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 negative consequences.
Stereotypes lead to perceive uniformity among group members and rigid expectations.
Stereotypes can be accurate or inaccurate
No good yardstick is available for measuring the accuracy or inaccuracy of most stereotypes.
Most stereotypes have some accuracy at least in the the sense that they reflect small differences that exist between groups or small differences that group members themselves feel to be true about their groups.
Stereotypes can be inaccurate.
Every stereotype is inaccurate when it is viewed as applying to every member of a group.
Seeking motives behind stereotyping
Early theorists traced prejudice and extreme negative stereotypes to deep inner conflicts in a few disturbed individuals, rather than to more normal social motives such as mastery and connectedness.
Authoritarian personality: based on Freudian ideas, people who are prejudiced because they cannot accept their own hostility, believe uncritically in the legitimacy of authority, and see their own inadequacies in others.
This explanation does not stand up against the accumulated evidence.
Motives for forming stereotypes: mastery through summarizing personal experiences
Stereotypes can be learned through personal experience with group members, but may still be biased because of emotions that arise during cross-group interactions and because people pay attention to extremes or inaccurately perceive groups’ characteristics. Social roles often shape group members’ behaviors, but people attribute the behaviors to group members’ inner characteristics. Learning about groups can also take place through media portrayals as well as firsthand experiences.
As people encounter group members, they try to make sense of their world by summarizing the information they get about those groups.
Bringing to mind positively evaluated group members can make feelings about a group more positive as well.
Positive or negative impressions of individual group members are important contributors to people’s overall impressions of a group.
Between-group interactions generate emotion
Feelings of uncertainty and concern often arise when people interact with novel groups, and these feelings can influence the stereotypes people form.
Why?
Emotions become associated with group encounters. Classical conditioning.
People notice some members more than others
Our attention is typically drawn to what is unusual, unexpected, or salient.
Distinctive individuals can have a disproportionate impact on the formation of group stereotypes.
Some information attracts more attention than other information
Biases in processing lead us from as association between unusual or distinctive characteristics and are rare or infrequently encountered groups.
These processes can operate even if we have no prior stereotype of a group.
Illusory correlation: a perceived association between two characteristics that are not actually related.
When something occurs infrequently, it becomes distinctive and people pay attention to it.
Social roles trigger correspondence biases.
Regardless of how often we encounter a group, what we see the group doing has a big impact on our impressions.
Even this kind of firsthand observation can lead to biased stereotypes when a group’s social role shapes the behavior that can be observed.
Our stereotypes of particular groups often come to reflect the social roles occupied by those groups.
Stereotypes may not reflect what groups are actually like, instead, they reflect the roles groups paly in society relative to the perceiver.
Social roles and gender stereotypes
Male’s and females’ differing social roles contribute to gender stereotypes.
Learning stereotypes from the media
Media portrayals often reflect stereotypes that are deeply integrated in a culture.
Mainstream media help convey stereotypes.
Video games fail to accurately represent the population.
Media stereotyping is and underrepresentation is quite pervasive.
Gender stereotypes and the media
Commercials typically reinforce gender stereotypes.
Motives for forming stereotypes: connectedness to others
Social learning contributes to stereotypes. Stereotypes and discriminatory behavior are often accepted and endorsed as right and proper by members of a particular group. Group members learn such stereotypes from family and peers. As stereotypes are communicated, they may become stronger.
Learning stereotypes from others
Parents, teachers, and peers offer us our first lessons about group differences.
Children can pick up stereotypes simply by observing and imitating their elders.
Social norms: generally accepted ways of thinking, feelings, or behaving that people in a group agree on and endorse as right and proper.
When stereotypes are deeply embedded in the social norms of a culture, people learn them naturally as part of growing up.
Social communication of stereotypes
Stereotypes may even become stronger through the process of social communication.
When people form impressions of a group by being told about them secondhand, their impressions are more stereotypic than those of people who learn about the group through firsthand experience.
The secondhand impressions, then formed, remain highly stereotypic even after later direct experience with the group itself.
Discussion of group members’ behaviors among several people tends to make their impressions more stereotypic.
Motives for forming stereotypes: justifying inequalities
The stereotypes prevalent in a society often serve to justify existing social inequalities. They do so by portraying groups as deserving their social roles and positions on the basis of their own characteristics.
Group stereotypes often have a strong evaluative tinge.
Once a stereotype exists, it influences what people think and how they behave toward members of stereotyped groups.
Activation of stereotypes and prejudice
Once established, stereotypes and prejudice can be activated by obvious cues, use of group labels, or the presence of a group member, especially a minority in a social situation. Some stereotypes and prejudices come to mind automatically.
Some categories seem so important that we use them to classify people even when they appear irrelevant to the social context.
What activates stereotypes
The more obvious and salient the cues to category membership, the more likely is tis that the category and its related stereotypes will come to mind.
The deliberate use of prejorative group labels, ethnic or sexist jokes, or slurs can bring stereotypes to a listerner’s mind at once.
A category becomes particularly salient when only a single member of the group is present among multiple members of another group.
Stereotypes can be activated automatically
If reminders of a group membership surrounds us, categories come to mind can set off ac vicious cycle.
The more often a category is used, the more accessible it becomes, the more accessible it is, the more it is used.
