Exam 2

In-Group Bias:

The tendency to favor members of one's own group and give them special preference over people who belong to other groups; the group can be temporary and trivial as well as significant - It often leads to unfair treatment of others merely because we have defined them as being in the out-group

Terror Management Theory:

The theory that holds that self-esteem serves as a buffer, protecting people from terrifying thoughts about their own mortality - People embrace views that make them feel like effective actors in a justice world

Investment Model:

The theory that people's commitment to a relationship depends not only on their satisfaction with the relationship, but also on how much they have invested in the relationship that would be lost by ending it

Similarity continues to have value in technologically driven relationships

Recent research indicates that this tendency to be drawn to comparable others who are "in our own league" is also evident when relationships go online

To predict whether people will stay in an intimate relationship, we need to know...

(1) how satisfied they are with the relationship, (2) what they think of their alternatives, and (3) how great their investment in the relationship is

Hypocrisy Induction:

(Elliot Johnson) The arousal of dissonance by having individuals make statements that run counter to their behaviors and then reminding them of the inconsistency between what they advocated and their behavior the purpose is to lead individuals to more responsible behavior

Self-Perception Theory

(Daryl Bem) Under certain circumstances people don't know how they feel until they see how they behave - People infer their attitudes from their behavior only under certain conditions 1) Initial attitude has to be weak or ambiguous 2) People infer their attitudes from their own behavior only when there are no other plausible explanations available

Using Norms to Change Behavior: Beware the "Boomerang Effect"

Efforts to change behavior by using norms have a downside - Ex) University administrators have tried a new technique for decreasing alcohol binge drinking on their campuses - For students who already drink very little (or not at all), finding out that the average student on campus drinks more than they do leads them to increase their own alcohol intake

What did the variation of Baron's experiment show us?

Even when the group is wrong, the right answer is obvious, and there are strong incentives to be accurate, some people still find it difficult to risk social disapproval

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions (Explain this header)

Every time we make a decision, we experience dissonance

Blaming the Victim:

The tendency to blame individuals (make dispositional attributions) for their victimization, typically motivated by a desire to see the world as a fair place - This tendency to blame victims is typically motivated by an understandable desire to see the world as a fair and just place - Most of us are good at reconstructing situations after the fact to support our belief in a just world - It simply requires making a dispositional attribution (it's the victim's fault) rather than a situational one

Normative Conformity:

The tendency to go along with the group in order to fulfill the group's expectations and gain acceptance - Explain why people who hold deep prejudices might not act on them, and why people who are not prejudiced might behave in a discriminatory way - Being a nonconformist is not easy

Impact Bias:

The tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of one's emotional reactions to future negative events - They fail to realize that dissonance reduction will eventually save them from future anguis - We fail to realize this b/c cognitive dissonance is largely unconscious (it is more effective that way)

Split Cable Market Tests

- Advertisers work in conjunction with cable companies and grocery stores, showing a target commercial to a randomly selected group of people - They keep track of what people buy - They can tell whether people who saw the commercial for ScrubaDub laundry detergent actually buy more ScrubaDub - Found that advertising does work, particularly for new products

An additional variation conducted by Milgram underscores the importance of authority ->

- At 150 volts, when the learner first cried out that he wanted to stop, the two experimenters began to disagree about whether they should continue - At this point, every single one of the participant-teachers stopped responding - When the authorities' definition of the situation became unclear, the participants broke out of their conforming role

Milgram's research= criticized by some as unethical for several reasons...

- Involved deception - Participants were told it was a study on memory and learning - Participants were told the electric shocks were real - No informed consent - When they agreed to be in the study, they were not informed as to its true nature, and thus they never really consented to take part in the scenario - Their role as teacher caused them psychological distress - It was not made clear to participants that they had the right to withdraw from the study at any time - Participants experienced inflicted insight - More recent critiques have focused on disturbing allegations that Milgram misrepresented his debriefing methods - Many research participants actually left the study unaware that the learner had been a confederate and the shocks had been fake New research guidelines (created primarily to protect participants in medical research) made conducting obedience research such as Milgram's increasingly problematic

Physical attractiveness is associated with a variety of benefits...

- People of above-average looks tend to earn 10% to 15% more than those of below-average appearance - College professors perceived as attractive tend to receive higher student evaluation ratings - Attractiveness even helps win elections - Physical attractiveness affects the attributions people make about others (and vice versa)

We are all victims or potential victims of prejudice

- Prejudice against us can be based on ethnicity, skin color, religion, gender, age, national origin, sexual orientation, body size, disability, etc. - Prejudice is a two-way street - Often flows from the minority group to the majority group as well as in the other direction

Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008)

- Researchers gave students on campus an envelope with 20 bucks and they told students to spend it on themselves by 5pm - In another condition, the person got 20 bucks but is told to spend it on someone else by 5pm - Those assigned to the "spend it on others" condition were happier than those asked to spend the money on themselves (Little less self-focus and a little more concern with others can actually make us happier)

Walter Stephan

- Was unable to find a single study demonstrating a significant increase in self-esteem among African American children, and 25% of the studies showed a significant decrease in their self-esteem following desegregation - Found that in 53% of the studies prejudice actually increased; in 34% of the studies, no change in prejudice occurred - You would have found almost no integration (white kids with white kids and vice versa) - We need to take a closer look at the contact hypothesis and the conditions under which it is effective - Contact can make intergroup relations more hostile and even increase prejudice

Stacey Sinclair (Experiment)

- When you arrive, the experimenter acts in either a likable or an unlikable manner - You then sit at a computer and complete a simple task in which you press one key every time the word good appears on the screen and another whenever the word bad appears - The computer task is a measure of automatic prejudice - A photograph of a white or black face is flashed very rapidly right before the word good or bad appears - The faces are flashed so quickly that you do not consciously see them - To see if people "tuned" their views to the experimenter, the researchers altered one other thing: In half of the sessions the experimenter wore a T-shirt that expressed antiracism views ("eracism"), and in half of the sessions she did not - When the experimenter was likable, participants showed less automatic prejudice when she was wearing the antiracism T-shirt than when she was not - When she was unlikable -> They showed more automatic prejudice when she was wearing the antiracist T-shirt than when she was not

An experiment dealing with SFP

- White college undergraduates were asked to interview several job applicants, some white, others African American - The white students displayed discomfort and lack of interest when interviewing African American applicants - Then, in a second experiment, the researchers systematically varied the behavior of the interviewers (actually their confederates) so that it coincided with the way the original interviewers had treated the African American or white interviewees in the first experiment - But in the second experiment, all of the people being interviewed were white - Applicants who were interviewed the way African Americans had been interviewed in the first experiment were judged to be far more nervous and far less effective than those who were interviewed the way white applicants had originally been interviewed

A variation of Asch's study went something like this...

- the actual participants were the only ones allowed to write down their answers on a piece of paper instead of saying them out loud - Conformity dropped dramatically, occurring on an average of only 1.5 of the 12 trials - demonstrated just how powerful social disapproval can be in shaping behavior

Attitudes are made of three components

1) A cognitive component - involving the beliefs or thoughts (cognitions) that make up the attitude 2) An effective/emotional component - Representing both the type of emotion linked with the attitude (e.g., anger, warmth) and the intensity of the emotion (e.g., mild uneasiness, outright hostility) 3) Behavioral Component

Three primary services...

1) aggregating a large number of profiles for browsing 2) providing opportunity for communication with potential mates 3) matching users based on analyses of compatibility - Still, some of the promise of online dating is tempered by psychological research findings - Ex) Algorithms used to match potential mates by compatibility do not lead to higher relationship success rates

Three reasons lowballing works...

1. Although the customer's decision to buy is reversible, a commitment of sorts does exist - Signing a check for a down payment creates the illusion of irrevocability 2. The feeling of commitment triggered the anticipation of an exciting event 3. Although the final price is substantially higher than the customer thought it would be, it is probably only slightly higher than the price at another dealership

There are three basic ways that we reduce dissonance...

1. By changing our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition 2. By attempting to justify our behavior through changing one of the dissonant cognitions 3. By attempting to justify our behavior by adding new cognitions

Stereotype:

A generalization about a group of people in which certain traits are assigned to virtually all members of the group, regardless of actual variation among the members - The stereotypical quality can be physical, mental, or occupational - If the stereotype blinds us to individual differences within a class of people -> maladaptive, unfair, and harmful Stereotyping is a cognitive process, and stereotypes can be positive as well as negative - If you like a group -> positive stereotype - If you dislike the group -> stereotype of the same behavior will be negative

Prejudice:

A hostile or negative attitude toward people in a distinguishable group based solely on their membership in that group; it contains cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components

Elaboration Likelihood Model:

A model explaining two ways in which persuasive communications can cause attitude change: centrally, when people are motivated and have the ability to pay attention to the arguments in the communication, and peripherally, when people do not pay attention to the arguments but are instead swayed by surface characteristics

External Justification:

A reason or an explanation for dissonant personal behavior that resides outside the individual (e.g., to receive a large reward or avoid a severe punishment) - When you can't find external justification for your behavior, you will attempt to find Internal Justification

American culture stresses the importance of not conforming

Americans picture themselves as a nation of rugged individualists, people who think for themselves, stand up for the underdog, and go against the tide - This image has been shaped by -> manner in which the nation was founded (system of government) and our historical experience with western expansion - American mythology has celebrated the rugged individualist - Ex) Marlboro Man - Ex2) Apple's Slogan ("Think Different")

Minority Influence: When the Few Influence the Many

An individual or minority of group members can indeed influence the behavior or beliefs of the majority

David Myers and Letha Scanzoni

Argued that there are far more verses in the Bible celebrating compassion, love, and justice - Because the Bible is a historical as well as a spiritual document, it has been used to justify many practices that Americans no longer believe in

Why should we avoid low self-esteem?

Associated with depression and the feelings that we are ineffective and not in control of our lives - High self-esteem also protects us against thoughts about our own death (TMT) - High self-esteem also motivates us during hard times - Make us exaggerate how good we are at things and be overly optimistic about our futures, motivating us to try harder when we encounter obstacles in our path - Research shows that people who are optimistic—even unreasonably so—try harder, persevere more in the face of failure, and set higher goals than do people who are not - If you exaggerate your prospects too much, though -> you are destined for failure (there is a dose of high self-esteem that is bad)

An important function of the self is to...

Be the chief executive who makes choices about what to do, both in the present and in the future - We are the only species that can imagine events and engage in planning for those events - It is the self that does this planning and exerts this control

Gordon Gallup (1997)

Compared the behavior of chimpanzees raised in normal family groupings with that of chimps who were raised alone in complete social isolation - The socially experienced chimps "passed" the mirror test - The socially isolated chimps did not react to their reflections at all

Upward Social Comparison:

Comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability - This can make us feel inferior

Elaine Hatfield (1986)

Developed a questionnaire to measure passionate love - As measured by this scale, passionate love consists of strong, uncontrollable thoughts; intense feelings; and overt acts toward the target of one's affection

Prejudice often leads to ____

Discrimination

Dissonance in the Brain

Experiments with monkeys and chimps support the notion that cognitive dissonance has some built-in, adaptive functions When monkeys and chimps are placed in a similar situation, having to choose between different-colored M&Ms instead of kitchen appliances, they later reduced their preference for the color of M&Ms they had not chosen - Monkeys and chimps do not have a self-concept to protect - But, instead, It seems likely that their preference for holding to a "win-stay" strategy, was evolutionarily adaptive The areas of the brain that are activated during dissonance include the striatum and other highly specific areas within the prefrontal cortex, the site prominently involved in planning and decision making

Realistic Conflict Theory

Finally, one of the most obvious sources of conflict and prejudice is competition—for scarce resources, for political power, and for social status

Shuangyue Zhang (2009)

Found two major differences in American and Chinese dating couples' decisions to marry - When describing how they would decide whether or not to marry their partners, Chinese students placed a heavier emphasis on two concepts central to their collectivistic culture... - Xiao - Guanxi - In contrast, American students placed importance on receiving support, care, and "living a better life

Highly attractive people do actually develop good social interaction skills and report having more satisfying interactions with others than do less-attractive people BECAUSE

From a young age, receive a great deal of attention that in turn helps them develop good social skills (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy)

What is Attractive?

From early childhood, the media tell us what is beautiful, and they tell us that beauty is associated with goodness - Taught us that heroines—and the princes who woo and win them—have a specific look - We often share criteria for defining beauty

Michael Norton (2007)

Gave a survey to participants both before and after going on a date - Pre-date, all that participants knew about their partner was what they had read on a Web site profile - Their ratings of how much they liked their partner decreased after the date - Because the more familiar participants became with their partner during the date, the more they realized that some aspects of their initial impression (based on an ambiguous dating Web site profile) turned out to be inaccurate

Akert (1998)

Heterosexual men are not particularly interested in remaining friends with their ex-girlfriends when they are in either the breaker or the breakee role - Women are more interested in remaining friends, hoping to reshape the intimate relationship into a platonic friendship, especially when they are the breakees - ALSO couples with higher rates of satisfaction and investment during the course of their relationship are also more likely to remain friends afterward

Kunda, Sinclair, + Griffin (1997)

Imaging an aggressive construction worker + then imagining an aggressive lawyer - My stereotypes of the construction worker + lawyer determined my definition of aggression - Most people see the construction worker as being physically aggressive and the lawyer as being verbally aggressive

Self-Affirmation:

In the context of dissonance theory, a way of reducing dissonance by reminding oneself of one or more of one's positive attributes - Ex) "Yeah, I feel pretty stupid to still be smoking, but boy am I a good cook."

Margaret Clark (1993)

Interactions between new acquaintances are governed by equity concerns and are called Exchange Relationships

The Importance of Being Accurate

Later research extended Sherif's classic study - Employed judgment tasks that are more like real life than the autokinetic effect - Also revealed another variable that affects informational social influence: how important it is to be accurate at the task

The absence of meaningful relationships with other people makes people feel ____

Lonely, worthless, hopeless, helpless, and powerless

Propinquity works because of ____

Mere Exposure Effect

Experiment conducted via Facebook during the 2010 U.S. congressional elections ->

Millions of Facebook users to receive either an informational or a social message about voting - provided a link for finding their local polling place - button they could click to update friends with the news that they had voted - It told users how many of their own Facebook friends had also voted Control group received no message at all - the informational message had little impact on users' own likelihood of voting - But Facebook users who received the social message were significantly more likely to vote

Fear-Arousing Communications

One way to get people's attention is to scare them

The Consequence of Resisting Normative Social Influence

One way to observe the power of normative social pressure -> examine the consequences when people manage to resist it

Blaming the Victim

People who have rarely been discriminated against have a hard time fully understanding what it's like to be a target of prejudice - True empathy is difficult for those who have routinely been judged on the basis of their own merit and not their racial, ethnic, religious, or other group membership - When empathy is absent, it is hard to avoid falling into the attributional trap of Blaming the Victim

Subjective Norms

People's beliefs about how others they care about will view the behavior in question

Self-Esteem:

People's evaluations of their own self-worth—that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

Justifying Feelings of Entitlement and Superiority:

Prejudices support the in-group's feeling of superiority - Wherever a majority group systematically discriminates against a minority to preserve its power, they will claim that their actions are legitimate because the minority is so obviously inferior and incompetent - Most people who are in dominant positions in their society do not see themselves as being prejudiced

Notably, in contrast to informational social influence, normative pressures usually result in ____

Public compliance without private acceptance - People go along with the group even if they think it is wrong or do not believe in what they are doing

By "average" here we don't mean "average looking," but rather...

Refer to features that appear to be of average size and dimension

Guanxi

Relationships as a network of connections

Experiment dealing with justifications in terms of friendships!!

