How culture and other people shape what we think

Transcript

RyanYou're sitting at a table with several other people. A researcher holds up a line, and then three comparison lines, and asks which one matches. It's obvious. But one by one, everyone before you confidently names a line that's clearly shorter.

SoheeNow it's your turn. And you can feel the room waiting.

RyanWelcome to EPPP Prep, the podcast. I'm Ryan.

SoheeI'm Sohee. This is our last episode on the cognitive and affective bases of behavior, and it covers the knowledge statement on how psychosocial factors influence our beliefs and behaviors. In other words, how other people, culture and circumstance get inside our thinking.

RyanThat line study is Solomon Asch's, from the 1950s. Each group had only one real participant. The rest were confederates working for the researcher, and they gave an obviously wrong answer out loud.

SoheeAnd Asch found that seventy-six percent of participants conformed to the group at least once, by naming the incorrect line. Conformity is changing your behavior to go along with the group, even if you don't agree.

RyanThree factors mattered. The size of the majority: conformity rose as the majority grew, up to seven people. Beyond that it leveled off and even dropped slightly.

SoheeThe presence of another dissenter: with even one, conformity dropped to near zero. And public versus private responses: conformity is more likely in public, less likely when people write their answers privately.

RyanWhich is why elections use secret ballots. And notice what was really happening in Asch's study. Participants complied, giving wrong answers out loud, but privately they didn't accept those answers as correct. Research also suggests overall conformity rates may have dropped since Asch's time, and replications show factors like age, gender and socio-cultural background affect how likely someone is to conform.

SoheeThen the two motives behind conformity, from Deutsch and Gerard. Normative social influence: conforming to fit in, feel good and be accepted. Informational social influence: conforming because we believe the group is competent and has the right information, especially when the situation is ambiguous.

RyanAsch's line task was unambiguous, so participants didn't need the group's information. That makes it normative influence.

SoheePause and think. In a movie theater, what might be smoke drifts under an exit door. You can't tell if it's real or a special effect, so you watch what everyone else does. Which kind of influence?

RyanInformational. The situation is ambiguous, so you treat other people's behavior as information. If they get up and leave, you probably will too.

SoheeAnd groups can shape whole decisions. Groupthink, from Janis, is the modification of members' opinions to align with what they believe is the group consensus. Groups can make more extreme decisions than individuals, and groupthink can shut down opposing views, contributing to faulty decisions.

RyanNow culture, which reaches even into perception. In a multinational study, Segall, Campbell and Herskovits found people from Western cultures were more prone to certain visual illusions than people from non-Western cultures, and vice versa.

SoheeOne was the Müller-Lyer illusion, where two lines of equal length look different because of the arrowheads at their ends. Westerners were more likely to experience it.

RyanThe explanation: Western environments are full of buildings with straight lines, what they called a carpentered world. People from cultures with an uncarpentered view, like Zulu villages of round huts arranged in circles, were less susceptible.

SoheeAnd it isn't just vision. The ability to identify an odor, and rate its pleasantness and intensity, varies across cultures too.

RyanCulture shapes how we explain behavior, too. The fundamental attribution error is overemphasizing internal factors and underestimating the situation. People from individualistic cultures, focused on individual achievement and autonomy, have the greatest tendency to commit it.

SoheePeople from collectivistic cultures, focused on relationships with family, friends and community, are less likely to commit it. Their focus on others gives a broader view that takes situational and cultural influences into account. Culture shapes motivation, too. In collectivistic cultures, it's common to do things for family members because the emphasis is on what's best for the group.

RyanThe textbook's table also contrasts thinking styles: analytic in individualistic cultures, holistic in collectivistic ones. And Masuda and Nisbett found Japanese participants were much more likely to recognize objects when shown in their original context. Changing the context had no such effect for American participants.

SoheePause and think. A manager from a strongly individualistic culture sees an employee arrive late and concludes, she's lazy. A colleague from a collectivistic culture wonders about traffic or family obligations. What explains the difference?

RyanCulture's influence on attribution. The first manager makes the fundamental attribution error, a dispositional explanation, more common in individualistic cultures. The second takes a more situational, holistic view.

SoheeNow expectations. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation held by a person that alters their behavior in a way that tends to make it true.

RyanRosenthal and Jacobson found in 1968 that disadvantaged students whose teachers expected them to do well had higher grades than disadvantaged students whose teachers expected them to do poorly.

SoheeAnd the textbook walks through the mechanism. An interviewer who expects an openly gay applicant to be incompetent acts coldly: less conversation, little eye contact. The applicant senses dislike and disengages. Then the interviewer sees the disengagement as proof of the stereotype.

RyanFeeding that loop is confirmation bias: focusing on information that confirms what we already believe, and ignoring what doesn't. The interviewer may never notice the applicant was friendly and competent at the start.

SoheeAnd a close cousin, the representative bias: judging based on how similar someone seems to our stereotypes. The textbook's example is an urgent care nurse who may detect a heart attack more efficiently in a male patient than a female one, because of an unintentional stereotype.

RyanThe textbook makes a broader point about these biases. They tend to preserve what's already established, our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and hypotheses.

SoheeStereotypes can even shape perception and memory. In several studies, non-Black participants identified weapons faster, and more often misidentified harmless objects as weapons, when the image was paired with a Black person's face. And White individuals' decisions to shoot an armed target in a video game were made more quickly when the target was Black.

RyanAnd in memory research, participants more often wrongly remembered typical African American names as linked to the occupation basketball player, and typical White names as linked to politician. The textbook calls this stereotypical bias, one form of Schacter's memory sin of bias.

SoheeNow circumstance. Children living in poverty experience more pervasive daily stress than children who don't worry about safety, shelter and food. Those worries can negatively affect how the brain functions and develops, causing a dip in I Q scores.

RyanMark Kishiyama and colleagues found children living in poverty showed reduced prefrontal brain functioning, comparable to children with damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex.

SoheeAnd Diamond's executive function review adds that stress, lack of sleep, loneliness and lack of exercise each impair executive functions. Those are psychosocial conditions, and they reach right into our capacity to think clearly.

RyanSo how might this knowledge statement show up on the exam? Expect scenarios where the setting, the group or the culture changes a judgment. Ask: is this the group's pressure, normative or informational? Is it culture shaping perception or attribution? Is an expectation creating its own confirmation?

SoheeAnd watch the tempting wrong answers. Calling Asch's conformity informational, when the task was unambiguous. Or assuming illusions are universal, when experience shapes them.

RyanLet's recap. Asch: seventy-six percent conformed at least once. Conformity grows with majority size up to about seven, collapses with one dissenter, and drops when responses are private.

SoheeNormative influence is about acceptance. Informational influence is about being right in an ambiguous situation. Groupthink aligns members with a perceived consensus and shuts down dissent.

RyanCulture shapes perception, like the carpentered-world effect on the Müller-Lyer illusion, and attribution, with the fundamental attribution error strongest in individualistic cultures.

SoheeExpectations create self-fulfilling prophecies, and confirmation bias keeps them going. Stereotypes can bias what we see and what we remember. And poverty, stress and loneliness affect the brain's capacity to think.

RyanAnd that wraps up our series on this domain. Fifteen episodes, from Pavlov's dogs to the cultures we live in. If you've listened this far, you've done real, steady work.

SoheeOne last social-psychology thought. Surround yourself with people who expect good things from you, and be one of those people for yourself. Try a few practice questions, and thanks for learning with us on EPPP Prep.

Loading the read-along timings…