Social Psychology

“WE CANNOT LIVE FOR OURSELVES ALONE.”

--HERMAN MELVILLE

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IS A BRANCH OF PSYCHOLOGY WHICH

EXAMINES THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON HUMAN

BEHAVIOR.

Social Psychology

Social Psychology

STUDYING THE WAY PEOPLE THINK ABOUT, INFLUENCE, & RELATE TO OTHERS.

Attitude Attraction Aggression Group Behavior

Social Psychologists A social psychologist looks at the attitudes,

beliefs, and behaviors of both individuals and groups.

The field also examines interpersonal interaction, analyzing the way in which someone interacts with other people, whether on a singular basis or in the form of a large group.

Social psychology also examines cultural influences like advertisements, books, films, television, and radio, looking at the ways in which these influences impact human behavior.

Social Thinking

HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT ONE ANOTHER?

Attitudes influence actions…

Attribution Theory (Fritz Heider) – people usually attribute others’ behavior to either their internal dispositions or their external situations.

Dispositional (internal) or Situational (external)?

They won only because the best athletes on the Central State’s teams were out with injuries – talk about good fortune.

External (situational) They won because they have some of the best

talent in the country. Internal (dispositional)

Anybody could win this region; the competition is so far below average in comparison to the rest of the country.

External (situational) They won because they put in a great deal of

effort and practice. Internal (dispositional)

Attribution At Work

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to underestimate the impact of a situation and overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

How do you view your teacher’s behavior? You probably attribute it to their personality rather than their profession.

Our attributions have consequences.

The following attribution errors

lead to overconfidence.

Fundamental Attribution Error – underestimating situational influences when evaluating the behavior of someone else. He swerved into my lane

because he is a jerk. Actor-observer bias – attributing

others’ behaviors to disposition but your own behaviors (even the same behaviors) to situational factors. Example: He swerved into my

lane because he is a jerk, but I swerved into the next lane because I was trying to avoid an animal in the road.

Self-serving bias – crediting your own successes to disposition, but attributing your own failures to situation. Example: I won the game

because I’m talented. I failed the test because the questions were unfair.

Answer in your notesTell me a time when you made the fundamental attribution error (FAE) on someone only to discover you were wrong.

Tell a time when someone made the FAE on you.

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Attitudes & Actions

A belief and feeling that predisposes a person to respond in a particular way to objects, other people, and

events.

If we believe a person is mean, we may feel dislike for the person and act in an unfriendly manner.

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Attitudes Can Affect Actions

Our attitudes predict our behaviors imperfectly because

other factors, including the external situation, also influence

behavior.

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Actions Can Affect Attitudes

Not only do people stand for what they believe in (attitude), they start believing in

what they stand for.

Cooperative actions can lead to mutual liking (beliefs).

D. M

acDonald/ PhotoE

dit

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Small Request – Large Request

In the Korean War, Chinese communists solicited cooperation from US army

prisoners by asking them to carry out small errands. By complying to small errands they were likely to comply to

larger ones.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

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Actions Can Affect Attitudes

Why do actions affect attitudes? One explanation is that when our attitudes

and actions are opposed, we experience tension. This is called cognitive

dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding two contradictory beliefs or performing an action contradictory to our beliefs.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive dissonance theory states that we are motivated to reduce this uncomfortable feeling by changing our beliefs to match our actions.

The dissonance (uncomfortable feeling) is less if we feel that we were forced to perform the action. Thus, the larger the pressure used to elicit the overt behavior, the smaller the tendency to change opinion.

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Cognitive Dissonance

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Role Playing Affects Attitudes

Zimbardo (1972) assigned the roles of guards and prisoners to random students

and found that guards and prisoners developed role- appropriate attitudes.

Originally published in the N

ew Yorker

Phillip G. Zim

bardo, Inc.

Role playing - subjects who play a role often begin to “become” the role

How can the subjects’ behavior in this study be explained by cognitive dissonance theory?

Zimbardo’s prison study