CHAPTER 1: An invitation to psychology

Back story

 Alan Turing: founder of computer science

o Broke enigma code of the German navy
o Arrested for gross indecency- homosexual conduct
o Died by cyanide poisoning in his apartment (ruled as suicide)
o Homosexuality was illegal back then (no anal or oral sex between homosexuals)
o Law reversed and said it was allowed under the “due process”
o Homosexuality= illegal up to 1974
o Now, possible for openly gay individuals to serve in the armed forces
o 2012-2014: more and more people accepted/ were for gay marriage
o Adoption by gays legal now in the U.S

Characterizing social psychology

 Social psychology
o Defined as the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, behaviours of individuals
in social situations
o People tend to like people that are like them whether it’s in attitudes or interests
 “The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you
encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact” – Daniel Kahneman
 Doing experiments to reveal causes of behaviour of individuals in social situations

Explaining behaviour

 CBS broadcast story of 60 minutes 2 exposing American atrocities against Iraqi prisoners
o Treating prisoners like shit
o Naked prisoners with plastic bags over their heads
o Forcing prisoners to have sexual intercourse, stimulate sexual acts
o Proved that Americans had malevolent intentions towards Arabs and that
everyone was rotten, but psychologists conducted an experiment to prove that
 Philip Zimbardo and colleagues paid 24 undergraduate men from Stanford University, all
with good character, to act either as prisoner or guards (flipped a coin)
o Prison was in the basement of psychology department
o Anticipated study to last 2 weeks but study was terminated after 6 days
 Guards resulted right away to sexual acts, verbal abuse, humiliation
 Barrel corrupts anything it touches (good apples in bad barrel)
 Why did the follow such orders?
 Social psychologists seek to find answers to such questions
o Situations in which people exert influence over one another, how people make
sense of their world, how they respond to certain things, influences about
decisions or motives and how they reach conclusions of the events
  Research by social psychologists regularly influences government policy
o Research on effects of different welfare programs used in shaping government
assistant policies
o Research reflects decisions by courts
 Explaining situations
o Seek to understand how people act in relation to others in social situations and
why

Comparing social psychology with related disciplines

 Events like those at Abu Ghraib (event with the prisoners) can be studied and viewed in
many ways
o Personality psychology (“cousin” to social psychology), emphasizes individual
differences in behaviour rather in social situations
 Try to find consistent pattern in the way a person behaves in situations
 Social psychologists would examine the GENERAL SITUATION of Abu
Ghraib (orders not clear, guards pressured to soften up prisoners to get
information but personality psychologists look at CERTAIN TRAITS
AND DISPOSITIONS –sadism or hostility, would predict cruel behaviour
across range of situations
 Social psychology related to cognitive psychology (study of how people perceive, think
about, remember aspects of world)
o Differ from topics they study are usually social (social psychology) like social
behaviour and perceptions of other people vs cognitive more likely to study
categorization processes or memory for words or objects
 Sociology is study of people in aggregate
o Study institutions, subgroups, bureaucracies, mass movements, changes in
demographics characteristics of populations (age, gender, status)
o Socialist might study how economic and government policy influences marriage
and divorce rates in a population whereas social psychologist would study why an
individual would fall in love, get married or divorced

The power of situation

 Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote controversial book of Eichmann in Jerusalem

o Adolf Eichmann, notorious architect behind Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews
in Nazi-occupied Europe
o Argued that he wasn’t demented, just boring, unimaginative cog in a machine that
he served with a resigned sense of duty
o Theory? Anyone can perform acts of brutality? Do you think anyone can act like
Eichmann did in Nazi situation?
o Her book created indignant protests and was denounced for her attempt to
exonerate a monster
 But research supported what she was saying, what she called “banality of
evil”
  Raised a question: how does the situation people find themselves in affect
their behaviour?
 Kurt Lewin- founder of modern social psychology (fled Nazi Germany, became professor
in Iowa and then at MIT, psychic before psychologists)
o Believed that behaviour of people, like behaviour of objects, is always a function
of the field forces in which they find themselves (object travelling through
medium, how fast? must know viscosity of medium, force of gravity, and initial
force of object)
o Case of people: forces psychological and physical
 Field of forces in case of human behaviour is the role of situations, especially in social
ones, in guiding behaviour
o Main situational influences in our behaviour: often misjudge or fail to see
altogether, the actions and mere presence of other people
o Friends, partner, family can cause us to be kinder, meaner, etc, influence our
beliefs not only by telling us but through actions too (being subtle
o We rely on other people for clues about what emotions to feel on various
situations and even to define who we are as a person

