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140 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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how are we influenced by human nature and culture diversity?
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- all of us everywhere are intensely social creatures
- several hundred universal behavior and language patterns have been identified - humans perfer living with others - in families and communal groups - to living alone |
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genes, evolution, and behavior
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- The universal behaviors that define human nature arise from our biological similarity.
- We are all Africans - As they adapted to their new environments, early humans developed differences that, measured on anthropoligcal scales, are relatively recent and superficial - We were Africans recently enough that "there has not been much time to accumulate many new versions of the genes" - we humans are strikingly similar |
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natural selectio
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- enables evolution
-- the evolutionary process by which heritable traits that best enable organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environments are passed to ensuing generations - organisms have many and varied offspring - those offspring compete for survival in their environment - certain biological and behavioral variations increase their chances of reporoduction and survival in that environment - these offspring that do survive are more likely to pass their genes to ensuing generations - thus over time population characteristics may change - natural selection implies that certain genes - those that predispose traits that increased the odds of surviving long enough to reproduce and nurture descendands - became more abundant |
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evolutionary psychology
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- studies how naatural selection predisposes not just physical traits suited to particular contexts, but also psychological traits and social behaviors that enhance the preservation and spread of one's genes
-- The study of the evolution of cognition and behavior using principles of natural selection |
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evolutional psychology, etc, continued
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- as mobile gene machines, we carry not only the physical legacy but also the psychological legacy of our ancestors' adaptive preferences
- we long for whatever helped them survive, reproduce, and nurture their offspring to survive and reproduce. - the evolutionary perspective highlights our universal human nature - evolutionary psychologists contend that our emotional and behavioral answers to questions are the same asnwers that worked for our ancestors. - Because these social tasks are common to people everywhere, humans everywhere tend to agree on the answers - evolutionary psychologists highlight these universal characteristics that have evolved through natural selection. |
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culture and behavior
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- Perhaps our most important similarity, the hallmark of our species, is our capacity to learn and adapt
- evolution has prepared us to live creatively in a changing world and to adapt to environments from equatorial jungles to arctic icefields - culture - Evolutionary psychology incorporates environmental influences. It recognizes that nature and nurture interact in forming us. Genes are not fixed blueprints; their expression depends on the environment. - We humans have been selected not only for big brains and biceps but also for culture. - We come prepared to learn language and to bond and cooperate with others in securing food, caring for young, and protecting ourselves. - The cultural perspective, while acknowledging that all behavior requires our evolved genes, highlights human adaptability. - people's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart |
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culture
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-- the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
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cultural diversity
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- the diversity of our languages, customs, and expressive behaviors confirms that much of our behavior is socially programmed, not hardwirred.
- If we all lived as homogenous ethnic groups in separate regions of the world, as some people still do, cultural diversit would be less relevant to our daily living - Increasingly, cultural diversity surrounds us. More and more we live in a global village, connected to our fellow villagers by email, jumbo jets, and international trade. - cultural diversity exists within nations also - confronting another culture is sometimes a startling experience - in many areas of the globe, your best manners are serious breaches of etiquette - migration and refugee evacuations are mixing cultures more than ever - as we work, play, and live with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, it helps to understand how our cultures influences us and how our cultures differ. In a conflict-laden world, achieving peace requires a genuine appreciations for differences as well as similarities. |
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norms - expected behaviors
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- as etiquette rules illustrate, all cultures have their accepted ideas about appropriate behavior
- We often view these social expectations, or norms, as a negative force that imprisons people in a blind effort to perpetuate tradition - Norms do restrain and control us - so successfully and so subtly that we hardly sense their existence. - we are all so immersed in our cultures that we must leap out of them to understand their influence - there is no better way to learn the norms of our culture than to visit another culture and see that its members do things that way whereas we do them this way. - to those that don't accept them, such norms may seem arbitrary and confining - Norms grease the social machinery. In unfamiliar situations, when norms may be unclear, we monitor others' behavior and adjust our own accordingly. - cultues vary in their norms |
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norms
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-- standards for accepted and expected beavior.
-- Norms prescirbe "proper" behavior. -- In a different sense of the word, norms also describe what most others do - what is normal. - some norms are culture-specific, others are universal. The force of culture appears in varying norms, whereas it is largely our genetic predispositions (human nature) that account for the universiality of some norms. Thus we might think of nature as universal and nurture as culture-specific |
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personal space
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- Personal space is a sort of portable bubble or buffer zone that we like to maintain between ourselves and others. As the situation changes, the bubble varies in size.
-- The buffer zone we like to maintain around our bodies. Its size depends on our familiarity with whoever is near us. - individuals differ - some people prefer more personal space than others - groups differ too - Adults maintain more distance than children. Men keep more distance from one another than do women. |
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cultural similarity
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- thanks to human adaptability, cultures differe
- Yet beneath the veneer of cultural differences, cross-cultural psychologists see "an essential universality" - as members of one species, we find that the processes that underlie our differing behaviors are much the same everywhere |
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universal friendship norms
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- people everywhere have some common norms for friendship
-respect the friend's privacy -make eye contact while talking -don't divulge things said in confidence |
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universal trait dimensions
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- around the world, people tend to describe others as more or less stable, outgoing, open, agreeable, and conscientious
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universal social belief dimensions
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- there are five universal dimensions of social belief
- people vary in the extent to which they endorse and apply these social understandings in their dialy lives - cynicism - social complexity - reward for application - spirituality - fate control - People's adherence to these social beliefs appears to guide their living. |
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universal status norms
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- wherever people form status heirarchies, they also talk to higher-status people in the respectful way they often talk to strangers. And they talk to lower-status people in the more familiar, first-name way they speak to friends
- most languages have two forms of the pronoun "you" - a respectful form and a familiar form - This first aspect of Brown's universal norm - that forms of address communicate not only social distance but also social status - correlates with a second - advances in intimacy are usually suggested by the higher-status person - this norm extends beyound language to every type of advance in intimacy - in general, the higher-status person is the pacesetter in the progression towards intimacy |
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the incest taboo
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- best-known universal norm
- the norm is still universal - every sociaty disapproves of incest. given the biological penalties for inbreeding (through the emergence of disorders linked to recessive genes), evolutionary psychologists can easily understand why people everywhere are predisposed against incest |
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norms of war
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- humans even have cross-cultural norms for conducting war
- you are to wear identifiable uniforms, surrender with a gesture of submission, and treat prisoners humanely - these norms, though corss-cultural, are not universal |
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gender similiarties and differences
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- there are many obvious dimensions of human diversity
- but for people's self-concepts and social relationshios, the two dimensions that matter most and that people first attune to are race and gender - When a hermaphrodite child is born with a combination of male and female sex organs, physicians and family traditionally have felt compelled to assign the child a gender and to diminsh the ambiguity surgically. - the simple message - everyone must be assigned a gender - but between male and female there is, socially speaking, essentially nothing |
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gender
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- the characteristcs people associate with male and female
- In psychology, the characteristics, whether biological or socially influenced, by which people define male and female - the common result for most variables studied is gender similarity. your opposite sex is actually your nearly identical sex - there are some differences and it is these differences, not the many similarities, that capture attention and make news |
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independence versus connectedness
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- individual men display outlooks and behavior that vary from fierce competitiveness to caring nurturance. So do individual women
- women more than men give priority to close, intimate relationships - as they each interact with their own gender, their differences grow - women are more likely to have empathy - the vicarious experience of another's feelings, putting oneself in another's shoes - one explanation for this male-female empathy difference is that women tend to outperform men at reading others' emotions - women are generally superior at decoding others' emotional messages - women are also more skilled at expressing emotions nonverbally - this is especially so for positive emotion - men were slightly more successful in converying anger |
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social dominance
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- all over the world, people rate men are more dominant, driven, and aggressive
- men more than women rate power and acievement as important - in essentially every society, men are socially dominant - men's style of communicating undergirds their social power. In situations where roles aren't rigidly scripted, men tend to be more autocratic, women more democratic - In leadership roles, men tend to excel as directive, task-focused leaders. Women excel more often in the "transformational" leadership. - men more than women place priority on winning, getting ahead, and dominating others. -men also take more risks - in conversation, men's style reflects their concern for independence, women's for connectedness - men's and women's conversational styles vary with the social context - Individuals vary - some men are characteristically hesitant and deferential, some women direct and assertive. to suggest that women and men are from different emotional planets greatley oversimplifies |
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aggression
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- by agression, psychologists mean behavior intended to hurt
-- Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. - men admit to more aggression than do women - again, the gender difference fluctuates with the context. when there is provocation, the gender gap shrinks - and within less assaultive forms of agression (slapping, throwing something, verbal), women are no less aggressive than men - women may be slightly more likely to commit indirect aggressive acts like spreading malicious gossip. But generally, men much more often injure others with physical aggression |
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sexuality
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- there is also a gender gap in sexual attitudes and assertiveness.
