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INSTRUCTOR'S GUIDE
INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
GROUP INFLUENCE
Conformity: Going Along To Get Along
Faculty Guide
In a classic early demonstration of how group norms evolve, Muzafer Sherif [(1935) had observers stand in a darkened room and stare at a single point of light projected onto the wall in front of them. These participants were told that the point of light would begin to move around the wall, and that their task was to accurately estimate how far the spot had wandered. In actuality, the light was stationary, but most people reported seeing it move because of an illusion known as the autokinetic effect. (In the dark, when a person is gazing at a small tiny speck of light, small unconscious eye movements can create the impression that the light itself is in motion. This is why bright objects in the night sky, such as the planet Venus, are often mistakenly identified as erratically moving UFOs.)
]When tested individually, Sherif's observers made wildly different estimates of the distance over which the spot of light had roamed; while some participants "saw" the light move only a few inches, some individuals guessed that it had drifted by several feet. In one extreme case, an observer reported that the light had strayed by as much as 800 feet! However, when Sherif tested people in groups, having them call out their estimates in front of the other observers, he found that their guesses tended to get more similar over time. It was as if the individuals didn't want to makes judgments that were too "different" or too unusual in comparison to the others in the group. Once they noticed that the majority of observers estimated that the light was moving by only a few inches, people tended to "conform" by giving similar estimates.
Faculty Guide: Conformity
Type of Activity: Movie
Learning Objective: Help students understand the power of normative and informational influence in an ambiguous situation.
Faculty Note: This video provides a first-hand look at the protocol used in Asch's conformity research and contains footage of the responses of several (simulated) subjects. Perhaps no literature makes the point about the social influences on behavior better than the conformity literature. By distinguishing between normative and informational influence, it is possible to show that the presence of others influences what we say (i.e., normative influence leads to public compliance) and what we see (i.e., informational influence leads to private acceptance). In Asch's classic work, participants were found to conform even on perceptual tasks where the correct responses were unambiguous. In many "real-world" situations, where the correct behavior or response will be much less obvious, conformity pressures will generally be even more powerful.
Faculty Guide: Conformity Factors
Type of Activity: Interactive Table
Learning Objective: Allow students to explore additional factors that influence conformity.
Faculty Note: In this interactive table, students can learn more about the effects that group size, stress, group cohesiveness, unanimity, and self-confidence have on conformity.
Obedience To Authority: Commands And Demands
Faculty Guide: The Milgram Obedience Experiment
Type of Activity: Movie
Learning Objective: Help students see the power that experiments have to establish the causes of behavior and to uncover surprising and counterintuitive findings.
Faculty Note: This video provides an overview of Milgram's obedience research and contains footage showing the responses of several of Milgram's subjects. Although somewhat dated in appearance and style, this clip effectively illustrates the situation in which Milgram's subjects found themselves, and the footage of actual subject reactions almost always stimulates interesting student discussion concerning their own likely reactions.
Why obey?
Faculty Guide: Why Obey
Type of Activity: Interactive Table
Learning Objective: Allow students to explore additional factors that influence obedience.
Description: In this interactive table, students can learn more about the effects that personal responsibility, power, and entrapment have on obedience.
Reactions to the obedience studies
Group Decisions
Group polarization
Informational influence
Normative influence
Groupthink: When good people make bad decisions
Faculty Guide: Bay of Pigs Illustrated Essay
Type of Activity: Illustrated Essay
Learning Objective: Help students translate the abstract principles of groupthink to an important and concrete historical event.
Faculty Note: Although somewhat dated, the Bay of Pigs incident was considered by Janis to be a prototypical example of groupthink, and provides a useful illustration of basic groupthink principles. This essay provides a brief overview of the historical events leading up to the Bay of Pigs incident and points out various features that Janis argued were symptomatic of groupthink.
SOCIAL THINKING
Perceiving Other Persons
Faculty Guide: Impression Formation
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Demonstrate the "constructed" nature of impression formation processes.
