Psych Ch 13: Social Psychology.

Attraction

For most of us, there is a very small number of people with whom we are willing to have sex, an even smaller number of people with whom we are willing to have children, and a staggeringly large number of people with whom we are unwilling to have either. So when we meet someone new, how do we decide which of these categories they belong in? Many things go into choosing a date, a lover, or a partner for life, but perhaps none is more important than the simple feeling we call attraction (Berscheid & Reis, 1998). Research suggests that this feeling is caused by a range of factors that can be roughly divided into three kinds: the situational, the physical, and the psychological.

PREVIEW

WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL GETS SICK OR GOES CRAZY when left alone? our kind. Human beings are the most social species on the planet and everything about us—from the structure of our brains to the structure of our societies—is influenced by that fact. Social psychology is the study of the causes and consequences of sociality. We'll start our tour of this field by examining social behavior (how people interact with each other) and see how social behavior solves problems that every living creature faces. next we'll examine social influence (how people change each other) and see that people have three basic motivations that make them responsive to the actions of others. Finally, we'll examine social cognition (how people think about each other) and see how people use information to make judgments about others.

Cooperation

• Aggression is one way to solve the problem of scarce resources, but it is not the most inventive way, because when individuals work together they can often each get more resources than either could get alone. Cooperation is behavior by two or more individuals that leads to mutual benefit (Deutsch, 1949; Pruitt, 1998), and it is one of our species' greatest achievements—right up there with language, fire, and the electric guitar (Axelrod, 1984; Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981; Nowak, 2006). Every roadway and supermarket, every iPod and cell phone, every ballet and surgery is the result of cooperation, and it is difficult to think of an important human achievement that could have occurred without it.

Reproduction: The Quest for Immortality

• All animals must survive and reproduce. Social behavior is useful for survival, but it is an absolute prerequisite for reproduction, which doesn't happen until people get very, very social. The first step on the road to reproduction is finding someone who wants to travel that road with us. How do we do that?

Stereotypes Can Be Overused

• Because all thumbtacks are pretty much alike, our stereotypes about thumbtacks (small, cheap, painful when chewed) are quite useful. We will rarely be mistaken if we generalize from one thumbtack to another. But human categories are so variable that our stereotypes may offer only the vaguest of clues about the individuals who populate those categories. • You probably believe that men have greater upper body strength than women do, and this belief is right on average. But the upper body strength of individuals within each of these categories is so varied that you cannot easily predict how much weight a particular person can lift simply by knowing that person's gender. The inherent variability of human categories makes stereotypes much less useful than they seem • Alas, we don't always recognize this because the mere act of categorizing a stimulus tends to warp our perceptions of that category's variability. For instance, participants in some studies were shown a series of lines of different lengths (see FIGURE 13.16; McGarty & Turner, 1992; Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). For one group of participants, the longest lines were labeled Group A and the shortest lines were labeled Group B, as they are on the right side of Figure 13.16. For the second group of participants, the lines were shown without these category labels, as they are on the left side of Figure 13.16. Interestingly, those participants who saw the category labels overestimated the similarity of the lines that shared a label and underestimated the similarity of lines that did not. • You've probably experienced this phenomenon yourself. For instance, we all identify colors as members of categories such as blue or green, and this leads us to overestimate the similarity of colors that share a category label and to underestimate the similarity of colors that do not. That's why we see discrete bands of color when we look at rainbows, which are actually a smooth chromatic continuum (see FIGURE 13.17). When two cities are in the same country (Memphis and Pierre) people tend to underestimate their distance, but when two cities are in different countries (Memphis and Toronto) they tend to overestimate their distance (Burris & Branscombe, 2005). Indeed, people believe that they are more likely to feel an earthquake that happens 230 miles away when the earthquake happens in their state rather than a neighboring state (Mishra & Mishra, 2010) • What's true of colors and cities is true of people as well. The mere act of categorizing people as Blacks or Whites, Jews or Gentiles, artists or accountants, can cause us to underestimate the variability within those categories ("All artists are wacky") and to overestimate the variability between them ("Artists are much wackier than accountants"). When we underestimate the variability of a human category, we overestimate how useful our stereotypes can be (Park & Hastie, 1987; Rubin, & Badea, 2012)

Social Behavior: Interacting with People

• Centipedes aren't social. Neither are snails or brown bears. In fact, most animals are loners who prefer solitude to company. So why don't we? • All animals must survive and reproduce, and being social is one strategy for accomplishing these two important goals. When it comes to finding food or fending off enemies, herds and packs and flocks can often do what individuals can't, and that's why over millions of years many different species have found it useful to become social. But of the thousands and thousands of social species on our planet, only four have become ultra social, which means that they form societies in which large numbers of individuals divide labor and cooperate for mutual benefit. Those four species are the hymenoptera (i.e., ants, bees, and wasps), the termites, the naked mole rats, and us (Haidt, 2006). Even in this fine company we distinguish ourselves, because only we form societies of genetically unrelated individuals. Indeed, some scientists believe that the complexity of living in large social groups is the primary reason why nature endowed us with such big brains (Sallet et al., 2011; Shultz & Dunbar, 2010; Smith et al., 2010). If 10,000 years ago you had rounded up all the mammals on Earth and placed them on a gigantic bathroom scale, human beings would have accounted for about 0.01% of the total mass, but today we would account for 98%. We are the heavyweight champions of survival and reproduction because we are deeply social, and as you are about to see, much of our social behavior revolves around these two basic goals.

Normative Influence

• Consider the many things you know about elevators. When you get on an elevator you are supposed to face forward and not talk to the person next to you even if you were talking to that person before you got on the elevator unless you are the only two people on the elevator in which case it's okay to talk and face sideways but still not backward. Although no one ever taught you this rule, you probably picked it up somewhere along the way. The unwritten rules that govern social behavior are called norms, which are customary standards for behavior that are widely shared by members of a culture (Cialdini, 2013; Miller & Prentice, 1996). We learn norms with exceptional ease and we obey them with exceptional fidelity because we know that if we don't, others won't approve of us. For example, every human culture has a norm of reciprocity, which is the unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefited them (Gouldner, 1960). When a friend buys you lunch, you return the favor; and if you don't, your friend gets miffed. Indeed, the norm of reciprocity is so strong that when researchers randomly pulled the names of strangers from a telephone directory and sent them all Christmas cards, they received Christmas cards back from most (Kunz & Woolcott, 1976) • Norms are a powerful weapon in the game of social influence. Normative influence occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is appropriate (see FIGURE 13.9). For example, waiters and waitresses know all about the norm of reciprocity, which is why they often give customers a piece of candy along with the bill. Studies show that customers who receive a candy feel obligated to do "a little extra" for the waiter who did "a little extra" for them (Strohmetz et al., 2002). Indeed, people will sometimes refuse small gifts precisely because they don't want to feel indebted to the gift giver (Shen, Wan, & Wyer, 2011) • The norm of reciprocity involves swapping, but the thing being swapped doesn't have to be a favor. The door-in-the-face technique is an influence strategy that involves getting someone to deny an initial request. Here's how it works: You ask someone for something more valuable than you really want, you wait for that person to refuse (to "slam the door in your face"), and then you ask the person for what you really want. For example, when researchers asked college students to volunteer to supervise adolescents who were going on a field trip, only 17% of the students agreed. But when the researchers first asked students to commit to spending 2 hours per week for 2 years working at a youth detention center (to which every one of the students said no) and then asked them to supervise a field trip, 50% of the students agreed (Cialdini et al., 1975). Why? The norm of reciprocity! The researchers began by asking for a large favor, which the student refused. Then the researchers made a concession by asking for a smaller favor. Because the researchers made a concession, the norm of reciprocity demanded that the student make one too—and half of them did

