When his scientific testimony was relatively simple and easy to understand, participants paid little attention to the expert’s apparent credentials, instead focusing on the strength of the arguments he offered. Able to understand the persuasive arguments, they engaged in a central route. But when his scientific testimony was complicated and conveyed in jargon that only a molecular biologist could fully grasp, mock jurors relied on the expert’s credentials to determine how much stock to place in his testimony. Unable to attend carefully to the persuasive communication, they were influenced by peripheral cues

One thing that determines whether people are motivated to pay attention to a communication is the personal relevance of the topic: How important is the topic to a person’s well-being?

But what if your goal is to change attitudes on a mass scale? Suppose you were hired by the American Cancer Society to come up with an antismoking campaign that could be used nationwide to counteract the kind of tobacco advertisements we discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Although dissonance techniques are powerful, they are difficult to carry out on a mass scale

When attitudes change, they often do so in response to social influence

Although some behaviors result from spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous decisions, others emerge from more thoughtful processes in which we carefully weigh pros and cons. The theory of planned behavior helps us understand the link between attitudes and these sorts of deliberative behaviors.

In the LaPiere (1934) study, people’s attitudes were more racist than their actions. A more recent study demonstrates that the disconnect between attitudes and behavior can operate in the other direction as well. Kerry Kawakami and colleagues (2009) found that participants who were asked to imagine a scenario in which another person used racist language reported believing that they would be distressed and would avoid that individual in the future. But those participants who actually witnessed such an event showed little reaction to a real-life encounter with racism

People can have explicit and implicit attitudes toward virtually anything, not just other racial groups. For example, students can believe explicitly that they hate math yet still have a positive attitude at an implicit level, finding that—in spite of what they claim—they actually enjoy working through a certain type of problem

People can have both explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same topic. Social psychologists have been especially interested in people’s explicit and implicit attitudes toward members of other races. For example, many people who evaluate job applicants would likely state that they have no biases whatsoever against people of different racial groups. But research suggests that résumés with “­White-sounding” names like Emily and Greg tend to get more callbacks for interviews than résumés with “Black-sounding” names like Lakisha and Jamal

people infer their attitudes from their behavior only under certain conditions. First, their initial attitude has to be weak or ambiguous. If your friend already has a strong attitude toward exercising, they do not have to observe their own behavior to infer how they feel about it. Second, people infer their attitudes from their own behavior only when there are no other plausible explanations available

According to Daryl Bem’s (1972) self-perception theory, under certain circumstances people don’t know how they feel until they see how they behave.

Imagine that a ­4-year-old White girl goes to the playground with her father and begins to play with a Black girl. Her father expresses disapproval, telling her, “We don’t play with them.” Unfortunately, it won’t take long before the child associates interacting with Black people with disapproval, and therefore adopts her father’s racist attitudes.

(The Literary Digest never recovered from this methodological disaster and went out of business shortly after publishing its poll.)

Correlational Method The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is assesse

Based on his observations of Mrs. Keech’s tenacious adherence to her beliefs, Festinger formulated one of the most famous theories in social psychology, cognitive dissonance, which we discuss in Chapter 6.

Ethnography is the chief method of cultural anthropology, the study of human cultures and societies.

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Now that you know correlation doesn’t equal causation, you know that eating fast food doesn’t necessarily cause poor test performance. What are some alternative explanations for the negative correlation between children’s fast-food consumption and low test scores?

But we also want to avoid causing our participants stress, discomfort, or unpleasantness. These two goals sometimes conflict as the researcher goes about the business of creating and conducting experiments. Above all, researchers are concerned about the health and welfare of the individuals participating in their experiments

, did it bother you to learn that researchers sometimes mislead people about the true purpose of their study or that, in Latané and Darley’s seizure study, people were put in a situation that might have been upsetting

But these projects have themselves proved to be controversial. Some view the results as demonstrating cause for concern about research practices in psychology (e.g., Open Science Collaboration, 2015), whereas others have pointed to problems with the replication projects themselves. These problems include the representativeness of the studies chosen for replication (i.e., how representative they are of the field in general) and that, at least in some cases, the researchers altered the procedures of the replications in key ways that departed significantly from the studies they were trying to reproduce (Bryan, Yeager, & O’Brien, 2019; Gilbert et al., 2016; Luttrell, Petty, & Xu, 2017; Noah, Schul, & Mayo, 2018). Others have raised statistical concerns with how the results of replication projects have been analyzed (e.g., Gilbert et al., 2016; Schauer & Hedges, in press; Wilson & Wixted, 2018).

