SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
I. Definition: How people are
influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
Two implications of definition:
#1 Your behavior always of interest
to social psychologists because people are hyper-social animals.
Even when we are physically alone, we are not truly alone because we are
being influenced by the implied or imagined presence of others. For
example, we may ask, "What would my partner, friends, or parents think if I did
that?"
#2 Social psychologists study almost everything.
See the main topics
The main topics fall into 3 general areas:
- Thinking about others and thinking about ourselves (e.g., attitudes, the
self)
- Being influenced by others
(i.e., conformity)
- Interacting with (helping, loving, hating, liking, and hurting) others.
II. Social psychologists get less respect than they deserve because they have an unpopular perspective: They look at
the power of the situation, rather than the power of
traits, character, or personality. That is, they look at external,
outside, situational
factors rather than internal, inside, personality factors. Rather than asking
"What inside you made you do that?", social psychologists ask "What
outside you made you do that?" (As the famous social psychologist Marilyn Brewer said, "It's
what's on the outside that counts"). That is, whereas most people ignore
the situation, social psychologists focus on the power of the situation.
In a sense, it is like most people focus on the black (the people's faces) in
the figure below whereas social psychologists focus on the white (the
vase). That is, while others focus on personality and put the situation in
the background, social psychologists focus on the situation and relegate
personality to the background.
Bryan Derksen, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
To get a sense of the power of situation, you might watch an episode of "What
Would You Do?" or imagine how you would behave if you were put in some of
the tense situation that the Borat movies have put people in.
To understand the social psychological view better, you may want to watch the 28 minute "Power
of the Situation" video.
3
Examples of the power of the situation
- Milgram's shocking examples of the situation being more
powerful than personality differences.
- The Zimbardo Prison Experiment.
-
Video of interview of Dr.
Zimbardo, discussing relationship of the Prison experiment to American
atrocities in Iraq (the Abu-Ghirab scandal).
III. People's ignorance of situational influences.
A. On themselves.
Implications: People often say, "I'm surprised I did that, "
or "That's not like me." --and people are often wrong
about what they would do if they were in a certain situation.
B. On judging others--the fundamental attribution error: the
tendency to overestimate the role of
internal, dispositional causes (personality) and
underestimate the role of
external causes (the situation)
in explaining the behavior of other people.
Examples of this error (people's ignorance of the situation):
Our willingness to believe commercials starring celebrities: We think
the celebrity is endorsing the product because the celebrity believes in
the product rather than because the celebrity was paid to do it.
Our legal system: We assume people who do bad things are bad people
and must be put in prison, even though that is not always the case.
In some cases, we even pay police to encourage people to break the
law and then punish the people for breaking the law.
Many drivers don't seem to learn that the roads are slippery from seeing
other drivers slide of the road.
IV. If situations matter, why do people talk about personality?
A. Maybe people are fooled.
How could they be fooled?
1. People like to see constancy because that means they think
they know how others will act. So, by thinking Sam has a certain
personality, they feel they can predict Sam's behavior (even though they may
occasionally complain about "seeing the same old Sam.")
2. People see often only see others in a certain situation and role. (They see Sam in the same old situation and role,
and assume that Sam's personality, rather than Sam's situation, that is
causing Sam to act the same every time they see Sam.) For example, a
student may only see a professor in the classroom.
3. People are so eager to believe in personality that they tend to
believe phony personality descriptions. To see one way in which people
are suckers for personality, try the following website which
illustrates
the Barnum effect.
(Try that page's computerized "personality" test).
B. People are (partially) correct: Personality matters, but not as much as
people think. To use an analogy, when we see someone riding a bike, we may
view their speed as being due entirely to them. Although their speed does
depend on them, their speed also depends on the wind, whether they are going
uphill or downhill, their bike, and many other factors that we tend to
ignore. Similarly, a person's actions are affected by both their personality
and their situation.