Groups and Favoritism

• Cooperation requires that we take a risk by benefiting those who have not yet benefited us and then trusting them to do the same. But whom can we trust? • A group is a collection of people who have something in common that distinguishes them from others. Every one of us is a member of many groups—from families and teams to religions and nations. Although these groups are quite different, they have one thing in common, which is that the people in them tend to be especially nice to each other. Prejudice is a positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their group membership, and discrimination is a positive or negative behavior toward another person based on their group membership (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010). One of the defining characteristics of groups is that members are positively prejudiced toward fellow members and tend to discriminate in their favor (DiDonato, Ullrich, & Krueger, 2011). The tendency to favor one's own group is evolutionarily ancient (Fu et al., 2012; Mahajan et al., 2011), arises early in development (Dunham, Chen, & Banaji, 2013), and is easily elicited (Efferson, Lalive, & Fehr, 2008). Even when people are randomly assigned to be members of meaningless groups such as "Group 1" or "Group 2," they still give preferential treatment to members of their own group (Hodson & Sorrentino, 2001; Locksley, Ortiz, & Hepburn, 1980). It appears that simply knowing that "I'm one of us and not one of them" is sufficient to produce prejudice and discrimination (Tajfel et al., 1971). Because group members can be relied on to favor each other, group membership makes cooperation less risky. • But if groups have benefits, they also have costs. For example, when groups try to make decisions, they rarely do better than the best member would have done alone— and they quite often do worse (Minson & Mueller, 2012). One reason is that groups don't fully capitalize on the expertise of their members (Hackman & Katz, 2010). For instance, groups (such as a school board) often give too little weight to the opinions of members who are experts (the professor) and too much weight to the opinions of members who happen to be high in status (the mayor) or especially talkative (the mayor). Groups are also susceptible to the common knowledge effect which is the tendency for group discussions to focus on information that all members share (Gigone & Hastie, 1993). The problem with this is that the information everyone shares (the size of the gymnasium) is often relatively unimportant, whereas the truly important information (how a school in a different district solved its budget crisis) is known to just a few. In addition, group discussion often acts as an "amplifier" of initial opinions. Group polarization is the tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than any member would have made alone (Myers & Lamm, 1975). A group whose members come to the table with moderate opinions ("We should probably just renovate the auditorium") can end up making an extreme decision ("We're going to build a new high school!") simply because, in the course of discussion, each member was exposed to many different arguments in favor of a single position (Isenberg, 1986). Finally, members of groups care about how other members feel and are sometimes reluctant to "rock the boat" even when it needs a good rocking. Groupthink is the tendency for groups to reach consensus in order to facilitate interpersonal harmony (Janis, 1982). Harmony is important (especially if the group is a choir), but studies show that groups often sacrifice the goodness of their decisions in order to achieve it (Turner & Pratkanis, 1998). For all of these reasons, groups underperform individuals in a wide variety of tasks. • The costs of groups go beyond bad decisions because people in groups sometimes do terrible things that none of their members would do alone (Yzerbyt & Demoulin, 2010). Lynching, rioting, gang-raping—why do we sometimes behave badly when we assemble in groups? One reason is deindividuation, which occurs when immersion in a group causes people to become less concerned with their personal values. We may want to grab the Rolex from the jeweler's window or plant a kiss on the attractive stranger in the library, but we don't do these things because they conflict with our personal values. Research shows that people are most likely to consider their personal values when their attention is focused on themselves (Wicklund, 1975), and being assembled in groups draws our attention to others and away from ourselves. As a result, we are less likely to consider our own personal values and instead adopt the group's values (Postmes & Spears, 1998). • A second reason why groups behave badly is diffusion of responsibility, which refers to the tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by others who are acting the same way. Diffusion of responsibility is the main culprit behind something you've probably observed many times—a phenomenon known as social loafing which refers to the tendency for people to expend less effort when in a group than alone. For example, individuals in large groups are less likely than individuals in small groups to clap loudly after a performance (Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979), exert effort in a team sport (Williams et al., 1989), leave good tips at restaurants (Freeman et al., 1975), donate money to charity (Wiesenthal, Austrom, & Silverman, 1983), and even say hello to passersby (Jones & Foshay, 1984). But the diffusion of responsibility has much more pernicious effects. For example, studies of bystander intervention—which is the act of helping strangers in an emergency situation—reveal that people are less likely to help an innocent person in distress when there are many other bystanders present, simply because they assume that one of the other bystanders is more responsible than they are (Darley & Latané, 1968; Latané & Nida, 1981). If you saw a fellow student cheat on an exam, you'd probably feel more responsible for reporting the incident if you were taking the test in a group of 3 than in a group of 3,000 (see FIGURE 13.5) • If groups make bad decisions and foster bad behavior, then might we be better off without them? Probably not. One of the best predictors of a person's general wellbeing is the quality and extent of their group memberships (Myers & Diener, 1995). People who are excluded from groups are typically anxious, lonely, depressed, and at increased risk for illness and premature death (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Cohen, 1988; Leary, 1990). Belonging is not just a source of psychological and physical wellbeing but also a source of identity (Ellemers, 2012; Leary, 2010; Tajfel & Turner, 1986), which is why people typically describe themselves by listing the groups of which they are members ("I'm a Canadian architect"). Groups may cause us to misjudge and misbehave, but are also the key to our happiness and well-being. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

Altruism

• Cooperation solves the problem of scarce resources. But is that the only reason we cooperate with others? Aren't we ever just . . . well, nice? Altruism is behavior that benefits another without benefiting oneself, and for centuries, scientists and philosophers have argued about whether people are ever truly altruistic. That might seem like an odd argument to have. After all, people give their blood to the injured, their food to the homeless, and their arms to the elderly. We volunteer, we tithe, we donate. People do nice things all the time! Isn't that evidence of altruism? Well, not exactly. Behaviors that appear to be altruistic often have hidden benefits for those who do them. Consider some simple examples in the realm of animal behavior. Birds and squirrels make alarm calls when they see a predator, which puts them at increased risk of being eaten but allows their fellow birds and squirrels to escape. Ants and bees spend their lives caring for the offspring of the queen rather than bearing offspring of their own. Although these behaviors appear to be altruistic, they actually aren't because the helpers are genetically related to the helpees. The squirrels most likely to make alarm calls are those most closely related to the other squirrels in the den (Maynard-Smith, 1965), and although honeybees do raise the queen's offspring, an odd genetic quirk causes honeybees to be more closely related to those offspring than they would be to their own. Any animal that promotes the survival of its relatives is actually promoting the survival of its own genes (Hamilton, 1964). Kin selection is the process by which evolution selects for individuals who cooperate with their relatives, and cooperating with related individuals is not really altruistic. Cooperating with unrelated individuals isn't necessarily altruistic either. Male baboons will risk injury to help an unrelated male baboon win a fight, and monkeys will spend time grooming unrelated monkeys when they could be doing something else, but as it turns out, the animals that give favors tend to get favors in return. Reciprocal altruism is behavior that benefits another with the expectation that those benefits will be returned in the future, and despite the second word in this term, it isn't actually altruistic (Trivers, 1972). Indeed, reciprocal altruism is merely cooperation extended over time. • The behavior of nonhuman animals provides little if any evidence of genuine altruism (cf. Bartal, Decety, & Mason, 2011). So what about us? Are we any different? Like other animals, we tend to help our kin more than strangers (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994; Komter, 2010) and we tend to expect those we help to help us in return (Burger et al., 2009). But unlike other animals, we do sometimes provide benefits to complete strangers who have no chance of repaying us (Batson, 2002; Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). We hold the door for people who share precisely none of our genes and tip waiters in restaurants to which we will never return. And we do more than that. As the World Trade Center burned on the morning of September 11, 2001, civilians in sailboats headed toward the destruction rather than away from it, initiating the largest waterborne evacuation in U.S. history. As one observer remarked, "If you're out on the water in a pleasure craft and you see those buildings on fire, in a strictly rational sense you should head to New Jersey. Instead, people went into potential danger and rescued strangers. That's social" (Dreifus, 2003). Human beings can be truly altruistic, and some studies suggest that they are actually more altruistic than they realize (Miller & Ratner, 1998).

Social Cognition: Understanding People

• Frank Ocean is sexy and talented. Whether or not you agree with that sentence, it almost certainly activated your medial prefrontal cortex, which is an area of your brain that is activated when you think about the attributes of other people but not about the attributes of inanimate objects such as houses or tools (Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002). Although most of your brain shows diminished activity when you are at rest, this area remains active all the time (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). Why does your brain have a specific area that is dedicated to processing information about just one of the millions of objects you might encounter, and why is this area constantly switched on? Of the millions of objects you might encounter, other human beings are the single most important. Social cognition is the processes by which people come to understand others, and your brain is doing it all day long. Whether you know it or not, your brain is constantly making inferences about others people's thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires, abilities and aspirations, intentions, needs, and characters. It bases these inferences on two kinds of information: the categories to which people belong, and the things they do and say.

Consistency

• If a friend told you that rabbits had just staged a coup in Antarctica and were halting all carrot exports, you probably wouldn't turn on CNN. You'd know right away that your friend was joking (or stupid) because the statement is logically inconsistent with other things that you know are true, for example, that rabbits do not foment revolution and that Antarctica does not export carrots. People evaluate the accuracy of new beliefs by assessing their consistency with old beliefs, and although this is not a foolproof method for determining whether something is true, it provides a pretty good approximation. We are motivated to be accurate, and because consistency is a rough measure of accuracy, we are motivated to be consistent as well (Cialdini, Trost, & Newsom, 1995). That motivation leaves us vulnerable to social influence. For example, the foot-inthe-door technique involves making a small request and then following it with a larger request (Burger, 1999). In one study (Freedman & Fraser, 1966), experimenters went to a neighborhood and knocked on doors to see if they could convince homeowners to agree to have a big ugly "Drive Carefully" sign installed in their front yards. One group of homeowners was simply asked to install the sign, and only 17% said yes. A second group of homeowners was first asked to sign a petition urging the state legislature to promote safe driving (which almost all agreed to do) and was then asked to install the ugly sign. And 55% said yes! Why would homeowners be more likely to grant two requests than one? •Just imagine how the homeowners in the second group felt. They had already signed a petition stating that they thought safe driving was important, and yet they knew they didn't want to install an ugly sign in their front yards. As they wrestled with this inconsistency, they probably began to experience a feeling called cognitive dissonance, which is an unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes the inconsistency of his or her actions, attitudes, or beliefs (Festinger, 1957). When people experience cognitive dissonance they naturally try to alleviate it, and one way to alleviate cognitive dissonance is to restore consistency among one's actions, attitudes, and beliefs (Aronson, 1969; Cooper & Fazio, 1984). Allowing the sign to be installed in their yards accomplished that. Recent research shows that this phenomenon can be used to good effect: Hotel guests who were asked at check-in to commit to being a "Friend of the Earth" were 25% more likely to re-use their towels during their stay (Baca-Motes et al., 2013) • The fact that we can alleviate cognitive dissonance by changing our actions, attitudes, or beliefs has some interesting implications. For instance, in one study, female college students applied to join a weekly discussion on "the psychology of sex." Women in the control group were allowed to join the discussion, but women in the experimental group were allowed to join the discussion only after first passing an embarrassing test that involved reading pornographic fiction to a strange man. Although the carefully staged discussion was as dull as possible, women in the experimental group found it more interesting than did women in the control group (Aronson & Mills, 1958). Why? Women in the experimental group knew that they had paid a steep price to join the group ("I read all that porn out loud!"), but that belief was inconsistent with the belief that the discussion was worthless. As such, the women experienced cognitive dissonance, which they alleviated by changing their beliefs about the value of the discussion (see the top half of FIGURE 13.14.). We normally think that people pay for things because they value them, but as this study shows, people sometimes value things because they've paid for them—with money, time, attention, blood, sweat, or tears. It is little wonder that some fraternities use hazing to breed loyalty, that some religions require their adherents to make large personal or monetary sacrifices, that some gourmet restaurants charge outrageous amounts to keep their patrons coming back, or that some men and women play hard to get to maintain their suitors' interest. • We are motivated to be consistent, but there are inevitably times when we just can't, for example, when we tell a friend that her new hairstyle is "daring" when it actually resembles a wet skunk after an unfortunate encounter with a snowblower. Why don't we experience cognitive dissonance under such circumstances and come to believe our own lies? Because while telling a friend that her hairstyle is daring is inconsistent with the belief that her hairstyle is hideous, it is perfectly consistent with the belief that one should be nice to one's friends. When small inconsistencies are justified by large consistencies, cognitive dissonance is reduced. • For example, participants in one study were asked to perform a dull task that involved turning knobs one way, then the other way, and then back again. After the participants were sufficiently bored, the experimenter explained that he desperately needed a few more people to volunteer for the study, and he asked the participants to go into the hallway, find another person, and tell that person that the knob-turning task was great fun. The experimenter offered some participants $1 to tell this lie, and he offered other participants $20. All participants agreed to tell the lie, and after they did so, they were asked to report their true enjoyment of the knob-turning task. The results showed that participants liked the task more when they were paid $1 than $20 to lie about it (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). Why? Because the belief this knob-turning task is dull was inconsistent with the belief I recommended the task to that person in the hallway, but the latter belief was perfectly consistent with the belief that $20 is a lot of money. For some participants, the large payment justified the lie, so only those people who received the small payment experienced cognitive dissonance. As such, only the participants who received $1 felt the need to restore consistency by changing their beliefs about the enjoyableness of the task (see the bottom half of Figure 13.14).

