BIOL130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Philip Zimbardo, Social Loafing, Chameleon
21 Jan 2020
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PSYCH 101 chapter 13
Social Influences on Behavior
In 2004 Darby received a CD with pictures from Graner. The CD contained pictures of prisoners in Abu
Ghraib prison being abused by American soldiers. Darby turned the pictures in and the soldiers that were abusing
the Iraqi prisoners were punished.
The person and the situation
• Phillip Zimbardo was a psychologist
o Suggested that when things go wrong “its not the bad apples it’s the bad barrels”
o Meaning that it’s not individuals that are the problem but the whole system
o Said that just a few sadistic individuals don’t exist but many social psychological
forces that, together, set up a situation that was hard to resist being evil
o We all have the capacity to do terrible things if we fall into the wrong
circumstances
• Kurt Lewis (1936) expressed this insight as B = f(P,E):
o Behaviour is a function of the Person and the Environment
▪ This challenged Freud's theory that a person is driven by the
unconscious
▪ also challenged behaviorism ,which emphasise is a persons past history
of conditioning
mimicry
taking on for ourselves the behaviours, emotional displays, and facial expressions of others
• Humans are social beings, going with the flow, observational learning, not necessarily know,
depends on communication and behavioural coordination, conscious and unconscious levels
• chameleon effect: people mimic others non-consciously, automatically copying others’
behaviours even without realizing it
o For example laughing when everyone else around you is laughing
o a benefit of this as you make good impressions on those around you
• social norms: unwritten guidelines for how to behave in social context
o For example the manners we use around her friends versus or grandparents, what we
wear in these situations (wouldn't wear ripped jeans around grandparents, but would
around friends)
Group Dynamics
• social loafing - which occurs when an individual puts less effort into working on a task with
others.
o Occurs on physical activities, cognitive activities and creativity
o Low efficacy beliefs. This occurs if tasks are too difficult or complex, so people don’t
know where to start
o Believing that one’s contributions are not important to the group, can’t see how their
own input matters to the group
o Not caring about the group’s outcome, not personally identified with the group
final exam
o Feeling like others are not trying very hard, people loaf if they feel others are loafing
• social facilitation occurs when one’s performance is affected by the presence of others
o The effects of arousal due to social facilitation depend on one’s skills and the difficulty
of the task; the greater the skills and the simpler the tasks, the more likely the presence
of others will enhance performance
• Groupthink refers to this stifling of diversity that occurs when individuals are not able to express
their true perspectives, instead having to focus on agreeing with others and maintaining
harmony in the group
o Overconfidence, minimize risk of problems and pressure unsupportive people, often a
strong directive leader that suppresses dissenters
Conformity
• normative influence - a social pressure to adopt a group’s perspective in order to be accepted,
rather than rejected, by a group,
o accept publicly but not privately
• informational influence - which occurs when people internalize the values and beliefs of the
group, coming to believe the same things and feel the same ways themselves
• low conformity when there is only two people but maximum when there is three, there are
norms created by society that influence us to make decisions
• even though groups are powerful, individuals can be powerful too
bystander effect - the presence of other people actually reduces the likelihood of helping behaviour
• as the number of people increase helping goes down,
• diffusion of responsibility - which occurs when the responsibility for taking action is spread
across more than one person, thus making no single individual feel personally responsible
o the more the people the more likely it is that people will assume someone else will do
something
• pluralistic ignorance - This occurs when there is a disjunction between the private beliefs of
individuals and the public behaviour they display to others
• social roles are more specific sets of expectations for how someone in a specific position should
behave
o the Stanford prison study: personal factors lead people to be better able to resist
destructive situations
• obedience to authority: the Milgram experiment
o 65% of people continued the torture, couldn’t resist the power of simple authority
o 30% when they were in the room, 10% when other participants protested, 92.5% when
only giving orders
Social Cognition
• The Diallo’s shooting in New York, prejudice?
• Explicit processes - which correspond roughly to “conscious” thought, are deliberative, effortful,
relatively slow and generally under our intentional control
• Implicit processes comprise our “unconscious” thought; they are intuitive, automatic, effortless,
very fast, and operate largely outside of our intentional control
• dual-process models - Models of behaviour that account for both implicit and explicit processes
• person perception - the processes by which individuals categorize and form judgments about
other people
o Schemas are organized clusters of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about
individuals and groups, which influence our attention and perceptual processes
o we make very rapid, implicit judgments of people based on thin slices of behaviour -
very small samples of a person’s behaviour
o impressions form quickly and they can be very accurate
• self-fulfilling prophecies - which occur when a first impression (or an expectation) affects one’s
behaviour, and then that affects other people’s behaviour, leading one to “confirm” the initial
impression or expectation
Projecting the self onto others, self-serving bias and attributions
• false consensus effect - This tendency to project the self-concept onto the social world
• naive realism - We tend to assume that the way we see things is the way that they are
• self-serving biases - which are biased ways of processing self-relevant information to enhance
our positive self-evaluation
o better than average effect is just another way we keep our self-esteem intact, forms
base of our interactions and impressions
• internal attribution (also known as a dispositional attribution), where by the observer explains
the behaviour of the actor in terms of some innate quality of that person
• external attributions (also known as situational attributions), whereby the observer explains the
actor’s behaviour as the result of the situation
o come with time
• fundamental attribution error (FAE) - tendency to over-emphasize internal (dispositional)
attributions and under-emphasize external (situational) factors
o more in individualistic societies like Canada and the US and not in collectivistic cultures
like China or Japan
Ingroups and Outgroups
• ingroups – Groups we feel positively toward and identify with
• outgroups are those “other” groups that we don’t identify with
• ingroup bias - As positive biases toward the self get extended to include one’s ingroups, people
become motivated to see their ingroups as superior to their outgroups
• minimal group paradigm - how easily people will form social categories, Us vs. Them, even using
criteria that are meaningless
o people categorized in groups meaninglessly (group X and Y) would prefer their own
o triggering favoritism and powerful biases form based on real-world history of conflicts
• Without naive realism, we would be plagued by doubts as we constantly second-guessed our
perceptions of the world.
• Without a positive sense of self-evaluation, it would be easy to feel useless, helpless, and
generally miserable
• Without the ability to attach ourselves to desired ingroups, we would lack self-identity
Stereotype, Prejudice and Discrimination
