Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [284]
Attraction: An unromantic reality: Physical proximity and membership in groups are major determinants of romantic preferences and of friendships… Within the parameters of nearness and group membership, physical beauty is by far the strongest factor in the initial attraction toward dating partners, yet persons with low or moderate self-esteem avoid approaching the most desirable partners out of fear of rejection…In both friendships and mate choices, similarity of personality and background have far more power to attract than the legendary appeal of opposite traits.64
Attitude change (or persuasion): Persons low in self-esteem are more readily made to change their attitudes than persons with high self-esteem…People are more influenced by the statement of an authority than by an equally or even better documented statement of a nonauthority… They are also more easily persuaded by overheard information than by information directed at them, and by actions they have been induced to perform (as in Festinger’s cognitive dissonance experiment) than by logical reasoning… Simply being repeatedly exposed to something—a name, a product, a slogan—often changes one’s attitude toward it, generally in a favorable way (again, obviously, a psychological reality well-known to advertisers and politicos).65
Prejudice: When people are assigned to or belong to a group, generally they come to think of it as better than other groups in order to maintain their self-esteem and positive self-image…People assume that others who share one of their tastes, beliefs, or attitudes are like them in other ways, and that those who differ with them on some issue are unlike them in other ways… The mutual antipathy of people in rival or hostile groups dissipates if the groups have to cooperate to achieve some goal valuable to both of them… Stereotyping can lead to prejudice, which may be conscious and intentional, conscious and unintentional, and, perhaps most serious, unconscious and unintentional.66
Group decision making: Groups make either riskier or more conservative decisions than individuals, largely because group discussion and the airing of opinions frees many of the members to take a more extreme position than they would have on their own… Groups perform better than individuals on tasks where everyone’s effort adds to the result but not on tasks where there is only one correct solution and where, if one member discovers it but is not supported by at least one other, the group may ignore the correct solution…In groups organized to solve a particular problem, two people assume particular importance: the task specialist, who speaks most, has the most ideas, and is seen as the leader; and the socioemotional specialist, who does the most to promote harmony and morale.67
Altruism: The bystander effect, discussed above, can be counteracted by knowing about it. In an experiment, students who had heard a lecture on the bystander effect were helpful to a hurt stranger in a situation where normally they would have been passive…Self-interest is the major motivation of many altruistic acts (one helps a person in distress to relieve one’s own discomfort or guilt at seeing that person’s pain), but some altruistic acts are motivated solely by a perception of the other person