Lecture: Social Psychology
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 13
Opening
A nurse wonders whether to question an order that seems wrong. A manager watches a friendly team meeting slide toward a plan nobody has really tested. Someone on a crowded sidewalk sees a stranger fall and waits to see what everyone else does. Each of them is inside the same force: the pull of other people and of the situation they're in.
That's this lecture. In Week 2, you learned what an experiment can claim and why research has ethics rules. Weeks 3 through 10 looked inside one person, and Weeks 11 and 12 followed that person over a lifetime. Now we put that person in a world full of other people. Next week, in Week 14, Stress, Health & Coping, the course follows how pressure from that world reaches the body.
Here's the plan. First, how you explain other people's behavior. Then how actions change attitudes, how groups pull you into line, and how far an order can carry you. Then five ways groups change people, who helps in an emergency, and what prejudice is made of. If you keep one sentence, keep this one: look at the situation, not only the person.
1. Explain a behavior: attributions and their two biases
A car swerves into your lane without signaling. You brake hard, and the words come out before you think: "What a jerk." The next morning you're running late, and you cut in at a merge yourself. When you get to class, you explain, "Traffic was terrible." Same behavior. Two very different explanations.
That double standard is where social psychology starts. Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. And 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. A situational attribution points to something about the circumstances, such as traffic, time pressure, or what other people did.
Both kinds can be right. The trouble is that we don't use them evenly. 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. That's "What a jerk." You knew nothing about that driver's morning. Maybe there was a sick child in the back seat. The self-serving bias is the tendency to take personal credit for one's own successes while blaming one's failures on the situation. That's "Traffic was terrible." And if you aced an exam that same week, you'd probably say, "I studied hard."
Why? When you watch someone else, the person is what you see. When you're the one acting, the situation surrounds you.
Pause and try this. A classmate misses a meeting, and you think, "She's lazy." Is that the fundamental attribution error or the self-serving bias?
Ask yourself whose behavior is being explained.
Here's the answer. It's the fundamental attribution error, because you're explaining someone else's behavior by her character instead of her situation.
2. Watch actions change attitudes: dissonance and persuasion
You saved for months and bought an expensive phone. Within a week, the battery lets you down. But when a friend asks, you hear yourself say it's the best phone you've ever owned. Why would you defend something that disappointed you?
Start with the word. An attitude is a feeling or belief about a person, object, idea, or event that can guide how a person acts toward it. Most of us assume attitudes come first and actions follow. Social psychology found the arrow also runs backward. 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 can't un-buy the phone, so the easier fix is to like it more.
Here's the study that made the idea famous, from Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959. Students did a long, dull task. Then each was paid to tell the next person the task was interesting. Some got $1. Some got $20. Later, the students paid $1 rated the task as more enjoyable than the students paid $20 did. The $20 students had a ready excuse for the lie: they did it for the money. The $1 students had no good excuse, so they closed the gap from the inside. They changed their attitude.
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. And messages persuade in two ways. 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.
Pause and try this. In Festinger and Carlsmith's study, which group ended up liking the dull task more: the students paid $1 or the students paid $20?
Think about which group had no good excuse.
Here's the answer. The students paid $1, because a tiny payment couldn't explain the lie, so changing their attitude was how they relieved the tension.
3. Go along with the group: Asch and conformity
You're in a study group, and the other five members all pick answer C on a practice question. You were sure it was B. Do you say B out loud? A lot of people quietly switch.
Conformity is changing one's behavior or judgment to match the behavior or judgments of a group. Solomon Asch tested it in 1951 with lines. A participant sat with a group and said which of three lines matched a standard line in length. The matching line was easy to spot. But everyone else in the group was secretly working with the researcher. Each participant made 18 judgments, and on 12 of them, every other member of the group gave the same wrong answer out loud first. A critical trial is one of the 12 of Asch's 18 trials on which every confederate gave the same wrong answer, so that group pressure was present. That leaves 6 trials where the group picked the matching line.
What happened? About one third of the answers on critical trials went along with the wrong majority. Roughly three in four participants conformed at least once, and about one in four never did. Without group pressure, people almost never got these lines wrong.
So why go along? Psychologists name two pressures. 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. Wearing a company cap you think looks silly, so you fit in at a new warehouse job, is normative. Copying coworkers' way of filing reports because they know the software is informational.
Pause and try this. In Asch's study, the lines were easy, yet many people still gave the group's wrong answer. Was that mostly normative or informational influence?
Remember how rarely people erred when they judged alone.
Here's the answer. Mostly normative, because many people could see the right answer and went along anyway to avoid standing out.
4. Follow an order: Milgram and the power of the situation
You met this study in Week 2 as an ethics case. Now let's see what it found. Obedience is following the direct orders of an authority figure; in Milgram's studies it was measured as continuing to the 450-volt switch.
Here's the setup from Milgram's 1963 study. 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 give a shock, one step higher each time, up to a switch marked 450 volts. No real shocks were given. But the participants believed they were real.
And 26 of 40 participants went all the way. Divide 26 by 40 and you get 0.65, which is 65%. That's about two in three ordinary people. The other 14 stopped before the end, which is 35%.