Researchers have to guard against imposing their own viewpoints and definitions learned from their culture onto another culture with which they are unfamiliar. They must also be sure that their independent and dependent variables are understood in the same way in different cultures

Latané and Darley’s original findings have been replicated in numerous studies. Increasing the number of bystanders inhibited helping behavior with many kinds of people, including children, college students, and future ministers (Darley & Batson, 1973; Latané & Nida, 1981; Plötner et al., 2015); in both small towns and large cities (Latané & Dabbs, 1975); in a variety of settings, such as psychology laboratories, city streets, and subway trains (Harrison & Wells, 1991; Latané & Darley, 1970; Piliavin & Piliavin, 1972); and with different kinds of emergencies, such as seizures, potential fires, fights, and accidents (Latané & Darley, 1968; Shotland & Straw, 1976; Staub, 1974), as well as with less-serious events such as having a flat tire (Hurley & Allen, 1974).

The only way to be certain that the results of an experiment represent the behavior of a particular population is to ensure that the participants are randomly selected from that population.

Just as the need to preserve self-esteem can occasionally run aground, however, so too can the need to be accurate. People are not perfect in their effort to understand and predict, because they almost never know all the facts they need to judge a given situation completely accurately. Whether it is a relatively simple decision, such as which breakfast cereal offers the best combination of healthfulness and tastiness, or a slightly more complex decision, such as our desire to buy the best car we can for under $20,000, or a much more complex decision, such as choosing a partner who will make us deliriously happy for the rest of our lives, it is usually impossible to gather all the relevant information in advance. Moreover, we make countless decisions every day. No one has the time and stamina to gather all the facts for each of them.

Given the choice between distorting the world to feel good about themselves and representing the world accurately, people often take the first option

Social psychologists emphasize the importance of two central motives in steering people’s construals: the need to feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate. Sometimes, each of these motives pulls us in the same direction. Often, though, these motives tug us in opposite directions, where to perceive the world accurately requires us to admit that we have behaved foolishly or immorally.

Naïve Realism The conviction that we perceive things “as they really are,” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see

But suppose, while you are deciding whether to complain about her to the manager, a regular customer tells you that your “crabby” server is a single parent who was kept awake all night by the moaning of her youngest child, who was terribly sick; that her car broke down on her way to work and she has no idea where she will find the money to have it repaired; that when she finally arrived at the restaurant, she learned that her coworker hadn’t shown up, requiring her to cover twice the usual number of tables; and that the short-order cook keeps screaming at her because she is not picking up the orders fast enough. Given all that information, you might now conclude that she is not a nasty person but an ordinary human under enormous stress.

So what is this person “really” like? Aloof and arrogant or charming and welcoming? It’s the wrong question; the answer is both and neither. All of us are capable of being shy in some situations and outgoing in others. A much more interesting question is: What factors were different in these two situations that had such a profound effect on the student’s behavior? That is a social psychological question. (See the Try It! exercise on social situations and shyness.)

We note here that a lively debate has arisen over the testability of evolutionary hypotheses. Because current behaviors are thought to be adaptations to environmental conditions that existed thousands of years ago, psychologists make their best guesses about what those conditions were and how specific kinds of behaviors gave people a reproductive advantage. But these hypotheses are obviously impossible to test with the experimental method. And just because hypotheses sound plausible does not mean they are true. For example, some scientists now believe that giraffes did not acquire a long neck to eat leaves in tall trees. Instead, they suggest, long necks first evolved in male giraffes to gain an advantage in fights with other males over access to females (Simmons & Scheepers, 1996). Which of these explanations is true? It’s hard to tell. Evolutionary explanations can’t be tested directly, because after all, they involve hypotheses about what happened thousands of years ago. They can, however, suggest novel hypotheses about why people do what they do in today’s world, which can then be put to the test, as we will see in later chapters (Al-Shawa, 2020).

For example, we are often influenced by the mere presence of other people, including perfect strangers who are not interacting with us. Other people don’t even have to be present: We are governed by the imaginary approval or disapproval of our parents, friends, and teachers and by how we expect others to react to us.

he global COVID pandemic has brought out the best and worst of humankind