CHAPTER 12

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
ATTITUDES

 Defined behavioural and cognitive tendencies that are expressed by positive or

negative evaluations of people, places, or things. Such as our likes and dislikes,
and our preferences.
 A-B Problem: Attitudes (A) do not always predict Behaviour (B). That is because
external situations often constrain our behaviours.
 Factors that determine whether attitudes predict behaviors include:
 Specificity (the more general a stated attitude, the less likely it will predict a
specific behavior)
 Strength of the attitude
 Vested interest (the greater the stake of the outcome, the more likely that
we will act on our attitudes)
 Self awareness
 Situational influence
 Attitudes are partly determined by genetics & physiology, and partly determined
by social conditioning & observational learning.

CHANGING ATTITUDES THROUGH PERSUATION

 Elaboration Likelihood Model
 Describes how people respond to persuasive messages
 Two routes to persuading others to change attitudes:
 Central route: Persuasion through encouraging the person to engage in
thoughtful consideration of arguments and evidence.
 Peripheral route: Persuasion through encouraging people to make snap
judgements by using emotional cues.
 Factors that determine the persuasiveness of a message:
 The communicator (expertise, attractiveness, trustworthiness, relatability).
 Type of audience
 People with high self-esteem and low social anxiety are more resistant
to persuasion via peripheral route.
 Audience with low intelligence, and audience between 18 and 25 are
easier to persuade via peripheral route.
 Context of the message
 Mere-exposure effect: repeated exposure to an argument enhance its
appeal.
 Emotional messages: often more persuasive than factual ones.
 Two-sided arguments (presenting and refuting arguments of the
opposition in addition to presenting own arguments) enhances
persuasion.
 Positive context (favorite music background, use of humor and praise,
etc.) can enhance persuasiveness of the message.
STEREOTYPES, PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION
 Stereotypes
 Generalization about a group of people where identical characteristics are
assigned to all members, and variations among members are ignored.
 Mostly a cognitive process; a way to simplify a complex world: Allport's
(1954) "law of least effort."
 Can lead to prejudice and discrimination.

 Prejudice
 Holding negative attitudes and evaluation toward members of a group, even
in the absence of evidence or personal experiences.
 Discrimination
 Unjustified, negative, and harmful actions directed toward members of a
group, simply because of their group membership.
 Whereas most discriminatory behaviors are intentional, some
discriminatory behaviors are unintentionally triggered by stereotypes when
a person is under stress, and must make decisions / carry out actions in split
second – such as in some cases of shooting of innocent African Americans
by police in the United States.

SOURCES OF PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION

 Social categorization: Natural tendency to divide people into groups based on
salient features (skin color, gender, religious practice, etc.). In-groups are
automatically viewed as more favorable than out-groups.
 Dissimilarity: We tend to like people who share our attitudes and dislike people
who do not.
 Competition for resources: Limited resources can lead to prejudice and
discrimination that would not develop if resources were abundant.
 Social learning: We pick up our attitudes by observing others, such as parents
and other authority figures. Through social learning, prejudice develop quickly
among children – not only against others, but also against oneself.

Jane Elliot's Field Experiment on the Development of Prejudice (excerpt; 6min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onKVeZaDzWg

REDUCING PREJUDICE, STEREOTYPE AND DISCRIMINATION

 Intergroup Contact Theory: Frequent contact with many members of the out-
group, under the condition of equal status, in which different group must
cooperate rather than compete in order to attain common goals, can reduce
prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination.
INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION

Factors that determine attraction

 Physical Appearance
 Physical attractiveness is one of the most important factors in initial
attraction. Some research shows that this is more true for men than for
women.
 Factors that contribute to the perception of beauty are cross-cultural: They
tend to be factors that communicate sexual readiness and health, both of
which enhance the chances of successful procreation.

 Similarity
 People are more attracted to others who are similar to them in
attractiveness and attitudes.
 At the same time, people who are attracted to each other perceive each
other as more similar than in reality.

Sternberg's Triangular Model Love

 Seven different types of love based on three components:

 Intimacy (liking, trust, comfort, etc.)
 Commitment (willingness to sustain a relationship, even through difficult
times)
 Passion (intense, possessive, mostly sexual)
SOCIAL PERCEPTION

 Refers to the ways we form and modify our impressions of others.

 We are biased toward the first impression we have of others (primacy effect), as
well as the most recent impression we have of them (recency effect).