The Milgram Experiment

 Stanley Milgram
o Advertised in newspaper for men to participate in study of learning and memory
in exchange for a modest amount of money (women participated in others, results
similar)  to test social influence
o Learner and teacher
 Learner tried memorizing words in pairs like wild/duck
 Shocks when wrong answer
 Learner not actually being shocked (rigged) one teacher, same learner
 Experimenter insisted to go on, volts got more powerful
 80% of participants went past 150-volt level
o Why did they go through with it?
 Didn’t expect to resist anyone’s demands
 Couldn’t guess the outset of experiment
 Never been part of a psychology experiment before
 If didn’t quit then, why quit now

Seminarians as Samaritans

 Class experiment by John Darley and Daniel Batson

o Demonstrate power of situation more simply
o Asked students whether mainly concerned with religion as means towards
personal salvation or more concerned with religion for its other moral and
spiritual values
o Asked seminarians to go to other building to deliver short sermon
o On the way to deliver, a man was there in need of help (coughing)
  Outcome? Religious orientation had nothing to do with the offer of
assistance
 Good Samaritans as a rush only when not in rush

The fundamental attribution error

 Internal factors: dispositions

o Beliefs, values, personality traits, and abilities that guide behaviour
o Prison guard humiliation prisoner = assume bad person
o Stranger giving beggar money = assume nice person
o Overgeneralized from a single act
 Failure to recognize the importance of a situational influences on behaviour, together
with the tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions = labeled the
fundamental attribution error by Lee Ross (1977)
 Look for situational factors that might affect someone’s behaviour before assuming
person has dispositions
 Social psychology encourages us to look at another person’s situation-to try and
understand the complex field of forces acting on the individual

Channel factors

 Kurt lewin (1952)-channel factors

o Explains why certain circumstances that seem unimportant on the surface can
have greater consequences for behaviour (facilitating or blocking it)
 Study by Howard Leventhal
o How to motivate people to take advantage of health facilities offerings of
preventive care
o Showed students photo of people in the last stages of lockjaw  can be avoided
by going to student health center and getting free vaccination
o Had intention to do so but only 3% did it, others given a map with health center
circled, raised getting vaccination to 28%
 Channel factor  requirement to shape vague intention into concrete plan
o Most powerful determinant of usage of health center services is the distance to
closest facility (not personality tests, demographics, etc)

The role of construal

 People fill in the empty spaces in their mind and perceive a white triangle when there is
no white triangle (picture: construct triangle out of gaps in pic)
o Gaps located where triangle would be
o But, just a creation of our perceptual apparatus and background assumptions
about visual world
o Perceptual process and assumptions are automatic and nonconscious
o (When you see beyond the image, ex: like a big face made up of other people)
Interpreting reality

 Gestalt: germain for “form” or “figure”

 Gestalt psychology
o Basic idea is that objects are perceived not by means of some passive and
automatic registering device, but by active, usually nonconscious interpretation of
what the object represents
o Belief: see world clearly, without complicated perceptions or cognitive machinery
“doctoring”  naïve realism
 Judgments and beliefs constructed from perceptions and thoughts
 Milgram experiment: soothing interpretations of events, that way you throw them off
from anything that could be sinister
 Participant: someone is acting freely
 Learning: normal activity that often depends on feedback
 Experiment: being activity carried out by trustworthy scientists
 Construal of situations and behaviour refers to our interpretation of them and to the
interferences, often nonconscious, that we make about them

