willing to do favors for ingroup members and to forgive their mistakes or errors.

• Evolutionarily, personal survival has depended on group survival. Keeping resources within a group while denying resources to outgroup members may have provided a selective advantage.

Stereotypes and Perception• Stereotypes can influence basic perceptual processes:

– White participants looked at pictures of either tools or guns and were asked to classify them as quickly as possible. Immediately before seeing a picture, participants were shown a picture of a white face or a black face; they were told that the face was being shown to signal that either a gun or a tool would appear next. Being shown a black face led the participants to identify guns more quickly and to mistake tools for guns (Payne, 2001).

– Priming people with pictures of weapons (e.g., guns and knives) leads them to pay greater attention to pictures of black faces than to pictures of white faces (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004)

Inhibiting Stereotypes• We can consciously alter our automatic stereotyping

• Presenting positive examples of admired black individuals (e.g., Denzel Washington) produced more-favorable responses toward African Americans (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001)

• Training people to respond counter-stereotypically —having them press a “no” key when they saw an elderly person paired with a stereotype of the elderly — led to reduced automatic stereotyping (Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, & Russin, 2000)

• Telling people that their test scores indicate that they hold negative stereotypes can motivate people to correct their beliefs, and the worse they feel about holding those beliefs, the harder they try not to be biased (Monteith, 1993)

• In everyday life, inhibiting stereotyped thinking is difficult and requires self-control

Cooperation Can Reduce Prejudice • In working together toward a greater purpose, people

can overcome intergroup hostilities• Social psychology suggests strategies for promoting

intergroup harmony and producing greater tolerance for outgroups:– Sherif et al. (1961): “Robber’s Cave” study showed that

introducing superordinate goals reduced hostility between groups

– People who work together to achieve a common goal often break down subgroup distinctions as they become one larger group (Dovidio et al., 2004)

– Bilingual instruction in schools leads to less ingroup favoritism among elementary school children (Wright & Tropp, 2005)

Jigsaw Classroom • Programs that most successfully bring groups together

involve person-to-person interaction• Eliot Aronson’s jigsaw classroom: – Students work together in mixed-race or mixed-sex groups in

which each member of the group is an expert on one aspect of the assignment and then return to their own groups and teach the material to their team members

• More than 800 studies of the jigsaw classroom have demonstrated that it leads to more-positive treatment of other ethnicities and that students learn the material better and perform at higher levels

12.2 How Do Attitudes Guide Behavior?• Explain how attitudes are formed.• Identify characteristics of attitudes that are

predictive of behavior.• Distinguish between explicit and implicit

attitudes.• Describe cognitive dissonance theory.• Identify factors that influence the

persuasiveness of messages.• Describe the elaboration likelihood model.

How Do Attitudes Guide Behavior?

• Attitudes: people’s evaluations of objects, of events, or of ideas

• Attitudes are shaped by social context, and they play an important role in how we evaluate and interact with other people

We Form Attitudes through Experience and Socialization

• People tend to develop negative attitudes about new things more quickly than they develop positive attitudes about them (Fazio, Eisner, & Shook, 2004)

• Mere exposure effect: The more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it (Zajonc, 1968; 2001)

• Attitudes are acquired via classical conditioning (e.g., advertisers associate products with celebrities) and operant conditioning (e.g., rewarding a student for studying may create a positive attitude toward studying)

• Attitudes are also shaped through socialization (e.g., would you eat a worm?)

Behaviors Are Consistent with Strong Attitudes

• Stronger, more personally relevant attitudes are more likely to predict behavior– Someone who grew up in a strongly Democratic household is

more likely to register as a Democrat and vote Democratic than someone who grew up in a more politically neutral environment

• Attitude specificity: The more specific the attitude, the more predictive it is

• Attitudes formed through direct experience tend to predict behavior better

• Attitude accessibility: Easily activated attitudes are more stable, predictive of behavior, and resistant to change

Attitudes Can Be Explicit or Implicit• Explicit attitudes: attitudes that a person can

report• Implicit attitudes: attitudes that influence a

person’s feelings and behavior at an unconscious level– People higher in self-reported (explicit) prejudice

were indeed less likely to vote for Obama– People who reported low levels of prejudice but

whose scores on an implicit measure indicated negative attitudes about blacks were also less likely to vote for Obama (Payne et al., 2010)

Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance

• Cognitive dissonance: an uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior– Example: People experience cognitive dissonance when

they smoke even though they know that smoking might kill them

• People reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors; they sometimes also rationalize or trivialize the discrepancies

