Social Psychology: Obedience to authority
When do people obey unreasonable orders?
War atrocities were committed in Nazi concentration camps.
Those
involved in those atrocities frequently justified their actions by
saying
they were "just following orders."
What type of people would follow such orders? Would it be
people
with rigid, authority-worshipping personalities or is this something
most
humans are capable of in the right situations?
Friday's class will be spent watching a video of one of the most
controversial
psychology experiments ever conducted.
Inspired by reports of Nazi war atrocities, Milgram (1974)
developed an
experiment to determine the situations in which people would be willing
to obey unreasonable, maybe even dangerous, orders (administering
intense
shocks to another research participant) when those orders were given by
somebody in a position of authority (the researcher).
When watching this film I want you to think about the results and
what
they have to say about human nature in certain types of social
situations.
I also want you to think about the ethics of this experiment.
This experiment more than any other prompted the development of
Human Subject
Committees. These committees review every proposed research
project
using human subjects. The job of such committees is to determine
whether the treatment of those subjects would be humane and
ethical.
An experiment such as Milgram's would never have passed such a
committee's
review.
After watching the film I want you to think about whether
Milgram's experiment
should have been conducted.
What are the reasons for allowing such research to be conducted?
What would be the reasons for preventing research of this
nature?
What would be the consequences to our understanding of human
nature if
this experiment had never be conducted? Would it be worth it?
<>Social Psychology:The Influence of Groups and Situations
Obedience to authority
- 65% of the subjects administered the full range of shocks
- Situation affected obedience
- Rates ranged from 0 to 93%
- Situations increasing obedience
- Person giving orders was close at hand
- Person giving orders perceived to be a legitimate authority
figure
- Authority figure was supported by a prestigious institution
- Victim was depersonalized or at a distance
- No role models for defiance
- Controversy
- Critics argued that it wouldn't generalize to real world
- Evidence demonstrates otherwise
- Consistently replicated
- Critics questioned the ethics of the experiment
- Ss exposed to severe deception
- Could undermine their trust in people
- Severe stress could leave emotional scars
- Supporters claim this is a small price to pay for the insights
that came out of the studies
- Cultural variations
- Experiment repeated in many different societies
- Results similar to those seen in the US.
- Replications limited to industrialized nations similar to US
- Obedience higher in many of these societies
Behavior traps
- The situation in which we find ourselves exerts extremely
strong
effects on our behavior
Behavior traps: Situations that coerce us into
engaging in
self-defeating behaviors
- Wander into the situation unaware of dangers
- Once you realize the danger you can't find an easy way out of
the
situation
- Escalation of conflict
- Experimental situation
- Dollar auction
- Real-world examples
- Cold War
- Arguments
- Prisoner's dilemma
Prisoner's dilemma: A situation in which people must
choose between
a cooperative act and an act that could benefit only themselves while
hurting
others.
