Social psychology - a summary of chapter 13 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)

Psychology
Chapter 13
Social psychology

Forming impressions of other people

Humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter.
This drive has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them.

The accuracy of judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases.
These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental recourses, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions.

• They provide clues about the mental processes that contribute to accurate as well as inaccurate perceptions and judgments.
• An understanding of biases can promote social justice.

Making attributions from observed behavior

Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions.

Any judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation.  It is an implicit claim that the person is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person.
Any claim about causation is an attribution. A claim about the cause of someone’s behavior.

The logic of attributing behavior to the person or the situation.

To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar situations.

When behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation.

Three questions in making an attribution

• Does this person regularly behave this way in this situation?
  • Yes → we have grounds for attributing the behavior to some stable characteristic of either the person or the situation.
  • No → this behavior may be a fluke that tells us little about either the person or the situation
• Do many other people regularly behave this way in this situation?
  • Yes → we have grounds for attributing the behavior more to the situation than to the person.
  • No → this behavior may tell us something unique about the person
• Does this person behave this way in many other situations?
  • Yes → we have grounds for making a relatively general claim about the personality of the observed person.
  • No → any personality claim about the person is limited to the particular situation

Given the answer to questions 1 and 2, question 3 will allow us to assess the generality of the personality attribute we can reasonably infer.

Often people lack the information, the time or the motivation to make a logical attribution. In that case they may take shortcuts in their reasoning, which may result in certain consistent errors or biases.

The person bias in attributions

People tend to give too much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situation when they make attributions about others’ actions.
This is the person bias in attribution.

Some of the most dramatic examples of the person bias occur in situations in which a person is socially pressured or required to behave in a certain way.

A person’s social role can have undue effects on the attributions that others make about that person. We might develop different impressions of the same person if we saw him or her in out-of-role situations.

The fundamental attribution error: the pervasiveness and strength of the bias and to suggest that it underlies many other social-psychological phenomena.
But it might not be as fundamental as thought:

• People are much more likely to make this error if their minds are occupied by other tasks or if they are tired.
• The apparent demands of the experiment may artificially produce the person bias

A cross-cultural difference in attributions

Because of philosophies, social orientation and religions:
People in western cultures may learn to attribute behavior more to the person than to the situation.
In eastern cultures, people might make relatively fewer person attributions and more situation attitudes.

Effects of facial features on person perceptions

The attractiveness bias

Attractive people are commonly judged more intelligent, competent, sociable and morel than less attractive people.
Judgments of personality can also affect judgments of physical appearance.

East Asians are less susceptible to the attractiveness bias than are westerners. So the attractiveness bias is at least partly a result of an influence of Western culture.

Correlations between perceived intelligence and perceived attractiveness are high. 0.57
The correlations between perceived attractiveness and IQ are lower 0.21
The ‘good genes’ theory.

• Attractiveness signals ‘good genes’ and people have evolved to judge good-looking people as a high-quality potential mate. 
• Facial attractiveness is related to symmetry. And symmetry is related to prenatal experiences. The more problems a fetus experiences, the less symmetrical his or her body is, and the less fit overall he or she can be expected to be

The baby-face bias

Some people, regardless of their age, have facial features that resemble those of a baby.
Baby-face adults are perceived as more naïve, honest, helpless, kind and warm than mature-faced adults of the same age and sex. Even though they could tell that the baby-faced persons were not really younger.

Judges find it hard to think of baby-faced persons as deliberately causing harm but do not find it difficult to think of them as incompetent or forgetful.
People vote for the mature-faced person, who looks more competent over the baby-faced person who looks more naive.

Long ago, human beings intuitively respond to infants’ facial features with feelings of compassion and care, a characteristic that helps promote the survival of our offspring.
We generalize this response not just to babies and animals but also to adult humans whose faces resemble those of babies.

Possible evolutionary consequences of the baby-face bias

Human adult, overall, are much more baby-faced than the adults of our closest primate relatives.

• This difference is generally attributed to the expanded cranial cavity with enlargement of the brain in humans.
• In course of human evolution, individuals who had babyish faces may have been treated more benignly than those who had more mature faces. And perhaps this helped promote our species’ evolution toward baby-facedness.

The function of the baby-face bias is that it promotes caretaking of infants and young children by adults. Immature facial features may provide adults with cues regarding a child’s health and overall maturity level that in turn may influence the amount of time and resources they devote to a child.

Bias toward baby-faces is not reliably found until adolescence.
Biases toward cues of immaturity may be related to the onset of puberty and possible parenthood.
Biases toward infantile features are specific to times during development when women are more likely to find themselves in a caregiving role, possibly mediated by hormones.

Forming impressions on the Internet

The Internet has added new dimensions to human communication.
There are positive correlations between Internet use and overall sociability and emotional well-being.