Schemas (free choice)

 How do we know how to behave in different kinds of situation?

o Someone asks you to give up seat in metro? What makes you respond in a certain
way?
 Depend on systematized knowledge to understand even the most simplest and most
obvious situation  schemas (what kind of behaviour is expected of us and how to
behave in certain situations; what to expect when dealing with minister, client; physical
and social world)
 High end restaurant (sit down eat) low end (empty table or take home)
 Schema for party: expect people to act cheerful, excited, be social
 Experiment by Solomon Asch (1940)
o Show that schemas can be very subtle to influence judgements
o Asked two groups of undergraduate students to rank professions by prestige
o Told students that previous group ranked politician near prestige in one group and
other group that it was ranked near the bottom
o Manipulation affected their judgement substantially
o Politician of first group took it as statesmen like Franklin Roosevelt
o Wasn’t that participants were going blindly into this but it was the different
schemas activated by peer’s ratings served to define what was that participants
were supposed to be judging
 Changing what it is being judge and not changing our judgements

Stereotypes

 Schemas that we have for people of various kinds

 Stereotype of nationality, gender, religion
Automatic vs controlled processing

 Two ways the mind processes information when you encounter social situation
o Automatic and nonconscious
 Based on emotional factors
 Emotional factors can occur before conscious kicks in (fear of person in
backpack at airport all anxious = bomb)
 Give rise to implicit attitudes and beliefs that cant be readily controlled by
conscious
 Anthony Greenwald study
o Majority of white people take longer to associate black faces with pleasant stimuli
than white faces with pleasant stimuli
 Bargh, chen, burrows (1996) (nonconscious)
o Students walk done the hall more slowly when calling to mind words related to
elderly people (cane, florida)
 Unprejudiced people were revealed to be just as prejudiced as their explicitly prejudiced
counterparts when studied by a technique that examines nonconscious processing of
information
o Conscious and systematic
 More controlled carefully
 Thinking systematically (person anxious because of summer heat)
 Give rise to explicit attitudes and beliefs which we are aware (become
implicit tho over time)

Types of nonconscious processing

 Nightgown example (psych notes class)

 Less violence in housing project building surrounded by greenery vs building surrounded
by concrete
 Judgements and behaviour people are unaware
o If a freshman is assigned randomly to a dorm room in which the roommate is a dri
nker, he gets worse grades; if the student himself was a drinker in high school, the 
cost to his grades of the drinking roommate is very great (Kremer & Levy, 2003).
(We use masculine pronouns advisedly. Women seem to be immune to this partic
ular kind of influence.)
o When people are surrounded by greenery they are less aggressive than when in an 
environment with lots of red in it (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001).
o Room with fishy smell  less likely to be persuaded in pleasant communication
vs room with no fishy smell  communication
 Ideomotor mimicry is something we engage in quite nonconscious (talking to someone
and keep moving hands body, watch what they will do)

Functions of nonconscious processing

 Mental processing outside of our awareness

  Conscious process  slow, serially (one step at a time)
 Automatic processes  faster and can operate parallel
o Recognizing face of a grade fourth student, driving an airplane and enjoy scenery
o Driving and phone different
 Concept of nonconscious stimuli processing is that research on human behaviour should
not normally depend on peoples verbal reports about why they believe something/engage
in particular behaviour

Evolution and human behaviour: how we are the same

 Key idea is that a process of natural selection operates on animals and plants, so that
adaptive traits, that that enhance probability of survival and reproduction, are passed on
to subsequent generations
o Operates for behaviour inclinations, as physical characteristics (size, coloring)
o Much e share, partly result of natural selection and encoded in our genes

Human Universals

 Evolutionary theory
o Theme consistent with it is that many behaviours and institutions are universal
o Human evolution = have basic behaviour propensities, much like physical
features like bipedalism (2 legs), help adapt social and physical environment
 Table 1.1 : universal behaviour, reactions, and institutions
o Humans share some of these characteristics with other animals, especially with
higher primates (facial expressions, food sharing, group living)
o Compatible with an evolutionary interpretation (we are a certain type of creature,
different, adaptions effective)

