Social Thought and Social Behaviour | ISC Class 12 Psychology Notes

This note covers social perception and attribution, Kelley's covariation model (consensus, consistency and distinctiveness), the attribution biases (fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, false consensus effect, automatic vigilance and counterfactual thinking), the meaning and characteristics of a group, types of groups (formal and informal, primary and secondary, ingroup and outgroup), conditions of group formation (proximity, similarity, common motives and goals), the influence of groups on individuals (social facilitation, social loafing and group polarisation), the meaning of social norms, conformity and Asch's study with the factors that affect conformity, and obedience, Milgram's experiment and the reasons why people obey.

What is social perception and attribution?

Social perception is the process by which we form impressions of other people and try to make sense of their behaviour.

A central part of social perception is attribution, the process through which people try to understand the reasons for others' behaviour.

When we see someone act in a particular way, we usually search for a cause: is the person behaving this way because of something about themselves, or because of the situation they are in?

Psychologists distinguish between two broad types of causes. An internal (dispositional) attribution explains behaviour in terms of a person's own traits, abilities, attitudes or effort, for example saying that a student failed an examination because she did not study hard enough.

An external (situational) attribution explains behaviour in terms of factors outside the person, such as the difficulty of the task, bad luck or other people's actions, for example saying that the student failed because the examination paper was unusually difficult.

The same behaviour can often be explained in more than one way, and the attribution we choose affects how we judge, like or blame the other person.

Definition: Attribution. The process through which people try to understand the reasons for their own and others' behaviour, by deciding whether it was caused mainly by internal (dispositional) factors or external (situational) factors.

How does Kelley's covariation model explain attribution?

Harold Kelley proposed that people act like informal scientists when deciding whether another person's behaviour is caused internally or externally. According to this covariation model, we use three kinds of information before reaching a judgement.

• Consensus asks whether other people behave in the same way in the same situation. High consensus means most people would do the same thing; low consensus means few other people behave this way.
• Consistency asks whether the person behaves the same way at different times and occasions in the same situation. High consistency means the person reacts the same way every time; low consistency means the reaction varies.
• Distinctiveness asks whether the person behaves this way only in this particular situation or across many different situations. High distinctiveness means the behaviour is specific to this situation; low distinctiveness means the person behaves the same way almost everywhere.

When consensus is high, consistency is high and distinctiveness is high, people tend to make an external attribution, concluding that the situation, rather than the person, caused the behaviour.

When consensus is low, consistency is high and distinctiveness is low, people tend to make an internal attribution, concluding that something about the person caused the behaviour.

Draw three overlapping circles labelled Consensus, Consistency and Distinctiveness. Under each circle write "High" or "Low" for an example (such as a student scolded by a teacher), and show an arrow from the combination of values to either "Internal attribution" or "External attribution".

What biases affect our judgements about others?

Attribution is not always accurate, because people's judgements are shaped by predictable biases.

• The fundamental attribution error (also called the corresponding bias) is the tendency to overestimate the role of a person's internal, dispositional qualities and to underestimate the role of the external situation when explaining someone else's behaviour. For example, assuming a person who is rude in traffic is simply a rude person, without considering that they may be late for an emergency.
• The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute one's own successes to internal factors, such as ability and effort, while attributing one's own failures to external factors, such as bad luck or a difficult task. For example, a student who scores well says she worked hard, but after a poor result blames an unfair paper or a noisy examination hall.
• The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people share one's own beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviours, assuming that "most people think and act as I do". For example, a student who copies homework assumes that most classmates do the same.
• Automatic vigilance is the tendency to pay quick, automatic attention to negative information about other people, even when it is only a small part of what we know about them, so that unfavourable information tends to stand out and dominate our impression. For example, if a new classmate is described as friendly, hardworking and once rude to a teacher, the single rude episode tends to stick and colour the whole impression.
• Counterfactual thinking is the tendency to imagine alternative outcomes to events that have already happened, that is, to think "if only" or "what might have been", especially after an outcome that was unpleasant or very nearly avoided. For example, a student who misses the bus by a minute keeps thinking "if only I had left a little earlier", and a runner who finishes second may dwell on how close she came to winning.

What is a group, and why do people join groups?

What are the characteristics of a group, and how does it differ from a crowd or audience?

A group may be defined as an organised system of two or more individuals who are interacting and interdependent, who have common motives, have a set of role relationships among its members, and have norms that regulate the behaviour of its members.

Groups have a social unit of members who perceive themselves as belonging together, common motives and goals, interdependence (what one member does affects others), interaction with one another, and a set of roles and norms that structure their behaviour.

