The Social Animal

• Belief outside the realm of your religious beliefs - supernatural beliefs
• Ex: Couples who adopt a child are more likely to get pregnant. Why? The pressure is off, the couple is relaxed.
• This is not true.
• Why do we believe it?
• a. We want it to be true
• b. selective attention. We focus on remembering the times it did occur.

• How we determine what is good and what is bad.
• Ex: Want to buy a car. We add up all the pleasures each brand would bring and subtract the pain it will cause.
• (comfy car, sporty design, powerful engine) vs ( monthly payments, gas mileage)

We base decision on what brings us most pleasure and least amount of pain.

• How we make sense of our social world.
• How do we arrive at our decisions?
• Things we believe, affect our decisions.
• Things are dangerous we are unaware of (cigarettes, splenda, toys from China)

• Try to take short cuts in simplifying complex decisions.
• We don't go into deep analysis before making a decision.
• House depends on size.
• Who we marry, we simplify. Ignore info, play down, depending on what we want to do.

• House salesman. Will use decoy house. Show 3 houses. The decoy house is there to make the other house more appealing.
• Show you really bad house before showing you one that is over your price range.
• Decoy house is the reference point.

• How we think of social events depends on what we are currently thinking about, as well as what beliefs and catagories we typically use to make sense of things.
• Rose colored glasses vs hostile world
• Our interpretation depends on what is prominant in situation.
• What is prominent is induced by PRIMING- a procedure based on the notion that ideas that have been recently encountered or frequently activated are more likely to come to mind.
• (Experiement: Some were asked to remember positive traits (adventurous, self-confident, independent, persistant). Others asked to remember negative traits (recless, conceited, aloof and stubborn)
• Afterwards a paragraph described number behaviors of man, could be interpereted as adventurous or reckless
• (skydiving) self confident or conceited, independent or aloof, persistant or stubborn. Then rated how desireable he was to meet. He was catagorized as less desirable than positive catagories primed.

How things are played up by media is priming.

• Framing by emphasis on loss has bigger influence on us.
• Water heater, uses less gas.
• Ex: Program A 200 people saved
• Program B one third probability 600 saved and two thirds probability no one will be saved.
• Simple rewording of the options produce a drastic switch in answers.

• What is Dilution Effect?
• Dilute impression, weaken impression with irrelevant information, distracts you.
• Politicians become more average with irrelevant information, our impression becomes diluted with more information we have to clutter our initial impression.
• Lot's of information, even if irrelivant, clutters the mind.
• Dilution effect occurs because the more information, they seem more similar to us, more average.
• Average person less likely to have high GPA or be terribly negative.

• Examlple of Primacy Effect:
• a. Steve is intelligent, industrious....critical, stubborn
• b. Steve is critical, stubborn...intelligent, industrious
• Steve is given better rating when he was described by a.

• Heuristic - enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves
• Proceeding to a solution by trial and error.

• What is False-Consensus Effect?
• We believe the percentage of people that agree with us is overestimated.
• Think most people think the way we do.
• Put things in catagories of good/bad:
• spiders/puppies, good guy/bad guy

• When we catagorize than the stereotype will guide our decision.
• Ex: Bar vs fine dining establishment
• Yuppie, college professor, party girl

• False memories can be implanted, such as priest abuse bringing up memories through questions.
• Police Interrugation - Richard Jewel case, security gaurd who left backpack. Interrogated him to the point of a confession. Can make you doubt yourself, that you did it.
• False confession because of asking over and over in interrogation.
• False memories can be dangerous
• abuse
• crime

• Repeated traumatic events occuring over a long stretch of time are not usually forgotten.
• Memories of abuse can be unintentionally implanted by therapist in an attempt to help the client
• If a therapist believes victims of abuse have low self esteem, fear of being alone in the dark, fear of losing control, the therapist can prod the client into remembering abuse.

• What is Fundamental Attribution Error?
• A general human tendency to overestimate the importance of personality or disposition factors relative to situational or enviornmental influences when describing and explaining the causes of social behavior.
• Ex: Person in grocery store on food stamps, "she is lazy". or a convicted burglar is considered a terrible human being.
• There are more reasons that what appear that would make someone a burglar or be on food stamps.

