Social psychology
Chapter 11
Interaction and performance in groups
Interdependence: each group member’s throughts, emotions, and behaviors influence the others’.
Social facilitation: improvement and impairment
Even when interdependence is minimal, the mere presence of others can produce arousal, either because the other people are highly evaluative or because they are distracting.
Social facilitation: an increase in the likelihood of hihgly accessible responses, and a decrease in the likelihood of less accessible responses, due to the persence of others.
Even the virtual presence of virutal others can cause these effects.
Evaluation apprehension
When we focus on what other people think about us, it creates arousal, with sometimes postive and sometimes negative effects on performance.
Most of the time, we want other people to value, include, and like us. Ou self-esteem is greatly affected by what others think of us.
The presence of others who are in a posititon to judge us produces evaluation apprehension, which changes our performance in the way predicted by social facilitation theory.
Distraction
The presence of others can also disctract us from our task, also creating arousal and impacting performance. However, with specific types of tasks, distraction can focus us on taks-relevant cues, potentially improving performance.
Others can distract us.
Their mere presence causes us to think about them, to react to them, or to monitor what they are doing, and thereby deflects attention from the task at hand.
Our impulses to do two different things at once, conentrate on the task and to react to others, start to conflict wich each other, we become agitated and aroused.
This arousal will typically improve performance on simple tasks and interfere with it on difficult tasks.
The presence of others also requires people to split their attention between the other people and the task at hand.
Being crowded is arousing because crowds create many opportunities for evaluation and distraction.
Task interdependence: reliance on other members of a group for mastery of material outcomes that arise from the group’s task.
Social interependence: relieance on other members of the group for feelings of connectedenss, social and emotional rewards, and a positive social identity.
How groups change: stages of group development
Face-to-face groups usually go through different stages of relationship with their members.
At the same time, groups to through formation, conflict, development of norms, performance, and dissolution as they try to maximize social en task interdependence to develop an identity and reach their groals. Time pressure can affect how groups solve these problems.
Group socialization: mutual evaluation by members and groups
Group socialization: the cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes that occur as individuals join and leave groups.
An ongoing process of mutual evaluation from both the individual member’s and the group’s perspectives.
When the individual feels that the group offers a better chance of meeting his or her needs than alternative group memberships, the individual becomes commited to the group.
When the group feels that the individual offers a better chance of fulfilling group goals than other potential members, the group is also committed to the individual.
These processes of evaluation and mutual commitment define the various stages of relationship that members can have with their groups.
Initialy, groups try to size up potential members who might contribute to the group good and help the group succeed, whilde individuals at the same time assess the extent to which groups help satisfy personal needs for mastery and connectedness.
If this initual evaluation leads to the individual to commit to the group and vice versa, the individual becomes a new member of the group.
Entry to the group triggers socialization.
The group triees to mold the individual into a ‘team player’ who can help achieve goals.
The individual tries to shape the group so that it meets as many of his or her needs as possible, both for task mastery and for social connections.
To the extent that individuals and groups like what they see in each other at this stage, their mutual commitment may rise again. Such commitment to the group makes individuals adopt group values, feel good about fellow members, and work hard to achieve group goals and maintain membership in the group.
Commitment to the individual makes the group value, like, and seek to keep the individual as a member.
Sometimes groups might be reluctant to commit to a new group member, especially if they know that the newcomer isn’t pernament.
Once the individual is a fully commited member, the relationship enters the maintenance phase.
The group tries to find a specific role for the individual that maximizes his or her contribution. The individual tries to find a role that maximizes the satisfaction he or she can obtain from the group.
If this role negotiation succeeds, mutual commitment remains hihg and membership works will from both perspectives.
Because the group and its members must be mutually commited to one another, those who want to join and remain in the goup must be careful not to upset the group n ways that might lead to hteir ousting.
Group development: coming together, falling apart
The overall interaction patterns among all the members of the group go through different stages as they try to coordinate task interdependence and enchance social interdependence.
Although some groups go through all five of the stages, many others skip steps, repeat steps, recycle through many of the steps, or dissolve before they ever reach the later stages.
Five stages:
Time and group development
Times has other effects on the ways groups interact and deal with their tasks.
Time growing short may trigger a radically different approach to the group’s task, shift in strategies, and a greater emphasis on productive work.
Groups that spend part of their early planning on timing issues will perform better.
