Chapter 16: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Social psychology focuses on the way other people influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The study of social cognition--how we think about other people and ourselvesincludes such topics as attitudes, person perception, stereotypes, and close relationships. We approach the social world with the same kind of heuristics or cognitive shortcuts that we bring to nonsocial stimuli. Thus, while we do make errors in social cognition, they tend to be "smart errors," and most of our social judgments are admirably accurate.

Attitudes

An attitude is a psychological tendency we express when we evaluate someone or something. It may be positive, negative, or neutral. Attitudes often have less influence on behavior than we might expect. Correlations between attitudes and such behaviors as signing petitions or writing letters to government officials are often quite small. This may be due in part to the fact that opportunities to behave in accordance with our attitudes are not always available; subjective norms (beliefs about what other people think you ought to do) may also interfere with acting upon our attitudes. In some situations, however, behavior and attitudes are more consistent, particularly when people are knowledgeable about the issues involved.

The theory of cognitive dissonance argues that when two cognitions (attitudes) are in conflict, psychological distress is produced and people are motivated to modify their attitudes. For example, someone who tells another person that a dull task is actually quite exciting may feel distress over the lie and may come to modify his or her own beliefs about how enjoyable the task was. Cognitive dissonance theory can be applied to a fairly wide range of situations.

How can people be persuaded to change their attitudes? Chaiken's heuristic-systematic model argues that persuasion can create attitude change through two separate routes:


Person Perception

Person perception examines two important issues in social cognition: Impression formation concerns integrating pieces of information about a person, whereas attribution concerns the way we explain the behavior of others and ourselves.

Impression formation is a critical task, but one in which people often make errors. Mental shortcuts such as schemas help us to avoid being overloaded with information about others. A person schema consists of bits of information about a person that have been organized into a general picture. Such schemas often oversimplify reality and thus lead to erroneous impressions. Other errors in impression formation may arise out of the primacy effect, which leads us to consider early information as more important than later information. Reliance on first impressions can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies: Positive or negative initial impressions lead to expectations about a person, which then lead the perceiver to act in certain ways toward that person. These actions lead that person to act in ways that confirm the perceiver's s expectations.

How do we mentally explain the behavior of others? Generally, when we search for a reason for someone's actions, we make one of two kinds of attributions: A personal attribution focuses on an internal trait of the person, whereas a situational attribution focuses on factors outside the person. Humans are influenced by several systematic biases in making attributions. According to the fundamental attribution error, we tend to overemphasize the role of internal traits in making attributions about the behavior of others. This error seems to be fundamental in individualistic cultures, but it is less common in collectivist cultures. According to the actor-observer bias, we tend to attribute our own behavior to situational causes but attribute the behavior of others to internal causes.


Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Stereotypes are organized sets of beliefs about the characteristics of a group of people. They apply to whole groups, whereas person schemas apply to individual people. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group of people. Prejudiced attitudes often lead to discrimination in one's behavior toward a group of people.

Racism is bias toward certain racial or ethnic groups. Racism is often seen in subtle forms, as when the government levies larger fines against companies that pollute White communities than those that pollute Black communities. Surveys of Black individuals with college degrees indicate that 100% of them believe that discrimination against Blacks is still common today.

Sexism is bias toward people on the basis of their gender. For example, women with assertive personalities may be judged differently than men with assertive personalities. Men can also be victimized by sexism when they show feminine traits or apply for a stereotypically feminine job such as receptionist. Unfortunately, our stereotypes about typical males and females are often inaccurate; real gender differences are usually smaller than we assume them to be.

The cognitive approach to stereotypes argues that stereotypes are a product of normal categorization processes. Such categorization usually helps us to deal with the vast quantities of information in our world, but it sometimes has negative side-effects. It may, for instance, lead us to exaggerate the contrast between different categories. Polarization occurs when we exaggerate the similarities within each gender and also exaggerate the differences between genders. Categorization processes may also encourage a belief in outgroup homogeneity, which is the perception that all members of another group are similar to each other.