• What is self serving bias?
• The tendancy for individuals to make dispositional attributions for their successes and situational attributions for their failures.
• Ex: Basketball game, if they make the shot, attribute it to their "eagle eye" but if don't make the shot, she claimed she was fouled or a soft spot on the floor.

• What is rituals of rebellion?

If in the middle of an earthquake and afraid, no need to justify your fear. But, if in neighboring town, feel slight tremors and heard about earthquake, experience fear, you would need to justify why you were afraid.

• Eating dessert everynight; know cholesterol is high, try to watch transfats. Gives pleasure but conflicting is that it's not healthy.
• Mind games - should be able to have what we enjoy
• Don't eat foods rest of the day.
• Seat Belts - We distort reality to justify actions. Exaggerate what will happen if quit smoking; will gain weight. We are not as rational as we believe, we rationalize things so we can be right.
• Our belief that we are consistant with what we believe about ourselves.

• What is Dissonance as a consequence of making a decision?
• Ex: Buying car
• Will always experience dissonance because the chosen alternative is seldom entirely positive and the rejected alternative are seldom entirely negative.

• What is Cultural Bias?
• Intelligence Testing - Does not show a persons intelligence, we are raised in different cultures, language influences what we know.

• Internal Justification:
• Changing your attitude to the direction of your statement.

• Dissonance: The guilty feeling we deal with, psychology of justification.
• External Justification: money or punishment.
• Reasons:
• Grade
• Drunk, high reason why did something wrong
• Didn't want to hurt someone's feelings
• Didn't want to get punished

Inadequate rewards: what affect does it have? If not rewarded with $, justify in our mind w/attitude change, trick ourselves. Will come up with good justification.

• The Justification Effort - If person works hard to attain goal, that goal will be more attractive to the individual than it will be to someone.
• More than one way to reduce dissonence -
• Severe or harsh punishment doesn't work to teach it wrong to cheat. It teaches its wrong to get caught. You must have milder punishment for person to persuade themselves that cheating is wrong.
• Can't justify not cheating with mild punishment - it's inadequate.
• Less severe the threat, less severe justification.
• Harsh punishment just brings out more aggression.
• Mild punishment, children less aggressive w/ fighting over children

• What is justification of cruelty?
• If cruel to person, how do you justify if you are a nice person?
• Convince yourself they are getting what they deserved!
• They brought it on themselves (battered woman)
• Kent State - justified students killed by saying they were pregnant, dirty, bugs to dehumanize the students.
• People dehumanize people they don't like, especially those with high self esteem.
• Viet Nam - Mi Li masacre, said ok to kill children, so they don't grow up to be viet cong.

• The way we treat others in a way to confirm what we believe about someone.
• Ex: When teachers see potential in their sutdents they create a warmer climate for them, both verbally and nonverbally, they give those students more attention, more critical feedback and more opportunities to respond. These conditions would make anyone gain in intellectual ability.
• Their belief in the students potential for growth, whether true or false, leads them to create the optimal conditions for the student to grow.
• Experiment where children were given IQ test. They were split in two groups. The teachers were told their group were "bloomers" making significant intellectual gains, giving the teachers a false expectancy about some of their students. When they observed the results, the group who were labeled bloomers got smarter, significantly, over the children not labeled as bloomer.

• Children who score lower on IQ test have less expected of them by their teachers, poor motivation happens.
• Self fulfilling prophecy for student, "why try if going to be treated this way".
• They become what you say they will become by the way you treat them.
• People become frustrated and hopeless with despair, brings on aggression towards yourself or another person.
• See your group isn't given same opportunity as others.
• Leads to Retreatism, (withdraw from enemy, remove oneself from uncomfortable situation) "so much hopelessness, resort to drinking or suicide."

• This grouping causes two consequences to happen:
• Homogeneity effect and ingroup favoritism. Homogeneity refers to the fact that we tend to see members of outgroups as more similar to one another than to the members of our own group, the ingroup.
• We imagine the "outgroup" to all look alike, act alike.
• Ex: Women in a sorority perceived more similarity between members of other sororities than within their own because when they thought of their own group they had knowledge of them as individuals, unique personality and lifestyle. When they thought of outgroup, they lacked that information so they considered them in terms of a group label.

