Switching Routes

Hey everyone!

First off just to get everyone in a good mood here is a song that I like!

The reason I chose this particular song is that I seriously have never met a person who is not a fan of it. Similarity has consistently been shown to make people more likable so I figured I could not go wrong with this choice (Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner, 2008).

But anyway, this week I am talking about routes to persuasion! The two routes are the peripheral route to persuasion and the central route to persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Which of these two routes people will use depends on both their ability and their motivation (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The peripheral route is distinguished by individuals relying on heuristics, rules of thumb, or generally superficial information to arrive at a decision (Chaiken, 1987; Chen & Chaiken, 1999) whereas the central route uses rationality and logic to arrive at a decision and individuals are therefore influenced by the content and strength of arguments when using this route (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

I know I personally would rather be able to say that I always use the central route as I think of myself as someone who is generally thoughtful and has good reasons for the way I act or for what I believe. However, this unfortunately is not always true as I am definitely not always motivated and therefore sometimes use the peripheral route when making a decision.

A good example of me using these two routes was when I was recently hearing about the Southwestern presidential candidates. Originally, I did not care very much who won as, on the surface, I had little investment in the next president of Southwestern as I would be graduating soon (a sentiment I heard echoed by other senior students). I was content to simply side with my friend's evaluations and trust their decisions without much research. However, upon hearing some good arguments from different individuals, including a few professors, I was quickly persuaded to care about who was elected as president as the quality of the president would affect Southwestern's direction as an institution and would also affect how valuable my degree would be in the long term. Upon hearing this, I realized that decision did matter and I became much more involved in learning about the candidates. I read about their accomplishments and qualifications online and listened much more attentively to when others were making an argument for a candidate. Furthermore, I engaged much more actively in discussion with my peers regarding the candidates. My critical outlook on the arguments that were being presented (pro or con) were indicative of my switch to the central route. Therefore, because I became motivated to care about the decision because of my realization that the decision would affect me, I transitioned to a central route when evaluating information related to the candidates. 

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Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M. P. Zanna, J. M. Olsen, & C. P. Herman (Eds.), Social influence: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 5, pp. 3-39). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chen, S., & Chaiken, S. (1999). The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 73-96). New York: Guilford.

Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., & Kirchner, J. (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 889-922.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T., (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Trying something different

Hey everyone!

For the Participant Observer Blog I decided to be a different person for a day! I actually ended up drawing from a several experiences over a few days in order to maximize the types of and number of situations I could try acting differently.

For this experience I decided to generally be more friendly! This trait manifested itself in a number of ways such as me generally being more talkative, using friendly body language, and looking for opportunities to help others. I choose this not because I think I'm unfriendly but because I am generally pretty shy unless I know a person pretty well and I think I could benefit from being more outgoing.

Before I launch into my behaviors and experience, I'd like to introduce some concepts relevant to this social experiment. First off is the self-concept which was proposed by Hazel Markus (1977) and refers an individual's beliefs about themselves. Essentially the self-concept is made up of self-schemas (referred to simply as schemas) which are these beliefs that determine how one interprets information relevant to themselves (Markus, 1977). Traits that matter a lot to the identity of the individual, such as shyness for myself, are referred to as schematic and traits or characteristics that the individual considers irrelevant about themselves are referred to as aschematic (Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987).

With this in mind, it was important for me to change a schematic trait in order to produce an effect that would be the most meaningful to me. In other words, I wanted to try to change a characteristic that mattered a lot to my personal identity in order to get a better idea of what it would be like to have a different trait and behave differently.

My experience over the few days had a ton of relevant examples but I can only talk about a few in depth. One situation where I was really able to try to behave differently was at my restaurant job where I work once a week as a server. Usually at work I tend to hang back and get my work done and only really talk to one or two people for extended periods of time during my shift. For this shift however, I struck up conversations with many other servers and throughout the shift tried to be helpful in small but noticeable ways (like taking drinks or food out). Towards the end of the night I talked at length with a few coworkers, more than I ever had before, and found that I really enjoyed it. Because a lot of this behavior (especially being so talkative) was so different from how I normally acted, I found it very difficult to keep it up just because it was always on my mind that I needed to engaging others in conversations when I had the opportunity. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy talking to others and had fun conversing with them, it was just so at odds with my normal behavior that it was really draining to keep it up for so long. My coworkers really enjoyed me talking more however and definitely joked with me a lot more than usual during the shift. One of them even commented that she noticed that I was in a really good mood that night.