The role of the Internet in meeting new people.
Get-acquainted meetings over the Internet are more intimate, more revealing of what each person considers to be his or her ‘true self’, than are such meetings conducted face-to-face.
The relative anonymity of the Internet, along with the lack of visual and auditory contact, reduces social anxiety and frees people to reveal more about themselves than they would if they met face-to-face. Also, the biasing effect of attractiveness, or the lack thereof, are absent. Communication is not shut down by early negative judgments or anxieties based on physical features.

Not only can people show their ‘true’ selves on the Internet, they can also ‘try out’ new identities. This happens especially during adolescence.
In this context, identity can be defined as ‘the aspect of the self that is accessible and salient in a particular context and that interacts with the environment’.

Perceiving an evaluating the self

Self-awareness is often described as one of the hallmarks of our species.
At about 18 months of age, children begin to recognize themselves in a mirror.
Not all species are capable of this.
For chimpanzees, at least, the capacity of self-recognition seems to depend on social interaction.

Many psychologist and sociologists have argued that the self-concept is fundamentally a social product. To become aware of yourself, you must first become aware of others of your species. And then become aware, perhaps from the way others treat you, that you are one of them.

In humans, self-awareness includes awareness of the physical self and also of one’s own personality and character, reflected psychologically in the reactions of other people.

Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others

Looking-glass self: people who react to us.
We all naturally infer what other people what others think of us from their reactions, and we use those inferences to build our own self-concepts.

Effects of others’ appraisals on self-understanding and behavior

The beliefs and expectations that others have of a person can to some degree create reality by influencing that person’s self-concept and behavior.
These effects are called self-fulfilling prophecies or Pygmalion effects.
There are real gains, not just perceived gains.

Changes in subject’s self-concepts can result from differences in the way that others treat them. It can also occur by simply telling others that they are consisted with the attribute that they are told to have.
In cases where an attribution runs directly counter to a person’s strong beliefs about himself, the attributions can backfire.

Self-esteem as an index of others’ approval and acceptance

Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval acceptance and liking of oneself.

Sociometer theory: self-esteem acts like a meter to inform us, at any given time, of the degree to which we are likely to be accepted or rejected by others.
What you experience as your self-esteem at this very moment largely reflects your best guess about the degree to which other people, whom you care about, respect and accept you.

• Individual differences in self-esteem correlate strongly with individual differences in the degree to which people believe that they are generally accepted or rejected by others.
• When people were asked to rate the degree to which particular real or hypothetical occurrences in their lives would raise or lower their self-esteem, and also to rate the degree to which those same occurrences would raise or lower other people’s opinions on them, the two sets of ratings were essentially identical.
• People’s self-esteem increases after praise, social acceptance or other satisfying social experiences, but it decreases after evidence of social rejection.
• Feedback about success or failure on a test has greater effects on self-esteem if the person was led to believe that others would hear this success or failure.

From an evolutionary perspective, other people’s views matter a great deal. Our survival depends on others acceptance of us and willingness to cooperate with us.

Actively constructing our self-perceptions

Although other people’s views of us play a large role in our perceptions of ourselves, we do not just passively accept those views.
We actively try to influence others’ views of us, and in that way we also influence our own self-perceptions.

We compare ourselves to others as a way of defining and evaluating ourselves, and we often bias those comparisons by giving more weight to some pieces of evidence than to others.

Social comparison, effects of the reference group

In perception everything is relative to some frame of reference. In self-perception the frame of reference is other people.
You see yourself compared with other people.

Social comparison: the process of comparing ourselves with others in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate our abilities
A direct consequence of social comparison is that the self-concept varies dependent on the reference group. The group against whom the comparison is made.

Effects of the reference group on self-descriptions
People identify themselves largely in terms of the ways in which they perceive themselves to be different from those around them.

Effect of the reference group on self-evaluations
The evaluative aspect of social comparison can be charged with emotion.
The big-fish-in-the-little-pond effect. The difference reflects the difference in the reference groups.

A person’s self-esteem is equal to his achievements divided by his pretensions (the persons self-chosen goals and reference groups).

Enhancing our views of ourselves

At least in North America and Western Europe, people tend to rate themselves unduly high on practically every dimension that they value.
It is useful to have relatively accurate views of ourselves, but it feels good to think well of ourselves, so most of us skew our self-evaluations in positive directions.

We maintain our unduly high self-evaluations by treating evidence about ourselves differently from the way we treat evidence about others.
Four means by which we do that:

• Attributing our successes to ourselves, our failures to something else.
  The self-serving attributional bias. The tendency to attribute our successes to our own inner qualities and our failures to external circumstances.
• Accepting praise at face value
• Remembering successes, forgetting failures
  Selective memory. The same bias does not occur in memory for the successes and failures
• Overinflated sense of self
  When one’s self-concept is far in excess of one’s accomplishments, the outcome may be maladaptive.
  An unrealistically high level of self-esteem can backfire. Feeling good about yourself without achievements to warrant your feeling. This can lead to depression when you encounter failure.