- the gender difference in sexual attitudes carries over to behavior - males are more likely than females to initiate sexual actiivity - Men want more uncommitted sex with more than one partner - everywhere sex is understood to be something females have that males want - cultures everywhere attribute greater value to females than male sexuality - sexual fantasies express the gender difference - women like emotion, men like just sex - individual differences far exceed gender differences. females and males are hardly opposite (altogether different) sexes. |
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gender and mating preferences
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- evolutionary psychology predicts no sex differences in all those domains in which the sexes faced similar adaptive challenges
- but evolutionary psychology does predict sex differences in behaviors relevant to dating, mating, and reproduction - example - male's greater sexual intitiative. Women's investment in childbearing is, just for starters, 9 months. Men's investment may be nine seconds. - Females invest their reproductive opportunities carefully, by looking for signs of resources and commitment - women seek to reproduce wisely, men widely - the physically dominant males were the ones who excelled in gaining access to females, which over generations enhancd male aggression and dominance as the less aggressive males had fewer chances to reproduce - if our ancestral mothers benefited from being able to read their infants' and suitors' emotions, then natural selection may have similarly favored emotion-detecting ability in females - nature selects traits that help send one's genes to the future - little of this process is conscious - our natural yearning are our genes' way of makes more genes - emotions execute evolution's dispositions - evolutionary psychology also predicts that men will strive to offer what women will desire - external resources and physical protection - male achievement is ultimately a courtship display. and women may undergo plastic surgery etc to offer men the youthful, healthy appearance (connoting fertility) that men desire. - men and women across the world differ in their mate preferences in precisely the ways predicted by the evolutionists |
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reflections on evolutionary psychology
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- evolutionary psychologists sometimes start with an effect and then work backward to construct and explanation for it - hindsight reasoning
- the way to overcome the hindsight bias is to imagine things turning out otherwise - they worry that evolutionary speculation about sexand gender reinforces male-female stereotypes. - Evolutionary wisdom is wisdom from the past. It tells us what behaviors worked in our early history as a species. Whether such tendencies are still adaptive today is an entirely different question -Evolution helps explain both our commonalities and our differences - but they contend that our common evolutionary heritage does not, by itself, predict the enormous cultural variation - nor does it explain cultural changes in behavior patterns over mere decades of time |
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gender and hormones
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- if genes predispose gender-related traits, they must do so by their effects on our bodies
- Girls who were exposed to excess testosterone during fetal development tend to exhibit more tomboyish behavior than other girls. Other case studies have followed males who, having been born without pensises, are reared as girls. Despite their being put in dresses and trades as girls, most exhibit male-typical play and eventually - in most cases, not without emotional distress - come to have a male identity - the gender gap in aggression also seems influences by testosterone. Testosterone heightens aggressiveness - the gender differences in aggression appears early in life (before culture has much effect) and wanes as testosterone levels decline during adulthood - sex hormones matter - as people mature to middle age and beyond, a curious thing happens . Women become more assertive and self-confident, men more empathetic and less domineering. Hormone changes are one possible explanation for the shrinking gender differences. Role demands are another. - As men and women graduate from these early adult roles, they supposedly express more of their restrained tendencies. Each becomes more androgynous - capable of both assertiveness and nurturance - androgynous - mixing both masculine and femininte characteristics |
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culture and gender - doing as the culture says
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- culture is what's shared by a large group and transmitted across generations - ideas, attitudes, behaviors, and traditions. We can see the shaping power of culture in ideas about how men and women should behave - and in the disapproval they endure when they violate those expectations.
- gender socialization - gives girls roots and boys wings - such behavior expectations for males and females define gender roles - the variety of gender roles across cultures and over time shows that culture indeed helps construct our gender roles |
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gender roles vary with culture
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- despite gender role inequalities, the majority of the world's people would ideally like to see more parallel male and female roles
-howeer, there are big country-to-country differences |
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gender roles vary over time
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- in the last 50 years, gender roles have changed dramatically
- behavioral changes have accompanied this attitude shift - the changing male-female roles cross many cultures -such changes across cultures and over a remarkably short time signal that evolution and biology do not fix gender roles - time also bends the genders |
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peer-transmitted culture
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- The Nuture Assumption - parental nurture, the way parents bring their children up, governs who their children become
- Moreover, children do acquire many of their values, including their political affiliation and religious faith, at home - two children in the same family are on average as different from one another as are pairs of children selected randomly from the population - genetic influences explain roughly 50% of individual variations in personality traits - Shared environmental influences (including the shared home influence) account for only 0 to 10 % of their personality differences. - So what causes the other 40 to 50 percent? it's largely peer influence. - What children and teens care most about is not what their parents think but what peers think. - Parents have an important influence but it's substantially indirect; parents help define the schools, the neighborhoods, and peers that directly influence whether their children become delinquent, use drugs, or get pregnant - moreover, children often take their cues from slightly older children, who get their cues from older youth, who take theirs from young adults in the parents' generation - The links of influence from parental group to child group are loose enough that the cultural transmission is never perfect. And in both human and primate cultures, change comes from the young |
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biology and culture
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- We needn't think of evolution and culture as competitors. Cultural norms subtly but powerfully affect our attitudes and behaviors, but they don't do se independent of biology. Everything social and psychological is ultimately biological.
- biology and culture may also interact - biology and experience interact when biological traits influence how the environment reacts - As role assignments become more equal, they predict that gender differences will gradually lessen - in cultures with greater equality of gender roles, the gender difference in mate preferences (men seeking youth and domestic skill, women seeking status and earning potential) is less. |
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the power of the situation and the person
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- we act, we react. we respond, and we get responses
- the power of the situation vs the power of the person - social control (the power of the situation) and the personal control (the power of the person) no more compete with each other than do biological and cultural explanations. - we may well be the products of the interplay of our genes and environment - our choices today determine our environment tomorrow - social situations do profoundly influence individual. But individuals also influence social situations. the two interact. |
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interaction between social situations and individuals
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- a given social situation often affects different people differently
- people often choose their situations - people often create their situations |
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What is conformity?
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- assuming the values most of us share, we can say that conformity is at times bad (when it leads to someone to drunk drive or join in racist behavior, at times good (when it inhibits people from cutting in line), and at times inconsequential (when it disposes tennis players to wear white).
- In western individualistic cultures, where submitting to peer pressure is not admired, the word conformity tends to carry a negative value judgement - In Japan, going along with others is not a sign of weakness but of tolerance, self-control, and maturity. - We choose labels to suit our values and judgements. Label both describe and evaluate, and they are inescapable. - Conformity is not just acting as other people act; it is also being affected by how they act. It is acting or thinking differently from the way you would act or think if you were alone. Thus, conformity is a change in behavior or belief in accord with others. - The key is whether your behavior and beliefs would be the same apart from the group - There are several varieties of conformities - compliance, obedience, and acceptance - Sometimes we conform to an expectation or a request without really believing in what we are doing. This insincere, outward conformity is compliance. We comply primarily to reap a reward or avoid a punishment. - If our compliance is to an explicit demand, we call it obedience. - Sometimes we genuinely believe in what the group has persuaded us to do. This sincere, inward conformity is called acceptance. Acceptance sometimes follows compliance; we may come to inwardly believe something we initially questioned. |
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definitions
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-- conformity - A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure
-- compliance - Conformity that involves publicly acting in accord with an implied or explicit request while privately disagreeing. -- obedience - Acting in accord with a direct order or command. -- acceptance - Conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with social pressure |
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classic studies
Sherif's studies of norm formation |
- See a stationary light and then watch it move. Finally, give a guess as to how far the light moved. When people had to guess in a group after hearing other responses, they changed their answers.
- The men tested changed their estimates markedly. A group norm typically emerged. - suggestibility - the lesson of these experiments - our views of reality are not ours alone - Suggestibility - laugh tracks on TV, being around people makes us happier (mood linkage) - the chameleon effect - more likely to copy the behavior of someone (ex: foot shaking or face rubbing) - It would quite likely be an automatic behavior, done without any conscious intention to conform. And, because behavior influences our attitudes and emotions, it would incline you to feel what the other feels. - Being mimicked seems to enhance social bonds. - Suggestibility can occure on a large scale - Suggestibility is not always so amusing - suicides |
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classic studies
Asch's studies of group pressure |
- People were asked to determine the length of a line. When other people in the group gave wrong (different) answers, so did the test subject
- "What is true? Is it what my peers tell me or what my eyes tell me?" - trust myself or trust others (conform)? - The experiments show that most people tell the truth even if others do not - if people are that conforming in response to such minimal pressure, how compliant will they be if they are directly coerced? |
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classic studies
Milgram's obedience experiments |
- Test subject tested a confederate. If the confederate answered incorrectly, the subject had to give them an electric shock. A tape of fake grunts and moans and sounds of pain were played to make the test subject think he was hurting the confederate. An experiment was present and told the subject to continue
- many people continued to the highest voltage, even if the confederate had become silent and with the knowledge that the confederate had a heart condition. |
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what breeds obedience?
