Basic Psychology

for Educators:
Useful Concepts from
Educational and
Positive Psychology

LECTURE 2 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

DR WAN LAI YIN SARAH
 Lecture Outline
• What is Social Psychology?
• Social Influence
– Conformity
– Compliance
– Obedience
• Social Cognition
– The ABC Components of Attitudes
– Attitude change: Persuasion
– Cognitive dissonance
– Attributions
• Liking and Loving: Interpersonal Attraction
– The rules of attraction
– The Triangular Theory of Love
• Why People Won’t Help: The Bystander Effect
– Diffusion of responsibility
– Five decision points in helping behavior
 What is Social Psychology?

• Social Psychology
– Scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and
behavior are influenced by others

• Social psychologists are interested in

understanding how and why the social
environment shapes the thoughts and
feelings of the individual
 What are the major areas in
Social Psychology?
• Social influence
– The ways behavior can be affected by other people
– The effect that words, actions, or mere presence of other people have
on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

• Social cognition
– The ways people think about themselves and other people
– How people select, interpret, remember and use social information to
make judgments and decisions

• Social interaction
– The positive and negative aspects of people relating to others
The ways behavior can be affected by other people

SOCIAL INFLUENCES
 Social Influence: Conformity

• Conformity
– Changing one’s own behavior to more closely
match or be the same as the actions of others

– Solomon Asch Study (1951)

 Q: Would a participant change his/her response in
order to fit in with group response?

Conformity: 從眾
Figure 12.1 Stimuli Used in Asch’s Study
Participants in Asch’s famous study on conformity were first shown the standard line.
They were then shown the three comparison lines and asked to determine to which of the
three was the standard line most similar. Which line would you pick? What if you were
one of several people, and everyone who answered ahead of you chose line 3? How
would that affect your answer? Source: Adapted from Asch (1956).
Asch’s study on conformity: Results
• When alone, 95% of participants got all the
answers correct
– But when the group gave the wrong answer, the
participants conformed to the group’s answer over
one-third of time
• Conformity decreased if there was just one
confederate who gave the correct answer
– Greater conformity in collectivist cultures
• Conclusion: People faced with strong group
consensus sometimes go along even though
they think the others may be wrong
 Social Influence: Compliance
• Compliance: changing one’s behavior as a
result of other people directing or asking for the
change
– Consumer psychology: branch of psychology that
studies the habits of consumers in the marketplace,
including compliance

• How is Compliance different from Obedience?

– In compliance, the person asking the other to change
has no authority over the other

Compliance: 順從 / Obedience: 服從 / Authority: 權威

 Gaining Compliance
• Foot-in-the-door technique
– asking for a small commitment and, after gaining compliance,
asking for a bigger commitment
– Your friend asks you to print a set of lecture handouts for him. You
say yes… then he asks you if you could help him jot down the key
points in class too.

• Door-in-the-face technique
– asking for a large commitment and then, after being refused, asking
for a smaller commitment
– Your friend asks you to jot down the key points in class for him. You
say no… so he asks if you could print a set of lecture handouts
instead.
 Gaining Compliance
• Lowball technique
– getting a commitment from a person and then raising the cost of
that commitment
– Your friend asks if you could bring him a set of lecture handouts.
You say yes, not knowing what you’ll need to do. Later he reveals
that the handouts need to be filled with notes too.

• That’s-not-all technique
– Sales technique where persuader makes an offer, and adds
something extra to make the offer look better
– It is done before the target person can make a decision
– Your friend says he’ll pay you if you help him jot down the notes.
Before you’ve decided, he says that he’ll ALSO take you out to
lunch at a nice restaurant.
 Practice!

