12.1 What Is Social Psychology?

Introduction to Social Psychology

Social psychology studies how the presence and actions of other people shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Even when no one is physically present, the imagined or implied presence of others can influence what we do. This unit covers the major ways social situations affect us: through social influence, group performance effects, and the mental shortcuts (biases) we use to explain behavior.

Social Influence

Social influence refers to the ways other people change how we think or act. There are three main types, and they differ in why the behavior change happens.

Conformity is changing your behavior or beliefs to match those of a group. Two distinct pressures drive conformity:

• Informational influence: You conform because you genuinely believe the group knows more than you do. If everyone in your study group agrees on an answer you're unsure about, you might go along because you trust their knowledge.
• Normative influence: You conform to fit in, be liked, or avoid rejection. This is classic peer pressure. You might laugh at a joke you don't find funny because everyone else is laughing.

Solomon Asch's line-judgment experiments are the classic demonstration of conformity. Participants gave obviously wrong answers about line lengths just to match the group, even when the correct answer was clear.

Compliance is changing your behavior because someone directly asks you to. Two well-studied techniques make compliance more likely:

• Foot-in-the-door technique: Start with a small request (e.g., "Will you sign this petition?"), then follow up with a larger one ("Would you donate $20?"). Agreeing to the small request makes people more likely to agree to the bigger one.
• Door-in-the-face technique: Start with an unreasonably large request (e.g., "Can you donate $100?"), which gets rejected, then follow with a smaller, more reasonable one ("How about $10?"). The contrast makes the second request seem much more manageable.

Obedience is changing your behavior because an authority figure commands you to. The key study here is Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment (1963). Participants were told by an experimenter in a lab coat to deliver what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person (actually a confederate who was not being shocked). About 65% of participants continued all the way to the maximum voltage. The study powerfully demonstrated how ordinary people can follow harmful orders when directed by a perceived authority.

Social Performance

The presence of others doesn't just change what we do; it also changes how well we do it.

• Social facilitation occurs when having an audience or co-workers nearby improves your performance on tasks you already know well. If you've practiced a piano piece dozens of times, you'll likely play it even better with people watching. However, for difficult or unfamiliar tasks, the presence of others can actually hurt performance.
• Social loafing is the tendency to put in less effort when working as part of a group. Because responsibility gets spread across members, each individual feels less accountable. Think of group projects where one or two people end up doing most of the work, or how people pull less hard in tug-of-war as the team gets larger.

Attribution Biases

Attribution is the process of explaining why someone behaved a certain way. We make two basic types of attributions:

• Dispositional (internal) attribution: You explain behavior as caused by the person's personality, character, or abilities. ("She got an A because she's smart.")
• Situational (external) attribution: You explain behavior as caused by circumstances, context, or outside pressures. ("She got an A because the test was easy.")

The errors we consistently make in this process are called attribution biases:

• Fundamental attribution error (FAE): The tendency to overestimate internal factors and underestimate external factors when explaining other people's behavior. If someone cuts you off in traffic, you're likely to think "that person is reckless" rather than "maybe they're rushing to the hospital." This is one of the most tested concepts in social psychology.
• Actor-observer bias: You explain your own behavior situationally but explain others' behavior dispositionally. You failed the test because it was unfair; your classmate failed because they didn't study.
• Just-world hypothesis: The belief that people generally get what they deserve. This bias can lead to victim-blaming, such as assuming a crime victim must have done something to provoke the attack. It's psychologically comforting because it lets people believe the world is fair and predictable.

Self-Serving Biases

These biases all function to protect or boost how we see ourselves.

• Self-serving bias: You attribute your successes to internal factors ("I aced that exam because I'm smart") and your failures to external factors ("I bombed that exam because the questions were unfair"). This is one of the most common biases in everyday life.
• Self-enhancement: The broader tendency to maintain a positive self-image by emphasizing your strengths and downplaying your weaknesses. Résumés are a perfect example: people highlight accomplishments and minimize shortcomings.
• Illusory superiority: Overestimating your own qualities compared to others. Studies consistently find that the vast majority of people rate themselves as "above average" drivers, which is statistically impossible.
• Hindsight bias: After learning an outcome, believing you "knew it all along." After a football game ends, fans often say, "I totally called that." This isn't unique to social psychology (it shows up across the field), but it's relevant here because it distorts how we judge other people's decisions.
• Optimism bias: Believing that negative events are less likely to happen to you than to other people. Most people acknowledge that car accidents are common but still believe they are unlikely to be in one.