Social Psychology

Your situation shapes you more than you might think. Social psychology studies how other people change what we feel, believe, and do. Those people can be real, imagined, or only implied. Its most lasting finding is humbling. In the right setting, ordinary people will go along with something they know is false. They will obey an authority even when it seems cruel. They will walk past an emergency. They will turn a harmless neighbor into a feared stranger. This chapter starts with the quiet, everyday work of explaining behavior. Then it moves to the loud, high-stakes forces of the group. Along the way you will meet the studies that made the field famous: Asch's lines, Milgram's shocks, and the bystanders who did nothing. You will also see what those studies teach us. They show how to steer ourselves and others toward better choices.

Section 1How we explain behavior

The attribution habit

People are always explaining things. Someone cuts you off in traffic. A coworker snaps in a meeting. A stranger drops some coins and keeps walking. In a heartbeat, your mind has come up with a why. This quick habit of giving a cause to a behavior is called attribution. The Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider introduced the idea. He described ordinary people as everyday scientists, always testing small theories about one another. Heider saw that our explanations fall into two big buckets. A dispositional (or internal) attribution puts the cause inside the person: their character, skill, mood, or intent. A situational (or external) attribution puts the cause outside the person, in the setting pressing on them.

This is not just a fine point. It decides how we respond. Suppose a student fails a test. If you read it as laziness (dispositional), you may feel scorn. If you read it as a family crisis plus a night shift (situational), you feel sympathy. Whole relationships, court verdicts, and public policies turn on which bucket we reach for. And as the next idea shows, we do not reach evenly.

The fundamental attribution error

When we explain other people's behavior, we lean too hard on disposition. We give too little weight to the situation. This lopsided habit is the fundamental attribution error (FAE). The name comes from Lee Ross. It is one of the strongest findings in the field. In a famous study, Edward Jones and Victor Harris had students read an essay. The essay either praised or criticized the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The readers were told plainly that a coin flip had assigned the writer's side. Even so, they believed a pro-Castro essay showed truly pro-Castro views. The situation was obvious, and they ignored it anyway.

Notice what changes when the person being judged is you. The actor-observer bias works like this. We explain our own behavior by the situation. But we explain the same behavior in others by their character. "I was late because traffic was terrible. You were late because you are disorganized." Add the self-serving bias. That is taking credit for our successes but blaming outside forces for our failures. Together they show a mind that quietly guards its own image. The FAE also depends on culture. It is stronger in individualist cultures, which prize the independent person. It is weaker in collectivist cultures, which pay more attention to the situation.

Section 2Attitudes and persuasion

What an attitude is, and when it predicts behavior

An attitude is a judgment, good or bad, about a person, thing, or idea. It has three strands woven together. The cognitive part is what you believe. The affective part is how you feel. The behavioral part is how you tend to act. We assume attitudes drive behavior. Often they do. But the link is looser than you might expect. In a classic study in the 1930s, Richard LaPiere traveled across the United States with a young Chinese couple. They were refused service only once. Later, LaPiere wrote to the same hotels and restaurants. He asked if they would serve Chinese guests. Over ninety percent of those who wrote back said no. What people said and what they did were completely different. Attitudes predict behavior best when they are strong, when they are specific to the action, when they come from direct experience, and when outside pressures are weak.

Cognitive dissonance: when actions rewrite attitudes

We usually expect attitudes to shape behavior. One of the field's key insights is that the arrow also runs backward. Behavior shapes attitudes. Leon Festinger called this cognitive dissonance. We feel an uneasy tension when we notice two beliefs that clash, or a belief that clashes with an action. We want to ease that tension. Often we do it by quietly changing the attitude to match what we already did.

The proof is a simple study from 1959 by Festinger and James Carlsmith. People spent an hour on a very boring task: turning pegs, over and over. Then they were paid to tell the next person that the task had been fun. Some were paid twenty dollars to say it. Others were paid only one dollar. Later, they were asked how fun the task really was. The twenty-dollar group admitted it was dull. But the one-dollar group said it had truly been interesting. Why the flip? The twenty-dollar group had a good outside reason: "I did it for the money." So they felt no dissonance. The one-dollar group had no such excuse. "I said it was fun" clashed with "it was boring." The only easy fix was to decide it had been fun after all. When we have too little outside reason for what we did, our real attitudes often change.