Informational Influence

• If everyone in the mall suddenly ran screaming for the exit, you'd probably join them— not because you were afraid that they would disapprove of you if you didn't—but because their behavior would suggest to you that there was something worth running from. Informational influence occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is true. You can observe the power of informational influence yourself just by standing in the middle of the sidewalk, tilting back your head, and staring at the top of a tall building. Research shows that within just a few minutes, other people will stop and stare too (Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz, 1969). Why? They will assume that if you are looking, then there must be something worth looking at • You are the constant target of informational influence. When a salesperson tells you that "most people buy the iPad with extra memory," she is artfully suggesting that you should take other people's behavior as information about the product. Advertisements that refer to soft drinks as "popular" or books as "best sellers" are reminding you that other people are buying these particular drinks and books, which suggests that they know something you don't and that you'd be wise to follow their example. Situation comedies provide laugh tracks because the producers know that when you hear other people laughing, you will mindlessly assume that something must be funny (Fein, Goethals, & Kugler, 2007; Nosanchuk & Lightstone, 1974). Bars and nightclubs make people stand in line even when there is plenty of room inside because they know that passersby will see the line and assume that the club is worth waiting for. In short, the world is full of objects and events that we know little about, and we can often cure our ignorance by paying attention to the way in which others are acting toward them. Alas, the very thing that makes us open to information leaves us open to manipulation as well

The Hedonic Motive: Pleasure Is Better Than Pain

• If there is an animal that prefers pain to pleasure it must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen it. Pleasure seeking is the most basic of all motives, and social influence often involves creating situations in which others can achieve more pleasure by doing what we want them to do than by doing something else. Parents, teachers, governments, and businesses influence our behavior by offering rewards and threatening punishments (see FIGURE 13.8). There's nothing mysterious about how these influence attempts work, and they are often quite effective. When the Republic of Singapore warned its citizens that anyone caught chewing gum in public would face a year in prison and a $5,500 fine, the rest of the world was outraged; but when the outrage subsided, it was hard to ignore the fact that gum chewing in Singapore had fallen to an all-time low. A good caning gets your attention every time • You'll recall from the Memory chapter that even a sea slug will repeat behaviors that are followed by rewards and avoid behaviors that are followed by punishments. Although the same is generally true of human beings, there are some instances in which rewards and punishments can backfire. For example, children in one study were allowed to play with colored markers and then some were given a "Good Player Award." When the children were given markers the next day, those who had received an award were less likely to play with them than were those who had not received an award (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). Why? Because children who had received an award the first day came to think of drawing as something one does to receive rewards, and if no one was going to give them an award, then why the heck should they do it (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999)? Similarly, rewards and punishments can backfire simply because people don't like being manipulated with them. Researchers placed signs in two restrooms on a college campus: "Please don't write on these walls" and "Do not write on these walls under any circumstances." Two weeks later, the walls in the second restroom had more graffiti on the walls, presumably because students didn't appreciate the threatening tone of the second sign and wrote on the walls just to prove that they could (Pennebaker & Sanders, 1976)

Stereotyping Can Be Automatic

• If we recognize that stereotypes are inaccurate and self-perpetuating (as you now do), then why don't we just make a firm resolution to stop using them? The answer is that stereotyping happens unconsciously (which means that we don't always know we are doing it) and automatically (which means that we often cannot avoid doing it even when we try; Banaji & Heiphetz, 2010; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Greenwald & Nosek, 2001). • For example, in one study, participants played a video game in which photos of Black or White men holding either guns or cameras were flashed on the screen for less than 1 second each. Participants earned money by shooting men with guns and lost money by shooting men with cameras. The results showed that participants made two kinds of mistakes: They tended to shoot Black men holding cameras and tended not to shoot White men holding guns (Correll et al., 2002). Although the photos appeared on the screen so quickly that participants did not have enough time to consciously consider their stereotypes, those stereotypes worked unconsciously, causing them to mistake a camera for a gun when it was in the hands of a Black man and a gun for a camera when it was in the hands of a White man. Sadly, Black participants were just as likely to make this pattern of errors as were White participants. Why did this happen? •Stereotypes comprise all the information about human categories that we have absorbed over the years from friends and uncles, books and blogs, jokes and movies and late-night television. When we see Black men holding guns in rap videos, our minds associate these two things, and although we realize that we are watching art and not real life, the association is made and remembered. Later, we can't decide not to be influenced by that association any more than we can decide not to be influenced by our second-grade teacher or the smell of French fries. • In fact, some research suggests that trying not to use our stereotypes can make matters worse instead of better. Participants in one study were shown a photograph of a tough-looking male "skinhead" and were asked to write an essay describing a typical day in his life. Some of the participants were told that they should not allow their stereotypes about skinheads to influence their essays, and others were given no such instructions. Next, the experimenter brought each participant to a room with eight empty chairs. The first chair had a jacket draped over it, and the experimenter explained that it belonged to a skinhead, who had gone to use the restroom. Where did participants choose to sit? Participants who had earlier been told not to use their stereotypes sat farther away from the jacket than did participants who had been given no instructions (Macrae et al., 1994). As you know from reading the Consciousness chapter, thought suppression is ironic business that often causes us to do the very thing we were trying to avoid doing (Wegner et al., 1987). • Although stereotyping is unconscious and automatic, it is not inevitable (Blair, 2002; Kawakami et al., 2000; Milne & Grafman, 2001; Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001). For instance, police officers who receive special training before playing the camera or gun video game described earlier do not show the same biases that ordinary people do (Correll et al., 2007). Like ordinary people, they take a few milliseconds longer to decide not to shoot a Black man than a White man, indicating that their stereotypes are unconsciously and automatically influencing their thinking. But unlike ordinary people, they don't actually shoot Black men more often than White men, indicating that they have learned how to keep those stereotypes from influencing their behavior. Other studies show that even simple games and exercises can reduce the automatic influence of stereotypes (Phills et al., 2011; Todd et al., 2011)

Biology and Aggression

• If you wanted to know whether someone was likely to engage in aggression and you could ask them just one question, it should be "Are you male or female?" (Wrangham & Peterson, 1997). Crimes such as assault, battery, and murder are almost exclusively perpetrated by men—and especially by young men— who are responsible for about 90% of the murders and 80% of the violent crimes in the United States (Strueber, Lueck, & Roth, 2006). Although most societies encourage males to be more aggressive than females (more on that shortly), male aggressiveness is not merely the product of socialization. Studies show that aggression is strongly correlated with the presence of a hormone called testosterone, which is typically higher in men than in women, in younger men than in older men, and in violent criminals than in nonviolent criminals (Dabbs et al., 1995). • Testosterone doesn't directly cause aggression, but rather, seems to make people feel powerful and confident in their ability to prevail (Eisenegger et al., 2010; Eisenegger, Haushofer, & Fehr, 2011). Male chimpanzees with high testosterone tend to stand tall and hold their chins high (Muller & Wrangham, 2004), and human beings with high testosterone walk more purposefully, focus more directly on the people they are talking to, and speak in a more forward and independent manner (Dabbs et al., 2001). Testosterone also makes people more sensitive to provocation (Ronay & Galinsky, 2011) and less sensitive to signs of retaliation. Participants in one experiment watched a face as its expression changed from neutral to threatening and were asked to respond as soon as the expression became threatening (see FIGURE 13.2). Participants who were given a small dose of testosterone before the experiment were slower to recognize the threatening expression (van Honk & Schutter, 2007). Failing to recognize that the person you are criticizing is getting angry is a good way to end up in a fight. • One of the most reliable ways to elicit aggression in males is to challenge their status or dominance. Indeed, three quarters of all murders can be classified as "status competitions" or "contests to save face" (Daly & Wilson, 1988). Contrary to popular wisdom, it isn't men with low self-esteem but men with unrealistically high self-esteem who are most prone to aggression, because such men are especially likely to perceive others' actions as a challenge to their inflated sense of their own status (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). Men seem especially sensitive to these challenges when they are competing for the attention of women (Ainsworth & Maner, 2012) • Although women can be just as aggressive as men, their aggression tends to be more premeditated than impulsive and more likely to be focused on attaining or protecting a resource than on attaining or protecting their status. Women are much less likely than men to aggress without provocation or to aggress in ways that cause physical injury, but they are only slightly less likely than men to aggress when provoked or to aggress in ways that cause psychological injury (Bettencourt & Miller, 1996; Eagly & Steffen, 1986). Indeed, women may even be more likely than men to aggress by causing social harm, for example, by ostracizing others (Benenson et al., 2011) or by spreading malicious rumors about them (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995)

