Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Unit 9: Social Psychology - Coggle Diagram
Unit 9: Social Psychology
13.1 The Power of the Situation: Social Influences on Behaviour
Situational Influence on Behaviour: Mimicry, Norms, and Roles
MIMICRY: taking on for ourselves the behaviours, emotional displays, and facial expressions of others
SOCIAL NORMS: the (usually unwritten) guidelines for how to behave in social contexts
OSTRACISM: being ignored or excluded from social contact
SOCIAL ROLES: guidelines that apply to specific positions within the group
Group Dynamics
SOCIAL LOAFING: occurs when an individual puts less effort into working on a task with others
Believing that an individual’s contributions are not important to the group.
This occurs if people can’t see how their own input matters to the group
Not caring about the group’s outcome.
This occurs when a person is not personally identified with the group, perhaps feeling socially rejected from the group or perceiving the group as unsuccessful or unimportant
Low efficacy beliefs
. This occurs if tasks are too difficult or complex, so people don’t know where to start
Feeling like others are not trying very hard.
As discussed earlier, people loaf if they feel others are loafing.
SOCIAL FACILITATION: occurs when one’s performance is affected by the presence of others
NORMATIVE INFLUENCE: the result of social pressure to adopt a group’s perspective in order to be accepted, rather than rejected, by the group
INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE: occurs when people feel the group is giving them useful information
GROUPTHINK: a decision-making problem in which group members avoid arguments and strive for agreement
To Act or Not to Act: Obedience, the Bystander Effect, and Altruism
OBEDIENCE: compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority.
ALTRUISM: helping others in need without receiving or expecting reward for doing so
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: The Bystander Effect
BYSTANDER EFFECT: (also known as bystander apathy), and is the observation that an individual is less likely to help when they perceive that others are not helping
DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY: the reduced personal responsibility that a person feels when more people are present in a situation
Introduction
B = f(P,E)—symbolizing that
Behaviour
is a function of the
Person
and the
Environment
(Kurt Lewin)
13.2 Social Cognition
Person Perception
PERSON PERCEPTION: the processes by which individuals categorize and form judgments about other people
THIN SLICES OF BEHAVIOUR: very small samples of a person’s behaviour
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHESIES: occur when a first impression (or an expectation) affects one’s behaviour, and then that affects other people’s behaviour, leading one to “confirm” the initial impression or expectation
The Self in the Social World
Much of the time, we look out at the social world through the lens of our own self-concepts. This has 2 very important consequences:
The first is that we tend to think that the way we are is the way people should be, and therefore, people who are substantially different from us have something wrong with them.
The second is that we have a strong tendency to split the world into
Us
and
Them
, and we are motivated to see
Us
more positively than how we see
Them
.
We tend to project our self-concepts onto the social world; this means that the qualities we see in ourselves and the attitudes and opinions that we hold, we tend to assume are similar for society at large.
FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT: the tendency to project the self-concept onto the social world
NAÏVE REALISM: our perceptions of reality are accurate, that we see things the way they are
SELF-SERVING BIASES: biased ways of processing self-relevant information to enhance our positive self-evaluation
INTERNAL ATTRIBUTION: (also known as a dispositional attribution), whereby an observer explains the behaviour of an actor in terms of some innate quality of that person
In other words, you (the observer in the above example) explain the actor’s behaviour (the driver who cut in front of you) as an internal part of who he is as a human being (being an aggressive jerk, bad driver, or all-around “idiot”).
internal attributions include: intelligence, gender, personality, ethnicity
EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTION: (also known as situational attributions), whereby the observer explains the actor’s behaviour as the result of the situation
external attributions include: time of day, surrounding environment, experience with others
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR (FAE): the tendency to over-emphasize internal (dispositional) attributions and under-emphasize external (situational) factors when explaining other people’s behaviour
Ingroups and Outgroups
INGROUPS: groups we feel positively toward and identify with
OUTGROUPS: those “other” groups that we don’t identify with
INGROUP BIAS: As positive biases toward the self get extended to include one’s ingroups, people become motivated to see their ingroups as superior to their outgroups
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
STEREOTYPE: a cognitive structure, a set of beliefs about the characteristics that are held by members of a specific social group; these beliefs function as schemas, serving to guide how we process information about our social world
PREJUDICE: an affective, emotionally laden response to members of outgroups, including holding negative attitudes and making critical judgments of other groups.