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- Milgram did more than reveal the extent to which people will obey an authority; he also examined the conditions that breed obedience.
- four factors determe obedience: - victim's emotional distance - the authority's closeness and legitimacy - whether or not the authority was part of a respected institution - the lberating effects of a disobedient fellow participant |
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what breeds obedience?
the victim's distance |
- Milgram's participants acted with greatest obedience and least compassion when the learners could not be seen and could not see them.
- When the victim was remote and the teachers heard no complaints, nearly all obeyed calmly to the end. - When the learner was in the same room, only 40 percent obeyed to maximum voltage. Full compliance dropped 30% when teachers were required to force the learner's hand into contact with a shock plate - In everyday life too it is easiet to abuse someone who is distant or depersonalized. - On the positive side, people act most compassionately toward those who are personalized. |
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what breeds obedience?
closeness and legitimacy of authority |
- the physical presence of the experimenter also affected obedience. when milgram's experimenter gave the commands by telephone, full obedience dropped to 21%.
- Other studies confirm that when the one making the command is phyiscally close, compliance increases. - The authority, however, must be perceived as legitimate. In another experiment, the experimenter left and was replaced by an assistant. 80% of the subjects refused to fully comply. When the assitant tried to take over for the subject, the subjects protested. - This rebellion against an illegitimate authority contrasted sharply with the deferential politeness usually shown the experimenter - ex: nurses following doctor's orders |
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what breeds obedience?
institutional authority |
- Milgram experiment performed at Yale vs school in Bridgeport. Obedience was lower at the less prestigious school.
- in everyday life too, authorities backed by institutions wield social power |
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what breeds obedience?
the liberating effects of group influence |
- conformity can also be constructive
- ex: when one or two people act in a way you wish to act, it liberates you to act the same way |
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reflections on the classic studies
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- Obedience is explicitly commanded. Without the coercion, people did not act cruelly.
- Asch and Milgram showed how compliance can take precedence over moral sense. They succeeded in pressuring people to go against their own consciences. - And they illustrated and affirmed some familiar social psychological principles: the link betwen behavior and attitudes, the power of the situation, and the strength of the fundamental attribution error |
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behavior and attitudes
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- Attitudes fail to determin behavior when external influences override inner convictions.
- When responding alone, Asch's participants nearly always gave the correct answer. It was another matter when they stood alone against a group. - In the obedience experiments, a powerful social pressure (the experimenter's commands) overcame a weaker one (the remote victim's pleas). - Step-by-step entrapment of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. - By the time they gave high voltage shocks, the participants had complied many times and had reduced some of their dissonance. They were therefore in a different psychological state from that of someone beginning the experiment at that point. - External behavior and internal disposition can feed each other, sometime in an escalating spiral. - Step-by-step, an obedient but otherwise decent person evolved into an agent of cruelty. Compliance breeds acceptance. - Too often, criticism produces contempt, which licenses cruelty,, which, when justified, leads to brutality, then killing, then systematic killing. Evolving attitudes both follow and justify actions. - But humans also have a capacity for heroism - Initial helping heightened commitment, leading to more helping. |
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the power of the situation
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- The most important lesson of Chapter 5 (culture is a powerful shaper of lives) and this chapter's most important lesson (that immediate situational forces are just as powerful) reveal the strength of the social context
- In trying to break with social constraints, we suddenly realize how strong they are. - Ex: people predicted they would speak up if they were insulted, but in an experiment, more than half did not - This once again demostrates the power of normative presures and how hard it is to predict behavior, even our own behavior. - According to what we see in movies and books, evil results from a few bad apples, a few depraved killers. But evil also results from social forces - from the heat, humidity, and disease that help make a whole barrel of apples go bad. (Problems in Middle East.) - Situations can induce ordinary people to capitulate to cruelty - When fragmented, evil becomes easier - Milgram studied this compartmentalization of evil by involving more subjects indirectly. With someone else triggering the shock, they had only to administer the learning test. Now 37 of 40 fully complied. - The drift toward evil usually comes in small increments, without any conscious intent to do evil. Procrastination involves a similar unintened drift, toward self-harm. |
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the fundamental attribution error
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- Cruelty, we presume, is inflicted by the cruel at heart
- most people continue to beileve that people's inner qualities reveal themselves - that good people do good and that evil people go evil - Millgram - "The most fundamental lesson of our study is that ordinary people,, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." - Under the sway of evil forces, even nice people are sometimes corrupted as they construct moral rationalizations for immoral behavior. - To explain is not to excuse. To understand is not to forgive. You can forgive someone whose behavior you don't understand, and you can understand someone whom you do not forgive. |
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what predicts conformity?
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- Conformity did grow if the judgments were difficult or if the participants felt incompetent. The more insecure we are about our judgements, the more influenced we are by others.
- The more insecure we are about our judgments, the more influenced we are by others. -Group attributes also matter. Conformity is highest when the group has three or more people and is unanimou, cohesive, and high in status. Conformity is also highest when the response is public and made without prior commitment |
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what predicts conformity?
group size |
- A small group can have a large effect.
- 3 to 5 people will elicit much more conformity than just 1 or 2. Increasing the number of people beyond 5 yields diminishing returns. - The way the group is "packaged" also makes a difference. The agreement of independent small groups makes a position more credible. |
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what predicts conformity?
unanimity |
- Several experiments reveal that someone who punctures a group's unanimity deflates its social power
- People will usually voice their own convictions if just one other person has also differed from the majority. - It is easier to stand up for something if you can find someone else to stand up with you. - The support of the one comrade greatly increases a person's social courage. - Observing someone else's dissent - even when it is wrong - can increase our own independence. |
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what predicts conformity?
Cohesion |
- A minority opinion from someone outside the groups we identify with - from someone at another college or of a different religion - sways us less than the same minority opinion from someone within our group..
- The more cohesive a group is, the more power it gains over its members -- cohesiveness - A "we feeling"; the extent to which members of a group are bound together, such as by attraction for one another. - Group members who feel attracted to hte group are more responsive to its influence. They do not like disagreeing with other group members. Fearing rejection by group members whom they like, they allow them a certain power. - we tend to like others who are similar to ourselves - people tend to align their opinions with those of people like themselves. |
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what predicts conformity?
status |
- Higher-status people tend to have more impact
- Milgram reported that in his obedience experiments, people of lower status accepted the experimenter's commands more readily than people of high status. |
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what predicts conformity?
public response |
- In experiments, people conform more when they must respond in front of others rather than writing their answers privately.
- It is much easier to stand up for what we believe in when in private than before a group |
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what predicts conformity?
no prior commitment |
- After you have given your judgment and then heard everyone else disagree, the experimenter offers you an opportunity to reconsider. In the face of group pressure, do you now back down?
- People almost never do. Once having made a public commitment, they stick to it. At most, they will change their judgments in later situations. At most, they will change their judgments in later situations. - Prior commitments restrain persuasion too. Making a public commitment makes people hesitant to back down. |
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Why conform?
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- There are two possibilities: a person may bow to the group (1) to be accepted and avoid rejection or (2) to obtain important information.
- normative influence and informational influence - The first springs from our desire to be liked, the second from our desire to be right - Concern for social images produces normative influence. The desire to be correct produces informational influence. In day-to-day life, normative and informational influence often occur together. - Conformity experiments have sometimes isolated either normative or informational influence. Conformity is greater when people respond publicly before a group; this surely reflects normative influence (because people receive the same information whether they respond publicly or privately). On the other hand, conformity is greater when participants feel incompetent, when the task is difficult, and when the individuals care about being right - all signs of informational influence. |
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normative influence
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-- conformity based on a person's desire to fulfill others' expectations, often to gain acceptance
- Normative influence is "going along with the crowd" to avoid rejection, to stay in people's good graces, or to gain their approval. - As most of us know, social rejection is painful; when we deviate from group norms, we often pay en emotional price. - Sometimes the high price of deviation compels people to support what they do not believe in or at least to suppress their disagreement. - Normative influence leads to compliance especially for people who have recently seen others ridicules or who are seeking to climb a status ladder |
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informational influence
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-- conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality provided by other people.
