2008-04-25
- "Tuesday is senior skip day? I didn't hear anything about that. Thanks guys." - Bryan
Changing attitudes. There's the foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. Role - set of expectations about a social position, and it defines how those in the position out to behave. Speaking of buying new things, let's talk about sales. Any time that you are trying to convince somebody of something, this is the foot in the door phenomena. The idea is that if you can get somebody to comply with a very small request, you can work them up (via chaining) to a much bigger request. So, if you're browsing at a car dealership, the salesman will try to get you to talk about it, and then get you in the car, and then get you talking about the features, then finance, then you're buying it. You can back somebody in to the decision you want - so ask for some money to go on vacation, and the parents say no, then ask for some money for Senior Skip Day and they'll be more likely to say yes.
Roles are something that are keeping us in our attitudes. If there is a defined role that you are breaking, you are going to have to find a way to gentley do it. Quite often those roles are parent-child roles, and as you become adults, you are starting to break that role. And this is difficult for the parents, they have been buying into it for decades, and you've been changing your roles. The parents have this stagnant role, and you have a dynamic role that keeps changing. It is hard for them to change. You have to work on changing the ideas of roles first.
Learning theory of attitude formation and change - it is the use of classical and operant conditioning, observational learning. And then there's dissonance theory - Leon Festinger (59') - assumes that inconsistency among attitudes pushes people in the direction of attitude change. Festinger & Carlsmith (59') - college students do excruciatingly dull work. They manipulated their attitudes by telling them it was fun (ex. Huck Finn). He asked if the subjects could help him out by telling others in the waiting room it was fun. Coax someone into doing something that was inconsistent w/ true feelings (counter additudinal behavior). So the dissonance is where the results didn't add up to the expectations. Festinger did this experiment, you saw it in the video. The groups were going to do very tedious work, get some pay, and then convince other students to do the same. Festinger found out that one group had a real cognitive dissonance, and they became more emphatic with it - which one was more enthusiastic about convincing? The $1 group was more energetic because they knew they were ripped off. People who are cheated recruit other people so that they feel better -- this is like peer pressure in alcohol and drug abuse. Festinger said that it wasn't just enough to convince somebody else. They need to maintain a certain level of self-perception. They will often justify their actions based off of making themselves feel better. "If more people are doing it, then it might be okay."
Bem's self-perception theory '67. Believed that self-perception, not dissonance, explains why people come to believe their own lies. Self-perception - people often infer their attitudes from their behavior. Ex. Festinger's study of $1 is not enough money to make me lie, I must have enjoyed it. Must have. Surely. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. etc.
Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cocioppo 86') 2 ways of persuasian. There are two ways that messages get to you. The strongest messages incorporate central and peripheral routes. The central route is when people carefully ponder the content and logic of persuasive messages. Example: politician works hard on speech. Or when being asked to marry - the peripheral is the ring, the flowers, the horse-carriage, the wine, whatever. The peripheral route is when persuasion depends on non message factors; attractiveness, credibility of source. Example: politician depends on bands and flags. Model says that the durability of attitude change depends on the extent to which people think about the contents of persuasive message/communication.
Social relations, groups
Equity - a condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it. All relationships have an understanding, it's conditional and you have roles. There is no unconditional relationship. The person with less equity is to give more self-disclosure. So if you are less powerful in the relationship, you are expected to give more information.
Self-disclosure - revealing intimate aspects of oneself to other.
Altruism - unselfish regard for the welfare for others
Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-reduction (GRIT) - if you can get those people with equal tension is to have them disclose information, so this is using basic human relations on a giant political scale for international relations. Opens doors to reciprocity.
Groups consist of two or more individuals who interact and are interdependent, we're not talking about groups that are codependent, these are normal groups. Are there any other rules? They do not have to consider themselves a group. If you have 2 or more humans interacting in any way, it's a group. There are no other criteria. For example, two people get stuck in an elevator dealing with the situation together. Even a passing glance - that's still a passing group - even if you have no communication with them, like stuck in an elevator with a random stranger. Groups come with hidden roles, and if you can figure out your hidden role, you're going to be the one who takes more power. Let's say that you get stuck in an elevator, you're not going to freak out because you don't have clauostrophobia? Blah. Who would you rather be with? Ugly, better looking than you, old, young? Norms about behavior - if that other guy is an engineer, you expect him to fix the problem with the elevator. The older people almost immediately always say "it's going to be okay" - and the more attractive one always talks first, they have power.
