Notes in History

Wednesday, February 15, 2023 12:10 PM

• 3 topics of interest
○ Intergroup and intergroup conflicts
○ Study of attitudes, opinions and beliefs
○ Social perception and self-perception
• 3 central themes
○ Power of the group as a normative influence
○ Centrality of subjective meaning and interpretation
○ "non-obvious" experimental demonstrations
○ Focus on the self (self to others)
○ Cognitive and motivational biases
• Group Influence
○ Allport (1954) - group influences individuals to behave in certain ways
○ Explicit and implicit group norms
○ Festinger 1954 - Social Comparison Theory, theory of cognitive dissonance
○ Schachter 1959 - Psychology of Affiliation, "two-factor" theory of emotion
○ social exchange (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959)
○ group versus individual risk tolerance (Wallach, Kogan & Bem, 1962)
○ social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965)
○ “groupthink” (Janis, 1972)
○ de-individuation (Zimbardo, 1970)
○ jury deliberation (Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington, 1983)
○ Intergroup relations
○ Cultural influences
• Subjectivism
○ Determine what stimulus the actors in light of their past experiences, current goals, and
understandings
○ Interpretation of responses
○ Zimbado (2007) prison study
○ Milgram electric shock
○ Asch conformity study
○ Kelley 1967 Attribution Theory
○ Davis (1965) had outlined processes by which observers of overt actions make inferences
about the intentions of the relevant actors
○ Mislabeling of one's own emotions
○ Bem’s self-perception explanation for classic dissonance results demanded the additional
assumption that actors in those studies
○ Construal
○ Power of the situation
○ The actor's definition of the situation
• Non-Obviousness and Contrasting Methodological Approaches
○ human beings are, in a sense, already intuitive psychologists (Ross, 1977)
○ Behaviour is determined by preceding and attending perceptions, thoughts and feelings
○ Social or situational context and interpretation are important
○ Small changes in the situation have large effects on behaviour
○ , it may be because those small changes significantly changed the meaning of the situation
or the actor
○ they might overestimate the power of conformity pressures, the degree of abandonment of
 responsibility in the “agentic state,” or the likelihood that the role of prison guard will
prompt sadistic behavior “in general,” without recognizing some of the unique, and subtle,
features of the situations in question that made them so potent.
○ Methods
 Reliance on analyses that focus on observed correlations between outcome measures
and measures of presumed mediators
 Laboratory demonstration
○ Social History, New challenges, and Dialects of Social Research
 shift from philosophical speculation and analysis to reliance upon data.
 WW2 - relied on experiments in which investigators directly manipulated social and
situational factors of theoretical relevance.
○ Influences from Society at Large
 social and societal impact of “natural experiments” wherein new technologies
(television, personal computers, credit cards) came to be widely adopted in some
regions or countries before others.
 changes in governmental policies
 Ex. G.I bill ensured types of topics that were central to the field (conformity, social
comparison)
○ Influences from psychology in general
 Relative independence form developments
 Three heuristics of cognitive salience
□ Availability
□ Representativeness
□ Anchors
○ Influences within social psychology
 Problem is lack of separate identity
 Capturing real-world complexity
 Findings that raise new issues
 The problem of obviousness
□ Received less enthusiastically
 The appearance of frivolity
□ Insufficient justification
□ Questions it as a sort of " serious science"
 Seeming Lack of social relevance
□ Some aspects are neglected