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We’re all basic social psychologists all constantly using social assumptions, social derivations of what we see and observe of other people.
We, humans, are a social species -> Social brain hypothesis. Our prefrontal cortex has increased considerable in size over the ages. This led to Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis and experiment. In order to perform well in larger social groups, we need bigger brains. large correlation between larger brain and larger social groups.
Social psychology: what happens to an individual in a group and situations on a group, aka how context influences an individual.
Situational factors used to explain large events such as terrorist attacks or genocide. What makes good people perform such bad act?
Kurt Lewin: Behaviour = f(person x situation). If you want to understand a behaviour, you must look at what happens to a person who finds themselves in a particular situation.
Almost all situations we find ourselves in are social.
Three aspects within social psychology: cognition, motivation and behaviour (interaction between the other two).
Recurring themes: Individual vs group, cognition vs affect, genes vs environment, evolution vs culture.
If two variable correlate is can be in two ways. X causes Y, X and Y cause Z or Z influences X and Y. If two things seem to correlate but in reality don’t, it is called spurious correlation. If you have a very large data set, it is easy to find any correlation that seems to be true. Correlations are easier to obtain, but they do not say anything about cause and effect, so that is why we perform experiments.
Social psychology often deals with more sensitive topics. Now, we are bound to ethics, but a lot of our information we get from experiments in the past that seriously lacked any ethics boundaries. Important now is that people sign their complete consent.
Themes of the topic social cognition
We tend to avoid most cognitive effort, we dislike thinking deeply about a lot of things, as well as making and effort of controlling, thinking about and registering thoughts. Decision fatigue means that the more decisions are already made and the later in the day it is, the less likely you will make a cognitive decision. Heuristics: things that create decision fatigue.
A lot of our heuristics are based mostly on schema’s. Schema’s are mental frameworks that organize social information and guide our perceptions. There are different types of schema’s: Person schema, role schema, script self-schema’s. Schema’s guide our attention, what we store in our memory and what we retrieve from our memory. Our attention’s focus can make us miss a lot of crucial information -> our schema’s tell us where to focus our attention.
In addition to that, we tend to seek out information which will confirm our schema’s or what we already know, in result making us act along the lines of what we already know.
Schema’s come to mind quickly because they are automatic. Automaticity means the things we do on an automatic basis. This is either because of our schema’s or because of priming. Automatism are very efficient, especially when dealing with a lot of information.
We also deal with negativity bias. A bad sensation is always more powerful than a good one, simply because bad thing can have a quicker, larger influence on our lives than good things.
Opposing is the positivity bias. This takes two forms. Optimistic bias is the tendency to overlook risks and expect good outcomes. Planning fallacy is the tendency to think that a task takes less time than it actually will.
Regret is a very strong emotion that affects our behaviour. It is a consequence of counterfactual thinking – comparing what is and what could have been and deciding that the present is the worst-case scenario.
We are more likely to remember positive things when we are feeling good and remember negative things when we feel like shit. This is called Mood Dependent Memory and is an example of affect. Affect can give us ‘information’, for example if we have a bad feeling completely unrelated to the situation, we are more likely to judge the situation on that feeling.
Social Perception, the perceiving and understanding of others
Pareidolia; seeing faces in objects or scenarios.
When we perceive others, we don’t necessarily see them. Often, we fill in things from our memory, and thus don’t notice minor differences or changes. This is called change blindness.
Change blindness has a lot of influence on for instance witness testimonies, and their reliability.
Themes of social perception
Nonverbal communication
Basic channels of nonverbal communication:
Paul Eckman: humans have some innate, basic facial expressions to express the 6 basic emotions, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.
Eye gaze: humans have an advanced gaze detection system in our vision cortex. We are good at determining what people are looking at. We easily detect abnormal postures from our periphery. Our white eyes sclera help us make good assessments of what people are looking at, because it can help us determining what the person’s pupils are directed at.
However, simply faces without bodies can be quite useless. The body language can tell us which emotion the face is making.
Deception: nonverbal cues, however, are often faint and unreliable (Aldert Vrij).
Social function of emotion: Are emotions between people rather than inside individuals?
A smile can: get someone a lower punishment, get a greater customer commitment, more likely to get hired somewhere, get higher tips as a waiter.
Attributions
Judgement of attributions stable/unstable and internal/eternal. If influences are stable/internal there is an individual ability, stable/external has to do with task difficulty, unstable/internal is effort, unstable/external is just luck.