A group is different from a mere collection of people. A crowd, for instance, is a collection of people present at a place by chance, with no structure, no feeling of belongingness and no interdependence among members; behaviour in crowds can be irrational.

An audience is a collection of people assembled for a special purpose, generally passive, though it can sometimes become a mob showing a definite sense of common purpose, polarisation of attention and impulsive, homogeneous behaviour.

A team is a special kind of group in which members have complementary skills, are committed to a common goal and are mutually accountable, so that both individual contribution and teamwork matter, unlike ordinary groups where performance depends mainly on individual members' contributions.

Why do people join groups?

People join groups because groups satisfy a range of needs:

• Security: being with others reduces the insecurity felt when alone and gives a sense of comfort and protection.
• Status: membership of a group perceived as important by others brings recognition and a sense of power.
• Self-esteem: groups provide feelings of self-worth and a positive social identity.
• Satisfaction of psychological and social needs: groups give a sense of belongingness and let members give and receive attention and love.
• Goal achievement: groups help achieve goals that cannot be achieved individually.
• Knowledge and information: group membership broadens one's view by supplementing information an individual alone would not have.

What conditions lead to the formation of a group?

Group formation requires some contact and interaction between people, and this interaction is helped by three conditions.

1. Proximity: repeated interactions with the same set of people, such as living in the same colony or studying in the same school, give people a chance to know each other's interests and attitudes, and common background becomes an important basis for liking.
2. Similarity: exposure to someone over time lets people assess how similar they are, and similarity leads to liking, partly because people prefer consistency in relationships, and partly because similar others reinforce and validate one's own opinions and values.
3. Common motives and goals: when people share a motive or goal that they cannot achieve alone, they come together and form a group, which facilitates attainment of that shared goal.

How do formal and informal, primary and secondary, and ingroup and outgroup differ?

Groups can be classified in several overlapping ways. The table below compares the three major classifications.

How does a group influence the behaviour of individuals?

Social facilitation and social loafing

Groups influence individual behaviour in several documented ways. Social facilitation refers to the finding that the presence of others leads to arousal, which can motivate an individual performing an activity alone in the presence of others to enhance their performance when their efforts are individually evaluated and they are already good at the task.

Social loafing is a reduction in individual effort when a person works on a collective task, that is, one in which outputs are pooled with those of other group members, such as a game of tug-of-war where no single member's effort can be identified.

Experiments that varied group size while asking participants to clap or cheer as loudly as possible found that total noise rose with group size, but the noise produced by each individual participant dropped as the group grew larger.

Social loafing occurs because group members feel less personally responsible for the overall task, because they realise their individual contribution will not be evaluated separately, because the group's performance is not compared with other groups, because there is poor coordination among members, and because belonging to the group is not important to the members, who are merely an aggregate of individuals. It can be reduced using the following strategies.

1. Making the efforts of each person identifiable.
2. Increasing the pressure to work hard, by committing members to successful task performance.
3. Increasing the apparent importance or value of the task.
4. Making people feel that their individual contribution is important.
5. Strengthening group cohesiveness, which increases motivation for a successful group outcome.

Group polarisation

Group polarisation is the tendency of groups to take more extreme decisions than individuals do when deciding alone. A group's initial position becomes much stronger as a result of discussion within the group.

This happens because members hear new arguments that favour the group's existing leaning, because they feel their view is validated by others in a kind of bandwagon effect, and because they identify with like-minded members as an ingroup and show conformity to the group's position.

What are social norms, and why do people conform to them?

Norms are expected standards of behaviour and beliefs that are established, agreed upon and enforced by group members; they may be considered a group's "unspoken rules" and represent shared ways of viewing the world.

Conformity is the tendency to change one's behaviour or opinion to match the behaviour or opinion of a group, and people conform to social norms for related but distinct reasons.

Normative social influence is conformity driven by the desire to be liked, approved of and accepted by the group, even if a person privately disagrees with the group's view.

Informational social influence is conformity driven by the desire to be right, that is, using the group's judgement as a useful source of information about an ambiguous or uncertain situation.

A descriptive norm is conformity based on the desire to be appropriate and to adapt one's behaviour to what most people around one are actually doing in that setting.

Case study: How did Asch demonstrate conformity, and what factors affect it?

Asch's line-judgement study

Solomon Asch's classic conformity study placed a genuine participant in a group of confederates and asked all of them, in turn, to judge aloud which of three comparison lines matched a standard line, a task with an obviously correct answer.

