Social influences on behavior - a summary of chapter 14 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)

Psychology
Chapter 14
Social influences on behavior

Human behavior is influenced powerful by the social environment in which it occurs.
We behave as we do not just because of who we are, but also because of the social situations in which we find ourselves.

Social pressure: the entire set of psychological forces that are exerted on us by others whether real or imagined.
We are most strongly influenced by those people who are physically or psychologically closed to us.
Social pressure arises from the ways we interpret and respond emotionally to the social situations around us.
It promotes our social acceptability and helps create order and predictability in social interactions.

Effects on being observed and evaluated

Facilitating and interfering effects of an audience

Social facilitation: the enhancing effect of an audience on task performance.
Social interference: a decline in performance when observers are present.

Facilitation of ‘easy’ tasks, interference with ‘hard’ ones

The presence of others facilitates performance of dominant actions and interferes with performance of nondominant actions.
Dominant actions: actions that are so simple, speciestypical, or well learned that they can be produced automatically, with little consciously thought
Nondominant actins: actions that require considerable conscious thought or attention

The presence of an audience increases a person’s level of drive or arousal.
The arousal increases the person’s effort, which facilitates dominant tasks where the amount of effort determines the degree of success.
The arousal interferes with controlled, calm, conscious thought and attention and thereby worsens performance of nondominant actions.

Evaluation anxiety as a basis for social interference

The primary cause of social interference is evaluation anxiety.
Social interference increases when the observer are high in status or expertise and are present explicitly to evaluate. It also increases when subjects are made to feel unconfident and more anxious about their ability.
It decreases when subjects feel confident about their ability.

Choking under pressure: the working-memory explanation

‘Choking’ is especially likely to occur with tasks that make strong demands on working memory.
The worry takes space out of the memory span.

Choking on academic tests

Distracting and disturbing thoughts flood their minds and interfere with performance on tests.
With sufficient pressure, choking can even occur in students who normally do not suffer from tests anxiety. It occurs specifically with tests items that make the highest demands on working memory.

Stereotype threat as a special cause of choking

Stereotype threat: threat that test-takers experience when they are reminded of the stereotypical belief that the group to which they belong is not expected to do well on the test.
It produce its effects by increasing anxiety and mental distraction. It undermines confidence, while at the same time increasing motivation to do well, resulting in increased anxiety.

The increased anxiety reduces performance at least in part by occupying working memory with worrisome thoughts thereby reducing the amount of working memory capacity available to solve the problems.

Stereotype threat reduces performance on problems that tax working memory more than on problems that can be answered largely through recall from long-term memory.

Simple awareness of the stereotype threat phenomenon helps people overcome it.

Impression management: behavior as performance

Social pressures influences our choices of what to say and do in front of other people.
We strike to influence their thoughts.

Impression management: the entire set of ways by which people consciously and unconsciously modify their behavior to influence others’ impressions of them.

Humans as actors and as politicians

To do what we want to do in life, we need the approval and cooperation of other people. To secure this we perform and compromise in various ways.
We try to make ourselves look good to other people.

In general, we are more concerned with impression management with new acquaintances than with familiar friends and companions.

We may or may not be conscious of our delicate balancing act between showing off and appearing modest, or between sincerity and ingratiation, but the act requires effort nevertheless.

Effects of others’ examples and opinions

Others influence our behavior also through the examples they set.

Two reasons we tend to conform to others’ examples.

• Informational influence. Other people provide information
• Normative influence. To promote group cohesion and acceptance by the group.

Asch’s classic conformity experiments

Under some conditions, conformity can lead people to say or do things that are objectively ridiculous.
Conformity decreases when subjects can respond privately rather than publicly.

A single dissension from the majority can have beneficial effects not just through reducing normative pressure to conform but also through informational means, by shaking people out of their complacent view that the majority must be right.
When people hear a dissenting opinion, they become motivated to examine the evidence more closely, and that can lead to a better solution.

Norms as forces for helpful and harmful actions

Social context consists of what we hear others say or see them do, various telltale signs that inform us implicitly about which behaviors are normal in the setting in which we find ourselves and which behaviors are not.

The “Broken windows” theory of crime

Crime is encouraged by physical evidence of chaos and lack of care.

People are motivated to behave in ways they see as normal.

Effects of implicit norms in public-service messages

Public-serve messages would be more effective if they emphasized that the majority of people behave in the desired way, not the undesired way, and implicitly portrayed the undesired way as abnormal.