But the baseline is only half the story. In later studies, which Milgram reported in his 1974 book, he changed one feature of the situation at a time. When the learner sat in the same room, obedience fell to 40%. When the teacher had to press the learner's hand onto a plate, it fell to 30%. When the experimenter gave orders by telephone, fewer than one in four obeyed. And when two peers refused first, it fell to 10%. Going from 65% to 10% is a drop of 55 percentage points. A percentage point is the plain difference between two percentages.
Here's what I want you to hold onto. The people didn't change. The situation did. That's the real finding: the power of a situation over ordinary people. And the stress these participants felt is part of why research now requires informed consent, the right to withdraw, and debriefing.
Pause and try this. Moving the learner into the same room took obedience from 65% to 40%. How many percentage points did it drop?
Subtract the smaller percentage from the larger one.
Here's the answer. It dropped 25 points, because 65 minus 40 is 25, and seeing the learner made the harm harder to ignore.
5. Feel the group around you: five group effects
Think of your last group project. One person did most of the work, two people coasted, and in the planning meeting nobody objected to a weak idea because everyone wanted to get along. 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. The teammate who has given many talks does better in front of the class than in rehearsal. 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. That's the two people coasting, because only the shared grade counts. Groupthink is a way of deciding in which a close, cohesive group's wish for agreement overrides a realistic look at alternatives and risks. That's the weak idea nobody questioned.
Two more. Group polarization is the tendency for discussion among like-minded people to push the group's shared leaning toward a more extreme position. If everyone came in leaning toward a bold design, an hour of agreeing makes it bolder. And 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. Picture a crowd at a game, a sea of matching jerseys, chanting things none of them would say alone.
Pause and try this. A friendly team avoids raising a budget problem so meetings stay upbeat. Is that groupthink or group polarization?
Ask whether doubts are hidden or a leaning is growing more extreme.
Here's the answer. It's groupthink, because the wish for agreement is hiding a real problem, not pushing a shared leaning further.
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 helps. The research says otherwise.
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 in 1968. Each participant sat 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 researchers changed how many other listeners the participant believed were on the line. Helping meant reporting the emergency before the recording ended.
When participants believed they were the only listener, 85% reported the seizure. With one other listener, 62% did. With four other listeners, only 31% did. From 85 down to 31 is a drop of 54 percentage points. Half of 85 is 42.5, and 31 is below that, so with four other listeners people were less than half as likely to report it.
Why? 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're the only listener, it's your job. When four others can hear, it's everyone's job, which can feel like no one's.
Now use Week 2's tools on both of this week's big studies. In Milgram's, the researcher changed the situation, so that's the independent variable, and measured the percentage who obeyed, so that's the dependent variable. In Darley and Latané's, the number of other listeners was the independent variable, and the percentage who reported was the dependent variable. Both are experiments. That's why "more listeners reduced helping" is a causal claim the design supports, not only an association.
Pause and try this. In Darley and Latané's study, what was the independent variable, and what was the dependent variable?
Ask which one the researchers changed and which one they measured.
Here's the answer. The number of other listeners was the independent variable, and the percentage who reported the emergency was the dependent variable.
7. Name the costs and the cure: prejudice, contact, and helping
Imagine a restaurant owner who believes people from one neighborhood "aren't reliable," feels uneasy about applicants from there, and throws their applications away unread. One scene holds three ideas.
A stereotype is an overgeneralized belief about the members of a group, applied to an individual because of their group membership. That's the owner's belief. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group and its members, formed in advance of knowing the individual person. That's the uneasy feeling. And discrimination is unfair action toward people because of their group. That's throwing the applications away. A belief, a feeling, an action.
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. 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, under the right conditions. When people from different groups work together toward a shared goal, as equals, with support from the people in charge, prejudice tends to fall. And the lesson of this whole lecture applies to helping, too. In Darley and Latané's study, people helped most when the responsibility was theirs alone. In Milgram's, two peers who refused changed what the participant did. One clear assignment of responsibility, or one person willing to act first, can change what a whole group does.
Pause and try this. The owner throws away applications unread. Is that a stereotype, prejudice, or discrimination?
Sort it into a belief, a feeling, or an action.
Here's the answer. It's discrimination, because throwing the applications away is an unfair action, not a belief or a feeling.
Closing
Let me pull it together in the order we built it. You explain other people's behavior with their character more than you should, and your own failures with the situation. Acting against an attitude creates dissonance, and the $1 students changed their minds more than the $20 students did. Asch showed that a unanimous group can pull people into a wrong answer. Milgram's 65% baseline showed how far an order can carry ordinary people, and his later studies showed how far a change in the situation could bring obedience down. Groups can lift effort or sink it, sharpen thinking or dull it. Darley and Latané showed that more listeners meant less helping, and both of those studies were experiments. And a stereotype is a belief, prejudice is a feeling, and discrimination is an action.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Analysis Workshop. Next week, in Week 14, Stress, Health & Coping, the course follows how pressure from the world reaches the body.
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