When the confederates unanimously gave a clearly wrong answer, a substantial proportion of genuine participants conformed to the incorrect majority judgement on at least some trials, even though the correct answer was visually obvious, showing how a unanimous group can override an individual's own perception.

Factors affecting conformity

Several factors influence how much a person conforms to a group's judgement.

Case study: How did Milgram study obedience, and when do people obey?

Milgram's experiment

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment asked a participant, acting as "teacher", to give what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to a "learner" (an actor who was not actually shocked) each time the learner answered a memory test incorrectly, on the instruction of an experimenter in a position of authority.

About two-thirds of participants (65 per cent in the original study) continued to obey the experimenter's instructions to the highest shock level offered, despite the learner's apparent protests and distress, demonstrating that ordinary people can obey an authority figure's instructions even when this conflicts with their own conscience.

Conditions affecting obedience

Several conditions make people more or less likely to obey an authority figure: the victim's emotional distance from the person giving the shocks (obedience is higher when the victim is not seen or heard directly); the legitimacy of the authority giving the command; the liberating effect of group influence, where seeing others defy the authority makes it easier for an individual to also refuse; a lack of personal responsibility, where the person feels the authority, not themselves, is responsible for the outcome; a tendency to follow social norms of obedience to legitimate authority; consistency in the way the command is given, which makes it harder to refuse midway; and the foot-in-the-door phenomenon, in which agreeing to a small initial request makes a person more likely to agree to a larger, related request later.

How does conformity differ from obedience?

Sources of conformity

Conformity and obedience are both forms of social influence, but they differ in important ways. Conformity is the tendency to change one's own behaviour or opinion to match that of a group of equals, usually without anyone giving a direct command, whereas obedience is compliance with a direct instruction or order given by a figure of recognised authority.

Conformity is driven mainly by normative social influence (the desire to be liked, approved of and accepted by the group), informational social influence (the desire to be right, using the group as a source of information in an ambiguous situation) and descriptive norms (the desire to be appropriate and to match what most people around one are actually doing). Asch's line-judgement study illustrates conformity, since a genuine participant matched an incorrect majority judgement on some trials even though the correct answer was visually obvious.

Sources of obedience

Obedience, by contrast, is explained by factors connected to the authority figure and the situation rather than to equal-status peers: the legitimacy of the authority giving the command, the victim's emotional distance from the person obeying, a lack of personal responsibility felt by the person obeying, a tendency to follow social norms of obedience to legitimate authority, consistency in how the command is given, and the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. Milgram's shock-generator experiment illustrates obedience, since a large majority of participants obeyed an experimenter's instructions to the highest shock level offered.

The table below sets out these differences side by side.

Going beyond the syllabus

Understanding attribution biases and conformity has practical uses beyond what is tested in an examination. Recognising the fundamental attribution error can make a person slower to judge a stranger's behaviour harshly, by prompting the question of whether a situational factor, rather than a fixed trait, might explain what was just observed. Recognising self-serving bias can make a person more careful when evaluating their own successes and failures, rather than automatically crediting ability for success and blaming bad luck for failure.

Recognising normative social influence can explain why people sometimes go along with a group decision even when they privately disagree, simply because they want to be liked and accepted by the other members. This connects directly to the idea of group polarisation discussed above, since a group whose members keep validating one another's existing view, through a bandwagon effect and through identifying with the group as an ingroup, can end up holding a far more extreme position than any single member started with. The same conditions of group formation described earlier, proximity, similarity and common motives and goals, that help people come together into a group are also what make that group's later discussions and decisions feel so persuasive and binding on its individual members. Thinking about why one obeys an instruction, whether from an employer, a teacher or an unfamiliar authority figure, in terms of legitimacy, emotional distance and personal responsibility, rather than assuming obedience is simply a matter of personal weakness, is a more useful and accurate way of understanding one's own everyday behaviour in groups.