• People do not like to see or hear things that conflict with their deeply held beliefs and wishes.
• An ancient response to such bad news was to kill the messanger.
• Modern day version of that is to blame the media for presenting material that produces the pain of dissonance.
• What influences our behavior? Person with high self esteem will experience more dissonence than someone who thinks of himself as "not nice", less dissonance because they find it easier to commit act of dissonance.
• If good person, dissonance more uncompfortable.
• Experiment: Prisoners with low self esteem were given plastic surgery to improve looks, bolstered their self esteem, less likely to return to prison.
• Power of the mind over body has physical effects of dissonance. Ex: Hypnosis, told people who were hypnotized that the temperature was dropping. They began to shiver. When told it was getting warmer, began to sweat.
• Told they would not feel pain of flame, no blisters.

• How does a leader avoid falling into the self-justification trap? By bringing in in a skilled advisor from outside his circle because the advisor will not be caught up in the need to reduce the dissonance created by the leaders earlier decision.
• Once a small commitment is made, it sets the stage for ever increasing commitments (Viet Nam, bombing an unwinable war.)

• This is achieved by an individual changes their attitude as a result of felt dissonance (wearing condom speech)
• to be more inline with the position they advocated.

Dissonance and Water Conservation: Those students who signed poster encouraging people to conserve water, saying "Take shorter showers. If I can, you can" through commitment or mindful condition through asking students to respond to a water conservation survey, consisting of items designed to make them aware of pro-conservative attitudes and the fact that their showering behavior was wasteful, students that were started taking shorter showers. They practiced what they preached.

• Dissonance and the Power of Cult Leaders:
• Jonestown and Jim Jones, the Jonestown massacre where an individual could have power enough to command hundreds of people to kill their children and themselves.
• One clue, the foot in the door phenomenon where if you get a small commitment it will be easier to get large commitment in the future.
• How could this happen?
• Jim Jones was charismatic, getting members to commit themselves to donating small amounts of money in response to his message of peace and universal brotherhood, he is able to request and receive a great deal more in the future.
• Followers eventually left homes, living families and friends to start a new line in a strange and difficult environment. They work hard, therefore increasing their commitment) they are cut off from potential dissenting opinion and surrounded by true believers. Then Jones takes sexual liberties with several married women among his followers who acquiesce (accept reluctantly without protest). Then Jones claims to be the father of their children and eventually induces his followers to perform a series of mock ritual suicides as a test of loyalty and obedience. This step-by-step fashion increases the commitment to Jim Jones.
• There were a number of events that increased commitment to finally contribute to the tragic outcome of suicide.

• Cultural Dissonance - Japan did experiment where students were paid to lie and say a task was interesting. They found the students began to actually believe the task was interesting (dissonance) and if a person observes someone he knows and likes saying a task is interesting rather than boring, that observer will come to believe the task is interesting.
• The observers tend to bring their evaluation in line with a lie their friend has told.

If individuals concentrate their time and effort on protecting their ego, they will never grow. To grow, we must learn from our mistakes. If we are intent on reducing dissonance, we will not admit our mistakes. We turn them into virtues or sweep them under a rug.

• You can increase the probability of learning from a bad experience by:
• a greater understanding of your own defensiveness and dissonance-reducing tendencies.
• The realization that performing stupid or immoral actions does not mean I am stupid or an immoral person.
• The development of enough ego strength to tolerate errors in myself
• Increasing my ability to recognize the benefit of admitting my errors in terms of my own growth and learning as well as my ability to form close, meaningful relationships with other people.