Stereotypes can also bias memory so that we remember attributes consistent with our stereotype while forgetting those that are not; this is particularly true when we are distracted by other tasks or when we have well-developed stereotypes. In general, we tend to evaluate members of our own group more favorably than members of another group, a phenomenon known as in-group favoritism. Sadly, negative stereotypes and evaluations of other groups often lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that keep members of other groups from being successful.

Discrimination is difficult to reduce. When a company wishes to decrease racial tension by hiring more people of color, for example, it will not help to hire just one good Black worker. Studies suggest that minority group members must constitute roughly 20% of a group before discrimination drops substantially. However, when groups of people must work together toward a common goal, as in a jigsaw classroom, more positive attitudes can develop. Also, discrimination can be minimized when we attempt to overcome mindlessness through questioning our own categorizations.

Close Relationships

What factors determine which people we choose to be our friends? Social psychologists have shown that similarity is an important determinant of friendship. Proximity is also important: People tend to be friends with those who live or work near them. Male friends also tend to be matched in attractiveness, although this does not seem to hold true for female friends.

Similarity, proximity, and attractiveness are also important in love relationships. We tend to fall in love with people who share similar interests and backgrounds, who live nearby, and who are physically appealing but not significantly more appealing than ourselves. Research by Beverly Fehr suggests that trust, caring, honesty, friendship and respect are central to the concept of love; these qualities of love may be combined in our prototype of love. A very different theory, however, suggests that men look for attractive, healthy females to bear their children, while women look for a good provider; this theory is based on the evolutionary approach and is quite controversial. A third approach is Shaver's attachment theory. Here, adults exhibit different attachment styles in much the same way as infants do. Adults may

Group Processes

Social psychologists define a group as two or more people interacting with each other. Groups establish social roles for their members. A role is the shared expectation about how people in a group ought to behave. In a famous study, Zimbardo showed how ordinary people could quickly take on the abusive role of prison guard and the helpless role of prisoner in a realistic simulation. Group settings can either improve or hurt productivity depending on circumstances. Our tendency to perform better on easy tasks and worse on difficult tasks when another person is present is called social facilitation. Social psychologists believe that when another person is present, we become more alert to the other person's evaluation of us. This monitoring may lead us to perform better on an easy task, but it may distract us from more difficult tasks. When groups of people work together on the same task, the result may be social loafing; each individual works less hard in a group than he or she would work independently.

Groups also influence the way their members make decisions. In group polarization, discussion among group members tends to produce a more extreme position than members would have taken individually. In groupthink group harmony becomes more important than wise decision making, and the preservation of group harmony becomes an unspoken heuristic. Groupthink can create the illusions of invulnerability and unanimity, as group members exert pressure on dissenters. We can try to avoid groupthink by encouraging discussion with people outside of the group, and by holding a second chance meeting after the initial decision, to discuss any remaining doubts.

Although group processes seem to have primarily negative effects within our individualistic culture, cross cultural research shows that collectivist societies see the world quite differently. In collectivist cultures, social roles help define one's identity, and people work more effectively in a group than alone.


Yielding to Social Pressure

Social pressure can be used to encourage positive or negative social behaviors. Conformity refers to a change in beliefs or behaviors in response to group pressure when the group does not directly request this change. Social psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that college students would often conform to a group opinion, even when that opinion was clearly incorrect. The more people in the group, the greater the conformity. People collectivist cultures are more likely to conform, and women are slightly more likely to conform than men Tendencies to conform can be decreased when another group member consistently expresses a different viewpoint. Environmental psychologists are attempting to use conformity research to influence people to conserve water and recycle.

