Social Psychology

by cisc1970

As human beings, we possess our own set of unique characteristics which determine how we will perceive situations or circumstances, as well as other individuals. These sets of characteristics that each of us possesses (each one’s unique from the other) are studied under the branch of social psychology. Social psychology expands on these characteristics as the influence of social interactions over our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Social perception is the correct term for our “unique characteristics”, which are gradually developed from our intake on the social world, including personal experience, observation of others, and received information.

The first major association with social perception covers the idea of forming impressions. An impression is an individual’s initial opinion of another person or individual. A first impression is usually either good or bad, and is very difficult to change after established. People will find more favorable first impressions with individuals who are similar to them, or with individuals who are physically attractive, although these are not the only limitations or determining factors. Personal disclosure, social schemas, stereo-types, and self-fulfilling prophecies also deal with the forming of first impressions. Reasonable personal disclosure is healthy for a first impression, while extensive personal disclosure can lead to disaster. Social schema is the mould or representation we shape for other individuals to help us better understand and organize our social environment. Because impressions are our sense of judgment per se, we use them to compare present reactions to a past mould or representation of another person. Thus the reason why making a first impression is so important is because it will become the social judgment block, until an extremely notable or detrimental action has taken place to either increase or decrease the positive impression of another’s impression upon yourself. Stereotypes are pre-judgments of an individual based on their belonging to a group (e.g. religion, race), rather than their own personal characteristics. This should typically be avoided, but at times can be very accurate. Self-fulfilling prophecies arise when you pre-perceive a person in a certain aspect, negative or positive, and as their actions respond to yours, could create a truth which may have never been (e.g. Steve thinks: “You know that John’s not such a bad guy.” | John thinks “Steve hates me”, and says “Hey Steve! You suck!” | Steve’s response: “Whatever jerk!”).

The next major association to social perception deals with attributions, the personal explanation of events. The two types of explanations are defined as dispositional causes, causes based on an individual’s lacks or talents, and situational causes, causes based on the outside world and environmental factors.  Attributing a failure to an individual’s laziness would be a dispositional cause, while attributing a failure to an unavoidable accident would be a situational cause. Personal cognitive biases such as the fundamental attribution error, actor-observer effect, and the self-serving bias further influence attributions. The fundamental attribution error, which commonly takes place more than not, is when an individual overlooks situational causes, and links the majority of an outcome to a dispositional cause. In other words the person blames the defect on the person’s flaws, rather than taking into consideration the situational causes which might have been involved. The actor-observer effect suggests that individuals are likely to blame situational causes for misfortunes or unfavorable happenings rather than dispositional causes. They will blame environmental factors rather than themselves. In reverse, the self-serving bias suggests that individuals will attribute success or good fortune to dispositional causes rather than to situational causes. Some individuals will credit themselves when a positive happening occurs, rather than calling it an act of luck.

The last perspective of social perception deals with attitude. An attitude can be seen as an individual’s beliefs, emotions (how they feel) and behaviors (what they will carry out) toward another individual, object, or social event. Attitudes are typically developed from a wealth of sources: various people, personal experience, and the media, but can also be indirectly linked to heredity or genes. Because an attitude determines beliefs and emotions toward a person, object or social event, some individuals may suggest that it also defines the behavior of that attitude based on those emotions and beliefs; although it is not necessarily true. For example, a gentleman may be highly interested in a car, and with all his heart may want to purchase it, but if he does not have sufficient funds, than he will not purchase the car (this decision is affected by a situational cause).

Persuasion deals with influencing others to change their attitudes. The ELM (elaboration likelihood model) determines that an individual will more carefully evaluate a persuasive message, when they possess the skills and knowledge needed to carry out that message, and the message is relevant or important to them. This is known as a high motivational state. A low motivational state would be the opposite. Source variables (communicator features), Message variables (meat of the persuasion message), and Recipient variables (audience factors) are other factors which tie into persuasion effectiveness.

