PSYCH101 Final: Psych Exam MC Notes from Readings
7 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Psychology: Final Exam Content
Social Psychology – Chapter 13
Module 13.1 - The Power of Situation: Social Influences of Behaviour
- The hope is that by understanding the social and psychological dynamics that lead to
tragedies, they may be able to be prevent in the future
- Cannot solely blame the individual perpetrators for wrong doings, must also examine the
situational forces
✴ If we fail to appreciate the power of the situation, how can we prevent history from
repeating itself?
- The situational analysis is never enough to fully explain a behaviour pattern; in the final
analysis, people are the ones responsible for their own behaviour
- Social psychologists study the interaction between the person and the situation to try and
fully understand social reality
✴ Kurt Lewin termed B = f(P,E) ~ behaviour is a function of the person and the environment
✴ Lewin’s physics metaphor: a persons behaviour is the consequences of sets of forces
operating on the person, and once an analyst sufficiently understood the forces, the the
person’s behaviour could be predicted
- Mimicry: taking on for ourselves the behaviours, emotional displays and facial expressions
of others
✴ Go with the flow or be influenced by others
✴ Communication and behavioural coordination
- Chameleon effect: describes how people mimic others non-consciously, automatically
copying others behaviour even without realizing
- Mimicry and imitation are deeply ingrained consciously and unconsciously
- Social norms: the (usually unwritten) guidelines for how to behave in social contexts
- As a result of social pressures being powerful and unnoticed by individuals, a variety of
fascinating group dynamics emerge
Group Dynamics: Social Loafing and Social Facilitation
- Social loafing: occurs when an individual puts less effort into working on a task with others
- Factors that encourage loafing:
✴ Low efficacy beliefs
✴ Believing that one’s contributions are not important to the group
✴ Not caring about the groups outcome
✴ Feeling like others are not trying very hard
- Social facilitation: occurs when one’s performance is affected by the presence of others
✴ 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 task the more likely the presence of
others will enhance performance
Groupthink
- 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
✴ In recent years, the U.S. war in Iraq has been criticized as being due to groupthink
✴ Point: when groupthink is involved, the search for alternative solutions and creative ideas
does not happen
The Asch Experiments: Conformity
- Experiment: participants were seated at a table with other “secret experiments” acting as
participants; asked a question about a picture
✴ When participant responded privately, they were almost 100% correct
✴ When the answers were spoken aloud in the group, the participant then picked the
wrong answer 75% of the time
✴ Conclusion: many people conformed to the confederates response and gave the wrong
answer
- Experiment showed that conformity can happen through either
✴ Normative influence: a social pressure to adopt a groups perspective in order to be
accepted, rather than ejected, by a group (leads to public acceptance, not private
acceptance)
✴ Informational influence: occurs when people internalize the values and beliefs of the
group, coming to believe the same things and feel the same ways themselves (leads to
privately accepting the group norm)
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Examining Why People Confirm ~ Seeing is Believing
- Consciously making a choice that one knows it wrong should activate the prefrontal cortex
(involves executive function abilities)
- The act of perceiving visual stimuli activates certain parts of the frontal, occipital and
parietal cortices ~ perceptual
- If it turns out that the group’s perception actually changes the way that people perceive a
stimuli, hen when people are conforming to the group, the perceptual networks of the brain
should be activated
- fMRI scans while participants undergo Asch experiments show true conformity intentions
- RELEVANCE: shows that when people conform to a group, it can potentially change their
basic perceptions about the world at a deep level
- As you go through your day, social norms are operating continuously, shaping your
behaviour in countless ways
The Bystander Effect: Situational Influences on Helping Behaviour
- The bystander effect: the presence of other people actually reduces the likelihood of
helping behaviour ~ as you add people to a situation, the helping rate decreases
- Diffusion of responsibility: occurs when the responsibility for taking action is spread across
more than one person, thus making no single individual feel personally responsible
- Pluralistic ignorance: occurs when there is a disjunction between the private beliefs of
individuals and the public behaviour they display to others
✴ One of its conclusions: it is possible for a social norm, which is not privately held by a
single person in the group, to develop in a group and exert pressure on each person
- Latane and Darley smoke room experiment
results
✴ 75% of participants in room alone got up to
investigate, but only 10% of participants in
room filled with other participants got up to
investigate
- The bystander effect, diffusion of responsibility,
and pluralistic ignorance can often work
together to ensure that people who need help
don’t get it
- Social roles: more specific sets of expectations
for how someone in a specific position should
behave
✴ Contrasts with social norms (general rules that apply to members of a group)
✴ Roles emerge within specific positions of society because the rest of society experts the
person to behave in accordance with the role
✴ Roles can lead people to do things that they would never thing they would be capable of
Social Roles: The Stanford Prison Study
- 1971: Philip Zimbardo at Stanford wanted to study the impact that situations could have on
people
13
PSYCH101 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
13 documents
Document Summary
Module 13. 1 - the power of situation: social influences of behaviour. The hope is that by understanding the social and psychological dynamics that lead to tragedies, they may be able to be prevent in the future. Cannot solely blame the individual perpetrators for wrong doings, must also examine the situational forces. The situational analysis is never enough to fully explain a behaviour pattern; in the final analysis, people are the ones responsible for their own behaviour. Social psychologists study the interaction between the person and the situation to try and fully understand social reality. Kurt lewin termed b = f(p,e) ~ behaviour is a function of the person and the environment. Lewin"s physics metaphor: a persons behaviour is the consequences of sets of forces operating on the person, and once an analyst sufficiently understood the forces, the the person"s behaviour could be predicted. Mimicry: taking on for ourselves the behaviours, emotional displays and facial expressions of others.
