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Stanford Prison Experiment

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- Roles are everywhere and they are powerful
- They cause us to behave differently
Criticisms of the study
- Selective sampling
  - Some belief that some of the people who wanted to be in the study were kind of biased to want power
Lack of replicability
- Huge violation of participant rights
- Made a significant impact on the field in terms of what is okay to do
Instructions may have encouraged the observed behavior
- Zambardo might have encouraged them to be agressive
Could this also be viewed as a study about obedience to authority?
- If so, in what way?
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- In studies, there is an implicit desire to please the experimenter
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    - Maybe the prisoners felt they needed to finish the experiment
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An area of social psychology concerned with social influences on thought, memory, perception, and beliefs

Our causal explanations for other people’s behavior
“Joe did what?! Why?????”
Logical (not covered here) and illogical attributions
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  - Assume people are making rational judgements of their environment
  - Thinking about all the available options and picking the one that makes the most sense
    - This doesn’t match reality
Attribution theory suggests that people are motivated to find situational or dispositional causes for their own and other people’s behaviors
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  - Person + Environment = Behavior
Situational attribution
- - Aladin
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    - He’s poor
      - That’s why he steals bread
Dispositional attribution
- - Aladin
    - He steals becauase he’s a theif

Usually, the target of the attribution
- Dave Chappelle on attributions:
  - Audio 0:32:31.083686
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLdim8hWR44
- Louis CK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquhBIlDIpM
What is Dave getting at?
- Audio 0:35:10.221291
- The situational look at Oscar is he’s a grouch because he lives in a trash can
- The dispositional look is that he’s a grouch by nature
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)
- The tendency to overestimate personality factors and underestimate the influence of the situation when drawing conclusions about the behavior of other people
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  - Think about someone with chronic pain
  - They might be upset or irritable often
    - You might make an FAE and say that that’s part of their personality

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Situations lack salience and go unnoticed
- When you see someone doing something, you don’t care about what they were doing 4 minutes before
  - If someone cuts you off in traffic, do you think “Oh I bet his wife is in labor and he’s going to see her in the hospital”
    - You probably think “f*** you!”
- Availability heuristic
Underestimating the impact of the situation
- Classic experiments from last lecture
Impact of situation may be salient initially, but then fade over time
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  - You might forget that your friend Kathy has a chronic pain disorder
Belief that the person caused the situation
- Kathy is a bad person who does bad things
  - Therefore she causes her own pain
  - Or: Therefore she deserves her pain

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Usually, the target of the attribution (others FAE)
Self-serving biases
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- Tendency to attribute our successes to dispositional factors and our failures to situational factors

Choosing the most flattering and forgiving attributions for our behavior
- “I’m not sexist; the male job candidate’s credentials were honestly just better.”
- “Well, I didn’t hire her because I honestly think a man would do the job better.”
The “better than average” effect
- The tendency to believe that we are better, smarter, and kinder than others
- Example
  - 70% of high school students said they were above the median for leadership skills
    - Everyone is inclined to think they are above average
  - 85% for getting along well with others
- When the average person is exposed to the suffering of an innocent person, how do you think they will respond?
- What is a normative response?
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  - Feel bad for them
- Do normative responses always occur?
  - No, usually people try to find a way that the person caused their pain
The bias to believe that the world is fair
- Good people are rewarded and bad people are punished
  - Karma essentially
- The just-world hypothesis
- “You reap what so you sow”, “They deserve what’s coming to them”
- Rooted in the need to predict one’s environment and make long-term goals
- Motivated responses victim blaming and victim derogation

Term	Definition
social cognition	An area of social psychology concerned with social influences on thought, memory, perception, and beliefs
attributions	Our causal explanations for other people’s behavior
attribution theory	suggests that people are motivated to find situational or dispositional causes for their own and other people’s behaviors
situational attribution	Explaining behavior based on someone’s situation
dispositional attribution	Explaining behavior based on someone’s inate personality
fundamental attribution error	The tendency to overestimate personality factors and underestimate the influence of the situation when drawing conclusions about the behavior of other people
self-serving bias	Tendency to attribute our successes to dispositional factors and our failures to situational factors
better than average effect	Tendency to believe that we are better, smarter, and kinder than others
just-world hypotheses	idea that good people are rewarded and bad people are punished (You reap what you sew)