Social Psychology Part 1: The Power of Situation and Framing

Humans are social animals. We instinctively form societies, and in more recent history, sprawling civilizations. We tend to involve ourselves in smaller groups as well, be they sports teams, book clubs, or just a good group of friends. So how do we interact with each other? How does being in different groups change our behaviors?

How do we think about others and ourselves?

The field of social psychology encompasses all of these questions and more. At its core, social psychology attempts to understand how a person’s behavior is influenced by the social context where it takes place. Like developmental psychology, social psychology is a huge field, and we could spend an entire series examining all of its fascinating aspects. However, we’re going to introduce the subject by looking at three major points in social psychology over the next three tutorials.

First, the power of situation. This is how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by our immediate environment.

Then the self/other divide, or how our perception of other people is fundamentally different than our perception of ourselves. And finally, social cognition, or how we think and interact with each other. So let’s jump into our first topic in social psychology, the power of situation.

You’ve probably experienced how certain situations impact your behavior. Simply as a baseline, you almost certainly behave differently in a room by yourself than in a room with other people. But the type of people in the room also has a dramatic influence on your behavior. You likely act much differently in a room with just your best friends than if you were in a room with your parents, or professors, or job supervisors. But why do our behaviors change?

Is this contrary to the idea we discussed in the previous tutorial, that personalities and behaviors are consistent? Not at all! It simply means that situation plays a powerful role in determining our behavior.

Remember, your personality is the average response you’ll have across multiple situations. This means that personality only weakly predicts how you’ll behave in a specific situation.

So it is the case that both our personality and the situations we find ourselves in ultimately work together to influence our behavior. Let’s take a closer look at this idea using two famous psychological experiments: the Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram obedience experiment. In both of these, the immediate social situation shaped the behavior of participants, overwhelming their plans, intentions, and even their most stable personality traits. The situation of the experiment made people more likely to do bad things. Let’s start by walking through the Zimbardo prison experiment, also known as the Stanford prison experiment.

Zimbardo was a social psychologist who wanted to know if the brutality seen among prison guards was due to the guards’ personality or because of the social environment of the prison. In other words, are prison guards naturally more domineering and aggressive or are they more hostile because of the power structure in the prison? Zimbardo tested this by creating a mock prison.

Participants were assigned to be either a prisoner or a guard, and they lived in this mock prison until the end of the experiment. Prisoners were treated as if they were in a real prison and guards were allowed to do whatever was necessary to maintain control, excluding physical violence.

The experiment was originally planned to go for two weeks, but it was ended after only six days.

In this time frame, multiple prisoners had emotional breakdowns and guards were excessively aggressive to the point of abusing the prisoners. Zimbardo and his colleagues were surprised at how quickly the participants fell into their roles and changed their behavior. None of the guards had shown any sadistic tendencies before the study, yet they rapidly descended into brutal behavior. Prisoners were also much more submissive than personality tests would predict.

The situation of being in a prison environment dramatically impacted the behaviors that the participants exhibited. A similar thing happened with the Milgram experiment. This experiment was an obedience experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. He wanted to see how far people would go in obeying instructions, even if those instructions harmed another person. Volunteers were told that they were part of a study investigating learning.

A confederate, meaning someone who works in the lab and knows the true purpose of the experiment, was strapped to an electric chair in one room. This person played the role of “learner” while the volunteer would play the role of “teacher.” The teacher and an experimenter were put in another room with an electric shock generator. The teacher would test the learner by saying a word and asking the learner to recall its partner word from a learned list of word pairs. Every time the learner made a mistake, the teacher would administer a shock.

These shocks started mild, but the teacher increased the voltage for every mistake until they reached shocks that were labeled on the generator as “Danger!” and even “XXX” at the highest level. Now in actuality, the learner was never in any danger. The shock generator didn’t actually do anything. Remember, the learner was a confederate: he was in on the experiment!

The learner was really just an actor who was pretending to be in increasing pain as the shock level increased.

However, the teacher didn’t know this. From their point of view, they were actually harming the learner as the shocks increased. For each subsequent shock, the learner cried out in increasing pain and pleaded with the teacher to stop. If the teacher wanted to stop, the experimenter in the room would prod them to continue despite the apparent pain of the learner.

All participants went up to 300 volts, the level labelled as “Danger!” And two thirds of participants continued from there despite the screaming from the learner all the way up to the highest volt level, at which point the learner became deathly quiet.

Why did the teachers continue to listen to the experimenter and deliver shocks, despite the clear signs of agony? Were all of the participants naturally evil people who liked shocking others? Almost certainly not.

Like in the Zimbardo experiment, participants were being influenced by their social situation. They were being told by someone in power, the experimenter, that they needed to continue shocking the learner. The social situation of being told by an authority figure to do something shaped the behavior of the participants in this experiment.

As we can clearly conclude, situations have the ability to dramatically shape our behaviors. To speak on a more subtle level, the mere presence of other people can also influence our behavior.

This is called social facilitation. It was first identified by in 1898, when Norman Triplett found that cyclists were faster when racing against each other than when they simply raced against a clock. This type of social facilitation is known as a co-action effect, or when your performance on a task improves because other people are doing the same task as you. In this case the cyclists did better because they were in the presence of other cyclists. Other examples of co-action effects include animals eating more food when there are other members of their species present, or someone being more productive working in a library surrounded by other people than by themselves at home.