Conformity as a basis for failure to help: the passive bystander effect

A person is much more likely to help in an emergency if he or she is the only witness than if other witnesses are also present.

• The more people present, the less any one person feels it is his or her responsibility to help
• Conformity. The inaction of people is a source of information that may lead you to question your initial judgment. It also establishes an implicit social norm.

Emotional contagion as a force for group cohesion

A social group is a unified collection of people.
People in a social group behave more like one another than the same people would if they were not in a group.
They tend automatically to mimic one another’s postures, mannerisms, styles of speech and take the same emotions.

By seeing others’ emotional expressions, group members know who needs help, who should be avoided, and who is most approachable at the moment for help.
People tend automatically to adopt the emotions that they perceive in those around them, and this helps the group to function as a unit.
The spread of emotions can occur completely unconsciously.

Social pressure in group discussions

When people get together to discuss an idea or make a decision, their explicit goal usually is to share information.
But group members also influence one another through normative social pressure. There is unstated pressure to agree.

Group discussion can make attitudes more extreme

When a group is evenly split on an issue, the result is often a compromise.
Each side partially convinces the other, so the majority leave the room with a more moderate view on the issue than they had when they entered.

If the group is not evenly split, discussion typically pushes that majority toward a more extreme view in the same direction as their initial view. → Group polarization
Discussions held separately by each group widened the gasps between the groups.

Group polarization can have socially serious consequences.

What causes group polarization?

Two classes of explanations for group polarization

• Informational
  Focus on the pooling of arguments that occurs during group discussion. People vigorously put forth arguments favoring the side toward which they lean and tend to withhold arguments that favor the other side.
  Simply hearing others repeat one’s own arguments in the course of discussion can have a validating effect.
• Normative
  People’s concerns about being approved of by other group members.
  • One-upmanship hypothesis: group members vie with one another to become the most vigorous supporter of the position that most people favor. His competition pushes the group as a whole toward an increasingly extreme position.
  • Group differentiation hypothesis: people who see themselves as a group often exaggerate their shared group opinions as a way of clearly distinguishing themselves from other groups.

Conditions that lead to good or bad group decisions

To the degree that the group decision arises from the sharing of the best available evidence and logic, it is likely to be better.
The degree that it arises from shared misinformation, selective withholding of arguments on the less-favored side, and participants’ attempts to please or impress one another rather than to arrive at the best decision, the group decision is likely to be worse than the decision most group members would have made alone.

Groupthink: a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive ingroup, when the members’ striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.
The ability of groups to solve problems and make effective decisions is improved if:

• The leaders refrain from advocating a view themselves and instead encourage group members to present their own views and challenge one another.
• The group focus on the problem to be solved rather than on developing group cohesion.

Effects of others’ requests

One of the least subtle yet most potent forms of social influence is the direct request.
If the request is small and made politely, we tend to comply automatically. This tendency increases when our attention is otherwise occupied.
Even if the request is onerous or offensive, people often find it hard to look a requester in the eye and say no.

Sales pressure: some principles of compliance

Cognitive dissonance as a force for compliance

A number of standard sales tricks make use of cognitive dissonance to elicit compliance.

• Throwing the low ball: increasing the price after commitment to buy.
• Putting a foot in the door: making a small request to prepare the ground for a large one.

The reciprocity norm as a force for compliance

People all over the world abide by a reciprocity norm. People everywhere feel obliged to return favors. 
This norm is so ingrained that people may even feel driven to reciprocate favors that they didn’t want in the first place.

Shared identity, or friendship, as a force for compliance

We automatically tend to like and trust people who have something in common with us or whom we have enjoyed some friendly conversation, and we are inclined to do business with those people.
Even a brief period of silent exposure makes the person seem familiar and therefore trustworthy.

Conditions that promote obedience: Milgram’s experiments

Obedience: those cases of compliance in which the requester is perceived as an authority figure or leader and the request is perceived as an order.

Explaining the finding

The experiment is replicated dozens of times, using many different groups of subjects, and yielded essentially the same results each time.

Factors that contribute to the psychological pressure to obey:

• The norm of obedience to legitimate authorities.
  To norm of obedience.
• The experimenter’s self-assurance and acceptance of responsibility
• The proximity of the experimenter and the distance of the learner
• The absence of an alternative model of how to behave
• The incremental nature of the requests

Critiques of Miligram’s experiments

• Ethical critique
• The question of generalizability to real-world crimes of obedience

To cooperate or not: prosocial behavior and the dilemma of social life

Prosocial behavior and cooperation are every bit as much of evolved human nature as are aggression and competition.
Two components of prosocial behavior:

• Altruism:
  Behaviors in which an actor tries to help another individual achieve some goal at some expense (and no obvious benefit) to the actor
• Mutualism or cooperation:
  Two or more individuals coordinate their actions to produce some mutually beneficial outcome, especially one that could not be achieved if working alone.