Two roads to persuasion

Persuasion is a planned attempt to change an attitude. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo created the elaboration likelihood model. It maps two routes for persuasion. The central route works through the content of the message. That means the evidence, the logic, and how good the reasons are. It persuades people who want to think hard and are able to. The change it creates lasts. It holds up when someone argues back. The peripheral route works through cues around the message. Examples are a good-looking speaker, a celebrity, or plain repetition. Another is a long list of arguments, even weak ones. This route persuades people who are distracted, rushed, or not interested. Its effects are shallow, and they fade fast. Advertisers use both. A drug ad packs in central-route data for the doctor, and peripheral-route smiling actors for everyone else.

Research on persuasion also covers compliance techniques. These are scripts that raise the odds of getting a yes. In the foot-in-the-door technique, studied by Freedman and Fraser, you first agree to a small request. That makes you much more likely to agree to a bigger one later. You have started to see yourself as the kind of person who helps. The door-in-the-face technique is the mirror image. The persuader opens with a huge request that you will refuse. Then they follow with the smaller request they wanted all along. Now it feels like a fair compromise.

Section 3Conformity and obedience

Conformity: Asch and the power of the majority

Conformity means changing our behavior or opinions to match a group. In the early 1950s, Solomon Asch made a test that seems impossible to fail. People looked at a standard line. Then they said which of three other lines matched it. The answer was obvious. Here was the twist. The other people in the room were confederates, which means actors working for the researcher. On certain trials, they all gave the same wrong answer. The real participant faced a group that all disagreed with what their own eyes saw. About seventy-five percent of real participants went along with the wrong answer at least once. Across the key trials, people went along with the group about a third of the time.

Why go along with an answer you can see is wrong? Asch's work showed two different engines. Normative social influence is conforming to be liked and accepted. You know the group is wrong, but you do not want to stand out. Informational social influence is conforming because you think the group knows something you do not. It is a real change of mind. It is strongest when a situation is unclear. Muzafer Sherif had already shown the informational kind with the autokinetic effect. In a dark room, a still point of light seems to move. People who watched it together slowly agreed on how far it "moved." Asch also found that conformity drops sharply when even one other person breaks from the group. The greatest gift a lone dissenter gives is company.

Obedience: Milgram and the man in the lab coat

Conformity gives in to peers. Obedience gives in to authority. Stanley Milgram ran some of the most troubling studies in psychology. He began in 1961 at Yale, the same year the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann began. Eichmann claimed he was only following orders. Milgram told volunteers they were in a learning study. Each volunteer was given the role of "teacher." A "learner," who was really a confederate, answered questions. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was told to give an electric shock. The shocks rose in fifteen-volt steps. They started at 15 volts and ended at a final switch marked 450 volts: XXX. No shocks were real, but the teachers did not know that. The learner cried out, begged to stop, complained of a heart problem, and finally went silent. Through it all, an experimenter in a gray coat calmly said, "The experiment requires that you continue." Milgram expected almost no one to go all the way. Instead, about sixty-five percent of ordinary people obeyed all the way to 450 volts.

This is not a story about monsters. It is a story about situations. Obedience went up when the authority seemed legitimate and was in the room. It went up when the institution had prestige. It went up when people could pass the blame up the chain ("I was just following orders"). And it went up when the victim was far away. It dropped sharply when the learner was in the same room. It dropped when the experimenter gave orders by phone, or when other "teachers" refused. The 65 percent figure comes from one version of the study. Across Milgram's many versions, obedience ranged widely, from almost none to more than 90 percent. A partial repeat of the study in 2009, stopping at 150 volts, found high rates, similar to Milgram's. The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, is often cited for the same idea: roles and settings can quickly change behavior. But it is now seen as deeply flawed. It had no control group, and guards were coached on how to act. Treat it as a cautionary story, not as strong evidence.

