Social Psychology and Human Behavior: An Overview
Social Psychology and Human Behavior
Attitudes and Persuasion
Prisoner’s Dilemma: A classic scenario in game theory illustrating the tension between cooperation and competition. Individuals must choose between a cooperative act (benefiting everyone) or a competitive act (benefiting themselves but potentially harming others).
Attitude: A set of beliefs and feelings that shape our responses to people, objects, and situations. Advertising often targets attitudes to influence consumer behavior.
- Mere-Exposure Effect: The tendency to develop a preference for things we are familiar with through repeated exposure.
Routes to Persuasion:
- Central Route: Persuasion based on the strength and logic of the message’s content.
- Peripheral Route: Persuasion based on factors unrelated to the message’s content, such as the speaker’s attractiveness or emotional appeals.
Cognitive Dissonance: The discomfort experienced when our attitudes and behaviors are inconsistent. People are motivated to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors.
- Festinger and Carlsmith Experiment: Participants who were paid $1 to lie about a boring task experienced more dissonance and subsequently rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid $20. The $1 group lacked sufficient justification for their lie, leading to dissonance reduction by changing their attitude toward the task.
Social Influence
Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Increasing compliance by first securing agreement to a small request, making it more likely individuals will agree to a larger request later.
Door-in-the-Face Technique: Increasing compliance by starting with a large, unreasonable request that is likely to be refused, followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.
Norms of Reciprocity: The social expectation that we should return favors and kindness. Positive actions tend to be reciprocated with positive actions, and negative actions with negative ones.
Attribution Theory
Attribution Theory: Explains how people interpret and explain the causes of behavior, both their own and others’.
- Situational Attribution: Attributing behavior to external factors, such as the situation or environment.
- Dispositional Attribution: Attributing behavior to internal factors, such as personality traits or dispositions.
Dimensions of Attribution:
- Consistency: Whether the person behaves similarly across different times.
- Distinctiveness: Whether the person behaves differently in different situations.
- Consensus: Whether other people behave similarly in the same situation.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: A prediction that comes true because the act of making the prediction influences behavior in a way that makes it more likely to occur.
- Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Study: Teachers’ expectations about students’ intellectual abilities influenced students’ actual IQ scores. Students labeled as”ready to bloo” showed greater gains than those not labeled, highlighting the power of expectations.
Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to overemphasize dispositional factors and underestimate situational factors when explaining others’ behavior.
Group Dynamics
Collectivist Cultures: Prioritize group goals and harmony over individual needs and desires.
Individualistic Cultures: Emphasize personal achievement and independence, even at the expense of group goals.
False Consensus Effect: Overestimating the extent to which others share our beliefs, values, and behaviors.
Self-Serving Bias: Attributing our successes to internal factors (e.g., ability) and our failures to external factors (e.g., bad luck).
Just-World Hypothesis: The belief that the world is fair and people get what they deserve.
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Stereotype: A generalized belief or expectation about a group of people. Stereotypes can be inaccurate and harmful, often based on limited information or selective memory.
Prejudice: A negative attitude toward a group of people based solely on their membership in that group. Prejudice can be fueled by stereotypes, modeling, and cognitive biases.
Ethnocentrism: The belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others. Differences are often viewed negatively.
Discrimination: Unequal treatment of individuals based on their group membership.
Outgroup Homogeneity Effect: The tendency to perceive members of outgroups as more similar to each other than members of our ingroups.
Ingroup Bias: Favoring members of our own group over members of other groups.
Superordinate Goals: Shared goals that require cooperation between groups, often reducing intergroup conflict.
- Contact Theory: Suggests that contact between hostile groups can reduce prejudice, especially when there is a superordinate goal, equal status, and support from authorities.
Aggression and Prosocial Behavior
Instrumental Aggression: Goal-directed aggression used as a means to an end.
Hostile Aggression: Aggression driven by anger and hostility, often impulsive and intended to inflict harm.
Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Frustration, or the blocking of goal-directed behavior, can lead to aggression.
Prosocial Behavior: Actions intended to benefit others.
- Kitty Genovese Case: A tragic example of the bystander effect, where the presence of multiple witnesses to a crime can decrease the likelihood of anyone intervening.
Bystander Effect: The tendency for individuals to be less likely to help someone in need when other bystanders are present.
- Diffusion of Responsibility: Feeling less personal responsibility to act when others are present.
- Pluralistic Ignorance: Mistakenly believing that others in a group have different information or interpretations of a situation.
Interpersonal Attraction
Proximity: Geographic nearness, a key factor in attraction. Repeated exposure can lead to increased liking (mere-exposure effect).
Reciprocal Liking: We tend to like those who like us.
Similarity: We are attracted to those who share our values, interests, and backgrounds.
Liking Through Association: Classical conditioning can influence attraction. We may develop positive feelings toward someone associated with positive experiences.
Physical Attractiveness: Plays a role in attraction, influenced by cultural standards and perceptions of symmetry and health.
Social Facilitation
: if you are really good at something or it is an easy task, you will perform better in front of a group but if u are not good or it is hard, the perform is worse in front of a group.