Social facilitation can also occur when you do something in front of an audience. This is called the audience effect. For example, musicians may perform better in front of an audience than by themselves, and weightlifters could lift heavier weights in front of others than when alone.

The co-action effect and the audience effect are both types of social facilitation where being around people improves performance. However, sometimes the presence of others impairs performance.

You may have felt this in your own life. Perhaps you can easily make basketball free throws when practicing by yourself, but when others watch you, you suddenly miss every shot. Or perhaps you were more prone to making errors during a driving test in the presence of an instructor than you were driving by yourself. Why do our behaviors improve when in the presence of others in some instances, but become impaired in others? Psychologist Robert Zajonc theorized that it has to do with physiological arousal.

The mere presence of others increases our physiological arousal, where our body becomes more awake, alert, and ready to respond. This physiological arousal increases the likelihood that we will exhibit the dominant response for a task. For easy or well-learned tasks, this dominant response is likely the correct one. The musician might play better in front of an audience because their arousal increases the likelihood they will correctly play a piece of well-learned music. But for difficult or novel tasks, the dominant response is likely the incorrect response.

This explains why you’re more likely to make mistakes as a new driver when someone else is in your car.

The arousal of having someone watching you perform the new and complex task of driving leads you to make mistakes. Having people present when you are performing a task can improve or worsen your performance, depending on how easy the task is or how well you are able to execute it, and this may differ from person to person. One last topic we’re going to touch on in this tutorial is framing. Framing refers to how information is presented or interpreted.

The same exact information can be framed differently depending on the situation. What matters for our psychology and our behavior is not the objective information, but the subjective way we interpret it.

A specific type of framing is called anchoring.

This is when someone relies too heavily on an initial, potentially irrelevant, piece of information when making a decision. We use that initial information to shape our perception of all the information that comes after it.

Here’s an example let’s do some quick math! For this exercise try to avoid computing the precise answer, just make your best estimate as quickly as possible. What’s 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8? I’ll give you a second to take a guess and write it down.

Now, what’s 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1?

Give that a guess and jot it down as well. Okay, now compare the answers. Typically, when forced to answer very quickly, people give a smaller answer for the first problem, like 512, but a larger answer for the second problem, like 2,250. Of course these are the exact same problem, with the same answer, 40,320. But when they are framed differently, people give different answers.

The first piece of information shapes how your mind responds. When the smaller number comes first, we anchor our minds to that small value and give a smaller answer. When the larger number comes first, we let our estimate climb very rapidly. This is a type of framing. Another type of framing that can affect how we interpret the world is confirmation bias.

This is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and remember information that confirms our own preexisting beliefs and desires. This happens when we gather information in a selective way, or even interpret information in a biased way. Let’s first look at the idea of searching for information in a biased way. Pretend you’re a cat person who wants to convince your friend to get a cat instead of a dog.

If you google “are cats better than dogs,” you’ll get a bunch of sites listing all the reasons cats are superior.

This information supports your belief that cats are better, and gives you “proof”, so to speak, to convince your friend that they should get a cat. But let’s say you’re actually a dog person. If you search “are dogs better than cats,” you find sites explaining why dogs are superior. The way you search for information, like the questions you ask and which sources you examine, can shape the information you get and thus bias your outlook. The other part of confirmation bias deals with how we interpret and remember information.

Even if we get accurate, objective information, our biases sometimes creep in and change how we deal with it.

We tend to interpret evidence in ways that confirm our beliefs, as well as remember information that confirms them. More specifically, people tend not to change their beliefs on a topic even after being provided contradictory research because of the way they interpret the information. They also tend to accept “confirming” evidence more easily, while they critically evaluate evidence that disproves their belief. Finally, people will actually remember and recall information that supports their beliefs better than information that does not.

I’m quite sure that anyone watching this can think of countless examples of this behavior in the context of science, politics, and religion, so we probably don’t need to say anything else here.

Finally, whether information is framed either positively or negatively can also impact our choices. Let’s say that 600 people are affected with a deadly disease. There are two treatment options. Say there are two scenarios, one where the treatment options are positively framed, and another where they are negatively framed.

See which one you prefer. Okay, here’s the positive framing: if you choose treatment A, 200 people live. If you choose treatment B, there is a 1/3 chance of saving all 600 people, and a 2/3 chance of saving no one.

Which one sounds better to you? Now for the negative framing: if you choose treatment A, 400 people will die.

If you choose treatment B, there’s a 1/3 chance that no one will die, and a 2/3 chance that all 600 people will die.

Again, make your decision based on this framing. Now, did your choice between treatments A and B change based on the framing? Of course it is quite simple to see mathematically that these are the same two treatments no matter how they are framed. But your choice of treatment may have been different depending on the positive and negative framing.

A study that asked participants this question found that when the treatments are framed positively, 72% of people choose treatment A. By contrast, only 22% of participants choose treatment A when it is framed negatively. In our minds, 200 people living sounds better than 400 people dying, even though in both cases only 200 people out of 600 survive. The way things are framed changes how we view information and make decisions. We talked about a lot of concepts and scenarios in this tutorial, but there was one constant theme: situation affects behavior.

Our social environment can change the decisions we make, like what we saw in the Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. Even just having people around us can change our behavior because of social facilitation. Finally, how we interpret the environment, and the situation will also impact our decisions. How are we framing the situation? How are we gathering information?

Situation truly has a dramatic impact on our behaviors. In the next tutorial, we’re going to move on to another big topic insocial psychology: how do we think about ourselves?

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