A stereotype sometimes becomes so well learned and so often used that its activation becomes automatic.
Prejudice can be activated automatically
Facial electromyography (EMG), an direct measure of attitudes. When people react positively to an attitude object, activity in the zogoatic muscles increases, whereas negative responses are accompanied by increased activity in the corrugator muscles. It can be measured by electroded placed at the indicated positions.
Measuring stereotypes and prejudice
Stereotypes and prejudice can be measured by asking plain questions or in more subtle ways that make it difficult for people to hide their stereotypes or prejudiced feelings. People may actually hold conflicting views.
Implicit measures: alternatives to self-report measures.
Implicit and explicit measures of stereotypes and prejudice may measure different aspects of an individual’s overall views of a social group.
Impact of stereotypes on judgments and actions
Stereotypes can affect our interpretations of behaviors performed by members of groups, and also our actions toward them. In extreme cases, stereotypes may even affect life-or-death judgments. Stereotypes have greater effects when judgments must be made under time pressure and when emotions are intense. Feelings of power can impact stereotype usage.
Effects of cognitive capacity
Research shows that time pressure or other conditions that limit people’s cognitive capacity generally increase the effect of stereotypes on their judgments.
Sometimes the situation is too complex to process adequately.
Familiarity can impact stereotype usage because people have a sense that they do not need to think carefully about previously encountered material which they already thought about deeply and carefully in the past.
Effect of ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ people.
Effects of emotion
By disrupting careful processing and short-circuiting attention, strong emotions increase our reliance on stereotypes.
Effects of power
When stereotyping others serves a goal, powerful people will do it more readily. When avoiding stereotypes will serves a goal, powerful people will be more apt to avoid their use.
Trying to overcome prejudice and stereotype effects
People may try to overcome the effects of stereotypes and prejudice by:
Al these tactics require motivation and cognitive capacity.
Suppressing stereotypes and prejudice
Well-intentioned efforts at suppressing the stereotype might have a negative result later.
Once-suppressed thoughts often rebound and become even more accessible. Suppressing a stereotype may make its content more likely to influence our thoughts and feelings later.
It may also not always be possible.
Correcting biased judgments
Being unprejudiced does not mean never having stereotypic thoughts or feelings, but rather acknowledging them and making a conscious effort to avoid being influenced by them. It is not easy.
Activating counterstereotypic information
Reduces implicit stereotypes.
Beyond simple activation: effects of stereotypes on considered judgments
Even when people make considered judgments, established stereotypes exert an effect. People tend to look for stereotype-confirming, on disconfirming, evidence and to interpret ambiguous information as stereotype-consistent. People may even elicit stereotype-consistent information from others by the way they interact with them.
When the judgment is important and when we choose to devote attention to the task, we may try to go beyond group stereotypes and collect further information about people as individuals.
When we do this, stereotypic information is less likely to come to mind.
But stereotypes can subtly bias the way we see other people.
Seeking evidence to confirm the stereotype: just tel me where to look
Interpreting evidence to fit the stereotype: well, if you look at it that way
When information is ambiguous, activation of a stereotype influences our interpretation of the behavior, making it seem consistent with the stereotype.
Comparing information to stereotypic standards: that looks good, for a group member
Stereotypes shift our standards for judgments.
By shifting our judgments, at least on characteristics like ‘tall’ that involve a strong subjective element.
Constraining evidence to fit the stereotype: the self-fulfilling prophecy
Contact hypothesis: the theory that certain types of direct contact between members of hostile groups will reduce stereotyping and prejudice.
Barriers to stereotype change
Even when people obtain information that is blatantly inconsistent with a stereotype, stereotypes may remain unchanged. This is because people can:
Explaining away inconsistent information
Compartmentalizing inconsistent information
Subtypes: a narrower and more specific social group, such as housewife, that included withing a broad social group, like women.
Protects stereotyped beliefs from change.
Differentiating atypical group members: contrast effects
Seeing stereotype-disconfirming individuals as remarkable or exceptional people.
Perceivers can decide that that these unusual people are not true group members at all.
Overcoming stereotype defenses: the kind of contact that works
Effective contact has to provide stereotype-inconsistent information that is repeated, that involves many group members and that comes from typical group members. Under these conditions, contact does reduce stereotypes.
Contact that is forced has stronger effects on reducing prejudice.
Repeated inconsistency: an antidote for explaining away
Stereotype change requires counterstereotypic behaviors o be performed more than once or twice.
Widespread inconsistency: an antidote for subtyping
Being typical as well as inconsistent: an antidote for contrast effects
If your goals is stereotype change, you should repeatedly remind others of your group membership, so that they cannot treat you as an exception to the rule.
Reducing prejudice and though contact
Pleasant contact with group members of other groups can reduce prejudice, even when that same contact does not alter stereotypes. Contact that involves the formation of actual friendships across group lines es especially effective in reducing prejudice.
A single positive encounter with a member of another group may be sufficient to reduce prejudicial evaluations, even if it cannot alter stereotypes.
Even more minimal forms of contact can create positive feelings about group members
Friendships may be especially effective in reducing prejudice.
Even knowing that someone else from your group has a member of the other group as a friend is sufficient.
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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
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