Social Psychological Bulletin
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The Internet Changed Chess Rules: Queen Is Equal to Pawn: How Social Media Influence Opinion Spreading
No full textStudies of social influence in large groups show that leaders are crucial in infecting followers with new ideas and that it requires time. This reflects social impact models based on Nowak, Szamrej, and Latané’s dynamic theory (1990), which are still being presented, modified and developed in the literature. However, recent mass events, e.g., the Arab Spring, 15-M Movement, protests in the Gezi Park in Turkey, Polish democratic movements (KOD, AkcjaDemokracja), do not seem to fit the aforementioned models: changes happened rapidly and without the presence of opinion leaders. In a series of simulation studies, we propose that global communication (Internet, mobiles, social media) is responsible for the difference between the theoretical model and recent mass events. Our results indicate that global communication dramatically decreases the role of leaders, increases the speed of spreading new ideas in the population, increases the influence of followers on the speed of social transformation, and that leaders who use the Internet can change their attitudes as quickly and as often as followers do.
 
How to Make Psychology a Genuine Science of Behavior: Comment on Dolinski’s Thoughtful Paper
No full textIn this comment to Doliński’s (2018, this issue) challenging paper, I express my agreement with his basic ideas and with his concerns about the alienation of social psychology. However, I also present some critical thoughts that amount to a slightly different diagnosis of the present situation. Rather than concluding that our discipline has ceased to study real behaviors, I provide positive counter-examples of substantial behavioral science and argue that the major problem is not to distinguish between measures of “real” and “non-real” behaviors. The problem core, rather, lies in the widespread tendency to mistake statistical and technical indices (latencies, model parameters, fMRI indices, etc.) for measures of meaningful behavior. When technical means become ends in themselves, Doliński’s metaphor applies that “the tail wags the dog”
Mentalization of Social Psychology Is a Sign of Its Maturity
No full textDariusz Doliński’ (2018, this issue) analysis strongly suggests that social psychologists are no longer interested in studying real human behavior and have switched their attention to internal cognitive processing and its interplay with motivational and affective phenomena. I propose to call this phenomenon ‘the mentalization shift’. In my commentary three issues are addressed: (i) Why has this phenomenon occured? (ii) Is it really so that we have ceased to study behavior, or rather we still do that, albeit differently? (iii) And, finally, is the mentalization of present-day social psychology something that is uniformly bad, or just a sign of the field’s maturing process? Nobody would oppose that modern social psychology offers more and more sophisticated instruments for explaining rather than for predicting and controlling human behavior. However, at an inevitable cost incurred by the advancement of our theoretical thinking, this is a sign of an increasing maturity of social psychology as a science rather than symptom of its deterioration
Violent Radicalism and the Psychology of Prepossession
No full textThe phenomenon of violent radicalism/extremism is portrayed as a consequence of a mechanism that fosters extremism in general. This is the process of motivational imbalance or “prepossession”, a state wherein a given need becomes dominant to the point of inhibiting other needs. In the case of violent extremism, the dominant need is the quest for significance, the desire to matter and have self and others’ respect. Whereas the “hydraulic” domination-inhibition process that underlies extremism can be observed across levels of phylogeny, the motivational imbalance in those cases is typically brief in duration. In the case of humans, however, participation in violent extremism can be long lasting, due to its facilitation by a compelling narrative” that ties violence to the attainment of significance, and is embraced by a “network” of trusted others (individuals’ friends and relatives) who validate the narrative and bestow significance on individuals who implement its dictates
Automatic Ingroup Bias as Resistance to Traditional Gender Roles?
