Unit 6: Social Behavior Flashcards
Solomon Asch
PERSPECTIVE ON CONFORMITY
In some of the classic research into impression formation, Solomon Asch demonstrated the importance that what he called central traits can have on the impressions we form of others. When you interact with people, you’re constantly engaged in person perception, the process of forming impressions of others. People show considerable ingenuity in piecing together clues about others’ characteristics. However, impressions are often inaccurate because of the many biases and fallacies that occur in person perception.
Asch devised a clever procedure that reduced ambiguity about whether subjects were conforming, allowing him to investigate the variables that govern conformity. Let’s re-create one of Asch’s classic experiments, which have become the most widely replicated studies in the history of social psychology. The subjects are male undergraduates recruited for a study of visual perception. A group of seven subjects is shown a large card with a vertical line on it and the subjects are then asked to indicate which of three lines on a second card matches the original “standard line” in length. All seven subjects are given a turn at the task, and they announce their choice to the group. The subject in the sixth chair doesn’t know it, but everyone else in the group is an accomplice of the experimenter, and they’re about to make him wonder whether he has taken leave of his senses.
The accomplices give accurate responses on the first two trials. On the third trial, line 2 clearly is the correct response, but the first five “subjects” all say that line 3 matches the standard line. The genuine subject is bewildered and can’t believe his ears. Over the course of the next 15 trials, the accomplices all give the same incorrect response on 11 of them. How does the real subject respond? The line judgments are easy and unambiguous. So, if the participant consistently agrees with the accomplices, he isn’t making honest mistakes—he’s conforming.
Averaging across all 50 participants, Asch found that the young men conformed on 37 percent of the trials. The subjects varied considerably in their tendency to conform, however. Of the 50 participants, 13 never caved into the group, while 14 conformed on more than half of the trials. One could argue that the results show that people confronting a unanimous majority generally tend to resist the pressure to conform. However, given how clear and easy the line judgments were, most social scientists viewed the findings as a dramatic demonstration of humans’ propensity to conform.
In subsequent studies, Asch found that group size and group unanimity are key determinants of conformity. To examine the impact of group size, Asch repeated his procedure with groups that included from 1 to 15 accomplices. Little conformity was seen when a subject was pitted against just one person, but conformity increased rapidly as group size went from two to four, and then leveled off. Thus, Asch reasoned that as groups grow larger, conformity increases—up to a point, a conclusion that has been echoed by other researchers.
Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid
Two early pioneers in research on love were Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid. They have proposed that romantic relationships are characterized by two kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is a complete absorption in another that includes tender sexual feelings and the agony and ecstasy of intense emotion. Companionate love is warm, trusting, tolerant affection for another whose life is deeply intertwined with one’s own. Passionate and companionate love can co-exist. They don’t, however, necessarily go hand in hand. Initially, it was thought that passionate love peaks in intensity early in relationships and then declines significantly over time. However, more recent research suggests that in relationships that remain intact, the erosion of passionate love tends to be gradual and modest, with levels remaining fairly high in most couples .
Research demonstrates that passionate love is a powerful motivational force that produces profound changes in people’s thinking, emotion, and behavior. Interestingly, brain-imaging research indicates that when people think about someone they are passionately in love with, these thoughts light up the dopamine circuits in the brain that are known to be activated by cocaine and other addictive drugs. Perhaps that explains why passionate love sometimes resembles an addiction.
Passionate and companionate love may co-exist, but they don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Research suggests that, as a general rule, companionate love is more strongly related to relationship satisfaction than passionate love. The distinction between passionate and companionate love has been further refined by Robert Sternberg. He subdivides companionate love into intimacy and commitment. Intimacy refers to warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship. Commitment is an intent to maintain a relationship in spite of the difficulties and costs that may arise.
John Cacioppo
The elaboration likelihood model of attitude change, originally proposed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, asserts that there are two basic “routes” to persuasion. The central route is taken when people carefully ponder the content and logic of persuasive messages. The peripheral route is taken when persuasion depends on non message factors, such as the attractiveness and credibility of the source, or on conditioned emotional responses. For example, a politician who campaigns by delivering carefully researched speeches that thoughtfully analyze complex issues is following the central route to persuasion. In contrast, a politician who depends on marching bands, flag-waving, celebrity endorsements, and emotional slogans is following the peripheral route.