ATTRIBUTION THEORY
An attribution is an assumption about why people behave the way they do. The two
main types of attributions are:
 Dispositional Attributions
 Attribute a person’s behaviour to internal factors such as personal attitudes
or goals.
 Situational Attributions
 Attribute a person’s behaviour to external factors such as social influence or
socialization.
 Fundamental Attribution Error
 Tendency to attribute others’ behaviour to dispositional factors.
 More likely among people from individualistic cultures (cultures that view
the self as independent of other people).
 Actor–Observer Effect
 Tendency to make dispositional attributions for others' behavior, and
situational attributions for our own behaviors. But. . .
 Self-Serving Bias
 Tendency to ascribe our successes to dispositional factors but our failures to
situational factors.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Obedience
 Please read p. 293 – 296 on the concept of obedience, as well as Milgram's
famous obedience study, on your own.
CONFORMITY
 Changing one's behaviour to adhere to social norms (widely accepted
expectations concerning social behaviours).
 We conform for 2 reasons: (1) because we genuinely think that others know
better (informational conformity), and (2) because we want to be liked or we are
afraid of rejection (normative conformity).
 First demonstrated by Asch's Line Judgement Studies (1952). Recent replication
shows that our tendency to conform has decreased somewhat over the past
decades.
 Factors that determine conformity includes:
 Desire to be liked by group members
 Low self-esteem
 Social shyness
 Lack of familiarity with the situation
 Group size
 Social support / unanimity of group opinion

GROUP BEHAVIOUR

SOCIAL FACILITATION
 Refers to situations in which our performance on a task is improved as a result
of the mere presence of others.
 Tends to occur when:
a. The task is simple or very well learned (dominant response)
b. Individual performance can be evaluated.
 Caused by increased arousal, leading to enhanced performance over easy / well-
learned tasks. Increased arousal is due to:
a. Increased vigilance because others may do something that requires us to
respond.
b. Evaluation apprehension by others.

SOCIAL LOAFING
 Refers to situations in which our performance on a task worsens as a result of
the presence of other group members who work to achieve the same goal.
 Tends to occur when:
a. The task is simple
b. Individual performance cannot be evaluated.
 Reasons:
a. When individuals know that their individual effort will not be evaluated,
they relax (lower arousal), which can hinder the performance of simple
tasks.
b. The tendency to diffuse responsibility to others in situations where
individual effort cannot be measured
GROUP POLARIZATION
 The tendency for cohesive groups to migrate toward extreme decisions.
 e.g.: An outdoor adventure group becoming more adventurous/risky in their
activity choices over time.
 e.g.: A moderately conservative/liberal political group becoming more
conservative/liberal over time.
 Group polarization can be explained by two theories:
a. The Persuasive Arguments theory:
 Group members present each other with their most persuasive
arguments for their position, thus mutually reinforcing one another's
view.
b. The Social Comparison Theory:
 In order to be liked, people first check out how everyone else feels and
then take a position similar to everyone else's but a little more extreme.

DEINDIVIDUATION
 Process by which individuals in a group discontinue self-evaluation, loosen self-
restraints on behavior, and become impulsive in their behavior.
 Tends to occur when people are (or think that they are) anonymous, thereby
lowering their own sense of personal accountability to the situation.
 Once de-individuated, it is the norm of the group, rather than personal norms,
that determines whether we act positively or negatively.
 The impact of deindividuation, together with powerful social norms, in
impacting behaviors is demonstrated by Zimbardo's infamous Stanford Prison
Study in the early 1970s.

ALTRUISM AND BYSTANDER EFFECT

Altruism
 The unselfish concern for the welfare of others – even to the detriment of
oneself.
 Research shows that empathy (our ability to see things from another person's
perspective and to feel what others feel) is the foundation of altruism.
 Research also shows that females tend to be more altruistic than males, and
that females also tend to be more empathic than males.

Bystander Effect
 An unexpected phenomenon, both in real life and in research, whereby the
more people witness someone in need of help, the less likely that anyone would
offer help to the person.

Bystander Effect Explained: Research shows that to engage in helping behavior,

several factors need to be present:
1. Noticing that an event has occurred.
2. Interpreting the event as an Emergency. When other bystanders are present,
people are more likely to assume an emergency is something innocuous
(pluralistic ignorance).
3. Assuming responsibility. When there are many witnesses, there is a diffusion of
responsibility: Everyone assumes that someone else will help. As a result, no one
does.
4. Knowing how to help.
5. Deciding to help. A person may decide not to help because he/she is afraid of
the costs of helping.
6. Of these factors, pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility can best
explain the bystander effect.