1.A.3
Social and cultural forces on behavior
ASPPB's competency statement 1.A.3: Social and cultural bases of behavior (e.g., social cognition, social interaction or relationships, group or systems processes, personality, cultural or sociopolitical psychology, social status)
This statement covers how people explain others' behavior, how groups and situations shape what people do, how personality develops, and how culture and social standing influence experience. Clinicians are subject to the same processes they study: they explain clients' behavior, decide things in teams and assess people whose groups carry stereotypes. Knowing these processes helps a psychologist read behavior in context and avoid errors in judgment and assessment.
Key ideas
- Correspondence bias
- The tendency to infer lasting traits from behavior that the situation could fully explain, also called the fundamental attribution error. Gilbert and Malone traced it to causes such as unawareness of situational constraints and incomplete correction of a first impression.
- Stereotype threat
- The risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group can itself lower performance. Black students underperformed relative to White students on a difficult verbal test framed as diagnostic of ability, but not when it was framed as nondiagnostic, and older adults show a similar effect on memory tests.
- Group polarization
- After discussion, a group's average position tends to move further in the direction its members already leaned. A team that starts mildly cautious can end up very cautious, which matters for case conferences, committees and juries.
- Intergroup contact
- Across 515 studies, contact between groups typically reduced prejudice, and the effect generalized to the outgroup as a whole. Contact under Allport's optimal conditions reduced prejudice further, although those conditions were not essential for contact to help.
- Personality across adulthood
- Traits keep changing after adolescence. In a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, social dominance rose especially between ages 20 and 40, and four of six trait categories still changed significantly in middle and old age.
Worked example
A memory clinic's intake script tells every older adult, just before the recall tests, 'This test measures the memory decline that comes with age.' A psychologist reviewing the clinic's procedures is asked whether the script matters.
- Recognize the risk: the script makes a negative stereotype about aging and memory salient right before a memory task, the condition under which stereotype threat appears.
- Weigh the evidence: in experiments, threat conditions lowered older adults' recall relative to older adults not under threat, and a meta-analysis found the effect strongest with stereotype-based framing, cognitive tasks and testing soon after the framing.
- Consider the consequence: scores lowered by the testing situation could overstate impairment and feed into a diagnosis or an opinion about capacity.
- Revise the procedure: replace the script with a neutral description of the tasks and keep the standard instructions, so scores reflect memory rather than the framing.
How a test is introduced is part of the situation, and the situation can shape the score.
Check yourself
Before a hospital ethics committee discusses a request, most members lean mildly toward approving it. After an hour of discussion, members favor approval far more strongly than any of them did at the start. Which group process does this show most clearly?
Sources
- Gilbert and Malone (1995), The correspondence bias, Psychological Bulletin (PMID 7870861), Abstract
- Steele and Aronson (1995), Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PMID 7473032), Abstract, Studies 1 and 2
- Hess, Auman, Colcombe and Rahhal (2003), The impact of stereotype threat on age differences in memory performance, Journals of Gerontology Series B (PMID 12496296), Abstract
- Lamont, Swift and Abrams (2015), A review and meta-analysis of age-based stereotype threat: negative stereotypes, not facts, do the damage, Psychology and Aging (PMID 25621742), Abstract: moderators (stereotype-based manipulations, cognitive measures, proximal testing)
- Myers and Lamm (1975), The polarizing effect of group discussion, American Scientist (PMID 1147368), Whole article
- Pettigrew and Tropp (2006), A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PMID 16737372), Abstract
- Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer (2006), Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, Psychological Bulletin (PMID 16435954), Abstract
- Darley and Latane (1968), Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PMID 5645600), Whole article (diffusion of responsibility)
- Karau and Williams (1993), Social loafing: a meta-analytic review and theoretical integration, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Definition of social loafing