chapter 12 psychology

Conformity

Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.

What is cognitive dissonance and how does it explain discrepancies between attitudes and behaviors?

It refers to the mental conflict that occurs when a person's behaviors and beliefs do not align. It may also happen when a person holds two beliefs that contradict one another. Cognitive dissonance causes feelings of unease and tension, and people attempt to relieve this discomfort in different ways.

How can we overcome prejudice as individuals?

Other techniques that are used to reduce prejudice include: Gaining public support and awareness for anti-prejudice social norms. Increasing contact with members of other social groups. Making people aware of the inconsistencies in their own beliefs.

Social loafing v. social striving

Social striving occurs when individuals exert more effort when working in a group than when working individually, and stands in contrast to the more often researched social loafing, which is the tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group than when working independently.

Zimbardo

Stanford Prison Experiment/Lucifer Effect - Role Playing: People take on the role of what they feel are proper for the situation

What does the Robber's Cave study show us about combating prejudice?

The Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that an attempt to simply bring hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice. Rather, this experiment confirmed that groups must cooperate and have common goals to truly build peace.

Prosocial/ helping behavior

any act that is intended to benefit another person

Social norms

expected standards of conduct, which influence behavior

Attitude

feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events

Implicity personality theory

system of rules matching qualities/characteristics with other qualities/characteristics

Social influence

the ability to control another person's behavior

Social categorization

the assignment of a person one has just met to a category based on characteristics the new person has in common with other people with whom one has had experience in the past

Deindividuation

the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity

Based on what you have learned about the obedience studies, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and Abu Ghraib, why do ordinary people commit evil acts?

According to Zimbardo and his colleagues, the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.

What factors affect the way we perceive and categorize other people?

Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include the characteristics of the person you are observing, the context of the situation, your own personal traits, and your past experiences. People often form impressions of others very quickly, with only minimal information.

Explain how individual behavior can be strongly influenced by the presence of others illustrated in social loafing, social striving, social facilitation, and deindividuation.

How is our behavior affected by the presence of others or by being part of a group? Social facilitation experiments reveal that the presence of either observers or co-actors can arouse individuals, boosting their performance on easy tasks but hindering it on difficult ones.

In-group v. out-group

In-group: social group with which a person experiences a sense of belonging or identifies as a member Out-group: social group with which an individual does not identify Negative feelings towards an out-group are not based on a sense of dislike, but favoritism for the in-group and absence of favoritism for the out-group

Cognitive dissonance

Inner tension that a consumer experiences after recognizing an inconsistency between behavior and values or opinions

self-effacing bias (modesty bias)

Involves blaming failure on internal, personal factors, while attributing success to external, situational factors

Under what conditions are attitudes likely to reflect behavior?

One other type of match that has an important influence on the attitude-behavior relationship concerns how we measure the attitude and behavior. Attitudes predict behavior better when the attitude is measured at a level that is similar to the behavior to be predicted.

What is the function of stereotypes, and how do they relate to prejudice?

Relationship with other types of intergroup attitudes In this tripartite view of intergroup attitudes, stereotypes reflect expectations and beliefs about the characteristics of members of groups perceived as different from one's own,prejudice represents the emotional response, and discrimination refers to actions.

Robber's Cave Experiment

Robbers Cave Experiment DefinitionThe Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that an attempt to simply bring hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice. Rather, this experiment confirmed that groups must cooperate and have common goals to truly build peace.

What factors influence conformity, and how does culture affect conformity?

Several factors are associated with increased conformity, including larger group size, unanimity, high group cohesion, and perceived higher status of the group. Other factors associated with conformity are culture, gender, age, and importance of stimuli.In addition to gender differences, there is also evidence that conformity is greater in some cultures than others. ... They found a significant relationship: conformity was greater in more collectivistic than in individualistic countries.

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

Name and describe attributional biases that affect our judgments of other people.

This bias helps to explain why individuals tend to take credit for their own successes while often denying responsibility for failures. For example, a tennis player who wins his match might say, "I won because I'm a good athlete," whereas the loser might say, "I lost because the referee was unfair."

How has the Robber's Cave study been applied in classrooms?

What did the Robbers Cave study teach us about how to get groups to work together? The Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that an attempt to simply bring hostile groups together is not enough to reduce intergroup prejudice. Rather, this experiment confirmed that groups must cooperate and have common goals to truly build peace.

According to Milgram's studies, why are people obedient?

Why is it so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires.

Just world hypothesis

claim that our attributions and behaviors are shaped by a deep-seated assumption that the world is fair and all things happen for a reason

What are the three components of attitudes?

cognitive, affective, behavioral

Social facilitation

improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others

Internal/external attributions

include causes inside and specific to the person, or outside the person such as social pressure

Normative v. informational social influence

normative social influence: influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval informational social influence: influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality

Persuasion

the process of creating, reinforcing, or changing people's beliefs or actions

Attribution

the process of explaining one's own behavior and the behavior of others

Person perception

the process of forming impressions of others

Social cognition

the processes by which people come to understand others

Social psychology

the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another

What is social psychology?

the scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another

Bystander effect

the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present

Diffusion of responsibility

the tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by others who are acting the same way

Fundamental attribution error

the tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition

In-group bias

the tendency to favor one's own group

Actor-observer effect

the tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others

Outgroup homogeneity

the tendency to view members of outgroups as more similar to each other than we see members of ingroups

Altruism

unselfish regard for the welfare of others

Obedience

A form of compliance that occurs when people follow direct commands, usually from someone in a position of authority

Prejudice

A negative attitude toward an entire category of people, often an ethnic or racial minority.

What factors increase / decrease obedience?

Commands were given by an authority figure rather than another volunteer. The experiments were done at a prestigious institution. The authority figure was present in the room with the subject. The learner was in another room. The subject did not see other subjects disobeying commands.

What other conditions are essential to reducing tension between groups?

The contact hypothesis suggests that interpersonal contact between groups can reduce prejudice. According to Gordon Allport, who first proposed the theory, four conditions are necessary to reduce prejudice: equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support.

Asch's Experiment

The experiments revealed the degree to which a person's own opinions are influenced by those of groups. Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.

What factors influence persuasion?

The four primary elements of persuasion explored by psychologist are the communicator, the message, how the message is communicated, and lastly the audience.

reciprocity, commitment

The idea of reciprocity says that people, by nature, feel obliged to provide discounts or concessions to others if they've received favors from those same people. Psychology explains this by stressing that humans simply hate to feel indebted to others!

Milgram's Obedience Experiment

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the 'learner' and who would be the 'teacher. ' The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram's confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

What factors increase/decrease prosocial behavior?

The purest forms of prosocial behavior are motivated by altruism, an unselfish interest in helping another person. According to Santrock, the circumstances most likely to evoke altruism are empathy for an individual in need, or a close relationship between the benefactor and the recipient.

discrepancy

a difference; a lack of agreement

Stereotype

a generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people

Self-serving bias

a readiness to perceive oneself favorably

Jigsaw Classroom

educational approach designed to minimize prejudice by requiring all children to make independent contributions to a shared project

Ethnocentrism

evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.

Why do people conform?

informational influence and normative influence