Self-control

When we perceive that someone is trying to control our behavior we sometimes act in opposition, termed a reactance effect, in order to exert some self-control. 

Self-control is related to executive functions.

Ego depletion

If self-control can be viewed as a special case of executive functions, then it is a mentally effortful activity that is potentially available to conscious awareness, and its execution consumes a person’s limited mental resources.

Ego depletion: exerting self-control on one task would deplete some of one’s limited mental resources, resulting in poorer self-control on subsequent tasks.

People find it to exert the mental effort necessary for self-control when they are stressed, tired, frustrated or sad.

‘Loss of mental energy’ means that ego depletion is caused by the actual depletion of a form of glucose in the brain.
Self- control is costly in terms of mental effort that cost is paid by reduced self-control on subsequent tasks.

Free will

The most obvious expression of self-control is in the perception of free will.
We follow the definition of free will as ‘a particular form of action control that encompasses self-regulation, rational choice, planned behavior and initiative’.
Free will, in the form of self-control, evolved as a result of pressure from living in increasingly complex social groups.
The increase of self-control was accompanied by an increase of self-awareness and thus the perception of free will.

There are degrees to which our behavior is truly intentional.
It matters what people believe about free will when it comes to some social important behaviors.
A deterministic (anti-free-will) view of the human mind results in reduced moral behaviors. Believe in free will may be one mechanism that promotes prosocial behavior and may have been selected over the course of human evolution to promote more harmonious life in a human group.

Perceiving ourselves and others as members of groups

Others are not just involved in the construction of the self-concept, they are also part of its contents.
We think of ourselves in terms of our individual characteristics, and also in terms of the groups to which we belong and with which we identify.
Personal identity and social identity.

Shifting between personal and social identities.

Our self-concepts are relatively consistent from situation to situation, but nor rigid.
Our evolution as a species has entailed a continuous balance between the need to assert ourselves as individuals and the need to cooperate with others. We have the capacity to hold both personal and social identities and to switch between them to meet or needs for survival.
Different cultures tend to vary in the relative weights they give to personal and social identity.

Consequences of personal and social identity

Our feelings about ourselves depend not just on our personal achievements, but also on the achievements of the groups with which we identify, even when we ourselves play little or no role in those achievements.
In some situations, high achievement by other members of our groups can temporarily raise or lower our self-esteem, depending on whether our social identity or our personal identity is more active.

Group-enhancing bias

Our bias to think highly of ourselves applies to our social identity as well as to our personal identity.
In some conditions our group-enhancing biases are at least as strong as our self-enhancing biases.
It occurs even when there is no realistic basis for assuming that one groups differs from another.

Group-enhancing biases increase when people are primed to think of their social identities and decline when people are primed to think of their personal identities.

Stereotypes and their automatic effects on perception and behavior

We can switch between personal and social identities in our perception of others as well as ourselves.
This is particularly true when we view members of out-groups.

The schema (or organized set of knowledge or beliefs) that we carry in our heads about any group of people is referred to as a stereotype.
We gain our stereotypes largely from the ways our culture as a whole depicts and describes each social category.
A stereotype may accurately portray typical characteristics of a group, or exaggerate those characteristics, or be a complete fabrication based on culture-wide misconceptions.
Stereotypes are useful to the degree that they provide us with some initial, valid information about a person, but they are also sources of prejudice and social injustice.

Distinction between implicit and explicit stereotypes

Three levels of stereotypes:

• Public
  What we say to others about a group (explicit)
• Private
  What we consciously believe but do not say to others (explicit)
• Implicit
  A set of mental associations that operate more or less automatically to guide our judgments and actions toward members of the group in question, even if those associations run counter to our conscious believes.

Implicit stereotypes and unconscious discrimination

Implicit stereotypes can lead people who are not consciously prejudiced to behave in prejudicial ways, despite their intentions.

Implicit stereotypes can be deadly

Defeating explicit and implicit negative stereotypes

Explicit and implicit stereotypes are psychologically quite different from each other.
People often hold implicit stereotypes that do not coincide with their explicit beliefs about the stereotyped group.
Explicit stereotypes are products of conscious thought processes, modifiable by deliberate learning and logic.
Implicit stereotypes are products of more primitive emotional processes, modifiable by such means as classical conditioning.

The association of positive feelings with individual members of the stereotyped group helps reduce automatic negative responses toward the group as a whole.

Attitudes: their origins and their effects on behavior

An attitude: any belief or opinion that has an evaluative component (like good or bad, attractive or repulsive, moral or immoral).
Our attitudes tie us both cognitively and emotionally to our entire social world.
Our most central attitudes, values, help us judge the appropriateness of whole categories and actions.