• Try to apply these different ways to get

your roommate to clean the room
– Foot-in-the-door technique

– Door-in-the-face technique

– Lowball technique

– That’s-not-all technique
 Social Influence: Obedience
• Obedience
– changing one’s behavior at the command of an
authority figure
– based on the belief that authorities have the right to
make requests

• Milgram study
– Milgram (1963) wanted to understand how far people
would go in obeying an instruction if it involved
harming another person
– “teacher” administered what he or she thought were
real shocks to a “learner”; participants consistently
follow orders to administer apparently painful shocks
Figure 12.2 Control Panel in Milgram’s Experiment
In Stanley Milgram’s classic study on obedience, the participants were presented with a
control panel like this one. In order to study “the effects of punishment on memory”, each
participant (“teacher”) was instructed to give electric shocks to another person (the
“learner,” who are actors only pretending to be shocked). At what point do you think you
would have refused to continue the experiment?

Documentary on the classic experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HcMWlnTtFQ
In first experiments, 65% of 40 “teachers” went all
the way to experiment’s 450-volt shock level; all the
participants continued to 300 volts.
The ways people think about themselves and other people

SOCIAL COGNITION
 Social Cognition: Attitudes

• Attitude
– a tendency to respond positively or negatively toward a
certain person, object, idea, or situation

• Three components of an attitude:

1. the affective (emotional) component (emotions & feelings)
2. the behavioral component (actions)
3. the cognitive component (thoughts)

– They are not always highly related to each other

– Attitudes are often poor predictors of behavior unless the attitude is very specific or
very strong
Three Components of an Attitude
Attitudes consist of the way a person feels and thinks about something, as well as the way the
person chooses to behave. If you like K-pop music, you are also likely to think that K-pop music
is good music. You are also more likely to listen to this style of music, buy this type of music,
and even go to a performance. Each of the three components influences the other two.

Attitude toward
K-pop music

I buy K-pop
I like K-pop music CDs I think K-pop
music; it’s fun every chance I music is better
and uplifting. get. I only listen than any other
to K-pop music kind of music I
channels; I’m hear.
going to a K-
pop music
concert soon.
 What’s your attitude towards…
• The durian?
• What are the components of
your attitude? Are they consistent?

– Affect:
 Do you feel positive, negative, or neutral about it?
– Behavior:
 Have you eaten any durian?
– Cognitive:
 Do you think that it’s delicious? Weird? Healthy? Worth eating
or not? Etc.
 Formation of Attitudes

• Direct contact with the person, situation,

object, or idea
• Direct instruction from parents or others
• Interacting with other people who hold a
certain attitude
• Vicarious learning: watching the actions
and reactions of others to ideas, people,
objects, and situations

Vicarious: 替身的
 Social Cognition: Persuasion

• Persuasion
– the process by which one person tries to
change the belief, opinion, position, or course
of action of another person through argument,
pleading, or explanation

– How we know if persuasion works? Let’s

analyze:
 3 key elements in persuasion
 2 routes to persuasion
 Persuasion

• 3 elements affecting the outcome of any

persuasion attempt:

– Source of the message

 Who/what communicates the message
– Message itself
 What is said to persuade you
– Target audience
 Who/what receives the message
 Persuasion

• Elaboration Likelihood Model

– an explanation of the two ways (routes) in
which persuasive communications can cause
attitude change, depending on TARGET
characteristics
– people will either elaborate on the persuasive
message or fail to elaborate on it
– the future actions of those who do elaborate
are more predictable than those who do not
 Persuasion

• Elaboration Likelihood Model (cont’d)

– central-route processing: involves attending to
the content of the message itself
– peripheral-route processing: involves
attending to factors not involved in the
message, such as the expertise of the source
of the message, the length of the message,
and other non-content factors
 Social Cognition:
Cognitive Dissonance
• Cognitive dissonance
– sense of discomfort or distress that occurs
when a person’s behavior does not
correspond to that person’s impression
– can be reduced by
 changing the conflicting behavior,
 changing the conflicting attitude,
 or forming a new attitude to justify the behavior

Cognitive dissonance: 認知失調

 Festinger & Carlsmith (1959)’s
study
• Ask participants to do a very boring
psychology experiment
– “Please turn these pegs over and over again
for an hour.”
– “Would you be willing to tell the next
participant that this was a fun experiment? I’ll
pay you…”
Participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than
the participants who were paid $20 to lie

