Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Introduction:

Social psychology: the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior, feelings, and thoughts in social situations

Four of the most important values that all fields must adopt to be considered scientific in nature:

• Accuracy: Gathering and evaluating information about the world in as careful, precise, and error-free manner as possible
• Objectivity: Obtaining and evaluating information in a manner that is as free from bias as possible
• Skepticism: Accepting findings as accurate only to the extent they have been verified over and over again
• Open-Mindedness: A commitment to changing one’s views if existing evidence suggests that these views are inaccurate

Why do social psychologists adopt the scientific method?

Because “common sense” provides an unreliable guide to social behavior and because our personal thought is influenced by many potential sources of bias.

Social Cognition:

Social Cognition: how we think about other people and the social world

Given our limited cognitive capacity, we often experience information overload. To cope with this condition, we use heuristics (simple rules of thumb for making decisions in a quick and relatively effortless manner)

Heuristics:

• Representativeness: the more an individual seems to resemble, or match a given group, the more likely she or he is to belong to that group
• Availability:  the easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater its impact on subsequent decisions or judgments
• Anchoring and adjustment: using a number or value as a starting point from which we then make adjustments.
  • Example: portion size effect: the tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than a smaller portion
• Status Quo: the way things are currently is better than any other alternative

Schemas: basic components of social cognition. These mental frameworks, formed through experience, help us to organize social information. Once formed, schemas exert powerful effects on what we notice (attention), enter into memory (encoding), and later remember (retrieval).

• Priming: temporary increases in the accessibility of specific schemas
  • Example: the word nurse is recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread
• Perseverance effect: tendency to cling to one’s initial belief even after receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of that belief
• Unpriming: When the schema is expressed in behavior or thoughts
• Schemas can also exert self-fulfilling effects, causing us to behave in ways that confirm them
• Metaphors:  relate an abstract concept to another dissimilar one

Controlled vs Automatic processing

Controlled processing: occurs in a systematic, logical, and highly effortful manner

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

The self

Often, others are better at predicting our behavior than us, because we know all our intentions and motives, they only see the outcome

How we present ourselves:

• Self-promotion: present our most favorable self-aspects
• Self-verification: having others agree with us about ourselves, even the negative qualities
• Ingratiation tactics: conveying our respect for others
• Self-depreciation: imply that we are not as good as the other person

Self-knowledge

• Introspection: the examination of one's own mental and emotional processes
  • Tricky because we often don’t have conscious access to the emotional factors that affect our behavioral choices, or to what actually brings us happiness
  • We may have difficulty predicting how we will feel in the future
• Think of ourselves by taking an observer’s perspective
  • We see the self in more trait terms and less responsive to situations, as observers do

Personal-versus-social identity continuum

• Personal identity level: based on intragroup comparison, we think of ourselves in terms of attributes that differentiate ourselves from other individuals
• Social identity level: based on intergroup comparison, perceptions of ourselves are based on attributes that are shared with other group members

Self-definitions

• What aspect of the self is influential at any moment in time depends on:
  • Context
  •  distinctiveness of the attribute
  • importance of the identity
  •  how others refer to us
• If we expect others to reject us for an aspect of ourselves:
  • We try to alter the part of the self that brings rejection, or
  • We rebel against those rejecting us by making that feature even more self-defining

Future possible selves

• Can motivate us to attempt self-change
• Role models: can represent future possible selves that we can attain
• Autobiographical memory: when people compare their present self to their past self, the further in the past that self is the more we downgrade it relative to our present self
• Dreaded possible selves can lead us to give up certain behaviors
• Desired possible selves can lead us to work hard to attain a behavior

Self-control

• Ego depletion: the process in which self-control is temporarily used up, which makes it more difficult to self-regulate
• Self-control can be more difficult when:
  • the initial control effort was longer
  • when no rest period is given
  •  when people lack training in self-regulation