In cases of conformity, no one asks the individual to go along with the group--he or she simply does it. Compliance, on the other hand, means going along with a stated request from a person who has no authority to make you obey. One common technique for achieving compliance is called the foot-in-the-door techniques where the influencer achieves compliance with a small request before making a larger request. People who had first said "yes" to a small favor are more likely to say "yes" to a second, larger favor. A second compliance technique, the door-in-the-face technique, also includes two steps: The influencer first makes a request that is so large that it is certain to be denied, then follows up with a more reasonable request. Under these circumstances the smaller request is more likely to achieve compliance.

A third kind of social pressure, obedience, involves responding to a command from an authority. Stan Milgram's research showed that normal people would obey the requests of an authority figure, even when they believed that those requests involved hurting another person, People may obey such orders out of embarrassment, because of their social roles as subordinates, or simply through mindlessness.


Aggression, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution


Aggression is behavior that is intended to hurt someone. Biological approaches argue that brain structures regulate aggression, that alcohol can increase aggression, and that individual differences in aggressiveness are inherited. However, these biological factors do not mean that aggression is inevitable; we can modify our behaviors to act with empathy rather than aggression. Other psychologists point to observational learning as a cause of aggression. For example, men who are exposed to violent pornography are more likely to believe the myth that women enjoy rape. Still other researchers point to maladaptive thinking as a cause of aggression; people with aggressive schemas will misinterpret other people's behavior as hostile, and they will respond in a hostile manner. One factor that has not been consistently supported as a cause of aggression is gender: Whereas physical aggressionincluding domestic violencemay be more often committed by males, verbal aggression comes equally often from both genders.

Conflict is an interpersonal process that occurs when the desires of one party interfere with the desires of another. Conflict may occur between individuals or groups. Conflict analysts describe three approaches to conflict: In a lose-lose approach, such as in war, both parties will suffer a loss. In a win-lose approach, such as in competitive sports, one player's win is balanced by another's loss. However, in a win-win approach, both parties may gain by cooperating. This approach can make conflict productive.

When a conflict starts small, but then each party adds additional grievances, issues proliferation has occurred. This problem tends to fuel the conflict and discourage conflict resolution. Attributional errors, such as those made by politicians in explaining the actions of rival nations, also fuel conflict. Enemy images lead us to see ourselves as good whereas our enemies are evil; these images distort reality and heighten conflict.

How can we resolve conflicts more successfully? Successful conflict resolution depends upon finding a perceived common ground that satisfies the wishes of both parties. Finding such a perceived common ground depends on the perception that the other party is ready to solve the problem, trust in the other party's concern over your welfare, and communication on terms of equal status.

Unfortunately, high levels of tension associated with large-scale international conflicts can lead to cognitive rigidity. The mere act of proposing a particular resolution may make the offer less attractive to the recipienta phenomenon known as reactive devaluation. One technique of international peacemaking, GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction), proposes a series of steps in which one party announces a small step to reduce tension, the party actually takes that step, and the other party is expected to reciprocate. Peacebuilding is an active process that attempts to improve relationships between parties after a conflict, and prevent further conflict before it arises.

Altruism


Altruism is showing concern for and helping other people without expecting anything in return. Altruism is more likely when one has seen another person serving as an altruistic role model. Other aspects of the situation-time pressure, for example--as well as individual differences influence altruistic behavior. Males and females are similar in their tendencies to behave altruistically.

Why do people sometimes fail to help others in need? We occasionally read, for example, of situations in which people are hurt and even murdered while large groups of people look on and do nothing. This bystander effect has been studied frequently by social psychologists. They argue that the presence of other people prevents any individual from feeling personally responsible for helping. This diffusion of responsibility causes larger groups to fail to act in situations where an individual might have shown altruism.

C. Daniel Batson proposes that we often help other people because we actually take on the perspective of those in need, feel empathy with them, and develop genuine desires to reduce their suffering. We may also act altruistically out of selfish motives; either to avoid the personal pain of seeing someone else suffer or to vicariously share the joy of the aided person. However, Batsons work demonstrates that we may act altruistically whenever empathy is aroused, even when neither of the selfish motives can operate.