PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: 60 Minutes Ii, American Psychiatric Association, Philip Zimbardo
NAn Invitation to Social Psychology
● Until 1974, the American Psychiatric Association held that homosexuality was
a mental illness
○ From mental illness and illegality of homosexual behavior to tolerance
of samesex marriage—in scarcely more than a generation.
● Why was homosexuality ever such a threat to people in modern Western
societies? In many cultures, homosexuality never was considered abnormal
or reprehensible or even particularly worthy of notice;
Characterizing Social Psychology
● social psychology
○ the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of
individuals in social situations
● many of our most strongly held folk theories or intuitions fail to give complete
answers to important questions, and others are just plain wrong
○ Social psychologists test these intuitions by devising studies and
crafting experiments that reveal the causes of behavior in social
situations.
Explaining Behaviour
● CBS broadcast a story on 60 Minutes II that exposed American atrocities
against Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
○ Iraq community took as an offense
○ many Americans were ashamed of their soldiers
○ Social psychologists, however, were not so quick to make such an
assumption.
■ **** RMB the case → Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues paid
24 Stanford University undergraduate men, chosen for their
good character and mental health, to be participants in a study
of a simulated prison
● Thus, at both Abu Ghraib and Stanford, “It’s not that we
put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a
bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches”
● Social psychologists study situations in which people exert influence over one
another, as well as the ways people respond to influence attempts of various
kinds.
○ how people make sense of their world—how they decide what and
whom to believe;
○ how they make inferences about the motives, personalities, and
abilities of other people; and how they reach conclusions about the
causes of events.
● Research by social psychologists regularly influences government policy. For
example, research on the effects of different kinds of welfare programs is
used in shaping government assistance policies
○ Research also affects decisions by the courts
Comparing Social Psychology with Related Disciplines
● Personality psychology is a close cousin of social psychology, but it
emphasizes individual differences in behavior rather than the social situation
○ try to find a consistent pattern in the way a person behaves across
situations—an individual’s position on a trait dimension.
○ Social psychologists would examine the general situation at Abu
Ghraib, in which orders were not clear but the guards were pressured
to “soften up” the prisoners to get information about other insurgents
and future attack
■ Personality psychologists would instead look at whether certain
traits and dispositions—for example, sadism or hostility—
● Social psychology is also related to cognitive psychology,
○ many psychologists call themselves cognitive social psychologists.
○ Social psychologists differ from cognitive psychologists primarily in that
the topics they study are usually social, such as social behavior and
perceptions of other people.
■ Cognitive psychologists would be more likely to study
categorization processes or memory for words or objects.
● Sociology is the study of behavior of people in the aggregate.
○ Sociologists study institutions, subgroups, bureaucracies, mass
movements, and changes in the demographic characteristics of
populations (for example, age, gender, socioeconomic status).
○ A sociologist might study how economic or government policy
influences marriage and divorce rates in a population
■ whereas a social psychologist would be more likely to study why
individuals fall in love, get married, and sometimes get divorced.
The Power of the Situation
● Kurt Lewin
○ founder of modern social psychology
○ applied a powerful idea from physics to an understanding of
psychological existence → He believed that the behavior of people, like
the behavior of objects, is always a function of the field of forces in
which they find themselves
● The field of forces in the case of human behavior is the role of the situation,
especially the social situation, in guiding behavior.
○ The main situational influences on our behavior, influences that we
often misjudge or fail to see altogether, are the actions—and
sometimes just the mere presence—of other people.
○ e.g. Friends, romantic partners, even total strangers can cause us to
be kinder or meaner, smarter or dumber, lazier or more hardworking,
bolder or more cautious
● We rely on other people for clues about what emotions to feel in various
situations and even to define who we are as individuals
○ demonstrating the power of the situation.
The Milgram Experiment
● experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram
○ a man in a white lab coat told them they would be participating in a
study about the effects of punishment on learning.
○ There would be a “teacher” and a “learner,” and the learner would try to
memorize word pairs such as wild/duck.
■ The participant “teacher” was then instructed to administer
shocks—from 15 to 450 volts—to the “learner” each time he
made an error.
● Most participants became concerned as the shock levels increased and
turned to the experimenter to ask what should be done, but the experimenter
insisted they go on.
○ 80 percent of the participants continued past the 150-volt level—at
which point the learner mentioned that he had a heart condition and
screamed,
○ Fully 62.5 percent of the participants went all the way to the 450-volt
level, delivering everything the shock generator could produce.
● Instead, the situation was extraordinarily effective in getting them to do
something that would normally fill them with horror
Seminarians as Samaritans
● experiment by John Darley and Daniel Batson
○ These investigators asked students about the basis of their religious
orientation to determine whether particular students were primarily
concerned with religion as a means toward personal salvation or were
more concerned with religion for its other moral and spiritual values.
● psychologists asked each young seminarian to go to another building to
deliver a short sermon.
○ The seminarians were told what route to follow to get there most easily.
■ Some were told that they had plenty of time to get to the building
where they were to deliver the sermon
Document Summary
Until 1974, the american psychiatric association held that homosexuality was a mental illness. From mental illness and illegality of homosexual behavior to tolerance of samesex marriage in scarcely more than a generation. In many cultures, homosexuality never was considered abnormal or reprehensible or even particularly worthy of notice; Social psychology the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations. Many of our most strongly held folk theories or intuitions fail to give complete answers to important questions, and others are just plain wrong. Social psychologists test these intuitions by devising studies and crafting experiments that reveal the causes of behavior in social situations. Cbs broadcast a story on 60 minutes ii that exposed american atrocities against iraqi prisoners in the abu ghraib prison near baghdad. Many americans were ashamed of their soldiers. Social psychologists, however, were not so quick to make such an assumption. **** rmb the case philip zimbardo and his colleagues paid.
