Review Sheet for Final Exam (this plus the two previous review sheets together make up the review).

The final is comprehensive and will have a similar format to previous exams in that there will be some objective and some short essay types of questions. There will be some choice in what to answer but it will not be possible to skip large areas of the course. Finally, there will be some weighting of the last section of the course and a bit of a tilt toward "synthetic" or "integrative" questions that tie two or more topics together.

Ch. 13: Social Psychology

Attitudes are defined as the relatively stable set of beliefs or mental views (positive or negative) we hold about some idea, object, or person. There are three interrelated components to any given attitude: ABC (Affect, Behavior, Cognition)

1. Cognition or Belief: (becomes an attitude with #3 below) 2. Tendency toward certain behaviors or policies 3. Evaluative/Affective component (for or againstÓsomething--you either favor or disfavor an object)

Humans are strongly predisposed to desire consistency among their attitudes and beliefs. Some evidence comes from what we do to maintain our attitudes:

selective exposure: we tend to select/expose ourselves to information that is consistent with our attitudes
selective interpretation: we distort input to fit with our attitudes/beliefs
forgetting: we forget information inconsistent with our attitudes/beliefs

Again, the main point is that we want to maintain consistency in our beliefs/attitudes.

Beliefs about other groups are often called "stereotypes" and for a number of reasons, are often (although not always) negative as we favor our ingroup over outgroups. (Remember the IAT lab?) Stereotypes combined with negative affect can lead to predudice. We also discussed the issue that thinking in categories is a prominent part of our thinking behavior in many ways and not just in stereotyping. It can help make the world more predictable if we correctly categorize newly encountered situations and people; the problem comes when we overgeneralize those categorizations and apply it to people, especially when it involved comparing other groups to our own and finding them deficient!

Attitude Change (propaganda):
Central and peripheral route to attitude change. The central route is through reasoned discourse and rational argument consciously attended to. The peripheral route is less rational but no less effective.

It depends on characteristics of the source of a message (such as credibility, attractiveness, prestige and expertise--although remember the sleeper effect whereby you forget the source over time (U.S. State Dept;. vs. Soviet attache arguments were the ex.).

It also depends on the message itself (one-sided, two-sided, emotional-rational, and the degree of discrepancy between the source and the recipient, with moderate levels often being best).

It includes techniques such as-- low-balling (unrealistic price to hook someone and then raise price/claim mistake/etc.), bait & switch (unrealistically low price with no intent to sell that item), prestige suggestion, appeal to everyone is doing/buying it, creating a sense of reciprocity (meeting "half way) or owing a favor because someone does something for you (as in salesmen or lobbyists taking people on expensive trips or to expensive restaurants, etc.), appeal to exclusivity and a lot of other techniques.

Often the intelligence of the recipient determines what kind of appeal works best.

In addition we have the very important foot in the door effect (and door in the face).

Foot in the door effect: Small initial request increases compliance with subsequent larger (even outlandish) related request (along similar dimension). Experiments with billboard request (safe driving) or consumer survey.

Door in the face effect: Turning down a large request increases compliance with a subsequent small request. (Summer camp volunteer request week long vs. afternoon).

The foot in the door results suggest that going along with a prior small request might make us define ourselves as "people who do or support this type of issue/activity/etc." --like self perception theory (see below). This mechanism , especially where we progressively take larger and larger steps along the dimension, might help explain the behavior of Jonestown where followers of Jim Jones who had done a number of things of increasing "size" that he asked ended up killing themselves, to or that in the Milgram experiment described below.

What kinds of situations produce consistancy or inconsistancy?

Balance Theory: (Heider)--attitude consistency. Some configurations between people and objects are balanced, others aren't (1, 3 positive connections balanced; 0, 2 unbalanced) --Examples of relations: (P is person who has attitudes toward another person, O and an attitude object, X; O is other person who also has an attitude toward X; X is object of the attitudes of P and O) Balanced: 1+ or 3 + (positive) connections; any combination of 1 + will work Unbalanced: 0+ or 2 + (positive) connections; any combination of 2 +'s will work

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: (Festinger)--if there exists conflict between 2 attitudes or between an attitude and behavior, then you have dissonance; you tend to change the belief, rather than the behavior Examples:

1. Consequence of Decision: (e.g. buying something--right after you buy it you think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread); recall the experiment where subjects were asked to rate appliances (when they chose which of two closely rated appliances they could keep, the rating of this appliance increased and the other's rating decreased --because their attitude had to match their behavior!) The same thing held for the horserace from before to after placing the bet (bettor's certainty of winning went up)
2. Justification of Effort: (Aronson & Mills.) women either initiated into a group or not; after initiation the women rated whether they wanted to return to visit the group or not; those women that were initiated were more likely to want to return to join the group (see your notes for more detail)
3. Adequacy of External Justification: 2 experiments-- A. had subjects do a boring task; offered to pay them either a little or a lot to lie to the next subject and tell them that the experiment was cool; finally, after the subject lied, they were asked to rate the pleasure of the experiment: those people who were paid more rated the experiment as boring, but those paid less found it more enjoyable; why? because the highly paid group had an external justification for lying--the money; the low paid group, however, didn't, and needed to reduce their dissonance; they did this by finding the experiment more enjoyable than it actually was ("it wasn't all that bad" reasoning) B. experiment with kids: got a strong or mild warning not to play with new, shiney toys; then kids came back later and could play with any toys; those who were strongly warned played with the new toys more than those mildly warned; why? because those mildly warned felt that the first time they had chosen on their own to avoid playing with the newer toys (as opposed to being forced to avoid playing with them--as the strongly warned group did); those mildly warned thus assumed they had intrinsic justification for avoiding the new toys; those strongly warned had obvious extrinsic justification.

Self-Perception Theory: (Bem)--behavior causes our attitudes (not the other way around); evidence for this: Lepper, Green, & Nisbett: how often kids played with magic markers (one group told they'd get an award for playing with them, the other group not); if they were rewarded for playing with the markers, they played with them less later on Valens: bogus heart rate feedback; showed male subjects centerfolds; on some photos the "heart rate" changed, on others it didn't; subjects liked the photos in which their heart rate changed (again, their attitude was driven by the behavior; "my heart changed so I must think she's hot", but this isn't conscious) Valens & Ray: snake phobics and electrical shocks: word "shock" actual shock photo of snake (entries are heart rate changes) group A up up up group B up up flat Group A remained afraid of snakes because they attributed the increase in their heart rate (again bogus) to the photo of the snake. Group B was, as a result of this experience, much less afraid of snakes.

Social applications of dissonance/self perception theory. Changing stateways can affect folkways if done correctly (minimum external force, opportunities for learning, etc.)

As humans, we tend to look to others for confirmations of our beliefs. We assume that we share the same perception of reality, and when this rule is violated, we may question or even change our understanding of our environment according to others’ beliefs.

We turn to others not only to confirm our beliefs, but also for means for comparison. Social Comparison usually occurs when we don’t fully understand a situation or when there is no real objective standard (in the case of physical attractiveness) or clear-cut answer (as in the case of controversial issues, such as abortion) available.

Conformity, Obedience and Social Compliance

Asch conformity experiment showed that even in non-threatening very neutral circumstances, people (2/3) conform if there are 3 or more in a unanimous majority arrayed against them. Positive side was that they only needed one ally who saw the lines (which of three matched) their way in order to stand by their own view--even with a large majority disagreeing with them. This latter finding has practical applications--we can be the person who "holds the key" to allowing others to voice their views by being first. Physiological measures showed it was stressful to be a non-conformer in the exper. Think about issue of whether conformity is good or bad or both.

Bystander apathy again argues for the power of social situations to determine/influence our behavior. Increasing the no. of bystanders who witness or are in an emergency situation decreases the likelihood that any one will intervene. (Remember epilepsy exper. , woman falling ,off a ladder, smoke -filled room, & Kitty Genevose murder case, etc.) With regard to explanations, conformity seems to play a large role, moral diffusion does also (the fact that your decision to not help or to help is not equivalent to whether help will or will not be given). Also, peoples' feeling of not being expert and not wanting to perform in front of an audience may play a role.

Milgram obediance experiment carried this result quite a bit further, showing that 2/3 (65%) of the subjects (who were quite diverse in age/sex/etc.) could be ordered to give extremely high electric shocks to people who were protesting that they wanted to quit the experiment. Social factors that cause this include gradually increasing nature of the involvement (foot in door again), social isolation, desire to help the experiment, and a lack of reliance on inner direction. Remedy? Checking it out with others (social validation of our ideas). But also, beware of building alternate unreal-realities--check it out with a lot of people of diverse viewpoints. Stay close to reality and reliance on an inner core of value isn't so bad either--Remember the Korean POW study. Cult behavior again shows the power that can be obtained by socially isolating people from others they can "check out" reality with. Jonestown was a major tragic exemplar of this. Also, it shows that the foot in the door effect can play a powerful role in eliciting negative behaviors. In addition, self perception theory plays an important role in foot in the door kinds of situations (by going along with early requests (including low shocks) you define yourself as the kind of person who does these things/thinks the experiment is important and thus continue on.