No full textTraditional roles are problematic for women because they constrain their life choices. Therefore, women have a vested interest in challenging them. We argue that women can resist pervasive traditional roles by showing automatic ingroup bias. In two studies we used an associative procedure to expose two groups of women to stereotypical vs. counter-stereotypical roles, and measured implicit ingroup bias with an evaluative decision task. Study 1 shows that women activated ingroup bias when they were exposed to stereotypical roles and targets appeared in a stereotype-congruent context (kitchen). Study 2 shows that automatic ingroup bias was activated only when gender roles were salient. Further, stereotypic role associations promote negative emotions, and increased persistence on a stereotype-relevant performance task in women
Conforming to Collective Action: The Impact of Rejection, Personality and Norms on Participation in Protest Activity
No full textSocial norms guide humans’ everyday behavior, and previous research has shown that social norms consistently predict some forms of political participation. Failure to conform to norms may lead to deviation and possible rejection, which humans innately seek to avoid since it threatens their need for belongingness. Following an episode of rejection, individuals are therefore likely to become increasingly willing to conform to norms in order to re-establish a position in their social group. In an experiment, we show that 1) individuals conform to a perceived political engagement norm, and that 2) when rejection associations are made salient, they become increasingly willing to conform to a political engagement norm. We also show 3) that this effect is moderated by individual-level need for belongingness, such that rejection primed participants with a high need to belong, showed the highest levels of conformity to the perceived political engagement norm. The results imply that social pressure is a strong motivating factor in political engagement, which is an important result suggesting that basic social affiliation needs may in fact have an impact on politics and political outcomes
The Effects of Synchronization With Either Joyful or Angry People on Perception of an Emotionally Neutral Person
No full textSynchronization has been shown to play an important role in social life through its effects on interactions between people and the quality of these interactions. However, little is known about how observing synchronization affects perceptions of the synchronized individuals. This paper examines how observed synchronization influences perceptions of a neutral person depending on the emotional valence of the faces with which they are synchronized. Two different forms of synchronization were used in these studies: synchronous flashing of faces and faces moving in a common direction. We hypothesized that observed synchronization biases the perception of emotions expressed by a neutral person and an observer’s attitude towards this person. These effects are expected to be congruent with the valence of the synchronizing faces. The results showed a divergent pattern of effects for different forms of synchronization. In Study 1, synchronous flashing biased only the perceived emotions. In Study 2, synchrony of movement affected participants’ attitudes towards the observed person. Our findings suggest that the form of observed synchrony is an important factor in drawing inferences about individuals
Lexical Access in the Processing of Word Boundary Ambiguity
No full textLanguage ambiguity results from, among other things, the vagueness of the syntactic structure of phrases and whole sentences. Numerous types of syntactic ambiguity are associated with the placement of the phrase boundary. A special case of the segmentation problem is the phenomenon of word boundary ambiguities; in spoken natural language words coalesce, making it possible to interpret them in different ways (e.g., a name vs. an aim). The purpose of the study was to verify whether the two meanings of words with boundary ambiguities are activated, or whether it is a case of semantic context priming. The study was carried out using the cross-modality semantic priming paradigm. Sentences containing phrases with word boundary ambiguities were presented in an auditory manner to the participants. Immediately after, they performed a visual lexical decision task. Results indicate that both meanings of the ambiguity are automatically activated — independently of the semantic context. When discussing the results I refer to the autonomous and interactive models of parsing, and show other possible areas of research concerning word boundary ambiguities
Serving Two Masters – What Kind of Resistance to Influence Allows Maintaining a Positive Image?
No full textResearch on social influence proves that an important motive of compliance is the need for a positive evaluation from others. However, there is little knowledge of how people responding to social influence in a resistant way are assessed. This study including 187 people concerns the evaluation of communion and agency of people (protagonists of the story) who, in a situation of unwanted social influence, reacted either with consent or presented one of three types of resistance: reactance, scepticism or inertia. The results showed that the evaluation of the protagonist’s agency was highest when s/he reacted to persuasion with reactance, and lowest for those who behaved compliantly. However, the assessment of the communion of the same behaviours was completely opposite. Such substantial asymmetries between the evaluation of communion and agency of the protagonists reacting in different ways to attempts to influence were noted for each of the types of behaviour except for inertia. In this one case, the evaluation of communion and agency of the protagonist turned out to be almost identical. The results are reflected in terms of self-presentation, politeness theory and the importance of norms in evoking submission to social influence
Is Observing Behaviour the Best Way to Understand Behaviour?
No full textDolinski (2018, this issue) argues that Social Psychology may hardly be considered a science of behaviour anymore, given the rarity of published studies in which the dependent measures involve behaviours other than the completion of surveys, pressing of keys on a computer keyboard, or clicking a mouse. In the present, we comment on this void of empirical studies in which “real” human behaviours are examined to put forward the following points: i) Key-pressing can be a human behaviour as meaningful as any other more complex behaviour (i.e., behavioural complexity is not a good criterion for meaningfulness), ii) Lessons learned from past research in social psychology have shown us that studying “real” behaviour introduces a number of well-known complications, iii) Improvement in the comprehension of human behaviour depends more on a strong theoretical lens constrained by results obtained via rigorous experimentation than on the complexity of people’s observed actions