Reservists who ate grasshoppers at the request of a stern, unpleasant officer increased their liking for grasshoppers far more than those who ate grasshoppers at the request of a well-liked, pleasant officer - Those who complied with the unfriendly officer's request had little external justification for their actions - As a result, they adopted positive attitudes toward eating grasshoppers

The Hypocrisy Paradigm

Self-justification helps us explain the fascinating, sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming phenomenon of hypocrisy

Edwin Hollander

Stated that conforming to a group over time earns you Idiosyncrasy Credits

People do not perform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed

Success at dehumanizing the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty - It sets up an endless chain of violence, followed by self-justification followed by more violence and dehumanization - In this manner, unbelievable acts of human cruelty can escalate

The Power of Familiarity

The crucial variable on which much of interpersonal attraction hinges may actually be familiarity - "Averaging" faces together produces one face that looks typical, familiar, and physically attractive - Additionally, when participants rated the attractiveness of faces, they preferred those faces that most resembled their own - Familiarity also underlies many of the other concepts we've discussed thus far: propinquity (people we see frequently become familiar through mere exposure), similarity (people who are similar to us will also seem familiar to us), and reciprocal liking (people who like each other get to know and become familiar with each other)

Reactance Theory:

The idea that when people feel their freedom to perform a certain behavior is threatened, an unpleasant state of resistance is aroused, which they can reduce by performing the prohibited behavior

Social norms:

The implicit or explicit rules a group has for the acceptable behaviors, values, and beliefs of its members - Of course, conformity to social norms isn't always dangerous - Ex) Ice Bucket Challenge

The Permanence of The Decision (Explain this header)

The more important the decision, the greater the dissonance - Decisions also vary in terms of how permanent they are—that is, how difficult they are to revoke

Some Final Thoughts on Dissonance: Learning From Our Mistakes

The more people give up and the harder they work, the greater will be the need to convince themselves that their views are correct Much of the time, dissonance-reducing behavior can be useful because it allows us to maintain self-esteem - Yet if we were to spend all our time and energy defending our egos -> we would never learn from our mistakes, bad decisions, and incorrect beliefs - Instead, we would ignore them, justify them, or, worse still, attempt to turn them into virtues

Xiao

The obedience and devotion shown by children to their parents

Operant Conditioning:

The phenomenon whereby behaviors we freely choose to perform become more or less frequent, depending on whether they are followed by a reward or punishment - Attitudes can take on a positive or negative affect through either classical or operant conditioning - Ex) A toddler will take on their parent's racist views if their parents yell at them when they play with black kids on the playground

Culture and Love

The process of finding a romantic partner varies across the world - Divorce in an unhappy marriage is also something that varies by culture Cultures also differ with regard to how people think about, define, and experience love - While romantic love is deemed an important, even crucial, basis for marriage in individualistic societies, it is less emphasized in collectivistic ones - In individualistic societies, romantic love is a heady, highly personal experience - In collectivistic societies, the individual in love must consider the wishes of family and other group members, which sometimes includes agreeing to an arranged marriage - Interestingly, though, in recent decades Western ways of finding a partner have begun to permeate collectivistic cultures through the media

Why Does Jigsaw Work?

The process of participating in a cooperative group breaks down in-group versus out-group perceptions - Allows the individual to develop the cognitive category of "oneness" - In addition, the cooperative strategy places people in a "favor-doing" situation - People who act in a way that benefits others subsequently come to feel more favorable toward the people they helped It also works because it encourages the development of empathy - But to participate effectively in the jigsaw classroom, you have to pay close attention to whichever member of the group is reciting - The participants learn how to approach each classmate in a way that is tailored to fit his or her special needs - Increase in general empathetic behavior -> reduce the tendency to rely on stereotypes

Self-Handicapping:

The strategy whereby people create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that if they do poorly on a task, they can avoid blaming themselves - Doing poorly or failing at a task is damaging to your self-esteem

Justification of Effort:

The tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard to attain

Idiosyncrasy Credits

The tolerance a person earns, over time, by conforming to group norms; if enough credits are earned, the person can, on occasion, deviate from the group without retribution

Where Desegregation Went Wrong

The traditional classroom is a highly competitive environment - Carlos finds he must compete against white, middle-class students who have had better preparation than he and who have been reared to hold white, middle-class values, which include working hard in pursuit of good grades - He is virtually guaranteed to lose - After a few failures, Carlos, feeling defeated, humiliated, and dispirited, stops raising his hand and can hardly wait for the bell to ring In the typical desegregated classroom, the students were not of equal status and were not pursuing common goals - The situation would have exacerbated whatever stereotypes existed before desegregation - Given that the minority kids were not prepared for the competitiveness of the classroom, some of the white kids quickly concluded that the minority kids were stupid (just as they expected) - For their part, the minority kids might conclude that the white kids were arrogant show-offs - SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Experiment dealing with the hypocrisy induction

They asked two groups of college students to compose a speech describing the dangers of AIDS and other STD - In one group, the students merely composed the arguments - In the second group, after composing their arguments, they were to recite them in front of a video camera and were told that an audience of high school students would watch the resulting tape - Half of the students in each group were made mindful of their own failure to use condoms - The participants in one group experienced the highest dissonance: those who made a video for high school students after the experimenter got them to think about their own failure to use condoms - Because they were made aware of their own hypocrisy - They had to deal with the fact that they were preaching behavior that they themselves were not practicing When the researchers phoned the students several months after the experiment, they found that the effects held

Another version of Milgram's study supports the idea that informational influence was operative ->

This version was identical to the original except for three critical changes... - First, the experimenter never said which shock levels were to be given - Second, before the study began, the experimenter received a telephone call and had to leave the room, telling the participant to continue without him - Third, there was a confederate playing the role of an additional teacher, whose job was to record how long it took the learner to respond to each word pair - Note that in this situation, the person giving the commands has no expertise - Full compliance dropped to only 20%

One form of self-control that does not work well is ____

Thought Suppression- When we try to push thoughts out of our mind - The more we try not to think about something, the more those thoughts come to mind

Other Tactics of Social Influence

Using norms is not the only way to change other people's behavior - The sequence in which a series of requests is made also contributes to the effectiveness of social influence

Gustav Le Bon (1895)

Was the first researcher to document how emotions and behavior can spread rapidly through a crowd—an effect he called contagion

Counterattitudinal Advocacy

Within a short time, your attitude toward X will have moved in the direction of the statement you made

Stereotypes of Gender

Women- More empathic and talkative Men- More competent and aggressive - The stereotypes exaggerate differences between the sexes, ignore differences in personality traits and abilities within each gender, and oversimplify - When women's and men's actual behavior is observed -> the sexes do not differ in having feelings of empathy or in its expression - There is also no significant difference in the number of words spoken

Ways of Identifying Implicit Prejudices

^^ The methods just described are based on the assumption that people know what they really feel but prefer to hide those feelings from others

William McGuire (1964)

"Inoculated" people by giving them brief arguments against cultural truisms- beliefs that most members of a society accept uncritically - Two days later, people came back and read a much stronger attack on the truism - The people who had been inoculated against these arguments earlier were much less likely to change their attitudes than were those in a control group who had not been inoculated

Charles Cooley (1902)

"Looking Glass Self" We see ourselves and the social world through the eyes of other people and often adopt those views - This is esp. True when two people want to get along with each other

All affectively based attitudes have what in common??

(1) do not result from a rational examination of the issues (2) are not governed by logic (3) are often linked to people's values

Cognitive Dissonance:

(Leon Festinger) The discomfort that people feel when two cognitions (beliefs, attitudes) conflict, or when they behave in ways that are inconsistent with their conception of themselves - Cognitive dissonance always produces discomfort, and in response we try to reduce it - The path to reducing dissonance is not always simple or obvious

Conforming to the wrong norm

- It can be difficult to switch midstream, to realize that this norm is no longer appropriate, or to recognize that another norm - It was particularly difficult for people to abandon the "obey authority" norm in the Milgram study because of three key aspects of the situation... - 1) The study was fast paced, preventing the participants from stopping to reflect on what they were doing - They were busy recording the learner's responses, keeping track of the word pairs, and determining whether the learner's responses were right or wrong - It was difficult for them to realize that the norm guiding their behavior was no longer appropriate because they were distracted

Enormous progress has been made, though...

- Less people are willing to be outrightly racist or sexist or whatever - Yet, it is clear that prejudice is still an issue - Some white people feel that the reduction in antiblack bias has been accompanied by a rise in antiwhite bias - Online, hundreds of thousands of self-identified white nationalists proudly express their contempt for gays, blacks, Mexicans, and, primarily, Jews - And sometimes prejudice happens overtly today - Many of its expressions are more subtle, however

Study of students in two rival universities: Princeton and Rutgers ->

- Male students at the two schools watched videotaped scenes in which three different young men were asked to make a decision - Told that the man was either a Princeton or a Rutgers student - Participants had to predict what the man in the videotape would choose - After they saw the man make his choice (e.g., rock or classical music), they were asked to predict what percentage of male students at that institution would make the same choice - When the target person was an out-group member, the participants believed his choice was more predictive of what his peers would choose than when he was an in-group member

How Advertising Works

- Many advertisements take the emotional approach - But for products for which people's attitudes are more cognitively based, we need to ask an additional question: How personally relevant is the issue? - And for cognitively based attitude that is not of direct personal relevance to people -> - You might succeed in changing their attitudes via the peripheral route, such as by having attractive movie stars endorse your product - BUT such attitude change triggered by peripheral cues does not last long ** SO, the trick is to make your product personally relevant **

Explored how injunctive and descriptive norms affect people's likelihood to litter. And the results showed...

- Patrons of a city library were returning to their cars in the parking lot when a confederate approached them - In the control group, the confederate just walked by - In the descriptive norm condition, the confederate dropped an empty bag from a fast-food restaurant on the ground before passing the participant - In the injunctive norm condition, the confederate was not carrying anything but instead picked up a littered fast-food bag - These three conditions occurred in one of two environments - Either the parking lot was heavily littered - Area was clean and unlittered - When they got back to their cars, they found a large flyer slipped under the driver's side of the windshield (They could throw the flyer on the ground, littering, or bring the flyer inside their car to dispose of it later) - The control group tells us the baseline of what percentage of people typically litter in this situation (slightly more than ⅓ of people) - In the descriptive norm condition... - In the littered parking lot, the confederate's behavior reminded participants that people often litter here and so he littered, too - In the clean parking lot, reminded participants that most people don't litter in this area, so he did not litter - In the injunctive norm condition... - Seeing the confederate picking up someone else's litter invokes the injunctive norm that littering is wrong in both the clean and the littered environments - Lowest amount of littering in the study

How do people hold their racists beliefs today?

- Some suppress their true feelings out of a sincere motivation to become less prejudiced - Others suppress their beliefs to avoid being labeled as racist, sexist, or homophobic - And others hold implicit prejudices that they might not even be aware of consciously - Social psychologists have developed a variety of measures to try to identify the prejudices that people don't want to admit

SA's experiment...

- The experimenter shows everyone two cards, one with a single line on it and the other with three lines labeled 1, 2, and 3 - He asked each person to announce out loud which of the three lines on the second card is closest in length to the line on the first card - It is crystal clear that the correct answer is the second line - The experimenter presents a third set of lines, and again the answer is obvious—line 3 is clearly the closest in length to the target line - Then all the confederates answer line one - When it is your turn to answer -> Seventy-six percent of the participants conformed and gave an obviously incorrect response on at least one trial + people conformed on about one-third of the trials on which the accomplices gave an incorrect answer (Normative Influence baby!)

Friese (2014)

- Those in the prayer condition were asked to spend 5 minutes praying - All participants then performed a difficult task (suppressing their emotions and facial expressions while watching comedy films), followed by another difficult cognitive task - Everyone had enough energy to do the first task, regardless of whether they had prayed or not - But those who prayed were better able to muster the energy to do well on the second task as well - Prayer could have helped b/c it could have convinced people that they had the resources and willpower to keep going

When Will People Conform to Informational Social Influence?

1. When the situation is ambiguous- - The more uncertain you are, the more you will rely on others 2. When the situation is a crisis - Crisis often occurs simultaneously with ambiguity - In a crisis situation, we usually do not have time to stop and think about exactly which course of action we should take 3. When other people are experts - The more expertise or knowledge a person has, the more valuable he or she will be as a guide in an ambiguous situation

Public Health Campaigns

A meta-analysis of studies that tested the effects of a media message on substance use among youths was encouraging - Television and radio messages had even bigger effects than messages in the print media

Conformity:

A change in one's behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people - The consequences of conformity span a wide range

Jigsaw Classroom:

A classroom setting designed to reduce prejudice and raise the self-esteem of children by placing them in small, multiethnic groups and making each child dependent on the other children in the group to learn the course material - Students are placed in diverse six-person learning groups - The day's lesson is divided into six segments, and each student is assigned one segment of the written material - Each part must be put together before the puzzle is solved - The jigsaw classroom has students depending on each other (not competing with each other) - The children begin to pay more attention to each other and to show respect for each other - Carlos would respond to this treatment by simultaneously becoming more relaxed and more engaged

Halo Effect:

A cognitive bias by which we tend to assume that an individual with one positive characteristic also possesses other (even unrelated) positive characteristics - Meta-analyses have revealed that physical attractiveness has its largest effect on attributions related to social competence: The beautiful are thought to be more sociable, extroverted, and popular than the less attractive - They are also seen as more sexual, happier, and more assertive

Propaganda:

A deliberate, systematic attempt to advance a cause by manipulating mass attitudes and behaviors, often through misleading or emotionally charged information - Ex) Nazis in 1930 - The Nazis disseminated their ideology through the extensive use of posters and "spectacles"—lavish public rallies that aroused powerful emotions of loyalty and patriotism - Nazi propaganda was taught in schools - It was always presented a consistent, dogmatic message: The German people must act to protect their racial purity and to increase their Lebensraum (living space) through conquest

When Informal Conformity Backfires

A dramatic form of informational social influence occurs during crises - When one's personal safety is involved, the need for information is acute—and the behavior of others is very informative

Opinions and Personality

A large body of research indicates that the more similar someone's opinions are to yours, the more you will like the person

Self-Persuasion:

A long-lasting form of attitude change that results from attempts at self-justification - Self-persuasion is more permanent than direct attempts at persuasion precisely because the persuasion takes place internally - Moreover, the effects of self-persuasion in young children can be lasting

How could the German people have acquiesced to the destruction of European Jewry?

A major factor was prejudice - Propaganda is most successful when it taps into an audience's preexisting beliefs - Jews were described in the Nazi propaganda as destroyers of Aryan racial purity and thus a threat to German survival Another factor= propaganda - Operated in the form of persuasive messages leading to attitude change - Also initiated social influence processes, persuading many Germans through informational conformity - AND in a crisis -> people are likely to conform - It was hard to not going along with their views (Normative Influence)

Similarity

A match between our interests, attitudes, values, background, or personality and those of another person

Social Distance

A person's reluctance to get "too close" to another group Overt prejudice among all groups has declined - BUT most people within each ethnic group are still strongly opposed to virtually all of the other ethnic groups living in their neighborhoods or marrying into their families

Self-Justification

A second important aspect of the situation in the Milgram study is that -> experimenter asked people to increase the shocks in very small increments - As the participants administered each successive level of shock, they had to justify it in their own minds - After they had justified a particular shock level, it became very difficult for them to decide on a place where they should draw the line and stop (215 volts is not that different from 200, and 230 is not that different from 215)

Implicit Association Test (IAT):

A test thought to measure unconscious (implicit) prejudices according to the speed with which people can pair a target face (e.g., black or white, old or young, Asian or white) with a positive or negative association (e.g., the words honest or evil) - People respond more quickly when white faces are paired with positive words and when black faces are paired with negative words - Speed difference is said to be a measure of their implicit attitudes toward African Americans because it's harder for their unconscious minds to link African Americans with positive words

Steele and Aronson

Administered a difficult test (the GRE) individually to African American and white students at Stanford University - Half of the students of each race were led to believe that the investigator was interested in measuring their intellectual ability - The other half were led to believe that the investigator was examining the process of test taking but didn't care about the students' abilities - White students performed equally well (or poorly) regardless of whether or not they believed the test was being used as a diagnostic tool - The African American students who believed their abilities were not being measured performed as well as the white student - African American students who thought the test was measuring their abilities did not perform as well as the white students or as well as the African Americans in the other group - Found that one of the triggers of stereotype threat is the salience of race: If test takers are asked to indicate their race prior to taking the test, black students perform significantly worse than they would otherwise

To prevent this "Boomerang Effect" that is seen in college's efforts to reduce binge drinking...

