Unit 11: Social Cognition and Social Influences

Transcription

1 Unit 11: Social Cognition and Social Influences Humans are social creatures. Indeed, our very survival depends upon our ability to live as part of a social group. Not surprisingly, social forces have great impact on our thinking and behavior. The behavior and thinking of individuals in social contexts is the focus of the topic of Social Psychology. READING: Chapter 8 During this unit, we will look at the following topics: Part 1: Social Cognition 1. Attitudes and Attitude Change 2. Attributions 3. Stereotypes and Prejudices Part 2: Social Influences and the Power of the Situation 4. Norms and Roles 5. Conformity 6. Groupthink 7. Diffusion of Responsibility 8. Obedience 9. A Real World Case Study of Prisoner Abuse 1

2 Part 1: Social Psychology Attitudes and Attitude Change (pp ) Effective ways of influencing attitudes Cognitive dissonance and the need for cognitive consistency (pp ) Cognitive persuasion Inoculation against attitude change VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to learn about attitudes and attitude change. Attributions (pp ) Internal (dispositional) vs. external (situational) causes of behavior Attributional biases Fundamental error of attribution Self-serving bias Self-handicapping strategies Blaming the victim: the just world hypothesis VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to learn about attributions. Stereotypes and Prejudices (pp ) Group identity Benefits and costs of stereotypes Prejudice Explicit vs. implicit negative attitudes What are your implicit attitudes? Take the IAT. VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to learn about explicit vs. implicit negative attitudes. 2

3 Definitions These are terms that are used frequently in Part 1. Attitude: A relatively stable opinion about a topic. Attitudes include beliefs about the topic and emotional feelings regarding the topic. Cognitive dissonance: An aversive state that one experiences when one holds two beliefs that are inconsistent with each other or when one's behavior is inconsistent with one's attitudes and beliefs. Justification of effort: Tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something that they have worked hard or suffered to attain. Stereotype: Beliefs about the characteristics of groups of people. Prejudice: A negative attitude toward members of a particular group. Attribution: Judgment involved in assigning a cause to the behavior of others or ourselves. Fundamental error of attribution: Tendency to overattribute behavior to internal causes--especially when evaluating other people's behavior. Self-serving bias: Tendency to attribute our own successes to internal causes, while attributing our own failures to external causes. Self-handicapping: Strategy of setting up a potential external cause explanation for anticipated failure. Just world hypothesis: The need to believe that the world is a fair and just place, that bad people are punished and good people are rewarded. Blaming the victim is a means of maintaining a belief in a just world 3

4 Activity 1: Take the IAT The IAT (Implicit Attitudes Test) is one of the most widely used measures of implicit attitudes. It is based on the assumption that our attitudes will affect the ease with which we can form associations between concepts. For example, if you hold a negative attitude of some kind toward old people, then it should be easier for you to do a task that requires you to treat old and bad as related concepts than a task that requires you to treat old and good as related concepts. You can take a number of tests of your own implicit attitudes at the IAT website at Harvard (link below.) Click on Demonstration and then click on Go to the demonstration tests. Read the information on this page, then click on the link at the bottom of the page, General information about the IAT. Then proceed, and take whichever of the tests interests you. After you have taken one or more of the tests, go to the Background Info section of the site. The FAQ s should answer most of the questions you have about the tests. REQUIRED WEBLINK: Click here to take tests about implicit attitudes: 4

5 Part 2: Social Influences and the Power of the Situation Norms and Roles (pp ) Personal space Context-specific norms: the spring break phenomenon Zimbardo s prison experiment (pp ) REQUIRED WEBLINK: Visit the prison experiment web site. Read about the study and watch the slide show: VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to watch the video lecture about norms and roles. Conformity (pp ) Asch s study of perceptual judgment conformity Factors affecting conformity: Group size, culture, characteristics of other group members, presence of another nonconformist Factors Affecting Conformity Research with the Asch task has identified a number of factors that affect conformity factors that also function in many situations in the real world. These include: 1. Group size: In general, the larger the group (in which everyone is behaving the same way), the greater the pressure that people feel to conform. The surprising finding in this research, however, is how much pressure people feel even when the group is small. There is more pressure with three other people behaving the same way than with two, and more with five than three, but the pressure to conform that people feel does not increase much after group size six in large part because with a group that large, the pressure people feel to conform is already very high. 2. Culture: Some cultures place greater value on conformity than do others. The surprising finding here is that, even in cultures that place great value on individualism and nonconformity such as in the United States the amount of pressure that people feel to conform is distressingly high. 3. Characteristics of other group members: It does matter who the other members of the group are. In general, we feel greater pressure to conform when we care about the opinions of the others in the group, hold them in high esteem, and/or feel they are similar to ourselves. Note again, however, that high levels of conformity are found with the Asch task even when the members of the group are strangers who are unlikely to ever see each other again. 4. Modeling: It makes sense to model one s behavior on that of others. It is adaptive to try to behave in a manner consistent with the way others are behaving. There is no question that this adaptive value of using the behavior of others as a guide to how we should behave is one factor that leads us to generally feel 5

