Deze samenvatting is gebaseerd op collegejaar 2012-2013. Social psychology is the science of exploring how we think about, influence and relate to one another. Social psychologists aim to illuminate the threats, with which we are all connected in our lives. They want to achieve this by asking questions that have intrigued us all like: how and what people think of each other à Is it reasonable how and what we think about our friends and about strangers, and how tight are the links between what we think and what we do?
All these behaviors are influenced by what social psychology is all about: attitudes and beliefs, conformity, independence, love, hate, etc.Everybody observes people during their lives. When observing others we create ideas about how human beings think about, influence and relate to each other.As social psychologists want to know more about the secrets of human nature, they organize their ideas and findings into theories. With a theory they can try to explain and predict observed events.Theories do not only summarize, they also imply the testable predictions, called hypotheses. With hypotheses you can serve several purposes, like:
A good theory gives a good summary of a wide range of observations and makes clear predictions. With these theories we can accept a theory, generate new exploration and also come up with practical implications.Social psychologists research varies by location. You can do research in a) alaboratory or b) you can do research in the field, with everyday situations. Social Psychology research also varies by method. There is the correlational research and the experimental research. The correlational research examines whether two or more factors are naturallyassociated, the experimental research manipulates some factors to see the effect by the change on others. The strong point of correlational research is that it is likely to take place in the real-world environment, which we cannot manipulate in the laboratory. Its maindisadvantage is the ambiguity of the results. As the correlational research does not indicate cause and effect, social psychologists create laboratory simulations of everyday processes.In every experiment of social psychology there are two essential ingredients. One of them is control in which we, as said before manipulate one or two independent variables while trying to hold everything else constant. The second ingredient is random assignment.The random assignment eliminates all the extraneous factors, it creates equivalent groups when doing an experiment so that the outcomes cannot be of factors in which the experiment does not want to be involved. An example of random assignment is when there are two groups where one group is going to watch violent TV and the other group is going to watch non-violent TV. Afterwards they are going to test the effects of what the people have seen. The random assignment, in this case, will make equivalent groups, so that in both groups you have the same kind of people with the same age distribution, etc.One problem social psychologists deal with is the ethical gray part they enter when doing research. They often design experiments that engage intense thoughts and emotions. Often, when they do a laboratory experiment, there is a mundane realism. This implies that the experiment isn’t an example of everyday behavior, so that the outcome can be not realistic. The experiment should have experimental realism: it should absorb and involve the participants. By achieving experimental realism, the tester sometimes has to deceive people with a plausible cover story, in order to have an honest and realistic reaction of the people involved in the experiment. However, there are certain principles for social psychologists; the ethics committees urge the investigators to tell potential participants enough about the experiment to enable their informed consent. The investigators have to be truthful; you may only use deception if it is really essential and justified by a certain purpose. You have to protect the people from harm and high discomfort, also treat information confidentially, and they have to fully explain the experiment afterwards, including the potential deception. The investigators should be sufficiently informative and considerate that people leavefeeling as good about themselves as when they came in. Even better is when theparticipants are repaid by having learned something about the nature of psychological inquiry. We can distinguish between the content of people’s thinking and acting (for example attitudes) and the process by which they think and act (for example how attitudes affect actions and vice versa). The content varies more from culture to culture than the process does. However, our behaviors may differ a lot; they are still influenced by the same social forces. Often people think they know all about the topics social psychologists deal with. Social psychologists in this way face two contradictory criticisms. The first one is that people claim that it is trivial because it documents the obvious; the second is that it is dangerous because its findings could be used to manipulate people. But the first criticism isn’t true in most cases. The common sense people have, is invoked after we know the facts, and events seem far more obvious and predictable in hindsight. Experiments have shown that when presenting the outcome of a certain experiment, the outcome seems unsurprising and obvious to the reader/ listener. However, when these people were asked to predict the outcome without knowing the answer, they didn’t know what the outcome would be, or they were far less secure of it. Likewise, in everyday life we often do not expect something to happen until it does. Then we suddenly see clearly the forces that made it happen and we feel unsurprised. As Soren Kierkegaard said: “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” This is meant with the hindsight bias (the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon). The hindsight bias not only can make social science findings seem like common sense, it also can have pernicious consequences. It has certain arrogance, an overestimation of our own intellectual powers. We forget that what is obvious to us now, was not nearly so obvious at the time. The point is not that common sense is predictably wrong. But, common sense usually is right after the facts presented. We easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we know and knew more than we do. This is why we need social psychology, to help us sift reality from illusion and genuine predictions from easy hindsight. The sense of “self” organizes our thoughts, feelings and actions. In this part we are going to look closer at the self-concept and at the self in action. So how do we come to know ourselves, and how does our sense of self drive our attitudes and actions? When you try to explain who you are, you will have many words in mind that all together will define your self-concept. Schemas are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. The self-schemas, how we perceive our self, powerfully affect how we process social information. These self-defining beliefs influence how we perceive, remember and evaluate others and ourselves.The self influences the memory, this phenomenon is described as the self-reference effect: when information is relevant to our self-concepts, we process it quickly and will remember it better. Thus, memories form around our primary interest: our self. Because the sense of self is at the center of the world, we often think that when something happens, this wouldn’t have happened without you. But instead, we only took a small part in this. Also, because we are so keenly aware of our own emotions, we often have an illusion that they are transparent to others. For some people, especially those in the Western cultures, individualism prevails. Identity is self-contained. When we grow up we slowly separate from our parents and become self-reliant and defining our independent self. The psychology of western cultures assumes that your life will be better when having defined your possible selves and when believing in the power of personal control.Where individualism prevails in the western civilization, collectivism prevails in Asia, Africa and Central- and South America. They nurture the interdependent self instead of the independent self. With an interdependent self, one has a greater sense of belonging. Uprooted and cut off family, colleagues and loyal friends, interdependent people would lose the social connections that define who they are. The interdependent self is embedded in social memberships, and they don’t have one self, but many selves, like: self-with parents, self-at-work, i.e. the self-concept is malleable (context-specific). The self-esteem in collectivist cultures often correlates with: “What do others think of my group and me?” i.e. the self-concept is stable. In individualistic cultures the outside rewards / critics to a group or person matter somewhat less. The self-esteem is more personal and less relational. When the personal identity is threatened, people will feel angrier and gloomier than when their collective identity is threatened.But how well do we now ourselves? Research has shown that sometimes we think we know something, but then the inside information turns out to be wrong. Many researches have now shown that we cannot always describe ourselves realistically and that we do not know what kind of things affect our lives. Sometimes people think they have been affected by something that has no effect. People also err when predicting their behavior. For example if asked to people whether they would obey demands to deliver electric shocks to a patient or if they would hesitate because also other people would be around, people overwhelmingly deny their vulnerability. But research stated that many people were vulnerable in reality.People also err frequently when predicting the fate of their relationships. Focusing on the positives, lovers often feel sure they will always be lovers, while research has shown that their friends and family often know better. However, when predicting negative behaviors such as crying or lying, self-predictions are more accurate than predictions by friends and family.The only conclusion we can make out of the researches is that the surest thing one can say about one’s future is that it is even hard for you to predict it. When predicting your future behavior, best is to look at past behavior in similar situations.When predicting our feelings we sometimes know how we will feel, but often wemispredict our feelings. People, who for example imagine a holiday on an island with sun, sea, the beach and so on, will discover how much they require daily structure, intellectual stimulation, etc when they are on the holiday. This also is the case for negative events, we here discount the importance of everything else that makes us happy and we will so overpredict our misery. Studies of affective forecasting reveal that people have most difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions.So, to a certain extent, our intuitions are often wrong about what has and will influence us and about how we do and will feel and will react. We are unaware of much that goes on in our minds. Studies have shown that we do think a lot of the results of our thinking; but that we don’t stand still at the thinking-processà the mental processes that control our social behavior are distinct from the mental processes through which we explain our behavior. We apparently have a dual attitude system, say Wilson and his colleagues. This means that our automatic, implicit attitudes regarding someone or something often differ from our consciously controlled, explicit attitudes. The research of Wilson has shown that drawing people’s attention to reasons, the attitude will be far less important than predicting behavior driven by feelings. There are two practical implications looking at these studies:
As we process self-relevant information, a potent bias intrudes. We always excuse our failures, accept credit for our success and we see ourselves in many ways as better than average. It is believed that most of us have a low self-esteem. And those who say they do not have a low self-esteem, are only pretending. In studies of self-esteem, however, even people with low self-esteem respond in the mid-range of possible scores, comparing themselves to others. The self-serving bias is the tendency to perceive and present oneself in a favorable way. Seventy studies now have shown that people accept credit when they are told they have succeeded. In this case they attribute their success to their ability and effort. However, when they fail, they attribute this to external factors, such as bad luck, etc, so that is was almost impossible to succeed. This tendency is also visible in other researches, where for example the responsibility of two people in a marriage is tested. Almost every person says that he or she does the most in the household. Such biases in allocating responsibility contribute to potential divorces, dissatisfied workers and impasses when bargaining. As we said before, most people think they are better than average. So the self-serving bias also appears when we compare each other to ourselves. For on most subjective and socially desirable dimensions, most people see themselves as better than average, for example:
Subjective behavior, such as honesty, triggers greater self-serving bias than objective behavior dimensions, such as intelligence. We also support ourselves by assigning importance to the things we are good at. Because of this image of ourselves, that we are better than average, we also often have an unrealistic opportunism. Many of us have an unrealistic opportunism of future events. Linda Perloff, notes how illusory optimism increase vulnerability. Believing ourselves immune to misfortune, we do not take sensible precautions. Optimism definitely beats pessimism in promoting self-efficacy, health and well-being. The moral: Success in school and beyond requires enough optimism to sustain hope and enough pessimism to motivate concern.The false consensus effect is the curious tendency we have to further enhance our self-images by overestimating or underestimating the extent to which others think and act as we do. For example, if we smoke: we overestimate the amount of smokers, when we lie, we assume everybody lies, etc. Thus on matters of opinion, we find support for our positions by overestimating the extent to which others agree. False consensus might occur because we generalize from a limited sample, which prominently includes ourselves. We are also more likely to associate with people we know and with which we share attitudes and behaviors. Then we judge the world from the people we know. On matters of ability, so how well we do, we underestimate the amount of others doing this. This is called the false uniqueness effect, for example: if you always fasten your seat belt, you will underestimate the amount of people that willalso do this. These tendencies, toward self-serving attributions, self-congratulatory comparisons, illusory optimism and false consensus for our failing, are not the only indicators of self-serving bias. Here some other “proofs”:
The self-esteem gauge alerts us to threatened social rejection, motivating us to act with greater sensitivity to others’ expectations. Social rejection lowers our self-esteem, but also increases our eagerness for approval. So the pain of rejection can motivate action, you will self-improve and / or you will start a search for acceptance and inclusion somewhere else. People are motivated to enhance their self-image. Thus, self-esteem motivation influences self-serving bias in a positive way.Studies have also shown that when people’s self-esteem has been (temporarily)bruised, these people are more likely to disparage others. So, threats to self-esteem can provoke self-protective defensiveness. When people’s self-esteem is (temporarily) bruised, they might offer self-affirming boasts, excuses and put-downs of others. High self-esteem goes hand in hand with self-serving perceptions. People with a high self-esteem also answer positive when evaluating themselves, their group and when comparing themselves to others. Self-serving bias and its accompanying excuses help protect people from depression. Non-depressive people excuse their failures and think they are more in control of themselves than they actually are. Depressed people’s self-appraisals are more negative, but also more accurate: sadder but wiser. Greenberg and colleagues argue that high self-esteem protects people from feeling terror over their own eventual deaths. Self-serving pride can help us to protect ourselves, but it cal also be maladaptive. People who blame others for their social difficulties are often unhappier than people who acknowledge their mistakes. When most people see themselves as more moral and deserving than others, conflict among people and nations are a natural result. Additional research on (1) Locus of control, optimism and (2) learned helplessness confirms the benefits of seeing oneself as competent and effective. This research has come to (3) the self-efficacy, a scholarly version of the wisdom behind the power of positive thinking. Your self-efficacy is how competent you feel to do something; your self-esteem is your sense of self-worth. 1. Locus of controlAre people the directors of their lives, or are they just the actors, who can do nothing about how things will go and end. This dimension is called the locus of control. Rotter who indicated this locus of control tries to find out how people believe they can influence their destiny. The internal locus of control implies that people can change and influence their destiny; the external locus of control believes that outside forces determine your life, your fate. The people who believe in internal control are often better at school, at work and deliver higher performances than the external controlled people. 2. Learned helplessnessIn animal research it has been proved that if dogs learn to run away from pain orshocks, they later on in their lives will also run away when something nasty happens. They will also more easily adapt to a new situation. Dogs who are being punished again and again and don’t manage to escape from the pain, learn to live with this helplessness and will undergo punishment as if unavoidable. This kind of pattern is also visible in human situations. Depressed people for example, are often very passive, because they believe their efforts will have no effect whatsoever. Studies have shown that systems of governing or managing people that promotepersonal control will promote health and happiness. For example:
But, however, too many choices can lead to paralysis, the tyranny of freedom asSchwartz calls it. With more choices come information overload and more opportunities to regret.Owning something irreversibly feels better than when one has the opportunity to return the item. For example: People expressed more satisfaction with their marriages back in the day when marriage was more irrevocable.3. Self-efficacy“When you think positive you will get positive results”. This is a statement that follows from many researches. To do one’s best and achieve something results in a more confident and empowered feeling. So there is a power to positive thinking. When people fail, we often blame the people themselves or ourselves, if we have failed. This because we believe with another attitude you can achieve much more. The biggest disappointments, on the other hand also the highest achievements, are born of the highest expectations. The more you expect, the more you might attain and the more you risk falling short.The healthiest attitude towards self-esteem is neither an inflated self nor cynical self-denigration. Rather, it mixes ample positive thinking with enough realism to discriminate those things we can control from those we cannot.People expressing low self-esteem are most of the times more vulnerable to assorted clinical problems such as anxiety and loneliness. On the other hand, when feeling good about ourselves is our goal, we are more likely to blame and more pressured to succeed at activities rather than to enjoy them. Over time, this search for happiness and self-esteem can fail to satisfy our deep needs for competence relationship and autonomy. Hence, to focus less on one’s self-image, and more on developing one’s talents and relationships, eventually leads to greater well-being. Social psychology’s most important lesson concerns how much our social environment affects us. When explaining someone’s behavior we often do not take the impact of the situation as much into account as we should do. So we overestimate the extent to which it reflects the individual traits and attitudes. This discounting of the situation is called the fundamental attribution error. We tend to presume that others are the way they act. We commit the fundamental attribution error when explaining other people’s behavior, however when explaining our own behavior we explain this in terms of the situation we were in. This for example is visible here: when talking about ourselves we use verbs anddescribe our actions and reactions (I become happy when…). When we refer tosomeone else we more often describe what the person is (He is nasty, she is nice, etc). Usually those with social power initiate and control conversations. That is why this often leads underlings to overestimate their knowledge and intelligence. For example, students often overestimate the brilliance of their teachers.So why do we underestimate the situational determinants of others’ behavior and not of our own? When we act, the environment commands our attention. When we watch another person act, that person occupies the center of our attention and the situation becomes relatively invisible. But not only has the environment effect on our thinking of others. Also the moment, the time being influences this. For example editorial reflections on the six presidential elections in the USA between 1964 and 1988 show the same growth in situational explanation with time (different reflections after a day and after a year). Circumstances can also shift our perspective on ourselves. Seeing ourselves on television redirects our attention to ourselves. Seeing ourselves in a mirror, hearing our tape-recorded voices, having our pictures taken, or filling out biographical questionnaires similarly focus our attention inward, making us self-conscious instead of situation-conscious. Because we are acutely aware of how our behavior varies with the situation, we see ourselves as more variable than other people. And, the less opportunity we have to observe people’s behavior in contexts, the more we attribute to their personalities. Cultures also influence the attribution error. A western worldview predisposes people to assume that people, not situations, cause events. Internal explanations are more socially approved. The fundamental attribution error occurs in all the cultures studied. Some everyday circumstances, such as being in the church, on a job interview are like the experiments we have been considering: they involve clear constraints. Hence to the attribution error, actors realize the constraints better than the observers. Many social psychologists follow Edward Jones in referring to the attribution error. He sees behavior as corresponding to an inner disposition: as the correspondence bias. The attribution error is fundamental because it colours our explanations in basic and important ways. Researchers in Britain, India, Australia and the US have found that people’s attributions predict their attitudes toward the poor and unemployed. The next part will deal with the powers of intuition, of immediately knowing something without a reason or analysis. To be able to do anything about it at all, action initiation needs to be taken apart from the inefficient workings of the conscious mind, otherwise inaction inevitably would prevail. We know more than we know we know. Studies of our unconscious informationprocessing confirm our limited access to what’s going on in our minds. Our thinking is partly controlled, but also partly automatic. So one part is deliberate and conscious, the other part is effortless and without awareness. Automatic thinking occurs not “on screen” but off screen, out of sight, where reason does not go. Consider for example:
Intuition means immediately knowing something without a reasoned analysis.Perceiving then is intuition par excellence. Of course also the intuition has its limits. Loftus and Klinger speak for today’s cognitive scientists in reporting a general consensus that the unconscious may not be as smart as previously believed. So far we have seen that our cognitive systems process a vast amount of information efficiently and automatically. But our adaptive efficiency has a trade-off; as we interpret our experiences and construct memories, our automatic intuitions often err. As we construe our past and future we construe different selves. This phenomenon is called overconfidence phenomenon. To find out whether overconfidence extends to social judgements, Dunning and his associates created a game show in which people had to predict answers of people they knew and of people they only knew from several personal questions. The people also had to say how confident they were about that the answers were right. Moreover, the most confident people were most likely to be overconfident. Studies reveal a similar, meagre correlation between self-confidence and accuracy in discerning whether someone is telling the truth. Every group seems to be overconfident. For example:
So why are people overconfident, why doesn’t experience lead us to more realistic self-appraisal? 1. People tend to recall their mistakes as times when they were almost right.2. People also tend not to seek for information that might disprove what theybelieve; we are eager to verify our beliefs but less inclined to seek evidence thatmight disprove them. We call this phenomenon the confirmation bias. What can we do against overconfidence? One lesson is to be careful about otherpeople’s dogmatic statements. Even when people seem right, they can be wrong. Two techniques have successfully reduced the overconfidence bias. a) The first one is prompt feedback. b) The second is to force the person to consider disconfirming information. Overconfidence can cost us, but realistic self-confidence is adaptive. Another topic social psychologists try to explain is the memory. Studies have proven that memories are not copies of experiences that remain on deposit in a memory bank. We construct memories at the time of withdrawal, for memory involves backward reasoning. “Like a palaeontologist inferring the appearance of a dinosaur from bone fragments, we reconstruct our distant past by combining fragments of information using our current feelings and expectations.” Thus, we can easily revise our memories (by the unconscious) to suit our current knowledge. People also seem to have a strange sense of changes according to attitudes people have. People whose attitudes have changed often insist that they have always felt much as they now feel. After his research, Vaillant said: “it is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they were little butterflies”. Becoming an adult or just becoming older makes a liar of us all. Another example is when people are telling of experiences on the moment itself and afterwards. For example, on a holiday most people say they are enjoying it. Later they recall this experience even more fantastic and enjoyable than they said during the holiday. People minimize the unpleasant or boring aspects and remember the high points. Also has been found out that we revise our collections of other people when ourrelationship with them changes. An example is when people brake up they onlyremember the bad things because they are now in a fight with this person. Such biases can lead to a dangerous downward spiral. The worse your current view of your partner is, the worse your memories are, which only confirms your negative attitude on that moment. We are not unaware of how we used to feel, but when memories are hazy, current feelings guide our recall. We all have “totalitarian egos” that revise the past to suit our present views. Our information processing is also very efficient. We have very little time to process such information; however, we specialize in special mental shortcuts to process more and quicker. In many situations we use our snap generalizations (like if something is dangerous, we have very quick reaction without thinking why it is). These situations are adaptive. They promote our survival. But our snap generalizations aren’t always right; our adaptive efficiency has a trade-off. Our helpful strategies for simplifying complex information can lead us astray. To enhance our own powers of critical thinking, let’s consider four reasons for unreason. Common reasons in which people form or sustain false beliefs:
We will now explain these four unreasons to you. 1. Our preconceptions control our interpretationsA significant fact about the human mind is that our preconceptions guide how we perceive and interpret information: We respond not to reality as it is, but to reality as we construe it. Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper have shown in an experiment howpowerful these preconceptions can be. They for example showed pro-Arab and pro-Israeli in the same movie. Both claimed afterwards that the movie was a hostile to its side. Our shared assumptions about the world can even make contradictory evidence seem supportive. For example, Charles Lord, asked students to evaluate the results of two supposedly new research studies. Half the group was in favor of capital punishment the other group was against. The results were that both proponents and opponents of capital punishment readily accepted evidence that confirmed their belief but were sharply critical of disconfirming evidence. So, showing both sides: as well confirming as disconfirming information, had increased their opinion and increased also their disagreement. Other experiments also have manipulated preconceptions with astonishing effects on how people interpret and recall what they observe. Kulechov demonstrated this phenomenon by making three short movies, presenting a face of an actor with neutral expression. In one movie the viewer first saw a dead woman, in the second they saw a dish of soup and in the third there was shown a playing girl. The viewers characterized the man as respectively, sad, thoughtful and happy. The conclusion of this: there is a reality out there, but our minds actively construe it. Other people might construe reality differently and therefore behave otherwise. 2. We are more swayed by memorable events than by factsOften our common sense is right, and what we expect to be so, is correct, without having any relevant evidence for it. This cognitive rule of thumb is called the availability heuristic. But this isn’t always true as said before. For example, if people here three famous female names and three names of unknown males, later on, people will say they heard more women’s names than men’s. Vivid, easy-to-imagine events, such as easy-to-picture symptoms, may likewise seem more likely than other events which are hard-to-picture. People are slow to deduce particular instances from a general truth, but are remarkably quick to infer general truth from a vivid instance. 3. We misperceive correlation and control Illusory CorrelationIt is easy to see a correlation where none exists. When we expect to find significant relationships, we easily associate random events, perceiving an illusory correlation. Other experiments confirm that people easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs. If we believe that premonitions correlate with events, we notice and remember the joint occurrence of the premonition and the event’s later occurrence. Illusion of ControlOur tendency to perceive random events as related feeds an illusion of control: the idea that chance events are subject to our influence. Gambling: in more than 50 experiments it was found that people act as if they can predict and control chance events. Ellen Langer observed people’s keen desire for control when for example choosing lottery numbers (where you actually have no control) in studying hospital patients and the elderly. It was discovered that enhancing their sense of control benefited their health and well-being. Perceived control is extremely important for successful functioning. Regression toward the average: Tversky and Kahneman noted another way by which an illusion of control can arise. We failed to recognize the statistical phenomenon of regression toward the average. When things reach a low point, we will try anything, and whatever that is, we will likely improve instead of further deterioration. Events are not likely to continue at an unusually good or bad extreme; when we are extremely high or low, we tend to fall back toward our normal average. 4. Our beliefs can generate their own confirmationThere is one additional reason why our intuitive beliefs resist reality: they sometimes lead us to act in ways that produce their apparent confirmation. Our beliefs about other people can therefore become self-fulfilling prophecies. One example of such a case was the research on what was the influence on thestudents’ performance by the expectations of the teacher and vice versa. Teacher’s evaluations correlate with student’s achievement: teachers think good of students who have higher performances. That is mostly because teachers perceive their student’s abilities and achievements. But out of the research came: Low expectations do not doom a capable child, nor do high expectations transform a lower capable child into a much better student. Human nature in this case is not so pliable. After this study they studied the effect of students’ expectation on the performances of the teacher. It showed that expectations affect both students and teacher. Students who expected to get a competent teacher perceived their teacher as more competent than did the students who had lower expectations. Besides, the students with high expectations actually learned more! There are times when negative expectations of someone lead you to be extra nice to that person, so that he will be nice in return, so that disconfirms your expectation of this person. But, studies showed that in a lot of cases we do get what we expected to get. In laboratory games, hostility nearly always begets hostility. People who perceive their opponents as nonco-operative will readily induce them to be nonco-operative. Self-confirming beliefs abound when there is a conflict. Also, when someone loves us, this leads us to become more the person he or she imagines us to be. Love helps create its presumed reality. Several experiments conducted by Snyder show how erroneous beliefs about thesocial world can induce others to confirm those beliefs. This form of self-fulfilling prophecy is called behavioral confirmation. Another experiment showed that when telling children that they worked hard, they worked even harder after hearing this. These experiments try to help us understand how social beliefs may be self-confirming. We help to construct our own social realities. We will now discuss the relationship between who we are and what we do.Underlying our teaching, preaching you should belief that private beliefs determine public behavior. If we want to alter people’s actions, we therefore need to change their hearts and minds. Attitudes are beliefs that can influence our reactions. If we believe that something is dangerous, we therefore feel dislike and act unfriendly for example. Dozens of studies have shown that what we say we think and feel has very little to do with how we act. After these outcomes, more studies have been done and in some cases our attitudes affect our actions in some circumstances, namely:
So attitude will influence our behavior if other influences are minimal, if the attitude specifically relates to the behavior or if the attitude is potent. Many studies confirm that attitudes follow behavior. Do we also come to believe in what we have stood up for? One of social psychology’s big lessons is that we do not only think ourselves in a way of acting, but also act ourselves into a way of thinking. Streams of evidence confirm that attitudes follow behavior, like role-playing, saying becomes believing, the foot-in-the-door phenomenon, evil acts and attitudes, and the interracial behavior and racial attitudes.