- Informational influence leads people to privately accept others' influence - When reality is ambiguous, other people can be a valuable source of information |
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who conforms?
personality |
- Although internal factors (attitudes, traits) seldom precisely predict a specific action, they better predict a person's average behavior across many situations
- Personality also predicts behavior better when social influences are weak. - But even in strong situations, individuals differ - Every psychologcal event depends upon the state of the peron and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases. |
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who conforms?
culture |
- Cultural background helps predict how conforming people will be.
- Compared with people in individualistic countries, those in collectivist countries (where harmony is prized and connections help define the self) are more responsive to others' influence. - Conformity and obedience are universal phenomena, yet they vary across cultures and eras. |
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who conforms?
social roles |
- Role theorists assume that social life is like acting on a theatrical stage, with all its scenes, masks, and scripts. And those roles have much to do with conformity. Social roles allow some freedom of interpretation to those who act them out, but some aspects of any role must be performed
- When only a few norms are associated with a social category, we do not regard the position as a social role. It takes a whole cluster of norms to define a role. - Roles have powerful effects. As you internalize the role, self-consciousness subsides. - In ways one may not have been aware of, the process of conforming will have shifted one's behavior, values, and identity to accommodate a different place. - Our actions depend not only on the power of the situation but also on our personalities. Not everyone responds in the same way to pressure to conform. - We have seen that social situations can move most normal people to behave in abnormal ways |
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who conforms?
social roles role reversal |
- Role playing can also be a positive force.
- By intentionally playing a new role and conforming to its expectation, people sometimes change temselves or empathize with people whose roles differ from their own. |
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do we ever want to be different?
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- We may act according to our own values, independently of the forces that push upon us.
- Knowing that someone is trying to coerce us may even prompt us to react in the opposite direction. |
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do we ever want to be different?
reactance |
- Individuals value their sense of freedom and self-efficacy.
- When social pressure becomes so blatant that it threatens their sense of freedom, they often rebel. - The theory of psychological reactance - that people act to preotect their sense of freedom - is supported by experiments showing that attempts to restrict a person's freedom often produce an anticonformity boomerang effect -- A motive to protect or restore one's sense of freedom. Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action |
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do we ever want to be different?
asserting uniqueness |
- People feel uncomfortable when they appear to different from others. But in individualistic Western cultures they also feel uncomfortable when they appear exactly like everyone else.
- People feel better when they see themselves as moderately unique. Moreover, they act in ways that will assert their individuality. - For those of us in Western cultures, our distinctiveness is central to our identity - Seeing oneself as unique also appears in people's spontaneous self-concepts - when children are invited to tell us about yourself, they are more likely to mention their distinctive attributes - Ex: we become more keenly away of our gender when we are with people of the other gender. - When the people of two cultures are nearly identical, they will still notice their diferences, however small. - So, although we do not like being greatly deviant, we are, ironically, all alike in wanting to feel distinctive and in noticing how we are distinctive. - Our quest is not merely to be different from average but better than average. |
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persuasion
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-- The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.
- Persuasion is neither inherently good nor bad. It's a message's purpose and content that elicit judgments of good or bad. - The bad we call "propaganda." The good we call "education." |
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what paths lead to persuasion?
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- any factors that help people clear the hurdles in the persuasion process increase the likelihood of persuasion.
- Pay attention -> Comprehend it? -> Believe it? -> Remember it -> Behave accordingly? -> Action - People's thoughts in response to persuasive messages also matter. - If a message is clear but unconvincing, then you will easily counterargue the message and won't be persuaded. - If the message offers convincing arguments, then your thoughts will be more favorable and you will most likely be persuaded. - Cognitive response approach |
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central route
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- Persuasion is likely to occur via one of two routes.
- When people are motivated and able to think about an issue, they are likely to take the central route to persuasion - focusing on the arguments. - If those arguments are strong and compelling, persuasion is likely. - If the message offers only weak arguments, thoughtful people will notice that the arguments aren't very compelling and will counterague. -- Central route to persuasion - Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts. |
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peripheral route
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- But sometimes the strength of the argument doesn't matter.
- Rather than noticing whether the arguments are particularly compelling, we might follow the peripheral route to persuasion - focusing on cues that trigger acceptance without much thinking. - In these situations, easily understood familiar statements are more persuasive than novel statements with the same meaning. - Billboards and television commercials - media that consumers are able to take in for only brief amounts of time - therefore use the peripheral route, by using visual images as peripheral cues. - On the other hand, magazine computer ads (which interested, logical consumers may pour over for some time) offer customers information on competitive features and prices. -- Peripheral route to persuasion -Occurs when people are influences by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness |
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different routes for different purposes
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- The ultimate goal of the advertiser, the preachers, and even the teacher is not just to have people pay attention to the message and move on. Typically, the goal also involves some sort of behavior change (buying a product, loving one's neighbor, or studying more effectively.)
- Central route processing can lead to more enduring change than does the peripheral route. When people are thinking carefully and mentally elaborating on issues, they rely not just on the strength of persuasive appeals but on their own thoughts and response as well. And when people think deeply rather than superficially, any changed attitude will more likely persist, resist attack, and influence behavior. - Thus, the central route is more likely to lead to attitude and behavior changes that stick, whereas the perihperal route may lead merely to superficial and temporary attitude change. - Changing attitudes is easier than changing behavior. - Changing behavior as well as attitudes seems to require people's actively processing and rehearsing their own convictions. - None of us has the time to thoughtfully analyze all issues. Often we take the peripheral route, by using simple rule-of-thumb heuristics, such as "trust the experts" or "long messages are credible." - We all make snap judgments using such heuristics |
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elements of persuasion
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- Among the primary ingredients of persuasion explored by social psychologists are these four:
- the communicator - the message - how the message is communicated - the audience |
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elements of persuasion
the communicator credibility |
- the effects of source credibility (perceived expertise and trustworthiness) diminish over time.
-- credibility - Believability. A credible communicator is perceived as both expert and trustworthy. - If a credible person's message is persuasive, its impace may fade as its srouce is forgotten or dissociated from the message. - And the impact of a noncredible person may correspondingly increase over time if people remember the message better than the reason for discounting it. - This delayed persuasion, after people forget the source or its connection with the message is called the sleeper effect -- sleeper effect - A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an initially discounted message becomes effective, as we remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it. |
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elements of persuasion
the communicator credibility perceived expertise |
- How does one become an authoritative expert?
- One way is to begind by saying things the audience agrees with, which makes one seem smart. - Another is to be introduced as someone who is knoledgeable on the topic - Another way to appear credible is to speak confidently. |
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elements of persuasion
the communicator credibility perceived trustworthiness |
- Speech style also affects a speaker's apparent trustworthiness
- Ex: If videotaped witnesses looked their questioner straight in the eye instead of gazing downward, they impressed people as more believable. - Trustworthiness is also higher if the audience believes the communicator is not trying to persuade them. - We also perceive as sincere those who argue against their own self-interest. It seems unbiased and more persuasive. - Being willing to suffer for one's beliefs (MLK, Gandhi, etc) alsp helps convince people of one's sincerity. - Trustworthiness and credibility also increase when people talk fast. |
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elements of persuasion
the communicator attractiveness and liking |
-- attractiveness - Having qualities that appeal to an audience. An appealing communicator (often someone similar to the audience) is most persuasive on matter of subjective preference.
- We may think we are not influences by attractiveness or likability, but researchers have found otherwise. We're more like to respond to those we like. - Even a mere fleeting conversation with someone is enough to increase our liking for that person and our responsiveness to his or her influence. - Our liking may open us up to the communicator's arguments (central route) or it may trigger positive associations when we see the product later (peripheral route). - Attractiveness varies in several ways. - Physical appeal is one. Arguments, especially emotional ones, are often more influential when they come from people we consider beautiful. - Similarity is another. We tend to like people who are like us. We are also influenced by them. People who act as we do, subtly mimicking our posutres, are likewise more influential. - As a general rule, people respond better to a message that comes from someone in their group. - Is similarlity more important credbility? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. - They suggest that an undiscovered factor is at work - that similarity is more important given the presence of factor X, and credibility is more important given the absense of factor X. Factor X is whether the topic is more one of subjective preference of objective reality. When the choice concerns matters of personal value, taste, or way of life, similar communicators have the most influence. But on judgments of fact, confirmation of belief by a dissimilar person does more to boost confidence. A dissimilary person provides a more independent judgment. |
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elements of persuasion
message content reason versus emotion |
- Should you use reason or emotion?
