12.11 CHAPTER REVIEW

KEY POINTS

• Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in social situations. One important social psychology concept is our sense of self. Social cognition and social influence are two additional important areas of research in social psychology.

• Person perception is an active and subjective process that occurs in an interpersonal context. The interpersonal context includes the characteristics of the individual you are judging, your own characteristics, and the situation.

• Person perception is influenced by subjective perceptions, personal goals, social norms, and self-perception.

• People often rely on social categories when they evaluate others. Social categorization may be automatic through a process called implicit cognition or deliberate through a process called explicit cognition. Using social categories is cognitively efficient but can lead to inaccurate conclusions.

• Because we expect certain traits and behaviors to go together, we often form and rely on implicit personality theories in person perception. Implicit personality theories provide a mental framework that organizes observations, memories, and beliefs about other people. One common implicit personality theory is “what is beautiful is good.” However, there are few personality differences between attractive and less attractive people.

• The attribution process refers to how we infer the cause of our own or another person’s behavior. Attributions can strongly influence our opinions of other people, but the attribution process is susceptible to many biases.

• Three important attributional biases are the fundamental attribution error, the actor-observer bias, and the self-serving bias. The just-world hypothesis, along with the fundamental attribution error, contributes to blaming the victim of a tragedy. In some collectivistic cultures, people display the modesty, or self-effacing, bias and are less prone to making the fundamental attribution error than are people in individualistic cultures.

• An attitude is a learned tendency to evaluate an object, person, or issue in a particular way. This evaluation is usually positive or negative, but may be ambivalent. Attitudes can have cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components.

• Attitudes are likely to determine behaviors when they are extreme or expressed frequently, when they have been formed through direct experience, when people are very knowledgeable about the attitude object, when people have a vested interest in the subject of the attitude, and when people expect a favorable outcome from acting in accordance with their attitude.

• When behavior conflicts with attitudes, cognitive dissonance may occur, and people may change their attitudes to conform to their behavior.

• Prejudice refers to a negative attitude toward people who belong to a specific social group. Stereotypes are characteristics associated with all members of particular social groups. Relying on stereotypes can have many negative consequences. Stereotyped thinking can distort perception and cause us to inaccurately prejudge individuals. Once formed, stereotypes resist change.

• Judgments of others are also influenced by whether they are members of the in-group or an out-group. We’re more likely to use negative stereotypes to evaluate members of out-groups. The out-group homogeneity effect and in-group bias are two forms of bias that can result from in-group/out-group thinking.

• Stereotypes form the cognitive basis for prejudicial attitudes. Prejudice also has emotional and behavioral components. Implicit attitudes are preferences that are unintentional and sometimes unconscious, and are measured by the Implicit Association Test.

• Muzafer Sherif demonstrated that intergroup conflict can be decreased when groups engage in a cooperative effort. Cooperative learning is one way of reducing prejudice in classrooms.

• Social influence is the psychological study of how behavior is influenced by the social environment and other people. Conformity occurs when people change their behavior, attitudes, or beliefs in response to real or imagined group pressure. Sometimes people conform publicly but not privately.

• Research by Solomon Asch demonstrated the degree to which people will conform to a majority view and the conditions under which conformity is most likely. Normative and informational social influence both contribute to conformity.

• Conformity is generally higher in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures. Conformity to group norms is viewed less negatively in many collectivistic cultures than it is in individualistic cultures.

• Obedience was studied most extensively by Stanley Milgram. In Milgram’s original obedience experiment, the subject (the “teacher”) thought he was delivering ever-increasing levels of electric shock to another person (the “learner”). In contrast to predictions, most of the subjects obeyed the experimenter and progressed to the maximum shock level.

• Milgram identified several powerful aspects of the original experimental situation that influenced subjects to obey the experimenter and continue delivering electric shocks. In later experiments, Milgram also identified several situational factors that made people less likely to obey.

• Asch’s research on conformity and Milgram’s research on obedience demonstrate the degree to which behavior is influenced by situational factors.

• The scientific study of helping behavior—altruism and prosocial behavior—was spurred by the murder of Kitty Genovese in front of 38 witnesses. Although no one intervened to save Genovese, sometimes people do help strangers.

• Bibb Latané and John Darley extensively studied the circumstances under which people will help a stranger. Several factors have been identified that affect the likelihood of bystander intervention. Diffusion of responsibility is the most important factor that explains the bystander effect.

• The likelihood that people will engage in aggressive behaviors is driven by a number of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors that interact with one another.

• Individual behavior can be strongly influenced by the presence of others. In social loafing, people expend less effort when working as a group on a collective task than when working alone on the same task. Social loafing is less likely when we know the other people in a group, when we are members of a highly valued group, or when a task is meaningful or unique.

• Social loafing is reduced or reversed in some collectivistic cultures. Instead, individuals expend more effort when they are working in a group on a collective task, a phenomenon known as social striving.

• Under some conditions, the presence of others enhances individual performance, a phenomenon called social facilitation. Social facilitation is most likely when a task is simple or well rehearsed. Performance decreases when a task is complex or poorly learned.

• Deindividuation can occur when increased arousal due to the presence of others is combined with diffusion of responsibility and anonymity. Deindividuation can lead to antisocial behaviors, but it can be reduced if self-awareness is heightened.

• We engage in persuasion when we try to influence other people’s attitudes or behavior.

KEY TERMS

KEY PEOPLE