A second example happened immediately that night after work was when I came back to campus and there was a party going on at a friend's apartment. These are definitely not my usual scene as they are filled with people who I vaguely know but I went to this one on a mission, to talk to (at length) at least one person who I don't know. During the party I talked to a few people who I don't know as well and surprised myself by talking to two people who I had never talked to before for a pretty long time. While talking to them I really tried to talk to them for awhile (whereas normally I would probably move onto someone who I know better after a short period of time). In this situation, I really enjoyed talking to some new people for a long period of time and was glad I made the effort to do so.

Another good example was on a later day when I was volunteering for a organization. I was tabling and selling t-shirts for the organization, which is an activity that I wouldn't ever want to do anyways but I did it regardless. I volunteered with another psych major who I didn't know that well but who I had met before and resolved that during volunteering I would talk a lot. During volunteering I talked to her a lot about her internship and job experience as well as my own. During this interaction (and during other interactions where I was trying to be more friendly) I really worked on and was cognizant of my body language. When talking to her, I tried to look at her often and nodded to let her know I was listening. I also smiled and leaned forward, again trying to show an engaged and interested attitude. Normally, in a situation like this, I would not inquire or so easily share so much about myself but I really wanted to try to have positive interactions with the other volunteer. Although something like this could easily be a fluke, I think that the other volunteer really enjoyed talking to me and I think my behavior influenced how she acted (e.g. I encouraged talking and showed my interest in her professional experiences). Again, this was difficult because I making an effort to be very friendly, definitely more so than usual and the experience was a little draining however, positive.

There were a lot of other small examples of friendliness such as me just asking how people were doing and getting smiles in return or making a joke with a HEB cashier but I think these three examples show more of how my behavior affected my day. In each of these three examples I had to ignore or inhibit my natural tendency, which is to be shy and reserved, for a significant period of time but instead make a conscious effort to be friendly, sociable, and interactive. I'm not normally really boring or anything, I just had to make the effort to step out of my comfort zone to see what would happen.

Before each time I was going to enter a situation (such as the three already described) I was pretty anxious as I knew I was going to have to act different from usual. During each event it was usually pretty fun although also fairly exhausting as I wasn't used to acting that way and had to work hard to act differently from usual. Afterward, I was generally pretty happy with how things went as my interactions were all positive and enjoyable (go figure). In sum, even though each experience was somewhat draining, it was definitely rewarding!

Overall, I did like the change in my behavior because I think it produced positive interactions and led to productive discussions. Because my natural inclination is usually more towards the quiet side it was fun to let some of my social inhibitions go and just be more sociable for a little while (and I could always tell myself that I needed to do this for a class which was alright encouragement).

Although, I have only discussed that I was affecting my internal view of myself, I was also clearly affecting my behavior which relates to self-presentation. Self-presentation is an active effort to change or affect behavior in order to influence what other people think of you (Schlenker, 2003). This theory was inspired by Goffman (1959) who said that individuals act out roles and behave as if in a play where we have a certain face that we desire to and make an active effort to maintain. Therefore, this process was largely influenced by my changing this face that I was putting on in social situations. Essentially, I was trying to change how I acted and therefore how other people saw me by behaving in a more friendly manner.

Even though changing my behavior was an active effort, it was clear that both self-concept and self-presentation are very self constructed and the possibility to change them exists. It is certainly not easy to change these things as they have been stable (and generally people are pretty happy with how they have been) for a good amount of time. For me, I had to actively consider how I would normally act, how I desired to act in the upcoming situation, and then (during the situation) act appropriately. However, it was possible to effectively change my behavior.

Going along with the fact that these are changeable attributes, even though they seem so central and innate, I would like to continue working on being more confident in my social interactions with people who I don't know. This was a pretty fun social experiment and overall I was pretty happy with how each experience turned out! Most importantly I'm glad I tried to affect my self-presentation heavily by choosing a trait that was more central to my self-concept, and by doing so, producing the greatest and most meaningful effect.

(Word count: 1550)

Goffman, E. (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday.



Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

Markus, H., Hamill, R., & Sentis, K. P. (1987). Thinking fat: Self-schemas for body weight and the processing of weight relevant information. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 17(1), 50-71.

Schlenker, B. R. (2003). Self-presentation. In M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 492-518). New York: Guilford.

Undesirable Associations

Hey everyone!

While the IATs were incredibly stressful and some of my results were not all entirely encouraging, I think it is definitely good to try use them educationally and realize some underlying assumptions you have. 

First off, here is a great video that many of you have probably seen, but after talking about race so much today I was thinking about culture and remembered this video from a few years ago!

