Social Psychology

Chapter 20 & 21 Review

Group Behavior

• When the desire to be part of a group prevents a person from seeing other alternatives.

Groupthink

Group Behavior

• When a person performs better in front of a group.

Social facilitation

Group Behavior

• Not doing your best in a group because you think others will do more

Social Loafing

Group Behavior

• When group attitudes become stronger after they discuss and act upon the shared attitudes.

Polarization

Group Behavior

• When a person is willing to do things with a group they would not do alone.

Risky Shift

Group Behavior

• Feeling you are less responsible when with a group

Diffusion of responsibility

Group Behavior

• Loss of self-awareness and self-restraint, and loss of sense of responsibility when in a group.

Deindividuation

Helping & Moral Behavior

• Sacrificing your own welfare to help another person.

Alturism

Helping & Moral Behavior

• Obviously neglecting someone needing help because of diffusion of responsibility.

Bystander Effect

Helping & Moral Behavior

• Any behavior that helps another person.

Prosocial Behavior

Helping & Moral Behavior

• This real life case study led to the theory of bystander effect.

Kitty Genovese Murder

Helping & Moral Behavior

• These experimenters tested helping behavior by faking an epileptic seizure.

Darley & Latane

Conformity & Obedience

• Found people would knowingly give the wrong answer to conform to the group.

Asch’s Line Experiment

Conformity & Obedience

• Unspoken or unwritten rules – you don’t pass gas in math class but you might when with friends.

Implicit Norms

Conformity & Obedience

• Guidelines for what people should or should not do in a situation

Social Norms

Conformity & Obedience

• Spoken or written rules – dress codes or traffic laws.

Explicit Norms

Conformity & Obedience

• Our the desire to be correct makes us more likely to conform

Informational social influence

Conformity & Obedience

• Our desire to gain social acceptance and approval that causes us to conform

Normative social influence

Conformity & Obedience

• Found most people would obey an authority figure to do something hurtful to another if authority figure accepted responsibility.

Milgram’s Shock Experiment

Aggression

• Found good people will become aggressive in the right environment or when they buy into their roles

Zimbardo’s Prison Study

Social Perception

• People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get.

Just-World Bias

Social Perception

• Recent interactions with a person cause you to change your opinion about them.

Recency Effect

Social Perception

• “When I get good grades it is because I am smart. When I don’t it is because the teacher is bad.”

Self-Serving bias

Social Perception

• The mental processes used in making judgments about people.

Person perception �

Social Perception

• First impressions are lasting impressions; dress up for a job interview.

Primacy Effect

Social Perception

• When you think a person is rude because the only time you saw the person was when they were impolite to another; forming a judgment on one behavioral observation.

Actor-Observer Bias

Social Perception

• Tendency to give too much weight to personality factors and not enough weight to situational factors when observing someone’s behavior.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Social Perception

• “When something bad happens it is always my fault. When something good happens it is luck.”

Self-Effacing Bias

Social Perception

• “She deserved to be mugged for being in that neighborhood after dark.” Their misfortune is their own fault.

Blaming the Victim

Social Perception

• Ignores a person’s unique qualities and makes a conclusion about a person based on limited information. Like to group people

Social Categorization

Social Perception

• We often explain our own behavior differently than we explain the behavior of other people; can lead to errors.

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Attribution Theory

Social Perception

• Waitresses received higher tips when making change with their customers this way.

Physical Contact

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Positive or negative evaluation of a person, object or idea.

Attitudes

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Prejudice was overcome when groups cooperate to achieve a common goal.

Robbers Cave

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Blaming a complex problem on an undeserving group.

Scapegoat Theory

Attitudes & Prejudice

• After being discriminated against, a person may put down another group that is worse off in order to gain power.

Victimization

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Unfair treatment of a person because they are part of a particular group.

Discrimination

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Children will imitate their parents’ attitudes and parents will reinforce these attitudes in their children.

Social Learning

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Unjustifiable attitude towards a group or a member; usually negative.

Prejudice

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Belief that people with less money are lazy and do not work as hard.

Justifying Economic Status

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Oversimplified belief about a group that is certainly not true about all people in that group. Tall people are good basketball players.

Stereotype

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Tendency to favor one’s own group even at the expense of others.

Ingroup Bias

Attitudes & Prejudice

• Tendency to see people who are not part of our group as being very similar, when we see people of our own group as varied.

Out-Group Homogeneity Effect

Attitudes & Prejudice

• This experiment with school children showed how quickly ingroups and outgroups can be formed and how prejudice can influence one’s performance.

Jane Elliot’s Blue/Brown Eye Experiment