Both routes can lead to persuasion. However, according to the elaboration likelihood model, the durability of attitude change depends on the extent to which people elaborate on (think about) the contents of persuasive communications. Studies suggest that the central route to persuasion leads to more enduring attitude change than the peripheral route. Research also suggests that attitudes changed through central processes predict behavior better than attitudes changed through peripheral processes.
William Cunningham
William Cunningham, a faculty member at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues, have examined a variety of social psychological topics from a social neuroscience perspective. In one study they used the characteristics of implicit and explicit evaluations to explore the role of the amygdala in people’s responses to white and black faces. Previous neuroscience research had often implicated the amygdala in fear responses, and other social psychological research had shown that whites frequently show more negative evaluations of blacks than of whites. During the fMRI, white participants were presented with various stimuli, including neutral-expression black and white faces. The stimuli were presented briefly (30 milliseconds) or for a longer duration (525 milliseconds). Cunningham used the shorter presentation time to assess automatic responses to the stimuli, and the longer presentation times to assess controlled, conscious evaluations of the stimuli.
Cunningham expected that his white participants would show greater activation in the amygdala when presented with black faces, most notably under brief presentation times, when automatic responses were being assessed, and this is just what the result of his experiments revealed. In addition, Cunningham found that this heightened activation of the amygdala was especially true for participants that he had previously identified as being more racially biased. This and other similar research suggests that “implicit associations to a social group may result in automatic emotional response when encountering members of that group”. Findings of greater amygdala response to black faces using fMRI methods is common in the literature. Other parallel research in the area has employed ERP techniques. At this point, it is unclear whether these effects reflect negative evaluations of black faces or are the result of greater “perceptual” expertise on the part of white participants for the faces of ingroup (i.e., white) members. Considerable research effort is currently being devoted to these and other questions in the neuropsychology of stereotypes and prejudice.
While the social neuroscience approach has clear limitations, we believe it will increasingly contribute to our understanding of human behavior in a social context and that the range of the phenomena to which it is applied will continue to expand. As neuroscientists continue to explore ways of integrating models of neuroscience with models of social psychology, we expect the literature to offer more, and more refined, explanations that contribute to our understanding of ourselves and others.
Leon Festinger
Leon Festinger’s dissonance theory assumes that inconsistency among attitudes propels people in the direction of attitude change. Dissonance theory had a profound impact on the directions taken by researchers in social psychology, and in other disciplines. It burst into prominence in 1959 when Festinger and J. Merrill Carlsmith published a famous study of counterattitudinal behavior. Let’s look at their findings and at how dissonance theory explains them.
Festinger and Carlsmith had male college students come to a laboratory, where they worked on excruciatingly dull tasks such as turning pegs repeatedly. When a subject’s hour was over, the experimenter confided that some participants’ motivation was being manipulated by telling them that the task was interesting and enjoyable before they started it. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, the experimenter asked if the subject could help him out of a jam. His usual helper was delayed and he needed someone to testify to the next “subject” (really an accomplice) that the experimental task was interesting. He offered to pay the subject if he would tell the person in the adjoining waiting room that the task was enjoyable and involving.
This entire scenario was enacted to coax participants into doing something that was inconsistent with their true feelings—that is, to engage in counterattitudinal behavior. Some participants received a token payment of $1 for their effort, while others received a more substantial payment of $20 (an amount equivalent to about $164 today, in light of inflation). Later, a second experimenter inquired about the subjects’ true feelings regarding the dull experimental task.
Who do you think rated the task more favorably—the subjects who were paid $1 or those who were paid $20? Both common sense and learning theory would predict that the subjects who received the greater reward ($20) should come to like the task more. In reality, however, the subjects who were paid $1 exhibited more favorable attitude change—just as Festinger and Carlsmith had predicted. Why? Dissonance theory provides an explanation.
According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance exists when related cognitions are inconsistent—that is, when they contradict each other. Cognitive dissonance is thought to create an unpleasant state of tension that motivates people to reduce their dissonance—usually by altering their cognitions. In the study by Festinger and Carlsmith, the subjects’ contradictory cognitions were “The task is boring” and “I told someone the task was enjoyable.” The subjects who were paid $20 for lying had an obvious reason for behaving inconsistently with their true attitudes, so these subjects experienced little dissonance. In contrast, the subjects paid $1 had no readily apparent justification for their lie and experienced high dissonance. To reduce it, they tended to persuade themselves that the task was more enjoyable than they had originally thought. Thus, dissonance theory sheds light on why people sometimes come to believe their own lies.
