Week 13 · Chapter

Chapter 13 — Social Psychology

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~40–50 minutes · Objective 8 (apply psychological science to social behavior, stress and health, and the classification and evidence-based treatment of psychological disorders, using accurate and non-stigmatizing language), Objective 2 (evaluate psychological research methods and ethics, distinguishing correlation from causation, random sampling from random assignment, and identifying sources of bias) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Analysis Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

Other people change what you think, what you feel, and what you do, often without your noticing. Social psychology is the part of psychology that studies that pull: how people explain one another, influence one another, and relate to one another. This week you will see why you judge a stranger's mistake more harshly than your own, how your own actions can change your opinions, and why ordinary people go along with a group or follow an order they dislike. You will also meet the bystander effect, the finding that a person is less likely to help in an emergency when other people are around. The big lesson is that the situation a person is in is often more powerful than it looks.

Why you already care about this

You are driving to campus on a 3-lane highway, and a car swerves into your lane without signaling. You brake hard. "What a jerk," you mutter, and you are sure you know what kind of person is behind that wheel. The next morning you oversleep, and you cut in front of someone at a merge to make up 2 minutes. When you get to class 10 minutes late, you explain, "Traffic was terrible."

Same behavior, two explanations. When someone else does it, you blame their character. When you do it, you blame the road. That small double standard opens the whole week, because it is one of the most common errors people make about one another.

The rest of the week asks bigger versions of the same question. Why did 26 of 40 ordinary people in Milgram's 1963 study keep following orders all the way to a switch marked 450 volts? Why did 85% of students in Darley and Latané's 1968 intercom study report an emergency when they thought they were alone, but only 31% when they thought four others could hear it? In both studies, a change in the situation moved the numbers.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

tell a dispositional attribution from a situational one, and spot the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias in an everyday case;
explain cognitive dissonance with the $1 and $20 result, and name the foot-in-the-door phenomenon and the two routes to persuasion;
describe Asch's line-judgment studies and tell normative from informational social influence;
state Milgram's 65% baseline and explain how changing the situation changed obedience;
name five group effects and match each one to a scene from a group project or a crowd;
explain the bystander effect with Darley and Latané's 85%, 62%, and 31%, and name the IV and DV in both studies;
define stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination, and name what keeps them going and what reduces them.

Carry this sentence with you: look at the situation, not only the person.

Where we are

Already covered: Weeks 1 and 2 built the "how do we know?" habit, including experiments and research ethics. Weeks 3 to 10 looked inside one person: the brain, the senses, learning, memory, thinking, motives, and feelings. Weeks 11 and 12 followed that person over a lifetime and asked what makes each of us who we are.
This week: the person in a world of other people: attributions, attitudes, conformity, obedience, groups, helping, and prejudice.
How they connect: Week 2's experiment returns in both of this week's worked studies, and Week 12's traits meet their limit, because the situation often predicts behavior better than the trait does.
Where we're going next: Week 14, Stress, Health & Coping, opens the last unit's second question: how pressure from the world reaches the body.

Two earlier ideas matter most this week. In Week 2 you met the experiment: a researcher manipulates an independent variable (IV), measures a dependent variable (DV), and, because the groups differ only in the manipulation, can draw a causal conclusion. You also met the ethics rules, informed consent, deception with a justification, and debriefing. Week 2 used Milgram's study as an ethics case. This week you see what the study actually found.

1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases

A coworker shows up late to a Monday shift. You can explain it two ways. Maybe she is careless. Or maybe her bus broke down. Either way, you have made a guess about why a person acted, and psychologists study those guesses.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. Its first question is about explanations.

An attribution is an explanation a person gives for why someone, including oneself, behaved a certain way.
A dispositional attribution points to something about the person, such as personality, ability, or character: "she is careless."
A situational attribution points to something about the circumstances, such as traffic, time pressure, or what other people did: "her bus broke down."

Both kinds of explanation can be right. The trouble is that people do not use them evenly. Two biases show up again and again.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency, when explaining other people's behavior, to over-credit their character and to underweight the situation they were in (Ross, 1977).
The self-serving bias is the tendency to take personal credit for one's own successes while blaming one's failures on the situation (Miller & Ross, 1975).