Many people assume that the most potent indoctrination comes through brainwashing. After looking at people being brainwashed, they always expected active participation, be it just copying something or participating in group discussions, writing self-criticism or uttering public confessions. Prevented from saying what they believed, they tried to establish their psychic equilibrium by consciously making themselves believe what they said. From these observations (on the effect of role-playing, the foot-in-the-door experience, moral and immoral acts and brainwashing) there is a conclusion: if we want to change ourselves in some important way, it’s best not to wait for insight or inspiration, but just act. So social psychology says: our actions increase our attitudes. One idea is that when we want to make a good impression, we might express attitudes that appear consistent with their actions. To control the impression we’re creating, we might adjust what we say to please rather than offend. To appear consistent we might at times feign attitudes that harmonize with our actions. Experiments suggest that some attitude changes follow our behavior commitments. There are been giving two explanations for this:
The dissonance theory best explains what happens when our actions openly contradict our well-defined attitudes. For example, if we hurt someone, we feel bad, but we will feel less bad, when thinking this person was very nasty. The self-perception theory best explains what happens when we are unsure of our attitudes: we infer them by observing ourselves. Clinical judgments are also social judgments and thus they are also vulnerable to illusory correlations, overconfidence bred by hindsight and self-confirming diagnoses. Many clinical psychologists assume that clinical judgments always reveal something important. Studies have shown this is not true. Often different clinical psychologists draw very different conclusions of a test. There are of course tests which are predictive, but other tests as Draw-a-person test (and later the doctors will try to explain why they draw the kind of person they draw) have correlation far weaker than their psychologists often expect. Believing that a relationship existed between two things, psychologists are more likely to notice confirming instances (to believe is to see). After a tragedy, an I-should-have-known-it-all-along phenomenon can leave family, friends and therapists feeling guilty. After what has happened, for example suicide, people often see the signs this person gave much more clearly and they claim there selves to have been blind and that they should have taken action. So far we have seen that mental health workers sometimes perceive illusorycorrelations and that hindsight explanations are often questionable. A third problem with clinical judgments is that people might also supply information that fulfills clinicians’ expectations. So there will be self-confirming diagnoses. Snyder and Swann found that people often test for a trait by looking for information that confirms what we expect it to be. Our own behavior sometimes creates the kind of people we expect to see. Given all these hindsight- and diagnosis-confirming tendencies, it will come as no surprise that most clinicians and interviewers express more confidence in their intuitive assessments than in statistical data. But, however, when we compare statistical predictions with the predictions based on intuition, the statistical facts, win most often. James Maddux concluded that professional clinicians are vulnerable to insidious errors and biases. Professional clinicians:
The implications for mental health workers are more easily stated than practiced: be mindful that clients’ verbal agreement with what you say doesn’t mean it is true. Also the clinicians have to recognize that hindsight is seductive: it can lead to overconfidence but also to judge yourself too harshly for not having foreseen certain outcomes. Guard against the tendency to ask questions that help strengthen the veracity of your preconceptions, but also consider opposing ideas and test them as well. Psychology has crept only a little way across the edge of insight into our human condition. Ignorant of their ignorance, some (clinical) psychologists invent theories to fill gaps in their understanding. Intuitive observation seems to support these theories, even if they are mutually contradictory. For 10 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women life’s down times are not just temporary blue moods, but major depressive periods that can last for weeks, without any apparent reason. With seriously depressed people (those people who are feeling worthless, lethargic, uninterested in friends and family, and unable to sleep or eat normally) the negative thinking has become self-defeating. Their intensely pessimistic outlook heads them to magnify bad experiences and minimize good ones. One surprising phenomenon among depressed people is the depressive realism, also called the sadder-but-wiser effect. Depressive realism is the tendency of mildly depressed people to make accurate rather than self-serving judgments, attributions, and predictions. Underlying the thinking of depressed people are their attributions of responsibility. For example people failing an exam and blaming themselves, may conclude that they are lazy or stupid and feel depressed. If you fail an unfair exam or to other circumstances beyond your control, you may feel angry. In over 100 studies involving 15,000 subjects, depressed people have been more likely than non-depressed people to exhibit a negative explanatory style. This is one’s habitual way of explaining life events. They are more likely to attribute failure and setbacks to causes that are stable, global and internal:
The result of this pessimism, over generalized self-blaming thinking is a depressing sense of hopelessness. Our moods definitely colour out thinking, when we feel happy, we think happy. As depressions increase, memories and expectations plummet, when depression lifts, thinking brightens. So, for example, depressed people claim their parents as having been rejecting and punitive. But formerly depressed people recall their parents as positive as non-depressed people. When things aren’t going our way, it may seem as though they never will. A depressed mood also affects behavior. The person who is withdrawn, glum and complaining does not elicit joy and warmth in others. Depressed people may also seek out those who have unfavourable views of them. This again can lower one’s self-image or self-esteem. Depression is natural when experiencing severe stress (anything that disrupts our sense of who we are and why we are worthy human beings. But depressed people respond to bad events in an especially self-focused and self-blaming way. Their self-esteem also fluctuates more with ups and downs. The vicious cycle of depression: negative experiences of people lead to self-focus and self-blame, which could turn into a depressed mood, what causes cognitive and behavioral consequences, which could lead to negative experiences etc. Depression is therefore both a cause and a consequence of negative cognitions.Seligman says that the self-focused and self-blaming people of the Western culture help explain the near-epidemic levels of depression in these cultures. In non-western cultures, where close-knit relationships and co-operation are the norm, major depressions are less common and less tied to guilt and self-blame and perceived personal failure. If depression is the common cold of psychological disorders, then loneliness is the headache. Loneliness, whether chronic or temporary, is a painful awareness that our social relationships are less than we want them to be. Loneliness must not been seen as aloneness. For example one can feel lonely at a party, but also someone who is alone has often no reason to feel loneliness. Like depressed people, chronically lonely people seem caught in a vicious cycle of self-defeating social cognitions and social behavior. Believing in their social unworthiness and feeling pessimistic about others inhibits lonely people from acting to reduce their loneliness (vicious cycle). Common with lonely people: when talking to a stranger, they spend more time talking about themselves and have less interest in the talking of the other person. After such conversations, the new acquaintances often come away with more negative impressions of the lonely people. What causes us to feel anxious in social situations? Self-presentation theory assumes that we are eager to present ourselves in ways that make a good impression. The implications for social anxiety are clear: we feel anxious when we are motivated to impress others but doubt our ability to do so. This simple principle helps explain a variety of research findings, we feel most anxious when:
The natural tendency in these situations is to be cautiously self-protective: to talk less, to avoid topics that reveal one’s ignorance, to be guarded about oneself, to be unassertive, agreeable and smiling. Shyness, therefore, is a form of anxiety characterized by self-consciousness and worry about what others think. Social psychology does not have its own therapy, but therapy in social encounter. Social psychologists are now suggesting how their principles might be integrated into existing treatment techniques. Two examples: 1. Inducing internal change through external behavior: our actions affect ourattitudes. The role we play, the things we say and do, and the decisions wemake influence who we are. Consistent with this attitudes-follow-behaviorprinciple, several psychotherapy techniques prescribe action. 2. Breaking vicious cycles: if depression, loneliness and social anxiety maintainthemselves through a vicious cycle of negative experiences, negative thinkingand self-defeating behavior, it should be possible to break the cycle at any ofseveral points by changing f.e. the environment, by training the person tobehave more constructively or by reversing negative thinking. In the last case social skills training can help. By observing and then practicing new behaviors in safe situations, the person can develop the confidence to behave more effectively in other situations. The vicious cycle that maintain depression, loneliness and shyness can be broken by social skill training, by positive experiences that alter self-perceptions, and by changing negative thought patterns. Some people have social skills, but their experiences with hypercritical friends and family have convinced them they do not. For such people it may be enough to help them reverse their negative beliefs about themselves and their futures. Humans all over the world are in many important ways, more alike than different. Apart from the obvious similarities such as feeling thirst and hunger or sharing sort of body language, we are also very social creatures. We join groups and recognize distinctions of social status. In childhood we display fear of strangers and as adults we favor members of our own group. These universal behaviors that define human nature arise from our biological similarity. Some 100,000 years ago, most anthropologists believe, we humans are all Africans. Slowly more and more of our ancestors moved out of Africa and spread out all over the world. In adapting to their new environments, these early humans developed differences. For example, those who stayed in Africa had darker skin pigment (sunscreen for the tropics), while those who went far north evolved lighter skins capable of synthesizing vitamin D in less direct sunlight. To explain the traits of all species Charles Darwin (1859) proposed an evolutionary process. Nature selects those traits that best increase the odds for survival. This process of nature selecting traits is called natural selection. Recently, psychologists found that this also applies for psychological traits and social behaviors that enhance the preservation and spread of one’s genes (evolutionary psychology). Perhaps the most important similarity between humans is our capacity to learn and adapt. Survival however, is easier for humans than for other species. Because it is so easy to survive for us, our shared biology enables our cultural diversity. It enables those in one culture to value promptness, welcome frankness or accept premarital sex, while those in another culture do not.Diversity in cultureIncreasingly, cultural diversity surrounds us. More and more we live in a global village, connected by e-mail, jumbo jets and international trade. In Europe people eat different than in the US. In Japan people bow to each other while shaking hands. In many areas of the globe, your best manners and mine are serious breaches of etiquette. As the examples above illustrate, all cultures have their accepted ideas about appropriate behavior. We often view these social expectations, or norms, as a negative force that imprisons people in a blind effort to perpetuate tradition. Cultures also vary in their norms for expressiveness and personal space. Personal space is a sort of bubble thatwe like to maintain between ourselves and others. As the situation changes, the bubble varies in size. The best way to learn the norms of our culture is to visit another culture and see how its members do things, while comparing those actions with our own way of doing things. Cultural similarity As members of one species, the processes that underlie our differing behaviors are much the same everywhere. Although norms vary by culture, humans do hold some norms in common:
Men and woman are alike in many ways. Yet there are some differences, other than the obvious physical ones. For example, women are twice as vulnerable to anxiety disorders and depression, while men are more likely to suffer hyperactivity or speech disorders. Most differences between men and women surface in childhood. Boys strive forindependence, girls welcome interdependence. Boys define their identity in separation from the caregiver and girls through their social connections.Adult relationships usually extend this difference. In groups, women focus on personal relationships while men focus on tasks and connections with large groups. Women are also far more likely to describe themselves as having empathy, or being able to feel what another person feels. The explanation for this is that women usually outperform men at reading others’ emotions and expressing emotions non-verbally. The only emotion men are more successful in showing is anger. As you probably already suspect, men are world-wide rated as more dominant, driven and aggressive. They tend to be directive and excel as directive, task-focused leaders. People find it easier to accept a man’s strong, assertive than a woman’s pushy aggressive leadership. Women are more democratic, and excel as social leaders who build team spirit.Moreover, men take more risks than women and if you look at writing, women tend to use more communal prepositions, fewer quantitative words and more present tense. Much of the style we attribute to men is typical of people (men and women) in positions of status and power. Nevertheless, individuals vary; some men are characteristically hesitant, some women are direct and assertive. When talking about aggression, psychologists mean behavior intended to hurt. And again as you probably suspect, when asked, men admit to more aggression than do women. However, with less assaultive forms of aggression (like slapping a family member or verbally attacking someone) women are no less aggressive than men. In physiological and subjective responses to sexual stimuli women and men are more alike than different. Still, males are more likely than females to initiate sexual activity. Also, men are usually more comfortable than women in having casual sex with different partners. Everywhere sex is understood to be something females have that males want, stated anthropologist Donald Symons. Men are much more likely to pay for it than women. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that physically dominant males gained moreaccess to females, which over generations enhanced male aggression and dominance. In the same way, if our ancestral mothers benefited from being able to read their infants’ emotions, then natural selection may have favored emotion-detecting ability in females. Evolutionary psychology also predicts that men strive to offer what women desire (external resources and physical protection). Underlying these presumptions is the principle that nature selects traits that help send one’s genes into the future. Do hormone differences also predispose psychological gender differences? The gap in aggression between males and females does seem related to testosterone. Violent male criminals have higher testosterone levels than normal. However, this is hardly conclusive. Taken together, sex hormones matter, but a second very important factor is culture. Men and women differ, because culture socializes their behavior. Evolutionarypsychologists remind us that evolutionary wisdom is past wisdom. It describes what behaviors worked in the past, but whether these tendencies are still adaptive is a different question. As humans have the capacity to adapt, this is where culture’s shaping power lies. Culture is what’s shared by a large group and transmitted across generations – ideas, attitudes, behavior and traditions. We can see the shaping power of culture in ideas about how men and women should behave. These behavior expectations (like that household repairs are a male task and cooking a female one) define gender roles. The variety of gender roles across cultures and over time shows that culture, indeed, constructs our gender roles. Evolution and culture are not competitors. What our biological heritage initiates, culture may accentuate. However, biology and culture do interact. Biological traits influence how the environment reacts. Although mainly differences have been accentuated so far, Wood and Eagly conclude that the behavior of women and men is sufficiently malleable that individuals of both genders are fully capable of effectively carrying out organizational roles at all levels. Asch’s studies of conformity: Seven people are sitting in a row and are asked to answer a simple question in turn. After a few easy questions that everyone answered correctly, there is a similar easy question. However, the first person gives a wrong answer. The sixth person will probably think that the first person is just stupid and ignores it. But when second until the fifth person gives that same answer, what will the sixth person do? Will he give his own answer or will he conclude that he must have overlooked something and give the same answer as the previous five persons (will he conform). In this experiment, 37% ofthe responses were conforming. The psychologist who performed the experiment (Asch, 1955) commented “Thatreasonable intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.” Milgram’s obedience experiments:Social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered how far people would go. Hisexperiment was to test what happens when the demands of authority clash with the demands of conscience. He had one person (the teacher) question a second person (the learner) and administer an electrical shock upon each wrong answer. The learner obviously was in on the experiment and faked agony. As the electrical shocks increase in voltage the learner starts screaming that he will not longer participate and eventually he falls still and no longer answers.Startling, 65% of all participants continued administering shocks to the highest level. This experiment slightly resembles the Eichmann case, which was a Nazi death camp administrator who said that he was only following orders. So why did the participants in this experiment obey? In general, what breedsobedience? emotional distance of the victim When the subjects were in the same room as the ‘learner’ only 40% obeyed, compared to nearly all when the ‘learner’ was in a different room, and could not be seen. Also, in real-life it is easier to abuse someone who is distant or depersonalized.closeness and legitimacy of the authority institutional authority People also sooner comply with orders if they come from persons or institutions with a good reputation. Why were the participants unable to disengage themselves?
