AP Psychology 4.3: Psychology of Social Situations

Every situation comes with a script. Social norms are a group's expectations for how its members should act: face the door in an elevator, keep your voice down in a library. A role is the set of expectations that goes with a position, such as referee or team captain.

Why follow a norm nobody asked you to sign? Social influence theory gives two kinds of pressure. Normative social influence is going along to be accepted, or to avoid standing out. Informational social influence is going along because you think others know something you do not, which is strongest when a situation is unclear.

Conformity is changing your behavior or thinking to match a group. In Asch's line studies (the setup in Think first), conformity was strongest when the group was unanimous. It dropped sharply when just one other person gave the right answer, and it dropped when participants wrote their answers where the group could not see them.

Obedience is following the directives of an authority figure. In Stanley Milgram's studies, an experimenter told participants to give a learner stronger and stronger electric shocks for each mistake. The learner was an actor and got no real shocks. Far more participants obeyed to the end than anyone had predicted. Obedience was highest when the experimenter was in the room and the setting seemed legitimate. It fell when orders came by phone, when the learner was close by, and when other participants refused.

Persuasion is any technique used to convince yourself or someone else of an idea, an action or a belief. The elaboration likelihood model says a message can work through two routes.

On the central route, you think hard about the arguments and the evidence. People take it when they care about the topic and have the time and attention to weigh it, and the attitudes it builds tend to last. On the peripheral route, you respond to cues around the message instead: how attractive or famous the speaker is, how upbeat the music is, how many arguments there seem to be. People take it when they are rushed, distracted or not very interested, and the change fades sooner.

The halo effect is one of those peripheral cues. One good trait, such as good looks or charm, leads people to assume other good traits, such as honesty or expertise. An actor selling a cold medicine is counting on it.

How a request is presented matters too. With the foot-in-the-door technique, you ask for something small first, and people who agreed are more likely to agree to a bigger request later. The door-in-the-face technique runs the other way: ask for something large that will be turned down, then ask for the smaller thing you wanted all along, which now seems reasonable.

Other people change how you perform even when nobody says a word. Social facilitation is better performance on a simple or well-practiced task when others are watching. On a hard or new task, an audience can make performance worse.

Groups change effort. In social loafing, people put less effort into a group task than they would alone, mostly when nobody can tell how much each person contributed. In deindividuation, being anonymous in a group, such as a masked crowd, lowers self-awareness and restraint, and people do things they would not do alone.

Groups change decisions. In group polarization, discussion among people who already lean the same way pushes the whole group further in that direction. In groupthink, the wish for harmony in a close group overrides a realistic look at the options: doubts go unspoken, dissent is discouraged, and a weak plan passes as if everyone agreed.

Groups also live in your head. The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how many other people share your opinions and habits.

Work is where many adults spend their group life. Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychologists study how people perform in the workplace: how work is managed, how coworkers get along, and how people feel about their jobs. One thing they track is burnout, the exhaustion and detachment that build up after long stretches of work stress.

Culture shapes how you see yourself and others. Individualism puts personal goals first and defines a person by their own traits and achievements. Collectivism puts the family's or group's goals first and defines a person by their relationships. Multiculturalism is several cultures sharing one society, each keeping its own traditions.

A superordinate goal, one no group can reach alone, unites groups in conflict and reduces hostility and stereotyping. In a social trap, each person acts in their own interest and the group ends up worse off, as when every boat overfishes a shared lake.

Altruism is selfless helping, with no thought of reward. Some researchers trace much helping to social debt instead. The social reciprocity norm says to help those who have helped you; the social responsibility norm says to help those who need help, especially those who depend on you. The helper's reason sets the norms apart from altruism: a norm-follower feels they owe help or ought to give it; an altruist helps from concern for the other person alone.

In the bystander effect, a person is less likely to help when others are present. In Darley and Latané's studies, people who believed others could also hear someone having a seizure helped more slowly, or not at all. Part of the reason is diffusion of responsibility: each person feels less responsible. Attention matters too: people in a hurry, or who see others stay calm, may not notice an emergency or read it as one.