• Attitude change as a means of reducing dissonance is not limited to postdecision situations. It occurs when someone says something they don't believe or does something stupid or immoral.
• Lying about a painting so not to hurt the persons feelings - an efficient way of reducing dissonance because it completely justifies your action.
• Ex: saying something in a conversation that you really don't believe, later trying to reduce dissonance by finding a reason for what you did (had too much to drink, but when can't justify, necessary to attempt to explain behavior by using internal justification, changing your attitude in the direction of the statement. If you can convince yourself that you believe what you clamined, it will reduce dissonance.
• Form of External Justification - the belief that it is all right to tell a harmless lie to avoid hurting a persons feelings.
• Another reason for External Justification is reward - earning something.

• Ex: Having to give speech about using a condom to preven AIDS, 1/2 the group was reminded of their own failure to use condom. This caused dissonance because the were made aware of their own hypocrisy.
• To remove hypocrisy and maintain their self estee they would need to start practicing what they were preaching.

• Example: Because it’s far too frightening for many to accept that bad things can happen to good people, and therefore that they themselves have no control over whether bad things might happen to
• them someday, they will instead search for ways to differentiate themselves from victims of ill fortune. For example, outsiders might deride people whose houses were destroyed by a tornado, blaming them for
• choosing to live in a disaster-prone area or for not building a stronger house.

• Who is the potential victim of a bully?
• Someone who appears to be different; height, clothes, stature, nationality.
• Bullies do not act alone, those who stand by are accomplice
• Social responsibility of parents to get involved.
• 75% of school shootings involve bullying

• Side effects of bullying to the victim;
• Irritable, nightmare, disease, miss school, comforting habits, suicidal thoughts, suicide
• Intervention:
• Support group, teach children conflict resolution, build self esteem to speak up
• Doing nothing, ignoring is wrong. It will not go away!
• Best intervention is through communication.
• To encourage the victim to fight back encourages negative interaction
• When teacher mediates, it puts more stress on victim
• Silence is a form of agreement , not a good role model, you MUST speak up

• Socializing process comes from fathers - boys taught to be aggressive through boxing gloves, guns, prize fights, sport competition.
• You can raise a son to be less aggressive
• Social learning and aggression - if the part of a monkey's brain that produces aggressive behavior is stimulated, the monkey will not be aggressive in the presence of a monkey whom it has learned to fear.
• Ex: Person steps on your toe is a considerate person, accident vs someone who is thoughtless and doesn't care about you or the pain. The latter would produce an aggressive response.
• The intention attributed to person, taking the intention of the other person into account
• Experiment of 3rd graders, another child's clumsiness prevented them from achieving a goal that would have resulted in cash. The children given an explanation (child was sleepy and upset) did not retaliate with aggression but children who were not given an explanation, directed aggression.
• We are less apt to retaliate against someone who has provoked anger when we hear a good excuse for their behavior before the event occurs.
• Experiment - two groups, one paired with a college boxer the other with speech major. The accomplice provoked the group by shocking them; then half the angered subjects viewed a violent prizefight scene with the others watched a nonaggressive movie. Those who watched the prizefight, administered ore shocks to the tarted and longer when paired with the boxer than the speech major. Even evoking a name that is paired with a known boxer, can evoke anger even though it has nothing to do with what the person actually did.
• Aggression is still aggression whether it succeeds its goal or not, EX: Bottle thrown at your head and you duck so it misses you. Still an act of aggression. It is the intention that matters

Sigmund Freud theorized humans are born with an instinct towards life, Eros, and equally powerful death instinct. Thanatos, an instinct driven towards death, leads to aggressive behavior.

What is Freud's Hydraulic Theory? an analogy based on that of water pressure building up in a container, unless aggression is allowed to drain off, it will produce some sort of explosion. Therefore, it is important to turn the destructive energy into acceptable or useful behavior.

• Ways to reduce stress; sports, TV, movies reading all provide minor relief from aggression.
• We justify aggression by accentuating the negative behavior about the victim.

• Violence breeds more violence. Watching violence on TV breeds violence.
• Aggression to attract public attention (riots) dramatic way to get attention for minority.
• Causes backlash - when the troops get called off, more aggression happens.

Better to protest in nonviolent way is more effective than aggression.



Freud believed aggressive behavior must come out somehow or the body will break down with disease.

• Aggression does not need to be learned, though the behavior can be modified by experience. Ex: Cat and Rat raised in the same cage. Cat did not attach rat.
• When rats were raised isolated from other rats, they attached the rat when entering the cage, just as experienced rats used.