Group living, language, and theory of mind

 Group living
o Protection from predators
o Success in hunting game and finding foraging areas
o Understanding language
o Emotions, beliefs, attitudes
o Promote survival and reproduction
 Infants born with brain prewired to acquire language because of importance to humans
living together in groups
o Language acquisition consists of dropping all the wrong phonemes that are not
used by the child’s particular language
o Can speak any language depending where they grow up (native language even
with deaf parents, crib language like twins, language that follows rules of
grammar)
o Findings indicate they are general, inherited propensities to develop grammatical
language
  Theory of mind
o Ability to recognize that other people have beliefs and desires
 Before age of 2, to understand other people’s behaviours is to understand
beliefs and desires
 Age 3-4, theory of mind sophisticated enough that children can recognize
when other people’s beliefs are false
 Biologically based theory of mind
o Comes from studying people who, through defect of psychical or chemical
trauma, seem not to have theory of mind, or weak version one
 Autism: inability to adequately communicate with others and interact with
them
 Can’t comprehend others desires or beliefs including other people’s
beliefs might be false
 Superior intellectual functioning but less comprehension of people’s
beliefs and desires

Evolution and gender roles

 Polygyny (one man several wives) more common than polyandry (one woman with
several husbands)?
 Parental investment
o Two sexes have different costs and benefits associated with nurturing of offspring
because number of offspring a female can have over lifetime limited
o Value of each child = high, investment = great
o Males: unlimited number of offspring is possible because so little energy required
in creating them, can always walk away

Avoiding the naturalistic fallacy

 Biologically differences between men and woman related to mate choice is objectionable
 Follow a long history of mistaken claims about biological differences that have been sued
for male privilege
 Evolutionary theory justification for viewing the different human races almost as a spate
subspecies
 Darwinism movement
o Struggle of some group of people to achiever supremacy over others
o Incorrectly interpreted “the survival of the fittest”  survival of one human group
in competition with another instead of one person’s struggle to survive and
reproduce it’s in environment
o Fascism, ruthless domination (Darwinism was used)
 Evolution claims about human behaviour can also lead people to assume, mistakenly, that
biology is destiny (all biologically predisposed to do is what we inevitably will do and
should do)
 The way things are should be  naturalistic fallacy
o Violence everyday life but declined over years
 o Breaking bones of person’s body, no longer practiced in Europe

Social neuroscience

 Evolutionary approaches study of social behaviour to warn us of fact that everything

human do or think takes place on a biological substrate
 Social neuroscience
o Chief tools is a technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fmri)
o Person feeling different emotions or solving problems= blood flows to areas of
the brain that are active
o Specific brain structures that are activated when were rejected socially and when
were esteemed by others
o Research show which part of brain become active for motivation and emotional
states
o Reading other people’s mental states  mentalizing network
 Region less active when powerful people attempt to interpret the emotions
of others than when people with little power attempt to interpret other
people’s emotions
 Neuroscientists provided a window into development of social behaviour by tracing
physical changes to rain
o Region of brain that alerts people to danger poorly developed until early
adulthood (adolescents greater risk then young adults)
o Mediate learning decay with age (older people harder time learner than younger
people)

Summary

 Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of human behavior, just as it does our
understanding of the physical characteristics of plants and animals. The many universals
of human behavior suggest that some of these behaviors may be prewired— especially
language and theory of mind. Differential parental investment of males and females may
help us understand certain differences between women and men. Although
misunderstandings and misapplications of evolutionary ideas sometimes make people
suspicious of it, the theory has important implications for the field of social psychology.

