Consistency in Cognitive Social Behaviour

An introduction to social psychology

C.J. Mower White

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317530510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Social psychology remains unbalanced as long as we study human behaviour exclusively 'from the outside', leaving out of account people's own reasons for acting as they do. Originally published in 1982, the result of the author's emphasis on the cognitive dimension is a much more complete and well-rounded textbook of social psychology than had previously been available. Beginning with an exploration of the various models that have been suggested to explain the whole range of social behaviour, the book goes on to argue that consistency – comparability, similarity, congruity – is the principle by which social behaviour can best be explained. It goes into the cognitive processes that determine social attitudes, ascription of certain characteristics to individuals, and the attraction we feel to some people but not others. It also shows how these processes can be extended and affected by group membership.

Consistency is important, the author believes, because it allows the maximum prediction of others' behaviour and guidance of our own. These functions are demonstrated by observing failures of consistency, such as occur in humour and in negative self-esteem, and the author examines these inconsistencies in a final chapter.

1	Cognitive social psychology: what is it, and how should it be done?

1 Social psychology and cognitive social psychology

Perhaps one of the most important and obvious things about people is that they live and interact with each other. The social character of human behaviour is undeniable, and it is only the absence of social characteristics of behaviour which is remarkable; for example, living as a hermit or recluse is more than unusual, and may cause the more conventional to wonder about the sanity of this bizarre way of life. If social behaviour is such a common occurrence, then one might imagine that the study of it (which constitutes social psychology) is a very obvious subject, in that we may know a great deal about it simply by observing our own and each others’ behaviour. To a certain extent this is true; it would be impossible to interact with others effectively without operating, at least some of the time, as a lay social psychologist. If this is so, it raises two points which need discussion before the main subject matter of this book is introduced. First, if we are all reasonably successful lay social psychologists, what is the need for, or function of, the professionals? Second, and more interestingly, how is it that as laymen we are able to be social psychologists? This second question may be expressed differently: what is the nature of those of our cognitive processes which allow us to interact with each other?

The first point could be answered in a number of ways. Professional social psychologists, some would argue, are concerned with a systematic analysis of people’s behaviour as it is influenced by others, and traditionally the method used for such analysis has been experimental. Laymen would scarcely find experimental or even systematic methods feasible. A rather different answer might be that social psychology is an academic subject in its own right, and has no need to justify itself in terms of its application or function. Opposing this view is a now growing trend to consider that social psychology should be directly concerned with problems of human welfare (e.g. Billig, 1977; Ring, 1967). The opinion that social psychology should be applied originated with Lewin (1948), who is also responsible for the experimental and academic nature of the subject. However, later social psychologists (e.g. McGuire, 1965) believed that these different aspects of the subject could not be combined successfully. This problem, and in particular severe criticisms of the experimental method (e.g. Armistead, 1974; Gergen, 1973; Harré and Secord, 1972; Moscovici, 1972; Ring, 1967), has led to a debate within social psychology about the methodology which should be used. Some of the points of this debate, and the alternatives to the experimental method, will be considered later in this chapter.

The second question to be considered really forms the main topic of this book. When one asks how it is that laymen are able to be social psychologists, one is interested in the cognitive processes which take place when a person interacts with, or thinks about, another person, and so makes a prediction about the other’s behaviour. The subject matter, then, of cognitive social psychology is what individuals think about social issues and people (including themselves), rather than their overt social behaviour. The topics which are generally included in a study of cognitive social psychology are the following: attitudes (see Chapter 2); attribution, or how we ascribe certain characteristics to other people or ourselves (see Chapter 3); and attraction, that is, how and why we like particular people, but not others (see Chapter 4). Chapter 5 will consider how these processes can be extended and affected by group membership: that is, how decisions about attitudes, attribution and attraction, are influenced by a person being part of a group of people who may be similar to himself.

2 Consistency in cognitive social psychology

When one considers these topics, there appears to be a simple general principle which has been used by social psychologists to explain them all. This is the notion of consistency. It seems that laymen and professional social psychologists alike expect that the different attitudes a person holds will be consistent with each other, that his attitudes will in turn be consistent with his behaviour, that he may be described by compatible or non-contradictory personality characteristics, and that he will be attracted to others who hold values consistent with his own. Consistency is probably an over-used word in social psychology, and may be taken to mean ‘compatible’, ‘similar’, ‘non-contradictory’, ‘conforming’, ‘inagreement’, or ‘congruous’. These uses will be followed here.

There are several points to be made about the notion of consistency. As already mentioned it has been applied to a number of areas in social psychology and in personality theory. For instance, it sometimes appears that there are a number of personality traits which are similar in meaning and which are often found clustered together. For example, it might be that individuals who are shy are also timid and cautious, whereas those who are extroverted may be neighbourly and chatty. An important point about the idea of consistent clusters of traits (see Hampson, 1982), and about the notion of consistency generally, is that, although the concept of consistency may be based on fact, it is a notion which is exaggerated by the layman in his attempts to interpret and predict other people’s behaviour; that is to say, it may be true that a person’s attitudes are sometimes consistent with his behaviour, but it is likely that as laymen or as psychologists we expect this consistency more often than it is actually present.

A further question, then, must be concerned with the function of consistency, particularly if our expectations of it seldom mirror what is present. It seems that if we are using cognitive processes in order to make our social interactions more efficient, an important use of such cognition will be to predict other people’s behaviour. After all, one cannot be particularly efficient at any activity unless one has some idea about how it is to be done. It is the same when, for example, chatting to a friend; by predicting his possible answers to one’s remarks, one can guide the conversation so that it is pleasant and conflict-free. But what is the foundation for this prediction? This prediction is based on the notion of consistency. Knowing that people have tended to be consistent in their attitudes, values and behaviour in the past, we exaggerate this tendency, and expect them to be so in the future. This expectation allows us to predict not just that people will be consistent, but that they may have particular values and attitudes. Suppose, for example, that your new neighbour regularly takes his dog for a walk each morning. You might be justified in assuming that he is a dog-lover since this attitude would be consistent with his behaviour. You might further assume that it would not induce good neighbourly relations if you were to make loud remarks through the adjoining hedge, to the effect that rabies will soon be endemic among the dog population of this country. This further assumption also involves the notion of consistency and can be readily explained by the Balance theory of Heider (1958), discussed in Chapter 2. These assumptions are likely to guide your behaviour towards the neighbour, and, in turn, to influence the neighbour’s behaviour towards you. For example, if he perceives that you are antagonistic to his dog, then he may be more covert, or more flaunting, in his morning walk, depending on whether he wishes to be friendly or hostile. It may be, of course, that your initial assumption was incorrect: perhaps he is not a dog-lover. Perhaps he keeps a dog because his wife fears burglars or to chase away the rats. This would then be an example of inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour, which in fact is fairly common (see Chapter 2). Nevertheless, your assumptions were based upon consistency, and it is this which allows maximum guidance of one’s own and prediction of others’ behaviour.

The important function of this expectation of consistency is, then, prediction and guidance of behaviour. A second function is related to the first. Since we expect others to be consistent, we value them when they are so. This becomes evident when listening to a person (perhaps oneself) dismiss another’s opinion as ‘inconsistent’, with the implication that it is therefore not worth considering. Only consistent arguments have value, and similarly only people who are consistent in their attitudes, attributes and behaviour are regarded favourably.

This relationship of consistency and value may similarly be applied to oneself. Eiser (1971a) proposed that the tendency towards forming consistent expectations is an attempt ‘to construct reality in such a way that one’s self esteem is preserved or enhanced’ (p.446). This proposal is supported by evidence (Eiser and Mower White 1974a; 1975) that people give more consistent descriptions of statements of opinion about an attitudinal issue when they are able to describe their own attitudes in more positively evaluative terms, so enhancing their own self esteem (see Chapter 2). Thus it seems that by using consistency to guide our own, and to predict other people’s, future behaviour we may also be inducing and supporting our own self esteem.

3 Traditional social psychology and its problems

Traditionally, social psychology has been an experimental discipline, in which the investigator has been interested in the effect of different variables on social behaviour. For example he might be interested in how a person’s opinions may be changed if he listens to people delivering persuasive speeches about a social issue. If such opinion change occurs, the investigator could manipulate certain variables and assess the degree of opinion change. Thus he could investigate the effect of the strength with which an opinion is initially held upon the degree to which it might be changed by the experimental treatment; or he could manipulate levels of involvement in the issue and see how this affected degree of opinion change. Alternatively, he could vary the nature of persuasive speech. Hovland and Weiss (1952) manipulated the credibility of the person delivering the speech, and demonstrated that a highly credible person is more influential in changing opinions than one of low credibility.

While one could not seriously challenge the commonsense nature of such a result, it is clear that experiments of this type pay little regard to the subject of the experiment – that is, to the person whose behaviour is being observed. A series of challenges to this utterly experimental approach began with the work on experimental artifacts and demand characteristics of experiments (e.g. Orne, 1962; Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1969); this work suggested that there may be a variety of confounding factors influencing social behaviour in the restrictive conditions of the laboratory. These factors primarily emerge from the subject himself, in the sense that they may be a product of the interpretation he gives to the experimental situation he is in. For example, subject’s behaviour may be influenced by experimenter’s sex (e.g. Glixman, 1967) and small differences in experimental instructions (e.g. Willems and Clark, 1969).

These criticisms are important because they have caused social psychologists to think more deeply about their methods of investigation and the direction of their discipline. It is therefore necessary to look at the problems traditional social psychology has faced; at some of the suggestions for revising the experimental method; and at the views of those who have proposed non-experimental methods of investigation.