Faculty Note: One of the more intriguing concepts in the social perception literature is that the first information that is received about a person has a disproportionate influence in the construction of a final, overall impression. A simple way to demonstrate this is to simulate an early impression formation study conducted by Solomon Asch. In this simulation, students are asked to form impressions of several persons and rate them in terms of likeability. Each hypothetical person is described by a list of adjectives. On some trials, the list will begin with positive, socially desirable traits and end with more negative descriptors. On other trials, negative traits are encountered earlier in the list, with the positive words seen later in the list. After reviewing their ratings, they should discover that they are generally more positive about a person when the first adjectives listed in the description are positive, and more negative about a person when the first adjectives listed in the description are negative.
Forming impressions
Social schemas
Faculty Guide
Perhaps more disturbingly, Vallone, Ross, and Lepper [(1985) showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab supporters news broadcasts that originally aired in 1982. The broadcasts covered a variety of issues that were relevant to the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. When the investigators asked whether the broadcasts were biased in the information that they presented, participants from both sides of the conflict agreed that they were. What they disagreed about was the direction of the bias. The pro-Israeli participants saw the broadcasts as biased against Israel, while the pro-Arab participants saw the broadcasts as biased against Arabs. Vallone et al. called this result the hostile media phenomenon and it raises serious implications for resolving conflict. If people from two sides of a conflict can look at the same "evidence" but see very different things, it makes it all the harder to mediate their differences.
]Faculty Guide: What's Going On?
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Allow students to explore the role that schemas play in social perception.
Faculty Note: This activity is loosely based on several classic studies that demonstrate the power of cognitive schemas to influence perception. In the activity, students will view a single silent video clip twice, each time with a different framing (e.g., two friends waiting for a third friend, two people planning a robbery, a drug transaction). After each viewing, the students will be asked to select from a list the things that they noticed and remembered. It is usually found [(e.g., Zadny & Gerard 1974) that the framing of the situation is critical in determining what was perceived. Moreover, the framings have the strongest influence during the initial encoding of the scene (meaning that students should experience the effects multiple times with repeated viewing).
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Physical appearance and impression formation
Faculty Guide: In Your Face
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Allow students to explore the influence that physical characteristics have on perceptions of beauty and how those characteristics interact with gender.
Faculty Note: In this activity, students will be able to see examples of male and female faces that can be made to vary in terms of the maturity of their features. For example, students will be presented with images of men and women with "mature" features that can be changed (morphed, perhaps using a sliding control) into a version with more "baby-faced" features. The student's impressions of these persons should vary as a function of the maturity of facial features. They should also discover that the effect of facial maturity depends to some extent on the gender of the person being evaluated; previous studies have found that people tend to find mature faces more attractive in men and immature or "baby-face" features more attractive in women.
Making attributions
External versus internal causes
Faculty Guide
This principle of sufficiency is easy to demonstrate. Imagine that someone tells you about a person who commits a horribly violent crime. When asked why they did it, the person said, "I woke up in a bad mood." Most people would probably reject this explanation. It's not sufficient. On the other hand, imagine asking someone why he or she ate a hot dog. If the answer comes back, "Because I was hungry," it would seem inappropriate to ask "why?" After all, being hungry is probably a sufficient explanation for eating a hot dog.
The fundamental attribution error
Self-serving biases
Do attributions really matter?
Faculty Guide
The distinction between self-handicapping and excuses is often hard for students to grasp. While both may be offered as explanations for poor performance, self-handicapping is behavior that occurs before the fact and actually increases the chances of failure. Excuses are typically offered after the fact.
Faculty Guide: Actor/Observer
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Provide a concrete demonstration of the power of perspective in shaping attributions.
Faculty Note This is a demonstration of the "actor-observer bias" in attribution. In this activity, students answer a series of questions about themselves and about another person. The students are first asked to choose an individual whom they know something about (a friend, an acquaintance, or a celebrity such as Oprah or Bill Clinton) and then describe them by picking the best adjectives from a list of paired alternatives. In each instance they will also have the option of selecting "depends on the situation." The students will then be asked to describe themselves by selecting from among the same alternatives. After completing both sets of descriptions, the computer summarizes the student's choices as a function of their perspective as an "actor" (rating themselves) or an outside "observer" (rating another person). What should emerge is that "actors" tend to be more situational in their attributions about themselves and more dispositional in their attributions about other people.
Interpersonal Attraction: Liking And Loving
Liking
Proximity
Similarity
Faculty Guide: Birds of a Feather
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Introduce balance theory and its perspective on interpersonal relations.
Faculty Note: Balance theories of attraction [(e.g., Heider; Newcomb) assume that people strive for consistency and balance in their interpersonal relationships. As a way of demonstrating this perspective, this activity is modeled after Byrne's "phantom other" survey paradigm. In the activity, students are asked to answer several attitude questions. Afterward, they see several attitudinal measures purportedly completed by other persons, and they are asked to pick the person they would most like to have as a friend. The computer then computes difference scores between the students' own attitudes and the attitudes of the chosen and unchosen others. Based on previous research, this computation should show that the majority of students will end up picking the fictional people most similar (proportionally) to themselves. In explaining this effect, the accompanying text focuses on instrumental and balance theories of attraction.
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Appearance
Faculty Guide: Ratings Game
Type of Activity: Simulation
Learning Objective: Provide a concrete demonstration of the power of subtle physical characteristics to influence attraction.
Faculty Note: Researchers [(e.g., Langlois & Roggman, 1990) have found that "averaged" (digitally combined) faces are often rated as more attractive than the original faces from which the composite was made. A description of this research program and controllable morphing examples of "averaged" faces can be found at the home page of Dr. Judith Langlois:
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/LangloisLAB/
In the accompanying text, Langlois proposes different explanations for this phenomenon, including accounts based on facial symmetry and evolutionary psychology.
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Love
Faculty Guide
Some people have resisted the idea of undertaking a scientific study of love, considering it a waste of time or even threatening in some way. In 1974, for instance, Senator William Proxmire attacked the National Science Foundation for daring to fund social science research on love. During a press conference, Proxmire bestowed his Golden Fleece award on the researchers (Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster) for what he perceived as a conspicuous waste of money. Since then, however, the psychology of love has gradually been accepted as a legitimate area of study and systematically investigated. Indeed, in 1993, the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists awarded the Distinguished Scientist award to Berscheid and Walster in recognition of their groundbreaking work on attraction.
Information on the award and the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists can be found at http://www.sesp.org.
Passionate love and companionate love
Faculty Guide: Love Scale
Type of Activity: Personal Assessment
Learning Objective: To illustrate that a controversial concept such as "love" can be studied scientifically.
Faculty Note:: This activity is a self-scoring adaptation of Robert Sternberg's (1988) Triangular Love Scale. This measure is based on Sternberg's model of love, in which love is defined by three components: Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment. This version of the scale will provide the student with subscores in these domains, indicating the degree to which each component plays a role in the relationship that they chose to describe.
The triangular model of love
Faculty Guide: The Love Triangle
Type of Activity: Exploration
Learning Objective: To more completely explore Sternberg's triarchic theory of love relationships.
Faculty Note: A graphic image of the Sternberg Love Triangle, in which the three components proposed in his model are combined to produce seven possible types of love (eight if you include "non-love", the complete absence of intimacy, passion, and commitment). The triangle is anchored by the three "corners" of Liking (intimacy alone), Infatuation (passion alone), and Empty Love (commitment alone). Students can click on these corners, as well as the sides and interior of the triangle to see pop-up descriptions of the types of relationships hypothesized to be associated with various combinations of the three factors: Romantic love, Companionate Love, Fatuous Love, and Consummate Love.
Attachment: The cradle of love?
Faculty Guide: Attachment Style
Type of Activity: Interactive Reinforcement
Learning Objective: To reinforce learning of the characteristics associated with each attachment style (secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent) in adults.
Faculty Note: Students are presented with examples of statements that might be made by individuals with secure, avoidant, or anxious/ambivalent attachment styles. They are asked to "drag and drop" these statements onto a label describing the attachment style indicated. Feedback is provided for correct and incorrect responses.
