500 CHAPTER 12
Chapter Summary
- Social psychology is the scientific study of how a person’s
thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the real,
imagined, or implied presence of other people.
Social Influence
- 1 Identify factors that influence people or groups to
conform to the actions of others.
- Asch used a set of comparison lines and a standard line to exper-
iment with conformity, finding that subjects conformed to group
opinion about one third of the time, increased as the number of
confederates rose to four, and decreased if just one confederate
gave the correct answer. - Cross-cultural research has found that collectivistic cultures
show more conformity than individualistic cultures. Gender
differences do not exist in conformity unless the response is not
private, in which case women are more conforming than men.
- 2 Explain how our behavior is impacted by the
presence of others.
- Groupthink occurs when a decision-making group feels that it is
more important to maintain group unanimity and cohesiveness
than to consider the facts realistically. Minimizing groupthink
involves holding group members responsible for the decisions
made by the group. - Group polarization occurs when members take somewhat more
extreme positions and take greater risks as compared to those
made by individuals. - When the performance of an individual on a relatively easy task
is improved by the presence of others, it is called social facili-
tation. When the performance of an individual on a relatively
difficult task is negatively affected by the presence of others, it is
called social impairment.- When a person who is lazy is able to work in a group of peo-
ple, that person often performs less well than if the person were
working alone, in a phenomenon called social loafing. - Deindividuation occurs when group members feel anonymous
and personally less responsible for their actions.
- 3 Compare and contrast three compliance
techniques.
- Compliance occurs when a person changes behavior as a result
of another person asking or directing that person to change. - Three common ways of getting compliance from others are the
foot-in-the-door technique, the door-in-the-face technique, and
the lowball technique.
- 4 Identify factors that make obedience more likely.
- Obedience involves changing one’s behavior at the direct order
of an authority figure. - Milgram did experiments in which he found that 65 percent of
people obeyed an authority figure even if they believed they
were hurting, injuring, or possibly killing another person with
electric shock.
Social Cognition- 5 Identify the three components of an attitude and
how attitudes are formed.
- Attitudes are tendencies to respond positively or negatively
toward ideas, persons, objects, or situations.
which may be linked to the social areas of the brain (Adolphs, 2010). Consider autism,
a developmental disorder than includes impaired social functioning, or Alzheimer’s,
Parkinson’s, or Huntington’s disease, all of which also have impaired social functioning.
Many psychological disorders also involve abnormal social behavior—depression, the
various personality disorders, and anxiety disorders, to name a few. Understanding how
these malfunctions occur within the brain is a huge step on the road to changing that
behavior. Where social psychologists once studied human interactions through observ-
ing outward behavior, social neuroscientists now study the most intimate workings of
the social brain.Questions for Further Discussion- Can you think of other diseases or disorders which include disrupted social
behavior? - What are the drawbacks of drawing parallels between nonhuman primate behavior
and human behavior?