Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
• In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson,
a president from Texas
• This happened after newspapers and television began showing civil rights demonstrators being set
upon by dogs and fire hoses
• When a black church in Birmingham was firebombed and four little girls were killed, public opinion
in much of the country turned in favour of the demonstrators almost overnight
• In this book, you will read about persuasion and attitude change, about people’s capacity for self-
deception, about the economic roots of social behaviour, about the influence of culture, about the
origins of and antidotes to racial prejudice, and about the sources of violence and the forces that can
counter violence
• This chapter explains what social psychology is and what social psychologists study
• It also presents some of the basic concepts of social psychology: the surprising degree to which social
situations can influence behaviour, the interpretive processes people use to understand situations, and
the overlapping contributions of conscious and unconscious thinking to our understanding of the social
world
Explaining Behaviour
• In April 2004, more than a year after the start of the war in Iraq, CBS broadcast a story showing Iraqi
prisoners naked, stacked in pyramids with bags over their heads, and possibly required to simulate
sexual acts, surrounded by laughing American men and women
• Abu Ghraib: military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq used torture, humiliation, and intimidation
to try to obtain information from the prisoners. This included stripping them and making them lie naked
in the prison corridors
• Such degradation echoes what happened in the Zimbardo prison study
• The reaction on the part of many Iraqis and others in the Arab world was to regard the acts as evidence
that the United States had malevolent intentions toward Arabs
• Most Americans too, were appalled at the abuse and ashamed of the behaviour of the U.S. soldiers
• Many of those who saw the photos on television or in the newspapers assumed that the soldiers
who had perpetrated these acts were rotten apples—exceptions to a rule of common decency
prevailing in the military and the general population
• But social psychologists were not so quick to make such an assumption
• Indeed, thirty years before the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues paid 24
Stanford University undergraduate men, chosen for their good character and mental health, to be
participants in a study of a simulated prison
• The researchers flipped a coin to determine who would be a guard and who would be a prisoner
• The researchers anticipated the study would last for two weeks, but the guards quickly turned to
verbal abuse and physical humiliation, requiring the prisoners to wear bags over their heads,
stripping them naked, and requiring them to engage in simulated sex acts. The study has to be
terminated after six days because the behaviour of the guards produced extreme stress reactions in
several of the prisoners
• Zimbardo today maintains that the balance of power in prisons is so unequal that they tend to be brutal
places unless heavy constrains are applied to curb the guards’ worst impulses
• Thus, “It’s not that we but bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The
barrel corrupts anything it touches” at Abu Ghraib and Stanford
• Some might contend that the soldiers in Iraq were only following orders
• But, why did they follow such orders?
• Social psychology now forms a significant part of the curriculum in many schools of business, public
health, social work, education, law, and medicine
• Social psychological research on such topics as judgment and decision making, social influence, and
how people function in groups is relevant to all those fields
• How to make eyewitness testimony more reliable; how physicians can best use diverse sources of
information to make a correct diagnosis; what foes wrong in airplane cockpits when there is an accident
or near accident
• Research by social psychologists regularly influences government policy
• The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling that struck down school segregation in the
United States drew heavily on social psychological research, which indicated that segregated
schools were inherently unequal in their effects (and thus unconstitutional)
Seminarians as Samaritans
• Classic experiment by John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973) shows power of situation even more
simply
• Asked students at Princeton Theological Seminary about basis of their religious orientation to
determine whether particular students were primarily concerned with religion as a means toward
personal salvation, or were more concerned with religion for its other moral and spiritual values
• After determining basis of their religious concerns, the psychologists asked each young seminarian to
go to another building to deliver a short sermon
• Were told what route to follow to get there most easily
• Some were told they have plenty of time to get there, others told to hurry as they are late
• On the way to deliver their sermon (on the topic of the Good Samaritan), each person passed a man
sitting in a doorway with his head down, coughing and groaning, in need of help
• Nature of religious orientation was of no use in predicting whether the person would offer help
• Whether in a hurry or not was a powerful predictor
• The seminarians were pretty good Samaritans as a group—but only when they weren’t in a rush
Channel Factors
• Channel factors: certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can
have great consequences for behaviour, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behaviour in a
particular direction
• Introduced by Kurt Lewin (1952)
• Consider a study by Howard Leventhal and others
• On how to motivate people to take advantage of health facilities’ offerings of preventive care
• Attempted to persuade Yale students to get tetanus inoculations
• Had them read scary materials about the number of ways a person could get tetanus
• Showed them photos of people in the last stages of lockjaw
• Told them there are free inoculations
• Most participants formed the intention to get an inoculation, but only 3% did so
• Other participants were given a map of the Yale campus emphasizing the health centre, and asked to
review their schedule to decide on a good time to visit the centre and the route they would take to get
there
• These were senior students who already knew how to get to the centre
• This increased the percentage of students getting an inoculation ninefold, to 28%
• The channel factor in this case was the requirement to shape a vague intention into a concrete plan
• The most powerful determinant of usage of public health services more generally yet discovered is the
distance to the closest facility
• Not attitudes about health, personality tests, or demographic variables
Interpreting Reality
• Looking at Figure 1.2 (below; Kanizsa triangle), most people see a white triangle. But there is no white
triangle
• We construct a triangle in our mind out of the gaps in the picture
• Our perceptions normally bear a resemblance to what the world is
really like, but perception requires substantial interpretation on our
part and is subject to significant error under certain conditions
• Gestalt is German for “form” or “figure”
• Gestalt psychology: approach that stressed the fact that people
perceive objects not by means of some passive and automatic
registration device but by active, usually unconscious interpretation of
what the object represents as a whole
• What’s true for visual perception is even truer for judgments about the social world