Ex: Bonobo, companion to the chimp, when meeting at an eating ground will first participate in communal sex, then eat peacefully. The chimps, when meeting at the eating ground, fight over food. Bonobo's form a female dominated society and are known for their sensitivity to others in the group.

Psychologists point out that all organisms have evolved with a strong mechanism that allows them to suppress aggression when it is in their best interest to do so. Aggression is an optional strategy. Aggression can be eliminated within a culture.

Human culture shows that aggression can be modified as with primitive tribes like the Pygmies in Africa. They live in a cooperative friendliness, both within their own tribe and among their relations with others. Acts of aggression are extremely rare.

It is our civilized society, where our elected leaders choose to spend our resources on military hardware , family violence is commonplace, drive by shootings have become a tragic aspect of urban life, rampage killings take place in high schools, suicide bombers have emerged as a fact of life.

By changing social conditions, humans can modify their aggressive tendencies!

Homicide rates for white southern males are higher than those for white northern males, especially in rural areas. Southerners will be inclined to endorse violence for the protection of property, it is a culture of honor. They are likely to use violence as a result of argument related homicides.

Farmer vs cattle rancher; farm's wealth cant be stolen but cattle can, so ranchers must establish themselves as someone you don't mess with.

This leads to humans cognitively primed for aggression. EX: Southern students at college in Michigan. Another student (on purpose) bumps into student, who then insulted him by calling him a degenerative name. Compared with northern white males who tended to shrug off the insult, southerners were more likely to think their masculine reputation was threatened, and being primed for aggression, were more likely to engage in aggressive behavior.

Job application letters sent out by someone who killed someone to defend their honor, they were more likely to be hired by South rather than North.

When is aggression useful? Survival of the Fittest - strongest and most aggressive male survive, allowing the young animals to have the strongest and smartest mothers and fathers enabling the group to be led by best leaders.

Aggression within the same group plays an important role in feeding, reproduction and determining dominance patterns. The strongest male passes on his vigor to subsequent generations.

To suppress aggression would affect the the same mechanism that drives one to kill his neighbor drives another to conquer outer space, to sink his teeth into a difficult mathematical equation, attack a logical problem.

• Cooperative behavior and mutual aid have great survival value for many forms of life.
• Altruistic behavior is sharing, EX monkey in cages, one has food other does not. The monkey with the food, though hesitant, shares his food with other monkey.

We are affected by our culture, what goes on at the playground, neighborhood influences our aggressive behavior. When cooperation is emphasized in group that leads to survival- working as a group and that is important for survival.

Watching each others back, engrained in military, working together for a purpose.

Winning is emphasized in our culture; end justifies the means



"The need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear". Loren Eiseley.

Frustration-aggression is the result of a person being thwarted on the way to a goal, resulting in frustration.

• What is social learning?
• Ex: adults punching and kicking a plastic, air filled Bobo doll, saying verbal abuse against the doll, as children watched.
• When child given the same opportunity they were not only kicking and punching what was modeled for them by the adults, they became even more aggressive than the adults.

• TV plays a vital role in socializing children. It is steeped in violence, 61% of all programming has violence.
• and 78% of those show no remorse, criticism or penalty for their violent behavior. 40% of initiated violence came from people that were seen as hero's.
• The more violence children see on TV the more aggressive their behavior will be as teens.
• Watching violent behavior on TV gives aggressive children permission to be aggressive.

Violence in media has a profound impact on the behavior of adults.

Ex: Study of males watching a movie of violent rape, of sexual orientation but no violence and a nonviolent nonaggressive film. When asked to administer shocks to subjects who answered a question wrongly, those who watched the rape administered high levels of shock, to women.

Empathy is an important phenomenon. When people see someone who is in wheel chair, difficult to inflict pain. Most people find it difficult to inflict pain purposely on another human being unless dehumanizing them first.

• Dehumanizing is a way of justifying acts of cruelty. Easier to commit act against a "gook" than a fellow human being.
• Empathy training activities significantly decreases aggressive behavior.