- It depends on the audience. - Well-educated or analytical people are more responsive to rational appeals than are less educated or less analytical people. - Thoughtful, involved audiences often travel the central route; they are more responsive to resasoned arguments. - Uninterested audiences more often travel the peripheral route; they are more affected by how much they like the communicator. - It also matters how people's attitudes were formed. - When people's initial atttudes are formed primarily through emotion, they are more persuaded by later emotional appeals. When their initial attitudes are formed primarily through reason, they are more persuaded by later intellectual arguments. - New emotions may sway an emotion-based attitude. But to change an information-based attitude, more information may be needed. |
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elements of persuasion
message content reason versus emotion the effect of good feelings |
- Messages also become more persuasive through associations with good feelings.
- Good feelings often enhance persuasion, partly by enhancing positive feelings with the mesage. - In a good mood, people view the world through rose-colored glasses. - But they also make faster, more impulsive decisions; they rely more on peripheral cues. - Unhappy people ruminate more before reacting, so they are less easily swayed by weak arguments. |
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elements of persuasion
message content reason versus emotion the effect of arousing fear |
- Messages can also be effective by evoking negative emotions.
- The more frightened people are, the more they respond. - The effectiveness of fear-arousing communications is being applied in ads discouraging not only smoking but also risky sexual behaviors and drinking and driving. - Feard-arousing communications have been used to increase people's detection behaviors, such as getting mammograms, doing breast or testicular self-exams, and checking for signs of skin cancer - Fear-framed messages work better when trying to prevent an outcome (such as cancer) than when trying to promote a good outcome (such as fitness). - Playing on fear won't always make a message more potent, though. - When the fear pertains to a pleasurable activity, the result is often not behavioral change but denial. People may engage in denial because, when they aren't tld how to avoid the danger, frightening messages can be overwhelming. - For that reason, fear-arousing messages are more effective if they lead people not only to dear the severity and likelihood of a threatened event but also to perceive a solution and feel capable of implementing it. - Vivid propaganda often exploits fears. |
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elements of persuasion
message content discrepancy |
- Disagreement produces discomfort, and discomfort prompts people to change their opinions (dissonance).
- So perhaps greater disagreement will produce more change. Then again, a communicator who proclaims an uncomfortable message may be discredited. - So perhaps greater disagreement will produce less change - A credible source - one hard to discount - would elicit the most opinion change when advocating a position greatly discrepant from the recipient's - Discrepancy and credibility interact - the effect of large versus small discrpancy depends on whether is communicator is credible - Deeply involved people tend to accept only a narrow range of views. To them, a moderately decrepant message may seem foolishly radical, especially if the message argues an opposing view rather than being a more extreme version of a view with which they already agree. - So if you are a credible authority and your audience isn't much concerned with your issue, go for it. Avocate a discrepant view. |
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elements of persuasion
message content one-sided versus two-sided appeals |
- Persuaders face another practical issue - how to deal with opposing arguments
- Acknowledging the opposing arguments might confuse the audience and weaken the case. On the other hand, a message might seem fairer and be more disarming if it recognizes the opposition's arguments. - The effective ness of the message depended on the listener. A one-sided appeal was most effective with those who already agreed. An appeal that acknowledged opposing arguments worked better with those who disagreed. - Experiments also reveal that a two-sided persentation is more persuasive and enduring if people are (or will be) aware of opposing arguments. Apaprently, a one-sided message stimulates an informed audience to think of counterarguments and to view the communicator as biased. So, if you audience will be exposed to opposing views, offer a two-sided appeal. - For optimists, positive persuasion works bet. For pessimists, negative persuasion is more effective. |
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elements of persuasion
message content primacy versus recency |
- Would first be better? People's preconceptions control their interpretations. Moreover, a belief, once formed, is difficult to discredit, so going first could give voters ideas that would favorably bias how they perceive and interpret the second speech. Besides, people may pay more attention to what comes first.
- Then again, people remember recent things better. Might it really be more effective to speak last? - Primacy effect - information presented early is most persuasive. First impressions are important. -- Primacy effect - Other things being equal, information present first usually has the most influence. - Would our better memory of the most recent information we've received ever create a recency effect? -- recency effect - Information presented last sometimes has the most influence. Recency effects are less common than primacy effects. - We know from our experience that today's events can temporarily outweigh significant past events. -Forgetting creates the recency effect: (1) when enough time separates the two messages AND (2) when the audience commits itself soon after the second message - When the two message are back-to-back, followed y a time gap, it is the primacy effect that usually occurs. This is especially so when the first message stimulates thinking.x |
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elements of persuasion
the channel of communication |
-- channel of communication - The way the message is delivered - whether face-to-face, in writing, on film, or in some other way
- Commonsense psychology places faith in hte power of written words |
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elements of persuasion
the channel of communication active experience or passive reception |
- Are spoken appeals more persuasive? Not necessarily.
- A persuasive speaker must deliver a message that not only gets attention but also is understandable, convincing, memorable, and compelling. - Passively received appeals, however, are not always futile. - Mere exposure to unfamiliar stimuli breeds liking. Moreover, mere repetition can make things believable. - As they forget the discounting, their lingering familiarity with the claim can make it seem believable. - Mere repetition of a statement also serves to increase its fluency - the ease with which it spills off our tongue - which increases believability. - Other factors, such as rhyming, also increase fluency and believability. - Whatever makes more fluency also makes for credibility - Persuasion decreases as the significance and familiarity of the issue increase. - Active experience also strengths attitudes. When we act, we amplify the idea behind what we've done, especially when we feel responsible. - What is more, attitudes more often endure and influence our behavior when rooted in our own experience. - Compared with attitudes formed passively, experience-based attitudes are more confident, more stable, and less vulterable to attack. |
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elements of persuasion
the channel of communication personal versus media influence |
- Persuasion studies demonstrate that the major influence on us is not the media but our contact with people.
- Word-of-mouth personal influence |
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elements of persuasion
the channel of communication personal versus media influence media influence: the two-step flow |
- Two-step flow of communication - from media to opinion leaders to the rank and file.
- In any large group, it is these opinion leaders and trendsetters that marketers and politicians seek to woo. - Opinion leaders are individuals perceived as experts -- Two-step flow of communication - The process by which media influence often occurs through opinion leaders, who in turn influence others. - The two-step flow model reminds us that media influences penetrate the culture in subtle ways. - Even if the media had little direct effect on people's attitudes, they could still have a big indirect effect. |
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elements of persuasion
the channel of communication personal versus media influence comparing media |
- Studies comparing different media find that the more lifely the medium, the more persuasive its message.
- Thus, the order of persuasiveness seems to be: - Live (face to face) - videotaped - audiotaped - written - To add to the complexity, messages are best comprehended and recalled when written. - Comprehension is one of the first steps in the persuasion process. - The TV medium takes control of the pacing of the message away from the recipients. By drawing attention to the communicator and away from the message itself, TV also encourages people to focus on peripheral cues, such as the communicator's attractiveness. |
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elements of persuasion
the audience |
- People's traits often don't predict their responses to social influence.
- A particular trait may enhance one stop in hte persuasion process but work against another. - People with moderate self-esteem are the easier to influence |
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elements of persuasion
the audience how old are they? |
- People tend to have different social and political attitudes depending on their age
- One is a life cycle explanation - attitudes change as people grow older. - The other is a generational explanation - attitudes do not change; older people largely hold onto the attitudes they adopted when they were young. - a generation gap develops - The evidence mostly supports the generational explanation. - The teens and early twenties are important formative years. Attitudes are changeable during that time and the attitudes formed then tend to stabilize through middle adulthood. - For many people, these years are a critical period for the formation of attitudes and values. - Adolescent and early-adult experiences are formative partly because they make deep and lasting impressions. - That is not to say that older adults are inflexible - Few of us are utterly uninfluences by changing cultural norms. - Research suggests that elderly adults, near the end of the life cycle, may again become more susceptible to attitude change, perhaps because of a decline in the strength of their attitudes. |
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elements of persuasion
the audience what are they thinking? |
- The cruicial aspect of central route persuasion is not the message but the responses it evokes in a person's mind.
- If the message summons favorable thoughts, it persuades us. If it provokes us to think of contrary arguments, we remain unpresuaded. |
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elements of persuasion
the audience what are they thinking? forwarned is forarmed - if you care enough to counterargue |
- What circumstances breed counterargumet?
- One is knowing that someone is going to try to persuade you. - It is difficult to try to persude people under such circumstances. |
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elements of persuasion
the audience what are they thinking? distraction disarms counterarguing |
- Verbal persuasion is also enhanced by distracting people with something that attracts their attention just enough to inhibit counterarguing.
