Invitation to Psychology

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Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

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378 ChapteR 10 Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

• Social psychologists study how social roles, attitudes, relationships, and groups influence individuals.


• Cultural psychologists study the influence of culture on human behavior.

Roles and Rules

• Norms are rules that regulate social life, including explicit laws and implicit cultural conventions.


• Roles are social positions that are regulated by norms about how people in those positions should behave.


• Social roles are shaped by culture, a set of shared rules and values of a community or society.

Two Classic Studies

• In Milgram’s obedience study, most people inflicted
  what they thought was extreme shock on another
  person because of the experimenter’s authority.


• In the Stanford prison study, students quickly took on
  the role of “prisoner” or “guard.”

Why People Obey

Several factors cause people to obey, including:

• Unpleasant consequences for disobedience and benefits of obedience.


• Respect for and dependence on the authority.


• Wanting to be polite or liked; not wanting to rock the boat.


• Entrapment: increasing commitment to a course of action to justify
  one’s investment in it.

Social Influences on Beliefs and Behavior

Attributions

Attribution theory holds that people explain

their own and other people’s behavior by

attributing its causes to a situation or disposition.

• The fundamental attribution error is the
  tendency to ignore situational factors in favor
  of dispositional ones.

Three self-serving biases contribute to the

fundamental attribution error:

• The bias to choose forgiving and flattering
  attributions for our behavior.


• The bias that we are better, smarter, and
  kinder than other people.


• The bias to believe that the world is fair (the
  just-world hypothesis).

Attitudes

• Attitudes may be implicit
  (unconscious) or explicit
  (conscious).


• They may be altered because of
  the need to reduce cognitive
  dissonance.

Shifting Opinions and

Bedrock Beliefs

• Efforts to get people to change
  their attitudes often rely on the
  familiarity effect and the validity
  effect.


• Some attitudes are highly heritable
  (e.g., religiosity and certain
  political views) and thus resist
  change, but many are influenced
  by the nonshared environment.

Persuasion or

“Brainwashing”

Social-psychological factors

are involved in the making of

a terrorist as well as recruit-

ing a person to membership

in religious and other sects:

• The person is subjected to
  entrapment.


• The person’s problems are
  explained by a simple
  attribution (“It’s the fault
  of those bad people”).


• The person is offered a
  new identity and salvation.


• The person’s access to
  disconfirming informtion
  is severely controlled.

Attributions

Situational Dispositional

“Why is Aurelia so mean and crabby lately?”

“She’s under pressure.” “She’s self-involved and clueless.”

Fundamental Attribution Error

(May lead to)

Ignoring inuence of situation

on behavior and emphasizing

personality traits alone.

Social cognition is the study of social influences on thought, memory, perception, and beliefs.