Factor is: | Internal | External |
Stable | Ability | Task difficulty |
Unstable | Effort | Luck |
Correspondence bias is the fundamental attribution error. We tend to take a situational thing and attribute it to a person or happening as a whole. This is because; 1. We tend to focus on a person rather than a situation, therefor attribute something to a person, 2. We only have a limited perspective, there are a lot of factors we have no knowledge of and 3. We have a limited cognitive capacity.
Occasionally we do a situational correction, where we correct our attribution.
Actor/observer bias: we assume people have more choice in matters than they do.
Self-serving bias: we see ourselves more favourably, attribute positive to internal, attribute negative to external.
This is because we only have our own, individual point of reference/perspective.
Kelley’s attribution theory;
All three of these are high? Tis is an external cause. All three low? This is an internal cause.
Impression formation and management
We form a very quick impression of people. This we evaluate on mostly their ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, do we like or dislike this person? We just infer certain traits of a person called central traits, which are closely associated to a lot of other traits
Implicit Personality Theory: we like to think certain traits imply that other traits are also present. We tend to pay more attention to a person’s negative traits. However, we are more likely to express positive evaluations (to seem nice and polite).
Motivate Person Perception: How we perceive others is influenced by what we want or trying to achieve. What are our goals on interacting with this person? What is our emotional state? Anticipation of a future interaction helps remember attributes and behaviour.
Impression management:
Self-other discrepancy: the difference between intentions and behaviour, dependant on point of view. Often, other people are better in estimating social behaviours. We ourselves are often better at saying how often we engage in events
Can you know yourself?
Introspection: looking in yourself. But conscious access to why we behave a certain way is sometimes difficult.
Affective forecasting bias: this is 1) because an over-projection of current feelings. Because things feel very extreme right now, you will assume that you will feel the same way later, and 2) failure to consider context, which means we tend to forget other factors.
Do we want to know ourselves?
Social comparison: comparing ourselves to others (duh). We often make a comparison right away, and only later assess if that comparison is useful. For an accurate self-image, we compare ourselves with similar others. If we want to feel better about ourselves, we compare ourselves with someone less than us (downward comparison). If we want to know what we want to strive for, set goals, we compare ourselves with someone better than us (upward comparison).
When comparing ourselves with similar people, we will feel bad when someone is better at you when you care about the topic. When the topic is irrelevant, we are more likely to feel happy with their accomplishments. Similarly, we feel bad when someone individually is better than you, but if someone in a group is better but it helps the group along, we are more likely to feel good about it.
How do we define ourselves?
There are two types of identity: personal and social. Social Identity Theory says that how we identify ourselves is often based on context. It also depends on who or what we compare ourselves to. Also important is centrality. This means that things such as religion or sexuality are often more stable.
We also define ourselves based on disapproval of others. It can either result in people solving the disapproved behaviour, or social creativity, which is defiance in order to recover our self-esteem.
Basking in reflected glory: riding on the success of a group you might identify yourself with.
Cutting off reflected failure: the opposite, trying not to associate yourself with failure of a group
When is a group a group?
When there is; interaction, mutual goals or a striving to achieve a common identity.
Evolutionary explanation for groups: it is safer. Task goals: there is more knowledge and information within a group. Social goal: the need to belong somewhere.
Key components of groups
Status: External -> Between groups, resulting in pride. Internal -> Hierarchy, resulting in respect. Factors for hierarchy; 1) Characteristics such as gender, sex etc, 2) Behaviour, 3) Seniority
Roles: Formal roles: explicitly discussed, such as assistant or coffee bringer. Informal roles: Not discussed, but people take roles, such as the one always asking how everyone feels
Norms: shared expectations about what is expected of group members. The more you identify with the group, the closer you are.
Cohesiveness: forces that makes a group stay together. Effect: joy of group and likeliness to recruit new members.
Decisions in groups
Polarisation: opinions become more extreme.
Group think: Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing opposing viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences. There is an illusion of being invulnerable.
Lecture topic: attitudes
Attitudes are global evaluations of any aspect of our social environment. These can be good or bad, but they are basically a judgement of any and everything that happens around us.
Functions of attitudes
Explicit attitudes: conscious, accessible attitudes that we control and are aware of
Implicit attitudes: unconscious associations between objects or people or situation and give evaluative response.
Implicit Association Test (IAT): tests associations between words/concepts judging on reaction time. It can indeed show prejudice, but is also dependant of mood, context and recent events
Social learning and attitudes
There are different ways of coming into a certain behaviour or attitude.
