Psychology by P. Gray and D. F., Bjorkland (eight edition) – Summary chapter 13

Humans are ‘natural psychologists’. This has an evolutionary explanation: people can help us or hurt us and we want to find out their intention. Attribution is a claim about the cause of someone’s behaviour. It is possible to attribute the cause of someone’s behaviour to two things:

1. Person
   We can view the person and the person’s personality as the cause of the behaviour (e.g: if someone is often late, we can say that that person is always late).
2. Behaviour
   We can view the situation as the cause of someone’s behaviour (e.g: someone running away in fear can be explained by the tiger running after him).

There are three questions one can ask himself to determine whether the attribute has to be about the situation of about the person:

1. Does this person regularly behave this way in this situation?
2. Do many other people regularly behave this way in this situation?
3. Does this person behave this way in many other situations?

People give to much weight to personality and not enough to the environmental situations when they make attributions about other’s actions. This is also called person bias. Or the fundamental attribution error. People also have the tendency to attribute success to themselves and attribute failure to the situation. Person bias occurs mainly in western countries.

There are several biases that arise from the perception of facial features:

1. Attractiveness bias
   Attractive people are perceived more positively than ugly people.
2. Baby-face bias
   People with a so-called ‘baby face’ are perceived as more honest, warm and helpless.

People that meet each other on the internet before meeting each other face-to-face like each other more than people that just meet each other face-to-face, because meeting over the internet reduces social anxiety. It also allows people to be their ‘true-self’ and frees people from biases that arise from physical attractiveness.

Self-concepts refer to the way that a person defines him- or herself. According to Cooley, we create our self-image based on what others think of us. He introduced the term looking glass self. The beliefs and expectation that others have of a person, whether true or false, can to some degree create reality by influencing that person’s self-concept and behaviour. These effects are called self-fulfilling prophecies or Pygmalion effects. Someone’s expectation can affect someone’s behaviour and self-image.

Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval, acceptance and liking of oneself. The sociometer theory states that we derive our self-esteem from others’ attitudes towards us and that self-esteem reflects your best guess about the degree to which other people respect and accept you. From an evolutionary perspective, other people’s views of us matter a great deal, because our survival depends on it.

The process of comparing ourselves with others in order to identify our unique characteristics and evaluate our abilities is called social comparison (e.g: we ourselves as tall if we are tall compared to others). A direct consequence of social comparison is that the self-concept varies depending on the reference group, the group against whom the comparison is made. People identify themselves largely in terms of the ways in which they perceive themselves to be different from those around them.

Adults often overestimate their own abilities and this is called the positive illusory bias. The self-serving attributional bias is the tendency to attribute our successes to our own inner qualities and our failures to external circumstances.

An attitude is any belief or opinion that has an evaluative component (e.g: an attitude towards Trump is a negative attitude). There are two types of attitudes:

1. Implicit attitudes
   These attitudes are manifested in automatic mental associations.
2. Explicit attitudes
   These attitudes are conscious, verbally states evaluations.

Implicit attitudes are measured using implicit association tests, which are based on the fact that people can classify two concepts together more quickly if they are already strongly associated with the mind. An individual’s implicit memory wins it unless an individual consciously thinks about it.

The cognitive dissonance theory states that our mind creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance when we sense some inconsistency among the various explicit attitudes, beliefs and items of knowledge that constitute our mental store. Cognitive dissonance can be undone by changing your attitude towards something. Cognitive dissonance is often avoided by people and this is a prime example of the confirmation bias.

Cognitive dissonance also arises when an individual’s action opposes one’s attitude. If there is not enough justification for that action that opposes one’s attitude, the insufficient-justification effect may arise, where people change their attitude in order to justify the behaviour.

Self-descriptions that pertain to the person as a separate individual are referred to as personal identity. Self-descriptions that pertain to the social categories or groups to which the person belongs are referred to as social identity. When we view others in terms of personal identity, we see them as unique individuals and when we view others in terms of social identity, we view them as similar to other members of the group (e.g: all skinheads are similar to each other). This is specifically true for members of out-groups, groups to which we don’t belong. In-groups are groups to which we belong.

The schema or organized set of knowledge or beliefs about any group of people is referred to as a stereotype. There are three levels of stereotypes

1. Public stereotypes (explicit)
   This is what we say to others about a group.
2. Private stereotypes (explicit)
   This is what we think of a group but don’t say to others.
3. Implicit stereotypes
   These stereotypes are sets of mental associations that operate more or less automatically to guide our judgements and actions toward members of a group, even if those associations run counter to our conscious beliefs.

