Introduction: You are a member of a social world on a planet containing about 7 billion people. Our behaviors differ in different settings (like if we are in the college, market, or at home). Human behavior is a function of both the person and the situation. Social psychology; is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel and behave in a social context. Social psychology addresses the following areas: Social Perception: (Why do people in Iraq differ from Americans in the way they explain people s behavior?) Social Influence: (Why a salesman may tick us into buying things we never really wanted?) Social Interaction: (Are the sexes equal in what they look for in an intimate relationship?) Factors that affect interpersonal attraction: 1. Proximity: Repeated contacts with individuals may induce a more positive feeling towards them. (living in dormitory with your classmate e.g.) 2. Mere exposure: (of a person, picture, or anything makes us like the stimulus more) 3. Physical attraction: for most people, the equation beautiful = good is quite true. 4. Personality traits: It is sometimes said that opposites attract (extravert and an introvert; a dominating person and a submissive one), though may be similarity to ourselves (in intelligence, stature, ambition, etc.) -May be because we assume that people with similar attitudes will evaluate us positively. Attribution theory: Attribution is the interpretation and explanation for the cause of an event or behavior of other people. We try to state whether someone s action should be attributed to internal (dispositional) causes or to external (situational) causes (social forces or other external circumstances). When we explain the behavior of others, we tend to give too much weight to dispositional factors and too little to situational factors. This bias is called the fundamental attribution error. We do the same errors when contributing our own behavior. (a student who scores a high mark in an easy exam, attributes it to his cleverness rather than to the easy type of questions) Page 1 Social Psychology/ 1
:(إتجاه) Attitude Attitudes are likes and dislikes_ favorable or unfavorable evaluations of and reactions to objects, people, events, or ideas. (e.g. you may have a positive attitude towards i-phone versus android phones) Attitudes are formed through classical conditioning, operant learning and social learning. They are the products of a person s life experiences. Components of Attitude: There are three components to an attitude: The cognitive component (your beliefs about it). The affective component (your feelings about it) The behavioral component refers to the predisposition to act in a particular way towards the object or issue. Let us take an example. Suppose you love swimming. Here the affective component: You love swimming. It is a great fun. Cognitive: You understand the health benefits that swimming can bring. Behavioral: jump into the swimming pool. Stereotypes: In our dealing with the busy social world around us, we tend to categorize objects (including people) leading to stereotypes, and our stereotypes of others affect our behavior toward them and the ways others behave toward us. So stereotypes are beliefs about people in a particular category. Stereotypes can be either positive or negative. Stereotypes are often incorrect (negative evaluation), leading to prejudice; which is an attitude (generally negative) toward members of a group (religious, ethnic, political, etc.) Stereotypes again can have harmful consequences like discrimination; which is behavior (exclusion from jobs, neighborhoods, etcs.) directed toward individuals on the basis of their membership in a particular group. Attitudes are more likely to predict a person s future behavior if they are: 1) strong and consistent: (e.g. In political elections those who hold weak or ambivalent attitudes are less predictable whom do they vote to) 2) They are based on the person s direct experience Page 2 Social Psychology/ 1
However, behavior can be influenced by a number of factors, including monetary factors, social influences, and external factors. Generally people strive for consistency between their attitudes and their behavior. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable state that arises because of a discrepancy between an attitude and behavior or between two attitudes. And this produces a state of mental and emotional discomfort. The concept of cognitive dissonance was proposed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. (Who in a study with Carlsmith in 1959 found that, interestingly, participants who were paid less to tell someone that a boring task was enjoyable reported afterword that they enjoyed the task more than those who were paid a great amount) According to Festinger, there are three ways in which human beings reduce dissonance: 1) a change in behavior 2) a change in one of the ideas, and 3) the addition of a new idea. For example, smokers forced to deal with the opposing thoughts I smoke and smoking is dangerous are likely to alter one of them by deciding to quit smoking, discount the evidence of its dangers, or adopt the view that smoking will not harm them personally. Persuasion: The Process of Changing Attitudes We are bombarded by attempts to change our attitudes about things, through advertisements, editorials and conversations with friends. These efforts to change our attitudes are called Persuasion. Routes to persuasion: Central; (paying close attention to the content of the argument) Peripheral; (attractiveness and expertise of the source, even mere exposure effect can change attitude through the peripheral effect) In general, people who are highly involved and motivated use central route processing to comprehend a message. Among the important factors in persuasion are factors related to all of (Source, message, route, and recipients): 1. Source: Experts are more persuasive than non-experts. Attractive sources (if your favorite actor comes in the advertisement of a particular product, it is supposed to have a greater appeal). People who speak rapidly are often more persuasive than persons who speak more slowly. The greater the perceived similarity between communicator and audience, the greater the communicator s effectiveness. 