Accordingly, your efforts to change others' behavior through processes of conformity must consider that there are different types of people receiving your message: those performing the undesirable behavior at an above-average level and those performing the undesirable behavior at a below-average level

Gan Qing

Achieved by helping and working for another person (Chinese) - Ex) a "romantic" act would be fixing someone's bicycle or helping someone learn new material - This is much different that Western's love

Dehumanizing The Enemy: Justifying Cruelty

All cultures are inclined to dehumanize their enemies by calling them cruel names - The use of such language is a way of reducing dissonance - Ex) "I am a good person, but we are fighting and killing these other people; therefore, they must deserve whatever they get, because they aren't fully human like us."

When Will People Conform to Normative Social Influence?

Although conformity is common, people don't always cave in to peer pressure Some answers to this question are provided by Bibb Latané's Social Impact Theory

Today's multiethnic college campuses are a living laboratory of the contact hypothesis ->

Although contact between ethnic groups is generally a good thing, the desegregation of schools did not work as smoothly as most knowledgeable people had expected - School desegregation frequently led to tension and turmoil in the classroom

Persuasive Communication:

Although dissonance techniques are powerful, they are difficult to carry out on a mass scale - Constructing an effective persuasive communication is complicated

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:

An expectation of one's own or another person's behavior that comes true because of the tendency of the person holding it to act in ways that bring it about

Anxious/Ambivalent Attachment Style:

An attachment style characterized by a concern that others will not reciprocate one's desire for intimacy, resulting in higher-than-average levels of anxiety - The key assumption of attachment theory is that the particular attachment style we learn in infancy becomes our working model or schema for what all relationships are like - This has been borne out in numerous studies using questionnaires to measure adults' attachment styles and analyzing correlations between attachment style and the quality of their adult romantic relationships

Avoidant Attachment Style:

An attachment style characterized by difficulty developing intimate relationships because previous attempts to be intimate have been rebuffed - Do not react much at their parent's departure or return

Secure Attachment Style:

An attachment style characterized by trust, a lack of concern with being abandoned, and the view that one is worthy and well liked - Cry and show signs of distress when their parent leaves the room and are quite happy when he or she returns

Behaviorally Based Attitude:

An attitude based on observations of how one behaves toward an object

Cognitively Based Attitudes:

An attitude based primarily on people's beliefs about the properties of an attitude object - Allows us to classify the pluses and minuses of an object so that we can quickly determine how we feel about it

The Decision to Behave Immorally (ETH)

An efficient path to reducing dissonance would involve changing your attitude about cheating - You would adopt a more lenient attitude toward cheating, convincing yourself that it is a victimless crime that doesn't hurt anybody Suppose that you decideD not to cheat - To relieve dissonance (you could have gotten a better grade if you cheated, you are dumb!) you could change your attitude about the morality of the act, but this time in the opposite direction - Convince yourself that cheating is a heinous sin

Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion:

An explanation of the two ways in which persuasive communications can cause attitude change: either systematically processing the merits of the arguments or using mental shortcuts or heuristics - Our emotions and moods can themselves act as heuristics to determine our attitudes - When trying to decide what our attitude is about something, we often rely on the "How do I feel about it?" heuristic (If we feel good, we must have a positive attitude) - This is generally a pretty good rule - The only problem is that sometimes it is difficult to tell where our feelings come from - It makes sense, then, that retailers strive to create good feelings while presenting their products More generally, emotions can also influence the way that people think about persuasive messages - When we're in a good mood, we tend to relax a bit, comfortable in the assumption that the world is a safe place, which can lead us to be content with heuristic cues - A bad mood, however, often puts on alert, sharpening our skepticism and leading us to pay more attention to message quality

Passionate Love:

An intense longing we feel for a person, accompanied by physiological arousal - When things are going well (the other person loves us too), we feel great fulfillment and ecstasy - When things are not going well (our love is unrequited), we feel great sadness and despair Cross-cultural research indicates that American couples tend to value passionate love more than Chinese couples do, and Chinese couples tend to value companionate love more than American couples do

Lowballing:

An unscrupulous strategy whereby a salesperson induces a customer to agree to purchase a product at a low cost, subsequently claims it was an error, and then raises the price; frequently, the customer will agree to make the purchase at the inflated price

Harrison Pope (1999)

Analyzed advertisements starting in 1950 from two women's magazines, Glamour and Cosmopolitan, for how often male and female models were pictured in a state of undress - For women, the percentage remained at about 20% over the decades - In 1950, fewer than 5% of ads showed men in some state of undress; by 1995, that figure had risen to as much as 35%

Out-Group Homogeneity

Another consequence of social categorization is the perception of Out-Group Homogeneity

Emotions as a Heuristic

Another way in which emotions can cause attitude change -> acting as a signal for how we feel about something

Bogus Pipeline

Another way of identifying people's explicit but suppressed prejudices - Participants were hooked up to an impressive-looking machine and told it was a kind of lie detector (it was not) - Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions 1) Which they indicated their attitudes either on a questionnaire (where it was easy to give socially correct responses) 2) Using the bogus pipeline (where they believed the machine would reveal their true attitudes if they lied) - People expressed more racial prejudice when the bogus pipeline was used - College men and women expressed almost identically positive attitudes about women's rights and women's roles in society on a questionnaire - When the bogus pipeline was used, however, most of the men revealed their true feelings

Investment

Anything people have put into a relationship that will be lost if they leave it - The greater the investment individuals have in a relationship, the less likely they are to leave, even when satisfaction is low and other alternatives look promising

Cialdini's experiment with the DITF Technique ->

Approached college students and asked if they would be willing to spend 2 hours chaperoning a group of troubled children on a field trip to the local zoo - Only 17% of students agreed - 50% of students who were first asked to volunteer every week for a minimum of 2 years at a local juvenile detention center agreed with the smaller commitment of going to the zoo - Bigger request makes the second "ask" seem less daunting by comparison - Another reason has to do with feelings of reciprocity - They feel as if the requestor has made concessions (so then they feel like they can negotiate a bit)

When it comes to feeling good about ourselves, most of us ____

Are doing fine! - Men have more positive views of their physical appearance than women do, but this same study found that women have higher self-esteem in some areas (e.g., their perception of their moral and ethical qualities) and that women and men have equally high self-esteem in other areas, such as academics and social acceptance

Anthony Greenwald and Thomas Pettigrew

Argue that in-group bias is an even more powerful reason for discrimination than outright prejudice and hostility are

Christian Crandall and Amy Eshleman

Argue that most people struggle between their urge to express a prejudice they hold and their need to maintain a positive self-concept as someone who is not a bigot - But suppressing prejudiced impulses requires constant energy - So people are always on the lookout for information that will enable them to convince themselves that they are justified - Many people justify their beliefs, including their prejudiced beliefs, by calling on religious doctrine - The problem with using the Bible in this way is that equally religious people use the Bible to support their belief in acceptance - And many religious denominations now endorse gay marriage and approve of gay clergy

David Buss

Argue that the evolutionary approach explains the different strategies and tendencies of men and women in romantic relationships - Finding (and keeping) a mate requires one to display resources—the aspects of oneself that will appear attractive to potential mates - Women, facing high reproductive costs, will look for a man who can supply the resources and support she needs to raise a child - Men will look for a woman who appears capable of reproducing successfully - Men will respond to the physical appearance of women because age and health denote reproductive fitness, and women will respond to the economic and career achievements - However, that the top characteristics on both men's and women's lists were the same: honesty, trustworthiness, and a pleasant personality

Susan Fiske (2001)

Around the world sexism takes two basic forms: - Hostile sexism- hold negative stereotypes of women - Benevolent sexism- hold positive stereotypes of women - Both sets of stereotypes are demeaning to women because benevolent sexists, like hostile sexists, assume that women are the weaker sex - Benevolent sexists tend to idealize women romantically and want to protect them when they do not need protection (PATRONIZING) - Because benevolent sexism lacks a tone of hostility to women, it doesn't seem like a prejudice to many people - Benevolent sexism can even cost lives: In the years between 1950 and 2012, about twice as many people died in hurricanes named after women than in hurricanes named after men - This is true because people thought the hurricanes with male names would be more deadly and violent Many people believe that men are aggressive and predatory and overall just not as warm and kind as women - This attitude seems hostile to men, the researchers found, but it also reflects and supports gender inequality and prejudice against women - Characterizes men as being "naturally" designed for leadership and dominance

Amae

As an extremely positive emotional state in which one is a totally passive love object, indulged and taken care of by one's romantic partner, much like a mother-infant relationship (Japanese word) - Amae has no equivalent word in English or in any other Western language - The closest word= Dependency- an emotional state that Western cultures consider unhealthy in adult relationships

What's Wrong With Positive Stereotypes

Asian Americans have often been labeled a "model minority," they are hardworking, ambitious, and intelligent - But many Asians object this stereotype b/c it sets up expectations for those who are not interested in academic achievement - Moreover, the stereotype lumps together all Asian Americans, ignoring differences across Asian cultures OR the idea that blacks are really good at basketball, but whites are not - It blurs the fact that many African American kids are not adept at basketball and that many white kids are

Robin Akert

Asked 344 college-age men and women to complete a questionnaire about their most important romantic relationship that had ended - Breakers= Participants who indicated a high level of responsibility for the decision to break up - Breakees= Those who reported a low level of responsibility - Mutuals= Those who shared the decision making with their partners about equally - Breakees were miserable (loneliness, depression, and anger, and virtually all reported experiencing physical illness) - Breakers found the end of the relationship the least upsetting, the least painful, and the least stressful - Although breakers did report feeling guilty and unhappy, they had the fewest negative physical symptoms - The mutual role helped individuals avoid some of the negative emotional and physical reactions to breaking up - Not as upset or hurt as breakees, but they were more affected than the breakers - Gender also played a role in the emotional and physical responses of the respondents - Women reporting somewhat more negative reactions to breaking up than men

Rusbult (1983)

Asked college students involved in heterosexual dating relationships to fill out questionnaires over the course of 7 months - Every 3 weeks, people answered questions about each of the components of the model - Rusbult also kept track of whether the students stayed in the relationships or broke up - Satisfaction, alternatives, and investments all predicted how committed people were to the relationship and whether it lasted (The higher the number on the scale, the more each factor predicted the commitment to and length of the relationship) Rusbult and a colleague interviewed women who had sought refuge at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, asking them about their abusive romantic relationships - Feelings of commitment to the abusive relationship were greater among women who had poorer economic alternatives to the relationship or were more heavily invested in the relationship

Lindsay Taylor (2011)

Assessed the popularity of over 3,000 heterosexual users of a dating Web site - Testing the hypothesis that profiles would be most popular among other users who shared the same attractiveness level - They defined popularity as the number of opposite-sex individuals who sent unsolicited messages to a particular profile - Found that users who qualified as popular contacted other popular users at a rate greater than would be expected by chance - Found that users lower in popularity contacted other low-popularity users more often - People tend to select (and be selected by) others with similar levels of popularity, and this tendency to try to "match up" with mates of comparable popularity was no different for men than for women

When the group grows larger

At what point does group size stop influencing conformity??

Attachment Styles in Intimate Relationships

Attachment theory does not suggest that people who had unhappy relationships with their parents are doomed to repeat this same kind of unhappy relationship with everyone they ever meet - They have found that 25% to 30% of participants change from one attachment style to another - Experiences in relationships can help them learn new ways of relating to others than what they experienced as children - Moreover, other research suggests that, at any given time, the attachment style that people display is the one that is called into play by their partner's behavior and the type of relationship that they've created as a couple

How do internal and external factors lead to attitude change?

Attitudes are not always consistent. They often change. - When attitudes change, they often do so in response to social influence (influenced by what other people do and say) - The entire premise of advertising is that your attitudes toward consumer products can be influenced by publicity - But such external influences are not the only forces that shape our attitudes

Affectively Based Attitudes:

Attitudes based more on people's feelings and values than on their beliefs about the nature of an attitude object - Ex) Sometimes we simply like a car, regardless of how many miles it gets - As a guide to which attitudes are likely to be affectively based, consider the topics that etiquette manuals will tell you should not be discussed at a dinner party: politics, sex, and religion - Do not come from facts, but from people's values - The function of such attitudes is not so much to paint an accurate picture of the world as to express and validate one's basic value system - Other affectively based attitudes can result from a sensory reaction or an aesthetic reaction - Still others can be the result of conditioning

Implicit Attitude:

Attitudes that exist outside of conscious awareness - People can have explicit and implicit attitudes toward virtually anything - A variety of techniques have been developed to measure implicit attitudes - Implicit Association Test, or IAT (This research is relatively young, though)

Explicit Attitude:

Attitudes that we consciously endorse and can easily report

Predicting Spontaneous Behavior

Attitudes will predict spontaneous behaviors only when they are highly accessible to people

Festinger's experiment demonstrates that....

Attraction and propinquity rely not only on actual physical distance but also on "functional distance," which refers to aspects of architectural design that determine which people you cross paths with most often

Emotion and Attitude Change

Before people will consider your carefully constructed arguments, you have to get their attention - One way is to grab people's attention by playing to their emotions

There are two major ways in which people self-handicap...

Behavioral Self-Handicapping and Reported Self-Handicapping

Other counter stereotype mindsets can enhance performance as well ->

Being reminded that abilities, including intelligence, are improvable rather than fixed; and being informed that anxiety on standardized tests is normal for members of stereotyped groups

Yuan

Belief that interpersonal relations are predestined (Chinese) - The romantic partners have little control over this process

Racial Discrimination

Blacks and whites are not treated equally in the national "war against drugs" - The great majority of those who use or sell serious drugs are white, yet almost two-thirds of those who are arrested are black - Whites constitute the majority of those who use or sell methamphetamine, ecstasy, powder cocaine, and heroin - Blacks are the majority of those who use or sell crack - But the police virtually ignore the white market and concentrate on crack arrests

Milgram

Blah Blah Blah Blah Psych Majors @ Yale -> estimated that less than 1% of the population would go to this extreme (450 volts) - In actuality, most of Milgram's participants succumbed to the pressure of the authority figure - The average maximum shock delivered was 360 volts - 62.5% of the participants went all the way to the end of the panel

We must be cautious in generalizing from these results b/c...