Anyway, I took both the race (more than once to see if my results varied) and gender related to occupation IATs. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was developed by Greenwald, McGee, and Schwartz (1998) and they work by provided you with either a word or picture (depending on which you're taking) and you have to sort it into a correct category as quickly as you can. Specifically with the race IAT, you are shown either a picture of a person's face (their race is either white or African-American) or you are shown an adjective that is either positive or negative (e.g. nasty, joy, peace) and you must quickly press a key that correctly sorts the word or image with the left or right category. Because there are only two categories, half the time the white faces are paired with negative adjectives and the African-American faces are paired with positive adjectives and the other half of the time the pairings are switched. Therefore if both African-American and positive is on the right, if an African-American face or the word joy appears you press the key for the right category (and if a white or negative word appears you press the left category key) as quickly as you can attempting to minimize error. 

Because this task is completed on a computer, the IATs are able to determine millisecond differences in response time and measure ability to associate and sort words and faces accurately and quickly. Therefore, if one is able to more easily (as in more quickly) associate positive words with white faces or, said differently, they quickly associate negative words with African-Americans or take a longer time with positive associations towards African-Americans, they are considered to have a preference for whites (the strength of that preference depends on the difference between the time one can associate negative words and positive words with members of each race).

On the gender IAT I obtained the result of little to no preference towards ones gender and their association with occupational or domestic words. I actively make an effort to think of men and women equally in terms of their career aspirations and think that this result is consistent with my beliefs and behaviors towards groups on this matter. I know that I am very proud of both my mother and father for working for my entire life. Furthermore, I have worked with many women professionally recently through several internships and that may have affected why my results showed no preference (my results may have been different at the start of college which I would not have been thrilled about). I very much hope that this is my “true” attitude as I greatly respect and admire hard workers and wouldn't want to have an underlying association that men are harder workers than women or that I have a primary or initial domestic association towards women.

Additionally, I took the race IAT several times in order to see if my results varied. They did vary but my overall result was not encouraging. I showed a slight to moderate preference for European-Americans. Again, I try to not make associations based on any external characteristic such as race and was therefore unhappy with this association. I had taken the race IAT during high school and obtained a similar result then. While I was unhappy with finding that out a few years ago, I would have thought that I would have made progress in destabilizing that association, as since then, I have have met many African-Americans in many different contexts and have really enjoyed my interactions with many of them. Unfortunately, I apparently have some work to do in continuing to break down my initial snap associations regarding individuals of a different race than mine. Therefore, I don't think of my results as representing my “true” or at least not desired attitude towards African-Americans but probably does accurately reflect some of my quickly made implicit associations which I would like to continue to try to change.

I think it is personally important to continue having diversity and variety in my relationships. Furthermore, I think having diverse relationships is one of the best ways for me fight these implicit biases. Indeed many of the examples I can think of for African-American friends are/were definitely positive, but perhaps not as significant or long lasting as they could have for various reasons. This insight informs how I have thought about stereotypes recently, that being that its is not a one time process to eliminate my biases but is an attitude that has to be challenged by continuing to experience diversity in my life. Therefore, I think my retaking the IAT I acquired insight into how I can personally be effective in continuing to effectively challenge my stereotypes. In sum, although I frequently and actively combat these associations (and have had many positive relationships with African-Americans) I will have to continue to endure and challenge these associations as I want them to diminish or be eliminated.

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Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

That makes (con)sense(us)!

Hey everyone! Sorry for the terrible title (It's late).

This week I'm going to tackle attributions and one theory as to how people make them. As explained by Fritz Heider (1958) attributions are simply explanations for other's behavior and the theory that describes this process is known as attribution theory.

One theory that sprung from Heider's (1958) ideas about attributions is the covariation theory (Kelley, 1967). According to the covariation principle, something only explains (is the cause of) a behavior if it is both present when the behavior is present, but also absent when the behavior is absent (Kelley, 1967). There are three kinds of information that are useful for determining behavior, those being, consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency and these three kinds of information are used to understand and make attributions about an individual's behavior (Kelley, 1967).

Consensus information refers to determining if different people behave or react similarly or differently to the same stimulus (Kelley, 1967). This information allows attributions be attributed more to the situation or to the individual; if consensus is high (i.e. a lot of people respond the same way to the stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus, if consensus is low (i.e. different people respond in a number of different ways to the same stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the individual (Kelly, 1967).

The second type of information is distinctiveness. When deciding about an individual's behavior you would also like to know how they respond to other situations or stimuli (Kelly, 1967). If the behavior is low in distinctiveness (i.e. an individual responds the same way to all situations), their response is attributed to the individual; if distinctiveness is high (i.e. the individual does not always respond in the same way to a variety of situations) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus (Kelly, 1967).