Relating to others is the second major topic of social psychology. When people meet, they realize that they either like or dislike each other. This process can better be defined as attraction. Factors which highly influence attraction include similarity, physical attractiveness, proximity, and reciprocity. Physical attractiveness plays more of a role in initial attraction, and usually becomes less important once relationships are formed. The matching hypothesis suggests that people who are not of ideal physical attractiveness will usually search for partners similar to themselves. Similarity is the grounds of comparison between two individuals matching ideals such as interests, social status, intelligence, race, physical attractiveness, etc. Individuals who share no common ground are usually not characteristically attracted to each other. Proximity determines a large role in friendships, because it determines your location to other people. Simply, because you sit next to Anna and John every day, you are more likely to form a relationship with them, than with Steve who sits on the opposite side of the room. Lastly reciprocity is the factor of “liking others who like us back”. Most people like it when someone will go out of the way to do something friendly for them, although too much going out of the way could be a bad sign of deeper intentions than friendship.

Going out of the way for another individual can be defined as a pro-social behavior, performing actions which are beneficial to another individual. As recently mentioned, people who help others for their own motives are the opposite of an individual with altruistic motives (one who helps another with no expectations of benefit for themselves). Bystander intervention is a popular topic to study when studying pro-social behavior. BibbLatane and John Darley developed the decision-making model of helping behavior which helps explain bystander intervention for providing assistance in five steps: 1) Decision that a need for help exists 2) Decision that the situation is a clear emergency 3) Decision to assume personal responsibility for providing aid 4) Decision of what type of help to provide 5) Decision to implement the course of action. Factors which attract or deter an individual to help someone include situational ambiguity (unclear situations), perceived cost, diffusion of responsibility (the more people present, the less the feeling of responsibility), similarity, facial features, mood, gender and race, attributions of the cause of need (he brought it upon himself/ the tornado caused it), and social norms (expected behaviors).

Prejudice would be considered quite the opposite of help, because it usually induces more harm toward other individuals than good. A popular side effect of prejudice is discrimination, the biased treatment of people based on a group judgment rather than a separate evaluation of the person. Once stereotypes or prejudices are developed, they are often difficult to get rid of, and usually flare up in presence of economic and social hardships. They usually develop from repeated exposure to prejudiced behavior toward another group of people, including personal experience, media influence, and teaching. The in-group is the group of people who are not discriminated against (bias-holders), while the out-group contains all those who are discriminated against (everyone outside of the in-group). These promote the ideas of in-group favoritism (treat our own well) and out-group negativism (treat everyone else sub-standard). Another type of prejudice is out-group homogeneity, which suggests that groups outside of our own contain no uniqueness or distinct character between individuals. Individuals who appear to be more prejudiced than others are usually said to have an authoritarian personality, a personality which consists of rigidity and an obsession with obedience and respect for authority. Also, their thinking process scans for differences amongst people, rather than similarities. Gordon Allport created the contact hypothesis, the most widely used model for reducing prejudice, which implements a four step process to reduce prejudice among groups. Firstly, there must be social and institutional support. Secondly, there must be opportunities existent for the two groups to build relationships. Thirdly, equal status must be implemented among all individuals in both groups, so that no sense of superiority exists. Lastly creating instances for the two groups to cooperate and work together will help create bonds between the groups. Apart from Allport’s contact hypothesis, other remedies such as promoting pro-social behavior and teaching acceptance among individuals can help to reduce prejudice.

Racism is yet another form of prejudice, which creates an in-group within the “elite” ethnic group, and out-groups among selected other ethnic groups. Unfortunately many minority ethnic groups today experience being stereotyped, due to their cultural background. A stereotype threat, a term created by Psychologist Claude Steele, is when individuals of the stereotyped group are aware of how negatively others view them, because of their group association. This threat could cause individuals to perform worse than they would otherwise. To counter this threat, Steele suggests that instructors be optimistic about all of their student’s potentials.

While prejudice is an unfavorable human behavior, aggression can be a much worse form of unfavorable human behavior. Many scientists suggest that human aggression stems from a variety of factors including biological (low serotonin/high testosterone levels in the brain), learning (observation of violence/aggression), sociocultural (social distress), emotional (frustration/anger), and environmental (higher temperatures) influences, as well as alcohol use (loosens human restraints), but is far too complex to be explained by instinctual influences.