Bolstering self-esteem can't be done in an artificial way - Research has found -> among people with low self-esteem, repeating positive self-statements actually made them feel worse, compared to people who did not repeat the statements or who focused on how the statements were both true and not true - Similarly, when children who have low self-esteem are given inflated praise -> often backfires, discouraging them from taking on new challenges that they fear they won't be able to meet ** To be effective, self-affirmation must be grounded in reality **

Andrew Pryzbylski (2013)

Brought pairs of strangers into their lab for a 10-minute conversation - Half of these conversations took place with a mobile phone or tablet sitting on the small table between them - In another condition, there was no phone present - The researchers found that the mere presence of the mobile device decreased participants' feelings of trust, closeness, and empathy with their conversation partner

Social Identity Theory: Us Versus Them

Each of us develops a personal identity that is based on our particular traits and unique life history - Also develop a Social Identity

Arthur Aron

Central human motivation is "self-expansion" - AKA the desire to overlap or blend with another person, so that you have access to that person's knowledge, insights, and experience and thus broaden and deepen your own experience of life

Social Psychologists have determined three components of attitudes:

Cognitive Component- thoughts and beliefs that people form about the attitude object Affective Component- People's emotional reactions toward the attitude object Behavioral Component- How people act toward the attitude object - Any given attitude can be based on any one of these components or some combination of them

Stone, Perry, and Darley (1997)

College students listened to a 20-minute audiotape of a college basketball game - Asked to focus on one of the players, given the name "Mark Flick" - Some were told he was white and others were told that he was black - Students who believed Flick was African American rated him as having more athletic ability and as having played a better game than those who thought he was white - Those who thought he was white rated him as having greater hustle and greater basketball sense

Experiment dealing with BTV

College students who were provided with a description of a young woman's friendly behavior toward a man judged that behavior as completely appropriate - Another group was told that the woman was raped at the end - This group rated the young woman's behavior as inappropriate

Downward Social Comparison:

Comparing ourselves to people who are worse than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability - Another way to make ourselves feel better is to compare our current performance with our own past performance

Catalina Toma

Conducted a series of investigations to assess these questions regarding online dating profiles - 81% of participants provided inaccurate information in their profile for at least one characteristic, with the most lies coming about weight, followed by age, then height - Interestingly, no gender differences emerged - Participants' self-reported estimates of their profile accuracy were reasonably good predictors of actual accuracy, - So, discrepancies observed did not result from unconscious tendencies

Solomon Asch

Conducted a series of now-classic studies exploring the power of normative social influence - Assumed there were limits to the amount people will conform - He believed that people conformed in Sherif's studies because they were highly ambiguous

Sean Mackinnon (2011)

Conducted a series of studies examining physical similarity and seating choice - In one study, they simply analyzed the seating arrangement of college students in a library computer lab - Results indicated that, for instance, students who wore glasses sat next to other students with glasses far more often than random chance alone would predict - A second study found the same pattern by hair color - In a third study, participants arrived at a psychology lab and were introduced to a partner who was already sitting - Pairs judged as more physically similar had sat, on average, closer to each other **Without even realizing it, we are often drawn to those who look like us**

Davidson and Jaccard (1979)

Conducted a study in which they examined the relationship between women's attitudes about birth control and their actual behaviors - Four different groups of women were studied, each of which was asked an attitude question with slightly different wording - Attitude toward using birth control pills during the next 2 years -> attitude-behavioral correlation= .57 - Attitude toward using birth control pills -> attitude-behavioral correlation= .53 - Attitude toward birth control pills -> attitude-behavioral correlation= .32 - Attitude toward birth control -> attitude-behavioral correlation= .08

Jure Leskovec

Conducted a study testing just how connected we are to other people in the modern world - They examined "degrees of separation," a measure of social distance between people - They found that the average length of a "chain" needed to connect any two people was seven, and that 90% of pairs could be connected in no more than eight "hops" - In the modern world, there aren't nearly as many degrees of separation between strangers as there once were, putting a whole new spin on the relationship between propinquity and attraction that we discussed earlier

Carl Hovland

Conducted many studies over the years on what makes a persuasive communication effective - Looked at the source of the communication, the communication itself, and the nature of the audience - Yale Attitude Change Approach

Jerry Burger

Conducted the first Milgram-style obedience study in the United States in decade - Made a number of changes to the procedure... - Reduced the psychological distress experienced by participants by stopping the study after 150 volts, when the learner is first heard yelling that he wants out and refuses to go on (most likely when disobedience would happen anyways) - Second, participants were prescreened by a clinical psychologist, and those who were identified as even slightly likely to have a negative reaction to the experience were excluded from the study - Explicitly and repeatedly told his participants that they could leave the study at any time, as could the learner - FOUND no significant difference in obedience rates between his participants and Milgram's Note that Burger's ethically necessary changes in methodology also complicate a direct comparison to Milgram's results... - Some of Burger's changes may have decreased slightly the likelihood of obedience; others may have increased its likelihood

Private Acceptance:

Conforming to other people's behavior out of a genuine belief that what they are doing or saying is right

Public Compliance:

Conforming to other people's behavior publicly without necessarily believing in what the other people are doing or saying

Steven Gangestad (1993)

Correlated the extent to which women in several countries had access to financial resources and the extent to which women reported male physical attractiveness as an important variable in a mate - The more economic power women had in a given culture, the more highly women prioritized a man's physical attractiveness

Robert Cialdini

Counted the number of college insignia T-shirts and sweatshirts worn to classes on the Monday following a football game at seven different universities - Students were more likely to wear their university's insignia after victory than after defeat - "We" won. But if our team loses, we say "they" lost

David Perret (1994)

Created composite faces of two types: One composite was based on 60 photographs that had each been rated as average in attractiveness. The other composite was based on 60 photographs that had each been rated as highly attractive - The researchers found that the composites of highly attractive faces were rated as significantly more attractive than the composites of average attractiveness faces

Henri Tajfel

Created entities called minimal groups - Complete strangers are formed into groups using the most trivial criteria imaginable - Ex) Boys were arbitrarily told that they were "overestimators" or "underestimators" - They had a chance to give points to other boys identified as overestimators or underestimators - Almost every single one assigned far more points to boys he thought were like him When your group does win, it strengthens your feelings of pride and identification with that group

What makes attitudes accessible?

Degree of experience people have behaving with the attitude object - The more direct experience people have with an attitude object, the more accessible their attitude will be (and the more consistent their attitude and behavior)

Stanley Schachter (1951)

Demonstrated how the group responds to an individual who ignores normative influence - He asked groups of college students to read and discuss a case history of "Johnny Rocco," a juvenile delinquent - Most of the students took a middle-of-the-road position about the case, believing that Rocco should receive a judicious mixture of love and discipline - Schachter placed an accomplice in the group who was instructed to disagree with the group's recommendations (he was the deviant) - He became the target of the most comments and questions from the real participants throughout most of the discussion - Near the end of the conversation, communication with him dropped sharply - In addition, they punished him - The participants were asked to nominate one group member who should be eliminated from further discussions + they nominated the deviant - They were also asked to assign group members to various tasks in future discussions + they assigned unimportant/boring jobs to the deviant

Jonah Berger (2011)

Demonstrated the importance of arousal in such processes - Participants asked to exercise while they read an article reported being more willing to share the article with other people than participants in a no-arousal control condition - AKA high-arousal emotional response makes us more likely to kickstart the processes of conformity required to make something "go viral"

Do fear-arousing communications work?

Depends on whether the fear influences people's ability to pay attention to and process the arguments in a message - If a moderate amount of fear is created and people believe that listening to the message will teach them how to reduce this fear -> more likely to be motivated to analyze the message carefully and their attitudes via the central route Some attempts to frighten people into changing their attitudes and behaviors fail because they do not provide specific ways to help them reduce that fear Fear-arousing appeals will also fail if they are so strong that they overwhelm people - If people are terribly frightened, they will become defensive, deny the importance of the threat, and be unable to think rationally about the issue (We need just enough fear to motivate people)

Wendy Wood

Described how minority influence operates - People in the minority can rarely influence others through normative means - Majority group members may be hesitant to agree publicly with the minority - Minorities therefore exert their influence on the group via the other principal method: informational social influence - The minority can introduce new and unexpected information to the group and cause the group to examine the issues more carefully - Such careful examination may cause the majority to realize that the minority view has merit Majorities often obtain public compliance because of normative social influence, whereas minorities are more likely to achieve private acceptance because of informational social influence

Gordon Allport

Described stereotyping as "the law of least effort": Because the world is too complicated for us to have a highly differentiated attitude about everything, we maximize our cognitive time and energy by developing elegant, accurate attitudes about some topics while relying on simple, sketchy beliefs for others - Information consistent with our notions about a group will be given more attention than information that contradicts those notions - Anyone who doesn't fit the stereotype can be considered an exception, so we have no need to change the stereotype

The act of conforming normatively to important groups most of the time can earn you the right to ____

Deviate occasionally without serious consequences

Elliot Aronson and J Carlsmith

Devised an experiment with preschoolers - Attempting to change the children's desire to play with some appealing toys - First asked each child to rate the attractiveness of several toys - He then pointed to a toy that the child considered among the most attractive and told the child that he or she was not allowed to play with it - Half of the children were threatened with mild punishment if they disobeyed; the other half were threatened with severe punishment - Next, the experimenter returned and asked each child to rate how much he or she liked each of the toys - The children who had received a severe threat -> continued to rate the forbidden toy as highly desirable - The children in the mild threat condition needed an internal justification to reduce their dissonance - Persuaded themselves that the reason they hadn't played with the toy was that they didn't like it

It is not about aggression

Did the participants act so inhumanely because there is an inherently evil side to human nature? - To test this hypothesis -> Milgram conducted another version of his study - Everything was the same except that the experimenter told the participants that they could choose any level of shock they wished - Participants chose to give very mild shocks

Common result of being the target of prejudice ->

Diminution of self-esteem, internalizing society's views of one's group as being inferior, unattractive, or incompetent

Post-decision Dissonance:

Dissonance aroused after making a decision, typically reduced by enhancing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative and devaluating the rejected alternatives

Consequences of being a narcissist

Do less well academically than others, are less successful in business, are more violent and aggressive, and are disliked by others, especially once people get to know them

Richard LaPiere

Embarked on a cross-country sightseeing trip with a young Chinese couple - Prejudice against Asians was common in the United States at this time SO LaPiere worried they would be denied service - BUT Of the 251 establishments he and his friends visited, only one refused to serve them - After his trip, he wrote a letter to each establishment he and his friends had visited, asking if it would serve a Chinese visitor - Only one said it would LaPiere's study was not, of course, a controlled experiment - There are several reasons why his results may show inconsistency between people's attitudes and behavior - He had no way of knowing whether the proprietors who answered his letter were the same people who had served him and his friends - Even if they were, people's attitudes change - BUT his results were so strikingly different, it got people wondering ** More recent research has also found that people's attitudes can be poor predictors of their behavior **

One common factor underlying many examples of "going viral":

Emotional response

Attitudes:

Evaluations of people, objects, and ideas - They determine what we do

Cultural Standards of Beauty

Even though racial and ethnic groups do vary in their specific facial features, people from a wide range of cultures agree on what is physically attractive in the human face

Evolution and Sex Differences

Evolutionary psychologists argue that men and women have very different agendas when it comes to mate selection, due to their differing roles in producing (and raising) offspring - For females, reproduction is costly in terms of time, energy, and effort - Must consider carefully when and with whom to reproduce - For males, reproduction is a low-cost, short-term investment - Males' reproductive success is measured by the quantity of their offspring

The idea that people strive to keep their self-concepts consonant with their actions has wide-ranging applications

Ex) African American children believe that they "don't have what it takes" to succeed academically, so they don't work hard

The images conveyed in advertisements are far from harmless

Ex) The unrealistically thin body style for women glamorized by ads - Body dissatisfaction has been shown to be a risk factor for eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression

Morton Deutsch and Mary Ellen Collins

Examined the attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans in two public housing projects that differed in their degree of racial integration - In one, black and white families had been randomly assigned to separate buildings in the same project - In the other project, black and white families lived in the same building - White residents in the integrated project reported a greater positive change in their attitudes toward black neighbors than the other group - Similarly, when white southerners joined the U.S. Army—after army units became integrated in the early 1950s—their racism gradually decreased

Rosanna Guadagno (2013)

Examined viral videos - Students reported a greater likelihood of sharing any video that led them to have a strong emotional response upon first viewing it

J.W. Berry

Explored the issue of conformity as a cultural value by comparing two cultures that had very different strategies for accumulating food - He hypothesized that societies that relied on hunting or fishing would value independence - He also postulated that societies that were primarily agricultural would value cooperativeness - Used an Asch-type conformity task to compare the Inuit people of Baffin Island in Canada, a hunting and fishing society, to the Temne of Sierra Leone in Africa, a farming society - Consistent with Berry's hypothesis, the Temne showed a significant tendency to accept the suggestions of fellow group members in the study, while the Inuit almost completely disregarded them

Elliot Aronson and Judson Miller

Explored the link between effort and dissonance reduction - College students volunteered to join a group that would be meeting regularly to discuss various aspects of the psychology of sex - For one-third of the participants, the procedure (of joining) was demanding and unpleasant - For another third, it was only mildly unpleasant - The final third was admitted to the group without any screening at all - Each participant was then allowed to listen in on a discussion being conducted by the members of the group - After the discussion was over, each participant was asked to rate it in terms of how much he or she liked it - Participants who expended little or no effort to get into the group did not enjoy the discussion much (and VV)

Prejudice is an ____

Extremely strong attitude - People do not only have attitudes, but they act on their attitudes

Being rejected by a group has horrible consequences...

Few of us could live happily as hermits, never seeing or talking to another person - Through interactions with others, we receive emotional support, affection, and love, and we partake of enjoyable experiences - Being deprived of human = stressful, traumatic, and psychologically painful

Until recently, research on attraction focused almost exclusively on ____

First impressions BECAUSE long-term relationships are much more difficult to study scientifically than first impressions are

P. Wesley Shultz

Focused on conserving electricity - Their baseline energy usage was measured - They were divided into two groups: those whose energy consumption was above the average for their neighborhood and those whose energy consumption was below the average - Households were then randomly assigned to receive one of two kinds of feedback about their energy usage over several weeks - Descriptive norm condition, they were told how much energy they had used that week, told how much energy the average household in their neighborhood had used - Descriptive norm plus injunctive norm condition, they received all of the above information plus one subtle but important addition: If they had consumed less energy than the average household, the researcher drew a smiley face next to the information - Results indicated that the descriptive norm message had a positive effect on those who consumed more energy than average; they cut back and conserved - Descriptive norm message had a boomerang effect on those who consumed less energy than average - Descriptive norm plus injunctive norm was uniformly successful - Those whose consumption was more than average decreased their usage when they received this message - Those whose consumption was below average to begin with did not boomerang

Jodette Hatoum

Focused on the relationship between media consumption and bodily concerns in a sample of college men - They found that reading male-oriented magazines such as Maxim, Details, Esquire, Men's Fitness, and Men's Health—all of which consistently present the "hypermuscular" male body—was significantly correlated with negative feelings about one's own body - In addition -> the more men were exposed to these male-directed magazines -> the more they valued thinness in women as well

When occupations are segregated by gender, many people...