Cindy Hazen and Philip Shaver
In a groundbreaking analysis of love, Hazan and Shaver looked at similarities between adult love and attachment relationships in infancy. We noted in Chapter 11 that infant-caregiver bonding, or attachment, emerges in the first year of life. Early attachments vary in quality, and infants tend to fall into three groups. Most infants develop a secure attachment. However, some are very anxious when separated from their caregiver, a syndrome called anxious-ambivalent attachment. A third group of infants, characterized by avoidant attachment, never bond very well with their caregiver.
According to Hazan and Shaver, romantic love is an attachment process, and people’s intimate relationships in adulthood follow the same form as their attachments in infancy. In their theory, a person who had an anxious-ambivalent attachment in infancy will tend to have romantic relations marked by anxiety and ambivalence in adulthood. In other words, people relive their early bonding experiences with their parents in their romantic relationships in adulthood.
Hazan and Shaver’s initial survey study provided striking support for their theory. They found that adults’ love relationships could be sorted into groups that paralleled the three patterns of attachment seen in infants. Secure adults found it relatively easy to get close to others and described their love relations as trusting. Anxious-ambivalent adults reported a preoccupation with love, accompanied by expectations of rejection, and they described their love relations as volatile and marked by jealousy. Avoidant adults found it difficult to get close to others and described their love relations as lacking intimacy and trust. Research eventually showed that attachment patterns are reasonably stable over time and that people’s working models of attachment are carried forward from one relationship to the next. These findings supported the notion that individuals’ infant attachment experiences shape their intimate relations in adulthood.
Research on the correlates of adult attachment styles has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s. Consistent with the original theory, research has shown that securely attached individuals have more committed, satisfying, intimate, well-adjusted, and longer-lasting relationships than do people with anxious-ambivalent or avoidant attachment styles. Moreover, studies have shown that people with different attachment styles are predisposed to think, feel, and behave differently in their relationships. For example, people high in attachment anxiety tend to behave in awkward ways that undermine their dating success. Worried about the likelihood of rejection, they end up courting rejection by acting cold, wary, disengaged, and preoccupied with themselves. When they do get involved in romantic relationships, people high in attachment anxiety tend to overreact emotionally to conflict with their partners. Their exaggerated expressions of hurt and vulnerability are designed to make their partners feel guilty, but these manipulative efforts end up having a negative impact on their relationship.
Fritz Heider
Fritz Heider was the first to describe how people make attributions. He asserted that people tend to locate the cause of behavior either within a person, attributing it to personal factors, or outside a person, attributing it to environmental factors.
Elaborating on Heider’s insight, various theorists have agreed that explanations of behavior and events can be categorized as internal or external attributions. Internal attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings. External attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to situational demands and environmental constraints. For example, if a friend’s business fails, you might attribute it to his or her lack of business acumen (an internal, personal factor) or to negative trends in the nation’s economic climate (an external, situational explanation). Parents who find out that their teenage son has just banged up the car may blame it on his carelessness (a personal disposition) or on slippery road conditions (a situational factor).
Internal and external attributions can have a tremendous impact on everyday interpersonal interactions. Blaming a friend’s business failure on poor business acumen as opposed to a poor economy will have a great impact on how you view your friend. Likewise, if parents attribute their son’s automobile accident to slippery road conditions, they’re likely to deal with the event very differently than if they attribute it to his carelessness.
Irving Janis
DESCRIBED GROUPTHINK
Irving Janis first described groupthink in his effort to explain how former U.S. president John F. Kennedy and his advisors could have miscalculated so badly in deciding to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The attempted invasion failed miserably and, in retrospect, seemed remarkably ill-conceived.
Applying his many years of research and theory on group dynamics to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Janis developed a model of groupthink. When groups get caught up in groupthink, members suspend their critical judgment and the group starts censoring dissent as the pressure to conform increases. Soon, everyone begins to think alike. Moreover, some members serve as “mind guards” and try to shield the group from information that contradicts the group’s view.