Culture and human behaviour: how we are different

 Important legacy of evolution for human beings  flexibility it allows for adaption to
different circumstances
 Human, rats, most successful of all mammals in ability to live in virtually every type of
ecosystem

Cultural differences in social relations and self-understanding

  Before, culture differences limited primarily to differences in beliefs, preferences, values
 Recent research, extend all the way to the level of fundamental forms of self-conception
and social existences even to perceptual and cognitive processes people use to develop
new thoughts and beliefs (for cultural differences)
 People prefer situations they have choice and control over
 People want to achieve personal success (relationships with other people can make it hard
to achieve goals sometimes)
 Want to be unique and different
 Feel good about themselves, excelling
 Like relationship when based on mutuality and equality
 Same rules should be applied to everyone, justice should be blind
 Westerners think as themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by bonds of
affection, separate from other people and having attributes that exist in absence of any
connection to others
 Independent
o Canada, united states, Australia
 Interdependent
o China, japan (east countries), korea, india,
o Do not have much freedom or personal control over their lives, not want or need
anyways
o Success important because brings good for family instead of personal gain
o Being unique and different not important
o Expect order
 Study of pens
o Americans chose unique colour, Koreans chose common color

Individualism and collectivism in the workplace

 Hosfede
o Table 1.3 shows differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures
 Figure 1.5
o Greater individualism in Great Britain and in the united states, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, all former British colonies
o Latin America more collectivistic
 Study Charles hampden-turner and alfons trompenaars
o Studied independence and interdependence among 15 000 middle managers from
united states Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Sweden, japan, Italy, etc
o Presented dilemmas in which individualistic values were pitted against
collectivistic ones
o Latin America collectivistic values
o British colonies individualistic ones
o Continental European nation: mix
o Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium more individualistic than those from the more
southern European nations of France, Italy, and Germany
Some qualifications

 Regional and subcultural differences within any large society

 U.S south more interdependent that much rest of country in that family connections tend
to be more important
 South described more tolerant, individualistic tendencies
 Gender socialization
o Running and playing = being independent (dick)
o Playing with dolls and caring for them, cooking for other = being interdependent
(jane)
 Social class differences
o Working class in modern cities more interdependent than middle class people
o Working class more interactions with family, parenting styles conformity and
obedience, value personal uniqueness less than middle class
 Study-stephens
o How would you feel if you’re friend bought a car just like yours?
 Middle class people: disappointed because they like to be unique, care
more about exercising choice, like object they chose better than given
 Working class: happy to share similarity with their friend
 Can have independent orientation in some cases (debate) and some interdependent (choir)

Culture and gender roles

 Male dominance one of most variable aspects of gender roles

 Predominant male role is to hunt
 Predominant female role is to gather plants
 Gender egalitarian
 Social structures characterize by weak hierarchies in general: leaders have little power
over others
 Modern western cultures relatively gender egalitarian, especially northwestern European
countries and Scandinavian
 Status of women ranges from the Scandinavian extreme of equality to near slavery
conditions for women
 Polygyny (one man, several wives) and serial monogamy  most common of worlds
subcultures
 Traditional monogamy is rare
 United states considered prudish compared to western Europeans
 Women suspected having an affairput to death, raped expelled from family circle or
killed
 Gay men  two spirit people
 Farmers in Nepal and Tibet practice polyandry (one wife, maybe husbands who are
brothers)
o Economic goal, scare agricultural land in one family
o One set of related heirs per generation
 o Only first born male could inherit land (primogeniture) or estates broken up

Culture and evolutions as tools for understanding situations

 Evolution and culture complementary ways of understanding social relations, social

human behaviour
 Evolution natural selection
 At first, concerned with surviving, reproducing, nourishing (prewired inclinations)
 Natures proposes but culture disposes
 Evolution equipped us with large repertoire tools for dealing with enormous range of
circumstances that humans confront

Social psychology and critical thinking

 Math courses: teach logic

 No better way to learn critical thinking than by learning about social psychology
 Courses in psych represent great deal of information about scientific methods
o Present in context of common everyday events
 Course stats: teach rules and variation
o IQ tests, applied to everyday life events stats, reasoning becomes greater
Critical thinking: explicit use of scientific tools you will develop about reading about