Form gender stereotypes about the requirements of such careers - Female jobs require kindness and nurturance; male jobs require strength and smarts

Juditha Langlois

Found evidence for cross-cultural agreement in what constitutes a beautiful or handsome face Researchers have suggested that humans came to find certain dimensions of faces attractive during the course of our evolution - Ex) We know that even infants prefer photographs of attractive faces to unattractive ones, and infants prefer the same photographs as adults do - One aspect of beauty that is preferred—in both men and women—is symmetry - Because they serve as markers of good health and reproductive fitness

Laurie Rudman (2007)

Found evidence that implicit attitudes are rooted more in people's childhood experiences, whereas explicit attitudes are rooted more in their recent experiences - The researchers measured college students' implicit and explicit attitudes toward overweight people - They also asked the students to report their current weight and their weight when they were growing up - Participants' implicit attitudes -> predicted by their childhood weight + explicit attitudes -> predicted by their current weight - People whose mother was overweight and were close to their mothers had positive implicit attitudes toward overweight people, even if their explicit attitudes were negative

Kelly Gildersleeve (2014)

Found reliable support for the hypothesis that as they near ovulation and peak fertility, women tend to exhibit greater preference for men who exhibit outward signs of reproductive fitness: a symmetrical face, a masculine face (e.g., sharp, pronounced jawline), and a muscular physique

How romantic love is defined varies across individualistic and collectivistic cultures ->

Found that Canadian college students' attitudes about love vary depending on their ethnocultural background - Asian Canadian respondents are significantly more likely to identify with a companionable, friendship-based romantic love, a "style of love that would not disrupt a complex network of existing family relationships" - Other researchers have found that in West African settings, relationships with one's parents, siblings, and other relatives are seen as more important and consequential than the more recent relationship one has formed with a spouse - Another study found that marrying for love was most important to participants in Westernized countries (e.g., the United States, Brazil, England, and Australia) and of least importance to participants in Asian countries - indicate that the concept of romantic love is culturally specific

Asch

Found that conformity increases as the number of people in the group increase, but once the group reaches four or five other people, conformity does not increase much (just as social impact theory suggests)

Hancock and Toma (2009)

Found that distortions are often less conscious, especially among women (when looking at photos) - 32% of profile photographs were judged to be deceptive or misleading, and females' photos were found to be less accurate than males' - Common inaccuracies included daters looking thinner in the profile photo than they currently do, having more hair in the profile photo than they do now, or using profile photos that were retouched or airbrushed

Bond

Found that even seeing the social message posted to a friend's News Feed was enough to have an indirect influence on a Facebook user's own voting behavior

R. Matthew Montoya

Found that in long-term relationships, individuals' beliefs about how similar they were to another person predicted liking and attraction better than their actual similarity did - Thus, feeling similar to another is what's really important

Norton (2007)

Found that learning more about a partner during a date often makes you like that person less than you did when you had only seen a profile, suggesting that perhaps the profiles aren't too accurate to begin with

Nicholas Christakis (2014)

Found that participants shared more DNA with their friends than with strangers - Of course, these data do not prove that our genes cause friendships or that our DNA drives people toward certain others - People tend to make friends with others who live near them, and individuals of similar genetic ancestry may be more likely to share such geographical propinquity - And perhaps certain genetic predispositions make people more likely to select certain activities and frequent certain locales

Jean Twenge

Found that there has been a steady increase in scores on this test since the mid-1980s - And there is some evidence that narcissism is more prevalent in America than in other cultures - Suspects this is due to American culture that has become increasingly self-focused

David Amodio (2005)

Found that whether similarity or complementarity was important depended on the level of commitment that research participants felt toward their romantic partner - If participants wanted a committed relationship, they chose a similar partner - if they felt a low level of commitment to the relationship, they favored dissimilar partners - A relationship with this sort of person represents more of an adventure

Haruki Sakai

Found that, in Japan, many people will vicariously experience dissonance on the part of someone they know and like - In subsequent experiments, Japanese participants justified their choices when they felt others were observing them while they were making their decision - Pattern was reversed for Americans

Jessica Nolan (2008)

Gave a sample of California residents information urging them to conserve electricity - The household members received one of four messages - Three of these presented basic reasons to conserve: - to protect the environment - to benefit society - to save money - The fourth message contained information designed to promote conformity: The participants were told that the majority of their neighbors conserved electrical energy - The fourth message -> caused people to conserve more energy

Gender Stereotypes and Expectations

Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in advertising imagery The message is often that men are doers and women are observers

Normative Social Influence:

Going along with what other people do in order to be liked and accepted by them; we publicly conform with the group's beliefs and behaviors but do not always privately accept them

We Why Overestimate the Pain of Disappointment (Explain this "Phrase"/Header)

How long will the pain last from getting a job that you REALLY wanted? - It depends on how successfully you reduce the dissonance caused by not getting the job

Diana Bridgeman

Half of the children had spent 2 months participating in jigsaw classes and the other half in traditional classrooms - Showed the children a series of cartoons aimed at testing their ability to put themselves in the shoes of the cartoon characters - In one cartoon, the first panel shows a little boy looking sad as he waves good-bye to his father at the airport - In the next panel, a letter carrier delivers a package to the boy - In the third panel, the boy opens the package, finds a toy airplane inside, and bursts into tears - Bridgeman asked the children why they thought the little boy burst into tears at the sight of the airplane - Nearly all of the children could answer correctly: because the toy airplane reminded him of how much he missed his father - Then Bridgeman asked the crucial question: "What did the letter carrier think when he saw the boy open the package and start to cry? - Children in the control group thought that the letter carrier would know the boy was sad because the gift reminded him of his father leaving - But those who had participated in the jigsaw classroom responded differently -> They had developed the ability to take the perspective of the letter carrier -> realized that he would be confused at seeing the boy cry over receiving a nice present because he hadn't witnessed the farewell scene at the airport **The extent to which children can develop the ability to see the world from the perspective of another human being has profound implications for empathy, generosity, and learning to get along with others**

Cunningham (1986)

He asked college men to rate the attractiveness of 50 photographs of women taken from a yearbook + beauty pageant - Then carefully measured the relative size of the facial features in each photograph - High attractiveness ratings for female faces were associated with large eyes, a small nose, a small chin, prominent cheekbones, high eyebrows, large pupils, and a big smile - They found that male faces with large eyes, prominent cheekbones, a large chin, and a big smile received higher attractiveness ratings

Asch's study on the importance of allies in the group ->

He had six of the seven confederates give the wrong answer, while one confederate gave the right answer on every trial - The subject was no longer alone - Having one ally dramatically changed the situation (People conformed on an average of only 6% of the trials in this study, compared to 32%)

The Motivation to Pay Attention to the Arguments

How important is the topic to a person's well-being? - If it is a relevant topic to them, they will use the central route to persuasion (and vice versa)

Caryl Rusbult

IDed four types of behavior that occur in troubled relationships - The first two are destructive behaviors: actively harming the relationship and passively allowing the relationship to deteriorate - The other two responses are positive, constructive behaviors: actively trying to improve the relationship and passively remaining loyal to the relationship - Destructive behaviors harm a relationship a lot more than constructive behaviors help it - When one partner acts destructively and the other partner responds constructively to save the relationship the relationship is likely to continue - When both partners act destructively, the relationship typically ends

Ainsworth (1978)

Identified three types of relationships between infants and their caregivers

In short, what did their research/experiment tell us?

If a person agrees to go through a demanding or an unpleasant experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive

Aronson

If merely thinking about a stereotype can harm performance, then some kind of alternative mindset ought to help performance—if it counters the stereotype - They reminded the test takers (women and men who were about to take a difficult test of spatial ability) that they were students at a "selective northeastern liberal arts college." - This reminder was enough to completely eliminate the male-female gap that occurred in the control condition

The self-concept is shaped by people around us. Explain.

If we never interacted with other people, our own image would be a blur because we would not see ourselves as having selves distinct from those of others

Autokinetic Effect

If you stare at a bright light in a uniformly dark environment (e.g., a star on a dark night), the light will appear to waver a bit back and forth (because you have no stable visual reference point with which to anchor the position of the light)

When social psychologists looked at implicit prejudices what did they find?

Implicit attitudes, being automatic and unintentional, reflect lingering negative feelings that keep prejudice alive below the surface

Experiment dealing with "Normative Conformity"

In a series of experiments, college women were put in a group allegedly to discuss group decision making; one male member (a confederate of the experimenter) repeatedly made sexist remarks - The women who valued confronting—but did not say anything when given the opportunity—later evaluated the confederate more highly than women who didn't care about speaking out - The self-silencers later decided that confronting guys who make sexist remarks is less important than they originally thought - They reduce dissonance by justifying their inaction—and thereby increasing the chance that they won't speak up in the future

Explain an experiment about "Affective Forecasting"

In a study, researchers asked a group of college women to look at a profile of a male student that included his photograph and information him + to predict how much they would enjoy a 5-minute speed date with him - Another group of college women weren't given any information about the male student, but they were told how much one other female student had enjoyed a 5-minute speed date with him - The women from both groups then had a speed date with the man and rated how much they enjoyed it - The second group of women made the better predictions - This is true because a small amount of information about what someone is like can be faulty - Even though other people's reactions to things are rarely perfectly aligned with ours -> knowing their reactions can be very useful

When Contact Reduces Prejudice

In additional to the three conditions above... 1) Both sides must depend on each other to accomplish their goals - Conditions of Interdependence 2) Both sides must pursue a common goal 3) Both sides must have equal status - When status is unequal, interactions can easily follow stereotypical patterns - The whole point of contact is to allow people to learn that their stereotypes are inaccurate - If status is unequal between the groups, their interactions will be shaped by that status difference—the bosses will act like stereotypical bosses, the employees like stereotypical subordinates (no one will learn new, disconfirming information) 4) Both sides must get to know each other in a friendly, informal setting - Discovering shared interests, having meals together, hanging out casually - Simply placing two groups in "contact" in a room where they remain segregated will do little to promote their understanding of each other 5) Both sides must be exposed to multiple members of the other group, not just one - In this way, the individual learns that the out-group members in that informal setting are typical of their group - Otherwise, they will perceive the one good person/example as an exception 6) Both sides must know that the social norms of their group, institution, and community promote and support equality

Experiment with Ethnocentrism + the Brain

In one study, when African Americans and whites saw pictures of each other, activity in the amygdala (the brain structure associated with fear and other negative emotions) was elevated - Not elevated when people saw pictures of members of their own group - Yet when participants were registering the faces as individuals or as part of a simple visual test rather than as members of the category "blacks," there was no increased activation in the amygdala - The brain is designed to register differences, it appears, but any negative associations with those differences depend on context and learning

In a variation of Baron's experiment...

In order to study normative social influence the researchers made the same task ridiculously easy (before, the task was really ambiguous and they were studying informative influence) - Manipulated the importance of the participants being accurate - Half -> told it was very important that they got the correct answer - Half -> told it did not matter if they were correct - The researchers found that participants in the low-importance condition conformed to the group on 33% of the critical trials - Participants in the high-importance condition -> conformed less to the obviously wrong answers of the group (But they still conformed sometimes!)

Overcoming Dissonance

In our zeal to protect our self-concept, we often make foolish mistakes and compound that failure by blinding ourselves to the possibility of learning from them - Although the process of self-justification is unconscious, once we know that we are prone to justify our actions, we can begin to monitor our thinking and, in effect, "catch ourselves in the act." - If we can learn to examine our behavior critically and dispassionately, we stand a chance of breaking out of the cycle

Muzafer Sherif (1963)

In the first phase of the study, you are seated alone in a dark room and asked to focus your attention on a dot of light 15 feet away - Asks you to estimate in inches how far the light moves - The interesting thing about this task is that the light was not actually moving at all - It looked as if it was because of a visual illusion called the Autokinetic Effect - All the subjects arrived at their own stable estimate during the first phase of the study, but these estimates differed across people - Second phase -> participants were paired with two other people - Over the course of several trials as a group, people converged on a common estimate

Finkel and Eastwick (2009)

In these speed-dating sessions, the women remained seated while the men in attendance rotated in a circle, spending 4 minutes with each prospective dating partner before moving on to the next person - Women were more selective than men, reporting lower levels of romantic desire and identifying fewer prospective mates that they'd like to get to know better - In a second set of dating events, they had men and women swap roles (the men remained seated and the women rotated around) - Women were no longer pickier than men (The explanation for these results are above)

The main take away from the litter experiment is...

Injunctive norms are more powerful than descriptive norms in producing desirable behavior - Not a surprise because injunctive norms tap into our normative conformity

Walter Lipman (1922)

Introduced the term "Stereotype" - Described the distinction between the world "out there" and stereotypes—"the little pictures we carry around inside our heads" - Within a given culture, these pictures tend to be remarkably similar - But we tend to categorize according to what we regard as normative AND within a given culture, what people regard as normative is similar - This is in part due to the media - Stereotyping goes beyond a general categorization, though

Creating the Illusion of Irrevocability (ETH)

Irrevocability of a decision always increases dissonance and the motivation to reduce it - SO, salespeople have developed techniques for creating the illusion that irrevocability exists

Other ways to increase self-control...

It helps to form specific implementation intentions in advance of a situation in which you will need to exert self-control - Make specific "if-then" plans that specify how and when you will study and how you will avoid temptations

Leon Festinger and J Merrill Carlsmith

It is the $1 vs $20 dollar study - People who had received an abundance of external justification for lying told the lie but didn't believe it, whereas those who told the lie without much external justification convinced themselves that what they said was closer to the truth - The smaller the external incentive, the greater the attitude change (has been found in many studies)

Other Reasons Why We Obey

Normative + Informative Influences account for why people initially complied with the experimenter's instructions - But why did they continue?? ->

One curious thing about advertising is that most people think ____

It works on everyone but themselves - People are influenced by advertisements more than they think, even when it comes to those annoying on-line pop-up ads - Ex) Split Cable Market Tests and Public health campaigns

Assumptions About Attractive People

It's important to realize that beauty matters— even when it shouldn't - We're attracted to that which is beautiful, and this can lead to inequity in everyday life

Reciprocal Liking

Just knowing that a person likes us fuels our attraction to that individual - Can even make up for the absence of similarity

Not Just Tangible Rewards or Punishments

Justifications can also come in more subtle packages - Ex) Friendships

Brown v. Board of Education

Legalized racial segregation in public schools - Illustrates the enormous power of norms: beliefs held by a society as to what is correct, acceptable, and permissible - Racial segregation in hotels, eating places, motion picture theaters, drinking fountains, and toilet facilities was normative in the American South - Yet, that norm almost entirely evaporated, and racial segregation is not normative in the South today Most people, simply by living in a society where stereotypical information abounds and where discriminatory behavior is the norm

Hannah Arendt (1965)

Particularly interested in understanding the causes of the Holocaust - Arendt argued that most participants in the Holocaust were not sadists or psychopaths who enjoyed mass murder but rather ordinary citizens subjected to complex and powerful social pressures

Resisting Peer Pressure

Many efforts to shape our attitudes consist of appeals to our emotions - Peer pressure is linked more to people's values and emotions, playing on their fear of rejection and their desire for freedom and autonomy - We could inoculate them with samples of the kinds of emotional appeals they might encounter - Ex) We might have him role-play a situation where a friend calls him a chicken for not smoking a cigarette

Impression Management:

Make specific "if-then" plans that specify how and when you will study and how you will avoid temptations - We are all like stage actors who are trying our best to convince the "audience" (the people around us) that we are a certain way, even if we really are not

Attitude Inoculation:

Making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position - By considering "small doses" of arguments against their position, people become more resistant to later, full-blown attempts to change their attitudes

Goldstein (2008)

Managed to increase hotel guests' compliance with a "reuse your bath towels and save energy" request - Found that an informational sign in the bathroom, stating that the majority of guests in this very room had reused their towels, was significantly more effective than the general "Help the Environment"

Eli Finkel

Many of the promises made by these Web sites go unfulfilled - Specifically, the idea of mathematical algorithms that can point users toward ideally compatible mates finds little in the way of empirical support - The success rates from these apps are no higher than other methods - The compatibility analyses of dating Web sites don't live up to their promises for a variety of reasons... - Sometimes we don't have a good sense of why we do what we do or what will make us happy - Secondly, most dating Web site algorithms focus on matching people by personality traits or other stable characteristics

Gender Discrimination

Many people think that gender discrimination is no longer an issue in the USA When science professors at leading universities rated the applications of a student for a laboratory manager position (identical except for a randomly assigned male or female name) -> thought the male applicant was significantly more competent than the female applicant The status of women varies around the world, and discrimination varies accordingly

Prejudice can also lead to discrimination through ____

Microaggressions

Judson Miller

Mills first measured the attitudes of sixth graders toward cheating - Situation was arranged so that it was almost impossible to win without cheating - Made it easy for the children to cheat and created the illusion that they could not be detected - Under these conditions, as one might expect, some of the students cheated and others did not - The next day, the sixth graders were again asked to indicate how they felt about cheating - The children who had cheated became more lenient toward cheating, and those who had resisted the temptation to cheat adopted a harsher attitude

"Morning people" are more likely to take which route?

More likely to take central route to persuasion the earlier in the day it is (and vice versa)

Many of the stereotypes underlying anti-Semitism are...

Mutually contradictory and constantly shift across generations and nations - AKA there is just no logic The emotional component of prejudice, its deep-seated negative feelings, may persist even when a person knows consciously that the prejudice is wrong

Do harsh punishments teach people not to do something (like cheating or speeding)?