Worked example — the driver and the late arrival. Label each explanation from the opening scene.

The other driver. You said, "What a jerk." That points to the person, so it is a dispositional attribution. You knew nothing about the situation: a sick child in the back seat, a missed exit, a blind spot. Over-crediting character for someone else's act is the fundamental attribution error.
Your own late arrival. You said, "Traffic was terrible." That points to the circumstances, so it is a situational attribution. You were explaining your own failure, and you put it on the situation, so this is the self-serving bias.
The flip side. If you aced an exam the same week and said, "I studied hard," you would be taking credit for a success. That is the self-serving bias too: credit inside, blame outside.

In words: the fundamental attribution error is about other people, and the self-serving bias is about you. The first blames their character. The second protects your own.

Why do these biases happen? When you watch someone else, the person is what you see; the situation is mostly invisible. When you are the actor, you see the situation all around you. The fix is the question this chapter carries: what situation might explain this?

Misconception check. Students often blur the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias, because both involve a character explanation and a situation explanation. The cure is to ask whose behavior is being explained. If it is someone else's behavior and the explanation leans on their character, it is the fundamental attribution error. If it is your own behavior and you credit yourself for a win or blame the situation for a loss, it is the self-serving bias. Other people: character. Yourself: credit in, blame out.

2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion

You saved for months and bought an expensive phone. Within a week, the battery disappoints you. Yet when a friend asks, you hear yourself say, "Honestly, it's the best phone I've owned." Something made you defend the purchase even as it let you down.

An attitude is a feeling or belief about a person, object, idea, or event that can guide how a person acts toward it. Most people assume attitudes come first and actions follow. Social psychology found that the arrow also runs the other way.

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable tension of holding two inconsistent beliefs or of acting against one's own attitude, which people often relieve by changing the attitude to fit the action. Leon Festinger proposed the idea in 1957. You cannot un-buy the phone, so the easier move is to like it more.

Worked example — the $1 and $20 study. Follow the logic of Festinger and Carlsmith (1959).

The setup. Students spent a long stretch on a dull, repetitive task. Then each was paid to tell the next person that the task was interesting. Some were paid $1. Others were paid $20.
The tension. Every student said something they did not believe. A student paid $20 had a good outside reason: "I said it for the money." A student paid $1 had almost no outside reason, so the gap between act and belief stayed open.
The result. Later, the students paid $1 rated the task as more enjoyable than the students paid $20 did.
What it means. With too little reward to explain the lie, the $1 students closed the gap from the inside. They changed the attitude to fit the act.

In words: the smaller payment produced the larger change of heart. That is the opposite of what a reward-based guess predicts, and it is why the study is famous.

Actions can also be used, on purpose, to move attitudes. The foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the tendency for people who have agreed to a small request to agree more readily to a larger request later (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). A volunteer group asks you to sign a petition for a bike lane. A month later the same group asks you to put a sign in your yard. Having said yes once, you are more likely to say yes again.

Messages persuade in two ways (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

The central route to persuasion is attitude change that happens through careful thought about the quality of the arguments and evidence in a message.
The peripheral route to persuasion is attitude change that happens through surface cues, such as a speaker's fame or attractiveness or a catchy song, rather than through the arguments themselves.

A shopper comparing two laptops' battery tests and repair records is on the central route. A shopper who picks the laptop a famous gamer holds in an ad is on the peripheral route. Central-route change tends to last longer, because the person built the reasons themselves.

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Describe a purchase, choice, or commitment you later defended more strongly than the facts warranted, and explain how cognitive dissonance fits it.

(b) Describe an ad or message that tried to persuade you, and say which route it used and how you can tell.

Misconception check. Students often predict that the students paid $20 should have liked the task more, because bigger rewards usually mean more liking. It is tempting because Week 6 taught that rewards strengthen behavior. The cure is to remember what dissonance is about: explaining yourself to yourself. A large payment is a ready explanation for the lie, so there is no tension to fix. A tiny payment leaves the tension in place, and changing the attitude is how people relieve it.

