Psychology Psya02 Utsc Notes Chapter 13

PSYA02 13-14

1. The power of the situation: Social influences on Behavior

1. Philip Zimbardo

1. Prominent social psychologist

1. Not just one person that does “bad” things but rather the whole group is responsible
2. Also have to consider situation factors (wrong circumstances)

1. Social psychologist

1. Interaction between the person and the situation in the present
2. Behavior (Kurt Lewin)

1. Function of the person and the environment
2. Challenges Freudian theories of early 20th century

1. People’s behavior is based on their past

1. Challenge Behaviorism

1. Emphasis on person’s past history of conditioning

1. Kurt Lewin

1. Brought physics into psychology

1. Person’s behavior was the consequence of sets of forces operating on the person. Once analyzed, person’s behavior can be predicted like in an experiment (of gravity, force…etc)

1. Mimicry

1. Taking on for ourselves the behaviors, emotional displays, and facial expressions of others
2. Who we are is constantly shaped and patterned by other people
3. Chameleon effect (Chartrand/ Bargh)

1. How people mimic others non-consciously, automatically copying other’s behavior even without realizing it

1. Occurs at unconscious level, reflecting genuine behavioral similarity, understanding and trustworthiness

1. Social norms

1. Guidelines for how to behave in social contexts
2. Peer pressure

1. Social loafing

1. Occurs when an individual puts less effort into working on a task with others

1. Low efficacy beliefs

1. Task too confusing. Overcome by structuring task so people know what to do

1. Believing that one’s contributions are not important to the group

1. Occurs if people can’t see how their own input matters to the group. Overcome by letting them understand that others depend on them

1. Not caring about the group’s outcome

1. Occurs when person is not personally identified with the group. Result of feeling reject from group. Overcome by socializing

1. Feeling like others are not trying very hard

1. Overcome by providing feedback about progress

1. Social facilitation

1. Occurs when one’s performance is affected by the presence of others

1. Group thinking

1. Refers to this stifling of diversity that occurs when individuals are not able to express their true perspectives, instead having to focus on agreeing with others and maintaining harmony in the group
2. Three main problem in term of group effectiveness

1. Group member minimize or ignore potential problems/risk in idea they are considering
2. May apply social pressure to influence people who are not fully in support of an idea in an effort to get them to conform, leading to decisions that are sub-optimal
3. Group becomes overconfident and fails to think critically

1. Have to consider other circumstances as well

1. Asch Experiments: Conformity

1. People less likely to give right answer when they are in a pressured group ( people give wrong answers on purpose), don’t wanna be the odd one out
2. Normative influence

1. Social pressure to adopt a group’s perspective in order to be accepted, rather than rejected by a group

1. Informational influence

1. Occurs when people internalize the values and beliefs of the group, coming to believe the same things and feel the same ways themselves

1. When people try to “fit in” the part of brain doesn’t activate the same pattern
2. Difference was in perception, perception part of brain activated so people think their first choice was wrong

1. If enough people say something is true, we will believe it
2. Need 3 or more people to do so (65%)

1. Groups are most powerful when unanimous, but single person’s courage can burst that bubble of unanimity

1. The bystander effect: Situational influences on helping behavior

1. Presence of other people actually reduces the likelihood of helping behavior
2. Social psychologist

1. Bibb Latane and John Darley

1. More people present, less help
2. Embarrassment you might feel in situation if something were wrong/ not sure what to do

1. Diffusion of responsibility

1. Occurs when responsibility for taking action is spread across more than one person, thus making no single individual feel personally responsible

1. Pluralistic ignorance

1. Occurs when there is a disjunction between the private beliefs of individuals and the public behavior they display to others
2. Smoke room

1. People are more likely to investigate on smoke when alone than with others that show no indication of being worried

1. Social revolution (easy)

1. If little people are revolting, people won’t. No media, people don’t see other people revolting, won’t complain to government

1. Social Role

1. More specific sets of expectations for how someone in a specific position should behave

1. Social Roles: The Stanford Prison Study

1. Philip Zimbardo (social psychologist)

1. Pick nine “prisoner”/ Nine “guards”

1. First day prisoner rebel, got punished

1. They adapted into their “role” and behave good after to avoid punishment
2. People have severe mental break down

1. 50 people watched, only one person questioned the unethical nature of this experiment. Experiment ended

1. Obedience to Authority: The Milgram Experiment (65%, 2/3 people)

1. Pressured by authority, would kill innocent people than argue back to authority
2. Two experiments

1. If it’s easier for a group to resist experimenter (90% yes, 10% continued)

1. Eichmann factor

1. Instead of shocking the subject themselves, other people do it. More likely to continue till person dies
2. Question of social pressure, can undermine people’s deep moral
3. Most foundation lesson

1. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
2. Situational forces can exert immense pressure on individuals, making an analysis of personal responsibility very tricky

1. However social psychologist would generally agree that, in the final analysis, people are responsible for their behaviors no matter how powerful the situation is.