Ingroup - us - people with whom one shares a common identity. Ingroup bias - tendency to favor one's own group. Outgroup is them - those perceived as different or apart from one's ingroup. Scapegoat theory is the theory that prejudice provides an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame. The scapegoat was the one where you gave somebody all of the sins so that you are free of sins, and you drive the goat out of town. Just-World Phenomenon - tendency of people to believe the world is just. People get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Eh -- this seems like a justification for inaction ... who cares who is to blame? This is more like defending your decision to not help somebody.. Conflict is where perceived incompatability of actions, goals or ideas. Social Trap - a situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing their self-interest, became caught in mutually destructive behavior. What it comes down to? Your own interests over the group - you may be unaware of destroying somebody else's interests, like in A Beautiful Mind with John Nash: if all of the guys went after the hot blond girl, none of them would get them, but if they went off on the other friends, heh.
Social facilitation - you do better when you have an audience than if you do it alone. If I gave you an assignment and said nobody is going to grade it, only some people would do it. Occurs with simple or well-learned tasks but not with tasks that are difficult or not yet mastered. The problem with social facilitation is that, as a teacher, asking somebody to do something that you are not prepared for, doing it in front of a crowd is going to make it harder to do, like standing up and reciting all of the vocab terms in front of your peers, that would break down instead of build you up.
Social exchange theory - the theory that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.
Superordinate goals - shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.
Deindividuation - loss of self-awareness and self-reliance in a group.
Social loafing - you experience this all of the time with those big projects from teachers. If I ask you to do a project, on your own, you are going to put more personal investment than if you had to do it in a group, Individuals' productivity in large groups declines. Why? It's your own project, you understand what needs to be done and you're the only one doing it. In a group, the assumption is that somebody else will pick up the slack. This happens at work. Reduced efficiency resulting from loss of coordination among workers' efforts. Effort is low in groups. So social loafing is the reduction in effort by individuals when they work in groups as compared to when they work by themselves. Diffusion of responsibility, less likely when group members are convinced that individual performance is crucial to group performance. Trust is a factor, especially overworking in groups which is not efficient (doing what the other people, you think, should be doing, but you doubt they are doing it). Working in a group and working near each other -- they declined. This was from the study of dynes per cm^3 of output when people were asked to make some sound. Interesting.
Decision making. Groups tend to make risky decisions. A shift toward more extreme position is a polarization as a result of a group decision. Think about how much you participate in decision making. Group polarization occurs when group discussion strengthens a group's dominant point of view and produces a shift toward a more extreme decision in that direction. Exposes group members to persuasive arguments. Discover that their views are shared by others. What spurs you to make decisions in groups? Sometimes you just don't want to argue, or get frustrated when you don't get heard, there's a lot of dynamics that occur here. If you just sit back and don't give any feedback, do you feel resentful? Regardless of your personal style of decision making, groups as a whole tend to have particular behaviors. Like in 12 Angry Men. That's groupthink in action. Normally, when you start off with a dominant point of view, the group will run to that POV and make the group members polarize. But if you have a strong, dominant, extreme voice in a group, "let's go to congress and get drunk" - you'll get opinions, and then any strong opinion will force the group into action. So if a group is going a direction you don't want - say something strong, so that everybody will speak up.
Skewed decision-making - groupthink occurs when members of a cohesive group emphasize concurrence at the expense of critical thinking in arriving at a decision. Groupthink is when everybody becomes a cohesive group at the expense of critical thinking, this happens with Nazi Youth Movement, Wave Movement - an artificial rabid youth movement. It spread across the nation in 3 days. It started in classrooms. The teachers would have chants. It was kind of like a pledge. They had to sit and stand in certain ways, they had secret codes, there were people that were not in the Wave, they were in the outgroup, and as soon as you get a desirable ingroup, you start to get polarization, and you have groupthink. The people in the ingroup will start mindlessly following, so they sacrifice lots of thinking. They started this with secret handshakes. Within three days they had people beating non-Wave people. JFK and Bay of Pigs. So a social experiment with measures - see if you can get people to polarize over a thought, some sort of opinion you throw out. Group strength is the strength of connections, not groupthink.
Conformity is adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. Normative social influence - influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval. And with informational social influence - influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality. Do you buy it?
Conforming to others and Solomon Asch (51', 55', 56') - this was where you had 20 people, bring in another person, and the 20 people are your cohorts, and the one poor person - well, they don't change their mind, just their willingness to state it since they don't want to be an outgroup person.
Bystander effect - is the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present. So say you are walking to class down the stairs, somebody drops their books, well, you look around and you diffuse responsibility, and if it's just you and him, well. The likelihood of stopping as the number of surrounding people decrease. This was Darley and Latane (1968). A good case study is Kitty Genevese. There were 38 people who witnessed the beating. She had still had money on her, he came back and continued to beat her; there was another 24 added to the 38, nobody stopped to help her. The more people are around when somebody needs help, the less likely people are going to help. And then when nobody else is helping, well, you start wondering why nobody else is doing it too. Diffusion of responsibility explains the bystander effect.