3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity

You are in a study group of six. The instructor posts a practice question, and the other five all choose answer C. You were sure it was B. Do you say B out loud? Many people would quietly switch.

Conformity is changing one's behavior or judgment to match the behavior or judgments of a group. Solomon Asch built a famous test of it.

Worked example — Asch's line judgments. Walk through the procedure of Asch (1951).

The task. A participant sat with a group and judged which of three lines matched a standard line in length. The right answer was easy to see.
The trick. Everyone else in the group was a confederate, a person secretly working with the researcher. Each participant made 18 judgments. On 12 of them, every confederate gave the same wrong answer out loud before the participant spoke.
The count. A critical trial is one of the 12 of Asch's 18 trials on which every confederate gave the same wrong answer, so group pressure was present. On the other 18 − 12 = 6 trials, the confederates answered correctly.
The results, in words. About one third of the critical-trial answers went along with the wrong majority. Roughly three in four participants conformed at least once, and about one in four never did. Control participants who judged the lines without group pressure erred on under 1 percent of trials.

In words: alone, people almost never got these lines wrong. With a unanimous group, a large share of people gave a wrong answer at least once. The lines did not change; the situation did.

One honesty note: the exact conformity rate in Asch's work differs from one summary to another, which is why this course states it in words, "about one third," rather than as a decimal.

Why go along? Psychologists name two kinds of pressure (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

Normative social influence is going along with a group in order to be accepted or to avoid disapproval, even while privately disagreeing.
Informational social influence is going along with a group because its members seem to know better, so their answers are taken as evidence about what is correct.

Worked example — two new employees. Label each one.

The dress code. On day one at a warehouse job, Tomás sees that everyone wears the company cap. He thinks the cap looks silly, but he wears it so he will not stand out. He privately disagrees and goes along to fit in, so this is normative social influence.
The software. On day one at an accounting office, Mei-Lin watches coworkers file reports through a menu she would never have found. She follows their method because they seem to know the system well. She goes along because the group seems to know better, so this is informational social influence.

Misconception check. Students often think the people in Asch's study who went along had truly misjudged the lines. Some did doubt themselves, which is informational influence. But the lines were easy, and control participants almost never erred, so many conformers saw the right answer and gave the wrong one anyway. That is normative influence. A second trap is the reverse: the belief that most people conformed on most trials. About one third of critical-trial answers conformed, and about one in four participants never conformed at all.

4. Follow an order: Milgram and the power of the situation

A shift supervisor tells a new employee to skip a safety check because the truck is late. The employee hesitates. Then the supervisor says, "I'll take responsibility." Many people would do it. How far would that go?

Obedience is following the direct orders of an authority figure; in Milgram's studies it was measured as continuing to the 450-volt switch. Stanley Milgram set out to measure how far ordinary people would go.

In Milgram's study, published in 1963, each participant was told they were the "teacher" in a study of learning. A "learner," who was secretly working with the researcher, sat in another room. For each wrong answer, the teacher was told to press a switch that delivered a shock, one step higher each time, up to a switch marked 450 volts. No real shocks were given. The participants believed they were real. When a participant hesitated, the experimenter told them to continue.

Worked example — the baseline. Compute and interpret Milgram's 1963 result.

Operational definition. A participant obeyed if they continued to the 450-volt switch.
The share. 26 of 40 participants did. 26 ⁄ 40 = 0.65, so 65% of participants obeyed to the end.
The rest. 40 − 26 = 14 participants stopped before the end, which is 14 ⁄ 40 = 0.35, or 35%.
In words. About two in three ordinary people followed the orders all the way, while about one in three refused at some point.

That 65% is a striking number. But the baseline is only half the story. In later studies, Milgram changed one feature of the situation at a time and measured obedience again. He reported these results in his 1974 book.

Percentage of participants who continued to the 450-volt switch in five situations Milgram reported, from the 1963 baseline and his 1974 book
Situation	What changed	Obedience
Baseline	Learner in another room	65%
Same room	Learner sat in the same room as the teacher	40%
Touch	Teacher had to press the learner's hand onto a plate	30%
Telephone	Experimenter gave orders by telephone	fewer than one in four
Peers refuse	Two peers refused to continue first	10%

Worked example — how the situation moved the number. Compare two situations with the baseline.