- Distraction is especially effective when the message is simple. - Sometimes, though, distraction precludes our processing an ad. That helps explain why ads viewed during violent or sexual TV are so often unremembered and ineffective |
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elements of persuasion
the audience what are they thinking? uninvolved audiences use peripheral cues |
- The central route has starts and stops as the mind analyzes arguments and formulates responses.
- The peripheral route speeds people to their destination. - Analytical people - those with a high need for cognition - enjoy thinking carefully and prefer central routes. - People who like to conserve their mental resources - those with a low need for cognition - are quicker to respond to such peripheral cues as the communicator's attractiveness and the pleasantness of the surroundings. -- need for cognition - The motivation to think an analyze. Assessed by agreement with items such as "the notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me" and disagreement with items such as "I only think as hard as I have to." - This simple theory - that what we think inf response to a message is crucial, especially if we are motivated and able to think about it - has generated many predictions, most of which have been confirmed. - Stimulating thinking makes strong messages more persuasive and (becuase of counterarguing) weak messages less persuasive. - Effective communicators care not only about their images and their messages but also about how their audience is likely to react. |
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cults
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- What persuades people to leave behind their former beliefs and join these mental chain gangs?
- First, this is hindsight anaysis. It uses persuasion principles as categories for explaining,a fter the fact, a troubling social phenomenon. - Second, explaining why people believe something says nothing about the truth of their beliefs. - Explaining either belief does not change its validity -- Cult (new religious movement) - A group typically characterized by (1) distinctive ritual and beliefs related to its devotion to a god or a person, (2) isolation from the surrounding "evil" culture, and (3) a charismatic leader. |
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cults
attitudes follow behavior |
- People usually internalize commitments made voluntarily, publicly, and repeatedly. Cult leaders seem to know this.
Compliance Breed Acceptance - New converts soon learn that membership is no trivial matter. They are quickly made active members of the team. - Cult initates become committed advocates. - The greater the personal commitment, the more the need to justify it. Foot In The Door Phenomenon - The recruitment strategy exploits the foot in the door phenomenon |
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cults
persuasive elements the communicator |
- Successful cults typically have a charismatic leader - someone who attracts and directs the members
- A credible communicator is someone the audience perceives as an expert and trustworthy - Trust is another aspect of credibility - Many cult members have been recruited by friends or relatives, people they trust |
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cults
persuasive elements the message |
- The vivid, emotional messages and the warmth and acceptance with which the group showers lonely or depressed people can be strinkingly appealing.
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cults
persuasive elements the audience |
- Recruits are often young people under 25, still at that comparatively open age before attitudes and values stabilize
- Some are less educated people who like the simplicity of the message and find it difficult to counterargue. - But most are educated, middle-class people who, taken by the ideals, overlook the contradictions in those who profess selflessness and practice greed, who pretend concern and behave indifferently. - They have needs; the cult offers them an answer. - Times of social and economic upheaval are especially conducive to someone who can make apparent simple sense out of the confusion. - Suicide bombers in Middle East - Like cult recuits, they come under the influence of authoritative, religiously oriented communicators who indoctrinate them into seeing themselves as living martyrs whose fleeting moment of self-destruction will be their portal into bliss an heroism. |
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cults
group effects |
- Cults also illustrate the power of a group to shape members' views and behavior.
- The cult typically separates members from their previous social support systems and isolates them with other cultists. - social implosion - external ties weaken until the group collapses inward socially, each person engaging only with other group members. - Cut off from families and former friends, they lose access to counterarguments. The group now offers identity and defines reality. - The apparent consensus helps eliminate any lingering doubts. - Stress and emotional arousal narrow attention - These techniques do not, however, have unlimited power. - Some of these cult influence techniques bear similaries to techniques used by more benign, widely accepted groups, like Buddhist and Catholic monasteries. Much of the same is true of some therapeutic communities for recovering drug and alcohol abusers. - Another constructive use of persuasion is in counseling and psychotherapy. - It takes persuasion to change self-defeating attitudes. - The psychotherapy setting, like cults and zealous self-help groups, provides: (1) a supportive, confiding social relationship (2) an offer of expertise and hope (3) a special rationale or myth that explains one's difficulties and offers a new perspective (4) a set of rituals and learning experiences that promises a new sense of peace and happiness - If we attribute cults to the leader's mystical force or to the followers' peculiar weakness, we may delude ourselves into the thinking we are immune to social control techniques. - In truth, our own groups - and countless political leaders, educators, etc - successfully use many of these same tactics on us. - The fact that some cult leaders abused the power of persuasion does not mean persuasion is intrinsically bad. - Knowing these powers can be harnessed for evil purposes shuold alert us to guard against their immmoral use. But the powers themselves are neither inherently evil not inherently good; it is how we use them that determines whether their effect is destructive or constructive. |
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how can persuasion be resisted?
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- Being persuaded comes naturally.
- It is easier to accept persuasive messages than to doubt them. - To understand an assertion is to belive it - at least temporarily, until one actively undoes the initial, automatic acceptance. - If a distracting event precents the undoing, the acceptance lingers - We do resist falsehoods. - We can rethink our habitual responses to authority. We can seek more information before committing time or money. We can question what we don't understand. |
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how can persuasion be resisted?
strengthening personal commitment |
- Before encountering others' judgments, make a public commitment to your position.
- Having stood up for your convictions, you will become less susceptible (less open) to what others have to say. |
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how can persuasion be resisted?
strengthening personal commitment challenging beliefs |
- How might we stimulate people to commit themselves?
- One way - mildly attack their position. - When committed people were attacked strongly enough to cause them to react, but not so strongly as to overwhlem them, they became even more committed. |
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how can persuasion be resisted?
strengthening personal commitment Developing counterarguments |
- There is a second reason why a mild attack might build resistance.
- Even weak arguments will prompt counterarguments, which are then available for a stronger attack. - Is there such a thing as attitude innoculation? -- attitude innoculation - Exposing people to weak attacks upon their attitudes so that when stronger attacks come, they will have refutations available. - A "poison parasite" defense - one that combines a poison (strong counterarguments) with a parasite (retrieval cues that bring those arguments to mind when seeing the apponent's ads) |
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how can persuasion be resisted?
Implications of attitude inoculation |
- The best way to build resistance to brainwashing probably isn't stronger indoctrination into one's current beliefs.
- If parents are worried that their children might become members of a cult, they might better teach their children about the various cults and prepare them to counter persausive appeals. - Cults apply this principle by forewarning members of how families and friends will attack the cult's beliefs. When the expected challenge comes, hte member is armed with counterarguments. - Another implication is that, for the persuader, an ineffective appeal can be worse than none. Those who reject an appeal are inoculated against further appeals - Ineffective persuasion, by stimulating the listener's defense, may be counterproductive. It may harden the heart against later appeals. |
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what is a group?
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- All groups have one thing in common: their members interact.
- Therefore, a group is defined as two or more people who interact and influence one another. -- group - two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another and perceive one another as "us." - Groups perceive theselves as "us" in contrast to "them." - Groups may exist for a number of reaons - to meet a need, to belong, to provide information, to supply rewards, to accomplish goals - People who are merely in one another's presence do sometimes influence one another. - Three examples of collective influence: social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividualization. - These three phenomena can occur with minimal interaction (in what we call "minimal group situations"). - Three example of social influence in interacting groups: group polarization, groupthink, and minority influence |
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co-actors
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- Co-partcipants working individually on a noncompetitive activity
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social facilitation
the mere presence of others |
-- social facilitation - (1) Original meaning - the tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better when others are present. (2) Current meaning - the strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses in the presence of others.
- Other studies on animals revealed that on some tasks, the presence of others hinders performance. This disruptive effect also occurs with people. Others' presence dimishes efficiency. - Arousal enhances whatever response tendency is dominant. - Increased arousal enhances performance on easy tasks for which the most likely (dominant) response is the correct one. - On complex tasks, for which the correct answer is not dominant, increased arousal promotes incorrect responding. - If social arousal facilitate dominant responses, it should boost performance on easy tasks and hurt performance on difficult tasks. |
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social facilitation
crowding: the presence of many others |
- So people do respond to others' presence. But does the presence of observers always arouse people?