Another important thing to remember is that evil becomes easier when fragmented. In the experiment this was tested by letting the participants ask the questions to the learner, but not deliver the shock. Now, 37 out of 40 fully complied. So it is in our everyday lives: the drift towards evil usually comes in small increments, without any conscious intent to do evil. Now why do the results of the experiment so often startle people? It is, because we presume that cruelty is inflicted by the cruel at hart. We are often tempted to think that Eichmann and the Auschwitz death camp commanders were uncivilized monsters. But like most Nazis, Eichmann himself was outwardly indistinguishable from common people. Psychologist Milgram noted “The most fundamental lesson of our study is that ordinary people, simply by doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” Under the sway of evil forces nice people sometimes do bad things and on the other hand, bad people are can also be nice. Persuasion is the process by which a message encourages change in beliefs, attitudes or behaviors. There are two main tactics to persuade: 1. Central Route (with strong arguments)2. Peripheral Route (by associating your message with favorable peripheral cues) When people are motivated and able to think systematically about an issue, they are likely to take the central instead of the peripheral route to persuasion – focusing on the arguments. However, when we are uninvolved, busy or just distracted we might follow theperipheral route to persuasion – focusing on cues that trigger acceptance without much thinking. Even people who usually think, sometimes form tentative opinions using the peripheral route. Sometimes it’s just easier to “trust the experts”. If a speaker is articulate, appealing or has good motives and if the different arguments come from different sources, we usually take the easy peripheral route and accept the message without much thought. The question “Who says what by what means to whom?” is answered by looking at the primary ingredients of persuasion: 1. The communicatorIt is not just the message that matters, but also who says it. What makes one communicator more persuasive than another?
o Physical appeal – arguments, especially emotional ones are moreinfluential when they come from beautiful people.o Similarity – we tend to like people who are like us. As a general rule,people respond better to a message that comes from someone in theirgroup. 2. The message Reason versus emotion Whether to use reason or emotion depends on the audience. Well-educated oranalytical people are more responsive to rational appeals than less-educated or less-analytical people.The effect of good feelings Good feelings often enhance persuasion, partly by enhancing positive thinking, and by linking good feelings with the message.The effect of arousing fear A message can also be very persuasive by evoking negative emotions. Fear arousing messages are more effective if you lead people not only to fear the severity and likelihood of a threatened event but also to perceive a solution. 3. How the message is communicated 4. The audience It matters who receives a message. What exactly matters?How old they are. People usually have different social and political attitudes depending on their age. This is because of two reasons 1. Life-cycle2. Generational attitudeWhat are they thinking The most important aspect of persuasion is not the message itself, but what responses it evokes in a person’s mind. 1. If someone is warned beforehand that someone will try to persuade him, he will prepare defenses2. Distraction disarms counter arguing3. Uninvolved audiences use peripheral cuesThen, by using rhetorical questions, or making people feel responsible, or repeating a message, you can make strong messages more persuasive and weak messages less persuasive. By doing this you force people to take the central route to persuasion. An important principle worth remembering: “People are usually more convinced by reasons they discover themselves than by those found by others.” (Pascal, 1620). The central question in this is module is what persuades people to leave behind their former believes and join mental chain gangs. Whether these people have strange personalities or their experiences illustrate the common dynamics of social influence and persuasion, we have to realize two things:
In recent decades, several cults have gained much publicity, such as Sun MyungMoon’s Unification Church, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians etc. These cults are also called new religious movements by some social scientists and are typicallycharacterized by (1) distinctive ritual and beliefs related to its devotion to a god or a person, (2) isolation from the surrounding “evil” culture, and (3) a charismatic leader. This chapter will analyze cult persuasion, the power of cults to shape members’ view and behavior etc. As stated before, attitude follows behavior. This can take on two forms: Compliance breeds Acceptance Just as people in social-psychological experiments come to believe in what they bear witness to, so do cult initiates come to believe what they preach. The greater the personal commitment, the more the need to justify it. To build your resistance to persuasion without becoming closed for valid messages, be an active listener and a critical thinker. Force yourself to counter argue. If the message cannot withstand careful analysis, then discard it. If it can, its effect on you will be the more enduring. Psychology’s most elementary question: Are people affected by the mere presence of another person? Mere presence means the other person functions as a co-actor, doing nothing except being present. The social-facilitation effect indicates that the presence of other people boostsperformance, with both humans and animals. However, this effect only applies to easy tasks. Arousal enhances performance on easy tasks for which the most likely (dominant) response is the correct one. For difficult tasks, the presence of others hurts performance. When people are in a crowd, they breathe faster, their pulse quickens and their blood pressure rises. Being in a crowd also intensifies positive or negative reactions. For example, when sitting all close together in a group, the accomplice could more readily induce the subjects to laugh and clap. There are three possible factors that cause arousal in this context: 1. Evaluation apprehensionCottrell surmised that observers make us apprehensive because we wonder how they are evaluating us. The enhancement of dominant responses is strongest when people think they are being evaluated.For example, joggers on a jogging track sped up as they came upon a woman seated on the grass, if she was facing them. 2. DistractionThe conflict between paying attention to others and paying attention to the taskoverloads the cognitive system, causing arousal. 3. Mere presence Zajonc and Goldman both believe that the mere presence of others produces some arousal, even without evaluation or arousing distraction. For example, people’s colour preferences are stronger when they make judgments with others present. In this experiment there was no right or wrong. The social-facilitation theory fulfills at least two of the conditions for a good theory:· The basics of the theory have been confirmed· The theory has brought new life to a long-dormant field of research · Possible practical implications. You might think of the design of office buildings: instead of separate offices, large open office areas. Responsibility The French engineer Max Ringelmann found that collective effort of teams was but half the sum of the individual efforts. This phenomenon is called social loafing. For example, it was found that six people clapping or shouting as loud as possible produced a noise three times that of a single person. In a group, people are tempted to free-ride, i.e. they benefit from the group but give little in return. In social loafing experiments people think they are evaluated only when they act alone. The group situation decreases evaluation apprehension. When people are not accountable and cannot evaluate their own efforts, responsibility is diffused across all group members. So when people are observed, evaluation concern increases and social affiliation occurs. When people are lost in a crowd, evaluation concern decreases and social loafing occurs. To motivate group members, one strategy is to make individual performanceidentifiable. However, people in groups loaf less when the task is challenging, appealing or involving. On challenging tasks, people perceive their efforts as indispensable. When people see others in their group as unreliable or as unable to contribute much, they work harder. Adding incentives or challenging a group to strive for certain standards also promotes collective effort. Alone When arousal and diffused responsibility combine and normal inhibitions diminish, people may commit acts that range from a mild lessening of restraint to impulsive self-gratification to destructive social explosions. Festinger, Pepitone and Newcombe labeled this as deindividuated. In other words, in certain kinds of group situations, people are more likely to discard normal restraints, to lose their sense of individual identity, to become responsive to group norms. What circumstances elicit this psychological state? Group size A group has the power not only to arouse its members, but also to render themunidentifiable. The bigger the mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and become willing to commit atrocities. Because “everyone is doing it,” all can attribute their behavior to situation rather than to their own choices. Zimbardo speculated that the mere immensity of crowded cities produces anonymity and, thus norms permit vandalism.Physical anonymity When people feel physically anonymous, i.e. wearing uniforms or in greater groups, their behavior changes. Postmes and Spears conclude that being anonymous makes one less self-conscious, more group-conscious and more responsive to cues present in the situation, whether negative or positive. Altruistic cues even make deindividuated people more generous.Arousing and distracting activities Aggressive outbursts by large groups often are preceded by minor actions that arouse and divert people’s attention. Group shouting, chanting, clapping or dancing serve both to hype people up and to reduce self-consciousness.Group experiences that diminish self-consciousness tend to disconnect behavior from attitudes. Experiments reveal that unself-conscious, deindividuated people are less restrained, less self-regulated, more likely to act without thinking about their own values and more responsive to the situation. These findings harmonize and strengthen the experiments on self-awareness, which is the opposite of deindividuation. Those made self-aware, exhibit increased self-control and their actions more clearly reflect their attitudes. Research helps clarify our understandings of group effects. Studies of people in small groups have produced a principle that helps explain both bad and good outcomes: Group discussion often strengthens members’ initial inclinations. The unfolding of this research on group polarization illustrates the process of inquiry; how an interesting discovery often leads researchers to hasty and erroneous conclusions. When having a discussion, amazingly, the group decisions are usually riskier than the average decision when people had to decide by themselves. Dubbed the risky shift phenomenon, this finding set off a wave of group risk-taking studies. These revealed that the risky shift occurs not only when a group decides by consensus; after a brief discussion, individuals too, will alter their decision. During discussions, opinions converge. After several years of study, it was found that surprisingly the risky shift was not universal. There were also cases where the persons became more cautious after the discussion. But normally people are willing to take more risk. It turns out that there is a strong tendency for discussion to accentuate these initial leanings. Sometimes the group phenomenon is not a consistent shift to more risk, but rather a tendency for group decision to enhance group members’ initial leanings. This idea led investigators to propose what Moscovici and Zavalloni called a group polarization: Discussion typically strengthens the average inclinations of group members. This new view of the changes included by group discussion prompted experimenters to have people discuss statements that most of them favored or most of them opposed. Would talking in groups enhance their initial inclinations as it did with the decision dilemma? In groups, would risk takers not only become riskier, bigots become despisers, and givers become philanthropic? That’s what the group polarization predicts. Dozens of studies now have confirmed this theory. In everyday life, people associate mostly with others whose attitudes are similar to heir own, e.g. look at your own circle of friends. One real-life parallel to the laboratory phenomenon is what education researchers have called the accentuation phenomenon: over time initial differences among groups ofcollege students become accentuated. If the students at college X are initially more intellectual that the students of college Y, the gap is likely to grow during the year. Likewise, compared to fraternity and sorority members, independents tend to have more liberal political attitudes, a difference that grows with time in college. Researchers believe this results partly from group members reinforcing shared inclinations. Polarization also appears in communities. During community conflicts, like-minded people associate increasingly with one another, amplifying their shared tendencies.