NO! All it teaches is to try to avoid getting caught

Stereotypes + Babies

Newborns have no preferences for faces of one race or another - But if they live in a "monoracial" world, they will show a preference for faces of their own race by only 3 months of age - If they repeatedly see faces of two or more races, however, they show no preference ** We are born with the ability to notice different categories, but experience shapes that ability, right from the get-go **

When the group is important

Normative pressures are much stronger when they come from people whose friendship, love, and respect we cherish because there is a large cost to losing this love and respect - it can be dangerous to have policy decisions made by highly cohesive groups -> want to please each other and avoid conflict rather than arrive at the best conclusion

The Role of Normative Social Influence

Normative pressures made it difficult for people in Milgram's studies to refuse to continue - Clear from the variations he conducted - Seeing their peers disobey made it much easier for the actual participants to disobey too It is important to note that this study, unlike the Asch study, was set up so that the experimenter actively attempted to get people to conform

Most powerful form of social influence is ____

OBEDIENCE - We internalize this norm of obedience such that we usually conform to rules and laws even when the authority figure isn't present - Obedience can have tragic consequences

Gordon Allport (1954)

Observed that contact can reduce prejudice only when three conditions are met... - 1) Both groups are of equal status - 2) Both share a common goal that generates awareness of their shared interests and common humanity - 3) Their contact is supported by law or local custom (social norms) - Note that in the housing study, as with the U.S. Army recruits, the two groups were of equal status, BUT this was not true in the case of schools

Alternate Perspectives of Sex Differences

One could argue that evolutionary advantages to having multiple sexual partners should not be limited to men, but should also apply to women It may also be the case that men value physical attractiveness in a partner not because of evolved tendencies, but simply because they have been taught by society to value it - Similarly, research has found that in some situations, women value physical attractiveness just as much as men Additional arguments that the preference for different qualities in a mate can be explained without resorting to evolutionary principles - Women typically have less power, status, wealth, and other resources than men do - Therefore, in many societies women need to rely on men to achieve economic security, and they must consider this characteristic when choosing a husband

What are the six conditions that can reduce prejudice?

One logical step might be to provide people with accurate information that refutes their stereotypes - But, it is not that simple - When people are presented with an example or two that seems to refute their existing stereotype, most of them do not change their general belief - In one experiment, some people presented with this kind of disconfirming evidence actually strengthened their stereotypical belief - The disconfirming evidence challenged them to come up with additional reasons for holding on to their prejudice Because of the underlying emotional aspects of prejudice, as well as some of the cognitive ruts we get into, stereotypes based on misinformation are difficult to modify merely by providing people with the facts - BUT repeated contact with members of an out-group can modify stereotypes and prejudice - Must be a special kind of contact

Ways of Identifying Suppressed Prejudices

One method is to send identical résumés to potential employers, varying only a name that indicates gender, implies race, mentions religious affiliation or sexual orientation, or describes an applicant as obese - The answer is often yes in the case of female applicants - Today, more than a third of U.S. employers check an applicant's Facebook page or other online sources for information they would be prohibited from asking the candidate directly - Sent out more than 4,000 fabricated résumés to private firms across the country that had posted job openings - Created fake Facebook pages containing information that the candidate was Muslim or Christian, or gay or straight - Found incredible progress in the acceptance of gay men and lesbians: Employers did not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation anywhere in the country - But employers in the most conservative states revealed an anti-Muslim bias

The Experience of Breaking Up

One predictor of how people will feel during the breakup = the role people play in the decision to end the relationship

Attitude Inoculation

One step you can take is to consider the arguments against your attitude before someone attacks it - The more people have thought about pro and con arguments beforehand (using attitude inoculation), the better they can ward off attempts to change their minds using logical arguments

Cognitive Attitudes by Changing Behavior: Cognitive Dissonance Theory Revisited

One way that attitudes change -> when people behave inconsistently with their attitudes and cannot find external justification for their behavior (Cognitive Dissonance) - If you wanted to change your friends' attitudes toward a problematic behavior -> one way to succeed might be to get them to give speeches against each practice - You would want to make it hard for your friends to find external reasons for giving the speech (get your friends to find internal justification) Although dissonance techniques are powerful, they are difficult to carry out on a mass scale

Many of our assumptions about attraction and falling in love turn out to be false. Some examples...

Opposites attract: Research offers the clear conclusion that similarity is a stronger predictor of who we're drawn to Women are pickier than men - This is often true, but not for the reasons you might assume

Researchers coded the lyrics of the 10 most popular songs of the year between 1980 and 2007 AND

Person singular pronouns has increased by 42%

One of the most powerful determinants of human behavior stems from ____

Our need to preserve a stable, positive self-image

Attitude Change and the Body

Our physical environment and even our body posture play surprising roles in the process of attitude change - Ex) Several studies across different cultures have found that being asked to hold an object in one's mouth in a way that forces the brow to furrow and lips to pucker in a frown-like manner leads participants to perceive a cartoon as being less funny

Brinol and Petty (2003)

Participants were asked to test out the durability of some new headphones - Some were asked to shake their heads from side to side while wearing them - Others were asked to nod their heads up and down - Participants listened to an editorial arguing that all students should be required to carry personal identification cards on campus - One final twist was that half of the participants heard strong, persuasive arguments - Other half heard weak, unconvincing arguments - When the arguments in the editorial were strong, people who nodded their heads agreed with them more than did people who shook their heads had more confidence in the strong arguments that they heard - But when the arguments were weak, head nodding had the opposite effect - It gave people more confidence that the arguments they heard were in fact weak and unconvincing

The Promise and Pitfalls of Online Dating

Participation on dating Web sites and apps is at an all-time high and attitudes toward Internet dating have never been more positive than they are today - These developments are understandable, particularly given that dating Web sites advertise three primary services...

Behavioral Self-Handicapping

People act in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will succeed on a task so that if they fail, they can blame it on the obstacles they created rather than on their lack of ability - Drugs, alc., reduced effort, and failure to prepare - Men are more likely to engage in this type than women

Genetics

People also tend to be drawn toward others who are genetically similar to them

What typically surprises people about the IAT?

People are often surprised and alarmed to be told they have prejudices they are unaware of - The IAT could mean you are prejudiced, but it might not - Psychological scientists have debated the ambiguities surrounding interpretations of the test - Some psychological scientists think it simply captures a cultural association or stereotype, in the same way that people would be quicker to pair bread + butter than bread + avocado - One way to judge the IAT's validity is to see if a high score predicts actual behavior toward old people, fat people, African Americans, or any other group - Some studies do show that the higher a person's IAT score, the more likely he or she is to discriminate against the target in some way ** Overall, however, the evidence linking IAT scores with overt behavior is weak **

Reported Self-Handicapping

People devise ready-made excuses in case they fail - A problem with preparing ourselves with excuses in advance, however, is that we may come to believe these excuses and hence exert less effort on the task - Further, even if self-handicappers avoid unflattering attributions about their performance (e.g., people thinking they aren't smart), they risk being disliked by their peers Women are particularly critical of other people who self-handicap - Research shows that women place more value on trying hard to achieve something than men do and thus are more critical of people who seem not to try hard and then make up excuses for doing poorly

Ingratiation and Self-Handicapping

People have many different impression management strategies (and these are two examples)

Culture, Impression Management, and Self-Enhancement (Explain this "Phrase"/Header)

People in all cultures are concerned with the impression they make on others - BUT the impression management strategies people use differ considerably from culture to culture - People in Asian cultures tend to have a more interdependent view of themselves than people in Western cultures do - "Saving face," or avoiding public embarrassment, is extremely important in Asian cultures

Fear-Arousing Communications:

Persuasive message that attempts to change people's attitudes by arousing their fears

"Depletion Effect"

People often have more energy to engage in self-control in the morning than they do in the afternoon because by the afternoon they are mentally depleted - So, people are more likely to act dishonestly in the afternoon - This "depletion effect" is not inevitable and that indeed people have some control over how much willpower they can muster - Those who hold the belief that willpower is an unlimited resource are better able to keep going and avoid being depleted by a difficult task - Another tactic is prayer

What is conformity, and why does it occur?

People try to get us to do what they want—to conform to their influence— sometimes through direct requests and sometimes through more subtle processes - The most powerful form of this social influence produces obedience and occurs when an authority figure gives an order - A more subtle version of conformity is when others indirectly indicate to us what is appropriate, and we come to sense that it is in our best interest to go along with them

The Affective Component: Emotions

People who are usually reasonable about most topics become immune to rational, logical arguments when it comes to the topic of their prejudice - It is primarily the emotional aspect of attitudes that makes a prejudiced person so hard to argue with - Logical arguments are not effective in countering emotions

How to Achieve Long Lasting Attitude Change

People who base their attitudes on a careful analysis of the arguments will be more likely to maintain this attitude over time, more likely to behave consistently with this attitude, and more resistant to counterpersuasion

An experiment on the permanence of the decision

People who had already placed their bets gave their horses a much better chance of winning than did those who had not yet placed their bets - The only thing that had changed was the finality of the decision Students who had the option of exchanging photographs liked the one they finally ended up with less than did those who made the final choice on the first day - When students were asked to predict whether keeping their options open would make them more or less happy with their decision, they predicted that keeping their options open would make them happier - Because they underestimated the discomfort of dissonance, they failed to realize that the finality of the decision would make them happier

Comparison Level: (another characteristic ur relationship also depends on)

People's expectations about the level of rewards and costs they are likely to receive in a particular relationship - Over time, you have amassed a long history of relationships with others, and this history has led you to have certain expectations as to what your current and future relationships should be like - Some people have a high comparison level, expecting lots of rewards and few costs in their relationships - If a given relationship doesn't match this lofty expected comparison level, they quickly will grow unhappy and unsatisfied - In contrast, people who have a low comparison level would be happy in the same relationship because they expect their relationships to be difficult and costly

Comparison Level for Alternatives: (another characteristic ur relationship also depends on)

People's expectations about the level of rewards and costs they would receive in an alternative relationship - People who have a high comparison level for alternatives are more likely to take the plunge, change things up, and hit the market for a new friend or lover - People with a low comparison level for alternatives will be more likely to stay in a costly relationship, because, in their mind, what they have may not be great, but it's better than what they expect they could find elsewhere

Perceived behavioral control

People's intentions are influenced by the ease with which they believe they can perform the behavior - If people think it is difficult to perform a behavior -> they will not form a strong intention to do so (and VV)

Descriptive Norms:

People's perceptions of how people actually behave in given situations, regardless of whether the behavior is approved or disapproved of by others - Motivate behavior by informing people about what is effective or adaptive behavior In sum, an injunctive norm relates to what most people in a culture approve or disapprove of; a descriptive norm relates to what people actually do

Injunctive Norms:

People's perceptions of what behaviors are approved or disapproved of by others - Motivate behavior by promising rewards (or punishments) for normative (or nonnormative) behavior

Affective Forecasts:

People's predictions about how they will feel in response to a future emotional event - Trusting other people's reactions (in this case of the dating app situation, your friend's opinion) can be a wise approach

Lina Badr (2001)

Physical attractiveness significantly predicted the health outcomes of these infants above and beyond factors such as their medical condition - Neonatal nurses responded more to the "prettier" infants and gave them better care

Jack Brehm (1956)

Posed as a representative of a consumer testing service and asked women to rate the attractiveness and desirability of several kinds of small appliances - Each woman was told that as a reward for having participated in the survey, she could have one of the appliances as a gift - After she made her decision, each woman was asked to rerate all the products - The women rated its attractiveness somewhat higher than they had the first time - Not only that, but they drastically lowered their rating of the appliance they might have chosen but decided to reject

Institutional Discrimination:

Practices that discriminate, legally or illegally, against a minority group by virtue of its ethnicity, gender, culture, age, sexual orientation, or other target of societal or company prejudice This will happen without anyone actively teaching you that minorities and women are inferior and without any law or decree banning minorities and women from college faculties - As social norms change, often as a result of changing laws and customs, so does prejudice - Ex) Prejudice against gay men and lesbians was institutionalized in law and custom, just as segregation was - Gay marriage is a nonissue for most young people, whereas it remains highly contentious among many of their elders

Aronson and David Mettee (1968)

Predicted that individuals who had been given a boost to their self-esteem would be less likely to cheat, if given the opportunity to do so, than individuals who had a lower opinion of themselves - After taking a personality test, one-third of the students were given positive feedback - Another third of the students were given negative feedback - The remaining one-third of the students were not given any information about the results of the test As part of this second experiment, the participants played a game of cards against some of their fellow students (Given a few opportunities to cheat and thereby win a sizable sum of cash) - The students who had gotten the positive feedback were least likely to take the opportunity to cheat (and vice versa) - In a more recent set of experiments -> found that people were less likely to cheat when their self-concept of "not being a cheater" was invoked

Rogers (1981)

Prejudices can also be activated when a person is angered or insulted White students were told they would be inflicting electric shock on another student, the "learner," whom they were told was either white or African American - The students initially gave a lower intensity of shock to black learners than to white ones (perhaps to make a point that they were not prejudice) - The students then overheard the learner making derogatory comments about them, which, naturally, made them angry - The students who were working with a black learner administered higher levels of shock than did students who worked with a white learner

Niclas Breggren (2010)

Presented photographs of Finnish political candidates to research participants in many other countries + asked them to rate the politicians on a variety of attributes, including attractiveness - Found that the ratings of attractiveness were the best predictors of the actual number of votes each candidate had gotten in the real elections

The effects of a JC

Produce an improvement in his ability to communicate (Carlos) - After a couple of weeks, the other students were struck by their realization that Carlos was a lot smarter than they had thought he was - Carlos begins to like school more and realize Americans are not stuck up - Compared to students in traditional classrooms, students in jigsaw groups became less prejudiced and liked their group mates more, both within and across ethnic boundaries - Children in the jigsaw classrooms did better on exams, had higher self-esteem, and began to like school better than did the children in traditional classrooms - Children became more truly integrated

One of the simplest determinants of interpersonal attraction is ____

Propinquity (AKA proximity)

Steve Duck (1982)

Relationship dissolution is not a single event but a process with many steps Theorizes that there are four stages to dissolving a relationship 1) Intrapersonal - the individual thinks a lot about his or her dissatisfaction with the relationship 2) Dyadic - the individual discusses the breakup with the partner 3) Social - the breakup is announced to other people 4) Intrapersonal - the individual recovers from the breakup and forms an internal account of how and why it happened

Gregory Berns

Provided biological evidence for just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it is to resist normative social influence - Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the changes in brain activity - Participants either normatively conformed OR maintained their independence and disagreed with the group - Participants were shown a three-dimensional figure and then asked if a second figure (rotated in a different direction) was the same as the first figure or different - They indicated their answers by pushing a button (slightly more difficult than Asch's line test) - Before being placed in the fMRI scanner, participants met and interacted with four confederates - the participant completed one-third of the trials with no knowledge of the answers of the other four people - On the remaining two-thirds of the trials, the participant saw the other four group members' answers on a visual display - baseline trials (when they answered the questions alone) -> fMRI results indicated increased activity in the posterior brain areas dedicated to vision and perception - When the participants conformed to the group's wrong answers, activation occurred in the same areas - When participants chose to give the right answer -> the amygdala, an area devoted to negative emotions, and the right caudate nucleus, an area devoted to modulating social behavior, were active

Exchange Relationships:

Relationships governed by the need for equity (i.e., for an equal ratio of rewards and costs) - In comparison, longer-term interactions between close friends, family members, and romantic partners are governed less by an equity norm and more by a desire to help each other as needed

An experiment about energy + self-control

Researchers asked participants to exert self-control on one task to see if this reduced their ability to exert control on a subsequent and completely unrelated task - People who were instructed to suppress a thought were worse at trying to regulate their emotions on a second task as compared to people who did not first have to suppress their thoughts

Theodore Newcomb (1961)

Randomly assigned male students at the University of Michigan to be roommates in a particular dormitory at the start of the school year - Men became friends with those who were demographically similar (e.g., shared a rural background), as well as with those who were similar in attitudes and values - Similar personality characteristics also promote liking and attraction

Elaine Walster Hatfield

Randomly matched 752 incoming students at the University of Minnesota for a blind date at a dance during freshman orientation week (paired at random) - They then evaluated their date and indicated the strength of their desire to see that person again - Of the many possible characteristics that could have determined whether they liked each other—such as their partner's intelligence, independence, sensitivity, or sincerity—the overriding determinant was physical attractiveness - There was no great difference between men and women on this count **A meta-analysis of many studies found that while both sexes value attractiveness, men value it a bit more** - This gender difference was greater when men's and women's attitudes were being measured than when their actual behavior was being measured - Men are more likely than women to say that physical attractiveness is important to them, but when it comes to actual behavior, the sexes are fairly similar

Understanding dissonance explains why so much of human thinking is not rational, but ____

Rationalizing!! - People are so involved with convincing themselves that they are right that they end up behaving irrationally or maladaptively Sometimes, of course, we pursue new information because we want to be accurate in our views or make the wisest decisions - But once we are committed to our views and beliefs, most of us distort new information in a way that confirms them - People remember the plausible arguments agreeing with their own position and the implausible arguments agreeing with the opposing position

Drew Westen

Reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when a person is confronted with dissonant information and the emotion circuits of the brain light up happily when consonance is restored

Communal Relationships:

Relationships in which people's primary concern is being responsive to the other person's needs - They are not completely unconcerned with equity, though - In communal relationships, the partners are more relaxed about what constitutes equity at any given time, believing that things will eventually balance out and a rough kind of equity will be achieved - If this doesn't happen—if they continue to feel that there is an imbalance—the relationship may ultimately end Research comparing heterosexual couples to same-sex couples has found that they are equally committed and communal in their relationships - If anything, gay men and lesbians report greater compatibility and less conflict than heterosexual couples do

Informational Social Influence:

Relying on other people as a source of information to guide our behavior; we conform because we believe that others' interpretation of an ambiguous situation is correct and can help us choose an appropriate course of action

What sex ends relationships more often?