- Resolution
- Discuss strategy and agree not to confess
- Separation adds element of uncertainty
- Constant communication essential for cooperation
- Commons dilemma
- Another situation in which people hurt others and
eventually themselves
by considering only their own short term interests
Commons dilemma: People who share a common resource tend to
overuse
it and therefore make it unavailable in the long run
- Parable
- Experimental simulation
- College students with a bowl of peanuts Can
take as many
as they want as often as they want
- Every 10 seconds the number of nuts remaining in the bowl
doubles
- Object of game is to collect as many nuts as possible
- Best solution
- Cooperation
- Actual performance
- Run on the nuts in the first few seconds
Power of the group
- Ambiguous situations
- Usually take our cues from what other people are doing
- Influence of others
- Provide us with information (or misinformation)
- Set norms
- Conformity
- Behaviors are contagious
Conformity: Maintaining or matching ones behavior to
match the behavior
of others is known as conformity
- Pressure to conform
- Especially strong in ambiguous situations in which it
is difficult
for people to be sure of their own judgment
- Asch and social conformity
- Examined how strong the effects of group consensus were
on a person's
tendency to conform
- Paradigm
- Asked students to look at a vertical bar
- Showed them three other vertical bars and their job was to
choose
the bar that was the same length as the model
- 18 trials
- Confederates instructed to give wrong answers on 12
of 18 trials
- Results
- Average subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials when
in the group
- Almost never provided incorrect answer when alone
- Explanations given by subjects for conformity
- Strengthening conformity
- Lack of competence or insecure
- Group size
- Degree of agreement in group
- Feelings about group
- Observation of responses
- Culture
- Reasons for conformity
- Normative social influence
- Sensitive to social norms
- Conform to avoid rejection
- Conform to gain social approval
- Informational social influence
- Groups may provide valuable information
- When we accept other's information about reality we
are responding
to informational social influence
- Conformity increases when being right matters
Bystander apathy
- Kitty Genovese murder
- Diffusion of responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility: The tendency for
people to feel
less responsibility for helping when other people are around than when
they know no one is around besides themselves to help
- Latane and Darley (1969)
- Results (Hint: write overall results here)
- Pluralistic ignorance
Pluralistic ignorance: A situation where people
say nothing
and each person falsely assumes that everyone else has a different,
perhaps
better informed opinion
- Overall lack of action in a situation provides information or
misinformation
about appropriate action
- Decision tree for helping behavior
Social Loafing
Social loafing: The tendency to “loaf” or work less
hard
when sharing work with other people
- Reasons
- Less accountability
- Worry less about what others think
- May view their contribution as dispensable
- Elimination of social loafing
Deindividuation
Deindividuation: Abandoning normal restraints to the power
of the
group
- Causes
- Arousal
- Diminished sense of responsibility
- Anonymity
- Become less self-conscious and less restrained in a group
situation
Liking and Loving
Predictors of Attraction
- Proximity
Proximity: geographic nearness
- Most powerful predictor of friendship
Mere exposure effect: the more often we are exposed to
novel stimuli,
the more we like it
- Used to explain the influence of proximity on attraction
- Moreland & Beach (1992)
– 4 equally attractive women
- Attended 0, 5, 10 or 15 class sessions
- Rated for attractiveness
- Those attending the most times were rated as the most attractive
- Similarity
- The greater the similarities between two friends – the longer
their friendship
tends to endure
- Evidence exists that similarity causes attraction
- Research on attitude similarity
- As attitude similarity increases, subject's ratings of
likability of
the stranger increases
- Physical Attractiveness
- Very strong predictor of attraction
- Research
- Randomly matching of freshmen at freshman dance
- Before the dance, all the subjects took a battery of personality and
aptitude tests
- Attraction to partners almost entirely determined by physical
attractiveness
of partners
- Wide ranging effects of attractiveness
- Predicts a variety of qualities about a person
- Predicts perceptions of attractive people
- Not related to self-esteem and happiness
- Differences in standards of beauty
- Between cultures
- Across time
- Cultural similarities in standards of beauty: Men
- Youthful appearance
- Hip to waist ratio
- Cultural similarities in standards of beauty: Women
- Each sex tends to advertise the qualities that maximize its odds of
attracting
desirable partners
Romantic Love
- Two Types
- Passionate love
- Involves a complete absorption in another person
- Companionate love
- Warm, trusting, tolerant, affection
- Arousal and Passionate Love
- Schacter and Singer theory of emotion
- Applied to experience of passionate love
- Passionate love
- Person feels physically aroused
- Person interprets arousal as love and desire
- Experiment
- 2 bridges
- Question subjects on bridges
- Scary bridge
- More likely to write stories containing a relatively high
level of sexual
imagery
- More likely to call the female research assistant at home
- Triangular theory of love
- Sternberg
- Love has three basic components
- Intimacy
- Feelings that promote closeness, and connection
- Passion
- The intense desire for union with another person
- Commitment
- The decision to maintain a relationship over the long term
- Different combinations of these three components lead to different
types
of love
- Progression of love
- Passionate love may change to companionate love
- Similarities determine whether love develops to companionate love
- Adaptive