If the group’s view is challenged from outside, victims of groupthink tend to think in simplistic “us versus them” terms. Members begin to overestimate the ingroup’s unanimity, and they begin to view the outgroup as the enemy. Groupthink also promotes incomplete gathering of information. Like individuals, groups often display a confirmation bias, as they tend to seek and focus on information that supports their initial views.
Recent research has uncovered another factor that may contribute to groupthink—individual members often fail to share information that is unique to them. Sound decision making depends on group members combining their information effectively. However, when groups discuss issues, they have an interesting tendency to focus mainly on the information that the members already share as opposed to encouraging offers of information unique to individual members. Additional research is needed to determine why groups are mediocre at pooling members’ information.
What causes groupthink? According to Janis, a key precondition is high group cohesiveness. Group cohesiveness refers to the strength of the liking relationships linking group members to each other and to the group itself. Members of cohesive groups are close-knit, are committed, have “team spirit,” and are very loyal to the group. Cohesiveness itself isn’t bad. It can facilitate group productivity and help groups achieve great things. But Janis maintains that the danger of groupthink is greater when groups are highly cohesive. Groupthink is also more likely when a group works in relative isolation, when the group’s power structure is dominated by a strong, directive leader, and when the group is under stress to make a major decision. Under these conditions, group discussions can easily lead to group polarization, strengthening the group’s dominant view.
A relatively small number of experiments have been conducted to test Janis’s theory, because the antecedent conditions thought to foster groupthink—such as high decision stress, strong group cohesiveness, and dominating leadership—are difficult to create effectively in laboratory settings. The evidence on groupthink consists mostly of retrospective case studies of major decision-making fiascos. So, Janis’s model of groupthink should probably be characterized as an innovative, sophisticated, intuitively appealing theory that needs to be subjected to much more empirical study.
Dennis Krebs
EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ON PERSON PERCEPTION
Why is the process of person perception riddled with bias? Evolutionary psychologists like Simon Fraser University’s Dennis Krebs argue that some of the biases seen in social perception were adaptive in humans’ ancestral environment. For example, they argue that person perception is swayed by physical attractiveness because attractiveness was associated with reproductive potential in women and with health, vigor, and the accumulation of material resources in men.
What about the human tendency to automatically categorize others? Evolutionary theorists attribute this behavior to our distant ancestors’ need to quickly separate friend from foe. They assert that humans are programmed by evolution to immediately classify people as members of an ingroup—a group that one belongs to and identifies with, or as members of an outgroup—a group that one does not belong to or identify with. This crucial categorization is thought to structure subsequent perceptions. As Krebs and Denton put it, “It is as though the act of classifying others as ingroup or outgroup members activates two quite different brain circuits”. Ingroup members tend to be viewed in a favorable light, whereas outgroup members tend to be viewed in terms of various negative stereotypes. According to Krebs and Denton, these negative stereotypes (“They are inferior; they are all alike; they will exploit us”) move outgroups out of our domain of empathy, so we feel justified in not liking them or in discriminating against them, or even in some circumstances dehumanizing them.
Evolutionary psychologists, then, ascribe much of the bias in person perception to cognitive mechanisms that have been shaped by natural selection.
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram wanted to study this tendency to obey authority figures. Like many other people after World War II, he was troubled by how readily the citizens of Germany had followed the orders of dictator Adolf Hitler, even when the orders required morally repugnant actions, such as the slaughter of millions of Jews. Milgram, who had worked with Solomon Asch, set out to design a standard laboratory procedure for the study of obedience, much like Asch’s procedure for studying conformity. The clever experiment that Milgram devised became one of the most famous and controversial studies in the annals of psychology. It has been hailed as a “monumental contribution” to science and condemned as “dangerous, dehumanizing, and unethical research”.
Milgram’s participants were a diverse collection of 40 men from the local community. They were told that they would be participating in a study concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. When they arrived at the lab, they drew slips of paper from a hat to get their assignments. The drawing was rigged so that the subject always became the “teacher” and an experimental accomplice became the “learner.”