1. Social Cognition

1. Explicit processes

1. Correspond roughly to conscious thought are deliberative, effortful, relatively slow and generally under out intentional control

1. Implicit processes

1. Comprise our conscious thought, they are intuitive, automatic, effortless, very fast, and operate largely outside of our intentional control

1. Influence each other (work together) to update our perception, infuse emotional evaluations and layers of personal meaning to our experiences (affect how we think, decision making and self-reflect)

1. Explicit influence implicit

1. When beliefs influence how we process info

1. Implicit influence explicit

1. When we categorize people into a stereotype

1. Dual process model

1. Model of behavior that account for both implicit and explicit processes
2. Implicit happens fast, before we consciously can think and deliberate about something

1. Person perception

1. The processes by which individuals categorize and form judgments about other people

1. Thin slices of behavior

1. Judging someone base on basic info we get from just impression

1. Face: trustworthiness, competence, likability, and aggressiveness

1. Self- fulfilling prophecies

1. Occur when a  first impression (or an expectation) affect one’s behavior, and then that affects other people’s behavior, leading one to confirm the initial expression or expectation

1. False consensus effect

1. Tendency to project the self-concept onto the social world  (We like cake, other people probably do too)

1. Naïve realism

1. Tend to assume that the way we see things Is the way that they are

1. Self-serving biases

1. Biased ways of processing self-relevant information to enhance our positive self-evaluation
2. We assume we are better than average- this keeps our self esteem

1. Internal attribution

1. The observer explains the behavior of the actor in terms of some innate quality of that person

1. External attribution

1. Observer explains the actor’s behavior as the result of the situation

1. Fundamental attribution error (FAE)

1. Tendency to over-emphasize internal (dispositional) attributions and under-emphasize external (situational) factors
2. Ex: Asia- murder might commit crime because of situations, whereas North America- murder commit crime because of inner evilness

1. In groups and out groups

1. In groups

1. Groups we feel positively toward and identify with

1. Out groups

1. Other groups that we don’t identify with

1. In group bias

1. Positive biases toward the self-get extended to one’s in groups, people become motivated to see their in groups as superior to their out group

1. Minimal group paradigm

1. How easy people form social categories using meaningless criteria to compare others with themselves

1. Stereotype

1. Cognitive structure, a set of beliefs about the characteristics that are held by members of a specific social group; these beliefs function as schemas, serving to guide how we process information about our social world

1. Prejudice

1. Affective, emotionally driven process, including negative attitudes toward and critical judgments of other groups

1. Discrimination

1. Behavior that disfavor or disadvantages members of certain social group in some way

1. Implicit association test (IAT)

1. Measures how fast people can respond to images or words flashed on a computer screen

1. We take longer to think black people are positive because of social racial prejudice

1. Measuring something real enough to be reflected in neurological activity in areas related to fear and emotional processing

1. Developed shoot, don’t shoot program

1. Helps reduce chance of making wrong/ bad decisions

1. Contact hypothesis

1. Predicts that social contact between members of different groups is extremely important to overcoming prejudice
2. Problem with the technological, legal, and economic perspective

1. Developing and implementing the technological solution(passing law)
2. Support of public- raise awareness

1. Elaboration likelihood model

1. When audiences are sufficiently motivated to pay attention to a message ( they care about the issue) and they have the opportunity for careful processing ( have cognitive resources available to understand message), will persuade by the fact of the arguments, substance, when either of these two factors, motivation and opportunity, are missing, people will tend to be persuaded by other factors

1. Central route to persuasion

1. Occurs when people pay close attention to the content of a message, evaluate the evidence presented, and examine the logic of the arguments

1. Peripheral route to persuasion

1. Persuasion will depend upon other features that are not directly related to the message itself, such as the attractiveness of the person delivering the information

1. Construal-level theory

1. Describes how information affects us differently depending on our psychological distance from the information

1. Identifiable victim effect

1. Describes how people are more powerfully moved to action by the story of a single suffering person, than by information about a whole group of people

