Chapter 9: Social Psychology

Mass Hysteria

A dark version of fads in which the behavior that spreads like wildfire is freaking out about some perceived threat (ex. 2016 sightings of evil clowns)

Groupthink

A phenomenon in which irrational decisions are made within a group due to pressures towards harmony and individual conformity. Eight specific factors that are characteristic of groupthink: illusion of invulnerability, illusion of morality, illusion of unanimity, self-censorship, pressure on dissenters, collective rationalization, excessive stereotyping, and mindguards.

Illusion of Morality

A rigid, unbending belief in the moral righteousness of the group's cause, which helps blind group members o objections and leads them to overlook possible consequences of their actions; contributes to groupthink

Anomie

A situation in which there's no longer a good match between society's stated norms and the norms that an individual responds to. Often framed as a weakening of social norms resulting in a breakdown of traditional systems of moral regulation, sometimes accompanied by negative feelings of apathy or despair.

Formal Norms

A social norm that must be encoded somewhere, usually in a law or regulation, with specific penalties for violating them.

Compliance (as it relates to conformity)

A subtype of conformity that does not correspond to a genuine change in a person's beliefs.

Compliance

Agreeing to a request that comes from someone with no power to directly enforce that request. Note that this is different from compliance as a subtype of conformity. Marketing and sales pitches are common examples of the request-related form of compliance. Several tactics can be used like foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, low-ball, etc.

Hawthorne Effect

Alteration of behavior by the subjects of a study due to their awareness of being observed

Riots

An even more temporary element of collective behavior than fads or mass hysteria. Can be thought of as spontaneous episodes of civil disorder where people violently lash out against authority in some form or another.

Solomon Asch Experiment

An example of the power of conformity; subjects where in groups with confederates and they were asked which of three lines matched the line on the example card. The confederates would go around and state an incorrect answer out loud, and subjects showed a strong tendency to repeat the incorrect answer.

Milgram Experiment

An experiment in which subjects were told to shock another person (a confederate) by someone who appeared to be an authority figure (white lab coat) to see how far they would go. Most participants were reluctant, questioned the experiment, and showed physiological signs of stress. However, most subjects went through which it anyway, administering shocks all the way to the strongest level.

Sanctions

Any punishment or negative consequence for violating a social norm OR any reward for following those norms. Social sanctions can be positive or negative to reinforce or extinguish behaviors. Closely linked with social control

Ethnocentrism

Applying the norms and beliefs of one's own culture directly to another culture. In other words, judging other cultures by the standards of one's own culture. Intricately linked with stereotypes.

Illusion of Invulnerability

Belief that no serious harm will happen to the group, resulting in excessive risk-taking; contributes to groupthink

Mindguards

Certain members of the group filter out information that could destabilize the group's consensus; contributes to groupthink

Envious Stereotype

Combination of low warmth and high competence; applied to high-status people who pose a competitive threat.

Stereotype Threat

Describes how even just being reminded indirectly of relevant stereotypes can affect someone's performance.

Stereotype Boost

Describes how people can perform better if they're reminded of positive stereotypes that apply to them.

Primary Deviance

Deviant acts committed before someone receives a label

Secondary Deviance

Deviant acts that are committed after someone has been labeled, partially in reaction to that label.

Situational Attribution

Explaining an individual's behavior in terms of external circumstances.

Dispositional Attribution

Explaining an individual's behavior in terms of something internal or inherent to their disposition or character. Can be positive or negative.

Attributions

Explanations of people's behaviors.

Differential Association Theory

Focuses on deviance as behavior that's learned socially. Bluntly, criminals become criminals by hanging out with other criminals and learning to commit crime from them. Draws from symbolic interactionism in that it sees behaviors as learned phenomena with culturally-determined significance

Labeling Approach to Deviance

Focuses on how people's behavior is affected by being labeled as deviant. The idea is that being labeled as a deviant shapes people's identity in ways that increase the frequency of deviant behavior.

Collective rationalization

Group members find reasons to ignore warnings and avoid reconsidering their actions, assumptions, or beliefs; contributes to groupthink

Consistency Cues

How consistent a person's behavior is with how that person has behaved previously; the more consistent the behavior over time, the more likely we are to make a dispositional attribution.