6 uncomfortable behaving in a manner different from that of others. However, in the Asch experiment, and in many situations in real life, we conform even when we know that the behavior of others is wrong. In these situations, however, modeling can also lead us to be a nonconformist. In the Asch task, if even one other person in the group is occasionally a nonconformist, the amount of conformity by the one real subject declines dramatically. It is much easier to go against the group with a partner than when you are all alone. WEBLINK: Listen to a BBC radio discussion of this research and its implications: Groupthink (pp ) Diffusion of Responsibility (pp ) Social loafing Mob behavior and deindividuation (p. 288) Bystander apathy (p. 287) Effects of group size Diffusing responsibility Creating pluralistic ignorance VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to watch the video lecture about social loafing. VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to watch the video lecture on bystander apathy. Obedience (pp ) Stanley Milgram s experiment Note: All students should watch the Milgram obedience video Obedience, diffusion of responsibility, the effects of roles, modeling: A real world case study of prisoner abuse 6

7 Definitions These are terms that are used frequently in Part 2. Norm: Rule that regulates human behavior, including social conventions, explicit laws, and implicit cultural standards. Role: A given social position that is governed by a set of rules and norms (implicit and explicit cultural standards) for behavior. Conformity: Tendency to match one s behavior to the behavior of others around us. Diffusion of responsibility: Tendency for members of a group to feel less personally responsible for their behaviors. Deindividuation: Loss of awareness of one s own individuality when part of a large group or crowd. Social loafing: Tendency for group members to work less hard on group tasks to let others do the work. Pluralistic ignorance: Using the inaction of others in an emergency situation as a cue that the emergency is not very serious. Behavioral trap (entrapment): A situation that pressures people into self-defeating behaviors. 7

8 Obedience One of the most obvious ways in which humans influence each other is by telling others what to do. Throughout history, evidence has accumulated suggesting that most people are distressingly willing to obey direct commands by someone perceived to have legitimate authority over them, even if the commands require them to engage in actions that ultimately cause harm to others. The signature case of this phenomenon occurred in Germany in the late 1930s and during the Second World War, when many ordinary Germans contributed in direct and indirect ways to the Holocaust. After the war, when these individuals were asked why they did what they did, a common response was, I was only doing what I was told to do. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University social psychologist, designed a series of studies to examine the factors that affect the extent to which humans are likely to follow the directions of someone in authority. VIDEO: Click here to watch the Milgram experiment video. Factors Affecting Obedience Politeness and the lack of a language of protest Diffusion of responsibility: legitimization of authority Entrapment: The dollar auction Modeling VIDEO LECTURE: Click here for the lecture on factors affecting obedience. 8

9 Entrapment Entrapment occurs in situations where some element of the situation leads individuals to gradually increase their commitment to a course of action that ultimately results in behaviors they would never have engaged in at the outset of the process. Usually, the escalation of commitment occurs as a means of justifying the individual s ongoing investment of time, money, effort, or emotion. The essence of an entrapment situation is that, once the individual begins the process, there is no logical place to stop. In the case of Milgram s experiment, for example, the only way to justify giving a shock of 180 volts is to continue the process by giving a shock of 195 volts. Then, the only way to justify giving a 195 volt shock is to continue by next giving a 210 volt shock. A good illustration of entrapment occurs with the dollar auction. The dollar auction involves auctioning off a real dollar. There should be two people bidding on the dollar. The odd feature of the rules of this auction, however, is that the person who makes the final winning bid does not have to pay anything. Instead, that person gets the dollar for free. It is the person who loses the auction who has to pay the amount of their own final bid. For example, if bidder A say $.50 and then bidder B says $.75 and then bidder A decides not to make a higher bid, bidder B is the winner and receives the dollar for free, while bidder A has to pay $.50. Once this process begins, both bidders become entrapped in a situation in which the only way to justify their most recent bid is to make another bid. In fact, the bidding usually quickly rises above the level of a dollar and sometimes quite a bit above that level! Obviously, no one would even, at the outset, agree to bid $1.50 for a dollar, but once the process begins, there is no logical place to stop even as the amounts escalate beyond the dollar level. VIDEO LECTURE: Click here to see the dollar auction in action! 9

10 Power of the Situation: A Real World Case Study of Prisoner Abuse On April 29, 2004, the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes II presented detailed information (including photos) of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in an Iraq prison by U.S. guards. How could something like this happen? As shocking as the events and photos may be, any student of social psychology should not be surprised. Interviews with the guards point toward the influence of many of the factors discussed in this section of the course, including obedience, diffusion of responsibility, and modeling. The influence of social roles and norms is also an obvious contributing factor. In order to learn more about this event in the context of research in social psychology, begin by visiting the CBS news website where you can read about this event, see pictures, and watch video clips from the news show. Be forewarned the pictures are unpleasant and some are for adults only. Then visit the NPR Talk to the Nation website for a discussion of this event with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who conducted the original Stanford Prison Experiment. REQUIRED WEBLINK: CBS news report on Iraqi prisoner abuse: REQUIRED WEBLINK: Talk of the Nation interview with Dr. Zimbardo: 10