Self-esteem

• Self-esteem changes in response to life events
• Implicit self-esteem measures: assess self-feelings of which we are not consciously aware
• Explicit self-esteem measures: assess self-feelings of which we are aware
• Initially, students who migrate show lower self-esteem, but that improves over time
• Women on average have lower self-esteem than men

Social comparison

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Causes and Cures of Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Discriminatory treatment can be:

• Short-term: minimal criteria such as being assigned to a group in class
• Long-term: ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.
• Seen as legitimate: e.g. discrimination against single people (singlism)
• Seen as illegitimate: e.g.: sexual orientation

People are risk averse with potential losses having greater psychological impact than potential gains

• People who are more privileged in some way might be more against equality, as they perceive it as a potential loss (e.g. whites against blacks)

Gender stereotypes: beliefs about the different attributes that males and females possess

• The glass ceiling effect: when qualified women have disproportionate difficulty attaining high-level position
• The glass cliff effect: women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions following a crisis and when there is greater risk of failure
• Negative stereotypes towards men too: such as being low on warmth

Tokenism: acceptance of only a few members of a particular group

• It maintains perceptions that the system is not discriminatory (belief in meritocracy)
• People who are hired as token representatives of their groups are perceived negatively by other members of the organization
• The person being in a leadership position might be undermined as simply being there to “fill the quota”

Scales

• Objective scales: the meaning is the same no matter who they are applied to
• Subjective scales: standards that can take on different meanings, depending on who they are applied to
  • Shifting standards: the idea that descriptions are made with reference to some standard of judgment, and that this standard may shift depending on the person or object being described (e.g. being tall means something different for children and adults)

Stereotypes are resistant to change, but they are revised as the relations between the groups are altered

• Example: Women who are repeatedly exposed to women faculty behaving in nontraditional roles show less agreement with gender stereotypes

Prejudice: an attitude (usually negative) toward members of a social group

• Prejudice may reflect more specific underlying emotional responses to different outgroups including fear, anger, guilt, pity, envy, and disgust
• Can be automatic and implicit in nature

Social identity theory: prejudice is derived from our tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them” and to view our own group more favorably than various outgroups

• Threat to our group’s interests can motivate prejudice
• Terror management theory: prejudice towards atheists for example, reflects our own existential anxiety

Modern racism: more subtle form of discrimination

Bona fide

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Social influence

Social influence: efforts by one or more people to change the behavior, attitudes, or feelings of one or more others

Forms of influence:

• Conformity 
• Compliance
• Obedience
• Unintentional social influence

Conformity: efforts to change others’ behavior through norms about how to behave in a given situation

• First systematically studied by Solomon Asch
• Formal: as in speed limits, rules for playing games
• Informal: as in the general rule “ don’t stare at people on an elevator”
• Cohesiveness: degree of attraction felt by an individual toward some group, group size, and type of social norm operating in that situation
  •  Descriptive norms: describe what most people do in a given situation
  •  Injunctive norms: specify how people should behave in a given situation
• Motives to conform:
  • The desire to be liked by others (normative social influence)
  •  the desire to be right or accurate (informational social influence)
• Motives to not conform:
  • Being perceived as being higher in status than those who conform
  • Conformity can induce good people to perform bad actions (e.g.: Stanford prison experiment)

Compliance: efforts to change others’ behavior through direct requests

• Foot-in-the-door technique: presenting target people with a small request and then following up with a larger request
•  Lowball procedure: After the customer accepts the good offer, something happens that makes it necessary for the salesperson to change the deal and make it less advantageous for the customer
• Door-in-the-face: starting with a very large request and then, after this is rejected, shift to a smaller request
• Playing hard to get and the deadline technique: based on the principle of scarcity, where what is scarce or hard to obtain is seen as valuable

Obedience: following direct orders or commands from others

• Many people obey orders from authorities, even if these orders require them to do harm (Milgram’s experiment)
• How it works:
  • People are more willing to obey when the authority is responsible for their actions
  • They see signs of authority which remind them of the norm “obey those in authority”
  • There is a gradual escalation of the scope of the commands given
  • The rapid pace with which such situations proceed gives no time to reflect