Time pressure alteres the way groups approach their tasks. Groups under time pressure devote more of their interaction to clearly task-focused matters and differ from less pressured groups in the ways they share information and seek to influence each other. Increased task focus.
Time pressure also has it costs. Less creative and original and groups under time pressure tend to find worse solutions in decision-making.
Being pushed out of groups: rejection and ostracism
When existing group members decide to actively remove someone from the group, social rejection has occurred.
Ostracism: being ignored and excluded from a group.
Being rejected or ostracized from groups can have profound effecs on a person.
Compared to being included, ostracizedd in Cyberball leads people to report lower levels of belonging, self-esteem, control and a sense of a meaningful existence.
Even ostracism by others we deplore can have the same effect.
Areas of the brain that are active in response of physical pain are activated during ostracism and their sensitivity to physical pain changes.
Ostracism and rejection have potent effect on people’s perceptions, motivations, and behaviors.
People who are rejected or ostracized want to recapure affiliation with other people.
Getting the job done: group performance
To achieve their performance goals, groups must maintain their motivation and avoid problems of coordination. Proccesses including communication within the group and shared emotions can influence group performance. Training and accountability can improve performance, but perhaps the most important is developing a common social identity, which helps avoid performance problems by attracting and keeping valuable group members and by enouraging acceptance of group goals and normative cooperation.
Forms of task interdependence
Groups differ in terms of the type of interdependence they require.
Most tasks are complex tasks, which consists of subtasks that involve all forms of interdependence.
The more complicated the task, the greater the need for planning and coordination to ensure that member’s skills and efforts are appropriately allocated. And the greater the opportunity will be for the group’s performance to multiply and surpass any possible effort by a single individual.
Also many opporutinities for things to go wrong.
Gains and losses in group performance
Groups do perform many tasks better than an individual could.
But
Losses from decreased motivation: social loafing
Social loafing: the tendency to exert less effort on a task when an individual’s efforts are an unidentifiable part of a group than when the same task is performed alone.
Sharing responsibility can reduce effort no matter the task.
People may even ‘preloaf’ by preparing less for an upcoming group task then they do for an upcoming individual one.
Why do people loaf in group tasks?
To loaf or not to loaf seems to depend on motivation.
When individual performance is important for task mastery, social loafing declines.
The same when an individual’s performance has implications for connectedness to the group.
Social compensation: one group member working especially hard to compensate for another’s low level of effort or performance.
Sometimees the wakes or least capable group members work harder in groups than they do alone, possible because social comparison with other, better-performing group members inspires more effort.
Lossess from poor coordination
The group needs to be organized if it is to do the best possible work.
Members need assigned roles and a clear sense of their resources.
They also need to be aware of one another’s strenghts and weaknesses, how their actions contribute to group goals, and of who has a right to command and who has a duty to obey.
Coordination in groups is often achieved via explicit communication, when group members directly spell out who should do what tasks.
Coordination can slo be tacit, occuring without explicit communication.
Shared social knowledge is especially important for tacit coordination.
Processes that affect performance: group communication
Groups have one primary weapon in the struggle to achieve high task efficiency while maintaining cohesion: communication.
A high level of open communication does contribute to overall group performance.
The balance between task-focused and socially-focused communications is crucial if a group is to be effective.
The optimal type and amound of communication depend on several factors.
Technology and communication
Groups often interact through technology instead of in person.
These new technologies influence both how tasks are completed and how group members feel as they complete them.
Computer-mediated group decision making may be less vulnerable to problems like the premature consensus of groupthink and biases that polarize majority views.
And more equal participation among members.
Overall, technology-mediated groups took longer to reach a decision, made poorer quality decisions, and group members were less satisfied with their decisions compared to groups who communicated face-to-face.
It may not feel very good to interact in technology-mediated groups either. It may damage group commitment and reduce positive emotions in groups.
Different types of computer-mediated communication may have unique problems.
Face-to-face communication is still preferre in many instances.
The emotional ties that develop from actual interaction seem essential for the growth of interpersonal trust and commitment, as well as group solidarity.
Physical proximity seems to be essential for this type of frequent, informal interaction.
Processes that affect performance: emotions and mood in groups
The emotional ties that form between group members can force for good, helping to develop trust and commitment.
A group’s emotional climate or mood can affect performance in many ways.