In the research, participants were induced to use shocks on learners in a learning experiment as feedback when the learners failed at a rigged task. While the learners were in fact confederates and the shocks were nonexistent, participants believed that they had delivered potentially harmful shocks to another person because they were told to do so by an authority figure, the experimenter. In the experiment, participants were induced to increase the shocks to what they believed would be dangerous levels as the learner continued to make mistakes in his task performance. Most participants went ahead and increased the shocks. Decades after the research was conducted, it still generates spirited debate.
After his initial demonstration, Milgram tried about 20 variations on his experimental procedure, looking for factors that influence participants’ obedience. In one variation, Milgram moved the study away from Yale’s campus to see if the prestige of the university was contributing to the subjects’ obedience. When the study was run in a seedy office building by the “Research Associates of Bridgeport,” only a small decrease in obedience was observed (48 percent of the subjects gave all of the shocks). Even when the learner was in the same room with the subjects, 40 percent of the participants administered the full series of shocks. As a whole, Milgram was surprised at how high subjects’ obedience remained as he changed various aspects of his experiment.
That said, there were some situational manipulations that reduced obedience appreciably. For example, if the authority figure was called away and the orders were given by an ordinary person (supposedly another participant), full obedience dropped to 20 percent. In another version of the study, Milgram borrowed a trick from Asch’s conformity experiments and set up teams of three teachers that included two more accomplices. When they drew lots, the real subject was always selected to run the shock apparatus in consultation with the other two “teachers.” When both accomplices accepted the experimenter’s orders to continue shocking the learner, the pressure increased obedience a bit. However, if an accomplice defied the experimenter and supported the subject’s objections, obedience declined dramatically (only 10 percent of the subjects gave all the shocks), just as conformity had dropped rapidly when dissent surfaced in Asch’s conformity studies. These findings are interesting in that they provide further support for Milgram’s thesis that situational factors exert great influence over behavior. If the situational pressures favoring obedience are decreased, obedience declines, as one would expect.
Milgram’s study evoked a controversy that continues to the present. According to Murray Goddard of the University of New Brunswick, some of the hesitation to accept Milgram’s findings may have resulted from the fact that they were counter to human intuition. Other critics have argued that Milgram’s results can’t be generalized to apply to the real world. They maintain that the participants went along only because they knew it was an experiment and “everything must be okay.” And some have argued that subjects who agree to participate in a scientific study expect to obey orders from an experimenter. Milgram replied by arguing that if subjects had thought, “everything must be okay,” they wouldn’t have experienced the enormous distress that they clearly showed.
As for the idea that research participants expect to follow an experimenter’s commands, Milgram pointed out that so do real-world soldiers and bureaucrats who are accused of villainous acts performed in obedience to authority. “I reject Baumrind’s argument that the observed obedience doesn’t count because it occurred where it is appropriate,” said Milgram. “That is precisely why it does count.” Overall, the evidence supports the generalizability of Milgram’s results, which were consistently replicated for many years, in diverse settings, with a variety of subjects and procedural variations.
Critics also questioned the ethics of Milgram’s procedure. They noted that without prior consent, subjects were exposed to extensive deception that could undermine their trust in people and to severe stress that could leave emotional scars. Moreover, most participants also had to confront the disturbing fact that they caved in to the experimenter’s commands to inflict harm on an innocent victim.
Milgram’s defenders argued that the brief distress experienced by his subjects was a small price to pay for the insights that emerged from his obedience studies. Looking back, however, many psychologists seem to share the critics’ concerns about the ethical implications of Milgram’s work. His procedure is questionable by contemporary standards of research ethics, and no replications of his obedience study have been conducted in the United States from the mid-1970s until recently, when Jerry Burger crafted a very cautious, partial replication that incorporated a variety of additional safeguards to protect the welfare of the participants.
Robert Sternberg
The distinction between passionate and companionate love has been further refined by Robert Sternberg. He subdivides companionate love into intimacy and commitment. Intimacy refers to warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship. Commitment is an intent to maintain a relationship in spite of the difficulties and costs that may arise.
Bernard Weiner
After studying the attributions that people make in explaining success and failure, Bernard Weiner (1980, 1986, 1994, 2004) concluded that people often focus on the stability of the causes underlying behavior. According to Weiner, the stable–unstable dimension in attribution cuts across the internal–external dimension, creating four types of attributions for success and failure.