Same room. Obedience fell from 65% to 40%, a drop of 65 − 40 = 25 percentage points. Seeing the learner made the harm harder to ignore.
Two peers refuse. Obedience fell from 65% to 10%, a drop of 65 − 10 = 55 percentage points. Two people saying no gave the participant permission to say no too.
What stayed the same. The participants were the same kind of ordinary people in every version. What changed was distance from the victim, closeness of the authority, and whether anyone else resisted.

In words: change the situation, change the number. That is the real finding. Obedience was not a fixed trait that some people had and others lacked; it rose and fell with the setting.

A caveat about the numbers: the 65% baseline is the figure to know exactly. The variations come from Milgram's later book and are here to show the pattern, and the telephone figure is stated in words because secondary summaries report it inconsistently.

Milgram's work also carries a cost. Participants believed they were hurting someone, and many showed strong stress. As Week 2 explained, studies like this are part of why research now requires informed consent, the right to withdraw, protection from harm, and debriefing after any deception. The study is history, and it is also the reason those rules exist.

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Pick one of the five situations in the table and explain, in your own words, why that change might have made disobeying easier.

(b) Describe a workplace or team you know where an instruction from someone in charge is hard to question, and name one change to the situation that would make questioning easier.

Misconception check. Students often retell Milgram as a story about cruel people, or about how "some people would do anything." It is tempting because the shocks are dramatic. The cure is the table. The same kind of ordinary people obeyed at 65% in one setting and 10% in another. The finding is about the power of the situation over ordinary people, and it is a warning to all of us, not a description of a cruel few.

5. Feel the group around you: five group effects

Your team has a group project due Friday. One member does most of the work, two coast, and in the planning meeting nobody objects to a weak idea because everyone wants to get along. On Saturday you go to a packed stadium, and the crowd does things none of its members would do alone. Groups change people in predictable ways, and each change has a name.

Social facilitation is better performance on simple or well-practiced tasks when other people are present or watching (Zajonc, 1965). A practiced free-throw shooter often does better with a crowd watching. A beginner at a hard task can do worse.
Social loafing is the tendency to put in less effort on a task when one's contribution is pooled with others' and cannot be singled out (Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979).
Groupthink is a way of deciding in which a close, cohesive group's wish for agreement overrides a realistic look at alternatives and risks (Janis, 1972).
Group polarization is the tendency for discussion among like-minded people to push the group's shared leaning toward a more extreme position (Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969).
Deindividuation is the loss of self-awareness and sense of personal accountability that can happen when a person is part of a crowd or is anonymous.

Worked example — the group project and the game. Match each scene to its effect.

Two members coast. Their effort is pooled into one grade, and no one can tell who did what. That is social loafing.
Nobody objects to the weak idea. The team is friendly and wants agreement more than a hard look at the plan. That is groupthink.
The meeting gets more extreme. Everyone already leaned toward a bold design, and after an hour of agreeing, the plan is far bolder than any one member first proposed. That is group polarization.
The practiced presenter shines. The member who has given many talks does better in front of the class than in rehearsal. That is social facilitation.
The crowd at the game. In a sea of matching jerseys, fans chant insults they would never say alone. Feeling anonymous and swept along is deindividuation.

In words: groups can lift effort or sink it, sharpen thinking or dull it, and loosen a person's sense that they are responsible for what they do. A fix for social loafing is to make each person's part visible; a fix for groupthink is to assign someone to argue the other side.

Misconception check. Students often think social facilitation means people always do better with an audience. It is tempting because the word "facilitation" sounds like help. The cure is the task. An audience tends to help on simple or well-practiced tasks and to hurt on hard or new ones. A second trap is mixing up groupthink and group polarization. Groupthink is about suppressing doubts to keep agreement; group polarization is about a shared leaning growing more extreme through discussion.

6. Ask who helps: the bystander effect and the design behind it

Picture someone collapsing on a busy sidewalk at rush hour. Dozens of people see it. Surely someone will help, and with so many people, the odds should be good. Research suggests the opposite is often true.

