Exam 13: B: Social Psychology

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--Obedience-We take our marching orders from people who are above us in the hierarchy of authority,such as a teacher,parent,or boss.
--The Milgram paradigm.In the early 1960s,Milgram began to tinker with a laboratory paradigm (a model experiment)that could provide a window into the causes of obedience.Milgram was interested in obedience because he believed that unquestioning acceptance of authority figures is the crucial ingredient in explaining unjustified violence against innocent individuals.
--The setup: You spot an advertisement in a local New Haven,Connecticut,newspaper,asking for volunteers for a study of memory.The ad notes that participants will be paid $4.50,which in the 1960s was a hefty chunk of change.You arrive at the laboratory at Yale University,where a tall and imposing man in a white lab coat,Mr.Williams,greets you.You also meet another friendly,middle-aged subject,Mr.Wallace,who unbeknownst to you is actually a confederate.The cover story is that you and Mr.Wallace will be participating in a study of the effects of "punishment on learning," with one of you being the teacher and the other the learner.You draw lots to see who'll play which role,and get the piece of paper that says "teacher" (the lots are rigged).From here on in,Mr.Williams refers to you as the "teacher" and to Mr.Wallace as the "learner." As the teacher,Mr.Williams explains,you'll present Mr.Wallace with what psychologists call a paired-associate task.In this task,you'll read a long list of word pairs,like strong-arm and black-curtain.Then you'll present the learner with the first word in each pair (such as strong)and ask him to select the second word (arm)from a list of four alternative words.Now here's the surprise: To evaluate the effects of punishment on learning,you'll be delivering a series of painful electric shocks to the learner.With each wrong answer,you'll move up one step on a shock generator.The shocks range from 15 volts up to 450 volts and are accompanied by labels ranging from "Slight Shock" and "Moderate Shock," to "Danger: Severe Shock" and finally,and most ominously,"XXX."
--The study: You watch as Mr.Williams brings the learner into a room and straps his arm to a shock plate.The learner,Mr.Williams explains,will push a button corresponding to his answer to the first word in each pair.His answer will light up in an adjoining room where you sit.For a correct answer,you do nothing.But for an incorrect answer,you'll give the learner an electric shock,with the intensity increasing with each mistake.At this point,the learner mentions to Mr.Williams that he has "a slight heart condition" and asks anxiously how powerful the shocks will be.Mr.Williams responds curtly that although the shocks will be painful,they "will cause no permanent tissue damage." You're led into the adjoining room and seated in front of the shock generator.Following Milgram's plan,the learner makes a few correct responses,but soon begins to make errors.If,at any time,you turn to Mr.Williams to ask if you should continue,he responds with a set of prearranged sentences that urge you to go on ("Please go on" "The experiment requires that you continue," "You have no other choice;you must go on").Milgram standardised the verbal statements of the learner,which also unbeknownst to you,have been pre-recorded on audiotape (Milgram,1974).At 75 volts,the learner grunts "Ugh!" and by 330 volts,he frantically yells "Let me out of here!" repeatedly and complains of chest pain.From 345 volts onward,there's nothing-only silence.The learner stops responding to your items,and Mr.Williams instructs you to treat these non-responses as incorrect answers and to keep administering increasingly intense shocks.
--The results: When Milgram first designed this study,he asked 40 psychiatrists at Yale University to forecast the outcome.Their predictions? According to them,most subjects would break off at 150 volts and only .1 percent (that's 1 in 1000),representing a "pathological fringe" (Milgram,1974),would go all the way to 450 volts.Before reading on,you may want to ask yourself what you would have done had you been a subject in Milgram's study.Would you have delivered any shocks? If so,how far would you have gone? Would you have gone all the way to 450 volts? In fact,in the original Milgram study,all subjects administered at least some shocks.Most went up to at least 150 volts,and a remarkable 62 percent of subjects displayed complete compliance,going all the way up 450 volts.This means that the Yale psychiatrists were off by a factor of several hundred.these results were,well,shocking.Milgram himself was startled by them.Before Milgram's study,most psychologists assumed that the overwhelming majority of normal subjects would disobey what were obviously cruel and outrageous orders.But like the Yale psychiatrists,they committed the fundamental attribution error: They underestimated the impact of the situation on subjects' behaviours.There were other surprises.Many subjects showed uncontrollable tics and fits of nervous laughter.Yet few appeared to be sadistic.Even those who complied to the bitter end seemed reluctant to deliver shocks,asking or even begging the experimenter to allow them to stop.Yet most subjects still followed Mr.Williams's orders despite these pleas,often assuming no responsibility for their actions.One subject's responses were illustrative: After the study was over he claimed,"I stopped,but he [the experimenter] made me go on" (Milgram,1974).