Attribution: Drawing Inferences from Actions

• In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in which he described his vision for America: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Research on stereotyping demonstrates that Dr. King's concerns are still well justified. We do indeed judge others by the color of their skin—as well as by their gender, nationality, religion, age, and occupation—and in so doing, we sometimes make mistakes. But are we any better at judging people by the content of their character? If we could somehow turn off our stereotypes and treat each person as an individual, would we judge these individuals accurately? • Not necessarily. Treating a person as an individual means judging them by their own words and deeds. This is more difficult than it sounds because the relationship between what a person is and what a person says or does is not always straightforward. An honest person may lie to save a friend from embarrassment, and a dishonest person may tell the truth to bolster her credibility. Happy people have some weepy moments, polite people can be rude in traffic, and people who despise us can be flattering when they need a favor. In short, people's behavior sometimes tells us about the kinds of people they are, but sometimes it simply tells us about the kinds of situations they happen to be in. • To understand people, we need to know not only what they did but also why they did it. Is the batter who hit the home run a talented slugger, or was the wind blowing in just the right direction at just the right time? Is the politician who gave the pro-life speech really opposed to abortion, or was she just trying to win the conservative vote? When we answer questions such as these, we are making attributions, which are inferences about the causes of people's behaviors (Epley & Waytz, 2010; Gilbert, 1998). We make situational attributions when we decide that a person's behavior was caused by some temporary aspect of the situation in which it happened ("He was lucky that the wind carried the ball into the stands"), and we make dispositional attributions when we decide that a person's behavior was caused by a relatively enduring tendency to think, feel, or act in a particular way ("He's got a great eye and a powerful swing") • How do we know whether to make a dispositional or a situational attribution? According to the covariation model (Kelley, 1967), we must consider the consistency, consensuality, and distinctiveness of the action. For example, why is the man in photo FIGURE 13.19 wearing a cheese-shaped hat? Does he have a goofy personality (dispositional attribution) or is he just a regular guy who is on his way to a Wisconsin football game (situational attribution)? According to the covariation model, you can answer this question by asking whether his behavior is consistent (does he usually wear this hat?), consensual (are other people wearing this hat?), and distinctive (does he do other goofy things?). If it turns out that he wears this hat every day (high consistency), and if today no one else is wearing a cheese hat (low consensus), and if he tends to do other goofy things, such as wear clown shoes and say "honk, honk" to passersby (low distinctiveness), then you should probably make a dispositional attribution ("He's a certified goofball"). On the other hand, if he rarely wears this hat (low consistency), if today lots of other people are wearing cheese hats (high consensus), and if he doesn't tend to do other goofy things (high distinctiveness), then you should probably make a situational attribution ("He's a Packers fan on game day"). As Figure 13.19 shows, patterns of consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness provide useful information about the cause of a person's behavior. • As sensible as this seems, research suggests that people don't always use this information as they should. The correspondence bias is the tendency to make a dispositional attribution when we should instead make a situational attribution (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones & Harris, 1967; Ross, 1977). This bias is so common and so basic that it is often called the fundamental attribution error. For example, volunteers in one experiment played a trivia game in which one participant acted as the quizmaster and made up a list of unusual questions, another participant acted as the contestant and tried to answer those questions, and a third participant acted as the observer and simply watched the game. The quizmasters tended to ask tricky questions based on their own idiosyncratic knowledge, and contestants were generally unable to answer them. After watching the game, the observers were asked to decide how knowledgeable the quizmaster and the contestant were. Although the quizmasters had asked good questions and the contestants had given bad answers, it should have been clear to the observers that all this asking and answering was a product of the roles they had been assigned to play and that the contestant would have asked equally good questions and the quizmaster would have given equally bad answers had their roles been reversed. And yet observers tended to rate the quizmaster as more knowledgeable than the contestant (Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977) and were more likely to choose the quizmaster as their own partner in an upcoming game (Quattrone, 1982). Even when we know that a successful athlete had a home field advantage or that a successful entrepreneur had family connections, we tend to attribute their success to talent and tenacity • What causes the correspondence bias? First, the situational causes of behavior are often invisible (Ichheiser, 1949). For example, professors tend to assume that fawning students really do admire them in spite of the strong incentive for students to kiss up to those who control their grades. The problem is that professors can literally see students laughing at witless jokes and applauding after boring lectures, but they cannot see "control over grades." Situations are not as tangible or visible as behaviors, so it is all too easy to ignore them (Taylor & Fiske, 1978). Second, situational attributions tend to be more complex than dispositional attributions and require more time and attention. When participants in one study were asked to make attributions while performing a mentally taxing task (namely, keeping a seven-digit number in mind), they had no difficulty making dispositional attributions, but they found it quite difficult to make situational attributions (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Winter & Uleman, 1984). In short, information about situations is hard to get and hard to use, so we tend to believe that other peoples' actions are caused by their dispositions even when there is a perfectly reasonable situational explanation. • The correspondence bias is stronger in some cultures than others (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999), among some people than others (D'Agostino & Fincher-Kiefer, 1992; Li et al., 2012), and under some circumstances than others. For example, we seem to be more prone to correspondence bias when judging other people's behavior than when judging our own. The actor-observer effect is the tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others (Jones & Nisbett, 1972). When college students are asked to explain why they and their friends chose their majors, they tend to explain their own choices in terms of situations ("I chose economics because my parents told me I have to support myself as soon as I'm done with college") and their friends' choices in terms of dispositions ("Leah chose economics because she's materialistic") (Nisbett et al., 1973). The actor-observer effect occurs because people typically have more information about the situations that caused their own behavior than about the situations that caused other people's behavior. We can remember getting the please-majorin-something-practical lecture from our parents, but we weren't at Leah's house to see her get the same lecture. As observers, we are naturally focused on another person's behavior, but as actors, we are quite literally focused on the situations in which our behavior occurs. Indeed, when people are shown videotapes of their conversations that allow them to see themselves from their partner's point of view, they tend to make dispositional attributions for their own behavior and situational attributions for their partner's (Storms, 1973; Taylor & Fiske, 1975).