The group as a force of its own

Groups do more than push members toward a norm. They change how people perform, how hard they try, and how they decide. On easy or well-practiced tasks, just having others around improves performance. This is social facilitation. Norman Triplett first noticed it with bicycle racers, who rode faster with others. Robert Zajonc explained it. Others make us more aroused, and arousal strengthens our dominant response, which is whatever we do most easily. On hard or new tasks, that same arousal makes us worse. When everyone's effort is pooled and no one can be singled out, people slack off. This is social loafing. It is why a committee of eight often does the work of three. In a large, anonymous, excited crowd, people can lose self-awareness and self-control. This is deindividuation, the psychology behind mob behavior. And in the meeting room, close groups that want to agree can shut down disagreement and misjudge reality. Irving Janis named this groupthink. He traced it through failures like the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. A related effect is group polarization. When like-minded people talk together, their views do not soften. They grow more extreme in the direction they already leaned.

Section 4Prejudice and stereotypes

Three cousins: prejudice, stereotype, discrimination

People often use these three words as if they meant the same thing. Keeping them straight is the base of this topic. A stereotype is a belief. It is a broad idea about the members of a group, such as "accountants are dull" or "athletes are not smart." Prejudice is an attitude. It is a judgment made ahead of time, usually a negative feeling toward a group and its members. Discrimination is behavior. It is the unfair act of treating people differently because of their group. Line them up with the three parts of an attitude and they fit neatly. A stereotype is the thought. Prejudice is the feeling. Discrimination is the deed. They tend to travel together, but not always. Someone can hold a stereotype without acting on it. Laws against discrimination target the behavior, because beliefs and feelings are much harder to make laws about.

In-groups, out-groups, and the ease of “us versus them”

Prejudice is fed by a mental move so basic that no one has to teach it. We split the social world into the in-group ("us") and the out-group ("them"). Some predictable errors follow. In-group bias is our habit of favoring, trusting, and rewarding our own group. Out-group homogeneity is the false sense that "they are all alike," while "we" are all different. Henri Tajfel's social identity theory showed how little it takes to set this off. He used the minimal group paradigm. People were sorted into groups by something as small as a coin toss, or by liking one painter more than another. Right away, they began to favor their own group when handing out rewards. Part of our self-esteem comes from the groups we belong to. So lifting up our group and putting down the other one helps us feel good about ourselves. Add a fight over scarce resources, or a frustrating threat, and the out-group can easily become a scapegoat. A scapegoat is a target that gets unfairly blamed.

Reducing prejudice

If groups can create prejudice, can they also undo it? Gordon Allport proposed the contact hypothesis. It says that bringing groups together reduces prejudice, but only under certain conditions. The groups must have equal status in the situation. They must work toward common goals. They must cooperate rather than compete. And they must have the support of leaders or the law. Just being near each other is not enough. It can even make things worse. Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave study showed the cure. Two groups of boys at a summer camp became bitter rivals. They made peace only when the researchers created superordinate goals. These were problems neither group could solve alone, like a broken water supply. (Later writers have raised questions about how the study was run, but its main lesson has held up in other research.) In the classroom, Elliot Aronson's jigsaw technique builds in the same kind of teamwork. Each student gets one piece of the material that the others need. So success means reaching across group lines.

Section 5Helping and hurting

Prosocial behavior and altruism

Prosocial behavior is any action meant to help another person. It can be as small as holding a door or as big as donating a kidney. Its purest form is altruism. Altruism is helping out of real concern for someone else's well-being. It happens even when it costs you, and with no reward expected. People have argued for a century about whether truly selfless helping exists. Daniel Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis says that when we feel empathy for someone, we help for their sake, not our own. Critics reply that we help to ease our own distress, or to look good to others. Evolution-based ideas add two more motives that need no conscious plan. Kin selection means we favor relatives, who share our genes. Reciprocal altruism means helping today earns help tomorrow.

The bystander effect

Common sense says that the more people who see an emergency, the more likely someone will help. Research found something surprising. The bystander effect is the finding that each person is less likely to help when others are around. The research grew out of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. News reports said many neighbors saw the attack and did nothing. (Later reporting showed those early details were exaggerated. Fewer people saw it clearly, and at least one person did call for help. But the puzzle it raised was real.) Bibb Latané and John Darley ran the studies that explained it. In one, participants heard another person, over an intercom, seem to have a seizure. Those who thought they were the only listener almost always went for help. Those who thought several others were also listening helped much less, and much more slowly.