Attitudes and behaviour
Attitude and behaviour can mismatch. This can be because general attitudes cannot predict very specific behaviours (influenced by more than an attitude)
What leads to a behaviour?
Attitudes + subjective norms + behavioural control -> behavioural intention -> behaviour
Attitudes vary on:
Attitude change
Attitude construction/maintenance. There are two ways of forming attitudes, fast and efficient, and accurate. Accurate descriptions are pro’s and cons of a situation. Fast and efficient features are also called peripheral features. Peripheral features are thing as status, ego, pleasing views. They can also be the number of arguments, a document of image’s lay out, and scientific jargon.
The easiest way to change someone’s attitude is through peripheral features.
However we do resist changes of attitudes. This happens in 3 ways. If we feel like the attitude will restrict our personal freedom, we will resist. This is the same when we know people will come and try to change our attitude – such as in a debate. And if we know, then we also just might to avoid it altogether.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when your attitude does not meet your behaviour. To get out of it, we might do one of three things. We either change the behaviour, change the attitude or simply deny that the attitude and behaviour so not match up.
Justification of effort means that we change our attitude to justify the amount the effort we put into a task.
Lecture topic: Motivation
In the industrial revolution, awareness was raised for the difference between just doing your job and actually being properly motivated. Most famous experiment: Hawthorne factory in Chicago. Study in lighting in the factory and motivation. Brighter light and less light both improved production -> attention improved performance, aka motivation.
Hawthorne effect: people perform better when they get a little attention. This is important in experiments because this can be a confounding variable, meaning you have to test with a control group that there is not a Hawthorne effect taking place instead of what you are looking for.
There are three aspects in work motivation. These are effort, direction and persistence. With no motivation, effort will always be low. Direction is about focus, are you doing something relevant or not. Direction is the focus of your effort. Persistence is about not giving up after just a single speedbump.
But motivation isn’t just motivation. Performance = wanting x being able (having the skills to do it)
How strong is the link between motivation and performance?
Cerasoli, Nicklin and Ford (2014): 18% of performance = motivation
There are two types or motivation: Intrinsic and Extrinsic. Also two types of performance: quality and quantity. The question is, do you need the same type of motivation for different types of performance. When dealing with quality performance, intrinsic motivation is mostly important. With quantity, this has more to do with extrinsic.
Important with extrinsic motivation is that there is direct link between a behaviour and the punishment/reward.
Theories of motivation
Four types of theories: Needs, Expectation, Fairness, Justice – all try to explain the processes underlying motivation.
Need: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a pyramid building up 5 needs.
You work from the bottom up, you first need to have the lowest layer to have the fourth, you need the fourth to have the third, etc.
Alderfer’s ERG theory works the same way, except there are only three categories: Existence, Relatedness and Growth.
Lecture topic: stereotypes and prejudice
Social categorisation’s ABC (real order CAB)
Cognitive: Stereotyping
Why do we stereotype? They are social categorisations, not bad, or good, not accurate or inaccurate. They are a faster cognitive way of predicting behaviour. A stereotype is a generalisation. We exaggerate differences and disregard similarities between groups. Once information gets overly simplified, it can become a stereotype. The problem is that stereotypes often are of groups of people, but we apply them to individuals.
Behavioural: Discrimination
Zero-sum situations occur when people outside of minorities feel like they have to sacrifice part of their privilege. This is because people are loss averse. The majority is afraid that they will lose parts of their privilege of advantages and thus sink into discrimination and stereotypes to keep their control.
Objective vs subjective scales: how can we make sure a judgement does not involve a subjective prejudice.
Jane Elliot’s experiment aka the brown-blue eye experiment
Prejudice: causes
*In bold was discussed in lecture 4
Remedies for prejudice:
The Contact hypothesis is that the more in contact you are with someone, the less prejudiced you become. You will start seeing more similarities, seeing more mistakes in the stereotypes and see the outgroup as more diverse. It works especially if there is: an equal status between people, there is a common goal, there is intergroup cooperation, support of authorities and actual personal interaction.
The Para-social contact hypothesis: via media such as shows, movies, social media etc.
Unlearning stereotypes is hard. Suppressing or negating them does not work
Lecture topic: Diversity and stress
Diversity is the human subjective opinion of what makes us different. Several things factor into this:
Stress
There are a lot of causes for stress, but the following are the main ones in terms of social psychology:
Consequences of too much stress
Coping
There are different forms of coping:
Lecture topic: Romantic relationships and prosocial behaviour
The need to belong
Every person has, to some extent, a desire to make and keep close relationships with other people and a need to affiliate with others. This is why social exclusion/ostracism (being excluded, rejected to ignored) is so extremely hurtful and harmful.