V. Conclusions: 7 principles that may change how you see the world
- Do not assume that a person did something because of their personality.
Instead, consider that they may be doing it because of their role or because of
the situation. For example,
- Good people may do bad things. (Most of the Nazis tried in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity
scored normally on personality tests).
- Attitudes often do a poor job of predicting behavior. </li>
- Soldiers who do terrible things, like executing children under the age of 6, usually do not score abnormally
on personality tests.
People do things because of factors inside them (e.g., their beliefs) and
factors outside of them (e.g, the situation). If you ignore the impact of
outside influences on people and decide that someone did something because "that's the way
they are," you may be making the
fundamental attribution error.
By asking whether something besides their personality caused the behavior, you
can fight the fundamental attribution error. By recognizing the power of the
situation on people's behavior (perhaps by "putting yourself in their shoes"),
you may understand others better.
- Do not assume that your behavior is due to your personality: If you
want to change, change your situation.
- Do not assume that your finding evidence that you are right is proof that
you are right. Instead, realize that you may just be displaying the confirmation bias.
To fight that bias, ask how you might be wrong.
- Do not assume that your thinking you are rational means that you are
rational: You could just be rationalizing. Because knowing that you are being
inconsistent makes you feel an uncomfortable feeling called cognitive
dissonance, you will want to rationalize your
inconsistencies. The result is that, by trying to convince yourself that
you are being consistent, you may actually be foolish (To quote Emerson, "A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"). To their credit,
many people who voted for Trump in 2016 admitted that they were wrong and
changed their vote in 2020. The following very short video is a spoof
about what happened when several people suffered hypothermia after a Trump
rally. However, note how the video captures the essence of how
cognitive dissonance
affects some Trump supporters.
More information about dissonance
- Conformity is common and complex.
- People may conform in terms of public actions but not in terms of their
private thoughts (e.g., apparently, many Senate republicans (click here for
one example) and people who work at Fox News
privately think Trump is terrible, but they publicly support him).
- People may exhibit both private and public conformity. For example,
some Trump supporters and QAnon members are true believers.
- The value of anything-- including stocks, houses,
horses,
bitcoin, a private college education,
gold, dollars, and
tulips-- is largely
determined by what people think other people think its worth.
- People and products are promoted by saying that they are popular. One result
is that many people hire bots to follow themselves on Twitter (by one analysis,
61% of President Trump's twitter followers were bots).
- Most people will obey an order from an authority, even if that order is
clearly illegal and immoral. In one study, over 90% of nurses followed instructions
from a doctor even when they thought that following those instructions was
unethical and would hurt
the patient. In one case, a nurse gave a patient complaining of an ear ache in
the right ear, 5 ear drops in the anus! Why? The nurse misinterpreted the
doctor's note of "5 drops in R ear" as 5 drops in Rear."
- People will often do things just because they are told to do it --or because
they are told that everyone else is doing it.
- Awareness of a problem, "education," or knowing what should be done may not
have any effect on what people do. Among the reasons for the disconnect
between knowledge and action are conformity and feeling that there is little
that the individual can do about the problem. If you want to change other
people's behavior, consider
- Making the path to the goal clearer and easier
- Making people believe they can change and that changing will make a difference
- Making social and peer pressure work for you rather than against you (e.g.,
one reason smoking has decreased seems to be because the amount of smoking seen in films and on television
has been reduced)
- Making the goal relevant to people's self-image (e.g., "I am an anti-racist")
- Making the goal seem relevant to the group's identity (e.g., the "Don't mess with Texas" anti-littering campaign
related anti-littering with being a proud Texan)
- Our desire to to be right and to want to know the truth is sometimes in
conflict with wanting to feel good and wanting to look good to others. President
Trump has resolved this conflict by not being that concerned with the truth: He denies science and comforts himself by watching Fox News, holding
rallies in front of his adoring fans, and surrounding himself by people who are
afraid to disagree with him.
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