Social Psychology: How do other people and social situations affect individual behavior, attitudes, perceptions and motives?

Power of situation

- but social situations sometimes "blend" into background.

Triplett - first social psych experiment, 1898: People perform better when others are present

Birds of feather flock together

OR

Opposites attract?

ingroup: group which we identify with

outgroup: group with which we do not identify

Henri Tajfel --

minimal groups: meaningless groups formed by grouping strangers on the basis of trivial criteria

1) We like members of our in-group better and are nicer to them than members of out-groups.

Crocker - studies using sororities

2) out-group homogeneity: perception that members of out-group are all alike-- more similar to each other than they really are, and more similar to each other than members of the in-group are to each other.

Park & Rothbart (1982): more likely to recall distinguishing information about members of our in-group

stereotype: generalization about a group of people

Is there a kernel of truth to stereotypes????

NOT! (at least not necessarily)

illusory correlation: tendency to see correlations between unusual or distinctive characteristics and unusual or distinctive groups. Hamilton and Gifford (1976)

Negative events tend to be more distinctive than positive events; smaller groups tend to be more distinctive.

thus - tendency to see illusory correlations between negative behaviors and minority groups.

confirmatory bias - seeing what we expect to see

self-fulfilling prophecy - actually influencing behavior to be what we expcect to see.

Claude Steele - stereotype threat: Stereotyped group members performance is adversely affected by fear of confirming negative stereotype. When threat is removed, performance improves.

Robbers Cave Study