The above studies (and Milgram's in particular) show that social influence is a very powerful force in determing our behavior and, coupled with self-perception theory, a force for changing our attitudes and beliefs as well. While it unites us into a social grouping it also makes us dangerous to others. Finding a balance between these forces of social cohesion and forces of blind conformity and obedience is a major challenge.>?P>

Ch. 2, Ch. 12 p473-478, + Koestler reading, The biological basis of social behavior--
Aggression A sociobiological perspective--i.e. how our social behavior has biological roots; dominant view in this field is the Ethological approach: ethologists have an interest in animal behavior per se

A. Example: Allocation of Resources: Animals establish fairly stable social relationships that determine allocation of resources to support a fairly stable population that can survive off the available food supply. Aggression plays a role in this. Territoriality: for example, birds fighting for territory--they establish individual territories within which a pair of birds will mate and rear young. The no. of territories determines the population of birds in the next generation. Dominance Hierarchies: in social animals. This is a mechanism for establishing social organization that determines who gets what (distribution of resources). Aggression plays a useful and important role. The aggression is limited--animals rarely kill members of their own species. Why? Surrender gestures (e.g. wolves) and ritualized combat (rams, deer, rattlesnakes). These things act to control aggression. Interestingly, there is a relation between lethelness and these mechanisms--dangerous animals have them, non-dangerous animals don't. Humans (according to this view of Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Lorenz) have switched from being non-dangerous (in terms of natural equipment) to being dangerous thru the cultural development of weapons, without having time to evolve the protective mechanisms.

B. Another, less biological and more human-centered view: Koestler's Perspective: argued that ethology view wrong (has the wrong focus). He said that if you want to understand something distinctly human, don't look at animals. He said the important human aggression was warfare. He said that the things that make us human cause us to make war. These were (1) our prehistory--love & bonding (we kill out of love, not hate): in our prehistory we formed tight hunting groups and we were devoted to these groups; (2) brain: different parts of the brain don't interact well, i.e., sometimes higher areas don't always control lower (more impulsive/reflexive) areas; (3) symbol use (language): because we're so symbol dependent we can be aroused to defend our in group even if not under attack. The idea is that we can portray a reality that's not real at all (we can make our own enemies, even when they're not our enemies). Thus leaders can lead populations into aggressivew adventures.

Ch. 15, 16,17: Personality, Psychopathology & Treatment.
Personality. We looked at the issue of whether there are stable personality characteristics, whether traits or types, concluding that while we can't make "point predictions" about an individual's behavior in a particular situation, there is nonetheless regularity in behavior that is somewhat predictable by understanding a person's personality. We also considered the "Big Five" theory of personality that holds that the myriad aspects of personality can be described along five dimensions; extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openess to experience. In addition, we looked at the issue of heritability of personality and studies showing significant effects of inheritance. Finally, we examined a few major theories of personality including psychoanalytic, behavioral and social-cognitive. (look at your notes). Psychopathology and Treatment Note: You will not be responsible for the details of particular approaches to therapy or treatment unless they were discussed in class. The issue of what is abnormal or pathological is complex. It ranges from the stresses and frustrations of day to day living through bothersome "quirky" behavior to debilitating illnesses. One view of this is that there is a continuum of normality-abnormality and the problem is to find the most useful place to define the two categories (to split the continuum into two portions.) We even examined the views of Thomas Szasz who argued that there is no such thing as a "mental illness". Both body and mind are involved and both can act as causative agent. We examined a large-scale study of the relationship of poverty to susceptibility to neurotic and psychotic disorders, where the authors found large and significant relationships, especially for psychotic behaviors. Heritability is also fairly high for many disorders (twin studies for SCZ and also depression for example). Genetic or other biologically based causes coupled with environmental stressors acting in concert are often the cause. For some disorders, specific neuro-transmitters play crucial roles. (ex. dopamine for schizophrenia). Treatment follows many models, broadly divided into biological and psychological or behavioral, and while different treatments are appropriate for different disorders, it is nonetheless the case that within psychotherapy a good bit of the variance in outcome depends on the individual therapist more than on their particular theoretical approach. Finally, we examined outcome studies--of the effectiveness of various kinds of therapies or treatments, drug and psychotherapy. The outcome studies show that treatment/intervention works--the rate of significant improvement and cure is significantly higher than for placebo or untreated groups. The lesson of this is "don't try to go it alone"!

An important issue here is that a combination of neurological processes or malfunctions and environmental influence on behavior and experience both play major roles in causing various disorders. Similarly, both the biological (medical) and behavioral/experiential (psychotherapy) approaches to treating disorders are effective, and for some disorders, are most effective when used in combination. A recent study of outcomes for the treatment of depression showed this dramatically; the improvement rate for psychotherapy was 52%, for drug treatment, 55% and for combined drug and psychotherapy 85%. We ended this discussion with the conclusion that the way to understand (and intervenein) human behavior and experience is, for some behavior, thru understanding the actions of our nervous system and for some behavior thru the analysis of our behavior, and that analysis and intervention via both, when possible, is a powerful combination!

Good Luck!!!
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