Let’s apply Weiner’s model to a concrete event. Imagine that you’re contemplating why you failed to get a job that you wanted. You might attribute your setback to internal factors that are stable (lack of ability) or unstable (inadequate effort to put together an eye-catching résumé). Or you might attribute your setback to external factors that are stable (too much outstanding competition) or unstable (bad luck). If you got the job, your explanations for your success would fall into the same four categories: internal–stable (your excellent ability), internal–unstable (your hard work to assemble a superb résumé), external–stable (lack of top-flight competition), and external–unstable (good luck).
Weiner’s model can be used to understand complex issues in the real world. For example, when people analyze the causes of poverty, their explanations tend to fit neatly into the cells of Weiner’s model: internal-stable (laziness, lack of thrift); internal-unstable (financially draining illness); external-stable (discrimination, inadequate government programs for training); and external-unstable (bad luck, economic recession).
Mark Zanna
Our perception of others is also subject to self-fulfilling prophecy; in effect, creating what we expect to see. This was clearly demonstrated in a classic study by Mark Zanna and his colleagues. The study was designed to show the operation of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you hold strong beliefs about the characteristics of another group, you may behave in such a way so as to bring about these characteristics. The research had two studies. In the first study, researchers had white undergraduate males interview either a black or white job applicant. The applicant was, in fact, an experimental accomplice or confederate. It was found that when the job applicant was black, the interviewers tended to sit farther away, end the interview more quickly, and make more speech errors (e.g., stuttering, stammering). Clearly, then, the white interviewers changed how they acted depending on the race of the interviewee. In interviewing a white accomplice, they adopted what was referred to as an immediate style (i.e., sitting closer, more eye contact), but when they interviewed a black accomplice they used a nonimmediate style (i.e., sitting farther away, making more speech errors, looking away).
In the second study, Word, Zanna, and Cooper attempted to find out how it would feel to have someone behave toward you in a nonimmediate style. In the study, white experimental accomplices interviewed other white students while adopting either the immediate or nonimmediate style. Students who had been interviewed in the nonimmediate style seemed more anxious and did not perform as well in the interview.
When we think about the effects of stereotypes, we often focus on the effects our stereotypes have on others and how self-fulfilling prophecy processes might serve to confirm those stereotypes. But, of course, our stereotypes also affect us; they influence our conceptualizations of our social environment. But the influence of our stereotypes on us doesn’t end there; they can also directly affect our own behavior.
Attitudes
Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought. “Objects of thought” may include social issues (capital punishment or gun control, for example), groups (liberals, farmers), institutions (the Lutheran Church, the Supreme Court), consumer products (yogurt, computers), and people (the prime minister, your next-door neighbor).
Attributions
Attributions are inferences that people draw about the causes of events, others’ behavior, and their own behavior. If you conclude that a friend turned down your invitation because she’s overworked, you have made an attribution about the cause of her behavior (and, implicitly, have rejected other possible explanations). If you conclude that you’re stuck at home with nothing to do because you failed to plan ahead, you’ve made an attribution about the cause of an event (being stuck at home). If you conclude that you failed to plan ahead because you’re a procrastinator, you’ve made an attribution about the cause of your own behavior. People make attributions mainly because they have a strong need to understand their experiences. They want to make sense out of their own behavior, others’ actions, and the events in their lives. In this section, we’ll take a look at some of the patterns seen when people make attributions.
Bystander Effect
When it comes to helping behavior, many studies have uncovered an apparent paradox called the bystander effect: people are less likely to provide needed help when they are in groups than when they are alone.
Channel
The process of persuasion includes an examination of factors that affect persuasion, with research in the area emphasizing four basic elements: source, receiver, message, and channel. The source is the person who sends a communication, and the receiver is the person to whom the message is sent. So, if you watch a political news conference on TV, the politician is the source, and you and millions of other viewers are the receivers. The message is the information transmitted by the source, and the channel is the medium through which the message is sent.
Cognitive Dissonance
According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance exists when related cognitions are inconsistent—that is, when they contradict each other. Cognitive dissonance is thought to create an unpleasant state of tension that motivates people to reduce their dissonance—usually by altering their cognitions.