Lastly, consistency information regards determining if the behavior is present every time the stimulus occurs or only some of the time (Kelley, 1967). If the behavior always occurs when the stimulus occurs then the behavior is high in consistency and is attributed to either the individual or the stimulus depending on whether the behavior is also high or low in consistency or distinctiveness; if the behavior is low in consistency (i.e. the behavior does not always occur when the stimulus does) then the behavior may be attributed to other irrelevant factors that relate to the situation and not due to the actual stimulus itself (Kelly, 1967).

As an example of this theory and process, my friend's girlfriend was recently mean to him for an entire day. Mostly she was not very responsive and generally grumpy and resulted in responding in less than nice ways to jokes, etc. When trying to decide the reason for this behavior I asked my friend why his girlfriend was acting this way and he attributed it to her large amount of homework and obligations she had that day. This is a fine explanation but I was not certain that it was the true explanation and the way to better determine if this was the true cause was to examine the three sources of information. First is consensus. Do people usually respond in grumpy ways when they have a lot of work to complete? Not always but that is definitely a common way for people to act when they are stressed, therefore I considered consensus to be high which therefore lended support to the probability that her behavior was due to the stimulus (i.e. her large workload). Next was distinctiveness, or, does this person react to different situations similarly. Generally, this person is in a good mood and is very pleasant to be around, therefore, distinctiveness was high (as they usually act differently) and again, it was likely that her behavior was due to her large workload. Last was consistency, or does this individual always respond this way when the stimulus is present. Well, unfortunately for my friend (because his girlfriend is a go getter and often has a lot of work) his girlfriend basically always responds in this way when she is very stressed, therefore consistency is high and the behavior was not attributed to random irrelevant situational factors.

Because both distinctiveness and consensus were high (and consistency was not low) I agreed with my friend and decided that her grumpy behavior was due to her situation (i.e. the large workload and high stress) and was not a personal factor. 

(Word count: 730)

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 15, 192-238.

Healthy Relationships

Earlier this week I attended a workshop for Healthy Relationships. While I felt that the presentation didn't have a ton of depth it did provide a lot of good information and considerations about healthy romantic relationships.

A main focus was on accepting oneself and how that was basically the most important quality for a good healthy relationship as, if you don't love yourself, how could you ever think that someone else could love you? So, that's was good, sounds like high self-esteem is a good thing. On top of that, qualities such as trust and communication were emphasized. Personally, I think communication is really important and in my relationships that has always been the most difficult thing to accomplish. While its importance was emphasized, I would have liked if the workshop approached more specific instances where communication can be difficult and how to approach those situations.

Lastly, an emphasis was put on communicating in an assertive but respectful manner. I liked this focus because, in line with my importance given to communication, I think it is very important in a relationship to be direct and clear with what you are thinking and feeling about the relationship. Additionally, this reasonably applies to any relationship, not just romantic ones. After the workshop, I found myself reflecting on the fact that I have been somewhat upset with my roommate recently which was silly because I didn't communicate well at all why I was upset (which of course resulted in nothing positive happening regarding the matter). Of course the best way to deal with this was not stewing but being clear with my roommate about what was bothering me and taking steps to address it.

They're smarter than that...

Hey everyone!

Before I start, watch this neat video and (ideally) form a positive impression of me and this blog post. 

Anyway, it's pretty easy to think back on experiences I've had and how I likely formed impressions of people and how that affected my behavior towards that person. Particularly interesting to me is when we have a pretty strongly formed idea about a person that is suddenly challenged and we deny whatever introduced that challenge to our idea about the person. The reason we deny the challenge is because of implicit personality theory which proposes that we have a network of traits that we associate together and therefore, when we know that an individual has one trait, that leads us to infer that they have other traits as well (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Schneider, 1973; Sedikides & Anderson, 1994).

Reasonably this would occur both when we hear a positive or negative trait (or get information) about a person, that information would lead us to assume other traits about a person that are connected with the initial information we obtained. Furthermore, this is why we deny the information that challenges our construction for the person. In other words, when the new information contradicts the current associations with traits and behaviors, we dislike it because we have made the assumption that the person will not act that way or have that trait because it is not associated with the original information we obtained.

A personal example of this happened last year with friend who attends another university. In short, there was a girl who liked him quite a bit and was quite pushy with her affections and he was not interested in a relationship with her (or encouraging affection from her due to the emotional nightmare that would likely result). One time towards the end of the summer, she convinced him that she should sleep over because she was too drunk to drive home despite the fact that he knew that he shouldn't let her in order to not encourage such behavior (I'm not encouraging drunk driving here, just she could have stayed at a nearby friends house, or had someone come pick her up, or whatever).