Unintentional social influence: influence that occurs when other people change our behavior without intending to do so

• Emotional contagion: instances in which our own emotions are influenced by those of others even when they do not intend to produce such effects
• Symbolic social influence: occurs when our thoughts about others influence our actions or thoughts even if they are not present
• Modeling: we learn from

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Aggression

Aggression is the intentional infliction of harm on others

• Theories:

  • Drive theories of aggression: aggression stems from externally elicited drives to harm or injure others
  • The frustration-aggression hypothesis: the suggestion that frustration is a very powerful determinant of aggression
  •  The general aggression model recognizes the importance of learning, various eliciting input variables, individual differences, affective states, and cognitive processes in aggression

• Frustration is a strong elicitor of aggression only under certain limited conditions. In contrast, provocation from others is a powerful elicitor of aggression

• Exposure to media violence and playing violent video games increases aggression

• Men appear to be more likely than women to engage in physical aggression, but the two genders do not differ significantly in terms of verbal aggression

• When does aggression increase?

  • High temperatures (unless it is too uncomfortable)
  • When consuming alcohol
  • There is an availability of weapons

• Bullying: repeated aggression against individuals who are unable to defend themselves against such treatment

  • Bullies and bully-victims appear to have lower self-esteem than children who are not involved in bullying
  •  In recent years, cyberbullying—bullying that occurs through electronic means has increased
  • Can be reduced by increased supervision by teachers, getting parents involved, and having popular peers serve as antibullying advocates

• Ways to reduce aggression:

  • Inducing thoughts and feelings that are incompatible with anger or aggression
  • Using cognitive techniques for changing the focus of your thought (e.g.: count to ten)
  • Punishment is rarely effective in reducing aggression

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

--Chapter 9

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Dealing with Adversity and Achieving a Happy Life

Stress: a contributing factor to psychological and physical health problems

• Can stem from traumatic events, or frequent daily hassles
• Interferes with the operation of the body’s immune system, and can be measured at the cellular level
• Stress can be reduced by social support

Loneliness: when a person has fewer and less satisfying relationships than desired

• If you see your personality as “fixed”: you are likely to react to rejection by cutting yourself off from others
• If you perceive yourself as capable of change: experience rejection as an opportunity for future improvement or growth

• Interventions related to self-change help to improve people’s resilience in the face of stress and reduce the likelihood of depression

Discrimination

• Experiencing discrimination based on disability, sexual minorities, and weight, is associated with harm to well-being
• Weight discrimination predicts mortality

Improving mental health

• Regular exercise
• Social support has shown to be beneficial for people with PTSD
• Joining groups can foster social connectedness and help prevent depression
• Practicing self-forgiveness

Is the legal system fair?

• Understand potential sources of error and bias within the current system
• Lineups used to identify criminal suspects are subject to bias if all the suspects are shown at once (simultaneous lineup)
• In legal proceedings, defendants’ race, gender, physical attractiveness, and socioeconomic status can influence jurors’ perceptions and judgments

Happiness: often referred to as subjective well-being with four basic components:

• global life satisfaction
• satisfaction with specific life domains
• a high level of positive feelings
• a minimum of negative feelings

Several factors consistently account for a nations’ average happiness levels:

• degree of social support
• per capita income
• healthy life expectancy
• freedom to make life choices
• generosity toward others
• amount of violence
• degree of corruption

On being happy:

• Happy people are more community-oriented than unhappy people
• Monetary wealth beyond a certain point does not necessarily increase happiness
• The optimum level of well-being theory: very high levels of happiness can foster complacency or lead to unjustified overoptimism
• Growing evidence supports the idea that happiness levels are fundamentally changeable
• Many of the characteristics needed to be a successful entrepreneur are the same ones that contribute to happiness levels
  • Self-determination theory: entrepreneurs typically have strong intrinsic motivation

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition)