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Summary chapter 12 social psychology

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Chapter 12 Social psychology
Big questions
- How does group membership affect people?
- When do people harm or help others?
- How do attitudes guide behavior?
- How do people think about others?
- What determines the quality of relationships?

As highly social species, humans are readily influenced by the actions of
others. The subfield of social psychology is concerned with how real or
imagined others influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Humans
depend on one another for survival, so almost every human activity has a
social dimension.

How does group membership affect people?
Humans always depend on one another. Social psychologists have labeled
humans the social animal. We are creatures that evolved to live in groups,
so we have adapted in ways that help us get along, fit in, and thrive in
group contexts. We need those adaptations because group membership
can be tricky. It is not always obvious, for instance, what our group expects
of us in each situation. The social brain hypothesis places such challenges
in the context of brain size. Humans belong to the other primates, which
includes great apes and monkeys. According to the social brain

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,hypothesis, primates have large brains. In particular, large prefrontal
cortices-because they live in complex social groups that change over time.
Being a good group member requires the capability to understand
complex and subtle social rules, recognize when actions might offend
others, and control desires to engage in behaviors that might violate group
norms.

12.1 People favor their own groups.
Social groups, or coalitions, are prevalent in some primate species, such as
chimpanzees, and in other social mammals, such as dolphins. Humans
automatically and pervasively form groups, and they are powerfully
connected to the groups they belong to. People cheer on their own groups,
fight for them, and sometimes are even willing to die for them. Those
groups to which particular people belong to are ingroups; those to which
they do not belong to are outgroups.

Forming ingroups and outgroups
People are likely to organize themselves into groups when two conditions
are met. One condition is reciprocity, meaning that people treat others as
others threat them. . another condition is transitivity, meaning that people
generally share their friends’ opinions of other people. Beginning in
infancy, humans readily differentiate between ingroups and outgroups.
Once people categorize others as ingroup or outgroup members, they
treat those others in a predictable set of ways. For instance, people tend to
view outgroup members as less varied than ingroup members. This
tendency is called the outgroup homogeneity effect. People from different
racial groups notice more variation among members of their own race and
less variation among people of other races. People also show a positivity
bias for ingroup members.

Social identity theory
According to social identity theory, people not only identify with certain
groups but also value those groups and in doing so experience pride
through their group membership. As people define themselves as
members of groups, they begin to learn, mimic, and eventually internalize
the ways other group members behave toward both ingroup and outgroup
members. Ingroup favoritism is one of the most consistent features of
categorizing people as ingroup or outgroup members. People give
preferential treatment to ingroup members compared with outgroup
members. The minimal group paradigm is people show ingroup favoritism
even when the groups are arbitrary.

Brain activity associated with group membership.

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, Being a good group member requires recognizing and following the
group’s social rules. When members violate these rules, they risk
exclusion from the group. The middle region of the prefrontal cortex, called
the medial prefrontal cortex, is important for thinking about other people.
Activity in this region is also associated with the ingroup bias that emerges
after assignment through the minimal group paradigm. The medial
prefrontal cortex is less active when people consider members of
outgroups. One explanation for these differences in brain activity is that
people see ingroup members as more human than outgroup members.

12.2 Groups influence individual behavior.
The desire to fit in with the group and avoid being ostracized is so great
that under some circumstances people willingly engage in behaviors they
otherwise should condemn.

Group decision making.
Being in a group influences decision making in complex ways. On the one
hand you have the risky-shift effect: groups often make riskier decisions
than individuals do. On the other hand, groups can sometimes become
more cautions. If most of the group members are somewhat cautious, then
the group becomes even more cautious. This tendency is known as group
polarization. Sometimes group members are particularly concerned with
preserving the group and maintaining its cohesiveness. Therefore, for the
sake of politeness, the group may end up making a bad decision. This is
called groupthink (extreme form of group polarization). Groupthink
generally occurs when a group is under intense pressure, is in facing
external threats, and is biased in a particular decision to begin with. The
group does not carefully process all the information available to it, dissent
is discouraged, and group members assure each other they are doing the
right thing. To prevent groupthink, leaders must refrain from expressing
their options too strongly at the beginning of discussions. The group
should be encouraged to consider alternative ideas, either by having
someone play devil’s advocate or by purposefully examining outside
options. Carefully going through alternatives and weighing the pros and
cons of each can help people avoid groupthink. The main point behind
groupthink is that group members sometimes go along with bad decisions
to protect group harmony.

Social facilitation
Social facilitation is that the presence of others generally enhances
performance. Robert Zajonc proposed a model of facilitation that involves
three steps. This model predicts that social facilitation can either improve
of impair performance. The change depends on whether the response that

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