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--Fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on others' behaviour.By dispositional influences,we mean enduring characteristics,such as personality traits,attitudes,and intelligence.Because of this error,we attribute too much of people's behaviour to who they are.
--Because of the fundamental attribution error,we also tend to underestimate the impact of situational influences on others' behaviour,so we also attribute too little of people's behaviour to what's going on around them.We may assume incorrectly that a boss in a failing company who fired several of his loyal employees to save money must be callous,when in fact he was under enormous pressure to rescue his company and spare the jobs of hundreds of other loyal employees.
--The fundamental attribution error is associated with cultural factors.Although almost everyone is prone to this error,Japanese and Chinese people seem to be less so.That may be because they're more likely than those in Western cultures to perceive behaviours in context.As a result,they may be more prone to seeing others' behaviour as a complex stew of both dispositional and situational influences.For example,after reading newspaper descriptions of mass murderers,Chinese subjects are considerably less likely to invoke dispositional explanations for their behaviour ("He must be an evil person")and more likely to invoke situational explanations for their behaviour ("He must have been under terrible stress in his life").In contrast,American subjects tend to show the opposite pattern.

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--Interpersonal provocation: Not surprisingly,we're especially likely to strike out aggressively against those who have provoked us,say,by insulting,threatening,or hitting us.
--Frustration: We're especially likely to behave aggressively when we're frustrated,that is,thwarted from reaching a goal.In one study,a research assistant asked participants to perform a difficult paper-folding (origami)task at an unreasonably rapid pace,and either apologised for moving participants along too quickly or told them to pick up the pace ("I would like to hurry and get this over with").Frustrated participants-those in the first condition-were later more likely to give the research assistant a low job-related evaluation.
--Media influences: As we learned in Chapter 6,an impressive body of laboratory and naturalistic evidence points to the conclusion that watching media violence increases the odds of violence through observational learning.Laboratory experiments show that playing violent video games also boosts the odds of real-world violence.
--Aggressive cues: External cues associated with violence,such as guns and knives,can serve as discriminant stimuli (see Chapter 6)for aggression,making us more likely to act violently in response to provocation.Berkowitz and LePage (1967)found that the mere presence of a gun-as opposed to a badminton racquet-on a table triggered more aggression in subjects who'd been provoked by mild electric shocks for supposed poor performance on a task.
--Arousal: When our autonomic nervous systems (see Chapter 3)are hyped up,we may mistakenly attribute this arousal to anger,leading us to act aggressively.Zillman and his colleagues found that participants who pedalled an exercise bicycle delivered more intense electric shocks to someone who'd annoyed them than did participants who sat still.
--Alcohol and other drugs: Certain substances can disinhibit our brain's prefrontal cortex (see Chapter 3),lowering our inhibitions toward behaving violently.After being provoked with electric shocks by an "opponent" (who was actually fictitious)during a competitive game,participants tended to choose more intense electric shocks after consuming alcohol or benzodiazepines,such as Valium (see Chapter 16),than after consuming a placebo.But alcohol is likely to trigger aggression only when the target of our aggression occupies the focus of our attention,as when someone is threatening us directly.
--Temperature: Rates of violent crime in different regions of the United States mirror the average temperatures in these regions.Because warm temperatures increase irritability,they may make people more likely to lose their tempers when provoked or frustrated.Nevertheless,because extremely warm temperatures are more common in the southern United States,in which violent crime rates are especially high (see the Cultural Differences section on pages 506-507),investigators have had to rule out the rival hypothesis that this "heat effect" is due to geographical region.They've succeeded in doing so by demonstrating that even within the same geographical region,warmer temperatures are associated with higher rates of violence.