Differentiating ourselves between personal identity and social identity is another large part of social psychology which decides who we are to ourselves, and who we are to the world (organizations, family, religion, etc.). Social identity tends to be a large part of the human identity, creating a sense of belonging, although social identity is said to be even more important in eastern and collectivist cultures. Social identity is also said to be seen stronger within groups who have suffered mistreatment, and unite to form strength in numbers.

Conformity is the part of social identity which expects us as individuals to sacrifice certain personal characteristics to fit the group requirements. As social creatures, most of us conform to not only social norms, but also to the norms of the individuals we interact with. Solomon Asch conducted a test which measured people’s level of conformity by displaying a simple question, and having the majority choose the obviously incorrect answer. The objective was to see if the individual would conform to the incorrect majority, or stick to what they knew was right. The results showed that individuals conformed to the majority over one-third of the time. There are certain reasons why some people conform more than others. In many cases people will assume that the majority is correct, they are more worried about acceptance than being correct, or/and they find it easier to just go with the flow.

Compliance, a bit different from conformity has more to deal with authority rather than pressure through peers or other groups. Social validation, when an individual bases his/her actions to others actions to see if they are appropriate (considered a social norm), is a factor involved in compliance. Several techniques including the foot-in-the-door technique, bait-and-switch technique, and low-ball technique gain an individual’s compliance, because they first gain the individual’s commitment which is consistent with the later requested course of action. The foot-in-the-door technique first requests an individual to complete a small task, than requests the individual to complete the related larger task. Bait-and-switch displays a too good to be true situation, once the individual is baited in, they say that that certain thing (whatever it may be) is unavailable, and they then switch to the less to good to be true object or whatever it may be. This approach eases the individual into doing something they normally wouldn’t do. The low-ball technique similar to the bait-and-switch offers a great deal, but suddenly this deal cannot be given, so the next-best deal is offered. Lastly the door-in-the-face technique introduces a large task right off the bat, which is rejected, and than re-introduces the actual task as a smaller more reasonable task than the first.

Obedience, the next step up from compliance, tests individuals to comply with an order, even against their own will. Studies such as Stanley Milgram’s obedience test showed that up to 65% of individuals would follow orders to administer highly painful and lethal electrical shocks to other individuals when responsibility was passed from them to the authority. This test raises a big question as to how “good” people would commit heinous acts when the responsibility for the act was no longer on their shoulders. The legitimization of authority suggests that the early teaching we receive as children to obey those in authority without questioning may apply to these types of situations. Also, social comparison and foot-in-the-door technique may be some explanation for the atrocities taken place in Nazi Germany.

Working in groups can be one of the most effective ways to complete a task quickly, but it also requires group harmony, another aspect of social psychology. Social facilitation is the term used to refer to an individual who works best when there are other individuals around. The opposite would be social loafing, when one commits him/herself less to the work than they would if they were on their own. Social loafing usually occurs when certain individuals are not recognized within the group or either they expect others to do the work. Ways to eliminate social loafing include making tasks more interesting, making each contributor visible within the group, increasing individual responsibility, holding each member accountable for his/her contributions, and giving public feedback of individual performance. Deindividuation in a group occurs when large groups are formed and individuals lose the identity of themselves and become identities of the large group. This can be dangerous in situations of destruction such as mobs, racist hatred, and revolts.

Group decisions usually prove to be better than individual based decisions, but two types of group decisions including group polarization and groupthink may lead to unwise decisions. Group polarization is the result of a group of individuals becoming more opposed to each other views than were before (lightly favored views will become strongly favored, while lightly unfavored will become strongly unfavored views). This causes worse decisions to be made within the group due to opposition. Groupthink occurs when the group’s main task is to reach an agreement, and they forget about the importance of evaluating the problem at hand. Groupthink usually happens when members are strongly attached to the group, when an external threat is present, and when there is a strong-minded leader at the head of the group. Because everyone wants to keep things harmonious, it can create a tunnel vision effect, in which certain individuals may not express important ideas if they will conflict, or they will just take the words of other members and the leader. Suggestions to negate the effects of groupthink include encouraging group members to consider all alternatives and weigh evidence, asking the group leader avoid stating preferences, encouraging outsiders to offer opinions and analyses, having group members or outsiders challenge/counter the groups ideas, dividing the group up to independently review issues, and holding group meeting to reassess the situation and evaluate any new information before making any final decisions.