These group moods may arise trough contagion, with the moods of one or more members spreading to many other group members.
These consequences are evident to outside observers as well as to the group members themselves.
Both the content of group emotions and the consistency of emotions across members shape observers’ impressions.
Cures for group performance losses
Communication and shared emotions do not always do the trick.
Building positive social interdependence often helps solve some of the problems of task interdependence.
There is a positive correlation between group cohesion and better performance.
Social identity can be such a powerful tool that it sometimes holds groups together when no material benefits are forthcoming.
Leadership and power
Effective leaders enhance task performance and maintain social interdependence. The ways they do this must differ from situation to situation. Sometimes, however, stereotypical thinking prevents the most effective leaders from emering in groups. Some types of leadership are particularly likely to help align individual and group goals and these leaders may help groups be particularly successful. Of course, such extraordinary influence can be used in destructive as well as constructive wasy. Formal group leaders as well as others (such as parents) usually can control other people’s outcomes, such as power has a numer of psychological effects.
Leadership: a process in which one or more group members are permitted to influence and motivate others to help attain group goals.
What do leaders do?
The exercise of leadership generally involves two distinct types of behavior:
Task-related leader behaviors include:
Relationship-oriented leadership involves:
Relation-oriented leadership appears to be especially important when work groups are diverse rather than homogeneous.
In general, diversity can have both positive and negative effects on groups.
Leader behavior strongly influences whether group diversity will hurt or help in these ways.
A match between leader mood and follower characteristics may be important.
Leadership effectiveness: Person or situation?
Studies have revealed that the same person could be an effective leader in one context, but ineffective in another.
Group success depends less on who the leader is than on what kind of leadership is needed in a particular situation.
Contingency theories of leadership: theories holding that leader behaviors can differ and that different behaviors are most effective in specific leadership situations.
The leader’s style should match the type of leadership demanded by the situation.
Althoug some specific tasks may be best matched by a task-focused or relationship-oriented leader, most complex tasks require both leadership styles.
The essence of good leadership may be the flexibility to adjust the mix of social and task motivation that a group needs in a particular situation.
Leadership is about the flexible exercise of social influence.
Who becomes leader?
People seem to have ideas about who is ‘leader material’ regardless of the task at hand.
Stereotypes and leadership
Common stereotypes influence people’s perceptions of leadership.
People are seen as leaders when their appearance fits stereotyipcally with what they say.
Putting group first: transformational leadership
Whereas most leaders help followers reach existing goals, charismatic leaders may actually change their followers’ goals.
Transformational leadership: leaders who inspire extreme devotion and emotional identification on the part of their followers, allowing them to have profound effects on their followers.
To have these profound effects, transformational leaders must be self-confident and determined, as well as skilled and inspiring communicators.
They take clear an strong stands that empathize commitment to goals, optimistically express an attractive vision of the future, question old assumptions and traditions, and are highly carign toward group members.
Studies of leaders who exhibit these kinds of behaviors suggest that they are successful in promoting not only organizational commitment and work satisfaction, but also group performance.
Transformational practices ten to empower followers, creating a sense of control that thelps explain the succes of such leadership.
Transformational leaders are effective for exactly the same reasons as other leaders: they nurture cohesion among group members and inspire them to adopt the group’s goals as their own. These factors in turn inspire group members to look beyond themselves and adopt new collective goals for the group, eliminating potential coordination and motivation losses in the process.
The dark side of leadership
Groups and group memebers can pay high cost for poor leadership.
When leaders lead the wrong way, group members who can do so will withdraw from the group, hurting their own, group’s, and the leader’s changes of achieving the goal that brought the group together in the first place.
Under bad leaders, task motivation abbs away and group members not only fail to perform, but can actively attempt to undermine the leader’s agenda and the group’s goals.
Even the life-changing potential of charismatic or transformational leadership can have a dark side.
Power
Power: the ability to provide or withold rewards or punishments from others.
Not only do powerful people seem to pursue goals differently, but they prefer to pursue certain types of goals more than others, especially those focused on rewards and those that thelp maintain their power.
Either too much power or too little power within a group can harm performance.
What is social psychology? - summary of chapter 1 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)
Social psychology
Chapter 1
What is social psychology?
Social psychology: the scientific study of the effects of social and cognitive processes on the way individuals perceive, influence and relate to others.
The scientific study
Social psychologist gather knowledge systematically by means of scientific methods. These methods help to produce knowledge that is less subject to the biases and distortions that often characterize common-sense knowledge.
The effects of social and cognitive processes
The presence of other people, the knowledge and opinions they pass on to us, and our feelings about the groups to which we belong all deeply influence us through social processes, whether we are with other people or alone. Our perceptions, memories, emotions, and motives also exert a pervasive influence on us through cognitive processes. Effects of social and cognitive processes are not separate but inextricably intertwined.
Social processes: the ways in which input from the people and groups around us affect our thoughts, feelings and actions.
Affect us even when others are not physically present.
The processes that affect us when others are present depend on how we interpret those others and their actions.
Cognitive processes: the ways in which our memories, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and motives influence our understanding of the world and guide our actions.
The way individuals perceive, influence and relate to others
Social psychology focuses on the effects of social and cognitive processes on the way individuals perceive, influence and relate to others. Understanding these processes can help us comprehend why people act the way they do and may also help solve important social problems.
Social psychology seeks and understanding of the reasons people act the way they do in social situations.
Social psychology is a product of its past.
Social psychology becomes an empirical science
Soon after the emergence of scientific psychology in the late 19th century, researchers began considering questions about social influences on human thought and action.
Social psychology splits from general psychology over what causes behavior
Throughout much of the 20th century, North American psychology was dominated by behaviorism, but social psychologists maintained an emphasis on the important effects of thoughts and feelings on behavior.
The rise of Nazism shapes the development of social psychology
In the 1930s and 1940s, many European social psychologists fled to North
.....read more Perceiving individuals - summary of chapter 3 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 3
Perceiving individuals
Our knowledge about people’s characteristics and the ways they are related to one another is one type of mental representation.
Our stored knowledge influences virtually all of our social beliefs and behaviors.
Impressions guide our actions in ways that meet our needs for both concrete rewards and connectedness to other people.
The raw materials of first impressions
Perceptions of other people begin with visible cues including:
Familiarity affects impressions, leading to increased liking.
Cues that stand out and attract attention in the particular context in which they occur are particularly influential.
Impressions from physical appearance
Physical appearance influences our impressions of other people.
The way people look is usually our first our only cue to what they are like.
Physical beauty, particularly a beautiful face, calls up a variety of positive expectations.
We expect highly attractive people to be more interesting, warm, outgoing and socially skilled.
People from different cultures generally agree about who is physically attractive and about the traits attractiveness conveys.
Baby-faced males were viewed as more naive, honest, kind and warm.
Impressions from nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication influences whether we like people, how we think they are feeling, and what we think they are like.
In general, we like people who express their feelings nonverbally more than less expressive individuals.
Specific nonverbal cues affect liking, even when we’re not aware of them.
Body language offers a special insight into people’s moods and emotions.
Impressions from nonverbal behavior can be formed quickly and are often quite accurate.
Detection and deception
Detecting lies is not always easy.
Paying attention instead to the diagnostic hints of deception can increase successful detection of lies from those within our own culture, as well as from those from other cultures.
Impressions form familiarity
Most of us tend to develop positive feelings about the people we encounter frequently in or everyday lives.
Mere exposure: exposure to a stimulus without any external reward, which creates familiarity with the stimulus and generally makes people feel more positively about it.
Impressions from environments
Clues to other’s personality, behavior and values can be seen in the real and virtual environments
.....read more The self - summary of chapter 4 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 4
The self
Self-concept: all on an individual’s knowledge about his or her personal qualities.
Sources of the self-concept
People construct the self-concept in much the same way they form impressions of others, by interpreting various types of cues. People often learn their own characteristics from their observed behaviors. They also use thoughts and feelings and other people’s reactions to form impressions of themselves. Finally, people compare themselves to others to learn what characteristics make them unique.
Learning who we are from our own behavior
Self-perception theory: the theory that we make inferences about our personal characteristics on the basis of our overt behaviors when internal cues are weak or ambiguous.
We can learn things about ourselves by observing our own behavior.
People rely on their behavior to draw inferences about themselves, and this is especially true when we are first developing a self-concept or when we do not have a good sense of who we are in a particular domain.
People are especially likely to draw self-inferences from behaviors that they see as having freely chosen.
Providing external rewards often undermines intrinsic motivation.
Even imagined behaviors can be input for self-perception processes.
Thinking about actual or imagined behavior increases the accessibility of related personal characteristics.
Learning who we are from thoughts and feelings
An important cue to learning who we are comes from an interpretation of our own thoughts and feelings. This might have more impact than our behaviors.
Learning who we are from other people’s reactions
Other people’s views of us also serve as a cue in the development of the self-concept.
Reactions of others serve as a kind of mirror, reflecting our image so that we, too, can see it.
Being explicitly labeled as a trait may shape your self-concept. Other people;s more subtle reactions can also do the trick.
Other people’s reactions have the largest effects on people whose self-concepts are uncertain or are still developing.
Learning who we are from social comparison
Social comparison theory: the theory that people learn about and evaluate their personal qualities by comparing themselves to others.
Two effects:
Perceiving groups - summary of chapter 5 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Sociale psychologie
Chapter 5
Perceiving groups
Discrimination: positive or negative behavior directed toward a social group and its members.
Prejudice: a positive or negative evaluation of a social group and its members.
Stereotype: a mental representation or impression of a social group that people form by associating particular characteristics and emotions with the group.
Can be changed.
Targets of prejudice: social groups
Any group that shares a socially meaningful common characteristic can be a target for prejudice. Different cultures emphasize different types of groups, but race, religion, gender, age, social status, and cultural background are important dividing lines in many societies.
Social group: two or more people who share some common characteristic that is socially meaningful for themselves or for others.
Socially meaningful.
Social categorization: dividing the world into social groups
People identify individuals as members of social groups because they share socially meaningful features. Social categorization is helpful because it allows people to deal with others efficiently and appropriately. Social categorization also helps us feel connected to other people. However, social categorization exaggerates similarities within groups and differences between groups. It forms he basis for stereotyping.
Social categorization: the process of identifying individual people as members of a social group because they share certain features that are typical of the group.
Why?
Negative effects
The content of stereotypes
Many different kinds of characteristics are included in stereotypes, which can be positive or negative. Some stereotypes accurately reflect actual differences between groups, though in exaggerated form. Other stereotypes are completely inaccurate.
Stereotypes include many types of characteristics
Stereotypes usually go well beyond what groups look like or act like, to include the personality traits group members are believed to share and the positive or negative emotions or feelings group members arouse in others.
Stereotypes can be either positive or negative
Stereotypes can include positive as well as negative characteristics.
Even positive stereotypes can have
Social identity - summary of chapter 6 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 6
Social identity
Being a member of a group influences many of our thoughts, feelings and actions.
Some group memberships are so important that they become a basic apart of our view of ourselves.
Self-categorization: the process of seeing oneself as a member of a social group.
Flexible and can readily shift depending on social context.
Social identity: those aspects of the self-concept that derive from an individual’s knowledge and feelings about the group membership he or she shares with others.
Extends the self out beyond the skin to include other members of our groups.
Most group memberships are stable en enduring.
Learning about our groups
People learn about the groups to which they belong in the same ways that they learn the characteristics of other groups: by observing other group members or from the culture.
What we and other group members do often becomes the basis for group stereotypes.
But what we do is strongly influenced by our roles.
Performing a role based on membership in some group can shape our future behaviors and, ultimately, our self-knowledge.
Feeling like a group member
Knowledge about group membership may be activated by direct reminders, such as:
Group membership is significant in some cultures and for some individuals, who tend to see the world in terms of that group membership.
Direct reminders of membership
The process is often subtle.
Circumstances remind us of our similarities with others, and this activates group membership.
The mere presence of other in-group members can be a potent reminder.
When group similarities are highlighted membership and all it entails becomes even more accessible.
This is powerful enough to overcome alternative categorizations that might be important in other circumstances.
Presence of out-group members
The presence of even a single out-group member is enough to increase our sense of in-group membership.
Being a minority
People are more likely to think of themselves in terms of their membership in smaller groups than in larger groups. Especially when they are sole representatives of their group in a situation.
Conflict or rivalry
The most potent factor that brings group membership to mind is ongoing conflict or rivalry between groups.
The importance of conflict also means that people identify more strongly with groups
Attitude and attitude change - summary of chapter 7 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 7
Attitude and attitude change
Attitude: a mental representation that summarizes an individual’s evaluation of a particular person, group, thing, action or idea.
Attitude change: the process by which attitudes form and change by the association of positive or negative information with the attitude object.