The bystander effect is the finding that a person is less likely to help in an emergency when other bystanders are present than when alone. John Darley and Bibb Latané tested it with an intercom.

Worked example — the intercom study. Read the design and the results of Darley and Latané (1968).

The setup. Each participant sat alone in a separate room and heard, over an intercom, another "participant," who was really a recording, begin to have what sounded like a seizure.
The manipulation. The researchers changed how many other listeners the participant believed were on the line: none, one, or four.
Operational definition. A participant helped if they reported the emergency before the recording ended.
The results. 85% reported the seizure when they believed they were the only listener, 62% with one other listener, and 31% with four other listeners.

Percentage of participants who reported the apparent seizure before the recording ended, by the number of other listeners they believed were present (Darley & Latané, 1968)
Other listeners believed present	Reported the emergency
None (only listener)	85%
One	62%
Four	31%

Worked example — reading the drops. Compare each group with the only-listener group.

One other listener. Helping fell from 85% to 62%, a drop of 85 − 62 = 23 percentage points.
Four other listeners. Helping fell from 85% to 31%, a drop of 85 − 31 = 54 percentage points.
Half as likely. Half of 85 is 85 ÷ 2 = 42.5, and 31 is below 42.5. So with four other listeners, participants were less than half as likely to report the seizure.

Put as one comparison: 85% versus 31% is more than a 2-fold difference, because 31 × 2 = 62 is still below 85. A participant who believed they were alone was more than twice as likely to report the emergency. Every person in the study heard the same seizure; only the number of other people changed.

Why does a crowd reduce helping? Diffusion of responsibility is the spreading of responsibility for acting across everyone present, so that each person feels less personally obliged to help. When you are the only listener, the job is yours. When four others can hear, it is everyone's job, which can feel like no one's.

Now read both of this week's studies with Week 2's tools.

Milgram. The researcher manipulated the situation, such as how close the learner was. That is the IV. The researcher measured the percentage who continued to the 450-volt switch. That is the DV.
Darley and Latané. The researchers manipulated the number of other listeners. That is the IV. They measured the percentage who reported the emergency. That is the DV.

Because the researchers manipulated the situation and measured the result, both studies are experiments. That is why "the situation lowered obedience" and "more listeners reduced helping" are causal claims these designs support. Compare that with a correlation, which in Week 2 could only support "associated with."

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Describe a time you saw someone who might have needed help in a public place, and explain how the number of people around may have shaped what you and others did.

(b) Imagine you are the person who needs help on a crowded sidewalk. Using diffusion of responsibility, explain why pointing at one person and saying, "You, in the green jacket, please call for help," might work better than shouting "Somebody help!"

Misconception check. Students often think more bystanders means more help, because more people means more chances that someone will act. It is tempting because it sounds like simple arithmetic. The cure is Darley and Latané's numbers: 85% with no other listeners, 62% with one, and 31% with four. More listeners meant less helping, and because the study was an experiment, the number of listeners is what caused the drop.

7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping

On the first day of a club, two students meet. One assumes the other must be good at math because of where her family is from. That is a single sentence, but it holds three different ideas that people often blur together.

A stereotype is an overgeneralized belief about the members of a group, applied to an individual because of their group membership. It is a thought, and it can be "positive" or negative.
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group and its members, formed in advance of knowing the individual person. It is a feeling.
Discrimination is unfair action toward people because of their group. It is a behavior: being passed over for a job, followed in a store, or left out of a project.

Worked example — sorting a hiring scene. Label each step.

The thought. A restaurant owner believes people from one neighborhood "aren't reliable." That belief about a whole group is a stereotype.
The feeling. The owner feels uneasy and dislikes applicants from that neighborhood before meeting them. That negative attitude is prejudice.
The act. The owner throws away their applications unread. That unfair action is discrimination.

Two everyday tendencies help keep stereotypes and prejudice going.

In-group favoritism is the tendency to view and treat members of one's own group more favorably than members of other groups (Tajfel et al., 1971).
Out-group homogeneity is the tendency to see members of another group as all alike while seeing members of one's own group as varied individuals: "they're all the same, but we're all different."

