Social Psych Notes

Here are my notes on this topic:

1. Allport

• Trait Theory
• 1^st modern personality trait theorist
• dictionaries for words that described personality
• 17,953 adjectives
• settled on 4504 of them.
• Common Traits
  • Most were “common traits”
  • traits we all hold in common
  • Some have a lot of one
  • Some have only a smidge
• Personal dispositions
  • Unique Traits
  • People can have individual traits unique to them
  • Bridged the “lots of traits” and the “only a few traits” debate by combining them.
  • central core is our sense of self
  • Three Types
    • Cardinal
    • Central: 5-10 traits
    • Secondary
  • Proprium
    • Core to personality: a proprium.
    • Six stages

2. Group Dynamics

• Norms
  • ​Rules about how group members should act
• ​Specific Roles
• ​​Social Loafing
  • When individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone
• Group Polarization
  • The tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually
• Groupthink
  • ​The tendency for some groups to make bad decisions
  • Group members suppress their reservations about the ideas the group supports

3. Three Studies

Zimbardo

• Stanford Prison Experiment
• ​Philip Zimbardo (the devil)
• Simulated prison
• Students took to assigned roles too well
• Ended early​
• Deindividuation
• Groups members feel anonymous and aroused
• Loss of self restraint
• People do things they never would have done on their own

Milgram

• Conformity
• ​The tendency to go along with the views or actions of others
• ​​Solomon Asch 1951 Experiment
  • ​brought participants into a room of confederates
  • asked them to make simple perceptual judgments
  • showed 3 vertical lines and asked which was the same length as a target line
  • ​had to answer out loud
  • confederates gave a unanimous, obviously wrong answer
  • 70% of participants conformed on at least 1 trial
• Obedience Studies
  • ​Focus on the willingness of participants to do what another asks
• The Milgram Experiment 1974
  • ​told participants it was a study about teaching and learning
  • participants were told to administer “electric shocks”
  • over 60% delivered all possible shocks
• Compliance Strategies
  • ​​​Strategies to get others to comply with your wishes
  • Foot-in-the-door Phenomenon
  • If you can get people to agree to a small request, they will become more likely to agree to a larger follow-up request
  • Door-in-the-face Strategy
  • After people refuse a large request, they will look more favorably upon a smaller follow-up request
  • Norms of Reciprocity
  • The tendency to think that when someone does something nice for you, you should do something nice in return

Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory

• People are motivated to have consistent attitudes and behaviors
  • when they don’t, they experience dissonance
  • unpleasant mental tension
• Experiment- Festinger and Carlsmith
  • participants performed a boring task
  • asked to tell next subject that they enjoyed it
  • subjects paid $1 to lie had more positive attitudes toward the experiment than those paid $20
  • they lacked sufficient external motivation to lie
  • reduced dissonance by changing attitudes

4. Four More Studies

Robbers Cave Study

• ​Sherif 1966
• ​​divided campers into 2 groups
• ​had them compete in a series of activities to create animosity
• ​staged camp emergencies as superordinate goals
• ​improved relations between the groups

Pygmalion

• Self-fulfilling Prophecy
• The expectations we have about others can influence their behavior
• “Pygmalion in the Classroom” experiment
• Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968
  • administered an IQ test to elementary school students
  • said it would measure who was on the verge of academic growth
  • randomly picked a group of students
  • claimed they were ripe for intellectual progress
  • measured IQs again at the end of the year
  • the scores of the randomly picked students improved more than those of their classmates

Diffusion of Responsibility

• Bystander Intervention
• The conditions under which people are more or less likely to help someone in trouble
• The larger the group of people who witness a problem, the less responsible any one individual feels to help

Attraction

• Fundamental Principle
• We like others who:
  • are similar to us
  • similarity: with whom we come into frequent contact
  • proximity: who return our positive feelings
  • reciprocal liking
• Self-Disclosure
• Sharing a piece of personal information with another person
• The Influence of Others on an Individual’s Behavior

5. Sexual Norms

• Kink vs Vanilla
  • sexual fetishism
  • non-conventional sexual practices
  • BDSM, leather, LGBTQ (the Q)
    • BDSM. 2-62%
  • Australians in last 12 months
    • 1.3% woman
    • 2.2% men
• B&D
  • 60% fantasize
  • 10% participate
• Christian Joyal (2015)
  • surveyed 1,500 women and men
• Sexual fantasies
  • Being dominated
  • 64.6% women
  • 53.3% men
• Sick
  • Freud                   yes
  • Pamela Connolly
    • compared to published norms on 10 psychological disorders.
    • lower depression, anxiety, PTSD
    • sadism, masochism, borderline
    • equal levels of OCD
    • higher narcissism
• Spanked & tied up makes you high
  • images of
  • bondage, disciple, sadomasochism, dominance, submission
  • endorphin rush (runner’s high)
  • pain, acting out fantasy & sex
• Power exchange
  • Pain of peppers
  • Classical conditioning
  • click of boot with licking boot
  • Operant (humiliation punishment)
  • Scenes & play together
• Group activities
  • Safe, Sane & Consensual
    • Safe word
    • Red-yellow-green
• Bondage
• Dominance
  • Can be abusive
  • Voluntary
  • Time limit
• Submission
  • Traditional woman’s role
  • Collar ceremony
• Not orientation specific
• S&M
• Leather
• Pet Play
  • Humiliation
  • Fun
  • Abusive