Social Psychology

Compliance with a request due to the perception that the “requestor” has a legitimate right to make the request (or at least has the appearance of legitimacy)

The extent of choice and free will

• 1. Loss of responsibility for participants
• 2. Situational obligation
• 3. Science as a legitimate institution

• Reduced freedom of choice for participants
• Distress of the participants
• Deception
• Self-knowledge

The farther the experimenter was from the teacher the less the level of obedience

The closer the learner the less the obedience

• Study of the way behavior or cognitions are influenced by the presence of others
• i.e., guys take longer to urinate in presense of others

• Obedience to authority
• -most controversial

• 1. Flyers for common people but not college students
• 2. Pay participant
• 3. Experimenter and Learner conspire to fool Teacher
• 4. Experiment cause great distress for teacher

The experimenter (authority)

• Social conformity experiment
• If 2 or more chose answer the same answer, conformity will increase
• i.e., peer pressure

stopping to help someone in immediate need

• 1) Notice the situation
• 2) Define the situation as an emergency; must see to understand
• 3) Take personal responsibility to do something; as bystanders increase, responsibility decrease

as the number of bystanders increases, likihood of help decrease

inferring causes of behavior

• Kelley (other's behavior)
• Weiner (our own behavior)

• Fundamental attribution error
• Actor-Observer error
• Self-Serving bias
• Relationship-maintaining biases

• attribute a person's behavior to internal states, not to the situation
• extreme example: Jury convicted Patty Hearst after being kidnapped and rob bank with her captors

actor puts cause in the environment, observer puts cause in the actor

something that grab your attention, sticks out