Physical Factors

• Once people are in the same place at the same time, they can begin to learn about each other's personal qualities, and in most cases, the first quality they learn about is the other person's appearance. You probably knew that appearance influences attraction, but this influence may be stronger than you thought. In one study, researchers arranged a dance for first-year university students and randomly assigned each student to an opposite-sex partner. Midway through the dance, the students confidentially reported how much they liked their partner, how attractive they thought their partner was, and how much they would like to see their partner again. The researchers measured many of the students' attributes—from their attitudes to their personalities—and they found that the partner's physical appearance was the only attribute that influenced the students' feelings of attraction (Walster et al., 1966). Field studies confirm this finding. For instance, one study found that a man's height and a woman's weight were among the best predictors of how many responses a personal ad received (Lynn & Shurgot, 1984), and another study found that physical attractiveness was the only factor that predicted the online dating choices of both women and men (Green, Buchanan, & Heuer, 1984). Superficiality, thy name is human! • Beauty gets us more than dates (Etcoff, 1999; Langlois et al., 2000). Beautiful people have more sex, more friends, and more fun than the rest of us do (Curran & Lippold, 1975), and they even earn about 10% more money over the course of their lives (Hamermesh & Biddle, 1994; see FIGURE 13.6). We tend to think that beautiful people also have superior personal qualities (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly et al., 1991), and in some cases they do. For instance, because beautiful people have more friends and more opportunities for social interaction, they tend to have better social skills than less beautiful people (Feingold, 1992b). Appearance is so powerful that it even influences how mothers treat their own children: Mothers are more affectionate and playful when their children are attractive than unattractive (Langlois et al., 1995). Indeed, the only real disadvantage of being beautiful is that it can sometimes cause others to feel threatened (Agthe, Spörrle, & Maner, 2010). It is interesting to note that men and women are equally influenced by the appearance of their potential partners (Eastwick et al., 2011), but men are more willing to admit it (Feingold, 1990) • So yes, it pays to be beautiful. But what exactly constitutes beauty? The answer to that question varies across cultures. In the United States, for example, most women want to be slender, but in Mauritania, young girls are forced to drink up to 5 gallons of high-fat milk every day so that they will someday be obese enough to attract a husband. As one Mauritanian woman noted, "Men want women to be fat, and so they are fat. Women want men to be skinny, and so they are skinny" (LaFraniere, 2007). In the United States, most men want to be tall, but in Ghana, most men are short and consider height a curse. "To be a tall person can be quite embarrassing," said one particularly altitudinous Ghanaian man. "When you are standing in a crowd, the short people start to jeer at you," said another (French, 1997). Beauty may vary across cultures, but it is not entirely in the eye of the beholder. Different cultures have different standards of beauty, but those standards have a lot in common (Cunningham et al., 1995). For example, people in all cultures seem to have similar preferences about the ideal body, face, and age of their romantic partners. a. Body shape. Male bodies are considered most attractive when they approximate an inverted triangle (i.e., broad shoulders with a narrow waist and hips), and female bodies are considered most attractive when they approximate an hourglass (i.e., broad shoulders and hips with a narrow waist). In fact, the most attractive female body across many cultures seems to be the "perfect hourglass" in which the waist is precisely 70% the size of the hips (Singh, 1993). Culture may determinewhether men prefer women who are heavy or thin, but in all cultures men seem to prefer this particular waist-to-hip ratio. b. Symmetry. People in all cultures seem to prefer faces and bodies that are bilaterally symmetrical—that is, faces and bodies whose left half is a mirror image of the right half (Perilloux, Webster, & Gaulin, 2010; Perrett et al., 1999). c. Age. Characteristics such as large eyes, high eyebrows, and a small chin make people look immature or "baby-faced" (Berry & McArthur, 1985). As a general rule, female faces are considered more attractive when they have immature features, and male faces are considered more attractive when they have mature features (Cunningham, Barbee, & Pike, 1990; Zebrowitz & Montepare, 1992). Women prefer older men and men prefer younger women in every human culture ever studied (Buss, 1989). • But why? Is there any rhyme or reason to this list of scenic attractions? Some psychologists think so. They suggest that nature has designed us to be attracted to people who (a) have good genes and (b) will be good parents (Gallup & Frederick, 2010; Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2010). The features we all find attractive happen to be reliable indicators of these things. For example: a. Body shape. Testosterone causes male bodies to become "inverted triangles" just as estrogen causes female bodies to become "hourglasses." Men who are high in testosterone tend to be socially dominant and therefore have more resources to devote to their offspring, whereas women who are high in estrogen tend to be especially fertile and potentially have more offspring to make use of those resources. In other words, body shape is an indicator of male dominance and female fertility. In fact, women who have the perfect hourglass figure do tend to bear healthier children than do women with other waist-to-hip ratios (Singh, 1993). b. Symmetry. Symmetry is a sign of genetic health (Jones et al., 2001; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1993), which may explain why people are so good at detecting it. Indeed, women can distinguish between symmetrical and asymmetrical men by smell, and their preference for symmetrical men is especially pronounced when they are ovulating (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). c. Age. Younger women are generally more fertile than older women, whereas older men generally have more resources than younger men. Thus, a youthful appearance is a signal of a woman's ability to bear children, just as a mature appearance is a signal of a man's ability to raise them. • If the feeling we call attraction is simply nature's way of telling us that we are in the presence of a person who has good genes and a propensity to be a good parent, then it isn't any wonder that people in different cultures appreciate so many of the same features in the opposite sex. Of course, appreciation is one thing and action is another, and studies show that while everyone may desire the most beautiful person in the room, most people tend to approach, date, and marry someone who is about as attractive as they are (Berscheid et al., 1971; Lee et al., 2008)

Situational Factors

• One of the best predictors of any kind of interpersonal relationship is the physical proximity of the people involved (Nahemow & Lawton, 1975). In one study, students who had been randomly assigned to university housing almost a year earlier were asked to name their three closest friends, and nearly half named their next-door neighbor (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950). We tend to think that we select our romantic partners on the basis of their personalities, appearances, and so on—and we do—but we only get to select from the pool of people we've met, and the likelihood of meeting a potential partner naturally increases with proximity. Before you ever start ruling out potential mates, geography has already ruled out 99.999% of the world's population for you. • Proximity not only provides the opportunity for attraction, it also provides the motivation: People work especially hard to like those with whom they expect to have interaction (Darley & Berscheid, 1967). When you are assigned a roommate or an office mate, you know that your day-to-day existence will be a whole lot easier if you like them than if you don't, and so you go out of your way to notice their good qualities and ignore their bad ones. Proximity provides something else as well. Every time we encounter a person, that person becomes a bit more familiar to us, and people generally prefer familiar to novel stimuli. The mere exposure effect is the tendency for liking to increase with the frequency of exposure (Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 1968). For instance, in some experiments, geometric shapes, faces, or alphabetical characters were flashed on a computer screen so quickly that participants were unaware of having seen them. Participants were then shown some of the "old" stimuli that had been flashed across the screen as well as some "new" stimuli that had not. Although they could not reliably say which stimuli were old and which were new, they did tend to like the old stimuli better than the new ones (Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000). The fact that mere exposure leads to liking may explain why college students who were randomly assigned to seats during a brief psychology experiment were likely to be friends with the person they sat next to a full year later (Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2008). There are some circumstances under which "familiarity breeds contempt" (Norton, Frost, & Ariely, 2007), but for the most part familiarity seems to breed liking (Reis et al., 2011). • Attraction can be the result of geographical accidents that put people in the same place at the same time, but some places and times are clearly better than others. In one study, researchers observed men as they crossed a swaying suspension bridge. An attractive female researcher approached the men, either when they were in the middle of the bridge or after they had finished crossing it, and asked them to complete a survey. After they did so, she gave each man her telephone number and offered to explain her project in greater detail if he called. Results showed that the men were more likely to call the woman when they had met her in the middle of the swaying bridge (Dutton & Aron, 1974). Why? You may recall from the Emotion and Motivation chapter that people can misinterpret physiological arousal as a sign of attraction (Byrne et al., 1975; Schachter & Singer, 1962). The men were presumably more aroused when they were in the middle of a swaying bridge, and some of those men mistook their arousal for attraction.

The Approval Motive: Acceptance Is Better Than Rejection

• Other people stand between us and starvation, predation, loneliness, and all the other things that make getting shipwrecked such an unpopular pastime. We depend on others for safety, sustenance, and solidarity, and so we are powerfully motivated to have others like us, accept us, and approve of us (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Leary, 2010). Like the hedonic motive, this one leaves us vulnerable to social influence.

Obedience

• Other people's behavior can provide information about norms, but in most situations there are a few people whom we all recognize as having special authority both to define the norms and to enforce them. The guy who works at the movie theater may be some high school fanboy with a bad haircut and a 10:00 p.m. curfew, but in the context of the theater, he is the authority. So when he asks you to put away your cell and stop texting in the middle of the movie, you do as you are told. Obedience is the tendency to do what powerful people tell us to do. • Why do we obey powerful people? Well, yes, sometimes they have guns. But while powerful people are often capable of rewarding and punishing us, research shows that much of their influence is normative (Tyler, 1990). Psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963) demonstrated this in one of psychology's most infamous experiments. The participants in this experiment met a middle-aged man who was introduced as another participant, but who was actually a trained actor. An experimenter in a lab coat explained that the participant would play the role of teacher and the actor would play the role of learner. The teacher and learner would sit in different rooms, the teacher would read words to the learner over a microphone, and the learner would then repeat the words back to the teacher. If the learner made a mistake, the teacher would press a button that delivered an electric shock to the learner (see FIGURE 13.12). The shock-generating machine (which was totally fake) offered 30 levels of shock, ranging from 15 volts (labeled slight shock) to 450 volts (labeled Danger: severe shock) • After the learner was strapped into his chair, the experiment began. When the learner made his first mistake, the participant dutifully delivered a 15-volt shock. As the learner made more mistakes, he received more shocks. When the participant delivered the 75-volt shock, the learner cried out in pain. At 150 volts, the learner screamed, "Get me out of here. I told you I have heart trouble . . . I refuse to go on. Let me out!" With every shock, the learner's screams became more agonized as he pleaded pitifully for his freedom. Then, after receiving the 330-volt shock, the learner stopped responding altogether. Participants were naturally upset by all this and typically asked the experimenter to stop, but the experimenter simply replied, "You have no choice; you must go on." The experimenter never threatened the participant with punishment of any kind. Rather, he just stood there with his clipboard in hand and calmly instructed the participant to continue. So what did the participants do? Eighty percent of the participants continued to shock the learner even after he screamed, complained, pleaded, and then fell silent. And 62% went all the way, delivering the highest possible voltage. Although Milgram's study was conducted nearly half a century ago, a recent replication revealed about the same rate of obedience (Burger, 2009) • Were these people psychopathic sadists? Would normal people electrocute a stranger just because some guy in a lab coat told them to? The answer, it seems, is yes—as long as normal means being sensitive to social norms. The participants in this experiment knew that hurting others is often wrong but not always wrong: Doctors give painful injections, and teachers give painful exams. There are many situations in which it is permissible—and even desirable—to cause someone to suffer in the service of a higher goal. The experimenter's calm demeanor and persistent instruction suggested that he, and not the participant, knew what was appropriate in this particular situation, and so the participant did as ordered. Subsequent research confirmed that participants' obedience was due to normative pressure. When the experimenter's authority to define the norm was undermined (e.g., when a second experimenter appeared to disagree with the first or when the instructions were given by a person who wasn't wearing a lab coat), participants rarely obeyed the instructions (Milgram, 1974; Miller, 1986)