Persuasion: the process of forming, strengthening or changing attitudes by communication.
Measuring attitudes
Researches infer attitudes from people’s reactions to attitude objects. Such reactions can range form subtle uncontrollable evaluative reactions that people are unaware of, to more deliberate and controllable expressions of support or opposition. Assessing these different reactions shows that implicit attitudes can sometimes differ from explicit attitudes.
Two aspects of people’s reactions are important for attitudes:
The most straightforward way to measure attitudes to through self-report.
Social psychologists usually get people to report their attitudes using attitude scales.
Researchers need to keep in mind that the words they use and the response options they offer can subtly change the attitudes people report.
Social psychologists also use observations of behavior to gauge attitudes.
Explicit attitude: the attitude that people openly and deliberately express about an attitude objecct in self-report or by behavior.
People can control their explicit attitudes to hide or deny their true attitudes.
Techniques to get around people’s desire to hide what they really think:
Implicit attitude: automatic and uncontrollable positive or negative evaluation of an attitude object.
Measures:
People’s explicit attitudes sometimes differ from their implicit attitudes.
Such differences don’t mean that implicit attitudes are pure measures of what people ‘really’ think about attitude objects, while their explicit attitudes are designed to dissemble or distort.
Implicit attitudes simply reflect the positive or negative associations that people have to an object.
Explicit attitudes are more likely to reflect the evaluations that people deliberately endorse, and these include the attitudes they want to have, not just the ones they want to be seen having.
Attitude
.....read more Attitudes and behavior - summary of chapter 8 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 8
Attitudes and behavior
Attitudes and behaviors are often related for two reasons:
Some important conditions have to be in place for attitudes to guide behavior.
Attitudes are only one of several factors that can affect behavior.
From action to attitude via superficial processing
Behavior is an important part of the information on which people base attitudes. If behaviors change, attitudes can also change. When people process superficially, attitudes can be based on associations with actions or on inferences from actions. Like other forms of superficial processing, actions are more likely to affect attitudes in this way when people lack the motivation or ability to process more thoroughly.
At the most superficial level of processing, attitudes can be based on associations with actions.
Associations with action
Movements that are strongly associated with liking and disliking can rub off when they occur in the presence of an attitude object.
Because some muscle movements and positive or negative evaluation is very strong, activating those muscles and movements makes particular attitudes more likely. But this effect depends upon what such movements mean to us.
People believe that actions reflect intention and motivation. Just as we think that others’ actions reflect their inner states, we are used to assuming our own do too, unless something tells us otherwise.
Inferences from action: self-perception theory
People often make straightforward inferences from their actions to their attitudes.
People infer attitudes by observing their own behaviors and the situations in which those actions occur.
Like saying what you think someone else wants to hear. What people say colors their own attitudes.
People often infer their attitudes from their behavior, but self-perception is likely only when people chose their own behaviors freely.
The foot-in-the-door technique: could you do this small thing (first)?
Foot-in-the-door technique: a technique for increasing compliance with a large request by first asking people to go along with a smaller request, engaging self-perception processes.
How does it work?
When do action-to-attitude inferences change attitudes?
Norms and conformity - summary of chapter 9 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 9
Norms and conformity
What are social norms?
Because people are profoundly influenced by others’ ideas and actions, interaction or communication causes group members’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to become more alike. Whether a judgment task is clear-cut or ambiguous, trivial or important, individual members’ views converge to form a social norm. Norms reflect the group’s generally accepted way of thinking, feeling, or acting.
Social norms are similar to attitudes in that both are mental representations of appropriate ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.
But whereas attitudes represent an individual’s positive or negative evaluations, norms reflect shared group evaluations of what is true or false, good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate.
Descriptive social norms: agreed upon mental representations of what a group of people think, feel, or do.
Injunctive social norms: agreed upon mental representations of what a group of people should think, feel or do.
Most social norms have both qualities, because most people think, feel, or behave in a certain way that we think they should. When people act in the same way over and over again, they begin to think that they should act that way. Descriptive norms morph into injunctive norms.
Public versus private conformity
Conformity: the convergence of individuals’ thoughts, feelings, or behavior toward a social norm.
Occurs for two reasons:
Most of the time people privately accept group norms as their own, believing them to be correct and appropriate.
Sometimes people publicly go along with norms they do not privately accept.
