Chapter 14: Social Psychology

Chapter Summary

Social Cognition: Attitudes LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1 Explain how attitudes form and change and what role they play in behaviour.

• Attitudes are relatively stable and enduring evaluations of things and people. According to the ABC model, they have affective, behavioural, and cognitive components. • Parents play a major role in shaping children’s attitudes. In older children, peers, teachers, and the media also exert an influence. • Leon Festinger proposed that people change their attitudes when they experience cognitive dissonance—a state of emotional discomfort that arises when a person holds two contradictory beliefs or holds a belief inconsistent with his behaviour. • The self-perception theory of attitude change minimizes the role of emotional discomfort and suggests that people simply infer what their attitudes are by observing their own behaviour. • The attitudes people express are not necessarily related to their behaviour. In part, this is because people sometimes misrepresent their attitudes. They may wish to express socially desirable attitudes, or they may not be aware of what their implicit attitudes really are. • Stereotypes and prejudice arise in part from the human tendency to identify with a group. Various explanations of prejudice come from evolutionary theories, realistic conflict theory, and social identity theory. • People use persuasion techniques to try to influence the attitudes of others. The central route to persuasion emphasizes the content of the message, while the peripheral route depends on more superficial appeals, such as the appearance of the spokesperson.

Social Cognition: Attributions LEARNING OBJECTIVE 2 Discuss how people make attributions to explain their own behaviour and the behaviour of others.

• Attributions, or causal explanations of behaviour, can be dispositional (internal) or situational (external). • People tend to attribute their own behaviour to situational factors and the behaviour of others to dispositional factors. The reliance on dispositional factors to explain others’ behaviour is the fundamental attribution error. • According to the actor–observer effect, this discrepancy exists because people make situational attributions as actors and dispositional attributions as observers. • People sometimes attribute only their failures to situational factors and attribute their successes to dispositional factors, called the self-serving bias. Social Forces LEARNING OBJECTIVE 3 Describe the power of conformity and obedience in shaping people’s behaviour.

• Society establishes rules, or norms, about how people are supposed to act. Social roles are sets of norms ascribed to particular social positions. Norms and roles are critical to the smooth functioning of society, but also place limits on individuals. • Conformity is the tendency to yield to real or imagined group pressure. In a famous series of experiments, Solomon Asch found that 75 percent of research participants yielded to implicit group pressure to conform to an incorrect judgment. • Unlike conformity, obedience involves following direct orders, usually from an authority figure. Experiments by Stanley Milgram found that 65 percent of subjects continued to follow orders to administer what they believed to be dangerous electric shocks.

Social Relations LEARNING OBJECTIVE 4 Review major concepts in the areas of group dynamics, helping behaviour, aggression, and interpersonal attraction.

• The social facilitation effect occurs when the presence of others enhances a person’s performance. Research shows that this effect holds for simple, well-learned tasks; but the presence of others can impair performance on more complicated tasks. • With social loafing, people in a group exert less effort on a task than they would if performing the task alone. • Group polarization is a phenomenon in which group discussion intensifies the already-held opinions of group members and produces a shift toward a more extreme position. • Groups with certain characteristics—a strong similarity among members, high group cohesiveness, high-perceive threat, elevated stress, insulation from outside influence, and a directive leader—may become victims of groupthink, a faulty decision-making process in which group members strive for unanimity at the expense of realistically appraising alternative courses of action. • Helping behaviour is of two types: altruism, which is motivated by concern for others, and egoistic helping behaviour, which is motivated by a desire to reduce one’s own distress or receive rewards. • People are more likely to engage in helping behaviour when alone than when in the presence of others. Theorists propose that the presence of others may create a diffusion of responsibility, in which no single individual feels personal responsibility for acting. • Aggression describes a broad range of behaviours intended to do harm to another. Aggression has some biological underpinnings. In addition, the frustration-aggression hypothesis proposes that aggression arises in response to frustration. • Factors that lead to liking another person include similarity, proximity, self-disclosure, situational, and physical attractiveness. • One description of love includes three elements: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Another, Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, holds that love is composed of intimacy, passion, and commitment, which combine in varying degrees. • Similar to young children, adults display three types of attachment in love relationships: secure attachment, avoidant attachment, and anxious-ambivalent attachment. Social Functioning What Happens in the Brain? LEARNING OBJECTIVE 5 Describe the major findings of social neuroscience about regions of the brain particularly important to our social functioning.

• Social neuroscience is the specialty of neuroscience that studies how the brain works during social functioning. Social functioning is so important and uniquely human that social neuroscientists have given the name “social brain” to the combination of brain areas that are particularly active in social functioning. • The orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, insula, and amygdala all have been identified as especially important in social functioning. Researchers continue to try to pinpoint neural connections related to social functioning.

Disorders of Social Functioning When Things Go Wrong LEARNING OBJECTIVE 6 Describe the major features of social phobias, anxiety disorder, avoidant personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, and autism.

• People with social phobias have severe, persistent, and irrational fears of social situations in which embarrassment may occur. • Avoidant personality disorder involves extreme discomfort and inhibition in social relationships. • People with dependent personality disorder display a pervasive, excessive need to be taken care of and a fear of separation. • Autism is a severe disorder marked by extreme unresponsiveness, poor communication skills, and very repetitive and rigid behaviours.