What reduces them? Contact helps, under the right conditions (Allport, 1954). When members of different groups work together on a shared goal, as equals, with support from the people in charge, prejudice tends to fall. A mixed team that has to finish a project together is a better setting than a room where two groups only sit side by side.

The same lesson about situations applies to helping. In Darley and Latané's study, people helped most when the responsibility was theirs alone. In Milgram's study, two peers who refused first changed what the participant did. Both results suggest that a clear assignment of responsibility, or one person willing to act first, can change what a whole group does. Even the driver who swerved into your lane in the opening scene deserves the same question: what situation might explain it?

Misconception check. Students often use stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination as three words for the same thing. It is tempting because they often appear together. The cure is to sort them into thought, feeling, and action. A stereotype is a belief, prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is a behavior. A person can hold a stereotype without acting on it, and discrimination can happen through a policy even when no one in the room feels hostile.

Key terms

Social psychology — The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another, including how the presence of others and the situation shape a person's behavior. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Attribution — An explanation a person gives for why someone, including oneself, behaved a certain way. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Dispositional attribution — An explanation of a behavior that points to something about the person, such as personality, ability, or character. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Situational attribution — An explanation of a behavior that points to something about the circumstances, such as traffic, time pressure, or what other people did. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Fundamental attribution error — The tendency, when explaining other people's behavior, to over-credit their character and to underweight the situation they were in. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Self-serving bias — The tendency to take personal credit for one's own successes while blaming one's failures on the situation. (first used: 1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases)
Attitude — A feeling or belief about a person, object, idea, or event that can guide how a person acts toward it. (first used: 2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion)
Cognitive dissonance — The uncomfortable tension of holding two inconsistent beliefs or of acting against one's own attitude, which people often relieve by changing the attitude to fit the action. (first used: 2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion)
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon — The tendency for people who have agreed to a small request to agree more readily to a larger request later. (first used: 2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion)
Central route to persuasion — Attitude change that happens through careful thought about the quality of the arguments and evidence in a message. (first used: 2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion)
Peripheral route to persuasion — Attitude change that happens through surface cues, such as a speaker's fame or attractiveness or a catchy song, rather than through the arguments themselves. (first used: 2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion)
Conformity — Changing one's behavior or judgment to match the behavior or judgments of a group. (first used: 3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity)
Critical trial — In Asch's line-judgment studies, one of the 12 of 18 trials on which every confederate gave the same wrong answer, so that group pressure was present. (first used: 3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity)
Normative social influence — Going along with a group in order to be accepted or to avoid disapproval, even while privately disagreeing. (first used: 3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity)
Informational social influence — Going along with a group because its members seem to know better, so their answers are taken as evidence about what is correct. (first used: 3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity)
Obedience — Following the direct orders of an authority figure; in Milgram's studies it was measured as continuing to the 450-volt switch. (first used: 4. Follow an order: Milgram and the power of the situation)
Percentage points — The units for the plain difference between two percentages, such as the 54-point gap between 85% and 31%, as opposed to a percent change. (first used: 4. Follow an order: Milgram and the power of the situation)
Social facilitation — Better performance on simple or well-practiced tasks when other people are present or watching. (first used: 5. Feel the group around you: five group effects)
Social loafing — The tendency to put in less effort on a task when one's contribution is pooled with others' and cannot be singled out. (first used: 5. Feel the group around you: five group effects)
Groupthink — A way of deciding in which a close, cohesive group's wish for agreement overrides a realistic look at alternatives and risks. (first used: 5. Feel the group around you: five group effects)
Group polarization — The tendency for discussion among like-minded people to push the group's shared leaning toward a more extreme position. (first used: 5. Feel the group around you: five group effects)
Deindividuation — The loss of self-awareness and sense of personal accountability that can happen when a person is part of a crowd or is anonymous. (first used: 5. Feel the group around you: five group effects)
Bystander effect — The finding that a person is less likely to help in an emergency when other bystanders are present than when alone. (first used: 6. Ask who helps: the bystander effect and the design behind it)
Diffusion of responsibility — The spreading of responsibility for acting across everyone present, so that each person feels less personally obliged to help. (first used: 6. Ask who helps: the bystander effect and the design behind it)
Stereotype — An overgeneralized belief about the members of a group, applied to an individual because of their group membership. (first used: 7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping)
Prejudice — A negative attitude toward a group and its members, formed in advance of knowing the individual person. (first used: 7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping)
In-group favoritism — The tendency to view and treat members of one's own group more favorably than members of other groups. (first used: 7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping)
Out-group homogeneity — The tendency to see members of another group as all alike while seeing members of one's own group as varied individuals. (first used: 7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping)