Glossary

• Attribution — the process of deciding whether someone's behaviour was caused by internal (dispositional) or external (situational) factors.
• Consensus — information about whether other people behave the same way as the person being judged, in the same situation.
• Consistency — information about whether a person behaves the same way on different occasions in the same situation.
• Distinctiveness — information about whether a person's behaviour is specific to one situation or occurs across many situations.
• Fundamental attribution error — the tendency to overestimate internal causes and underestimate situational causes of another person's behaviour.
• Self-serving bias — attributing one's own success to internal factors and one's own failure to external factors.
• False consensus effect — overestimating how many other people share one's own beliefs and behaviour.
• Automatic vigilance — the tendency to notice and weigh negative information about a person more quickly than positive information.
• Counterfactual thinking — imagining alternative, "what might have been" outcomes after an event has occurred.
• Group — an organised system of two or more interacting, interdependent individuals with common motives, roles and norms.
• Primary group — a pre-existing group with face-to-face, emotionally close relations, such as family.
• Social facilitation — enhanced performance on a well-learned task when others are present.
• Social loafing — reduced individual effort on a collective task where outputs are pooled.
• Group polarisation — the strengthening of a group's initial view through discussion, towards a more extreme decision.
• Normative social influence — conforming out of a desire to be liked and accepted by a group.
• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon — agreeing to a small request first increases the likelihood of agreeing to a larger request later.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: consensus, consistency and distinctiveness can be judged from a single piece of information. Correct: Kelley's model needs all three kinds of information together to decide between an internal and an external attribution.
• Misconception: the fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias are the same thing. Correct: the fundamental attribution error is about judging other people's behaviour, while self-serving bias is specifically about explaining one's own successes and failures.
• Misconception: a crowd and an audience are examples of groups. Correct: they are collections of people without interdependence, defined roles or group norms, and are therefore not groups in the technical sense.
• Misconception: social loafing happens because people are individually lazy. Correct: it occurs mainly because effort cannot be identified or evaluated individually in a pooled, collective task.
• Misconception: conformity and obedience mean the same thing. Correct: conformity is yielding to pressure from peers of equal status, while obedience is yielding to a direct instruction from a recognised authority.
• Misconception: group polarisation means a group splits into two opposing factions. Correct: it means the group's single shared position becomes more extreme after discussion, not that the group divides.
• Misconception: Asch's study showed that most people conform on every trial. Correct: conformity occurred on only some of the trials, and even one dissenting confederate sharply reduced it.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. Define attribution. [2 marks]

1. Attribution is the process through which people try to understand the reasons for others' (and their own) behaviour, by attributing it to internal (dispositional) or external (situational) causes.

Q2. State the three kinds of information used in Kelley's covariation model of attribution. [2 marks]

1. Consensus (whether other people behave similarly), consistency (whether the same person behaves the same way across occasions) and distinctiveness (whether the behaviour is specific to this situation or general across situations).

Q3. Rohan fails an examination and says the paper was unfairly difficult, but when his classmate fails, Rohan says the classmate simply did not study. Identify and explain the bias shown by Rohan, giving the meaning of the bias. [4 marks]

1. Rohan is showing self-serving bias.
2. Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute one's own failures to external factors, such as a difficult paper, while attributing one's own successes to internal factors, such as ability and effort.
3. This protects Rohan's self-esteem when explaining his own outcome.
4. It is distinct from the fundamental attribution error, which concerns judging other people's behaviour rather than one's own.

Q4. Explain, with an example, how the false consensus effect differs from automatic vigilance. [4 marks]

1. The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how many other people share one's own beliefs or behaviour, for example a person who smokes assuming that most people around them also smoke.
2. Automatic vigilance is the tendency to pay quick, automatic attention to negative information about a person, so that one unfavourable fact can dominate an overall impression.
3. The false consensus effect concerns judging how similar others are to oneself, while automatic vigilance concerns how negative information is weighted when forming a judgement about someone else.
4. Both are biases that distort accurate social perception, but they operate on different kinds of social information.

Q5. Differentiate between primary and secondary groups, and between formal and informal groups. [4 marks]

1. Primary groups are pre-existing and usually given to the individual, such as family, with face-to-face interaction and close emotional bonds; secondary groups, such as a political party, are joined by choice and involve more impersonal, indirect relationships.
2. Formal groups have explicitly stated functions and roles, based on specific rules, such as a university; informal groups have no such rules and are based on close personal relationships.
3. Boundaries of primary groups are less permeable than those of secondary groups.
4. Formal groups rely on explicit norms for order, while informal groups rely on close relationships instead of formal rules.

Q6. A team captain notices that in the tug-of-war event, individual members seem to pull less hard than when they compete alone in individual events. Identify the phenomenon and explain two reasons why it occurs. [4 marks]

1. The phenomenon is social loafing, a reduction in individual effort when a person's output is pooled with others' in a collective task.
2. One reason is that individual contributions cannot be evaluated separately in tug-of-war, so group members feel less personally responsible.
3. A second reason is that motivation decreases when members realise their individual effort will not be compared with other members' effort or with other groups.
4. The problem can be reduced by making each person's effort identifiable or by strengthening group cohesiveness.