Now, this dude is usually reasonable and makes pretty good and responsible decisions with things such as school work, how he has fun, but also definitely in helping people with inter/intra personal concerns. In fact, these are central traits to me regarding my friend meaning that they are traits that exert a significant effect in my overall impression of him (Asch, 1946). Because these traits are so important to me, they are even more significant when challenged.

Therefore, upon hearing about his actions I could not believe it. My friend was not one to make decisions such as these lightly. This made me question, how did he end up acting this way when it seemed like such a bad decision? It is easy to see how I would assume that he would not act in such as way because my previous experience with this friend would make me think that he would act in a more responsible manner. For quite some time, I questioned the tale's legitimacy (I heard about it through another friend) as it was not in line with the traits I currently associated with my friend. Even as I became convinced that it was true, I twisted the details to make it consistent with what I thought of my friend such as, “oh, he only let her do that because he was worried for her safety.” In time, I finally had to accept that it happened just as it was told to me, but importantly, I initially strongly resisted the actual sequence of events and all the relevant information.

In sum, I associated a certain way of behaving for my friend and when his behavior did not conform to my associations I resisted the truth of his behavior actually occurring. In the end, his relationship with this girl got all worked out, don't worry. But seriously, it was complicated.

Word count: 638

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Bruner, J. S., & Tagiuri, R. (1954). Person perception. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 634-654). Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.

Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 79, 294-309.

Sedikides, C., & Anderson, C. A. (1994). Causal perceptions of intertrait relations: The glue that holds person types together. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 294-302.

All I do is win

Hey everyone! This week I'm talking about self-esteem. Self-esteem involves an individual's total positive and negative thoughts and opinions about the self (Coopersmith, 1967). Furthermore, self-esteem fluctuates regularly in response to events and experiences that happen to an individual such as receiving a bad grade on a test, getting asked out on a date, or scoring a goal in a soccer game (Heatherton & Polivy, 1991). As we all know, people can vary in their levels of self-esteem with high-esteem being associated with confidence, liking oneself, etc. For an example of two individuals who likely posses high self-esteem see the video below...

While I find this video very entertaining, if you found it annoying or disheartening please see the video at the end to help decompress.

Anyway, one theory as to why humans need self-esteem was proposed by Leary and Baumister (2000). Leary and Baumister (2000) proposed that self-esteem serves as an indication of how we are doing socially and alerts us to when we need to improve (as well as when we do a good job) due our behavior being under the judgment of others. Therefore, it encourages us to feel bad when we experience a negative social interaction and encourages us to modify our behavior in order to gain the approval of others and makes us feel good and behave in a similar manner when we do something that improves our self-esteem (Leary & Baumister, 2000). This would mean that self-esteem makes us more successful (ideally) by helping us to recognize our strengths and weaknesses.

Now, because we know that as humans we need self-esteem and that it serves a function for us (other than just making us feel good) it also makes sense that we would try to preserve it. This can be accomplished in multiple ways but one such way is self-handicapping. Self-handicapping is essentially when people give themselves an excuse or take actions to reduce their performance due to an anticipated failure (Berglas & Jones, 1978). This makes sense because it gives individuals the ability to blame something else (whatever the self-handicap is) for their failure rather than a personal shortcoming or lack of ability.

I know that I especially used to take advantage of this tactic when I was a first year. Upon getting back a test and receiving a grade that was lower than I would have liked, I would rationalize to myself that I am just taking so many courses that I don't have time to adequately study for all my classes. Now this was not true in the slightest as I still had plenty of free time which I liked to use for nonacademic activities. Other times I would complain that I had a headache at the time of the test or that I stayed up late the night before studying and that my low sleep impacted my performance. Of course, the root of the problem was my study habits and not taking responsibility for my work and time management. This pattern continued for my entire Fall semester and it was the Spring semester when I managed to make some changes in my behavior. Essentially I got much better about doing all of my regular work and getting it done on time but before I was able to do that, I was regularly self-handicapping in order to maintain my self-esteem while doing poorly in some courses.

Word count: 530

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Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405-417. 

Coopersmith, S. (1967). The antecedents of self-esteem. San Francisco: Freeman.

Heatherton, T. F., & Polivy, J. (1991) Development and validation of a scale for measuring state self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 895-910.

Leary, M. R., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). The nature and function of self-esteem: Sociometer theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 32, 1-62.