Among several proposed theories of group polarization, two survived scientific scrutiny. One deals with the arguments presented during a discussion, the other with how members of a group view themselves vis-à-vis the other members. The first idea is an example of informational influence, the second of normative influence. Informational influence According to the best-supported explanation, group discussion elicits a pooling of ideas, most of which favor the dominant viewpoint. Ideas that were common knowledge to group members will often be brought up in discussion or, even if unmentioned, will jointly influence their discussion. But when people hear relevant arguments without learning the specific positions other people assume, they still shift their positions. Arguments, in and of themselves, matter.Normative Influence A second explanation of polarization involves comparison with others. As Festinger argued in his influential theory of social comparison, it is human nature to want to evaluate our opinions and abilities, something we can do by comparing our views with those of others. This social comparison theory prompted experiments that exposed people to others’ positions but not to their arguments. This is roughly the experience we have reading the results of an opinion poll of exit polling on the day of the election. When people learn others’ positions will they adjust their responses to maintain a socially favorable position? When people have made no prior commitment to a particular response, seeing others’ responses does stimulate a small polarization. This comparison-based polarization is usually less than that produced by a likely discussion. Still, it’s surprising that, instead of simply conforming to the group average, people often go one better. On many issues that have both factual and value-laden aspects, both informational andnormative factors work together. Groupthink: the tendency of decision-making groups to suppress dissent in theinterests of group harmony.From historical records and the memoirs of participants and observers, Janis, identified eight groupthink symptoms. These symptoms are a collective form of dissonance reduction that surface as group members try to maintain their positive group feeling when facing a threat. The first two groupthink symptoms lead group members to overestimate their group’s might and right:
Group members also become closed-minded:
Finally, the group suffers from pressures toward uniformity:
Janis comes with five effective procedures to attempt to minimize groupthink:
Physicist Bohr declared “There are trivial truths and great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” The great truth about the power of external pressures would explain our behavior is we were passive. However, we are not passive, we act and react. The opposite of the great truth is ‘power to the person’. Social and personal explanations of our social behavior are both valid, for at anymoment we are both creatures and creators of our social world. Social situations and individuals interact with each other. According to Snyder & Ickes this interaction occurs in at least three ways:
The reciprocal causation between situations and persons allows us to see people in two different perspectives, which are both correct:
Perhaps we would do well more often to view ourselves as free agents and to view others as influenced by their environments. Most religions encourage us to take responsibility for ourselves but to refrain from judging others. Does religion teach this because of our natural inclination to excuse our own failures while blaming others for theirs? While resisting social pressure, we may be reminded of the power of the person. As we act in response to the forces that act upon us, knowing that someone is trying to coerce us may even prompt us to react in the opposite direction. Individuals value their sense of freedom and self-efficacy. So when social pressure becomes so blatant that it threatens their sense of freedom, they often rebel. Therefore it might be a solution to offer choices instead of a demand. The reactance phenomenon ensures us that people are not puppets. People feel better when they see themselves as unique. People are more likely tonotice their distinctive attributes (hair colour, gender, weight, race, etc.) when they are in a group with different attributes. When people of two cultures are nearly identical, they will still notice their differences, however small. Even trivial distinctions may provoke scorn and conflict. Small differences can mean big conflicts. Rivalry is often most intense when the other group most closely resembles you. We have seen that:
At the beginning of most social events, a small minority will sometimes sway, and then even become the majority. Experiments initiated by Serge Moscovici in Paris have identified several determinants of minority influence: Consistency More influential than a minority that wavers is a minority that sticks to its position. A minority may stimulate creative thinking. A persistent minority is influential, even if not popular, partly because it soon becomes the focus of debate. Defections from the majority A persistent minority punctures any illusion of unanimity. When a minority consistently doubts the majority’s wisdom, majority members become freer to express their own doubts and may even switch to the minority position. These factors can strengthen both minorities and majorities. The social impact of any position depends on the strength, immediacy and number of those who support it.Leadership is the process by which certain individuals mobilize and guide groups. Task leaders often have a directive style – one that can work well if the leader is bright enough to give good orders. Social leaders often have a democratic style – one that delegates authority, welcomes input from team members and, as we have seen, helps prevent groupthink. The best leaders possess traits of both task and social leadership. They are actively concerned with how work is progressing and sensitive to the needs of their subordinates. Charismatic leaders typically have a compelling vision of some desired state of affairs, an ability to communicate this to others in clear and simple language and enough optimism and faith in their group to inspire others to follow. Groups also influence their leaders. Leaders who may deviate too radically from the group’s standards may be rejected. Prejudice comes in many forms. For example against north-eastern liberals, southern rednecks, against Arab “terrorists” or Christian fundamentalists. But also against people who are fat, ugly, homely, etc. Prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, racism, and sexism: the terms often overlap. Each of the situations of these involves a negative evaluation of some group. And that is the essence of prejudice: a negative prejudgment of a group and its individual members. Prejudice biases us against a person based on the person’s perceived group. Prejudice is an attitude. An attitude is a distinct combination of three factors ABC:
The negative evaluations that mark prejudice can stem from emotional associations, from the need to justify behavior, or from negative beliefs, called stereotypes. To stereotype is to generalize. A problem with stereotypes arises when we overgeneralize or we are just plain wrong. Prejudice is a negative attitude; discrimination is a negative behavior. Discriminatory behavior often has its source in prejudicial attitudes. Prejudiced attitudes need not breed hostile acts, nor does all oppression spring from prejudice. Racism and sexism are institutional practices that discriminate, even when there is no prejudicial intent. Racial prejudiceThe phenomenon of greatest prejudice in the most intimate social realms seemsuniversal. Experiments and studies show: unwanted thought and feeling often persist. All of this illustrates again our dual attitude system. We can have differing explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same target. Thus, we may retain from childhood a habitual, automatic fear for or dislike from people for whom we now express respect and appreciation. Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice. Having confirmed the phenomenon of automatic stereotyping and prejudice, these studies briefly flash words or faces that automatically activate stereotypes of some racial, gender or age group. Without their awareness, the subjects’ activated stereotypes may then bias their behavior. Gender prejudice Newer research reveals that behaviors associated with leadership are perceived less favorably when enacted by a woman. Assertiveness can seem less becoming in a woman than in a man. Gender stereotypes are people’s beliefs about how women and men do behave, in stead of ideas about how they ought to behave (gender-role norms). Gender stereotypes are very pervasive. But, judging from what people tell survey researchers, attitudes towards women have changed as rapidly as racial attitudes. Stereotypes (beliefs) are not prejudices (attitudes). However, it may support prejudice. To conclude, overt prejudice against people of colour and against women is far less common today than it was four decades ago. The same is true of prejudice against homosexual people. Nevertheless, techniques that are sensitive to subtle prejudice still detect widespread bias. And in parts of the world, gender prejudice is literally deadly. We therefore need to look carefully and closely at the problem of prejudice and its causes. Prejudice springs from several sources because it serves several functions. Prejudice may express our sense of who we are and gain us social acceptance. It may defend our sense of self against anxiety that arises from insecurity or inner conflict. And it may promote our self-interest by supporting what brings us pleasure and opposing what doesn’t. Consider first how prejudice can function to defend self-esteem and social position. A principle to remember: Unequal status breeds prejudice. Masters view slaves as lazy, irresponsible, lacking ambition – as having just those traits that justify the slavery. Historians debate the forces that create unequal status. But once these inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic and social superiority of those who have wealth and power. Cruel acts breed cruel attitudes. Also, in experiments: People perceive members of unknown groups as having traits suit their roles. When oppression ends, its effects linger, like a societal hangover. In the Nature of Prejudice, Allport catalogued 15 possible effects of victimization. Allport believed these reactions were reducible to two basic types: those that involve blaming oneself, and those that involve blaming external causes. Also, shown from this study: cultural differences need not imply social deficits. Nevertheless, social beliefs can be self-confirming. Placed in a situation in which others expect you to perform poorly, your anxiety may cause you to confirm the belief. Clause Steele and his colleagues call thisphenomenon: stereotype threat. This is a self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. Stereotype threat is distracting: the effort it takes to dismiss its allegations increases mental demands and decreases working memory. Another effect is motivational. Stone: “When people are reminded of a negative stereotype about themselves it can adversely affect performance. Steele confirmed that racial stereotypes are self-fulfilling: Whites and Blacks take different verbal abilities tests. Negative stereotypes disrupt performance, but positive stereotypes, it seems, facilitate performance.” We humans are a group-bound species. Our ancestral history prepares us to feed and protect ourselves, to live in groups. Humans cheer for their groups, kill for their groups, die for their groups. Self-concept: (our sense of who we are) contains not just a personal identity, it also contains a social identity. Working with Henri Tajfel, Turner proposed the social identity theory. They observed that:
We evaluate ourselves partly by our group memberships. Having a sense of “we-ness” strengthens our self-concepts. We seek not only respect for ourselves, but pride in our groups. The group definition of who you are (your race, religion, gender, academic major)implies a definition of who we are not. The circle that includes us (ingroup), excludes them (outgroup). Thus, the mere experience of being formed into groups may promote ingroup bias. We are so group conscious that, given any excuse to think of ourselves as a group, we will do so, and then will exhibit ingroup bias. This bias occurs with both genders and with people of all ages and nationalities. We are also more prone to ingroup bias when our own group is small and lower in status relative to the outgroup. When we are part of a small group surrounded by a larger group, we are also more conscious of our group membership. When our ingroup is in majority, we will think less about it. Once established, prejudice is maintained largely by inertia. If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion. If prejudice is not deeply ingrained in personality, then as fashions change and new norms evolve, prejudice can diminish. Although prejudice is bred by social situations, emotional factors often add fuel to the fire: Frustration can feed prejudice, as can personality factors like status needs and authoritarian tendencies. Pain and frustration often evoke hostility. When the cause of our frustration isintimidating or unknown, we often redirect our hostility. This phenomenon of displaced aggression may have contributed to the lynching of African Americans in the south after the Civil War. In earlier centuries, people vented their fear and hostility on witches, whom they sometimes burned or drowned in public. As new studies confirm, people who are put in unhappy moods often think and act more negatively toward outgroups. Passions provoke prejudice. One source of frustration is competition. When two groups compete for jobs, housing, or social prestige, one group’s goal fulfillment can become the other’s frustration. Thus, the realistic group conflict theory suggests that prejudice arises when groups compete for scare sources. Any two people with equal reason to feel frustrated or threatened will often not be equally prejudiced. This suggests that prejudice serves other functions besides advancing competitive self-interest. Status is relative: to perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us. Thus, one psychological benefit of prejudice, or of any status system, is a feeling of superiority. It is also shown that people whose status is secure have less need to feel superior. Also asserting one’s social identity by boasting one’s own group and denigrating outgroups, can boost one’s ego. Ethnocentric people who are judgmental, share authorial tendencies. Intolerance for weakness, a punitive attitude, and a submissive respect for their ingroup’s authorities, as reflected in their agreement with such statements as, “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn”. Moreover, contemporary studies of right-wing authoritarians confirm that there are individuals whose fears and hostilities surface as prejudice. Feeling of moral superiority may go hand in hand with brutality toward perceived inferiors. Different forms of prejudice sometimes coexist in the same individuals. The same is true of those with a social dominance orientation, who view people in terms of hierarchies of merit or goodness. By contrast, those with a more communal or universal orientation (who attend to people’s similarities and presume “universal human rights” enjoyed by “all God’s children”) are more welcoming of affirmative action and accepting of those who differ. Stereotyped beliefs and prejudiced attitudes exist not only because of socialconditioning and because they enable people to displace hostilities, but also as by-products of normal thinking processes. Like perceptual illusions, which are by-products of our knack for interpreting the world, stereotypes can be by-products of how we simplify our complex worlds. One way we simplify our environment is to categorize: to organize the world by clustering objects into groups. Having done so, we think about them more easily. We find it especially easy and efficient to rely on stereotypes when:
Experiments expose our spontaneous categorization of people by race. Suchcategorization itself isn’t a form of prejudice, but it does provide a foundation for prejudice. Mere divisions into groups can create an outgroup homogeneity effect: a sense that they are “all alike” and different from us and our groups. Because we generally like people we think are similar to us and dislike those we perceive as different, the natural result is ingroup bias. When the group is similar to our own group we are more likely to see diversity among its members. For example, you can recognize more faces of your own race than faces of another race. In general, the greater our familiarity with a social group, the more we see its diversity. The less our familiarity, the more we stereotype. It’s not that we cannot perceive differences among faces of another race. Rather, whenlooking at a face from another racial group we often attend, first, to race (“that man is black”) rather than to individual features. When viewing someone of our own race, we are less race-conscious and more attentive to individual details. People define you by your most distinctive traits and behaviors. They also take note of those who violate expectations. Such perceived distinctiveness makes it easier for highly capable job applicants from low-status groups to get noticed; through they also work harder to prove that their abilities are genuine. The extra attention we pay to distinctive people created an illusion that they differ more from others than they really do. If people thought you had the IQ of a genius, they would probably notice things about you that otherwise would pass unnoticed. Sometimes we perceive others as reacting to our distinctiveness when actually they aren’t. In an experiment, women were made to believe that they had a visible scar on their face (make-up). Self-conscious of being different, the “disfigured” persons misinterpreted mannerisms and comments they would otherwise not have noticed. Our minds also use distinctive cases as a shortcut to judging groups. Such generalizing from single cases can cause problems. Vivid instances, though more available in memory, are seldom representative of the larger group. In explaining others’ actions, we frequently commit the fundamental attribution error. We attribute their behavior so much to their inner dispositions that we discount important situational forces. The more people assume that human traits are fixed dispositions; the stronger are their stereotypes. The just-world phenomenon is a short way from the assuming that those who flourishmust be good and those who suffer must deserve their fate. Such beliefs enablesuccessful people to reassure themselves that they, too, deserve what they have. Linking good fortune with virtue and misfortune with moral failure enables the fortunate to feel pride and to avoid responsibility for the unfortunate. Aggression is any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. Instrumental aggression aims to hurt only as a means to some other end, such as most terrorism. Philosophers have long debated whether our human nature is fundamentally that of a benign, contented, “noble savage” (Rousseau) or that of a potentially explosive brute (Hobbes, Freud, Lorenz). The first view blames society, not human nature, for social evils. The second idea sees society’s laws as necessary to restrain and control the human brute. The idea that aggression is an instinct collapsed as the list of supposed humaninstincts grew to include nearly every conceivable human behavior, and scientists became aware how much behavior varies from person to person and culture to culture. Yet, biology clearly does influence behavior just as nurture works upon nature. Researchers have found neural systems in both animals and humans that facilitate aggression. It was discovered that the prefrontal cortex, which acts like an emergency brake on deeper brain areas involved in aggressive behavior, was less active in men with antisocial conduct disorder. This does not mean that this brain abnormality predisposes violence, but for some violent people it is likely a factor. Heredity influences the neural system’s sensitivity to aggressive cues. Aggressiveness naturally varies among primates and humans. Our temperaments – how intense and reactive we are – are partly brought with us into the world, influenced by our sympathetic nervous system’s reactivity. Blood chemistry also influences neural sensitivity to aggressive stimulation. Violent people are more likely to (1) drink and (2) become aggressive when intoxicated. Alcohol enhances aggressiveness by reducing people’s self-awareness and by reducing their ability to consider consequences. Alcohol de-individuates and disinhibits. Aggressiveness also correlates with the male sex hormone, testosterone. Testosterone is roughly like battery power. If its battery levels are very low, it is noticeable that things slow down. There exist important neural, genetic and biochemical influences on aggression.Biological influences predispose some people more than others to react aggressively to conflict and provocation. But there are other factors to consider:Frustration and aggressionAccording to Dollard and his colleagues, frustration always leads to some form of aggression. Frustration is anything that blocks our attaining of a goal. Frustration grows when our motivation to achieve a goal is very strong, when we expected gratification and when the blocking is complete. As we learn to inhibit direct retaliation, espcially when others might disapprove or punish, we displace our hostilities to safer targets. This situation is called displacement and it occurs when a new target is found that is safer and more socially acceptable. The person’s aggression is then moved to a new target other than the source of the frustration. When a person harbors anger, even a trivial offence may elicit an explosiveoverreaction. Berkowitz revised the, in his opinion overstated, frustration-aggression connection. Frustration produces anger, an emotional readiness to aggress. Anger arises when someone who frustrates us could have chosen to act otherwise. A frustrated person is especially likely to lash out when aggressive cues pull the cork, releasing the bottled-up anger. Examples of such a cue are weapons, especially (hand) guns. The learning of aggressionBy experience and observing others, we learn that aggression often pays. For instance, an aggressive child whose aggressive acts successfully intimidate other children will become increasingly aggressive. Another example is aggressive ice hockey players score more goals on average. Aggression has certain payoffs. If nothing more, it gets attention. This is called social learning theory of aggression, proposed by Albert Bandura. People learn aggressive responses both by experience and by observing aggressive models. Bandura contended that aggressive acts are motivated by a variety of aversive experiences, e.g. frustration, pain, insults. Such experiences arouse us emotionally. But whether we act aggressively depends upon the consequences we anticipate. Aggression is most likely when we are aroused and it seems safe and rewarding to aggress. Environmental influencesPain heightens aggressiveness in humans. Berkowitz states that aversive simulation rather than frustration is the basic trigger of hostile aggression. Frustration is certainly one important type of unpleasantness. But any aversive event, whether a dashed expectation, or a personal insult, or physical pain, can incite an emotional outburst. Even the torment of a depressed state increases the likelihood of hostile aggressive behavior. An uncomfortable environment also heightens aggressive tendencies. Offensive odors, cigarette smoke, and air pollution have all been linked with aggressive behavior. But the strongest environmental irritant is heat. There are indications that uncomfortable heat increases aggression, both in the laboratory and the real world. Being attacked or insulted by another is especially conducive to aggression. Many experiments confirm that intentional attacks breed retaliatory attacks. Crowding is the subjective feeling of not having enough space. For example, people in dense urban areas do experience higher rates of crime and emotional distress. The concept of catharsis is usually credited to Aristotle. The catharsis hypothesis has been extended to include the emotional release supposedly obtained not only by observing drama, but also through recalling and reliving past events, through expressing emotions and through various actions. There is near consensus among social psychologists that catharsis does not reduce anger or aggression, on the contrary. The venting of hostility breeds hostility. Fortunately, there are non-aggressive ways to express our feelings and to inform others how their behavior affects us. Rephrasing accusatory “you” messages as “I” messages communicates feelings in a better way and enables the other person to make a positive response. Aversive experiences such as frustrated expectations and personal attacks predispose hostile aggression. So it is wise to refrain from planting false, unreachable expectations in people’s minds. Anticipated rewards and costs influence instrumental aggression. This suggests we should reward co-operative, non-aggressive behavior. Aggressive stimuli also trigger aggression. This suggests reducing the availability of weapons such as handguns. In several countries there was an increase in reported crime from 1960 to the early 1990s. The surging violence might have been fuelled by:
Repeated exposure to fictional eroticism has several effects. It can decrease one’s attraction to one’s less exciting, real-life partner. It can also increase one’s acceptance of extramarital sex and of women’s sexual submission to men. Social psychologists report that viewing fictional scenes of a man overpowering and arousing a woman can (1) distort one’s perceptions of how women actually respond to sexual coercion and (2) increase men’s aggression against women, at least in laboratory settings. Evidence suggests that pornography may contribute to men’s actual aggression toward women. Correlational studies raise that possibility. As pornography became widely available, the rate of reported rapes sharply increased. In other studies, sexual offenders commonly admit to pornography use. This correlation cannot prove that pornography is a contributing cause of rape. Maybe the offenders’ pornography use is a mere symptom and not a cause of their deviance. Although limited to the sorts of short-term behaviors that can be studied in thelaboratory, controlled experiments reveal cause and effect. A consensus statement by 21 leading social scientists sums up the results: “Exposure to violent pornography increases punitive behavior toward women.” Crime stories on television are not scientific evidence. Researchers therefore usecorrelational and experimental studies to examine the effects of viewing violence. Studies among thousands of children in different countries have showed that watching violence on television at an early age modestly predicted violence at the age of nineteen and enlarged the chance that at the age of thirty the person had been convicted of a serious crime. Where television goes, increased violence followed. As violent television spread, homicide rates sharply increased. Viewing violence increases violence. This is especially so among people withaggressive tendencies. The violence viewing effect is also strongest when an attractive person commits justified, realistic violence that goes unpunished and that shows no pain or harm. Conclusions drawn by researchers are not that television and pornography are primary causes for social violence. Rather, they say, television is one of the causes in a very complex recipe for violence. Given the convergence of correlational and experimental evidence, researchers have explored why viewing violence has this effect. 1. It is not the violent content itself that causes social violence, but the arousal it produces. Arousal tends to spill over: one type of arousal energizes otherbehaviors.2. Viewing violence disinhibits. It primes the viewer for aggressive behavior byactivating violence-related thoughts. 3. Media portrayals also invoke imitation. The commercial television industry ishard-pressed to dispute that television leads viewers to imitate what they haveseen: its advertiser’s model consumption. As the ways of relating and problem solving modeled on television trigger imitation, prosocial behavior can be stimulated by television’s subtle influence teaching children positive lessons in behavior. The scientific debate over whether media violence has an effect is basically over, stated Gentile and Anderson (2003). Researchers are now focusing on video games, which have exploded in popularity and are exploding with increasing brutality. Gentile and Anderson offered some reasons why violent game playing might have a more toxic effect than watching violent television. With game playing, players: · Identify with, and play the role of, a violent character· Actively rehearse violence in stead of only watching it· Engage in the whole sequence of enacting violence· Are engaged with continual violence and threats of attack· Repeat violent behaviors often· Are rewarded for effective aggression Playing violent video games has five consistent effects: 1. It increases arousal (rise of heart rate and blood pressure)2. it increases aggressive thinking3. it increases aggressive behaviors4. it decreases prosocial behaviors (after playing a violent game, peoplebecome slower to offer help) Moreover, the more violent the games played, the bigger the effects. Video games have become more violent and this is why parents have to discover what their kids are ingesting and ensure that their media diet is healthy. Consider a simple but powerful reward theory of attraction: we like those whosebehavior is rewarding to us, or whom we associate with rewarding events. If yourrelationship is to survive, it’s important that you both continue to associate yourrelationship with good things. One of the most powerful predictors of whether any two people are friends is sheer proximity. Proximity can also breed hostility; most assaults and murders involve people living close together. But far more often, proximity kindles liking. For example, sociologists have found that that most people marry someone who lives in the same neighbourhood, or works at the same company, or sits in the same class. Actually, it is not geographical distance that is critical, but functional distance – how often people’s paths cross. We frequently become friends with those who use the same entrances, parking lots, and recreation areas. So why does proximity encourage affection more often than animosity? Proximity enables people to discover commonalities and exchange rewards. What is more, merely anticipating interaction boosts liking. The phenomenon is adaptive. Anticipatory liking – expecting that someone will be pleasant and compatible – increases the chance of forming a rewarding relationship. There is another factor that boosts liking. Mere exposure to all sorts of novel stimuli – nonsense syllables, Chinese characters, musical selections, faces – boosts people’s rating of them. The mere-exposure effect violates the common-sense prediction of boredom – decreased interest in – repeatedly heard music or tasted foods. Unless the repetitions are incessant, liking usually increases. Zajonc notes that the mere-exposure effect has “enormous adaptive significance.” It is a hard-wired phenomenon that predisposes our attractions and attachments. It colours our evaluation of others: we like familiar people. We even like ourselves better when we are the way we’re used to seeing ourselves. The belief that looks matter little may be another insurance how we deny realinfluences upon us. Studies have shown that appearance does matter. Theconsistency and persuasiveness of this effect is disconcerting. Good looks are a great asset. A young woman’s physical attractiveness is a moderately good predictor of howfrequently she dates. A young man’ attractiveness is slightly less a predictor of how frequently he dates. As philosopher Bertrand Russel thought: “On the whole women tend to love men for their character while men tend to love women for their appearance.” Even in job interviews, attractiveness and grooming affect first impressions. This helps explain why attractive people have more prestigious jobs and make more money. Experiments confirm the matching principle. When choosing whom to approach,knowing the other is free to say yes or no, people usually approach someone whose attractiveness roughly matches their own. Over all, married couples are better matched. In cases of happy couples where the partners are not equally attractive, the least attractive person often has other qualities (e.g. money, status). Much as adults are biased toward attractive children, young children are biased toward attractive children. Adults show a similar bias when judging children. The sad truth is that most of us assume what we might call a “Bart Simpson effect” – that homely children are less able and socially competent than their beautiful peers. What is more, we assume that beautiful people possess certain desirable traits. These expected traits differ per culture. Added together, the findings define a physical-attractiveness stereotype: what is beautiful is good. Often attractive people are more socially skilful, likeable, popular, outgoing and gender-typed. The first two due to a more developed social self-confidence. By this analysis, what is crucial to your social skill is not how you look, but how people treat you and how you feel about yourself. Although attractiveness is not the same everywhere in the world and in varies times, there is also some agreement: facial and bodily features should not deviate too drastically from average and a symmetrical face. Psychologists working from the evolutionary perspective explain these genderdifferences in terms of reproductive strategy. They assume that beauty signalsbiologically important information: health, youth and fertility. Over time, men who preferred fertile-looking women outreproduced those who were just as happy to mate with prepubescent or postmenopausal females. They also assume evolution predisposes women to favor male traits that signify an ability to provide and protect resources. These factors still play an important role in our society today. Although our mating psychology has biological wisdom, attraction is not all hard-wired. What’s attractive to you also depends on your comparison standards. Laboratory experiments confirm this “contrast effect”. To men who have been recently gazing at centrefolds, average women or even their own wives tend to seem less attractive. It works the same way with our self-perceptions. After viewing a superattractive person of the same sex, people feel less attractive than after viewing a homely person. Not only do we perceive attractive people as likeable, we also perceive likeable people as attractive. Discovering someone’s similarities to us makes the person seem moreattractive. Moreover, love sees loveliness. The more in love a woman is with a man, the more physically attractive she finds him. Byrne and his colleagues found over and over again that the more similar someone’s attitudes are to your own, the more likeable you’ll find the person. Experiments showed that “birds of a feather do flock together”. Some complementarity may evolve as a relationship progresses, yet people seem slightly more prone to like and to marry those whose needs and personalities are similar. If we like those whose behavior is rewarding, then we ought to adore those who like and admire us. One person’s liking for another does predict the other’s liking in return. Liking is usually mutual. People’s reports suggest that one person liking another causes the other to return the appreciation. Experiments confirm it: those told that certain others like or admire them usually feel a reciprocal affection. People whose self-esteem has been (temporarily) shattered are presumably hungry for social approval. This helps explain why people sometimes fall passionately in love on the rebound, after an ego-bruising rejection. We humans have an intense need to belong – to connect with others in enduring, close relationships. Baumeister and Leary illustrate the power of social attractions bred by our need to belong: · For our ancestors, mutual attachments enabled group survival.