Conformity

• People can influence us by invoking familiar norms, such as the norm of reciprocity. But if you've ever found yourself sneaking a peek at the diner next to you, hoping to discover whether the little fork is supposed to be used for the shrimp or the salad, then you know that other people can influence us by defining new norms in ambiguous, confusing, or novel situations. Conformity is the tendency to do what others do simply because others are doing it, and it results in part from normative influence • In a classic study, psychologist Solomon Asch had participants sit in a room with seven other people who appeared to be ordinary participants, but who were actually trained actors (Asch, 1951, 1956). An experimenter explained that the participants would be shown cards with three printed lines and that his or her job was simply to say which of the three lines matched a "standard line" that was printed on another card (see FIGURE 13.10). The experimenter held up a card and then asked each person to answer in turn. The real participant was among the last to be called on. Everything went well on the first two trials, but then on the third trial something really strange happened: the actors all began giving the same wrong answer! What did the real participants do? Seventy-five percent of them conformed and announced the wrong answer on at least one trial. Subsequent research has shown that these participants didn't actually misperceive the length of the lines, but were instead succumbing to normative influence (Asch, 1955; Nemeth & Chiles, 1988). Giving the wrong answer was apparently "the right thing to do" and so participants did it. • The behavior of others can tell us what is proper, appropriate, expected, and accepted (in other words, it can define a norm) and once a norm is defined, we feel obliged to honor it. When a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona, left a variety of different "message cards" in guests' bathrooms in the hopes of convincing those guests to reuse their towels rather than laundering them every day, it discovered that the single most effective message was the one that simply read: "Seventy five percent of our guests use their towels more than once" (Cialdini, 2005). When the Sacramento Municipal Utility District randomly selected 35,000 customers and sent them electric bills showing how their energy consumption compared to that of their neighbors (see FIGURE 13.11), consumption fell by 2% (Kaufman, 2009). Clearly, normative influence can be a force for good

Risk and Trust

• So if the benefits of cooperation are clear, then why don't we cooperate all the time? Cooperation is potentially beneficial, but it is also risky, and a simple game called the prisoner's dilemma illustrates why. Imagine that you and your friend have been arrested for hacking into your bank's mainframe computer and directing a few million dollars to your personal accounts. You are now being interrogated separately. The detectives tell you that if you and your friend both confess, you'll each get 10 years in prison for felony theft, and if you both refuse to confess, you'll each get 1 year in prison for, oh say, disturbing the peace. However, if one of you confesses and the other doesn't, then the one who confesses will go free and the one who doesn't confess will be put away for 30 years. What should you do? If you study FIGURE 13.4, you'll see that you and your friend would be wise to cooperate. If you trust your friend and refuse to confess, and if your friend trusts you and refuses to confess, then you will both get a light sentence. But look what happens if you trust your friend and then your friend double-crosses you: Your friend gets to go home and wash his car while you spend the next three decades making his license plates. • The prisoner's dilemma is more than a game. It mirrors the potential costs and benefits of cooperation in everyday life. For example, if everyone pays his or her taxes, then the tax rate stays low and everyone enjoys the benefits of sturdy bridges and firstrate museums. If no one pays taxes, then the bridges fall down and the museums shut their doors. There is clearly a moderate benefit to everyone if everyone pays taxes, but there is a huge benefit to the few noncooperators who don't pay taxes while everyone else does because they get to use the bridges and enjoy the museums for free. This dilemma makes it difficult for people to decide whether to pay taxes and risk being chumps or to cheat and risk having the bridges collapse and the museums shut down. If you are like most people, you would be perfectly willing to cooperate in this sort of dilemma but you worry that others won't do the same. • Life is a strategic game, and we value those who play it honorably and despise those who don't. When people are asked what single trait they most want those around them to have, the answer is trustworthiness (Cottrell, Neuberg, & Li, 2007), and when those around us fail to demonstrate that quality we react bitterly. For example, the ultimatum game requires one player (the divider) to divide a monetary prize into two parts and offer one of the parts to a second player (the decider), who can either accept or reject the offer. If the decider rejects the offer, then both players get nothing and the game is over. Studies show that deciders typically reject offers that they consider unfair because they'd rather get nothing than get cheated (Fehr & Gaechter, 2002; Thaler, 1988). In other words, people will pay to punish someone who has treated them unfairly. Nonhumans also seem to dislike unfair treatment. In one study, monkeys were willing to work for a slice of cucumber until they saw the experimenter give another monkey a more delicious food for doing less work (Brosnan & DeWaal, 2003). At that point the first set of monkeys went on strike and refused to participate further

Divorce: When the Costs Outweigh the Benefits

• The most recent U.S. government census statistics indicate that for every two couples who get married, one couple gets divorced. But why? Although feelings of love, happiness, and satisfaction may lead us to marriage, the lack of those feelings doesn't seem to lead us to divorce. Marital satisfaction is only weakly correlated with marital stability (Karney & Bradbury, 1995), suggesting that relationships break up or remain intact for reasons other than the satisfaction of those involved (Drigotas & Rusbult, 1992; Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003). Relationships offer both benefits (love, sex, and financial security) and costs (responsibility, conflict, loss of freedom). Social exchange is the hypothesis that people remain in relationships only as long as they perceive a favorable ratio of costs to benefits (Homans, 1961; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). For example, a relationship that provides an acceptable level of benefits at a reasonable cost will probably be maintained, and one that doesn't won't. Research suggests that this hypothesis is generally true, but there are three important caveats: a. The acceptableness of any cost-benefit ratio depends on the alternatives. A person's comparison level refers to the cost-benefit ratio that people believe they deserve or could attain in another relationship (Rusbult et al., 1991; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). A cost-benefit ratio that is acceptable to two people who are stranded on a desert island might not be acceptable to the same two people if they were living in a large city where each had access to other potential partners. A cost-benefit ratio is acceptable when we feel that it is the best we can or should do. b. People may want their cost-benefit ratios to be high, but they also want them to be roughly the same as their partner's. Studies show that people care about equity, which is a state of affairs in which the cost-benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equal (Bolton & Ockenfels, 2000; Messick & Cook, 1983; Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978). For example, spouses are more distressed when their respective cost-benefit ratios are different than when their cost-benefit ratios are unfavorable, and this is true even when their cost-benefit ratio is more favorable than their partner's (Schafer & Keith, 1980). Indeed, people who give too much are sometimes disliked just as much as those who give too little (Parks & Stone, 2010). c. Relationships can be thought of as investments into which people pour resources such as time, money, and affection, and research suggests that once people have poured resources into a relationship, they are willing to settle for less favorable cost- benefit ratios (Kelley, 1983; Rusbult, 1983). This is one of the reasons why people are much more likely to end new marriages than old ones (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002; Cherlin, 1992).

Aggression

• The simplest way to solve the problem of scarce resources is to take those resources and then kick the stuffing out of anyone who tries to stop you. Aggression is behavior with the purpose of harming another (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Bushman & Huesmann, 2010), and it is a strategy used by just about every animal on the planet. Aggression is not something that animals do for its own sake but, rather, as a way of getting the resources they need. • The frustration-aggression hypothesis suggests that animals aggress when their desires are frustrated (Dollard et al., 1939). The chimp wants the banana (desire) but the pelican is about to take it (frustration), so the chimp threatens the pelican with its fist (aggression). The robber wants the money (desire) but the teller has it all locked up (frustration), so the robber threatens the teller with a gun (aggression). The frustration-aggression hypothesis is right as far as it goes, but many scientists think it doesn't go far enough. They argue that the cause of aggressive behavior is negative affect (more commonly known as feeling bad) and that a frustrated desire is just one of many things that might induce negative affect (Berkowitz, 1990). If animals aggress when they feel bad, then anything that makes them feel bad should increase aggression—and evidence suggests that it does. Laboratory rats that are given painful electric shocks will attack anything in their cage, including other animals, stuffed dolls, or even tennis balls (Kruk et al., 2004). People who are made to put their hands in ice water or to sit in a very hot room are more likely to blast others with noise weapons or make others eat hot chili in subsequent experiments (Anderson, 1989; Anderson, Bushman, & Groom, 1997). The idea that aggression is a response to negative affect may even explain why so many acts of aggression—from violent crime to athletic brawls—are more likely to occur on hot days when people are feeling irritated and uncomfortable (see FIGURE 13.1). It is worth noting that not every kind of negative affect gives rise to aggression; for example, when people feel disgusted they actually become less likely to aggress (Pond et al., 2012). • Of course, not everyone aggresses every time they feel bad. So who does and why? Research suggests that both biology and culture play important roles in determining if and when people will aggress.

Social Influence: Controlling People

• Those of us who grew up watching cartoons on Saturday mornings have usually thought a bit about which of the standard superpowers we'd most like to have. Super strength and super speed have obvious benefits, invisibility and X-ray vision could be interesting as well as lucrative, and there's a lot to be said for flying. But when it comes right down to it, the ability to control other people would probably be the most useful. After all, who needs to lift a tractor or catch a bad guy if someone else can be convinced to do it? The things we want from life—gourmet food, interesting jobs, big houses, fancy cars—can be given to us by others, and the things we want most—loving families, loyal friends, admiring children, appreciative employers—cannot be had in any other way. Social influence is the ability to control another person's behavior (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). But how does it work? If you want someone to give you their time, money, allegiance, or affection, you'd be wise to consider first what it is they want. People have three basic motivations that make them susceptible to social influence (Bargh, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2010; Fiske, 2010). First, people are motivated to experience pleasure and to avoid experiencing pain (the hedonic motive). Second, people are motivated to be accepted and to avoid being rejected (the approval motive). Third, people are motivated to believe what is right and to avoid believing what is wrong (the accuracy motive). As you will see, most social influence attempts appeal to one or more of these motives.

