Social Psychology: Attitudes, Prejudice, Compliance, and Social Behavior

Social Psychology: Attitudes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Attitudes & Behavior: Attitudes affect interpretations of everyday events. An attitude is an overall evaluation of some aspects of the world.

Types of Attitudes

• Affective: Refers to your feelings about people, issues, and objects
• Behavioral: Refers to your predisposition to act in a particular way towards people, on an issue, or object
• Cognitive: Refers to what you believe or know about people, issues, or objects

Persuasion

Persuasion attempts to change people's attitudes in the hope of changing behavior. Attitudes can change based on experience or additional information. Persuasion can be achieved by two routes:

• Central: Paying close attention to the content of the argument
• Peripheral: Attempts based on attractiveness/expertise, number of arguments presented, or information about how people respond to the message

Prejudice and Discrimination

Prejudice often leads to discrimination, which is negative behavior toward individuals from a specific group that arises from negative attitudes. It is similar to what stereotypes are based on.

Causes of Prejudice

• Realistic Conflict: Prejudice due to competition over scarce resources (good housing, jobs, and schools), which develops negative views on other groups, which become prejudice.
• Social Categorization: The cognitive operation that leads people to sort others automatically into categories of us versus them. When you meet a new person, you automatically classify them as"u" or"them"
• Social Identity Theory: Social categorization is important in part because people usually think of their group favorably (ingroup) and other groups (outgroup) unfavorably.
• Social Learning: Social Learning Theory explains how prejudicial attitudes can spread and be passed through generations as a learned stereotype. (Parents, peers, and movies are the influences)

Principles of Compliance

1. Friendship/Liking: People are more likely to comply with a request from a friend than from a stranger.
2. Commitment/Consistency: When a request is consistent with an idea or goal
3. Scarcity: Comply with requests related to a limited, short-term opportunity.
4. Reciprocity: Comply with requests that come from someone who has previously provided a favor.
5. Social Validation: Comply if they think others similar to them have or would comply (e.g., bottled water over tap because everyone is doing it).
6. Authority: Comply with requests that come from someone who appears to be an authority.

Compliance Techniques

• Foot-in-the-Door Technique: A technique that achieves compliance by beginning with an insignificant request which is then followed by a larger request
• Social Loafing: The group process that occurs when some members don't contribute as much to a shared group task as do others and instead let other members work proportionally harder than they do.
• Social Facilitation: The increase in performance that can occur simply as a result of being part of a group or in the presence of other people
• Altruism: The motivation to increase another person's welfare

Social Psychology

Social Psychology is the area of psychology that focuses on how people think about other people and interact in relationships and groups.

Social Cognition

Social Cognition refers to the ways that people perceive the social world and how they attend to, store, remember, and use information about other people and the social world.