· For a woman and a man, the bonds of love can lead to children, whose survival chances are boosted by the nurturing of two bonded parents who support one another.· For children and their caregivers, social attachments enhance survival. · For people everywhere, actual and hoped-for close relationships preoccupythinking and colour emotions. · For the jilted, the widowed, and the sojourner in a strange place, the loss ofsocial bonds triggers pain, loneliness or withdrawal. Williams and his colleagues explored what happened when our need to belong was thwarted by ostracism – acts of excluding or ignoring. To thwart our deep need to belong is to unsettle our life. First impressions are important. Nevertheless, long-term loving is not merely anintensification of initial liking. Social psychologists have therefore shifted their attention from the mild attraction experienced during first encounters to the study of enduring, close relationships. The first step in scientifically studying romantic loves is to decide how to measure it. Social scientists have counted several ways in which one can love. Psychologist Sternberg views love as a triangle, whose three sides are passion, intimacy and commitment. Some elements are common to all loving relationships: mutual understanding, giving and receiving support, enjoying the loved one’s company. Some elements are distinctive. If we experience passionate love, we express it physically, we expect the relationship to be exclusive, and we are intensely fascinated with our partner. Hatfield described passionate love as “a state of intense longing for union with another.” To explain passionate love, Hatfield notes that a given state of arousal can be steered into any of several emotions, depending on how we attribute the arousal. An emotion involves both body and mind – both arousal and how we interpret and label the arousal. The two-factor theory of emotion claims that emotional experience is a product of psychological arousal and how we cognitively label the arousal. According to this theory, being aroused by any source should strengthen passionate feelings, but only if the mind is free to attribute some of the arousal to a romantic stimulus. Another experiment showed that fear (adrenaline) makes the heart grow fonder. In most cultures love is a precondition for marriage. In cultures where arrangedmarriages are common, love often follows marriage. Males and females differ in how they experience passionate love. Men fall more readily in love, fall out of love more slowly and are less likely than women to break up a premarital romance. Women are more likely to report feeling euphoric, are more likely to focus on intimacy of the friendship and their concern for their partner. Although passionate love burns hot, it inevitably simmers down. The longer arelationship endures, the fewer its emotional ups and downs. About four years after marriage, the divorce rate peaks in cultures worldwide. If a close relationship is to endure, it will settle to a steadier but still warm afterglow, called companionate love. Unlike the wild emotions of passionate love, companionate love is lower key; it’s a deep, affectionate attachment. The cooling of passionate love over time and the increasing importance of factors such as shared values can be seen in the feelings of arranged versus love-based marriages. Experimenters found that those who married for love reported diminishing feelings of love if they had been married more than five years, while those in arranged marriages often experience increasing love over time. The decline in intense mutual fascination may be natural and adaptive for species survival. The result of passionate love frequently is children, whose survival is aided by the parents’ waning obsession with one another. There are two factors that influence the ups and downs of our close relationships: equity and intimacy. If both partners pursue their personal desires, without taking into account the feelings of the other person, the friendship will die. Therefore, our society teaches us to exchange rewards, based on the equity principle of attraction: what you and your partner get out of a relationship should be proportional to what you each put into it. If both the partners feel their outcomes correspond to the assets and efforts each contributes, then both perceive equity. Strangers and casual acquaintances maintain equity by exchanging benefits. Those in an enduring friendship feel freer to maintain equity by exchanging a variety of benefits and eventually to stop keeping track of who owes whom. Those involved in an equitable, long-term relationship are unconcerned with short-term equity. One clue that an acquaintance is becoming a close friend is that the person shares when sharing is unexpected. Happily married people tend not to keep score of they are giving and getting. According to the matching rule people usually bring equal assets to romanticrelationships. If they are mismatched in one area, they tend to be mismatched in some other area, but in total assets, they are an equitable match. Those in an equitable relationship are more content. Those who perceive their relationship as inequitable feel discomfort: the one who has the better deal may feel guilty and the one who senses a raw deal may feel strong irritation. When both partnersfreely give and receive and make decisions together, the odds of sustained, satisfying love are good. Deep, companiate relationships are intimate. They enable us to be known as we truly are and feel accepted. As a relationship grows, self-disclosing partners reveal more and more of themselves to one another; their knowledge of one another penetrates to deeper and deeper levels until it reaches an appropriate depth. The disclosure reciprocity effect: disclosure begets disclosure. We reveal more to those who have been open with us. But intimacy is seldom instant. Some people – most of them women – are especially skilled “openers” – they easily elicit intimate disclosures from others, even from those who normally don’t reveal very much of themselves. These people tend to be good listeners. Jourard argued that dropping our masks, letting ourselves be known as we are,nurtures love. He presumed that it is gratifying to open up to another and then to receive the trust another implies by being open with us. Intimate self-disclosure is also one of companiate love’s delights. Dating and married couples who most reveal themselves to one another express most satisfaction with their relationship and are more likely to endure in it. Researchers have also found that women are often more willing to disclose their fears and weaknesses than are men: women express, men repress.Is computer-mediated communication within virtual communities a poor substitute for in-person relationships, or is it a wonderful way to widen our social circles? Although the internet spreads communication (and therefore relationships), it is an impoverished version of, for example, telephone or printing press. Most people don’t find the internet isolating. They claim that email has strengthened their relationships and increased their contact with relatives and friends. On the other hand, people can pretend to be whoever they want to be online. Robert Putnam notes that the social benefits of computer-mediated communication are constrained by two other realities: · The “digital divide” accentuates social and educational inequalities between the world’s haves and have-nots. · Cyber-balkanization allows groups to come into contact with each other. As economic and social barriers to divorce weakened during the 1960s and 1970s, the divorce rate rose. The risk of divorce also depends on who marries whom. People usually stay married if they: · Married after age 20;· Both grew up in stable, two-parent home;· Dated for a long while before marriage;· Are well and similarly educated;· Enjoy a stable income from a good job;· Live in a small town or on a farm;· Did not cohabit or become pregnant before marriage;· Are religiously committed;· Are of similar faith, age and education. Severing bonds produces a predictable sequence of agitated preoccupation with the lost partner, followed by deep sadness and, eventually, the beginnings of emotional detachment and a return to normal living. Even newly separated couples who have long ago ceased feeling affection are often surprised at their desire to be near the former partner. In conflict situations, choices that are individually rewarding become collectivelypunishing. How can we reconcile individuals’ well-being, including their right to pursue their personal interests, with communal well-being? The prisoners´ dilemma is a good illustration of the social trap. Every individual is better of defecting, as this exploits the other’s co-operation or protects against the other’s exploitation. A metaphor for the insidious nature of social dilemmas is what ecologist Garrith Hardin called the “tragedy of the commons.” He derived the name from the centrally located pasture area in old English towns, but “commons” can be any shared and limited resource. The prisoners´ dilemma and the tragedy of the commons have several similar features. First, both tempt people to explain their own behavior situationally and to explain their partners´ behavior dispositionally. Second, motives often change. At first, people are eager to make some easy money, then to minimize their losses, and finally to save face and avoid defeat. Third, most real-life conflicts, are non-zero-sum games. The two sides’ profits and losses need not add up to zero. How can we induce people to co-operate for their mutual betterment? Regulation: We develop laws and regulations for our common good. Small is beautiful: If groups are smaller, people feel more responsible and effective. People also feel more identified with a group’s success. Communication:To escape the social trap, people must communicate. Sometimes groupcommunication degenerates into threats and name-calling. More often, communication enables groups to achieve much more. Discussing the dilemma forges a group identity, which enhances concern for the group’s welfare. Changing the payoffs Co-operation rises when the payoff matrix is changed to make co-operation more rewarding than exploitation. Appeals to altruistic normsWhen co-operation obviously serves the public good, one can usefully appeal to the social-responsibility norm. In an experiment Muzafer Sherif showed that competition can change strangers into enemies. The win-lose situation produced intense conflict, negative images of the outgroup and strong ingroup cohesiveness and pride. According to some social-psychological theorists, people perceive justice as equity – the distribution of rewards in proportion to the individuals’ contributions. An interesting implication of equity theory is that the more competent and worthy people feel, the more they will feel underbenefitted and thus eager to strike back. If people believe they are more worthy than they are receiving, intense social protests may occur. There is a “golden” rule – whoever has the gold makes the rule. More often than not, those with social power convince themselves and others that they deserve what they’re getting. According to Hatfield, Walster and Berscheid, exploited people have three possible reactions: (1) accept ands justify their inferior position, (2) demand compensation, perhaps by harassing, embarrassing, even cheating their exploiter, and (3) restore equity by retaliating. A conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals. Many conflicts contain but a small core of truly incompatible goals; the bigger problems are the misperceptions of the other’s motives and goals. Because of our self-serving bias, self-justifying and fundamental attribution error, an ingroup bias is easily formed. To a striking degree, the misperceptions of those in conflict are mutual. People in conflict attribute similar virtues to themselves and vices to the other. Another type of mirror-image perception is each side’s exaggeration of the other’s position. Each side overestimates the extremity of the other’s views, especially those of the group seeking change. If misperceptions accompany conflict, then they should appear and disappear asconflicts wax and wane. They do! Good advice, then, is this: when in conflict, do not assume that the other fails to share your values and morality. Rather, compare perceptions, assuming that the other is likely perceiving the situation differently. During the last thirty years in the United States, segregation and prejudice havediminished together. Was interracial contact the cause of these improved attitudes? Were those who actually experienced desegregation affected by it? Desegregation sometimes improves racial attitudes, but sometimes it doesn’t. The more encouraging older studies of store clerks, soldiers, and housing project neighbors involved considerable interracial contact, more than enough to reduce the anxiety that marks initial intergroup contact. Other studies involving prolonged, personal contact, between Black and White prison inmates and between Black and White girls in interracial summer camps, show similar benefits. In experiments, those who form friendships with outgroup members develop more positive attitudes toward the outgroup. Surveys of nearly 4000 Europeans reveal that friendship is a key to successful contact: If you have a minority-group friend, you become much more likely to express sympathy and support for the friend’s group, and even somewhat more support for immigration by that group. The social psychologists that advocated desegregation never claimed that contact of any sort would improve attitudes. They expect poor results when contacts are competitive, unsupported by authorities, and unequal. Such unequal contacts breed attitudes that merely justify the continuation of inequality. So, it’s important that the contact be equal-status contact. By studying co-operation between different groups, we see that when the hostility is great, mere contact only provides the opportunity for haunts and attacks. Competitive contact divides, but co-operative contact unites. Such friendliness is common among those who experience a shared threat. Lanzetta observed this when he put four-man groups of Naval ROTC cadets to work on problem-solving tasks and then began informing them over a loudspeaker that their answers were wrong, their productivity was inexcusably low and their thinking was stupid. Other groups did not receive this harassment. Lanzetta observed that the group members under duress became friendlier to one another, more co-operative and less argumentative. They were in ittogether. The result was a co-operative spirit. Closely related to the unifying power of an external threat is the unifying power of superordinate goals: goals that compel all in a group and require co-operative effort. After working together to achieve such superordinate