Postdecisional Dissonance• Dissonance arises when a person holds positive

attitudes about different options but has to choose one of the options– Example: A person might have trouble deciding which

college to attend; the person might narrow the choice to two or three alternatives and then have to choose

• Postdecisional dissonance: motivates the person to focus on one school’s — the chosen school’s — positive aspects and the other schools’ negative aspects

• Effect occurs automatically, with minimal cognitive processing, and apparently without awareness

Insufficient Justification• One way to get people to change their

attitudes is to change their behaviors first, using as few incentives as possible– Participants performed an extremely boring task

and then reported to other participants on how enjoyable it was

– Participants who were paid more ($20) to lie about their experience reported enjoying it less than those paid less ($1) to lie (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)

Justifying Effort

• When people put themselves through pain, embarrassment, or discomfort to join a group, they experience a great deal of dissonance

• To resolve the dissonance they inflate the importance of the group and their commitment to it

• This justification of effort helps explain why people are willing to subject themselves to humiliating experiences such as hazing

Attitudes Can Be Changed through Persuasion

• Persuasion: the active and conscious effort to change an attitude through the transmission of a message

• Factors affecting the persuasiveness of a message include: source (who); content (what); receiver (whom)

• Elaboration likelihood model: a theory of how persuasive messages lead to attitude changes– Central route: motivated/able to process information. Use of rational

cognitive processes leads to strong attitudes that last over time and that people actively defend

– Peripheral route: not motivated/able to process information. Minimal processing of the message; leads to more impulsive action

12.3 How Do Others Influence Us?

• Define social facilitation, social loafing, deindividuation, group polarization, and groupthink.

• Differentiate between conformity, compliance, and obedience.

• Identify factors that increase or decrease conformity, compliance, and obedience.

How Do Others Influence Us?

• To fit in, we display our best behavior and try not to offend others; we conform to group norms, obey commands made by authorities, and are easily influenced by others in our social groups

• The desire to fit in with the group and avoid being ostracized is so great that under some circumstances we willingly engage in behaviors we otherwise would condemn

Social Facilitation

• Social facilitation: The presence of others enhances performance (Triplett, 1897)

• Zajonc’s (1965) model expands on Triplett’s, predicting that social facilitation can enhance or impair performance:– If the dominant response is relatively easy, the

presence of others will enhance performance– If the dominant response is difficult, the presence

of others will impair performance

Social Loafing

• Social loafing: People work less hard when in a group than when working alone– Six blindfolded people wearing headphones were told to

shout as loudly as they could. Some were told they were shouting alone and others were told they were shouting with other people. Participants did not shout as loudly when they believed that others were shouting with them(Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979).

• When people know that their individual efforts can be monitored they do not engage in social loafing

Deindividuation• People sometimes lose their individuality when

they become part of a group• Deindividuation: a state of reduced individuality,

reduced self-awareness, and reduced attention to personal standards– Self-awareness typically causes people to act in

accordance with their values and beliefs; when self-awareness disappears, so do restraints

– People are especially likely to become deindividuated when they are aroused and anonymous and when responsibility is diffused (e.g., rioting by fans)

Group Decision Making• Being in a group influences decision making in complex

ways• Risky-shift effect: Groups often make riskier decisions

than individuals (Stoner, 1961)• Subsequent research showed that groups sometimes

become more cautious• Group polarization: The initial attitudes of group

members determine whether the group becomes riskier or more cautious

• Groupthink: is an extreme form of group polarization that results when group members are particularly concerned with maintaining the group’s cohesiveness

We Conform to Others

• Conformity: altering one’s behaviors and opinions to match those of other people or to match other people’s expectations

• Why we conform:– Normative influence: occurs when we go along

with the crowd to avoid looking foolish– Informational influence: occurs when we assume

that the behavior of the crowd represents the correct way to respond

Social Norms• Social norms: expected standards of conduct• Research consistently has demonstrated that people

tend to conform to social norms:– Adolescents conform to peer pressure to smoke; jury

members go along with the group rather than state their own opinions; people stand in line to buy tickets instead of “cutting in”

• When do people reject social norms?– Conformity varies with group size (Asch, 1956)– Presence of a dissenter threatens group unanimity

• Groups tend to enforce conformity: Those who fail to go along are rejected (Schachter, 1951)

“Shy Brains” Some of us never talk to strangers at a party, while others like to work the room. As this ScienCentral News video reports, psychologists can see the signature of shyness imprinted in the brain, in toddlers as well as in twenty-year-olds.