In result, people compensate for their loneliness, which is called social snacking. Nowadays, people go online for this, try to get likes on posts etc. We also tend to seek out company from people who feel the same as us. This means that miserable people seek out other miserable people
Rules of attraction
Evolution and gender differences
Cheating on a partner is regardless of gender. The more power we have, the more likely infidelity is.
Evolutionary accounts are very important for us to explain odd, lingering behaviour. There are often many alternative explanations that refute evolution, because we cannot know precisely exactly what happened in the past.
Prosocial behaviour: why do people help?
Our help varies on similarity, gender, attractiveness and self-focus (e. g. social class)
Obstructions of helping
Lecture topic: Power, politics, conflict and negotiation.
Power
Power is the ability to make someone else do something they otherwise maybe wouldn’t do. Power in itself is extremely necessary for achieving organisational goals. Therefore it is often called a necessary evil. It can lead to competition, better decision making, coalition building and positive change.
There are two types of power; formal and informal.
Formal power depends on a couple things. Legitimacy is also called legal power – you have the right to do something. Reward power is the ability to rewards or promote someone. Coercion is related to punishment, the power to fire or punish you. Information power is related to who knows more and thus have more responsibility. Formal power is related to extrinsic motivation.
Informal power: expert power, having a talent or being good at what you do. This is also related to scarcity. If you are one of the few to do something, you power is greater. Role model power – are you a role model to someone, then you have responsibility and power. Personality power is also called charismatic power. It is when you have the charisma to make people believe you have the power to change things. Informal power is related to intrinsic motivation.
Consequences of power: cognitive, affective, behavioural
Cognitive: big difference in perspective taking between high and low power. People with high power tend to be more self-oriented. People with more power also tend to stereotype more. People with power often also learn from their mistakes more and tend to think more abstractly.
Affective: people with high power have more to testosterone, thus tend to be quicker angered. Powerlessness is more related to cortisol and stress. People with high power express more positive than negative emotions, defend own opinion more, perceive less threat and more positive opportunities.
Behaviour: power is associated with more action oriented behaviour such as; prioritising tasks, goal oriented behaviour, optimism, and more risk taking.
Power is a circle. Powered people see more things from their own perspective and get things done because of their power and thus gain more power. Powerless is the opposite circle.
Politics
Work can serve as a base of power for some people. Jobs that provide power are often related to; problem solving, irreplaceability, central activity and control over resources.
How to gain power? You can;
Conflict
Happens when people/divisions within organisation have opposing goals. Two types; task conflict and relationship conflict.
Within task conflict there is;
Task conflict isn’t always bad. With an optimal level, it can improve performance.
Within relationship conflict there is ;
Negotiation.
Usual pattern: Initial offer –> counter offer –> concessions -> compromise.
When negotiating and wanting a most integrative potential, focus on;
Lecture topic: social influence
Social influence are the attempts of one or more individuals to change the attitudes, beliefs, points of view or behaviour of one or more other individuals. This can be both conscious and unconscious.
Cohesiveness is the degree to which attraction felt by an individual toward some group, group size, and type of social norm operating in that situation. This also determines how much influence the group has on said individual.
People tend to change their attitudes or behaviour to adapt to the existing social norms
Different types of social behaviour
The two types of rule-following behaviour
Compliance: when a person gives direct requests to another person to receive a positive or desired reaction
Resistance of compliance
Obedience: when one or more individuals demand of others to behave in a certain way and these demands are followed without question. Things that affect the level of obedience are:
Resistance to obedience
Lecture topic: groups and teams
When is a group a group?
Book definition: A set of two or more people who interact with each other to achieve certain goals or meet certain needs
Social identity theory: if two or more people see themselves as a group.
Why do we join a group?
Types of groups
Within an organisation, there are two types, formal and informal work groups. Formal work groups are established by the organisation’s management. Informal groups are created by members.
These groups develop in 5 stages
However, these phases do not always end or in the right order.
Another schema only has two stages: ‘wasting time’ aka social goals -> performance aka task goals. Usually, people spend 50% of the time in either of the stages.
When a group is presented with a newcomer, one of two things can happen. Socialisation: the newcomer adjusts to the group and accommodation: the group adjusts to the newcomer.
Characteristics of groups
Group norms
Formal norms: these are formal rules that are officially written down
Informal norms: ‘undiscussed’ agreements within a group.