goals, people are much friendlier towards each other. In comparison, with isolation and competition, you can make strangers into bitter enemies, but with superordinate goals you can turn enemies into friends. McConahay, a race-relation expert, wrote that it is clear that the most effective practice for improving race relations in desegregated schools is co-operative learning. Thus, an important challenge facing our divided world is to identify and agree on our superordinate goals and to structure co-operative efforts to achieve them. Conflicting parties have other ways to resolve their differences. When husband and wife, or labor and management, or nation X and Y disagree, they can bargain with another directly. They can otherwise ask a third party to mediate by makingsuggestions and facilitating their negotiations. Or they can arbitrate by submitting their agreement to someone who will study the issues and impose a settlement. BargainingMany a conflict is not over a pie of fixed size but over a pie that shrinks if the conflict continues. Being tough can also diminish the chances of actually reaching an agreement. If the other party responds with an equally extreme stance, both may be locked into positions from which neither can back down without losing face. In the weeks before the 1991 Persian Gulf War e.g., President Bush threatened, in the full glare of publicity to “Kick Saddam’s ass”. MediationA third-party mediator may offer suggestions that enable conflicting parties to make concessions and still save face. If my concession can be attributed to a mediator, who is gaining an equal concession from my antagonist, thus neither of us will be caving in to the other’s demand. Mediators also help resolve conflicts by facilitating constructive communication. Their first task is to help the parties rethink the conflict and gain information about others’ interest. Typically, people on both sides have a competitive win-lose orientation: They are successful if their opponent is unhappy with the result and unsuccessful if their opponent is pleased. The mediator aims to replace this win-lose orientation with a co-operative win-win orientation. After experiments some scientists induced bargainers to search for integrativeagreements. Some that integrates both parties’ interests. Compared to compromises, in which each party sacrifices something important, integrative agreements are more enduring. Because they are mutually rewarding, they also lead to better ongoing relationships. Communication often helps reduce self-fulfilling misperceptions. Those who engaged the issue (by making their positions clear and by taking one another’s views into account) achieved more actual agreement and gained more accurate information about one another’s perceptions. That helps explain why couples that communicate their concerns directly and openly are usually happily married. Conflict researchers report that a key factor is trust. If you believe the other person is well intentioned, you are then more likely to divulge your needs and concerns. Lacking such trust, you may fear that being open will give the other party information that might be used against you. E.g. once labor and management both believe that management’s goal of higher productivity and profit is compatible with labor’s goal of better wages and workingconditions, they can begin to work for an integrative win-win solution. When the parties then convene to communicate directly, they are usually not set loose in the hope that, eyeball-to-eyeball, the conflict will resolve itself. In the midst of a threatening, stressful conflict, emotions often disrupt the ability to understand the other party’s point of view. The mediator will often structure the encounter to help each party understand and feel understood by the other. Neutral parties may also suggest mutually agreeable proposals that would be dismissed if offered by either side. ArbitrationSome conflicts are so intractable, the underlying interests so divergent, that a mutually satisfactory resolution is unattainable. If even a third party cannot solve the problem, the parties may turn to arbitration by having the mediator or another third party impose a settlement. Disputants usually prefer to settle their differences without arbitration so they retain control over the outcome. When people knew they would face an arbitrated settlement if mediation failed, they tried harder to resolve the problem, exhibited less hostility, and were thus more likely to reach agreement. In cases where differences seem large and irreconcilable, the prospect of arbitration may have an opposite effect. The disputants may freeze their positions, hoping to gain an advantage when the arbitrator chooses a compromise. Negotiation researchers report that most disputants are made stubborn by optimistic overconfidence. Successful mediation is hindered when, as very often happens, both parties believe they have a two-third chance of winning a final-offer arbitration. Sometimes tension and suspicion run so high that communication, much lessresolution, becomes all but impossible. Each party may threaten, coerce, or retaliate against the other. Unfortunately, such acts tend to be reciprocated, escalating the conflict. Social psychologist Charles Osgood advocated a third alternative, one that isconciliatory rather than retaliatory, yet strong enough to discourage exploitation. Osgood called it “graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction”: GRIT. GRIT, a label that suggests the determination it requires. GRIT aims to reverse the conflict spiral by triggering reciprocal de-escalation. GRIT requires one side to initiate a few, small de-escalatory actions, after announcing a conciliatory intent. Next, the initiator establishes credibility and genuineness by carrying out, exactly as announced, several verifiable conciliatory acts. GRIT is conciliatory. But it is not “surrender and installment plan”. The remaining aspects of the plan protect each side’s self-interest by maintaining retaliatory capability. Less dramatic acts of comforting, caring, and helping abound: without asking anything in return, people offer directions, donate money, give blood, volunteer time. Why, and when, will people perform altruistic? Altruism is selfishness in reverse. An altruistic person is concerned and helpful even when no benefits are offered or expected in return. What motivates altruism? One idea, called social-exchange theory, is that we help after doing a cost-benefit analysis. As part of an exchange of benefits, helpers aim to maximize their rewards and minimize their costs. Social-exchange theory takes the selflessness out of altruism. It seems to imply that a helpful act is never genuinely altruistic; we merely call it altruistic when the rewards are inconspicuous. From babyhood onward, however, people sometimes exhibit a natural empathy, by feeling distress when seeing others suffer and relief when their suffering ends. Although some helpful acts are indeed done to gain rewards or relieve guilt, experiments suggest that other helpful acts aim simply to increase another’s welfare, producing satisfaction foroneself merely as a by-product. In these experiments, empathy often produces helping only when help givers believe the other will actually receive the needed help and regardless of whether the recipient knows who helped. Social norms also motivate helping. They describe how we ought to behave. We learn the reciprocity norm (that we should return help to those who have helped us). Thus, also we feel a social-responsibility norm, that we should help those who really need it, without regard to future exchanges. When do people help? Helping often increases among people who are: · feeling guilty, thus providing a way to relieve the guilt or restore self-image· in a good mood· deeply religious Social psychologists also study the circumstances that enhance helpfulness. The odds of our helping someone increase in these circumstances: · We have just observed a helpful model· We are not in a hurry· The victim appears to need and deserve help· The victim is similar to ourselves· We are in a small town or rural area· There are few other bystanders Bystander passivity during emergencies has prompted social commentators to lament people’s alienation, apathy, indifference and unconscious sadistic impulses. By attributing the non-intervention to the bystanders’ disposition, we can reassure ourselves that, as caring people, we would have helped. By 1980, four dozen experiments had compared help given by bystanders whoperceived themselves to be either alone or with others. In about 90 % of thesecomparisons, involving nearly 6000 people, lone bystanders were more likely to help. Sometimes the victim was actually less likely to get help when many people were around. Latane and Darley surmised that as the number of bystanders increases, any given bystander is less likely to notice the incident, less likely to interpret the incident as a problem or emergency, and less likely to assume responsibility for taking action.An example when there was smoke entering the room: Solitary students, who often glanced idle about the room while working, noticed the smoke almost immediately, usually in 5 seconds. Those people working in groups kept their eyes on their work and it took them almost 20 seconds to detect the smoke. Once we notice an ambiguous event, we must interpret it. Put yourself in the room filling with smoke. Through worried, you don’t want to embarrass yourself by getting flustered. You glance at the others. They look calm, indifferent. Assuming everything must be all right you shrug it off and go back to work. Then one of the others notices the smoke and, noting your apparent unconcern, reacts similarly. This is yet another example of informational influence. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. The bystander effect is the inaction of strangers faced with ambiguous emergencies. There are several causes for this effect. Misinterpretation is not the only cause. We sometimes don’t know why we handle different and we even do not know that we do so. But as experiments have shown, more bystanders have a huge effect on how people react on situations. Research revealed that once people understand why the presence of bystanders inhibits helping, they become more likely to help in group situations. We are spending our environmental capital, not just living off the interest. With world economic growth and population both destined to increase, resource depletion and further global warming now seem inevitable. The fact is that the earth cannot support our present consumption indefinitely, much less the expected increase in consumption. If we are to cease stealing from our descendents, we can, first, increase technological and agricultural efficiency. For our species to survive and flourish some things must change, we must modify our human behavior. Having overshot the earth’s carrying capacity, and with our material appetites still swelling (as people in developing countries desire to join us in nicer clothes, cars and computers, and as Westerns seek ever more CD’s, air conditioning, and vacation condos) how can we change direction? Population control of course will help. But we have a huge consumption also. In “Luxury Fever” economist Frank proposes we go a step further and create a progressive consumption tax that rewards savings and investments and increases the price of all luxury goods. Tax people not on what they earn but on what they spend, he says. Support for these policies will require a shift in public consciousness not unlike that occurring during the 1960s civil rights movement and the 1970s women’s movement. As the atmosphere warms and oil and other resources become scarce, such a shift is inevitable, eventually. Is there any hope, before the crisis becomes acute? Human priorities might shift from accumulating money to finding meaning, and from aggressive consumption towards nurturing connections. Here social psychology can perhaps help, by exposing our materialism, by informing people of the disconnection between economic growth and human morale, and by helping people understand whymaterialism and money fail to satisfy. Increasing materialismIronically, those who most ardently seek after money tend to live with lower well-being, a finding that comes through very strongly in every culture. People who instead seek intimacy, personal growth and contribution to the community experience greater quality of life. The research of Ryan & Kasser echoes an earlier finding that college alumni with “Yuppie values” (those preferring high income and vocational success to close friendships and marriage) were twice as likely as their former classmates to be fairly or very unhappy. Economic growth and human morale (wealth and well-being)Materialism (lusting for more) exacts ecological and psychic costs. We can observe the traffic between wealth and well-being by asking, first if rich nations have more satisfied people. There is, indeed, some correlation between national wealth and well being. But early 1990s data revealed that once nations reached $10,000 GNP per person, which was roughly the economic level of Ireland, higher levels of national wealth were not predictive of increased well being. In poor countries (where low incomes threaten basic needs) being relatively well off does predict greater well being. In affluent countries this is far less. Over time, our collective well-being does not float upward with a rising economic tide. Since 1957 the number of Americans who say they are “very happy” has declined slightly from 35 to 34 percent, while the people now are twice as rich. All these facts of life explode a bombshell underneath our society’s materialism:economic growth has provided no boost to human morale. Why materialism and money fail to satisfyIt is known that economic growth in affluent countries has failed to satisfy andindividuals who strive most for wealth tend to live with lower well-being. Kasser (2000, 2002) concludes from these studies that those people who strive for intimacy, personal growth and contribution to the community experience a higher quality of life. The adaptation-level phenomenon is our tendency to judge our experience relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience. We adjust our neutral levels based on our experience. We then notice and react to up or down changes from these levels. As our achievements rise above past levels we feel successful and satisfied. As our social prestige, income, or in-home technology surges, we feel pleasure. Before long, however we adapt. What once felt good comes to register as neutral, and what formerly was neutral now feels like deprivation. As the good feeling wanes, it takes a higher high to rejuice the joy. Much of life revolves around social comparison. We are always comparing ourselves with others. And whether we feel good or bad depends on who those others are. Social comparisons help us understand the modest income-happiness correlation. Middle-and upper-income people in a given country, who can compare themselves with the relatively poor, tend to be slightly more satisfied with life than their less-fortunate compatriots. Nevertheless, once people reach a moderate income level, further increases do little to increase their happiness. This is because we tend to compare upward as we climb the ladder of success or income. The adaptation-level and social comparison phenomena give us pause. They imply that the quest for happiness through material achievement requires continually expanding affluence. But the good news is that adaptation to simpler lives can also happen. If choice or necessity shrinks our consumption we will initially feel pain, but it will pass. “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning”. Indeed, thanks to our capacity to adapt and to adjust comparisons, the emotional impact of significant life events dissipates sooner than most people suppose. A shift to post-materialist values will gain momentum as people: · Face the implications of population and consumption growth for climate change, habitat destruction, and resource depletion;· Realize that materialist values mark less happy lives;· Appreciate that economic growth has not bred increased well being. Social psychology’s contribution to a sustainable and survivable future will come partly through its consciousness-transforming insights into adaptation and comparison. These insights also come from experiments that lower people’s comparison standards and thereby cool luxury fever and renew contentment. Social psychology also contributes to a sustainable and survivable future through its exploration of the good life. If materialism does not enhance life quality, what does? Four things that make for genuinely good life are mentioned below. A good thing is that all these factors are sustainable: · Close, supportive relationships (need to belong)· Faith communities· Positive traits (optimism, self-esteem, perceived control and extraversion) · Flow (an optimal state in which, absorbed in an activity, we lose consciousness of self and time) |
The fact that active participation in discussion produces more attitude change is best explained by
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