Private conformity: private acceptance of social norms.
When people are truly persuaded that the group is right, when they willingly and privately accept group norms as their own beliefs, even if the group is no longer physically present.
Public conformity: overt behavior consistent with social norms that are not privately accepted.
Only a surface change.
We often privately conform to social norms without even realizing we are doing so.
Expecting consensus
Private conformity comes about because we expect to see the world the same way similar others see it. We often assume that most other people share our opinions and preferences. Agreement with others increases our confidence that our views
.....read more Norms and behavior - summary of chapter 10 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 10
Norms and behavior
All human groups establish social norms.
Activating norms to guide behavior
Norms must be activated before they can guide behavior. They can be activated by direct reminders, environmental cues, or observations of other people’s behavior. When people see themselves purely in terms of group identity, their behavior is likely to be guided by group norms alone.
Norms can be made accessible by several means
- Direct reminders of norms
Which norms guide behavior?
Both descriptive norms and injunctive norms influence behavior, and these norms may sometimes interact with each other in interesting ways. One type of normative information may me more important than another, depending on our motivation and ability to think carefully.
Descriptive norms as guides for behavior
What other people are doing (descriptive norms) frequently influences what we do.
Giving people more accurate views of what their reference groups are doing changes behavior.
Injunctive norms as guides for behavior
Injunctive norms (shared beliefs about what should be done) can also influence behavior.
We sometimes misperceive injunctive norms.
The interplay of descriptive and injunctive norms
When injunctive and descriptive norms mismatched, behavioral intentions were as low as they were when there was no support from either type of norm.
Endorsement of injunctive norms is more effective when it is seen as sincere rather than as mere lip service.
When people get information about just one type of norm, they assume that the other norm is in line. Using descriptive norms may be cognitively easier.
Injunctive norm information has stronger effects.
Why norms guide behavior so effectively
Norms are sometimes enforced by rewards and punishments. More often, however, people follow norms simply because they seem right. Following norms may also be in our genetic makeup.
Enforcement: Do it, or else
The most obvious reason is that groups sometimes use rewards and punishments to motivate people to adhere group standards.
Interaction and performance in groups - summary of chapter 11 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 11
Interaction and performance in groups
Interdependence: each group member’s throughts, emotions, and behaviors influence the others’.
Social facilitation: improvement and impairment
Even when interdependence is minimal, the mere presence of others can produce arousal, either because the other people are highly evaluative or because they are distracting.
Social facilitation: an increase in the likelihood of hihgly accessible responses, and a decrease in the likelihood of less accessible responses, due to the persence of others.
Even the virtual presence of virutal others can cause these effects.
Evaluation apprehension
When we focus on what other people think about us, it creates arousal, with sometimes postive and sometimes negative effects on performance.
Most of the time, we want other people to value, include, and like us. Ou self-esteem is greatly affected by what others think of us.
The presence of others who are in a posititon to judge us produces evaluation apprehension, which changes our performance in the way predicted by social facilitation theory.
Distraction
The presence of others can also disctract us from our task, also creating arousal and impacting performance. However, with specific types of tasks, distraction can focus us on taks-relevant cues, potentially improving performance.
Others can distract us.
Their mere presence causes us to think about them, to react to them, or to monitor what they are doing, and thereby deflects attention from the task at hand.
Our impulses to do two different things at once, conentrate on the task and to react to others, start to conflict wich each other, we become agitated and aroused.
This arousal will typically improve performance on simple tasks and interfere with it on difficult tasks.
The presence of others also requires people to split their attention between the other people and the task at hand.
Being crowded is arousing because crowds create many opportunities for evaluation and distraction.
Task interdependence: reliance on other members of a group for mastery of material outcomes that arise from the group’s task.
Social interependence: relieance on other members of the group for feelings of connectedenss, social and emotional rewards, and a positive social identity.
How groups change: stages of group development
Face-to-face groups usually go
.....read more Attraction, relationships, and love - summary of chapter 12 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 12
Attraction, relationships, and love
Challenges in studying attraction, relationships, and love
By necessity, most research on close friendships uses nonexperimental settings that leave some ambiguity about causal relations between variables, and most studies have focused on romantic attachments between heterosexual couples in individualist cultures.
We are fist drawn to people on the basis of their immediately obvious appearance or behavior.