Attitudes and Attitude Change
The ABCs of attitudes
Persuasion: Changing attitudes
The communication approach to persuasion
The cognitive approach to persuasion
Faculty Guide
Petty, Cacioppo, and Goldman [(1981) conducted an early study that supports the ELM. In that study, college students heard arguments in favor of requiring a new set of exams before graduation. Half of the students were told that the new exams were being considered for immediate implementation. Presumably these students found the topic involving and processed the arguments by the central route. The other half of the students were told that the exams were being considered for implementation several years down the road. Presumably these students found the issue less involving and processed things by the peripheral route. Consistent with the logic of the ELM, students who processed the arguments centrally paid more attention to strength of those arguments and than they did to superficial characteristics such as the credibility of the source. In contrast, students who processed the arguments peripherally ignored the strength of the arguments and focused on the credibility of the source.
]Faculty Guide: Ad Categorization Activity
Type of Activity: Interactive Reinforcement
Learning Objective: Allow students to review and apply the central/peripheral distinction from the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion..
Faculty Note: In this activity, students see sample advertisements (e.g., image ads, information-based ads) and categorize them according to whether they rely primarily on central or peripheral processing for their impact.
Attitudes and behavior
Asking the right questions — attitude specificity
Balancing things out — cognitive dissonance
Faculty Guide: Dissonance Theater
Type of Activity: Movie
Learning Objective: Allow students to explore dissonance theory in greater depth.
Faculty Note: The idea that people are motivated to maintain consistency between their attitudes and behavior helps explain a number of phenomena. The persistence of hazing, the success of many weight-loss programs, and the tenacity of many cult beliefs all have their roots in dissonance theory. In this activity, students will first have the opportunity to see Festinger describe some of the earliest dissonance studies. They will then learn about the role that Festinger et al.'s participant observation study of a cult played in the development of dissonance theory. Finally, they will watch a movie clip in which followers of the televangelist Peter Popoff learn that he has deceived them. What is fascinating about the clip, and wholly consistent with dissonance theory, is that the followers find ways to justify and dismiss the damning evidence against their leader.
Faculty Guide
One of the recurring questions in the attitude literature is whether attitudes have to be held consciously in order to influence behavior. The steps outlined above tend to emphasize the role that conscious attitudes play in behavior. Recently, however, Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji [(1995) have suggested that we have two types of attitudes. Explicit attitudes are attitudes that we consciously hold and that we can easily articulate when asked. Implicit attitudes are attitudes that we hold outside of conscious awareness and over which we have little control. Typically, implicit attitudes are measured using reaction time procedures. For example, it takes most people less time to identify the word disgust when it has been preceded by the word wasp than when it has been preceded by the word rose. The fact that the word wasp primes negative words such as disgust is taken as evidence of an implicit dislike for wasps.
]One question that you might ask is, "What is the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes?" So far, the relationship is unclear [(Karpinski & Hilton, 2001). Sometimes our explicit and implicit attitudes appear to be similar. When it comes to wasps, for example, peoples' explicit attitudes and their implicit attitudes are similarly unfavorable. But in other areas, there is less agreement between the two kinds of attitudes. When it comes to attitudes toward people of a different race, for example, explicit attitudes are often considerably more favorable than implicit attitudes. One possible explanation for this difference is that explicit attitudes are more sensitive to social desirability pressures. We know what socially desirable responses are and we routinely give them when our attitudes are measured explicitly. But when our attitudes are measured implicitly, we may not be able to control the attitudes that come out.
On online version of one measure the purports to tap implicit attitudes is available at http://buster.cs.yale.edu/implicit/index.html
]Instructors may want to preview this site. Most students (including students of color) who take the IAT will receive an IAT score that shows an "implicit bias" toward whites. Although the site discusses possible interpretations of the IAT, it clearly favors the interpretation that most of us are more prejudiced than we think — at least at the implicit level. Students may find this disturbing.
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