Relationships of attitudes to behavior: distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes

The attitude-behavior relationship depends very much upon the way in which the attitude is accessed.

Explicit attitudes: conscious, verbally stated evaluations.
Implicit attitudes: attitudes that are manifested in automatic mental associations.

Implicit attitudes automatically influence behavior

Implicit attitudes automatically influence our behavior. The less we think about what we are doing, the more influence our implicit attitudes have.
Our explicit attitudes require thought. The more we think about what we are doing, the more influence our explicit attitudes have.

People’s implicit attitudes are reflected directly in portions of the brain’s limbic system that are involved in emotions and drives.
Explicit attitudes are reflected in portions of the prefrontal cortex that are concerned with conscious control.
In cased where an explicit attitude counters an implicit attitude, the subcortical areas respond immediately to the relevant stimuli, in accordance with the implicit attitude, but then downwards connections from the prefrontal cortex may dampen that response.

Early findings of lack of correlations between explicit attitudes and behavior

There is a lack of correlations between measures of explicit attitudes and measures of behavior.

Explicit attitudes must be retrieved by memory to affect behavior

People are must likely to behave in accordance with an explicit attitude if they are reminded of that attitude just before the behavioral test.

If you are trying to behave in accordance with some newly formed explicit attitude, then you may need to exert considerable mental effort, at least for a while, to keep reminding yourself of your attitude. Until your implicit attitude begins to change.

The origins of attitudes and methods of persuasion

To a considerable degree, our attitudes are products of learning.
Through direct experience or from information that others convey to us, we learn to like some objects, events and concepts and to dislike others.
This can be automatic or highly controlled.

Attitudes through classical conditioning: no thought

Classical conditioning can be thought of as an automatic attitude generator.
It leads us to feel positive about objects and events that have been linked in our experience to pleasant, life-promoting occurrences. And the other way around.
Such conditioning generally affects people’s implicit attitudes more than their explicit attitudes. It is possible to generate either a positive or negative implicit attitude through conditioning while, at the very same time, generating an opposite attitude through the presentation of evaluative statements.

Classical conditioning, when its effects aren’t countered with opposite statements, can effect explicit attitudes in the same direction as the implicit effects.

Attitudes through heuristics: superficial thought

The more sophisticated, but still relatively automatic process of using certain decision rules, or heuristics, is to evaluate information and develop attitudes.
Heuristics provide shortcuts to a full, logical elaboration of the information in a message. They can affect our explicit and our implicit attitudes.

We learn to use such rules because they often allow us to make useful judgments with minimal expenditures of time and mental energy. The rules become mental habit, without awareness that we are using them.

Attitudes through logical analysis of the message: systematic thought

Sometimes we think logically in ways that produce rational effects on our explicit attitudes. We most likely do this for issues that really matter to us.

Elaboration likelihood model
A major determinant of whether a message will be processed systematically or superficially is the personal relevance of the message.
We tend to be cognitive misers. We reserve our elaborate reasoning powers of messages that seem most relevant to us, and we rely on mental shortcuts to evaluate messages that seem less relevant.

Attitudes as rationalizations to attain cognitive consistency

The cognitive dissonance theory
We have a mechanism built into the workings of our mind that creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, or lack of harmony, when we sense some inconsistency among the various explicit attitudes, beliefs, and items of knowledge that constitute our mental store.
The discomfort of cognitive dissonance motivates to seek ways to resolve contradictions or inconsistencies among our conscious cognitions.

Such a mechanism could well have evolved to serve adaptive functions related to logic.

The dissonance-reasoning drive does not always function adaptively. It can lead us to reduce dissonance in illogical and maladaptive ways.

Avoiding dissonant information

People generally choose things that they believe will support their existing views.
One way avoid dissonance is to avoid situations in which we might discover facts or ideas that run counter to our current views.

Firming up an attitude to be consistent with an action

After we have irrevocably made one choice or another, any lingering doubts would be discordant with our knowledge of what we have done. According to the cognitive dissonance theory, we are motivated to set those doubts aside.
People tend to set their doubts aside after making an irrevocable decision. Even in the absence of new information, people suddenly become more confident of their choice after acting on it that they were before.

Changing an attitude to justify an action: the insufficient-justification effect

Sometime people behave in ways that run counter to their attitudes and then are faced with the dissonant cognitions. They can’t undo what they did, but they can relieve dissonance by modifying, or even reversing, their attitudes.
This change in attitude is called the insufficient-justification effect.
It occurs only if the person has no easy way to justify the behavior, given his or her previous attitude.
Requirements:

• There is no obvious, high incentive for performing the counter-attitudional action.
• The subject must perceive their action as stemming from their own free choice.