Persuasion

• When the next presidential election rolls around, two things will happen. First, the candidates will say that they intend to win your vote by making arguments that focus on the issues. Second, the candidates will then avoid arguments, ignore issues, and attempt to win your vote with a variety of cheap tricks and emotional appeals. What the candidates promise to do and what they actually do reflect two basic forms of persuasion, which occurs when a person's attitudes or beliefs are influenced by a communication from another person (Albarracín & Vargas, 2010; Petty & Wegener, 1998). The candidates will promise to persuade you by demonstrating that their positions on the issues are the most practical, intelligent, fair, and beneficial. Having made that promise, they will then devote most of their financial resources to persuading you by other means: for example, by dressing nicely and smiling a lot, by surrounding themselves with famous athletes and movie stars, by repeatedly pairing their opponent's picture with Osama bin Laden's, and so on. In other words, the candidates will promise to engage in systematic persuasion, which refers to the process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to reason, but they will spend most of their time and money engaged in heuristic persuasion, which refers to the process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to habit or emotion (Chaiken, 1980; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) • How do these two forms of persuasion work? Systematic persuasion appeals to logic and reason, and assumes that people will be more persuaded when evidence and arguments are strong rather than weak. Heuristic persuasion appeals to habit and emotion, and assumes that rather than weighing evidence and analyzing arguments, people will often use heuristics (simple shortcuts or "rules of thumb") to help them decide whether to believe a communication (see the Language and Thought chapter). Which form of persuasion will be more effective depends on whether the person is willing and able to weigh evidence and analyze arguments. In one study, students heard a speech that contained either strong or weak arguments in favor of instituting comprehensive exams at their school (Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981). Some students were told that the speaker was a Princeton University professor, and others were told that the speaker was a high school student—a bit of information that could be used as a shortcut to decide whether to believe the speech. Some students were told that their university was considering implementing these exams right away, whereas others were told that their university was considering implementing these exams in 10 years—a bit of information that made students feel motivated or unmotivated to analyze the evidence. As FIGURE 13.13 shows, when students were motivated to analyze the evidence, they were systematically persuaded—that is, their attitudes and beliefs were influenced by the strength of the arguments but not by the status of the speaker. But when students were not motivated to analyze the evidence, they were heuristically persuaded—that is, their attitudes and beliefs were influenced by the status of the speaker but not by the strength of the arguments

Stereotypes Can Be Self-Perpetuating

• When we meet a truck driver who likes ballet more than football or a senior citizen who likes Jay-Z more than Bach, why don't we simply abandon our stereotypes of these groups? The answer is that stereotypes tend to be self-perpetuating. Like viruses and parasites, once they take up residence inside us, they resist even our most concerted efforts to eradicate them. Here's three reasons why: a. Self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency for people to behave as they are expected to behave. When people know that observers have a negative stereotype about them, they may experience stereotype threat, which is the fear of confirming the negative beliefs that others may hold (Aronson & Steele, 2004; Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008; Walton & Spencer, 2009). Ironically, this fear may cause them to behave in ways that confirm the very stereotype that threatened them. In one study (Steele & Aronson, 1995), African American and White students took a test, and half the students in each group were asked to list their race at the top of the exam. When students were not asked to list their races they performed at their academic level, but when students were asked to list their races, African American students became anxious about confirming a negative stereotype of their group, which caused them to perform well below their academic level (see FIGURE 13.18). Stereotypes perpetuate themselves in part by causing the stereotyped individual to behave in ways that confirm the stereotype. b. Even when people do not confirm stereotypes, observers often think they have. Perceptual confirmation is the tendency for people to see what they expect to see and this tendency helps perpetuate stereotypes. In one study, participants listened to a radio broadcast of a college basketball game and were asked to evaluate the performance of one of the players. Although all participants heard the same prerecorded game, some were led to believe that the player was African American and others were led to believe that the player was White. Participants' stereotypes led them to expect different performances from athletes of different ethnic origins—and the participants perceived just what they expected. Those who believed the player was African American thought he had demonstrated greater athletic ability but less intelligence than did those who thought he was White (Stone, Perry, & Darley, 1997). Stereotypes perpetuate themselves in part by biasing our perception of individuals, leading us to believe that those individuals have confirmed our stereotypes even when they have not (Fiske, 1998). c. So what happens when people clearly disconfirm our stereotypes? Subtyping is the tendency for people who receive disconfirming evidence to modify their stereotypes rather than abandon them (Weber & Crocker, 1983). For example, most of us think of people who work in public relations as sociable. In one study, participants learned about a PR agent who was slightly unsociable, and the results showed that their stereotypes about PR agents shifted a bit to accommodate this new information. So far, so good. But when participants learned about a PR agent who was extremely unsociable, their stereotypes did not change at all (Kunda & Oleson, 1997). Instead, they decided that extremely unsociable PR agent was "an exception to the rule" which allowed them to keep their stereotypes intact. Subtyping is a powerful method for preserving our stereotypes in the face of contradictory evidence.

The Accuracy Motive: Right Is Better Than Wrong

• When you are hungry, you open the refrigerator and grab an apple because you know that apples (a) taste good and (b) are in the refrigerator. This action, like most actions, relies on both an attitude, which is an enduring positive or negative evaluation of an object or event, and a belief, which is an enduring piece of knowledge about an object or event. In a sense, our attitudes tell us what we should do (eat an apple) and our beliefs tell us how to do it (start by opening the fridge). If our attitudes or beliefs are inaccurate—that is, if we can't tell good from bad or true from false—then our actions are likely to be fruitless. Because we rely so much on our attitudes and beliefs, it isn't surprising that we are motivated to have the right ones, and that motivation leaves us vulnerable to social influence

Culture and Aggression

• William James (1911, p. 272) wrote that "our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us." Was he right? Although aggression is clearly part of our evolutionary heritage, that doesn't mean it is inevitable. Indeed, the number of wars and the rate of murder have decreased by orders of magnitude in the last century alone. As psychologist Steven Pinker (2007) noted:, • Just as aggression varies with time, so too does it vary with geography (see FIGURE 13.3). For example, violent crime in the United States is more prevalent in the South, where men are taught to react aggressively when they feel their status has been challenged (Brown, Osterman, & Barnes, 2009; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996). In one set of experiments, researchers insulted American volunteers from Northern and Southern states and found that Southerners were more likely to experience a surge of testosterone and to feel that their status had been diminished by the insult (Cohen et al., 1996). When a large man walked directly toward them as they were leaving the experiment, insulted Southerners got "right up in his face" before giving way, whereas Northerners just stepped aside. Of course, in the control condition in which participants were not insulted, Southerners stepped aside before Northerners did, which is to say that when they aren't being insulted, Southerners are more polite than Northerners! • Variation over time and geography shows that culture can play an important role in determining whether our innate capacity for aggression will result in aggressive behavior (Leung & Cohen, 2011). People learn by example, which is why some researchers believe that watching violent television shows and playing violent video games can make people more aggressive (Anderson et al., 2010) and less cooperative (Sheese & Graziano, 2005; cf. Ferguson, 2010). But cultures can provide good examples as well as bad ones (Fry, 2012). In the mid-1980s, an unusual disease killed the most aggressive males in a particular troop of wild baboons in Kenya, leaving only the least aggressive males. A decade later, researchers discovered that a new "pacifist culture" had emerged among the descendants of the peaceful males. This new generation of male baboons was less aggressive, more likely to affiliate with females, and more tolerant of low-ranking males (Sapolsky & Share, 2004). If baboons can learn to get along, then surely people can too.

Selectivity

• With the exception of a few well-known rock stars, people don't mate randomly. Rather, they select their sexual partners, and as anyone who has lived on earth for more than 7 full minutes knows, women tend to be more selective than men (Feingold, 1992a; Fiore et al., 2010). When researchers asked an attractive person to approach strangers on a college campus and ask, "Would you go out with me?" they found that roughly half of the men and half of the women agreed to the request for a date. On the other hand, when the attractive person said to strangers, "would you go to bed with me?" the researchers found that none of the women and three quarters of the men agreed to the request for sex (Clark & Hatfield, 1989). There are many reasons why a woman in this situation might turn down a sexual offer (Conley, 2011), but research suggests that women tend to be choosier than men in most other situations as well (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Schmitt et al., 2012). • One reason for this is biology. Men produce billions of sperm in their lifetimes, their ability to conceive a child tomorrow is not inhibited by having conceived one today, and conception has no significant physical costs. On the other hand, women produce a small number of eggs in their lifetimes, conception eliminates their ability to conceive for at least 9 more months, and pregnancy produces physical changes that increase their nutritional requirements and put them at risk of illness and death. Therefore, if a man mates with a woman who does do not produce healthy offspring or who won't do her part to raise them, he's lost nothing but 10 minutes and a teaspoon of bodily fluid. But if a woman makes the same mistake, she has lost a precious egg, borne the costs of pregnancy, risked her life in childbirth, and missed at least 9 months of other reproductive opportunities. Clearly, our basic biology makes sex a riskier proposition for women than for men. • But if basic biology pushes women to be choosier then men, culture and experience can push every bit as hard (Petersen & Hyde, 2010; Zentner, & Mitura, 2012). For example, women may be choosier than men simply because they are approached more often (Conley et al., 2011) or because the reputational costs of promiscuity are higher (Eagly & Wood, 1999; Kasser & Sharma, 1999). Indeed, when sex becomes expensive for men (e.g., when they are choosing a long-term mate rather than a short-term date), they can be every bit as choosey as women (Kenrick et al., 1990). In fact, relatively minor changes in the courtship ritual can actually cause men to be choosier than women (see the Real World box). The point is that biology makes sex a riskier proposition for women than for men, but cultures can exaggerate, equalize, or even reverse those risks. The higher the risk, the more selective people of both genders tend to be.