DISCRIMINATION: behaviour that disfavours or disadvantages members of a certain social group
CONTACT HYPOTHESIS: predicts that social contact between members of different groups is extremely important to overcoming prejudice
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Explicit versus Implicit Measures of Prejudice
IMPLICIT ASSOCIATIONS TEST (IAT): measures how fast people can respond to images or words flashed on a computer screen
Introduction
EXPLICIT PROCESSES: which correspond roughly to “conscious” thought, are deliberative, effortful, relatively slow, and generally under our intentional control
IMPLICIT PROCESSES: comprise our “unconscious” thought; they are intuitive, automatic, effortless, very fast, and operate largely outside of our intentional control
DUAL PROCESS MODELS: models of behaviour that account for both implicit and explicit processes
Videos
In the Real World: Are Stereotypes and Prejudice Inevitable?
What’s In It For Me: Persuasion
13.3 Attitudes, Behaviour, and Effective Communication
Changing People’s Behaviour
Four Common Approaches to Encouraging Positive Behaviour Change and Reducing Negative Behaviours:
Technological—making desired behaviours easier to accomplish and undesired behaviours more difficult
Legal—creating policies and laws to encourage or reward positive behaviours while discouraging or punishing negative behaviours
Economic—providing financial incentives and penalties, generally through taxes and pricing
Social—using information and communication to raise awareness, educate, and illustrate positive and negative outcomes of relevant behaviours
ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL (ELM): a dual-process model of persuasion that predicts whether factual information or other types of information will be most influential.
CENTRAL ROUTE TO PERSUASION: focuses on facts, logic, and the content of a message in order to persuade
PERIPHERAL ROUTE TO PERSUASION: focuses on features of the issue or presentation that are not factual
Using the Central Route Effectively
CONSTRUAL-LEVEL THEORY: describes how information affects us differently depending on our psychological distance from the information
ATTITUDE INOCULATION: a strategy for strengthening attitudes and making them more resistant to change by first exposing people to a weak counter-argument and then refuting that argument (straw man)
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: The Identifiable Victim Effect
IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM EFFECT: describes how people are more powerfully moved to action by the story of a single suffering person than by information about a whole group of people.
EXPERIENTIAL SYSTEM: operates more implicitly, quickly, and intuitively and is predominantly emotional
specializes in feeling and intuition
ANALYTIC SYSTEM: operates more at the explicit level of consciousness, is slower and more methodical, and uses logic and discursive thinking (i.e., reasoning using language) to try to understand reality
specializes in understanding
Using the Peripheral Route Effectively
Authority: The use of experts and authority figures to deliver a message can often enhance the impact of the message.... Dressing the part is important as well; one amusing study from long ago showed that a man wearing a suit who jaywalks against a red light will be followed by 3.5 times as many people as the same man wearing casual clothes
Liking: We believe people we like.
Social Validation: Because humans are such a social species, we use the behaviour of others as a guide to inform us of what we should do (e.g., social norms in Module 13.1 and conformity in Module 13.2)
Reciprocity: All cultures have a strong social norm that obligates people to repay to others what they have received.
DOOR-IN-THE-FACE TECHNIQUE: involves asking for something relatively big, then following with a request for something relatively small
Consistency:
FOOT-IN-THE-DOOR TECHNIQUE: involves making a simple request followed by a more substantial request
The Attitude–Behaviour Feedback Loop
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY: when we hold inconsistent beliefs, this creates a kind of aversive inner tension, or “dissonance”; we are then motivated to reduce this tension in whatever way we can