Collectivism
Decades of research have shown that cultural differences in individualism versus collectivism influence attributional tendencies as well as many other aspects of social behavior. Individualism involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships. In contrast, collectivism involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one’s identity in terms of the groups one belongs to (such as one’s family, tribe, work group, social class, and caste).
Commitment
The distinction between passionate and companionate love has been further refined by Robert Sternberg. He subdivides companionate love into intimacy and commitment. Intimacy refers to warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship. Commitment is an intent to maintain a relationship in spite of the difficulties and costs that may arise.
Companionate Love
Two early pioneers in research on love were Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid. They have proposed that romantic relationships are characterized by two kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is a complete absorption in another that includes tender sexual feelings and the agony and ecstasy of intense emotion. Companionate love is warm, trusting, tolerant affection for another whose life is deeply intertwined with one’s own. Passionate and companionate love can co-exist. They don’t, however, necessarily go hand in hand.
Conformity
Conformity occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure. For example, if you maintain a well-groomed lawn only to avoid complaints from your neighbors, you’re yielding to social pressure. If you like Rage Against the Machine because you genuinely enjoy their music, that’s not conformity. However, if you like Rage because doing so is “cool” and your friends would question your taste if you didn’t, then you’re conforming.
Defensive Attribution
The defensive attribution is the tendency to blame victims for their misfortunes, so that one feels less likely to be victimized in a similar way. The defensive attribution is relevant to situations in which you are attempting to explain calamities and setbacks that befall others. Here, an observer’s tendency to make internal attributions becomes even stronger than normal. Blaming a victim helps people maintain their belief in a just world, where they are unlikely to suffer a similar fate.
Discrimination
Prejudice may lead to discrimination, which involves behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group. Prejudice and discrimination tend to go hand in hand, but attitudes and behavior do not necessarily correspond.
Elaboration Likelihood Model
The elaboration likelihood model of attitude change, originally proposed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, asserts that there are two basic “routes” to persuasion. The central route is taken when people carefully ponder the content and logic of persuasive messages. The peripheral route is taken when persuasion depends on non message factors, such as the attractiveness and credibility of the source, or on conditioned emotional responses. For example, a politician who campaigns by delivering carefully researched speeches that thoughtfully analyze complex issues is following the central route to persuasion. In contrast, a politician who depends on marching bands, flag-waving, celebrity endorsements, and emotional slogans is following the peripheral route.
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is a tendency to view one’s own group as superior to others and as the standard for judging the worth of foreign ways.
Explicit Attitudes
Explicit attitudes are attitudes that we hold consciously and can readily describe. For the most part, these overt attitudes are what social psychologists have always studied until fairly recently.
External Attributions
External attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to situational demands and environmental constraints. For example, if a friend’s business fails, you might attribute it to his or her lack of business acumen (an internal, personal factor) or to negative trends in the nation’s economic climate (an external, situational explanation). Parents who find out that their teenage son has just banged up the car may blame it on his carelessness (a personal disposition) or on slippery road conditions (a situational factor).
Foot-in-the-Door Technique
The foot-in-the-door technique involves getting people to agree to a small request to increase the chances that they will agree to a larger request later. This technique is widely used in all walks of life. For example, groups seeking donations often ask people to simply sign a petition first.
Fundamental Attribution Error
A common form of bias seen in observers is the fundamental attribution error, which refers to observers’ bias in favor of internal attributions in explaining others’ behavior.
Group
In social psychologists’ eyes, a group consists of two or more individuals who interact and are interdependent. Historically, most groups have interacted on a face-to-face basis, but advances in telecommunications are rapidly changing that situation. In the era of the Internet, people can interact, become interdependent, and develop a group identity without ever meeting in person.
Group Cohesiveness
What causes groupthink? According to Janis, a key precondition is high group cohesiveness. Group cohesiveness refers to the strength of the liking relationships linking group members to each other and to the group itself. Members of cohesive groups are close-knit, are committed, have “team spirit,” and are very loyal to the group. Cohesiveness itself isn’t bad. It can facilitate group productivity and help groups achieve great things. But Janis maintains that the danger of groupthink is greater when groups are highly cohesive. Groupthink is also more likely when a group works in relative isolation, when the group’s power structure is dominated by a strong, directive leader, and when the group is under stress to make a major decision. Under these conditions, group discussions can easily lead to group polarization, strengthening the group’s dominant view.