Research has found, however, that neither sex ends romantic relationships more frequently than the other - A better predictor of whether and when a relationship will end seems to be how a couple deals with conflict

Experiment dealing with the Importance of Being Accurate

Research participants were given an involving but ambiguous task: eyewitness identification - Participants were asked to pick a "perpetrator" out of a lineup - The participants were first shown a slide of a man—the perpetrator - Next, they saw a slide of a lineup composed of four men, one of whom was the perpetrator - The task was made difficult (and ambiguous) by presenting the slides extremely quickly - The study took place in a group consisting of the participant and three confederates - On the critical seven trials, where informational social influence would be measured, the three confederates answered before the participant—and all the confederates gave the same wrong answer - The researchers also manipulated how important it was to the research participants to be accurate at the task - In the high-importance condition -> told upcoming task was a real test of eyewitness identification ability (Participants' scores would therefore establish standards against which future eyewitness performance would be judged) - In the low-importance condition -> research participants were told that the study was a first attempt to study eyewitness identification and that the slide task was still being developed - Found that high-importance conditions make us more susceptible ** Relying on other people as a source of information is a strategy that also comes with risks**

Culture and Advertising

Researchers created different print ads for the same product that stressed independence - The Americans were persuaded most by the ads stressing independence, and the Koreans were persuaded by the ads stressing interdependence - American ads tended to emphasize individuality, self-improvement, and benefits of the product for the individual consumer - Korean ads tended to emphasize the family, concerns about others, and benefits for one's social group - Advertisements work best if they are tailored to the kind of attitude they are trying to change

Experiment w/ the Halo Effect

Researchers gave college men a photo and a packet of information about a woman with whom they were about to have a phone conversation - The men were either given a photo that a previous group of raters had judged to be attractive or one that a previous group had rated as unattractive (NOT the actual woman they were going to have coffee with) - The men who thought they were talking to an attractive woman responded to her in a warmer, more sociable manner than the men who thought they were talking to an unattractive woman - And the men's behavior actually influenced how the women behaved - Subsequent studies have found similar results with the gender roles reversed

In a study about RT

Researchers placed one of two signs in the bathrooms on a college campus, in an attempt to get people to stop writing graffiti on the restroom walls - One sign read, "Do not write on these walls under any circumstances" - The other gave a milder prohibition: "Please don't write on these walls" - Significantly more people wrote graffiti in the bathrooms with the "Do not write..." sign than with the "Please don't write..." sign SO efforts at persuasion are not always effective

Back (2008)

Researchers tested if you like the people you see in your classes everyday a lot - That first day, they had students rate each member of the class on likability and the extent to which they would like to get to know each other - Indicated that students who sat in neighboring seats or in the same row had higher initial attraction scores than those seated far apart - A year later, they asked these students to rate the members of their original class again in terms of how much they liked them - Once again, those who had sat side by side or in the same row the prior semester were significantly more likely to be friends a year later than those who sat far apart

Social costs to an increasingly smartphone-tethered existence?

Researchers visited coffee shops and cafes in the Washington, D.C., area, observed 100 real-life interactions between pairs of people, and then asked the individuals involved questions about the conversation they just had - Among pairs who had at least one mobile device (e.g., smartphone, laptop, tablet) present during the conversation, ratings of connectedness to and empathy for the other person were significantly lower than they were among pairs who interacted in the absence of such a device (this finding is correlational, though) - This finding is a correlational one, though. Maybe it's a certain type of person who always keeps a smartphone nearby and doesn't invest as much in face-to-face conversation

"Pot Calling the Kettle Black" problem

Researchers wondered how people reduce the dissonance of being guilty of ethical violations they condemn in others - Hypocrites judge others more harshly than do people who have not committed the same unethical acts, and they present themselves as being more virtuous and ethical than everyone else - AKA they typically polarize their judgments, seeing more evil in others and more righteousness in themselves

Finkel (2009)

Results suggest that the sex differences in mate selectivity do not simply reflect evolution or biology, but are also attributable to the established dating paradigm in most societies, in which men are the approachers and women the approachee - Being approached gives you control in the world of dating

Elliot Aronson

Said dissonance is most painful, and we are most motivated to reduce it, when one of those cognitions is about the self: when are self-concept or self-esteem is threatened by cognition that we have done something that violates our view of ourselves - SO, people with the highest self-esteem -> experience the most dissonance when they behave in ways that are contrary to their high opinion of themselves -> work harder to reduce it - Psychopaths are fairly immune from dissonance

Cooper and Colleagues (1996)

Showed mock jurors a video reenactment of a product liability trial - One of the critical witnesses to testify was an expert biologist to persuade the jury that the product in question had caused the plaintiff's illness - Some mock jurors were told that the expert had published 45 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and had multiple advanced degrees - Other jurors learned that the expert had published far fewer articles and his degrees came from relatively obscure schools - When his scientific testimony was relatively simple and easy to understand, participants paid little attention to the expert's apparent credentials - Able to understand the persuasive arguments, they engaged in a central route - But when his scientific testimony was complicated... - Mock jurors relied on the expert's credentials to determine how much stock to place in his testimony

Asked these research participants to bring two photographs to the experimental session: one of their beloved and one of an acquaintance of the same age and sex as their beloved ->

Slid into a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner The experimenters alternated projecting on a screen one photograph and then the other, interspersed with a mathematical distraction task - The researchers found that two specific areas, deep within the brain, showed evidence of increased activation when participants looked at the photograph of their romantic partner - Furthermore, those participants who self-reported higher levels of romantic love showed greater activation in these areas when looking at their beloved than those who reported lower levels - These two brain areas were the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the caudate nucleus, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit - VTA becomes active when we engage in rewarding behaviors - The VTA, rich in the neurotransmitter dopamine, also fires when people eat chocolate

Microaggressions

Slights, indignities, and put-downs - Ex) Employers spend less time interviewing people they are uncomfortable with, making less eye contact and being less verbally positive - Social Distance

When gender ratios change in occupations...

So do prejudice and discrimination - As these numbers have increased (the number of women in "male dominated areas), the old prejudice that women are not "naturally" suited to engineering, math, and science has been fading, though certainly not everywhere

Door-In-The-Face Technique:

Social influence strategy in which first asking people for a large request that they will probably refuse makes them more likely to agree later to a second, smaller request

Foot-In-The-Door Technique:

Social influence strategy in which getting people to agree first to a small request makes them more likely to agree later to a second, larger request - When you get people to agree to a small request, they begin to see themselves as an agreeable person and want to be consistent

Robert Cialdini, Raymond Reno, and Carl Kallgren

Social norms are particularly useful for subtly inducing people to conform to positive, socially approved behavior

Gender Roles:

Societal beliefs—such as those conveyed by media and other sources—regarding how men and women are expected to behave - In the United States and other countries, these expectations are evolving, and women do have more opportunities than ever before - But conflict can still result when expectations change for some roles but not for others assumed by the same person - Societal roles such as these can be powerful determinants of people's feelings, behavior, and personality

Prejudice is created and maintained by many forces in the social world

Some operate on the level of the group or institution - Normative standards Some operate within the individual - Ways we process information and assign meaning to observed events Some forces operate on whole groups of people - Competition, conflict, and frustration

Equity Theory

Some researchers have criticized social exchange theory for ignoring an essential variable in relationships—the notion of fairness, or equity

The Ability to Pay Attention to the Arguments

Sometimes even when we want to pay attention to a persuasive communication, it is difficult to do so

Counterattitudinal Advocacy:

Stating an opinion or attitude that runs counter to one's private belief or attitude

Experiment dealing with the Ben Franklin Effect

Students participated in an intellectual contest that enabled them to win a substantial sum of money - Afterward, the experimenter approached one-third of them, explaining that he was using his own funds for the experiment and was running short - He asked, "As a special favor to me, would you mind returning the money you won?" - The same request was made to a different group of subjects, not by the experimenter but by the departmental secretary - The remaining participants were not asked to return their winnings at all - Finally, all of the participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire that included an opportunity to rate the experimenter - Participants who had been cajoled into doing a special favor for him found him the most attractive

Michael Osofsky

Studied guards on the execution teams of three southern state prisons and compared them to their fellow guards who did not conduct executions - All the guards responded anonymously to a questionnaire that asked them to rate their level of agreement with statements such as "Because of the nature of their crime, murderers have lost the right to live" - The execution-team guards demonstrated much more "moral disengagement" from their work than did the other guards - The execution-team guards denied all personal responsibility for the executions - They also engaged in justification in other areas... - They dehumanized the prisoners more, seeing them as lacking important human qualities

Laboratory Evidence for Subliminal Influence

Subliminal messages don't work when "encountered in everyday life" - There is evidence, however, that people can be influenced by subliminal messages under carefully controlled laboratory conditions - To get subliminal effects, researchers have to make sure that the illumination of the room is just right, that people are seated just the right distance from a viewing screen, and that nothing else is occurring to distract people - Further, even in the laboratory, there is no evidence that subliminal messages can get people to act counter to their wishes, values, or personalities

Advertising, Stereotypes, and Culture

Subliminal messages has obscured the fact that ads are most powerful when people consciously perceive them For that matter, advertising influences more than just our consumer attitudes - Advertisements transmit cultural stereotypes in their words and images, subtly connecting products with desired images, feelings, and desires - Advertisements can also reflect, reinforce, and perpetuate stereotypical ways of thinking about others

Cialdini

Suggest that first we need to focus on what kind of norm is operating in the situation - A culture's social norms are of two types - Injunctive Norms and Descriptive Norms

Toma and Hancock (2012)

Suggest three giveaways that the profile you're checking out online may not pass a reality check 1. Deceptive profiles tend to have fewer first-person pronouns like I and me a. Those who lie or exaggerate to distance themselves psychologically from their half-truths 2. Deceptive profiles make more use of negations, or negative turns of phrase 3. Deceptive profiles simply include fewer total words than accurate profiles a. The fewer inaccurate statements you put in your profile, the fewer fabrications you have to remember later on when you meet someone in person

Berns experiment essentially tells us what?

Supports the idea that normative social influence occurs because people feel negative emotions (when against the group)

Muzafer Sherif and colleagues (1961)

Tested group conflict theory using the natural environment of a Boy Scout camp called Robber's Cave (in class notes)

People are often quick to deny ____

That they've been influenced by normative considerations - We often underestimate the power of normative social influence

Stereotype Threat:

The apprehension experienced by members of a group that their behavior might confirm a cultural stereotype - When African American students find themselves in highly evaluative educational situations, many feel apprehensive about confirming the existing negative cultural stereotype of "intellectual inferiority." - This extra burden of apprehension in turn interferes with their ability to perform well

Evolutionary Psychology:

The attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection

Ethnocentrism:

The belief that one's own ethnic group, nation, or religion is superior to all others - It is universal, probably because it aids survival by increasing people's attachment to their own group - As soon as people have created an "us," however, they perceive everybody else as "not us." - Feeing suspicious of "outsiders" seems to be part of a biological survival mechanism - BUT human beings are also biologically prepared to be friendly, open, and cooperative

Peripheral Route to Persuasion:

The case in which people do not elaborate on the arguments in a persuasive communication but are instead swayed by more superficial cues

Central Route to Persuasion:

The case in which people have both the ability and the motivation to elaborate on a persuasive communication, listening carefully to and thinking about the arguments presented

Minority Influence:

The case where a minority of group members influences the behavior or beliefs of the majority - The key is consistency: People with minority views must express the same view over time, and different members of the minority must agree with one another

Narcissism:

The combination of excessive self-love and a lack of empathy toward others - Narcissism has been increasing among college students in recent years

Stereotype threat applies to gender as well ->

The common belief is that men are far better at math than women are - Asian American women do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their gender (stereotype: women are poor at math) than when they are reminded of their cultural identity (stereotype: Asians are good at math)

Insufficient Punishment:

The dissonance aroused when individuals lack sufficient external justification for having resisted a desired activity or object, usually resulting in individuals devaluing the forbidden activity or object In the case of punishing your son who bullies his younger brother... - In this situation (Insufficient Punishment instead of severe punishment), he continues to experience dissonance; therefore, the child must find another way to justify the fact that he is not hitting his kid brother - He will convince himself that he does not want to beat up his brother

Attachment Styles:

The expectations people develop about relationships with others based on the relationship they had with their primary caregiver when they were infants

The Role of Informational Social Influence

The experimenter was authoritative and insistent, but he was hardly pointing a gun at participants and telling them to "conform or else" Informational social influence is especially powerful when the situation is ambiguous, when it is a crisis, and when the other people in the situation have some expertise - All three of these characteristics describe the situation Milgram's participants faced - The learner cried out in pain, but the experimenter told the participant that the shocks did not cause permanent damage (very conflicted + confused) - So, no wonder they relied on an expert

Companionate Love:

The feelings of intimacy and affection we have for someone that are not accompanied by passion or physiological arousal - In nonsexual close friendships, or in romantic relationships

Mere Exposure Effect:

The finding that the more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more apt we are to like it - We typically associate positive feelings with things that are familiar - However, there is a caveat: If the person in question is an obnoxious jerk, then, not surprisingly, the more exposure you have, the greater your dislike becomes

Propinquity Effect:

The finding that the more we see and interact with people, the more likely they are to become our friends

Imagine these two scenes: (1) A soldier kills an enemy combatant in the heat of battle; (2) a soldier kills an innocent civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who suffers more dissonance?