Being paid only $1 is not sufficient incentive for lying and so they experienced
dissonance; they could only overcome that dissonance by coming to believe that the
tasks really were interesting

Being paid $20 provides a reason for turning pegs and there is therefore no dissonance
 Social Cognition: Attributions

• Attribution
– the process of explaining the causes of one’s
own behavior and the behavior of others

• Attribution theory: the theory of how

people make attributions
 Attributions

• Internal or dispositional attributions

– cause of behavior attributed to internal factors
 personality
 character
• External or situational attributions
– cause of behavior attributed to external
factors
 delays
 the action of others
 some other aspect of the situation (e.g. luck)
 What might Johnny attribute his failure to?

Internal or dispositional attributions:

External or situational attributions:

 Attributions
• Fundamental attribution error (actor-observer
bias)
– When you are the observer,
 the tendency to overestimate the influence of internal
factors in determining behavior (explain behavior by
“What kind of person he/she is”),
 while underestimating situational factors
The positive and negative aspects of people relating to others

SOCIAL INTERACTION
 Social Interaction: Attraction
• Interpersonal attraction
– liking or having the desire for a relationship
with another person
– Factors involved in attraction:
 physical attractiveness
 proximity: physical or geographical nearness
 similarity: people like people who are similar to
themselves OR who are different from themselves
(complementary)
 reciprocity of liking: tendency of people to like other
people who like them in return
 Social Interaction: Love

• Sternberg’s three components of love:

• Intimacy
– Close emotional ties
– Psychological, not physical
• Passion
– Physical aspect of love, not just sex
• Commitment
– The length and security of the relationship
(whether to keep it or not)
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of
Love
 Is it true love?
• What are these people missing? Would you call
it “true love?”:
– Amy and Ben always kiss and have been together for
years, but they never really talk
– Cathy and Donald have long in-depth discussions and
get butterflies in the stomach whenever they see one
another, but aren’t officially boy/girlfriend yet
– Emily and Frank have been married for 22 years and
are really fond of one another, but have no sex life

• Do you agree that all 3 components are needed

for it to be “true love?”
 Why People Won’t Help:
The Bystander Effect
Bystander Effect: Kitty Genovese
• Bystander effect
– the effect that the presence of other people
has on the decision to help or not help
– help becomes less likely as the number of
bystanders increases

Bystander: 旁觀者
Figure 12.6 Elements Involved in Bystander Response
In a classic experiment, participants were filling out surveys as the room began to fill with
smoke. As you can see in the accompanying graph, the time taken to report smoke and
the percentage of people reporting smoke both depended on how many people were in
the room at the time the smoke was observed. If a person was alone, he or she was far
more likely to report the smoke and report it more quickly than when there were three
people. Source: Latané & Darley (1969).
 Bystander Effect

• Diffusion of responsibility
– a person fails to take responsibility for action
or for inaction because of the presence of
other people who are seen to share the
responsibility
– one bystander cannot diffuse responsibility
 Diffusion of Responsibility

• Five steps in making a decision to help

– noticing
– defining an emergency
– taking responsibility
– planning a course of action
– taking action
 How do the five steps apply?
• Hannah is a student who lives in the dormitory.
She is very depressed, and her boyfriend just
broke up with her. She wants to commit suicide,
so she collects all of her medicine bottles on her
desk. Just as she’s about to take the pills, her
roommate walks into the room.

– What will determine whether or not the roommate

helps Hannah?
 Noticing; Defining an Emergency; Taking Responsibility;
Planning a Course of Action; Taking Action
 Social Neuroscience
• Social neuroscience
– the study of how biological processes influence social
behavior
– studies use fMRI
and other imaging
techniques to
discover areas of
the brain involved
in social actions
 Thank You!

LECTURE 2 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

DR WAN LAI YIN SARAH