The Halo Effect

How positive or negative impressions of someone in one domain can expand out to affect judgements of them in other domains. Ex. Someone who dresses well and behaves charmingly is more likely to be perceived as a good coworker, employee, business partner, or friend.

Distinctiveness Cues

How someone behaves differently in comparable situations. If someone shows uneven patterns of behavior in otherwise comparable situations, we're more likely to make a situational attribution.

General Strain Theory

Hypothesizes that people who experience social, economic, or even personal stressors may have negative emotional experiences that push them towards deviance or crime.

Informational Influence

In a group discussion, people are more likely to express points of view in line with the dominant viewpoint, and the disproportionate attention paid to such information reinforces individuals' pre-existing viewpoints.

Mores

Informal norms that will garner some serious disapproval for violating. Ex. cheating on a romantic partner or being a jerk to people who work in customer service

Door-in-the-Face Technique

Involves making a large request at first that you know will be rejecting, only to follow it up with a smaller, more reasonable-seeming request (which seems more reasonable after the first request).

Foot-in-the-Door Technique

Involves making a small request at first and then making a larger request. The idea is that positively responding to a small request makes it more likely that the person will then agree to a larger request.

Low-Ball Technique

Involves offering something at a low price, only to raise it at the last minute, once the customer is invested in the purchase.

Prejudice

Irrational attitudes (positive or negative) towards various groups. Prejudice is an affective or emotional response. It's about the immediate gut level emotional reaction you have before you even really have time to process why.

Strain Theory

Looks at why people engage in deviant behavior, and in particular focuses on the role of social and economic pressures in pushing people towards criminal behavior. Says that deviant behavior occurs in some people when there's a mismatch between socially acceptable goals and socially accepted ways to get there (ex. we glorify wealth while making certain ways of getting wealthy illegal).

Pressure on Dissenters

Members feel pressure not to express opinions contrary to the majority group; contributes to groupthink

Self-Censorship

Members of the group who disagree with the rest of the group don't share their opinion (supported by pressure on dissenters); contributes to groupthink

Identification

Middle ground between internalization and compliance, where someone's behavior and beliefs change, but only kind of, and only in the presence of the group.

Excessive Stereotyping

Negative views about outside opinions or viewpoints lead group members not to take other perspectives seriously; contributes to groupthink

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Occurs when our perceptions of ourselves wind up shaping our behavior. Linked to stereotypes: when people are reminded of stereotypes that apply to them, it affects their performance.

Psychological Arousal

One's alertness and readiness to respond.

Stereotypes

Opinions about what certain things signal about a person. Where prejudice is emotional, stereotypes are cognitive - they contain specific content about what we assume about people.

Normative Influence

Our desire to be socially accepted, affirmed, or admired within a group. This is more easily accomplished by agreeing with people than by disagreeing with them, and this tendency towards agreement contributes to group polarization.

Stereotype Content Model

Proposes that stereotypes of social groups can be arranged on two axes: warmth and competence, where warmth refers to our fondness of the group in question and competence refers o how capable we perceive that group. Describes paternalistic stereotype, admiration, contemptuous stereotype, and envious stereotype.

Obedience

Refers to a change in behavior in response to a direct request from someone who has power to enforce that request.

Stigma

Refers to intense disapproval that society directs towards certain identities and behaviors, and that disapproval also goes hand in hand with negative stereotypes about the people in question.

Institutional Discrimination

Refers to larger patterns of unequal behavior or outcomes as mediated by entire institutions.

Actor-Observer Bias

Refers to the idea that we're more likely to make a dispositional attribution of someone else, but a situational attribution for ourselves (especially when explaining negative behaviors). One explanation is that we're more aware of the situational circumstances that affect ourselves than of those affecting others; another is that we might be more ready to apply negative labels to others than to ourselves.

Individual Discrimination

Reflects behavior on the individual level - that is, the ways in which a single person can treat other people differently based on their group membership.

Self-Serving Bias

Related to actor-observer bias, but applies only to how we view ourselves. That is, we're more likely to make dispositional attributions of our own behavior if the outcomes are good and situational attributions if the outcomes are bad.

Folkways

Relatively insignificant informal norms that typically involve small details of everyday behavior (ex. fashion trends). Violating these doesn't usually cause too much of a problem.

Collective Behavior

Short social interactions, differs from group behavior. has looser norms and more open. Examples include fads, mass hysteria, and riots.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Similar to actor-observer bias, but applies only to how we view other people. That is, we're more likely to apply dispositional attributions than situational attributions to other people.