A common criticism of experimental social psychology (e.g. Armistead, 1974; Jahoda, 1972; Moscovici, 1972; Ring, 1967) is that it has deserted its early direction, and no longer pays attention to the investigation of social problems. Jahoda (1972), in advancing this kind of criticism, has claimed that the discipline has confined itself to elegant trivialities. Ring (1967) has criticized the frivolity and ‘fun and games’ values implicit in many experiments, arguing that not only did this approach ignore problems of broad human significance, but that it led to students becoming bored and disenchanted with the subject, and, since a topic was dropped when no longer amusing, a number of areas of social psychology were only partly researched before being abandoned.

Moscovici (1972) argued that traditional experimental social psychology is often far from social in the sense that it is not concerned as it should be with man in society, and nor does it study social behaviour as an interaction between man and society. Instead, it appears to be interested in how a person reacts to social, as opposed to non-social stimuli; or even how people may be differentiated by their personality characteristics. Such studies, he claims, are not social:

The proper domain of our discipline is the study of cultural processes which are responsible for the organization of knowledge in a society, for the establishment of inter-individual relationships … for the formation of social movements … for the codification of inter-individual and inter-group conduct which creates a common social reality with its norms and values, the origin of which is to be sought again in the social context. (pp. 55–6)

Moscovici’s plea is for social psychology to be concerned with the study of communication, since the most important feature of human social behaviour is our use of symbols in social communication. This in turn produces ideologies, which are intricately bound up with communication. It is these two aspects of behaviour – ideology and communication – which should, according to Moscovici, form the basis of social psychology. This is so, since ideologies, produced by communication, initiate new conditions of social life, which in turn produce new types of social behaviour.

Moscovici’s further concern with how social psychology may be a more adequate discipline relates to the role of theories in the discipline. He asserts that what is needed are theories which will allow sets of propositions to be systematized, and which offer new ideas whose worth can subsequently be assessed. Any thought provoking theory, he suggests, would be preferable to none at all, and the proposal of any such theory would be a more acceptable contribution to the discipline than the collection of trivial, piecemeal data from academically respectable experiments.

Finally, he claims that social psychologists must be prepared to abandon their traditionally scientific method and be ready to achieve their aims using a variety of approaches, which may be, among others, mathematical, observational or reflective. At present, the handicap of social psychology, according to Moscovici, is its inability to free itself from respectable science, so making it able to tackle only minor problems.

Other doubts concerning experiments in social psychology have been voiced by Tajfel (1972); these involve the interpretation which the subject makes of the experimental context. The problem, in essence, is that however many extraneous variables, social or non-social, an experimenter eliminates from the experiment, he cannot eliminate subjects’ expectations about what is appropriate behaviour in this particular context. What is of crucial importance here, Tajfel argues, is the social context, embodied in those social expectations which are shared by most or all subjects entering an experiment. Since the social context is concerned with appropriate behaviour, and since ‘to behave appropriately is a powerful social motive’ (p.101), Tajfel considers that social psychologists must be aware that the social context is of prime importance in determining the data of any experiment. It is therefore necessary to realize that social psychological hypotheses cannot be stated in universal terms, because the social context, though it must by definition be shared, is unlikely to be universal. Social psychology should therefore be aiming to establish the values and norms relating to any particular behaviour, and an experimenter must consider who shares them, and in what situations they are relevant.

4 Variations on the experimental method in social psychology

These criticisms of, and problems with, traditional experimental social psychology have in recent years led to a number of variations on the experimental method, and in addition the rejection of experimentation in favour of other means of investigation. This section will consider the variations upon the experimental method which have been proposed; the next section will consider non-experimental methods of investigation.

One approach to the avoidance of the pitfalls of the traditional experiment was proposed by Rosenberg (1969). Although a behavourist, he acknowledged nevertheless that subjects might engage in purposeful activity in an attempt to interpret any situation including experimental situations. He believed that this could be eliminated by improved experimental techniques and by investigating influence processes within the experiment. Thus by experiments about experiments spurious casual factors inherent in the design could be removed.

Unfortunately this approach, though successful in eliminating the more obvious biases of the laboratory, could not remove the possibility that the sheer awareness of being in an experiment might alter subjects’ behaviour. Furthermore, this approach did not deal with the problem posed by Tajfel (1972), that subjects’ interpretation of what is appropriate behaviour is a vital influence on the data yielded by any social-psychological experiment.

A rather different view which has been proposed is that the influence of the laboratory situation is too pervasive for the results to be generalized to other situations, and that in an experiment subjects’ interpretations might be crucial. One of the proponents of this approach was Campbell (1969), who suggested that problems arising from a subject’s awareness that he was participating in an experiment might be avoided by using naturalistic experiments. One such experiment, in which subjects were unaware they were being observed by experimenters, was that of Darley and Latané (1968). This study was concerned with bystander intervention, and used a contrived emergency in which subjects overheard a fellow subject simulating an epileptic fit. The majority of subjects who believed that they were alone in hearing the emergency reported it, while those who thought that they were one of a number who were able to hear it rarely did so. Darley and Latané suggested that di...