Implicit prejudices are based on primitive emotional processes modifiable by classical conditioning.

Social pressure is a set of psychological forces that are exerted on us by others’ judgements. Being observed affects how well people perform tasks:

1. Social facilitation
   Observation improves performance in simple tasks
2. Social interference
   Observation decreases performance in complex tasks

The presence of others facilitates the performance of dominant actions and interferes with performance of nondominant actions. Choking under pressure is the highly aroused mental state in which people perform worse, because of pressure. This is especially likely to occur with tasks that make strong demands on working memory. The pressure interferes with the concentration and this causes the performance to worsen.

Stereotype threat is the 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. Impression management refers to the entire set of ways by which people consciously and unconsciously modify their behaviour to influence others’ expression of them. People conform because of two reasons:

1. Informative influence
   People may know something we don’t and we conform because of the information we receive, rather than trying it out ourselves.
2. Normative influence
   This promotes group cohesion and acceptance by the group; we conform to the norm of the group (e.g: saying a stick is smaller than you think it is, because of the norm of the group).

The passive bystander effect is an effect that occurs when someone needs help in the presence of a lot of people. If there are a lot of people present when someone needs help, the individual that needs help is less likely to receive that help than when he’s alone. This is because of the shared responsibility, the more people, the less responsibility you have and the social norm, no one helps, so you shouldn’t either, because you don’t want to stand out of the crowd.

A group tends to automatically mimic one another’s postures, mannerisms and styles of speech. This causes individuals in a social group to become like one another.

The phenomenon group polarization occurs when the large majority of everyone in a group argues on the same side of the issue, discussion typically pushed that majority towards a more extreme view in the same direction as their initial view, whereas a split group tends to get a more moderate view. Groupthink is a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group when the members’ striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. The ability of groups to make effective decisions and solve problems is improved if leaders refrain from advocating a view themselves and instead encourage group members to present their own views and challenge one another. Also, if the groups focus on the problem to be solved rather than on developing group cohesion.

People tend to comply automatically to a direct request (if the request is small and asked politely), we tend to honour requests of people who have done thins for us, this is the norm of reciprocity and we are more apt to honour a request from someone who is a member of our in-group. There are several techniques to exploit people’s tendency to comply:

1. Low-ball technique
   If a low-price is agreed upon and the price rises, people tend to buy it anyway, in order to reduce cognitive dissonance.
2. Foot-in-the-door technique
   People are more likely to agree to a large request if they already agreed to a small one.

Obedience refers to those cases of compliance in which the requester is perceived as an authority figure or leader and the request is perceived as an order. There are a number of social factors that contribute to the psychological pressure to obey in Mill’s experiments:

1. The norm of obedience to legitimate authorities
   People tend to honour requests of legitimate authorities
2. The experimenter’s self-assurance and acceptance of responsibility
   If people have the idea that they are not responsible for the consequences, they are more likely to comply with requests.
3. The proximity of the experimenter and the distance of the learner
   Physical distance plays a key role in obedience.
4. The absence of an alternative model of how to behave
   If there are no alternative models of how to behave, people tend to comply quicker.
5. The incremental nature of the requests
   The requests start off relatively normal and get increased a little by a little.

There are several critiques on Milgram’s experiments:

1. Ethical critique
2. The question of generalizability to real-world crimes of obedience
   It might not be possible to draw general conclusions from this experiment.

Social dilemmas are dilemmas where you have to choose between action for the group’s interest or for your own interest. There are several reasons for a person to choose for cooperation:

1. Reputation
   Reputation is important in making the decision to cooperate, as this influences your future results.
2. Reciprocity
   If I help a person today, that person and others who hear of my help may be disposed to help me in the future.
3. In-group favouritism and out-group discrimination
   People are more likely to cooperate with people from their in-group than people from an out-group. People also experience schadenfreude, pleasure if a competitor receives something negative (e.g: a rumour is spread about the competitor).

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

1. Within-group solidarity
   A common opponent unites.
2. Negative stereotyping of the other group
   The other group becomes negatively stereotyped.
3. Hostile between-group interactions
   Hostile interactions between groups increase as rivalry increases.

Rivalries between groups can be reduced by the establishment of superordinate goals, goals that were desired by both groups and could be achieved best through cooperation between groups.