2. Message: Messages that do not appear to be designed to change our attitudes are often more successful than ones that seem intended to reach this goal. Persuasion can be enhanced by messages that arouse Page 3 Social Psychology/ 1
strong emotions. (e.g fear-producing messages). Two-sided messages are more effective than one-sided messages. 3. Route: In general, face-to-face communication is found to be more effective than indirect communication 4. Recipients: Gender, age, intelligence level (intelligent people are more resistant to persuasion), need for cognition... etc. Social cognition the way people understand and make sense of others and themselves. We typically hold schemas for specific types of people. Schemas: Sets of cognitions about people and social experiences. Our schema for teacher, e.g., (knowledgeable, interested in teaching.. etc). Our schema for mother includes (warmth, nurturance, and caring). However, our schemas are susceptible to error. (If we are in a happy mood we may form more favorable impressions about others) Social Facilitation: We all are affected in different ways by other people. (You will run faster when you are competing with others, eat more when in a group than when we are alone.) This is called Social facilitation. Contrary to what this term suggests, such effects are not always beneficial. The presence of an audience seems to improve performance when individuals are highly skilled or practiced on a given task, but it can worsen performance when individuals are not highly skilled or are just learning to perform the task (Social inhibition); e.g. Stutterers, for example, stutter more when reading a passage aloud in front of an audience than when they do the same alone. Conformity and Social Influence: Attempts at social influence are efforts made by others to change our attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, or behaviors (like advertisements in newspapers, T.V., requests from parents or friends). Social groups: Two or more people who interact with one another, perceive themselves as part of a group, and are interdependent. Conformity is a type of social influence in which individuals change their behavior or belief in order to follow a group s norms. (In your first entrance to college you may noticed that your fellow classmates didn t stand up when they talked to the teacher, you simply conformed to them, although you may had used to stand up in the preparatory stages!) Solomon Asch s Experiment: Asch instructed subjects to choose which of three lines was the same length as the original line shown. Each subject was on a panel with other subjects (indeed they were confederates) who all initially gave the same wrong answers. Approximately 35% of the real subjects chose to give an obviously wrong but conforming choice. Asch found that the greatest Page 4 Social Psychology/ 1
amount of conformity by subjects came when the confederates all gave the same wrong answer. (See the figure below) Certain factors play a significant role in determining behavior that encourages an individual to conform to the behavior of a given group: 1. The perceived ambiguity of a situation makes social influence more effective. (E.g. if a student is worrious to choose between two colleges to apply). 2. Obedience, a tendency to conform to the requests of an authority figure. (it is less commonly occurring than conformity and compliance). The psychologist Stanley Milgram found that a majority of subjects were willing to inflict high levels of shock on protesting learners. The interpretation of the subjects behavior was not that they were antisocial persons, but they were conforming, responding to an authority figure. (The cruelty of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is an example of obedience) 3. The diffusion hypothesis suggests that we are less likely to conform to social expectations if we perceive ourselves as carrying only an insignificant portion of an overall responsibility to act. E.g. among four daughters of a mother none really take on the home responsibilities well, since each of them will expect one of the others to do it. The diffusion hypothesis is usually used to explain bystander apathy, a tendency of individuals to do nothing to help out in a crisis if there are a lot of other people around. For example, if someone collapses and seems to be having a heart attack on a busy city street, many people will walk by and glance at the victim without doing anything. On the other hand, if the same thing happens in a small town, the witnesses to the person are much more likely to come forward and render aid. Bystander apathy represents a failure to conform to social expectations. (END) References: 1- Atkinson and Hilgard s Introduction to Psychology, 2003 2- Psychology; a Self-Teaching Guide, 2002 3- Psychology, Robert A. Baron, Fourth Edition, 1997 4- Psychology, Miles Hewstone, 2005 5- Essentials_of Understading Psychology, 8 th edition, 2009 Page 5 Social Psychology/ 1