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Social Psychology: people in groups volledige samenvatting + lectures
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Social Psychology: people in groups summary + lectures
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EUR- Social psychologyPeople in groups
Learning goals:
o Have a basic understanding of why and how people feel, think, and behave in the
way they do under certain circumstances
o Emotions in social interactions, helping behavior, conformism and obedience,
behavior of people in groups, and attitudes.
Theme 1 Emotion and arousal
Same muscle use can indicate different emotions (ex. Being frustrated/happy uses the same
muscle reflexes, but also same increase of heartrate etc.)
Theme 2 Helping behavior
Helping comes from the inner feeling, it’s not a contemplation whether to help a ‘homeless’
person on the street -> empathy
There can be costs and benefits in helping people
Someone being helped
Putting yourself at risk
Theme 3 I spy…
Following the socially accepted norm, if everyone applauses or gives a standing ovation, you
automatically join the crowd to avoid awkwardness or feeling left behind
Theme 4 Attitudes
Theme 5 Groups
The feeling of group membership, to be a part of something can make you do things you
usually wouldn’t – exp. Jumping in cold water to congratulate your winning team
Theme 6 First impressions
Even though people differ from each other, can always find their way back to each other due
to subgroups etc. when in first look, you don’t think you have anything in common -> first
impressions can be misleading.
Theme 7 Relationships
Different type of relationships and how they evolve
,Classics
1898: Norman Triplett
Running faster when in competition compared to running alone -> competition leads to higher
results.
Social facilitation: improving your performance when in competition/working together.
Results were shown in his experiment called the ‘competition machine’ where 2 kids went
fishing both separate and together, showing better performance when fishing together.
(With big individual differences, or discouragement etc. you can actually have worse
performance)
1913: Max Ringelmann
Rope pulling experiment, assumption: the more people you add the more strength there is in
the competition, however, due to peoples differences the strength can actually decrease,
people tend to get lazier/‘someone else’ll do it for me’
Social loafing (Ringelmann Effect)
2 explanations:
o Biomechanics, some strengths can get lost
o People get lazy, they’re feeling like they’re not personally accountable
Put in a reality situation: a group project with 2 people vs 20, differences will be shown.
1924 Social psychology textbook (Floyd Allport)
People wanted explanations for what happened after WW2
Self-reflection within (social) psychology
o Scientific method and Replications
o WEIRD science
, Lecture 1
05-09-2022
William James: theory of emotion
Common thought when seeing a bear:
Feeling: emotion of fear
Response: running away
William James however, discredited this: ‘it’s the other way around’
You see the bear, it’s purely physical how you react: increase of heartrate, sweating etc. ->
this is the sensation of the emotion Fear.
“Your emotion IS your body”
Role of cognition: how you interpret a situation
Attribution is ESSENTIAL, shown in experiments.
Ex. Injecting participants with epinephrine, people reported ‘as if I’m angry’, even though they
knew they weren’t angry -> attribution -> Two-factor theory of emotion.
o An emotion is a complex reaction pattern, involving experimental, behavioral, and
physiological elements.
o Emotions are how individuals deal with matters or situations they find personally
significant
o American psychological association
Zillman (1979)
o Learned aggressive behaviour
o Arousal from another source
o Interpretation of the arousal state in which aggression is appropriate
Working out in the gym -> high heartrate, sweat etc.
When moving to a new situation ex. The supermarket, someone taking your parking spot,
you’d be angrier then when you’d come from your house being all relaxed etc.
Possibility of overreacting due to your previous source -> Excitation-transfer model.
Lecture 2
13-09-2022
Sherif 1936: What is truth?
Truth/reality is:
- Strictly empiricist (what we can measure -> the time on the clock etc.)
- Religious faith (an ideology -> what you think is right)
- Truth as a psychological concept (how we are able to understand it, is it hot or cold?
It’s both empirical but also depends on the person and their opinion about it).
Social norm: what we as a group think is right, what’s accepted (how to raise a child etc.).
Autokinetic experiment (Sheriff, 1936)
Aim of the experiment: demonstrating that people conform to group norms when they are put
in an ambiguous (unclear) situation.
Subjects (students) went in a dark room, would then see a dot in this dark room. Due to
perception in our eyes the dot seems to move (even though it’s not). He told these students
to press a button as soon as this dot moves.
, The experiment was done in counterbalanced order: letting someone do the experiment in a
group first and individual second, and vice versa (to see if there are different results).
2 phases of the auto kinetic experiment:
1. Individual experiment: were there random answers or some sort of norm?
2. Group experiment: were there even more random answers or a group norm?
Results of the experiment:
The answers given were not random at all, individuals established a mode and there was an
individual median -> there was stability.
Starting as individuals: all different answers, afterwards, in a group, they all came to an
agreement.
Starting as a group: they all have the same answer, and they stick to it.
Reality: a social construction, people make an estimate, and they stick to it.
Theoretical significance:
- Norms are social products
- Groups seem to have a binding power
- There was no leader!
Generalizability
.Why and under what conditions do people accept/follow the social norm?
Many people have reasons to conform even though they know it’s not right
A situation is very powerful:
- Dependency on others for social approval (normative), you want to be a part of a
group, “I want to be accepted”.
- Dependency on others for information about reality (informational), sometimes you
just don’t know what’s right, you’re not sure, you ask others for reviews etc. (for a
book, u use this information whether to read it or not), “I want to know what’s right”.
Conformity and obedience.
People choose to go along to fit it, without anyone telling them to do so.
They decided to conform out of free will.
Doing what seems right based on the social norms, this is mostly not implicit, not black-white.
Study on obedience
Obedience: explicit requests, when you’re given an order, and you go along with it.
.Stanley Milgrim’s SHOCK experiment, studying the issue of authority.
Participants were given shocks for answering questions wrong, varying from very mild
shocks to extreme dangerous shocks. Getting a question right will move you to the next and
getting a question wrong will give you a shock getting higher volts each time.
Results:
The majority of people went to the highest level of shock if there was any pressure (the
teacher in control of the shocks would pressure the participants into going to the next
questions and they would listen).
Conclusion:
Everyone can do horrible things -> theory of evil, this explains the behaviour of Nazi’s, and
the way people could handle their deeds in times of war.
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