Q7. Explain Asch's conformity study and discuss three factors that influence the degree of conformity shown by group members. [5 marks]

1. Asch's study placed a genuine participant among confederates who were all asked to judge, aloud, which of three comparison lines matched a standard line, a task with an obviously correct answer.
2. When confederates unanimously gave a clearly wrong answer, a substantial proportion of genuine participants conformed to the incorrect majority on at least some trials, despite the visually obvious correct answer.
3. Group size affects conformity, which tends to rise as the number of people in the unanimous majority increases, up to a point.
4. Unanimity of the group strongly affects conformity, since even one dissenting voice in the majority sharply reduces the pressure to conform.
5. The nature of the task matters, since ambiguous or difficult tasks produce more conformity than simple, clear-cut tasks.

Q8. With reference to Milgram's obedience experiment, explain the procedure and discuss three conditions that influence whether people obey an authority figure. [5 marks]

1. In Milgram's experiment, a participant acting as "teacher" was instructed by an experimenter, a figure of authority, to give what were believed to be increasingly severe electric shocks to a "learner" each time the learner answered a memory test incorrectly.
2. About two-thirds of participants continued to obey the instructions to the highest shock level offered, despite the learner's apparent distress, showing that ordinary people can obey authority even against their own conscience.
3. The victim's emotional distance affects obedience, since obedience is higher when the person being harmed is not seen or heard directly by the one giving the order.
4. The legitimacy of the authority giving the command affects obedience, since a recognised, legitimate authority figure is obeyed more readily than one without such standing.
5. A lack of personal responsibility affects obedience, since a person who believes the authority, rather than themselves, is responsible for the outcome is more likely to continue obeying.

Q9. Explain the foot-in-the-door phenomenon and how it helps explain why people obey step-by-step instructions. [3 marks]

1. The foot-in-the-door phenomenon is the tendency for a person who first agrees to a small request to become more likely to agree to a larger, related request made later.
2. In obedience situations, once a person has complied with a mild initial instruction, refusing a slightly stronger instruction afterwards feels inconsistent with their own earlier behaviour.
3. This explains why consistency in the way commands are given, moving step by step from small to larger demands, increases the chance that a person continues to obey even as instructions become more severe.

Q10. A group of office colleagues initially hold a mild opinion in favour of a new policy, but after discussing it together they unanimously support an extreme version of the same policy. Identify the phenomenon and explain why it occurs. [3 marks]

1. This is an example of group polarisation, the strengthening of a group's initial position through group discussion.
2. During discussion, members hear new arguments that support their shared leaning, which makes the view stronger.
3. Hearing others favour the same view feels like public validation of their opinion, a bandwagon effect, and members begin identifying with each other as an ingroup, which increases conformity to the strengthened group position.

Key takeaways

• Attribution is the process of deciding whether a person's behaviour is caused internally (dispositional) or externally (situational).
• Kelley's covariation model uses consensus, consistency and distinctiveness information together to reach an attribution.
• Common attribution biases include the fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias, false consensus effect, automatic vigilance and counterfactual thinking.
• A group is an organised system of interacting, interdependent members with common motives, roles and norms, unlike a crowd or audience.
• Groups are classified as primary or secondary, formal or informal, and ingroup or outgroup.
• Proximity, similarity and common motives and goals are the main conditions that lead to group formation.
• Groups influence behaviour through social facilitation, social loafing and group polarisation.
• People conform to social norms owing to normative social influence, informational social influence and descriptive norms, as shown in Asch's conformity study.
• Milgram's obedience study showed that ordinary people readily obey legitimate authority, influenced by emotional distance, lack of personal responsibility and the foot-in-the-door phenomenon.

Test yourself

What is the difference between an internal and an external attribution?

An internal attribution explains behaviour by a person's own traits or effort; an external attribution explains it by situational factors outside the person, such as task difficulty or luck.

Name the three kinds of information in Kelley's covariation model.

Consensus, consistency and distinctiveness.

What is the fundamental attribution error?

The tendency to overestimate a person's internal, dispositional qualities and underestimate situational factors when explaining their behaviour.

How does a crowd differ from a group?

A crowd is a chance collection of people with no structure, roles or interdependence, while a group has common motives, interaction and norms.

What is social loafing?

A reduction in individual effort when a person works on a collective task where individual output is pooled with others and cannot be identified separately.

What did Asch's line-judgement study show?

A unanimous group giving an obviously wrong answer made a substantial proportion of genuine participants conform to the wrong answer on some trials.

What is normative social influence?

Conforming to a group out of the desire to be liked, approved of and accepted, even when one privately disagrees with the group.

What is the foot-in-the-door phenomenon?

Agreeing to a small request first makes a person more likely to agree to a larger, related request made later.