has a psychological term called "the just world assumption". A person believes that he lives in a just world. If someone has misfortune, it must be "there is a reason for it." If a vicious incident occurs, the victim must have done something wrong.
Human beings are used to understanding something with specific thinking, which is our common commonality. Many times we judge a person because of certain behaviors. We believe that we can accurately understand and predict other people's behavior patterns, but this book subverts our cognition.
The author tells us that we think that our performance in one particular situation can predict their behavior in another situation, but the facts can make a large difference. Why is this?
This requires mentioning the three principles of social psychology:
1. Situationalism: That is to say, when trying to make people change their familiar ways of doing things, external group social pressures and restrictions are the strongest inhibitory forces that must be overcome.
2. Subjectivism: To successfully predict someone’s behavior, we must be able to understand the actor’s explanation of the situation.
3. Tension system: An individual's attitude is generally determined by the attitude of group members, because people do not like a state of inconsistent with their peers. When we encounter this situation, we generally change it in three ways. First, try to change other people's opinions and keep our own opinions; second, accept other people's opinions to change their attitude; third, reject other people in the group. This also leads to us being in a nervous system many times.
So what impact does the situation have on people?
1, social impact
first, the herd effect, also known as band float effect , refers to when an individual is influenced by the group (guided or applied pressure), he will doubt and change his own views, judgments and behaviors, and change in a direction consistent with the majority of the group. That is what people usually call "follow the crowd".
For example, anthropologist Robin Dunbar studies the brains of various primates as samples and found that brain capacity is closely related to community size, and primates with large community size have larger brains. This confirms that the social brain hypothesis is more reliable, and that the larger brain evolved specifically to adapt to the skills required in group life. All mental functions such as language, memory, and attention are the result of common cognitive evolution in the knowledge community. Simply put, the human brain evolved with the goal of adapting to group thinking.
We are born to rely on the power of the group to survive. Our information comes from the outside world and from others. The so-called independent thinking is also a judgment made after fully understanding other people's ideas and collecting enough information.
Another example is called the Ash paradigm visual perception experiment. They grouped 7 to 9 people and asked to point out which of the three "comparison" lines in front of the room is the same standard line as long. Everyone answered in order. Of course, there is only one subject here who is a real subject, and it is generally ranked last. Everyone else is accomplice of the experimenter. During the experiment, the researchers told the subjects not to communicate with each other during the experiment and to make independent judgments. The answers of the first three subjects in
are correct, and the fourth subject starts, and the answer given is wrong. When it is the last subject's turn to answer, he chooses to follow the judgment of most people and remain independent. In other words, people blindly follow, and people can relatively easily produce large-scale herd behavior.
Secondly, bystanders intervene. In the 1960s, a woman was attacked in a middle-class area called Qiuyuan, Queens, New York. The attack lasted for 30 minutes. The attackers repeatedly stabbed the woman. The woman shouted for help, and there were at least 38 people watching, but no one reached out to help, and no one even called the police.
Situationist and subjectivist speculation that the failure of bystanders to provide help in this matter and similar events is largely due to the suppression of some important social situational factors. In other words, if they feel that others are not interfering, I will not interfere. Or you may feel that your intervention is not suitable and may even be dangerous, so it is better to avoid it.
2, channel factors
Speaking of channel factors, the most representative thing is the compliance effect. Submission refers to the tendency to do according to the requests of others under the direct requests of others, that is, to accept requests from others and make other people satisfied.
In fact, our general behavior is not based on the free choice of real attitude, but is caused by pressure from some situations. The author mentioned the "traffic threshold" strategy in the book. That is to ask for a small help or commitment first, and then gradually make a bigger request until its true purpose is achieved.
There was an experiment where the subjects were housewives from some middle-class residential areas. The experimenters first came to ask them to do some small things, such as placing small signs on the car windows to remind everyone to drive safely. Most people agree with this kind of small thing.
A few weeks later, the second experimenter visited the housewife I had visited before, and also visited a group of new housewifes as a comparison. This time, the researchers made a little unreasonable request, such as installing a large, rough, obviously ugly "driving carefully" sign in front of the door, and showing them what they looked like.
The results of the experiment were: Among the subjects who initially agreed to place a "safe driving" small sign on the window, 76% agreed to the second experiment, while the control group that had not been visited before, and only 17% agreed.
Researchers believe that small obedience behavior will motivate subjects to adopt attitudes that are consistent with the behavior. In other words, because of the previous obedience behavior, even if more excessive requests are made later, the subjects will rationalize their previous behavior. There are also many people who will obey authoritative figures without hesitation and even perform many harmful behaviors, which can explain the compliance effect.
Generally speaking, there are individual differences among everyone. We cannot predict other people's behavior based on the details of objective behavior. Instead, we need to understand the subjective meaning of the event itself in order to know why people do that; secondly, predicting other people's behavior also requires considering the participants' own understanding of objective events and their views on the relationship between events.
You should know that complete free will is considered an illusion and we cannot escape the influence of the situation. Situations are everywhere in life, and the mutual shaping of people and situations has led to many behaviors in our modern society.
This book is a very good book that allows us to better understand our own and others' behavior, which is also the subtlety of social psychology. This book is worth reading again and again, and every time we read it, we have a different feeling. Therefore, it is highly recommended to everyone.