The latter case - B/C when engaged in combat with an enemy soldier, it is a "you or me" situation - Indeed, one of the major causes of PTSD among veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is their inability to reduce dissonance over killing children, bystanders, and other innocent civilian

John Harvey

The honest version of "why the relationship ended" that we present to close friends can be very different from the official version that we present to coworkers or neighbors

The Cognitive Component: Stereotypes

The human mind cannot avoid creating categories (it is an adaptive mechanism) - We usually group people depending on their -> gender, age, and race (physical characteristics) - The resulting categories are both useful and necessary, but they have profound consequences - They do not inevitably generate prejudices, but they can be the first step

Social Impact Theory:

The idea that conforming to social influence depends on the group's importance, immediacy, and the number of people in the group - Strength: How important to you is the group? - Immediacy: How close is the group to you in space and time during the attempt to influence you? - Number: How many people are in the group? - Predicts that conformity will increase as strength and immediacy increase - As the size of the group increases, so does the normative pressure it exerts, but each additional person has less of an influencing effect - HOWEVER, If we feel pressure from a group to conform, adding another person to the majority makes a much bigger difference if the group is small rather than large

Realistic Conflict Theory:

The idea that limited resources lead to conflict between groups and result in increased prejudice and discrimination - On a national level, weak leaders and governments often select a minority group to use as a scapegoat

Equity Theory:

The idea that people are happiest with relationships in which the rewards and costs experienced by both parties are roughly equal - We are also concerned about equity or the idea that the rewards and costs we experience should be roughly equal to those of the other person involved - These theorists describe equitable relationships as the happiest and most stable, whereas, inequitable relationships result in one person feeling overbenefited and the other feeling underbenefited - According to equity theory, both underbenefited and overbenefited partners should feel uneasy about this state of affairs, and both should be motivated to restore equity to the relationship - The overbenefitied person -> will eventually feel uncomfortable and guilty if they keep getting more than they deserve in a relationship - Still, being overbenefited isn't as bad as being underbenefited, and research has indicated that inequity is perceived as more of a problem by the underbenefited individual Of course, this whole notion of equity implies that partners in a relationship are keeping track of who is benefiting how much and who is getting shortchanged - Some might suggest that many people in happy relationships don't spend so much time and energy keeping tabs on contributions and benefits in this manner

Social Exchange Theory:

The idea that people's feelings about a relationship depend on their perceptions of its rewards and costs, the kind of relationship they deserve, and their chances for having a better relationship with someone else - The basic concepts of social exchange theory are reward, cost, outcome, and comparison level

Theory of Planned Behavior:

The idea that people's intentions are the best predictors of their deliberate behaviors, which are determined by their attitudes toward specific behaviors, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control

Social Comparison Theory:

The idea that we learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to other people (Leon Festinger) - Revolves around two essential questions-- When do people engage in social comparison + with whom do they chose to compare themselves with 1) People socially compare when there is no objective standard to measure themselves against and when they are uncertain about themselves in a particular area 2) The answer depends on whether your goal is to get an accurate assessment of your abilities, to determine what the top level is so that you know what to strive for, or to feel better about yourself - If your goal is to get the most accurate assessment of your abilities -> compare yourself to others w/ a similar background - If your goal is to know what excellence is, you are likely to engage in Upward Social Comparison - If our goal is to feel good about ourselves -> we are likely to engage in Downward Social Comparison

Social Exchange Theory

The more social rewards (and the fewer costs) a person provides us with, the more we like the person - The flip side of this equation is that if a relationship costs (e.g., in terms of emotional turmoil) far more than it gives (e.g., in terms of validation or praise), chances are that it will not last Social exchange theory has received a great deal of empirical support - However, many people do not leave their partners even when they are dissatisfied and their other alternatives look bright - Research indicates that we need to consider at least one additional factor to understand close relationships: a person's level of investment in the relationship (Investment Model)

Specific Attitudes

The more specific the attitude toward the behavior in question, the better that attitude can be expected to predict the behavior - Explains why La Piere found such inconsistency between people's attitudes and behaviors - His question to the proprietors—whether they would serve "members of the Chinese race"—was very general

Social Identity:

The part of a person's self-concept that is based on his or her identification with a nation, religious or political group, occupation, or other social affiliation - Give us a sense of place and position in the world

Social psychologists have recognized that a good definition of love must include...

The passionate, giddy feelings of romantic love as well as the deep, long-term devotion of married couples, lifelong friends, or siblings

Out-Group Homogeneity:

The perception that individuals in the out-group are more similar to each other (homogeneous) than they really are, as well as more similar than members of the in-group are

Classical Conditioning:

The phenomenon whereby a stimulus that elicits an emotional response is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus that does not, until the neutral stimulus takes on the emotional properties of the first stimulus

Self-Affirmation

The practice of reminding yourself—realistically—of your good qualities or experiences that made you feel successful or proud - This practice can help to counteract the effects of feeling stigmatized, disrespected, or incompetent - The reason is that self-affirmation directs a person to focus on important domains other than the stereotyped one

Social Tuning:

The process whereby people adopt another person's attitudes - Can happen even when we meet someone for the first time, if we want to get along with that person - It can happen unconsciously

Ingratiation:

The process whereby people flatter, praise, and generally try to make themselves likable to another person, often of higher status - We can ingratiate through compliments, by agreeing with another's ideas, by commiserating and offering sympathy, and so on - Ingratiation is a powerful technique because we all enjoy having someone be nice to us - However, such a ploy can backfire if the recipient of your ingratiation senses that you're being insincere

Interdependence:

The situation that exists when two or more groups need to depend on one another to accomplish a goal that is important to each of them - Ex) (In Sherif's study) To get the truck going again, it was necessary for all of them to work in harmony to pull it up a steep hill

Interests and Experiences

The situations you choose to be in are usually populated by people who have chosen them for similar reasons - Researchers found that students were significantly more likely to choose friends from inside their track than from outside it - Over time, students in the same academic track share many of the same experiences, which are different from the experiences of those in other tracks - Thus, new similarities are created and discovered, fueling the friendships **In short, shared experiences promote attraction**

When the group's culture is collectivist

The society in which one is raised affects the frequency of normative social influence - Norwegian participants conformed to a greater degree than the French participants did in Asch's study Although Japanese culture is more highly conforming than American culture in many areas -> two Asch-type studies found Japanese students were less conformist in general than North Americans -In Japan, cooperation and loyalty are directed to the groups to which one belongs - Little expectation that one should conform to the behavior of strangers Moral of the story: Participants from more collectivistic cultures showed higher rates of conformity on the line task than participants from more individualistic cultures

Attitude Accessibility:

The strength of the association between an attitude object and a person's evaluation of that object, measured by the speed with which people can report how they feel about the object - When accessibility is high, your attitude comes to mind whenever you see or think about the attitude object - When accessibility is low, your attitude comes to mind more slowly - Highly accessible attitudes will be more likely to predict spontaneous behaviors because people are more likely to be thinking about their attitude when they are called on to act

Yale Attitude Change Approach:

The study of the conditions under which people are most likely to change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages, focusing on the source of the communication, the nature of the communication, and the nature of the audience - A problem became apparent: Many aspects of persuasive communications turned out to be important, but it was not clear which were more important than others

Emotion and Different Types of Attitudes

The success of various attitude-change techniques also depends on the type of attitude we are trying to change - Some attitudes are based more on beliefs about the attitude object (cognitively based attitudes), whereas others are based more on emotions and values (affectively based attitudes) - If an attitude is cognitively based, your best bet is to try to change it with rational arguments - If an attitude it is affectively based, you're better off trying to change it with emotional appeals

When Persuasion Attempts Backfire: Reactance Theory

There is harm to administering strong prohibitions: The stronger they are, the more likely they will backfire, actually causing an increase in interest in the prohibited activity

Debunking the Claims About Subliminal Advertising

There is no evidence that the types of subliminal messages encountered in everyday life have any influence on people's behavior

All these findings suggest what?

These findings suggest that prejudices often lurk just beneath the surface - It does not take long to activate them - They have tragic consequences

Halo Effect across cultures ->

These stereotypes operate across cultures - Both male and female participants thought the more physically attractive people would also be more socially skilled, friendly, and well adjusted - But Korean and North American students differed in some of the other traits they assigned to the beautiful, highlighting differences in what is considered important in each culture - For the American and Canadian students—who live in more individualistic cultures that value independence, individuality, and self-reliance - For these students, who live in a more collectivistic culture that values harmonious group relations, the "beautiful" stereotype included integrity and concern for others

Where do Attitudes Come From?

They are linked, in part, to our genes - Evidence for this conclusion comes from the fact that identical twins share more attitudes than do fraternal twins (Even when the identical twins were raised in different homes) BUT this does not mean that specific genes determine our attitudes - It does appear, though, that genes are an indirect function of our genetic makeup -> they are related to things such as our temperment + personality, which are directly related to our genes Our social experiences also play a major role in shaping our attitudes

What is a better strategy (than Thought Suppression)

Think about the forbidden topic while trying to exert willpower when it comes to acting on those thoughts We are likely to have the most willpower when we have plenty of energy while trying to control our actions - But, because self-control requires energy, spending this energy on one task limits the amount that can be spent on another task - This explains why you might indulge after exerting self-control (you used up all your energy already)

Distorting our Likes and Dislikes (Explain this header)

This happens because the chosen alternative is seldom entirely positive and the rejected alternative is seldom entirely negative

The Gradual Spread of Cooperative and Interdependent Learning

This method (jigsaw classroom) is now generally accepted as one of the most effective ways of improving relations between ethnic groups - Unfortunately, the operative word in the preceding sentence is slowly - The educational system, like all other bureaucracies, tends to resist change

Being Alert to Product Placement

To counteract efforts to avoid ads, advertisers look for ways of displaying their wares during the show or movie itself - Many companies pay the producers to incorporate their products into the script - One reason product placement can work is that people do not always realize that someone is trying to influence their attitudes and behavior - As a result, we don't generate counterarguments - Children are especially vulnerable

Leon Festinger

Tracked friendship formation among the couples in the various apartment buildings - One section of the complex, was composed of 17 two-story buildings, each having 10 apartments - Residents had been assigned to apartments at random, and nearly all were strangers when they moved in - When the researchers asked residents to name their three closest friends in the complex -> 65% of the friends mentioned lived in their same building (even though the other buildings were not far away) - Even more striking was the pattern of friendships within a building - 41% of the next-door neighbors indicated that they were close friends, 22% of those who lived two doors apart said so, and only 10% of those who lived on opposite ends of the hall indicated that they were close friends

Predicting Deliberative Behaviors

Under these conditions, the accessibility of our attitude is less important - Given enough time and motivation to think about an issue, even inaccessible attitudes can be conjured up and influence the choice we make

Discrimination:

Unjustified negative or harmful action toward a member of a group solely because of his or her membership in that group - Can be official or subtle - Most forms of explicit discrimination in schools and the workplace are now illegal in America

Nicolas Koranyi (2012)

Used a computer program to present a series of opposite-sex faces to German research participants - Immediately after each photo appeared, a geometrical shape was shown that required participants to respond quickly using a keyboard - Allowed the researchers to measure which faces elicited the most visual attention from the respondents - We have a tendency to linger and look longer at good-looking faces - BUT participants who had previously been asked to imagine that they had just learned that someone whom they had a crush on also had feelings for them broke this spell

Stereotype Threat

Various cultural groups in the United States differ, on average, in their academic test performance - There are any number of explanations—economic, cultural, historical, political - But one major contributing factor is clearly situational and stems from the anxiety produced by negative stereotypes

An experiment that supports this idea ^

Volunteers had to administer a supposedly painful electric shock to a fellow student - Half of the students were told that there would be a turnabout: the other student would be given the opportunity to retaliate against them at a later time - Those who were led to believe that their victim would be able to retaliate later did not derogate the victim - Because the victim was going to be able to even the score, there was little dissonance

John Dallard

Was among the first to document the relationship between discrimination and economic competition - At first, there was no discernible hostility toward the new German immigrants who had arrived in the town - Prejudice flourished, however, as jobs grew scarce - Similarly, the prejudice, violence, and negative stereotyping directed against Chinese immigrants in the United States fluctuated wildly throughout the nineteenth century - Result of changes in economic competition - Only a few years later, however, when they were willing to accept backbreaking work as laborers on the transcontinental railroad (work that few white Americans were willing to do) -> they were regarded as sober, industrious, and law abiding - Today, Mexicans are viewed in the same way the Chinese were - As competition—real and imagined—has increased, violence against Latinos has risen as well - Mexicans and other Latinos have become the main focus of white anger about illegal immigration

How does normative social influence motivate people to conform?

We also conform so that we will be liked and accepted by other people - Normative conformity is so powerful because deviant group members are often ridiculed, punished, or even rejected by other group members

Dissonance Across Cultures

We can find dissonance operating in almost every part of the world - But it does not always take the same form, and the content of the cognitions that produce it may differ across cultures - In "collectivist" societies -> dissonance-reducing behavior might be less prevalent, at least on the surface - We'd be more likely to find behavior aimed at maintaining group harmony and less likely to see people justifying their own personal misbehavior - Also more likely to see people experiencing dissonance when their behavior shames or disappoints others Nonetheless, most causes of dissonance are international and intergenerational

Knowing Ourselves by Comparing Ourselves to Others. Explain this "Phrase"/Header.

We measure our own abilities and attitudes by seeing how we stack up against other people

How have new technologies shaped attraction and social media?

We now live in an era in which much social interaction is not of the face-to-face variety, but rather takes place via text

What did Sidney Sinclair's experiment show us?

We tend to automatically adopt the views of people we like but automatically reject the views of people we do not

Defining Love: Companionship and Passion

We use the word love to describe all of these relationships, though each one seems to be of a different kind

How does informational social influence motivate people to conform?

We watch others, observing their behavior to help us achieve a better definition of the situation - When we subsequently act like everyone else, we are conforming - The influence of others leads us to conform because we see those people as a valuable source of information to guide our behavior

Another approach to studying why relationships end considers...

What attracted the people to each other in the first place - In one study, college men and women were asked to focus on a former romantic relationship to list the qualities that first attracted them to the person and the characteristics they ended up disliking the most about the person - Thirty percent of these breakups were examples of "fatal attractions" -> The very qualities that were initially so attractive became the very reasons why the relationship ended

The Ben Franklin Effect: Justifying Acts of Kindness

What happens when you are subtly induced to do a favor for a person you don't much like? - Dissonance theory predicts that you will like the person more after doing the favor

Jung

What ties two people together (much more than love) (Korea) - Takes time and mutual experiences - Interestingly, jung can develop in negative relationships too

Politics and Self-Justification

When a political leader gets caught up in a self-justifying cycle, the consequences can be devastating for the nation and the world

John Gottman

When discussing issues related to relationship conflict, those couples whose communication shows signs of contempt, sarcasm, and criticism are more likely to break up (and break up sooner) than other couples - Qualities of a long-lasting relationship = wait to calm down before hashing out a disagreement and those who exhibit an ability to listen without automatically getting defensive

Knowing Ourselves by Adopting Other People's Views. Explain this "Phrase"/Header

When it comes to our views of the social world we adopt the views our friends hold - People who have similar views are attracted to each other and are more likely to become friends than are people who have dissimilar views - It is also true that people adopt the views of people they hang out with (at least under certain circumstances)

What determines whether people take the central versus the peripheral route to persuasion?

When people are truly interested in the topic and thus motivated to pay close attention to the arguments, and if people have the ability to pay attention (for example, if nothing is distracting them)

The reason corporations and other groups are willing to spend so much money on ad campaigns is because of a simple assumption ->

When people change their attitudes, they change their behavior as well - In reality, though, the relationship between attitudes and behavior is not so simple

The Contact Hypothesis

When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools... - Social psychologists believed desegregating the schools—increasing the contact between white children and black children—would increase the self-esteem of minority children (AKA end prejudice) - Contact Hypothesis

Justifying Good Deeds and Harmful Acts

When we like people, we show it by treating them well - When we dislike people, we also often show it - But it can also work the other way around: our own behavior toward a person affects whether we like or dislike that individual

Internal Justification:

When you can't find external justification for your behavior, you will attempt to find

Attitudes do predict behavior, but only under certain specifiable conditions. One key is knowing whether ____ or ____

Whether the behavior we are trying to predict is spontaneous or planned

Some Final Comments About Similarity

While similarity is very important in close relationships, it is important to make a distinction between actual similarity and perceived similarity

Cornell, Park, Jud (2002)

White participants saw videos of young men in realistic settings - Half of the men were African American, and half were white - Half of the men in each group were holding a handgun, and half were holding nonthreatening objects - Participants were instructed to press a button labeled "shoot" if the man in the video had a gun and a button labeled "don't shoot" if he did not - The white participants were especially likely to pull the trigger when the men in the videos were black, whether or not they were holding a gun

Subliminal Messages:

Words or pictures that are not consciously perceived but may nevertheless influence judgments, attitudes, and behaviors - Subliminal messages are not just visual; they can be auditory as well - Most members of the public believe that subliminal messages can shape their attitudes and behaviors

The Loss of Personal Responsibility

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