• Our judgments and beliefs are constructed from perceptions and thoughts, but they are not simple
readouts of reality
• Prisoner’s dilemma: a situation involving payoffs to two people, who must decide whether to
“cooperate” or “defect.” In the end, trust and cooperation leads to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and
defection
• Confront two criminals who had committed a crime together, were arrested, and were being
questioned separately
• Each prisoner could behave in one of two ways: confess the crime, hoping to get lenient treatment
by the prosecutor; or deny the crime, hoping that the prosecutor would not bring charges or would
fail to persuade a jury of his guilt
• But of course, the outcome that would result from the prisoner’s choice would depend on the other
prisoner’s behaviour
• If both denied crime (a “cooperative” strategy), both would probably avoid harsh punishment
• If one denied crime and other admitted it (a “defecting” strategy), the one who admitted it would
be treated leniently and the one who denied it would be punished severely
• If both admitted crime, both would go to prison
• In psychology experiments, this game is usually played with monetary payoffs rather than prison time
• If both cooperate (deny crime), they both make some money
• If both defect (admit the crime), neither gets anything
• If one defects and the other doesn’t, the defector wins big and the cooperator loses a small amount
• Each player does better by defecting, no matter what the other player does
• And yet if each player follows the logic of defecting and acts accordingly, both players are worse off
than if they had both cooperated
• Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2002) asked Stanford University dormitory resident assistants to identify
students in their dorms who they thought were particularly cooperative or competitive, and both types of
students were then recruited to participate in a psychology experiment using prisoner’s dilemma game
• Played in one of two experimental conditions: “the Wall Street game” or “the community game”
• The majority of students who were told they were playing the Wall Street game played in a competitive
fashion, the majority of students who were told they were playing the community game played in a
cooperative fashion
• The terminology that was used prompted different construals
• The situation exerted its influence through its effect on the way participants interpreted the meaning
of the activity they were performing
• Participants’ presumed dispositions—whether they had been identified as highly competitive or highly
cooperative—were of no use in predicting behaviour
Schemas
• Although it usually seems as if we understand social situations immediately and directly, we actually
depend on elaborate stores of systematized knowledge to understand even the simplest and most
“obvious” situation—these knowledge stores are called schemas
• Schema: a knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
• Generalized knowledge about the physical and social world
• Such as what kind of behaviour to expect when dealing with a professor and how to behave at
a four-star restaurant
• There is even a schema—alleged to be universal—for falling in love
• Schemas capture the regularities of life and lead us to have certain expectations we can rely on so that
we don’t have to invent the world anew all the time
• An early experiment by Solomon Asch (1940) shows that schemas can sometimes operate very subtly
to influence judgments
• Asked two groups of undergraduates to rank various professions in terms of prestige
• Before they gave their own ratings, participants from one group were told that a sample of fellow
students had previously ranked politicians near the top in prestige, and other group was told that
politicians were ranked near bottom
• The participants in the first group took the term politician to refer to statesmen of the caliber of
Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Participants in the second group were rating
something closer to corrupt political hacks
• The different schemas activated by their peers’ ratings served to define just what it was that the
participants were supposed to judge
Stereotypes
• Stereotypes: schemas that we have for people of various kinds
• We tend to judge individuals based on particular person schemas we have—stereotypes about a
person’s nationality, gender, religion, occupation, neighbourhood, or sorority
• Such summaries may be necessary to function efficiently and effectively; but they can be wrong,
they can be applied in the wrong way and to the wrong people, and they can be given too much
weight in relation to more specific information we have about a particular person
Human Universals
• One theme that is consistent with evolutionary theory is that many human behaviours and institutions
are universal, or very nearly so
• We have acquired basic behavioural propensities that help us adapt to the physical and social
environment
• Humans share some of these characteristics with other animals, especially the higher primates
• These include facial expressions, dominance and submission, food sharing, group living, greater
aggressiveness on the part of males, preference for own kin, and wariness around snakes
• The number of universals we share with other animals is quite small (so far as we know)
• The bulk of Table 1.1 represents a large number of behaviours that appear to be effective adaptations
for highly intelligent, group-living, upright-walking, language-using animals that are capable of living in
almost any kind of ecology
• Some theorists believe that the commonalities can be accounted for as simply the result of our species’
superior intelligence
Group Living, Language, and Theory of Mind
• Theory of mind: the understanding that other people have beliefs and desires
• Children recognize before the age of 2 that other people have beliefs and desires
• By the age of 3 or 4, theory of mind is sophisticated enough that children can recognize when other
people’s beliefs are false
• Individuals with autism have deeply disordered abilities for interacting and communicating with others,
and do not seem to be able to comprehend the beliefs or desires of others
• Autistic children can have normal or even superior intellectual functioning but have less comprehension
of people’s beliefs and desires that children with Down syndrome, whose general intellectual
functioning is far below normal
• Given the importance of accurately understanding other people’s beliefs and intentions, it would not be
surprising that a theory of mind comes prewired
Evolution and Gender Roles
• Parental investment: the evolutionary principle that costs and benefits are associated with
reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. Because these costs and benefits are different for males
and females, one sex will normally value and invest more in each child than will the other sex
Social Neuroscience
• While a person is experiencing different emotions or solving various problems, blood flows to the areas
of the brain that are active
• Using a technology known as fMRI, scientists can take a picture of the brain that detects this blood flow
and shows which brain regions mediate various feelings and behaviours
• A region of the brain that alerts people to danger is poorly developed until early adulthood
• This may explain why adolescents take greater risks
• Neuroscience has also revealed that later in life, the brain regions that mediate learning, notably the
prefrontal cortex, decay particularly rapidly with increasing age
• Neuroscience informs us about how the brain, the mind, and behaviour function as a unit and how
social factors influence each of these components at the same time