Those two develop relatively early in childhood, are mediated by empathy and do not increase with rewards.
Humans, from a very early age, not only have the social-cognitive abilities to engage in cooperative behaviors, but see cooperation in social games as normative.

There is always conflict between cooperation and looking out for number one.
Social dilemmas: the tension between cooperation and defection (acting for one’s own selfish good at the expense of others).
A social dilemma exists whenever a particular course of action or inaction will benefit the individual buy harm the others in the group and cause more harm than good to everyone if everyone takes that course.

The tragedy of the commons: a social-dilemma allegory

We are constantly involved in social dilemmas, some as grand in scale as to encompass all members of our species as a single group and others much smaller in scale.

The logic of social dilemmas exemplified in games

The one-trial prisoner’s dilemma game

• The highest individual payoff goes to the player who defects while the other cooperates
• The lowest individual payoff goes to the player who cooperates while the other defects
• The highest total payoff to the two players combined occurs if both cooperate
• The lowest total payoff occurs if they both defect

The one-trial version of the game, each player plays only once with a given other player.

The iterative prisoner’s dilemma game: the power of reciprocity

In the iteratively game, two players play the same prisoner’s dilemma repeatedly with each other for a series of trials rather than just once.

Logic and selfishness, which lead players to defect in the one-trial game, can lead them to cooperate in the iterative game.

Decline in cooperation as the number of players increases

Each individual player’s choice to contribute or not has a bigger impact on the whole group effort if the number of players is small than if it is large, so the temptation to refrain from contributing becomes greater as the number of players increases.
The larger the group, the greater is the diffusion of responsibility, and the less is the likelihood that a given individual will contribute.

Conditions that promote cooperation

People cooperate more in social dilemmas than would be expected if their choices were based solely on immediate self-interest.

Evolution, cultural history, and our own individual experiences have combined to produce in us decision-making mechanisms that are not confined to an immediate cost-benefit analyses.
Consciously or unconsciously, we take into account factors that have to do with not just our short-term interests, but also our long-term interests, which often reside in maintaining good relationships with other people.

Accountability, reputation and reciprocity as forces for cooperation

Cooperation is successful because each person is accountable for his or her actions. Through that accountability, it establishes a reputation as one who helps others and reciprocates help given by others but who won’t be exploited by those who fail to reciprocate.

When players of laboratory social-dilemma games believe that others, who can identify them, will learn about their choices, they behave more generously or more cooperative than they do in anonymous conditions.

When players are free to choose the partners with whom they play, they favor those who have already developed a reputation for cooperation.

People everywhere tend to keep track of the degree to which others are helpful and to offer the greatest help to those who have themselves been most helpful in the past.

Norms of fairness and punishment of cheaters as forces for cooperation

People everywhere seem to have a strong sense of fairness, which goes beyond immediate self-interest.

In public good games with more than two players, people are willing to give up some of their own earnings in order to punish a player who has contributed substantially less than his or her share to the public good. Altruistic punishment
The punishment, in such cases, involves removing some of the winnings that the ‘cheater’ has garnered.

The fact that people are willing to go out of their way and pay a cost to punish cheaters may be a fact of human nature, and/or norm resulting from cultural training, that helps maintain cooperation in human societies.
Such behavior is mediated by emotions.

Different types of social decision-making are associated with activation in specific brain regions.

Social identity promotes cooperation within groups and competition across groups

People in all types of social-dilemma games cooperate much more when they think of the other players as group-mates than when they think of them as separate individuals or as members of other groups.
People are more likely to feel empathy for in-group than for out-group members.
When groups are in competition with one another, people may experience schadenfreude (pleasure at another’s pain).
Identification with a group increases people’s willingness to help members of their own group but decreases willingness to help members of another group.

Group against group: lessons from Robberts cave

The escalation of conflict

Competitions promote three changes in relationships among people within and between groups:

• Within-group solidarity
• Negative stereotyping of the other group
• Hostile between-group interactions

Resolving the conflict by creating common goals

Superordinate goals. Goals the were desired by both groups and could be achieved best through cooperation between the groups.
The intergroup harmony brought on by superordinate goals involves the fading of group boundaries.