Social Norms Marketing• Can the power of social norms be harnessed to

modify behavior in positive ways?• College posters with messages such as, “Most

students have fewer than four drinks when they party”

• May actually increase drinking among light drinkers (Russell, Clapp, & Dejong, 2005)

• Adding a message that the behavior is undesirable might help prevent social norms marketing from increasing the behavior it is meant to reduce (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007)

We Are Compliant • Compliance: the tendency to agree to do

things requested by others• Factors that increase compliance include:– Being in a good mood– Failure to fully consider options

• Compliance strategies: – Foot-in-the-door effect– Door in the face– Low-balling strategy

We Are Obedient to Authority

• The Milgram studies in obedience• Milgram’s research demonstrated that

ordinary people may do horrible things when ordered to do so by an authority

• A recent replication found that 70 percent of the participants were obedient up to the maximum voltage in the experiment (Burger, 2009)

12.4 When Do We Harm or Help Others?

• Identify biological, situational, and sociocultural determinants of aggression.

• Discuss the association between steroid use and aggression.

• Review evolutionary explanations for altruism.• Review explanations for the bystander

intervention effect.

When Do We Harm or Help Others?

• Humans help and hurt each other• This tension between our aggressive and

altruistic sides is at the core of who we are as a species

• Psychologists have provided much insight into the roles that nature and nurture play in these fundamental human behaviors

Many Factors Can Influence Aggression

• Aggression: any behavior that involves the intention to harm someone else

• Among humans, physical aggression is common among young children but relatively rare in adults

• Adults’ aggressive acts more often involve words or other symbols meant to threaten, intimidate, or emotionally harm others

• Aggression can be considered across the levels of analysis, from basic biology to cultural context

Biological Factors • Stimulating or damaging the septum, amygdala, or

hypothalamus regions in the brain leads to corresponding changes in the levels of aggression displayed– Removing the amygdalas of normally very aggressive rhesus

monkeys caused them to become tame (Kluver & Bucy, 1937)– Behavior associated with damage to this region is now

referred to as Kluver-Bucy syndrome• In monkeys, enhanced serotonin activity lowered

aggression; interference with serotonin increased aggression (Raleigh, McGuire, Brammer, Pollack, & Yuwiler, 1991)

• In humans, low levels of serotonin have been associated with aggression in adults and hostility and disruptive behavior in children (Kruesi et al., 1992)

“Monkey Talk” Researchers have discovered that some monkeys process the sounds of the other monkeys much as people process language. As this ScienCentral News video reports, it’s a discovery that may lead to a better understanding of how people acquire the ability to communicate.

Situational Factors

• Whether someone behaves aggressively depends on the situational context

• Frustration-aggression hypothesis: The extent to which people feel frustrated predicts the likelihood that they will be aggressive (Dollard & Miller, 1939)

• Cognitive-neoassociationistic model: Frustration leads to aggression by eliciting negative emotions (Berkowitz, 1990)

Social and Cultural Factors• An evolutionary approach to aggression would call for

similar patterns of aggressive behavior to exist in all human societies

• Violence varies dramatically across cultures and even within cultures at different times– Over the course of 300 years, Sweden went from being violent

to non-violent; this cultural change did not correspond with a change in the gene pool

– Murder rates are far higher in some countries than in others– In the United States, physical violence is much more prevalent

in the South than in the North

• Culture of honor: belief system in which men are primed to protect their reputations through physical aggression

Steroids May Play a Role in Some Violent Behavior

• “’Roid rage” has been used as a defense in murder cases– Taking steroids might increase testosterone to such a level that the

hormone produces an extreme need for dominance and control, which, in turn, provokes violent behavior

• Aggressive men, such as violent criminals, and particularly physical athletes, such as hockey players, have been found to have higher levels of testosterone than other males (Dabbs & Morris, 1990)

• Research shows a modest correlation between testosterone and human aggression

• Testosterone may be the result — rather than the cause — of aggressive behavior

Many Factors Can Influence Helping Behavior

• Prosocial behavior: acting for the benefit of others• Why are humans prosocial?– Selfless: motivated by empathy– Selfishness: to relieve one’s negative mood– Inborn tendency to help others

• Altruism: helping when it is needed without any apparent reward for doing so– From an evolutionary perspective, altruistic helping of others with

shared genes (kin selection) is beneficial (inclusive fitness)– Through helping non-relatives, altruistic animals may also increase

the likelihood that other members of the social group will reciprocate when needed (reciprocal helping)

Some Situations Lead to Bystander Apathy

• Kitty Genovese was murdered while walking home from work in New York City

• Witnesses to the crime reportedly did nothing to help• Bystander intervention effect: the failure to offer help

by those who observe someone in need• Research indicates four major reasons:– Diffusion of responsibility– People fear making social blunders in ambiguous situations– People are less likely to help when they are anonymous and

can remain so– People weigh the costs versus benefits of helping

12.5 What Determines the Quality of Relationships?

• Identify factors that influence interpersonal attraction.