- In times of stress, a comrade can be comforting. Nevertheless, with others present, people perspire more, breathe faster, tense their muscles more, and have higher blood pressure, and have a faster heart rate. - The effect of others' presence increases with their number. - Sometimes hte arousal and self-conscious attention created by a large audience interferes even with well-learned, automatic behaviors such as speaking. - Given extreme pressure, we've vulnerable to choking. - Being in a crowd also intensifies positive or negative reactions. - When they sit close together, friendly people are liked even more, and unfriendly people are disliked even more. - When other people are close by, we are more likely to notice and join in their laughter or clapping. - But crowding also enhances arousal. - On difficult tasks, they made more errors, an effect of crowding - Crowding has a similar effect to bring observed by a crowd: it enhances arousal, which facilitates dominant responses. |
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social facilitation
why are we aroused in the presence of others? |
- What you do well, you will be energized to do best in front of others (unless you become hyperaroused and self-conscious).
- What you find difficult may seem impossible in the same circumstances. - 3 factors - evaluation apprehension, distraction, and mere presence |
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social facilitation
why are we aroused in the presence of others? evaluation apprehension |
- Observers make us apprehensive because we wonder how they are evaluating us
-- Concern for how others are evaluating us - The enhancement of dominant responses is strongest when people think they are being evaluated. - The self-consciousness we feel when being evaluated can also interfere with behaviors that we perform best automatically. |
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social facilitation
why are we aroused in the presence of others? driven by distraction |
- When we wonder how co-actors are doing or how an audience is reaction, we become distracted.
- This conflict between paying attention to others and paying attention to the task overloads our cognitive system, causing arousal. - We are driven by distractiong - This arousal comes not just from the presence of another person but even from a nonhuman distraction, such as bursts of light. |
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social facilitation
why are we aroused in the presence of others? mere presence |
- There mere presence of others produces some arousal even without evaluation apprehension or arousing distraction.
- This also occurs in animals, which indicates an innate social arousal mechanism |
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social loafing
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- Social facilitation usually occurs when people work toward individual goals and when their efforts can be individually evaluated.
-- The tendency for people to exert less effort when they ppol their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable. |
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social loafing
many hands make light work |
- The collective effort of tug of war teams was but half of the sum of the individual efforts.
- That suggests, contrary to the presumption "in unity there is strength," that group member may actually be less motivated when performing additive tasks - Social loafing - When the participants believed 5 others were also either shouting or clapping, they produced 1/3 less noise than when they thought themselves alone. - Curiously, those who clapped both alone and in groups did not view thmselves as loafing; they perceived themselves as clapping equally in both situations. - In the group condition, people were tempted to free-ride on the group effort -- free riders - People who benefit from the group but give little in return - We see a twist on oen of the psychological forces that makes for social facilitation: evaluation apprehension. - In the social loafing experiments, individuals believed they were evaluated only when they acted alone. - The group situation decreased evaluation apprehension. - When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, reponsibility is diffused across all group members. - By contrast, the social facilitation experiments increased exposure to evaluation. - When made the center of attention, people self-consciously monitor their behavior. - So when being observed icnreases evaluation concerns, social facilitation occurs; when being lost in a crowd decreases evaluation concerns, social loafing occurs. - To motivate group members, one strategy is to make individual performance indentifiable - whether in a group or not, people exert more effort when their putputs are individually identifiable |
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social loafing
social loafing in everyday life |
- Researchers have also found evidence for social loafing in varied cultures, particularly by assessing agricultural output in formerly communist countries
- people in collectivist cultures do exhibit less social loafing than do people in individualistic cultures. - When rewards are divided equally, regardless of how much one contributes to the group, any individual gets more reward per unit of effort by free-riding the group. - So people may be motivated to slack off when their efforts are not individually monitored and rewraded. - But surely collective effort does not always lead to slacking off. Sometimes the goal is so compelling and maximum output from everyone is so essential that team spirit maintains or intensifies effort - People in groups load less when the task is challenging, appealing, or involving. On challenging tasks, people may perceive their efforts as indispensable. When people see others in their group as unreliable or as unable to contribute much, they work harder. Adding incentives or challenging a group to strive for certain standrads also promotes collective effort. Group members will work hard when convinced that high effort will bring rewards - Groups also load less when their members are friends or identified with their group, rather than strangers. Even just expecting to interact with someone again serves to increase ffort on team projects - Cohesiveness intensifies effort. - When groups are given challenging objectives, when they are rewarded for group success, and when there is a spirit of commitment to the team, group members work hard. - Keeping work groups small and forming them with equally competent people can also help members believe their contributions are indispensable. |
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deindividuation
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-- Group situations may cause people to lose self-awareness, with resulting loss of individuality and self-restraint.
-- Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension; occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms, good or bad. |
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deindividuation
doing together what we would not do alone |
- Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility.
- When arousal and diffused responsibility combine and normal inhibitions dimish, the results may be startling. - People may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint to impulsive self-gratification to destructive social explosions. - These unrestrained behaviors have something in common - they are someone provoked by the power of a group - Groups can generate a sense of excitement, of being caught up in something bigger than one's self. - In group situations, people are more likely to abandon normal restraints, to lose their sense of individual identity, to become responsive to group or crowd norms |
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deindividuation
doing together what we would not do alone group size |
- A group has the power not only to arouse its members but also render them unidentifiable
- Evaluation apprehension plummets - People's attention is focused on the situation, not on themselves. - And because everyone is doing it, all can attribute their behavior to the situation rather than to their own choices. |
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deindividuation
doing together what we would not do alone physical anonymity |
- Women were dressed in identical white coats and hoods. Asked to deliver electric shocks to a woman, they pressed the shock button twice as long as did women who were visible and wearing large name tags.
- The effect of wearing uniform? - Does becoming physically anonymous always unleash our worst impulses? No. - Being anonymous makes one less self-consciou, more group-conscious, and more responsive to cues present in the situation, whether negative or positive. |
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deindividuation
doing together what we would not do alone arousing and distracting activities |
- Aggressive outbursts by large groups often are preceded by minor actions that arouse and divert people's attention
- Group shouting, chanting, clapping, or dancing serve both to hype people up and to reduce self-consciousness - There is a self-reinforcing pleasure in acting impulsively while obesrving others doing likewise. - When we see others act as we are acting, we think they feels as we do, which reinforces our own feelings. - Moreover, impulsive group action absorbs our attention - Later, when we stop to think about what we have done or said, we sometimes feel chagrined. Sometimes. - At other times we seek deindivuating group experiences (dances, worship experiences, group encounters) where we can enjoy intense positive feelings and closeness to others. |
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deindividuation
diminished self-awareness |
- Group experiences that dimish self-consciousness tend to disconnect behavior from attitudes.
- Unself-conscious, deindividuated people are less restrained, less self-regulated, more likely to act without thinking about their own values, and more responsive to the situation - self-awareness is the opposite of deindividuation - People who are self-conscious, or who are temporarilty made so, exhibit greater consistency between their words outside a situation and their deeds in it. - Circustances that decrease self-awareness (ex: alcohol consumption) increase deindividuation. - Deindividuation decreases in circumstances that increase self-awareness: mirrors, cameras, small towns, bright lights, large name tags, undistracted quiet, individual clothes and houses |
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group polarization
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- Group discussion often strengthens members' initial inclinations
-- Group-produced enhancement of members' preexisting tendencies; a strengthening of the members' average tendency, not a split within the group. |
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group polarization
the case of the risky shift |
- The groups decisions were usualy riskier.
- Risk shift occurs not only when a group decides by consensus; after a brief discussion, individuals will also alter their decisions. - During discussion, opinions converged. - Curiously, however, the point toward which they converged was usually a lower (riskier) number than their initial average. |
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group polarization
do groups intensify opinion? |
- Discussion typically strengthens the average inclination of group members
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group polarization
do groups intensify opinion? group polarization experiments |
- Would talking in groups enhance their shared initial inclinations as it did with the decision delimmas? In groups, would risk takers take bigger risks, bigots become despisers, and givers become more philanthropic?