Stereotyping: Drawing Inferences from Categories

• You'll recall from the Language and Thought chapter that categorization is the process by which people identify a stimulus as a member of a class of related stimuli. Once we have identified a novel stimulus as a member of a category ("That's a textbook"), we can then use our knowledge of the category to make educated guesses about the properties of the novel stimulus ("It's probably expensive") and act accordingly ("I think I'll download it illegally"). • What we do with textbooks we also do with people. No, not the illegal downloading part. The educated guessing part. Stereotyping is the process by which people draw inferences about others based on their knowledge of the categories to which others belong. The moment we categorize a person as an adult, a male, a baseball player, and a Russian, we can use our knowledge of those categories to make some educated guesses about him, for example, that he shaves his face but not his legs, that he understands the infield fly rule, and that he knows more about Vladimir Putin than we do. When we offer children candy instead of cigarettes or ask gas station attendants for directions instead of financial advice, we are making inferences about people whom we have never met before based solely on their category membership. As these examples suggest, stereotyping is a very helpful process (Allport, 1954). And yet, ever since the word was coined by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1936, it has had a distasteful connotation. Why? Because stereotyping is a helpful process that can often produce harmful results, and it does so because stereotypes tend to have four properties: They are inaccurate, overused, selfperpetuating, and automatic.

Survival: The Struggle for Resources

•Animals have a problem: survival. To survive, animals must find resources such as food, water, and shelter. The problem is that these resources are necessarily scarce, because if they weren't, then the population would increase until they were. Animals often solve this problem by hurting or helping each other. Hurting and helping are antonyms and you might expect them to have little in common, but as you will see, these disparate behaviors are actually two solutions to the same problem (Hawley, 2002).

Psychological Factors

•If attraction is all about big biceps and high cheekbones, then why don't we just skip the small talk and pick our mates from photographs? Because for human beings, attraction is about much more than that. Physical appearance is assessed easily and early (Lenton & Francesconi, 2010), and it determines who draws our attention and quickens our pulse. But once people begin interacting they quickly move beyond appearances (Cramer, Schaefer, & Reid, 1996; Regan, 1998). People's inner qualities—their personalities, points of view, attitudes, beliefs, values, ambitions, and abilities—play an important role in determining their sustained interest in each other, and there isn't much mystery about the kinds of inner qualities that most people find attractive. For example, intelligence, sense of humor, sensitivity, and ambition seem to be high on just about everybody's list, whereas "experienced serial killer" doesn't seem to make anyone's list (Daniel et al., 1985) •How much wit and wisdom do we want our mate to have? Research suggests that people are most attracted to those who are similar (Byrne, Ervin, & Lamberth, 1970; Byrne & Nelson, 1965; Hatfield & Rapson, 1992; Neimeyer & Mitchell, 1988). We marry people with similar levels of education, religious backgrounds, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and personalities (Botwin, Buss, & Shackelford, 1997; Buss, 1985; Caspi & Herbener, 1990). We're even attracted to those who use pronouns the same way we do (Ireland et al., 2010). In fact, of all the variables psychologists have ever studied, gender appears to be the only one for which the majority of people have a consistent preference for dissimilarity • Why is similarity so attractive? First, it's easy to interact with people who are similar to us because we can instantly agree on a wide range of issues, such as what to eat, where to live, how to raise children, and how to spend our money. Second, when someone shares our attitudes and beliefs, we feel more confident that those attitudes and beliefs are correct (Byrne & Clore, 1970). Indeed, research shows that when a person's attitudes or beliefs are challenged, they become even more attracted to similar others (Greenberg et al., 1990; Hirschberger, Florian, & Mikulincer, 2002). Third, if we like people who share our attitudes and beliefs, then we can reasonably expect them to like us for the same reason, and being liked is a powerful source of attraction (Aronson & Worchel, 1966; Backman & Secord, 1959; Condon & Crano, 1988). Although we tend to like people who like us, it is worth noting that we especially like people who like us and who don't like anyone else (Eastwick et al., 2007). Our desire for similarity goes beyond attitudes and beliefs and extends to abilities as well. For example, we may admire extraordinary skill in athletes and actors, but when it comes to friends and lovers, extraordinary people can threaten our self-esteem and make us feel a bit nervous about our own competence (Tesser, 1991). As such, we are generally attracted to competent people who—like us—have small pockets of incompetence. Why? It seems that people who are annoyingly perfect are perfectly annoying. Having a flaw or two "humanizes" people and makes them seem more accessible—and more similar to us (Aronson, Willerman, & Floyd, 1966).

Love and Marriage

•In most cultures, committed, long-term relationships are signified by marriage, and ours is no exception. The probability of marrying by age 40 is about 81% for American men and 86% for American women (Goodwin, McGill, & Chandra, 2009). But when asked, people don't say that they married to solve the big-headed baby problem; they say that they married for love. Indeed, about 85% of Americans say that they would not marry without love (Kephart, 1967; Simpson, Campbell, & Berscheid, 1986); the vast majority say they would sacrifice their other life goals to attain it (Hammersla & Frease-McMahan, 1990); and most list love as one of the two most important sources of happiness in life (Freedman, 1978). The fact that people marry for love seems so obvious that you may be surprised to learn that it only became obvious in the past century or so (Brehm, 1992; Fisher, 1993; Hunt, 1959). Ancient Greeks and Romans married, but they considered love a form of madness (Heine, 2010). Twelfth-century Europeans married but thought of love as a game to be played by knights and ladies of the court (who happened to be married and not to the knights). Throughout history, marriage has traditionally served a variety of economic (and decidedly unromantic) functions—ranging from cementing agreements between clans to paying back debts—and in many cultures, that's how it is still regarded. In fact, it wasn't until the 17th century that Westerners started to think that love might be a reason to get married •But what exactly is love? Psychologists distinguish between two basic kinds: passionate love, which is an experience involving feelings of euphoria, intimacy, and intense sexual attraction, and companionate love, which is an experience involving affection, trust, and concern for a partner's well-being (Acevedo & Aron, 2009; Hatfield, 1988; Rubin, 1973; Sternberg, 1986). The ideal romantic relationship gives rise to both types of love, but the speeds, trajectories, and durations of the two experiences are markedly different (see FIGURE 13.7). Passionate love is what brings people together: It has a rapid onset, reaches its peak quickly, and begins to diminish within just a few months (Aron et al., 2005). Companionate love is what keeps people together: It takes some time to get started, grows slowly, and need never stop growing (Gonzaga et al., 2001)

Relationships

•Once we have selected and attracted a mate, we are ready to reproduce. (Note: It is perfectly fine to pause for dinner.) Human reproduction ordinarily happens in the context of committed, long-term relationships (Clark & Lemay, 2010). Only a few animals have such relationships, so why are we among them? •One answer is that we're born half-baked. Because human beings have large heads to house their large brains, a fully developed human infant could not pass through its mother's birth canal. So human infants are born before they are fully developed. That means they need a lot more care than one parent can provide. If human infants were like tadpoles—ready at birth to swim, find food, and escape predators—then their parents might not need to form and maintain relationships. But human infants are remarkably helpless creatures that require years of intense care before they can fend for themselves, and that's one reason why human adults tend to do their reproducing in the context of committed, long-term relationships. (By the way, some baby birds also require more food than one adult caretaker can provide, and the adults of those species also tend to form long-term relationships.)

Stereotypes Can Be Inaccurate

•The inferences we draw about individuals are only as accurate as our stereotypes about the categories to which they belong. Although there was no evidence to indicate that Jews were especially materialistic or that African Americans were especially lazy, American college students held such beliefs for most of the last century (Gilbert, 1951; Karlins, Coffman, & Walters, 1969; Katz & Braly, 1933). They weren't born holding these beliefs, so how did they acquire them? There are only two ways to acquire a belief about anything: to see for yourself or to take somebody else's word for it. In fact, most of what we know about the members of human categories is hearsay—stuff we picked up from hearing other people talk. Many of the people who believe stereotypes about Jews or African Americans have never actually met a member of either group, and their beliefs are a result of listening too closely to what others told them. In the process of inheriting the wisdom of our culture, it is inevitable that we also will inherit its ignorance too • But even direct observation can produce inaccurate stereotypes. For example, research participants in one study were shown a long series of positive and negative behaviors and were told that each behavior had been performed by a member of one of two groups: Group A or Group B (see FIGURE 13.15). The behaviors were carefully arranged so that each group behaved negatively exactly one third of the time. However, there were more positive than negative behaviors in the series, and there were more members of Group A than of Group B. As such, negative behaviors were rarer than positive behaviors, and Group B members were rarer than Group A members. After seeing the behaviors, participants correctly reported that Group A had behaved negatively one third of the time. However, they incorrectly reported that Group B had behaved negatively more than half the time (Hamilton & Gifford, 1976) • Why did this happen? Bad behavior was rare and being a member of Group B was rare. Thus, participants were especially likely to notice when the two co-occurred ("Aha! There's one of those unusual Group B people doing an unusually awful thing again"). These findings help explain why members of majority groups tend to overestimate the number of crimes (which are relatively rare events) committed by members of minority groups (who are relatively rare people, hence the word m-i-n-o-r-i-t-y). The point here is that even when we directly observe people, we can end up with inaccurate beliefs about the groups to which they belong.