1. Experiential system

1. Operates more implicitly, quickly, and intuitively and is predominately emotional

1. Analytic system

1. Operates more at the explicit level of consciousness, is slower and more methodical, and uses logic and discursive thinking (reasoning using language)
2. (pg. 576)- TED talk about climate change

1. Value appeals

1. Pro-environment go against audience self-interest
2. Biospheric, not compatible to North American value system- egoistic

1. Attitude inoculation

1. Strategy for strengthening attitudes and making them more resistant to change by first exposing people to a weak counter-argument and then refuting that argument

1. Processing fluency

1. Which is ease with which information is processes

1. Key factor that can easily derail communication is the message’s complexity

1. Door in the face technique

1. Which involves asking for something relatively big, then following with a request for something relatively small

1. Foot in the door technique

1. Which involves making a simple request followed by a more substantial request

1. Cognitive dissonance theory

1. When we hold inconsistent beliefs, this creates a kind of aversive inner tension or dissonance we are then motivated to reduce this tension in whatever way we can

1. Behavior and Health

1. Body mass index (BMI)

1. Statistic commonly used for estimating a healthy body weight given an individual’s height

1. Set point

1. Hypothesized mechanism that serves to maintain body weight around a physiologically programmed level

1. Social contagion

1. Subtle, unintentional spreading of a behavior as a result of social interactions

1. Stress and Illness

1. Stress

1. Psychological and physiological reaction that occurs when perceived demands exceed existing resources to meet those demands

1. Appraisal

1. Refers to cognitive act of assessing and evaluating the potential threat and demands of an event

1. Primary appraisals

1. Asking herself (when received a threat)

1. Secondary appraisals

1. Determine how to cope with threat

1. Fight or flight response

1. Set of physiological change that occur in response to psychological or physical threats

1. General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

1. Theory of stress responses involving stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion

1. Two key pathways

1. Autonomic nervous system (ANS) pathway
2. Hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal (HPA) pathway

1. Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis

1. Neural and endocrine circuit that provides communication between the nervous system ( the hypothalamus) and the endocrine system (pituitary and adrenal glands)

1. Hypothalamus release substances called

1. Corticotrophin-releasing factor → stimulates pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotrophic hormone→ release cortisol

1. Hormone secreted by the adrenal cortex ( outer part of adrenal gland) that prepares the body to respond to stressful circumstances

1. Oxytocin

1. Stress- sensitive hormone that is typically associated with maternal bonding and social relationships

1. Psychoneuroimmunology

1. Study of relationship between immune systems and nervous system functioning
2. Married couple- Low, High, High

1. Coronary heart disease

1. Condition in which plaques form in the blood vessels that supply the heart with blood and oxygen, resulting in restricted blood flow

1. Type A personality

1. Inpatient, worry about time, easily angered, competitive, highly motivated

1. Type B personality

1. More laid back, patient, easy going, relaxed disposition

1. Coping and Well-Being

1. Coping

1. Refers to the processes used to manage demands, stress and conflict

1. Positive psychology

1. Uses scientific methods to study human strengths and potential

1. Optimism

1. Tendency to have a favorable, constructive view on situations and to expect positive outcomes

1. Pessimists

1. Tend to have a negative perception of life and expect negative outcomes

1. Pessimistic explanatory style

1. Which is the tendency to interpret and explain negative events as internally based ( as being due to that person rather than to an external situation) and as a constant, stable quality

1. Negative affectivity

1. Tendency to respond to problems with a pattern of anxiety, hostility, anger, guilt or nervousness

1. Resilience

1. Ability to effectively recover from illness or adversity

1. Post-traumatic growth

1. Capacity to grow and experience long term positive effects in response to negative events

1. Biofeedback

1. Therapeutic technique involving the use of physiological recording instruments to provide feedback that increases awareness of bodily response

1. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)

1. Structured relaxation program based on elements of mindfulness meditation
2. Altered brain activity

1. Integrated mind body training (IMBT)

1. Brain derived neuro-trophic factor (BDNF)

1. Protein in the nervous system that promotes survival, growth, and formation of new synapses

1. Learned helplessness

1. Acquired suppression of avoidance or escape behavior in response to unpleasant, uncontrollable circumstances

1. Compensatory control

1. Psychological strategies people use to preserve a sense of nonrandom order when personal control is compromised

1. Exercise supports the development of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, a critical area for memory and cognitive ability
2. Cortisol levels are elevated during stress, However during maternal bonding and social relationships, Oxytocin and Vasopressin levels are elevated. Oxytocin and Vasopressin have stress-reducing functions and may also prevent the release of cortisol
3. In group, out group, competition- prejudism (Robbers Cave experiment)