- That's what the group polarization hypothesis predicts - Dozens of studies confirm group polarization - Another research strategy has been to pick issues on which opinions are divided and then isolate people who hold the same view - The discussions among like-minded students did indeed increase the initial gap between the two groups. |
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group polarization
do groups intensify opinion? group polarization in everyday life |
- In everday life people associate mostly with others whose attitudes are similar to their own
- Does everyday group interaction with like-minded frinds intensify group attitudes? Do the nerds become nerdier and the jocks jockier? It happens. - The self-segregation of boys into all-male groups and girls into all-female groups accentuates over time their intially modest gender differences Group Polarization In Schools - "accentuation effect" - Over time, initial differences among groups of college students become accentuated - Researchers believe this results partly from group members reinforcing shared inclinations Group Polarization in Communities - Polarization also occurs in communities as people self-segregate. - Neighborhoods become echo chambers, with opinions richocheting off kindred-spirited friends - In the US, the end result has become a more divided country - During actual community conflicts, like-minded people associate increasingly with one another, amplifying their shared tendencies. Group Polarization on the Internet - Email, blogs, and electronic chat rooms offer a potential new medium for like-minded people to find one another and for group interaction - Email, Google, and chat rooms make it much easier for small groups to rally like-minded people, crystallize diffuse hatreds, and mobilize lethal force - As broadband spreads, internet-spawned polarization will increase Group Polarization in Terrorist Organizations - Terrorism does not errupt suddenly. Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances being thrm together. - As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme. - The social amplifier brings the signal in more strongly. The result is violent acts that the individuals, apart from the group, would never have committed. - The precess of becoming a terrorist, isolates individuals from other belief systems, dehumanizes potential targets, and tolerates no dissent. - Over time, group members come to categorize the world as us versus them - The key to creating a terrorist suicide is the group process - After moving to their foreign places in serach of jobs or education, they became mindful of their muslim identity and often gravitated to mosques and move in with other expatrite muslims - Massacres have been found to be group phenomenon. The biolence is enabled and escalated by the killers egging one another on. |
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group polarization
explaining polarization |
- informational influcne - influence that results from accepting evidence about reality
- normative influence - influence based on a person's desire to be accepted or admired by others |
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group polarization
explaining polarization informational influence |
- Group discussion elicits a pooling of ideas, most of which favor the dominant viewpoint.
- Some discussed ideas are common knowledge to group members. - Other ideas may include persuasive arguments that some group members had not previously considered. - But what people hear relevant arguments without learning the specific stands other people assume, they still shift their positions. - Arugments, in and of themselves, matter. - Active participation in discussion produces more attitude change than does passive listening. - Participants and observers hear the same ideas, but when participants express them in their own words, the verbal commitment magnifies the impact. - The more group members repeat one another's ideas, the more they rehearse and validate them. - With central route persuasion, what people think in response to a message is crucial. |
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group polarization
explaining polarization normative influence |
- A second explanation of polarization involves comparison with others.
- Social comparison - we humans want to evaluate our opinions and abilities, something we can do by comparing our views with others'. -- social comparison - Evaluating one's opinions and abilities by comparing oneself with others - We are almost persuaded by people in our reference group - groups we identify with. - Moreover, wanting people to like us, we may express stronger opnions after discovering that others share our views. - pluarlistic ignorance - a false impression of what most other people are thinking or feeling, or how they are responding. - Pluralistic ignorance - they don't realize how strongly others support the socially perferred tendency. - No longer restrained by a misperceived group norm, they are liberated to voice their preferences more strongly. - To overcome just pluralistic ignorance, someone must break the ice and enable others to reveal and reinforce their shared reactions. - When people learn ohers' positions (without prior commitment and without discussion or sharing of arguments), they will adjust their responses to maintain a socially favorable position. - This comparison-based polarization is usually less than that produced by a lively discussion - Merely learning others' choices also contributes to the bndwgon effect |
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groupthink
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- Researcher studied wrong decisions in history.
- He believed those blunders were bred by the tendency of decision-making groups to suppress dissent in the interests of group harmony - groupthink -- groupthink - The mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. - Environment for groupthink: - an amiable, cohesive group - relative isolation of the group from dissenting viewpoints - a directive leader who signals what decision he or she favors |
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symptoms of groupthink
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Members overestimate their group's might and right
- An illusion of invulnerability - Unquestioned belief in the group's morality Close-minded - Rationalization - Stereotyped view of opponent Pressures toward uniformity - Conformity pressure - Self-censorship - Illusion of unanimity - Mindguards - Groupthink symptoms can produce a failure to seek and discuss contrary information and alternative possibilities. - When a leader promotes an idea and when a group insulates intself from dissenting views, groupthink may produce defective decisions |
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critiquing the concept of groupthink
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- Directive leadership is indeed associated with poorer decisions because subordinates sometimes feel too weak or insecure to speak up
- Groups do prefer supporting over challenging information - When members look to a group for acceptance, approval, and social identity, they may suppress disagreeable thoughts - Yet friendships need not breed groupthink. - Secure, highly cohesive groups (ex family) can provide members with freedom to disagree - In some groups, they want critique - In a free-spirited atmosphere, cohesion can enhance effective teamwork. - Even good group procedures sometimes yield ill-fated decisions - Sometimes good groups do bad things |
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preventing groupthink
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- Flawed group dynamics help explain many failed decisions.
- However, given open leadership, a cohesive team spirit can improve decisions. - Sometimes two or more heads are better than one Effective group procedures - Be impartial - do not endorse any position - Encourage critical evaluation, play devil's advocate - welcome the voice of a dissenter - Occasionally subdivide the group, then reunite to air differences - Welcome critques from outside experts and associates - Before implementing, call a second-chance meeting to air any lingering doubts |
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group problem solving
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- Under some conditions two or more heads really are better than one.
- Several heads critiquing one another can also allow the group to avoid some forms of cognitive bias and produce some higher-quality ideas - People feel more productive when generating ideas in groups (partly because people disproportionately credit themselves for the ideas that come out). - But researchers found that people working alone usually will generate more good ideas than will the same people in a group - Large brainstorming groups are especially inefficient - Social loafing - large groups cause some individuals to free-ride on others' efforts. - Normative influence theory - they cause others to feel apprehensive about voicing oddball ideas - And they cause production clocking - losing one's ideas while awaiting a turn to speak Enhance group brainstorming - Combine group and solitary brainstorming - Have group members interact by writing - Incorporate electronic brainstorming |
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the influence of the minority
consistency |
- More influential than a minority that wavers is a minority that stick to its position
- Nonconformity (especially persistent nonconformity) is often painful, and being in a minority in a group can be unpleasant - Minority slowness effect - a tendency for people with minority views to express them less quickly than do people in the majority. - People may attribute your dissent to psychological peculiarities - The majority acknowledged that the persistence of the two did more than anything else to make them rethink their positions. - Indeed, a minority may stimulate creative thinking |
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the influence of the minority
self-confidence |
- Consistency and persistence convey self-confidence
- Any behavior by a minority that conveys self-confidence (ex taking the head seat at the table) tends to raise self-doubts among the majority - By being firm and forceful, the minority's aparent self-assurance may prompt the majority to reconsider its position. |
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the influence of the minority
defections from the majority |
- A persistent minority punctures any illusion of unanimity.
- When a minority consistenly doubts the majority wisdom, majority members become freer to express their own doubts and may even switch to the minority opinion - A minority person who had defected from the majority was even more persuasive than a consistent minority voice - Informational influence (via persuasive arguments) and normative influence (via social comparison) fuel both group polarization and minority influence - The social impact of any position, majority or minority, depends on the strength, immediacy, and number of those who support it. - Minorities are more likely than majorities to convert people to accepting their views - New recruits to a group exert a diferent type of minority influence than do longtime members. - Newcomers exert influence through the attention they receive and the group awareness they trigger in the old-timers. - Established members feeel freer to dissent and to exert leadership. |
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the influence of the minority
is leadership minority influence? |
- the power of leadership - the proces by which individuals mobilize and guide groups
-- leadership - The process by which certain member motivate and guide the group - Some leaders are formally appointed or elected; others emerge informally as the group interacts. - People tend to respond more positively to a decision if they are given a chance to voice their opinions during the decision-making process - People who value good group feeling and take pride in achievement therefore thrive under democrativ leadership and participative management - The once-popular "great person" theory of leadership - that all great leaders share certain traits - has fallen into disrepute. Effective leadership styles vary with the situation - The most effective supervisors excel at both task and social leadership - they are actively concerned with how work is progressing and senstive to the needs of their subordinates - Such leaders engender trust by consistently sticking to their goals, and they often exude a self-confident charisma that kindles the allegiance of their followers - Groups also influence their leaders - Someone who typifies the group's views is more likely to be selected as a leader; a leader who deviates too radically from the group's standards may be rejected |
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the influence of the minority
is leadership minority influence? task leadership |
- Some people excel at task leadership - at organizing work, setting standards, and focusing on goal attainment
-- Leadership that organizes work, sets standards, and focuses on goals - Task leaders generally have a directive style |
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the influence of the minority
is leadership minority influence? social leadership |
- Others excel at social leadership - at buildign teamwork, mediating conflicts, and being supportive
-- Leadership that builds team work, mediates conflict, and offers support - Social leaders generally have a democratic style |
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the influence of the minority
is leadership minority influence? transformational leadership |
- Motivates others to identify with an commit themselves to the group's mission
-- Leadership that, enables b a leader's vision and inspiration, exerts siginifcant influence - Transformational leaders - many of whom are charismatic, energetic, self-confident extraverts - articulate high standards, inspire people to share their vision, and offer personal attention |
