Social thought and behaviour

SOCIAL PERCEPTION- the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences
about other people. We learn about other people’s feelings or emotions by picking up on
information we gather from their physical appearance and verbal/ non -verbal
communication.
*social cognition is how we process social information, remember it and use it in making
judgements or decisions about others.
Attribution refers to the fairly orderly process through which we seek to determine the
causes behind others’ behaviour.
We examine people’s behaviour for clues as to the causes behind their actions and thus
reach a particular decision. The kind of information that a person considers depends upon
the specific question that has to be answered. To answer such questions we focus on
information about
KELLEY’S THEORY OF ATTRIBUTION/ COVARIATION MODEL
1. Consensus- information regarding the extent to which the behaviour by one person
is shown by others as well.
2. Consistency- information regarding the extent to which a specific person shows
similar behaviour to a given stimulus across time.
3. Distinctiveness-information regarding the extent to which a given person reacts in
the same manner to different stimuli or situations.
If very few people act like the person then consensus is low, if the person has
behaved in the same manner over time, then consistency is high and if the person
behaves in much the same manner in many situations then distinctiveness is slow.
Thus behaviour stems for internal causes. Moreover, people behave the way they do
because of external causes.
BIASES IN FORMING JUDGEMENTS
In psychology, an attribution bias is a cognitive bias that affects the way determine who or
what was responsible for an event or action.
1. person positivity bias- A ‘person- positivity bias’ is proposed such that the attitude
objects are evaluated more favourably the more they resemble individual humans.
Eg- we tend to view certain politicians more positively when we evaluate them as
individuals as opposed to being members of a particular political party.

2. Motivation bias- a discrepancy, usually conscious, motivated by one’s personal

situations. Motivation bias is also known as social bias which reflect errors we make
when evaluating the rational for both our own behaviour as well as the behaviour of
others.
Eg- the halo effect is the tendency for either positive or negative trait of an individual
to overwhelm the perceptions of others traits by those around him.
 3. self- serving bias- “ if I can do no wrong, you can do no right” it is a tendency to
attribute positive outcomes to internal causes or our own traits and negative
outcomes to external causes, especially factors beyond our control.
Eg- if a student performs well in a subject it is because of his hard work but if he fails
in the subject, he would reason by saying or thinking that the subject was not taught
correctly or the lecture was not interesting.

4. False consensus effect- this refers to the tendency to overestimate the degree to
which our own behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, values are shared by people.
Eg saving the environment is important because you feel that way, hence you
perceive saving the environment is important to all, even if it is not.

5. Automatic vigilance-this bias is based on the theory that negative information draws
attention more readily than positive or neutral information. Despite the fact that
there is a snake in the grass or an angry face in the crowd, negative stimuli have the
power to disrupt people’s ongoing activities and make them wonder about the
situation. Apparently, the human mind is configured in such a way that it instantly
notices potential dangers.

6. Motivational scepticism- when people are faced with information and ideas that are
in accordance with pre-existing beliefs of the world they are accepted easily.
Scepticism refers to the doubt that information is against or beliefs we interrogate
them harshly subjecting them to endless scrutiny. It is our own tendency to criticise
negative information on one hand and blindly accept positive information on the
other.

7. Counterfactual thinking- is the tendency of focusing on how the past might have
been or the present could be, different. These thoughts are usually triggered by
negative events that block one’s possibilities for past and future events. Eg- athletes
who win a bronze medal think of what it would have been to win a gold medal or no
medal whatsoever.
SOCIAL NORMS
Social norms are unwritten rules about how to behave appropriately in order to avoid
certain circumstances. Social norms emerge to guide behaviour under conditions of
uncertainty.
CONFORMITY
Conformity is a type of social influence in which individuals change their attitudes or
behaviour in order to adhere to the existing social norms. Conformity refers to situations in
which individuals change their beliefs or behaviours so that they can become more similar
to those of other group members.
Factors affecting conformity
1. Conformity is affected when a person is asked to give his views alone or secretly.
For example, during elections, a person may give his vote to a person going
against his conformed candidate of a political party or group.
2. Conformity is affected or reduced when a person when a person is instructed to
give his view or conformation in favour or against a party or a person in writing
ahead of a group discussion on conformity.
3. Conformity is also affected when the morale of the group is low. If there is no
unity or ‘we’ feeling amongst the members of the group, conformity is affected.
4. Conformity is also affected by reasoning, intelligence and the will of the people.
Intelligent and reasonable people do not go by emotion alone and do not blindly
accept anything ordered by a group. They find out the justification of the orders,
and why they should be carried out.
5. Conformity is affected if a person with a rigid attitude fails to change his decision
in favour of the group. Rigid and stubborn people with fixed views may not
conform or obey certain decisions as they normally stick to their point.
OBEDIENCE
Obedience is a form of social influence in which one or more individuals behave in specific
ways in response to direct orders from someone.
The following factors affect obedience