• Distinguish between passionate and companionate love.

• Discuss the function of idealization in romantic relationships.

• Identify interpersonal styles and attributional styles that contribute to relationship dissatisfaction and dissolution.

“Mating Trick” Any man who thinks he planned something clever for Valentine’s Day should consider the ingenuity of the male Australian cuttlefish. As this ScienCentral News video reports, it sometimes disguises itself as a female in order to get the girl.

What Determines the Quality of Relationships?

• The term relationships refers to connections with friends and romantic partners

• Until the last decade or so, psychologists paid little attention to how people select either their friends or their romantic partners

• Researchers have now made considerable progress in identifying the factors that lead us to form relationships

Situational and Personal Factors Influence Friendships

• There are a number of factors that promote friendships, including:– Proximity: how often people come into contact

• Proximity might have its effects because of familiarity: People like familiar things more than unfamiliar ones

Birds of a Feather

• People similar in attitudes, values, interests, backgrounds, and personalities tend to like each other

• Matching principle: The most successful romantic couples also tend to be the most physically similar

Personal Characteristics

• People tend to especially like those who have admirable personality characteristics and who are physically attractive

• Least likable characteristics are dishonesty, insincerity, and lack of personal warmth. Most likeable characteristics are kindness, dependability, and trustworthiness (Anderson, 1968).

Physical Attractiveness • How people rate attractiveness is generally consistent

across all cultures (Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995)– A computer program combined (or “averaged”) various faces

without regard to individual attractiveness. As more faces were combined, participants rated the “averaged” faces as more attractive (Langlois & Roggman, 1990).

– Other research shows averaged attractive faces are rated more favorably than averaged unattractive faces (Perrett, May, & Yoshikawa, 1994)

– Most people find symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical ones

• Attractiveness can bring many important social benefits• The “what is beautiful is good” stereotype

Love Is an Important Component of Romantic Relationships

• Passionate love: a state of intense longing and sexual desire

• Companionate love: a strong commitment to care for and support a partner

• In most enduring relationships, passionate love evolves into companionate love (Sternberg, 1986)

• Adult relationships also vary in their attachment styles (Hazan & Shaver, 1987)

• The attachment style a person has as an adult appears to be related to how the person’s parents treated her or him as a child (Fraley & Shaver, 2000)

Love is Fostered by Idealization• People who fall in love and maintain that love tend to

be biased toward positive views of their partners• Research (Murray et al., 1996) with couples showed

that:– People who loved their partners the most also idealized

their partners the most;– People with the most positively biased views of their

partners were more likely to still be in the relationships with their partners several months later than were those people with more “realistic” views of their partners;

• Idealization appears to buffer a relationship against the ugly truths that might threaten it

Staying in Love Can Require Work• Passion fades: The long-term pattern of sexual

activity within relationships shows a rise and then a decline– From the first year of marriage to the second,

frequency of sex declines by about half. After that, the frequency continues to decline, but it does so more gradually.

– The loss of passion leads to dissatisfaction and often to the eventual dissolution of the relationship (Berscheid & Regan, 2005).

• People must develop other forms of satisfaction in their romantic relationships

Dealing with Conflict• The way a couple deals with conflict often determines

whether the relationship will last• Gottman (1994) describes four interpersonal styles that

typically lead couples to discord and dissolution:– being overly critical– holding the partner in contempt– being defensive– mentally withdrawing from the relationship

• Satisfied partners tend to express concern for each other even while they are disagreeing and may deliver criticism lightheartedly and playfully (Keltner, Young, Heerey, Oemig, & Monarch, 1998)

Attributional Style and Accommodation

• Attributional style: how one partner explains the other’s behavior

• Accommodation: a process in which happy couples make partner-enhancing attributions by overlooking bad behavior or responding constructively (Rusbult & Van Lange, 1996)

• Unhappy couples make distress-maintaining attributions: They view each other in the most negative ways possible, they attribute good outcomes to situations, and they attribute bad outcomes to each other