Two mechanisms do the work. Diffusion of responsibility means that as the number of bystanders grows, each person feels less personal duty. "Someone else will handle it." Pluralistic ignorance means we look at the calm faces around us to decide whether this is truly an emergency. But everyone is doing the same thing. So the whole group's inaction looks like the whole group's judgment that nothing is wrong. Latané and Darley built these into a five-step model. A bystander must (1) notice the event, (2) see it as an emergency, (3) take personal responsibility, (4) know how to help, and (5) decide to act. If any step breaks, no help comes. The best fix is to beat diffusion directly. Point to one person: "You, in the red jacket, call 911." One more point is worth knowing. A 2019 study of real street conflicts, caught on camera in three countries, found that someone stepped in about 90 percent of the time. Larger groups made it more likely that someone helped, even though each single person was less likely to.

Aggression

If helping is one edge of social behavior, aggression is the other. Aggression is behavior meant to harm someone who wants to avoid it. There are two kinds. Hostile aggression is driven by anger and aims to cause pain. Instrumental aggression is a cold means to some other goal, like hurting someone to steal from them. The causes come in layers. Biology plays a part. The amygdala, testosterone, and low serotonin are all linked to it. Next is the classic frustration-aggression hypothesis. It came from Dollard and his colleagues. Leonard Berkowitz later refined it. The idea is that blocked goals breed aggression. This is most likely when there are cues around that hint at violence. Berkowitz's weapons effect found that just seeing a gun could raise aggression. Later studies found this effect is smaller and less steady. Finally, Albert Bandura's famous Bobo doll studies showed that aggression can be learned. Children watched an adult punch and kick an inflatable doll. Later, they copied those exact acts. So violence can pass from person to person by watching and copying. It is not only frustration or instinct. That finding is still central to debates about violent media.

ReferenceWords worth knowing

A quick list of the terms in this chapter. Skim it now, or come back whenever a word trips you up.

Altruism

Helping out of real concern for someone else's well-being, even at a cost to yourself and with no reward expected.

Attitude

A good or bad judgment about a person, thing, or idea. It has a belief part, a feeling part, and an action part.

Attribution

The process of explaining what caused a behavior. The cause can be dispositional (inside the person) or situational (outside).

Bystander effect

The finding that each person is less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present.

Central route to persuasion

Persuasion through the strength and content of an argument. It creates lasting attitude change.

Cognitive dissonance

The uneasy tension of holding beliefs that clash, or of acting against a belief. It pushes us to change our attitudes.

Conformity

Changing your behavior or opinions to match a group.

Contact hypothesis

Allport's idea that contact between groups reduces prejudice when there is equal status, common goals, cooperation, and support from leaders.

Deindividuation

The loss of self-awareness and self-control that can happen in large, anonymous, excited groups.

Diffusion of responsibility

The drop in each person's sense of duty to act as the number of bystanders grows.

Discrimination

Unfair behavior that treats people differently because of their group.

Foot-in-the-door technique

A compliance tactic. Agreeing to a small request makes a person more willing to agree to a bigger one later.

Fundamental attribution error

The habit of giving too much weight to character and too little to the situation when explaining other people's behavior.

Groupthink

Poor decision-making in a close group, where the wish to agree overrides a realistic look at the options.

In-group bias

The habit of favoring and giving special treatment to members of your own group.

Normative social influence

Going along with a group to be liked or accepted, not because you think the group is right.

Obedience

Changing your behavior because a person in authority directly tells you to.

Peripheral route to persuasion

Persuasion through surface cues around a message, such as the source, good looks, or repetition. It creates shallow change that is easily reversed.

Prejudice

A judgment made ahead of time, usually a negative attitude and feeling, toward a group and its members.

Prosocial behavior

Any voluntary action meant to help another person.

Self-serving bias

Giving yourself credit for successes (inside causes) and blaming outside causes for failures.

Social loafing

The habit of putting in less effort when everyone's work is pooled and no one is singled out.

Stereotype

A broad belief about what the members of a group are like.