ASCH’S STUDY ON CONFORMITY

Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social
pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
The Subjects – The subjects were 50 male students from Swarthmore College in USA. The
FPs or the subjects in this experiment were asked to choose which of the comparison lines
the same length as a standard line was in comparison to the standard line. The control
subjects were by themselves, when they looked at the lines, 99 per cent of the time the
time they were accurate. This established a base line against which the responses of the
other subjects in the experimental sessions were to be judged.
Experimental Sessions- Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line
(A,B OR C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real
participant sat at the end of the row and gave his answer last. The judgements were made
within the group, each session typically employed only one actual subject in a group of
seven to nine other people – the agents- who had been coached to choose one of the non-
matching lines. These people were confederates or helpers of the experimenters. The
experiment was setup so that the real experimental subject heard the judgements of all but
one of these confederates, the subject would hear eight of them choose a particular
comparison line that did not match the standard line. For instance, in the figure above, eight
confederates would say that line 2 matched the standard line – a judgement at variance
with what the subject must have perceived. There were 18 trials in total and the
confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials (called the critical trials). Asch was
interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch’s
experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a real
participant.
Findings – Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority
view. In general, they showed tendency to conform to the group. On the average, only 67%
of their judgements, compared with 99% of control subject judgements were correct. In
other words, about 33% of the judgements made by the experimental subjects in the group
situation were wrong. Not all subjects conformed, however, there were large individual
differences in conformity, and those who conformed did not do so on every trial. Subjects
conformed most often when their judgements were ‘public’ that we when majority could
hear their answers. If the majority was not unanimous, that is if one of the confederate was
instructed to disagree with the majority opinion, the amount of conformity was greatly
reduced. In experiments performed with fewer than seven or nine confederates, as the
number of confederates in the majority group increased from one to three, conformity
increased, but further increases in size of the majority did not result in greater conformity.
the occurences of conformity will increase when
1. the subjects are fatigued
2. it is uninformed about the stimuli
3. has lower status than agents
4. is desirous of further interactions with the agents
Conclusion When the subjects were interviewed after the experiment as to why they
conformed so readily, most of them said that they didn’t really believe their conforming
answers, however they had gone along with the group due to the fear of being ridiculed or
thought peculiar.

MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENT ON OBEDIENCE

The subjects of the Milgram’s experiment who responded to newspaper ads were paid were
paid $4.50 for coming to the laboratory. The situation was described as a learning
experiment in which one person, the teacher, would shock another person, the learner after
each mistake while learning a list of paired words. On the basis of a rigged drawing, the
subject was always assigned the role of the teacher, while the male confederate of the
experimenter was assigned the role of the learner. The learner was strapped to an electric
chair, while the real subject was taken to the room where the electric shock apparatus was
located. Actually, no shocks were administered, but the equipment led the subjects to
believe that he would be administering painful shocks to the learner.
The shock apparatus contained 30 switches, ranging from 15 to 450 volts, with labels such
as ‘slight shock’, ‘moderate shock’, ‘danger; severe shock’ and finally ‘XXX’ . The teacher was
to hock the learner for each mistake made in learning and the level of the shock was to
increase one increment with each error. At several levels as the shock increased the learner
would cry that the shock is getting painful, or he could be heard kicking the wall. At 300
volts he stopped giving answers while the teacher was instructed by the experimenter to
continue increasing the level of the shock. If the subject showed any reluctance, the
experimenter podded him to continue saying it was necessary or required for the
experiment. Obedience was measured by the amount of shock the subject was willing to
administer to the learner.
Before conducting the experiment, Milgram described it to several groups of people all of
whom predicted that very few of the subjects would follow the experimenter’s commands
to give shocks upto 450 volts. Contrary to expectations, however 26 of his 40 subjects (65%)
continued to give shocks up to the 450 volt level, even though they believed they were
hurting another person and showed signs of a great deal of tension- trembling, stuttering
and nervous laughter.
The Milgram’s experiment suggest that no group of people is immune to the pressures
producing destructive obedience. Although at the beginning some of the conditions in which
destructive obedience has been resisted, not much of that is known.