Summary

An attribution explains a behavior by the person (dispositional) or the circumstances (situational).
Fundamental attribution error: other people's acts blamed on character.
Self-serving bias: your wins are yours; your losses are the situation's.
Cognitive dissonance: acting against an attitude creates tension, often eased by changing the attitude.
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959): the $1 students liked the dull task more than the $20 students.
Foot-in-the-door: a small yes makes a larger yes more likely.
The central route runs on arguments; the peripheral route runs on surface cues.
Asch (1951): 12 of 18 trials were critical; about one third of critical-trial answers conformed.
Normative influence is about acceptance; informational influence is about accuracy.
Milgram (1963): 26 of 40, or 65%, continued to the 450-volt switch.
Change the situation, change the number: obedience fell to 10% when two peers refused first.
Five group effects: social facilitation, social loafing, groupthink, group polarization, deindividuation.
Darley and Latané (1968): 85%, 62%, and 31% reported the emergency as listeners grew.
Both studies are experiments: the situation is the IV, the percentage is the DV.
Stereotype is a belief, prejudice is an attitude, discrimination is an action.
Cooperative, equal-status contact reduces prejudice.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

Priya's lab partner forgets to bring the data sheet, and Priya thinks, "He's so disorganized." A week later Priya forgets it herself and says, "The printer in my building was broken." Name the bias in each explanation and say how you can tell them apart.
A neighborhood garden club asks 30 residents to wear a small "Grow Local" pin for one day, and 24 agree. A month later it asks those same residents to volunteer for a full Saturday of planting. What percentage agreed to the first request, and which phenomenon predicts that the earlier yes will raise agreement to the second request?
A five-person team at a design firm has a week to plan a product launch. Two members do almost nothing because only the team's final plan is graded, and in meetings no one raises the obvious budget problem because the team is close and wants to stay upbeat. Name the two group effects and suggest one fix for each.
A researcher wants to test whether the number of other shoppers in an aisle affects whether people pick up a dropped bag of groceries. She arranges for 0, 2, or 6 helpers-in-disguise to stand in the aisle and records whether each passing shopper helps. Name the IV and the DV, say what design this is, and predict the pattern using diffusion of responsibility.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Priya's first explanation is about someone else and blames his character ("disorganized"), so it is the fundamental attribution error. Her second explanation is about her own failure and blames the circumstances ("the printer was broken"), so it is the self-serving bias. The way to tell them apart is to ask whose behavior is being explained: other people get a character explanation, and your own failure gets a situation explanation.
24 of 30 agreed: 24 ⁄ 30 = 0.8, so 80% agreed to wear the pin. The foot-in-the-door phenomenon predicts that people who said yes to the small request will be more likely to say yes to the larger one. Having acted as a supporter of the garden, they now see themselves as supporters, which is also why cognitive dissonance makes a later no feel inconsistent.
The two members who coast because only the shared plan is graded show social loafing; a fix is to give each member a visible, named part of the plan. The team that avoids the budget problem to stay upbeat shows groupthink; a fix is to assign one member to argue against the plan in every meeting. Note that this is not group polarization, because no shared leaning is growing more extreme.
The IV is the number of other shoppers in the aisle (0, 2, or 6), because the researcher manipulates it. The DV is whether each passing shopper picks up the bag, because that is what she records. Because she manipulates the situation and measures the result, the design is an experiment, which can support a causal claim. Diffusion of responsibility predicts that helping will be highest with 0 other shoppers and lowest with 6, because the more people are present, the less each one feels the job is theirs.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week the general adaptation syndrome shows how pressure from the world reaches the body.

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