Attraction follows rules:
As those factors draw tow people together, liking can develop, as each individual goes beyond surface features to start knowing the other better.
Physical attractiveness
Attraction to strangers is strongly influenced by perceptions of physical attractiveness. Some features are regarded as attractive across cultures. Other features that make people attractive are more dependent on experience, exposure, and expectation.
Biological bases of physical attractiveness
There are some immediately obvious physical features that almost everyone agrees are attractive.
Experimental bases of physical attractiveness
Despite the generally universal nature of cues of health and wealth, individuals and groups can also differ greatly in some of the physical characteristics they find attractive. This is because judgments of what is physically attractive are also strongly influenced by our experience and expectations.
Similarity
Similarity of many kinds increases attraction and liking because of:
Once you find someone ‘your type’, chances are you will end up liking this person.
Similarity breeds attraction and the better people get to know one another, the more their liking depends on similarity (does not have to be deep).
The more similar they are, the more people like each other. Liking is even greater is the qualities we
Aggression and conflict - summary of chapter 13 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 13
Aggression and conflict
Defining aggression and conflict
Aggression, defined by people’s immediate intention to hurt each other, is often set in motion by incompatible goals. There are two types of aggression
Aggression: behavior intended to harm someone else.
Conflict: a perceived incompatibility of goals between tow or more parties.
Aggression often has its roots in conflict. What one party wants, the other party sees as harmful to its interests.
Conflict between individuals and groups is acted out in many forms.
Aggression and conflict between individuals and groups are found throughout the world.
They generally fall into two distinct categories.
Origins of aggression
Humans have evolved to compete effectively for good and mates. Although the capacity to act aggressively may have helped, aggression has no special place in ‘human nature’. Aggression is just one strategy among many others that humans use to attain rewards and respect, and too is influenced by cognitive processes and social forces.
Research on aggression
Aggression can be difficult to study experimentally because people are often unwilling to act aggressively when they are being observed. Researchers have used a variety of techniques to get around these problems.
Whether aggression is between individuals or between groups, it is usually triggered by perceptions and interpretations of some event or situation.
What causes interpersonal aggression? The role of rewards and respect
Aggression is triggered by a variety of factors. Some aggression is a result of mastery needs. Potential rewards make this kind of aggression more likely and costs of risks make it less likely. Sometimes, however, perceived provocation such as treat to the self-esteem or connectedness produces anger, which can also set of aggression. Many negative emotions can make aggression more likely. Norms too can promote aggressive behavior.
Counting rewards and costs
When aggression pays, it becomes more likely.
When rewards are withdrawn, aggression usually subsides. Even the possibility of punishment can deter
Helping and cooperation - summary of chapter 14 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)Social psychology
Chapter 14
Helping and cooperation
Pro-social behavior: behavior intended to help someone else.
Cooperation: involves two or more people working together toward a common goal that will benefit all involved.
Altruism: behavior intended to help someone else without any prospect of personal rewards for the helper.
Egoism: behavior motivated by the desire to obtain personal rewards.
Helping is crucially dependent on people’s interpretation of a situation.
Is help needed and deserved?
Helping is dependent on people’s perception of someone as both needing and deserving help. The ability and motivation to pay attention to others’ needs influence whether people think help is needed. People are more likely to help those not held responsible for their own need.
Perceiving need
Several factors influence the judgment that someone needs help.
Becoming aware of a need is usually the first step in the helping chain of events.
Judging deservingness
Helping depends on whether we think help is deserved, and groups typically develop norms that dictate who does and who does not deserve help.
The norm of social responsibility: a norm that those able to take care of themselves have a duty and obligation to assist those who cannot.
Especially in the individualist cultures in the West, deservingness also depends on the attributions we make about controllability.
Stereotypes of social groups often influence judgments about controllability and deservingness.
Should I help?
People sometimes help because social norms, their own standards, of the behavior of others show them that it is appropriate to do so. However, sometimes the presence of other potential helpers can diminish the pressures to help. While some norms work against helping, others dictate that certain people should receive help.
Even when people think that helping is both needed and deserved, action doesn’t always follow.
Is helping up to me? Diffusion of responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility: the effect of other people present on diminishing each individual’s perceived responsibility for helping, one explanation for the
.....read more Introduction to social psychologyIn this magazine, all summaries needed for the first year psychology course Social psychology are bundled.
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