Conformity

Situations where someone's behavior, beliefs, or thinking changes to line up with the perspectives of others or with social norms in the community. Note that there must be a change: someone simply behaving in the same way as the rest of the group isn't automatically conforming.

Informal Norms

Social norms that aren't written down anywhere; they're just expectations and they don't have fixed penalties for violating them.

Illusion of Unanimity

The assumption that the majority opinions in the group are unanimous (i.e. that everyone in the group agrees. This factor is buffered by self-censorship. Contributes to groupthink

Just-World Hypothesis

The belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. So, if you're in a good situation, you must be a good person or have done something good to deserve it, and if you're in a bad situation, you must be a bad person or have done something bad to deserve it. Even though most people wouldn't explicitly endorse this perspective as a law of the universe, it's a bias that tends to affect how we see people: we tend to assume good things about people who are doing well in life and bad things about those who aren't. This bias likely stems from a tendency that many of us have to want the world to be just, which is challenged by situations where awful people do well in life and vice versa. We look for characteristics / actions to rationalize these outcomes.

Admiration

The combination of high warmth and high competence; directed towards people who are felt to be high-status and not pose a competitive threat (one's own in-group or close allies thereof).

Paternalistic Stereotype

The combination of high warmth and low competence; applied to people who are low status in society but not felt to pose a competitive threat (like children and elderly people).

Contemptuous Stereotype

The combination of low warmth and low competence; applied to people who are felt to be low-status and pose a competitive threat of some sort.

Locus of Control

The extent to which a person views themselves as having personal control over their circumstances Linked to self-serving bias.

Cultural Relativism

The idea that if we encounter a tradition or behavior in another culture that seems strange or uncomfortable, instead of immediately judging that behavior in the same way that would be applied to someone in our culture, we should put in some mental effort to understand the role and function of that tradition or behavior in its cultural context.

Social Facilitation

The idea that we perform tasks better in group settings when psychological arousal is higher; doesn't hold true for skills that are beyond the subject's technical ability.

Yerkes-Dodson Law

The idea we perform best at intermediate levels of psychological arousal; For familiar tasks, we would see a linear relationship between psychological arousal and performance. But for complex tasks, we get an upside-down u-shaped graph, with performance being somewhere in the middle under conditions of moderate arousal.

Taboos

The most restrictive norms, or things that you just don't do. Ex. incest, cannibalism, etc. Taboos can be culture-specific Because violating them is perceived to be such a severe offense, they kind of blur the line between formal and informal norms (some are forbidden by law and some aren't).

Social Control

The myriad of ways in which social norms are taught, enforced, and perpetuated.

Socialization

The process of learning social norms by interacting with other people and institutions. The first agent of socialization we encounter is family, but the education system, mass media, and peers / colleagues are also important agents.

Anonymity

The sense that no one will know you in a crowd.

Diffused Responsibility

The sense that you're not really responsible for something that happens in a group.

Social Loafing

The tendency for people to work less hard or be less productive in a group setting because they know that other people will pick up the slack. Doesn't have to be a deliberate choice (ex. clapping less loudly in a big audience than a small one).

Bystander Effect

The tendency not to offer help to someone in distress if other people are present. This occurs for two reasons: diffusion of responsibility within a crowd, and also if everyone else is walking by as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening, it's likely that we'll do the same.

Group Polarization

The tendency of a group to make decisions or arrive at final opinions that are more extreme than the initial positions of the individual members of the group. Two major factors contribute: informational influence and normative influence

Deindividuation

The tendency of people to lose their sense of self-awareness in a large group setting due to a high degree of psychological arousal and a low degree of perceived responsibility. Helps explain the behavior of violent mobs, for example. Three main factors contribute to deindividuation: anonymity, diffused responsibility, and group size (which increases the effects of both anonymity and diffused responsibility).

Fads

When a new behavior suddenly becomes extremely popular, and then its popularity fades; ex. planking

Internalization / Conversion

When conformity corresponds to a genuine change in someone's beliefs

Deviance

When someone doesn't follow a social norm.

Discrimination

When someone is treated differently based on prejudices regarding their membership in a group; where prejudice is emotional and stereotypes are cognitive, discrimination requires action.