Psychology and Social Situations

learning_notes

Last updated: 8/16/2025

Persuasion

  • Elaboration Likelihood Model: central vs peripheral route of persuasion
  • Central Route of Persuasion: informative
  • Peripheral Route of Persuasion: emotional
  • Foot-in-the-Door: small request first -> agree -> larger request
  • Door-in-the-Face: large request first -> reject -> ask smaller again

Social Influence

  • Social Norms: unsaid social rules/expectations for people in a society
  • Normative Social Influence: no change in opinions, but wants to fit in (Asch)
  • Informational Social Influence: actual change in opinions (because others say so)
  • Conformity: acts according to others' consensus behavior to gain social approval
  • Solomon Asch's Conformity Study: two lines; one dissenter is enough to break conformity
  • Milgram's Shock Experiment: obedience to authority -> leads to ethics & IRB
  • Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment: Social Roles (prisoner/guard); anonymity
  • Compliance: cooperation out of persuasion: foot-in-door, etc.
  • Obedience: complying with the directives of an authority figure

Group Processes

  • Social Loafing: "slacker"; diffusion of responsibility
  • Social Facilitation: with an audience, one can perform familiar skills even more successfully
  • Social Inhibition: with an audience, one's performance of unfamiliar skills are even worse
  • Deindividuation: loss of self awareness in a group, do things unlike your usual behavior
  • Groupthink: no one say dissenting words because they assume others agree
  • Group Polarization: opinion becomes more one-sided (usually the same side as the starting side, but more extreme)
  • Minority Influence: only one dissenter is needed to break group polarization or groupthink
  • False Consensus Effect: people overestimate the levels to which others agree with them

In-Group/Out-Group Processes

  • Contact Theory: we start to like those we don't like just by being in touch with them
  • Superoridnate Goals: we can befriend enemies when we have common goals; help reduce stereotyping and hostility
  • Instrumental Aggression: I attack others to benefit myself
  • Hostile Aggression: I attack others just to vent (angry, catharsis); no self-benefit
  • Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: violence is because of built up frustration
  • Altruism: selfless act; prosocial behavior
  • Reciprocity: a norm, you give me something, I will reciprocate
  • Social exchange = Reciprocity
  • Social Responsibility Norm
  • Bystander Effect: consequence of Diffusion of Responsibility

Social Traps: everyone only thinks of self interest, depletes public resources, e.g. fishing problem (public pool problem)

Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychologists: study how people perform in the workplace (e.g. best practices in management of work, relationships among people working together or for a common company or program, and how people feel about work (burnout), etc.)

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