PSY2043 Ch17 Lecture Notes

PSY2043 Introduction to Psychology

Ch17 Social Influence

Intended Learning Outcomes

• Explore how the presence of others influences people’s behavior.
  • Deindividuation
  • Bystander effects
  • Social facilitation & inhibition
• Cover how deindividuation and bystanders influence social behavior.
  • Deindividuation
    • enhancing group identity
    • promotes conformity to situation-specific social norms
  • Bystander effects – people are less likely to help if others are present
    • Pluralistic ignorance – everybody in group misleads everybody else by defining situation as non-emergency
    • Diffusion of responsibility – Presence of others, even imagined others, diffuses responsibility so no one person feels need to act
• Be introduced to classic experiments on compliance and obedience.
  • Asch’s experiment – unanimous agreement among a group exerts strong pressures on individual to conform, even when judgements clearly wrong
  • Milgram’s classical experiment
• Learn how the classic Zimbardo Prison Experiment illustrates the power of situations and institutional norms.
  • Institutions have norms that strongly govern the behavior of people who occupy critical roles within the institution. An example of how institutional norms shape group interactions is provided by the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which ordinary young men were randomly assigned roles of ‘prisoner’ and ‘guard’ in a simulated prison.
• Define the fundamental attribution error and provide an example.
  • Fundamental attribution error – tendency to explain other’s actions by overestimating personality influence but underestimating situational influence.
  • e.g. Imagine you witness a colleague arriving late to an important meeting. Instead of considering external factors like traffic or a family emergency, you attribute their tardiness to a lack of punctuality or irresponsibility (internal, dispositional factors). In reality, the colleague might have faced unexpected traffic delays, highlighting the fundamental attribution error by focusing on the person’s traits rather than the situation.
• Explain when and why social facilitation vs. social inhibition occurs.
  • Social facilitation – simple or well-learned tasks
  • Social inhibition – complex or poorly learned tasks
  • Why – the presence of others narrows people’s attention
• Describe how deindividuation can produce aggression.
  • Creates increased sensitivity to situation-specific social norms linked with the group.
  • Minimizes people’s personal identities
  • Reduces sense of accountability
• Explain pluralistic ignorance and why it matters.
  • everybody in group misleads everybody else by defining situation as non-emergency
• Discuss the differences between informational and normative social influence.
  • Informational social conformity – we conform because we believe that other people’s interpretations of an ambiguous situation are more correct than our own.
  • Normative social influence – we conform because we believe that other people’s interpretations of an ambiguous situation are more correct than our own.
• Explain the importance of Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority.
  • Showed that ordinary people would obey experimenter’s order to deliver strong electric shocks to innocent victim
• Discuss various explanations for why people change their attitudes to reflect their past behavior.
  • Cognitive dissonance theory – when people’s behavior conflicts with their attitudes it creats an uncomfortable tension that motivates them to change their attitudes to be more in line with their actions.
    • Rationalization, Self-justification
  • Self-perception theory – stating that inner turmoil does not necessarily occur. To the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, people may simply infer their attitudes from their past behavior.
• Explain group polarization and why it happens.
  • Group polarization: The group decision is in the same direction but is more extreme than the average of the group members’ initial positions. This is not just public conformity; group members’ private attitudes typically shift in response to the group discussion as well.
  • The group polarization effect is due in part to informational social influence, in which group members learn new information and hear novel arguments that are relevant to the decision under discussion. Group polarization is also produced by normative social influence, in which people compare their own initial views with the norms of the group. They may then adjust their position to conform to that of the majority.

The Presence of Others

Social facilitation and social inhibition

Deindividuation

Bystander effects

Compliance and Obediance

Comformity to a Majority

Minority influence

Obediance to Authority

Internalization

Self-justification

Reference groups and idenitifacation

Group Interactions

Institutional norms

Group decision making

Recap: Social Psychological Views of the Seemingly Inexplicable