Norms can communicate identity and opinion. But why do people conform to certain norms?
A deviant does not conform to these formal or informal normal. This can be in both a positive and negative way. This is also very dependant on environment. Generally, for maximum group performance, you want a mid-level of conformity and deviance. When people do not conform to the norm, you can:
Group performance
When the group is watching you do an easy task, it results in a better performance, aka social facilitations.
When the group is watching you do a new or hard task, it results in a bad performance, aka social inhibition.
When working in a group, the individual effort/performance decreases the larger group becomes. This is called the Ringelmann effect or process loss. This is either because if coordination loss (you don’t time the task correctly for example) or motivation loss.
Performance in cooperation often depends on the importance of the tasks and the other person’s efforts. When working on an important task with a weak partner, people tend to work a lot harder to compensate. When working on an important task with a strong partner, people tend to work a lot less hard. This is called loafing.
The sucker effect is when your partner performs below standard, you lower your own performance to avoid being taken advantage of.
Lecture topic: employment relationships and organisation culture
Performance appraisal can be fairly difficult. There are two goals; motivating and evaluating. Crucial is the accuracy of the appraisal, and it is hard not to be influenced by trivial things by for instance appearance.
Character and personality traits, as well as behaviour or results without context are not completely fair to be judged on individually. Therefore, a performance appraisal should be made on a combination of all the above aspects. It is also important to leave out biases and stereotypes, such as that men are assertive and women very caring.
When rewarding someone for their good work, the two most straightforward options seen to be salary/bonusses or help in someone’s career. However, giving people more money does not always increase someone’s performance. However, the issue with salary and bonusses it that the quantity performance goes up but the quality decreases. The amount of risk-taking increases, but when things go wrong, someone else has to pick up the mess.
The problem with helping someone’s career is that here is not always an option of promotion. In a linear career, one actually steps up closer to the dream job every time. A spiral career means you step up but not in the same profession. A transitory career means you just switch jobs without going higher up and a steady state career, you simply commit to one profession for the rest of your career, such as a family-doctor.
Types of people in a company
There are generally two types of workers, career-tigers and team players. Career tigers tend to be more focussed at achieving more in their career, while team players are often more concerned with their co-workers and the attitude in work. However, for a company, team players are often more valuable, because they tend to work harder, perform better, and are often more loyal to the company.
Organisational culture
Shared values beliefs norms that influence the way employees think, feel and behave towards each other and outside of the company.
There are two types of values; instrumental, concrete such as being helpful or keeping up with traditions, and terminal, which are more abstract, things the company strives for.
The culture within a company is kept through socialisation – newcomers adopt the norms and values of the company -, stories and ceremonies and language – the way people speak but also dress or travel, things that are usual within the company.
Things that shape organisational culture;
Lecture topic: antisocial behaviour
Aggression: any behaviour intended to do physical or psychological harm.
Theories
Aggression factors
What increases display of aggression?
Antisocial behaviours
Antisocial behaviour is any behaviour that is disruptive or harmful to the wellbeing or property of another person -> cheating, lying, stealing.
Lecture topic: Leaders and leadership
Leadership substitutes are factors that reduce the need for actual leadership.
Leadership neutralisers are factors that reduce the ability of leaders to exert any influence
Formal leaders are given the authority by the organisation to influence and affect the members, while informal leaders do not have any formal authority, but are rather chosen by the members of the organisation.
A leader controls, informs, supports and motivates subordinates.
Types of leaders pt.1
Fiedler contingency theory: Effectivity leader = person x situation (task structure, relationship and power)
The path-goal theory: finding out what motivates subordinates and what their goal is and then rewards for a strong performance by the use of showing them the path to that goal.
Motivating leadership behaviours:
Types of leaders pt. 2 (Vroom & Yetton)
Leader-Member Exchange theory
Instead of a one-way relationship, sometimes the relationship is two way. The follower listens to the leader, but the leader also listens to what the follower has to say. This bond doesn’t occur with everybody, only with select followers who do then become part of the in-group.
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More lecture notes (2017-2018) JulitaBonita contributed on 07-03-2019 11:00
Thank you for sharing your notes with us, Emy! :) Very useful! I would like to point out the link to more relevant content. A now 2nd year IBP student, shared her notes for this course last year. Check out the relevant bundle > Social and Organizational psychology. You can also follow Ilona's profile for more summaries, blogs and lecture notes.
Ilona also shared exam tips for Social and Organizational Psychology
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