10 Surprising Social Psychological Phenomena

The human being is a galaxy of motivations, emotions, cognitive distortions (biases), perceptions and elaborations. Its complexity is such that it is not surprising that from time to time it gets stuck. We are not talking about real mental disorders, but psychological phenomena that can occur on a daily basis and yet indicate brain failure.

So, here is this Psychology-Online article in which we will show you a list of surprising social psychological phenomena that you may never have heard of, but have probably experienced at least once in your life.

Index

1. Diffusion of responsibilities
2. drag effect
3. Dunning–Kruger effect
4. Forer effect
5. streetlight effect
6. lombard effect
7. Pygmalion effect
8. Ringelmann effect
9. bystander effect
10. fundamental attribution error

Diffusion of responsibility is a socio-psychological phenomenon that exposes that a person has less likely to take responsibilityof an action when there are other individuals presents. In these situations, the individual assumes that others are responsible for acting.

This is one of the social psychological phenomena that tends to occur in large groups of people in which responsibility is not specifically assigned. The diffusion of responsibilities rarely occurs when the person is alone, but rather happens in groups of three or more people.

Here are some examples of this psychological phenomenon:

• Emergency situations: People feel less of a responsibility to respond or ask for help if they know that others are also observing the situation.
• group assignments: each member assumes the least responsibility for contributing and working to achieve the task or goal. The extension of responsibility is present in almost all groups, but at various levels, and can be mitigated by reducing group size and explicitly increasing the responsibility of each one.

What phenomena does social psychology study? One of them is the drag effect, or effect bandwagon, in which it is considered that a person has certain beliefs only because the majority believes in those same things. This effect is often referred to as herd instinct.

Therefore, it can be said that we humans have a tendency to follow the crowd. In the literal sense, the term bandwagon means "the car that takes the band to a parade". Therefore, the expression "jump on the bandwagon" is used in the sense of "joining an increasingly widespread trend".

If you want to better understand this psychological phenomenon, we recommend you read this article on The Asch Experiment: Majority Influence and Conformity.

he andDunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive distortion in which a inexperienced person and competent in a field tend to overestimate their abilities and to despise experts in the field. As a corollary to this theory, the incompetent are often extremely arrogant.

The forer effect, also called subjective validation effect or Barnum effect, is one of the most surprising social psychological phenomena. Specifically, it describes how a person identifies as his own a generic phenomenon unaware that it can refer to any individual.

Thus, the Forer effect provides a partial explanation for the wide spread of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as some personality tests.

The lamppost effect or street light effect, is a type of observational distortion consisting of look for something where it is easier to find it. This type of research is also called "drunk's search" because of the example commonly used to explain this phenomenon.

The expression was coined by David H. Freedman, but the metaphor dates back to at least 1964, when Abraham Kaplan dubbed it the "principle of the drunken quest." If we talk about examples of psychological phenomena, this one has numerous versions, but they all have the following structure:

• A policeman sees a drunk looking for something near a lamppost and asks him what he has lost.
• "A set of keys," replies the questioned.
• The policeman decides to help him, but after a few minutes of fruitless searching he asks the drunk if he is sure he lost his keys near the lamppost.
• The drunk says no and that he actually lost them in the park.
• So, the policeman asks "Why are you looking for them here then?"
• The drunk replies: "Because it's lit up here!"

Actually, the story of the streetlight effect is related to the human tendency to lead the search for truth along simple paths, avoiding complexity. For example, it's hard to find an object where it's dark, so you often look for places where there's light because the search will be easier.

There are many social psychological phenomena that affect human behavior. Specifically, the Lombard effect is the involuntary tendency from the speakers to increase the intensity of the voice in the presence of a noise background noise that interferes with understanding the conversation.

Effort and change not only affect intensity, but also other acoustic characteristics such as pitch, rhythm, and syllable duration. This compensation has the result that the listener perceives an increase in the sound and, therefore, understands the words better.

As we can see, the Lombard effect is related to real communication needs. Given the this effect is involuntary, is used to detect staining in simulated hearing loss.

The pygmalion effect, also known as the Rosenthal effect, derives from classical studies on self-fulfilling prophecy, whose basic assumptions follow this order:

1. If a teacher believes that a child has less intellectual resources, they will unconsciously treat him or her differently from others.
2. Then, the minor will internalize that judgment and behave accordingly.
3. In this way, a vicious circle will be established by which the infant will tend to act as the teacher had initially imagined.
4. It should be noted that this behavior can be attributed to the fact that, unconsciously, the negative judgment of the teacher will undermine the academic results of the minor, because he will believe that he is not capable of having the performance of the the rest.

In short, this psychic phenomenon exposes that belonging to a social context in which performance is evaluated it can have a psychological affect on boys and girls whose results are not similar to the average. In addition, the fact that the teacher himself gives more credit to the student facilitates the learning of it. On the contrary, if the teacher discredits him, the child may come to believe that he is not capable of meeting the academic objectives.

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for members of a group to become less and less productive as the group grows. This effect, discovered by the French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann, illustrates the inverse relationship that between the size of a group and the extent of the individual contribution of its members in achieving chores.

So Ringelmann studied the relationship between reductions in efficacy or performance efficiency and group productivity when working together on a task. The result of this social psychological phenomenon is that the effort is significantly less when members work in a group than when they work alone.

Furthermore, Ringelmann found that as more people join a group, the group becomes less and less efficient. Ultimately, this undermines the notion that group effort and team participation reliably lead to increased effort on behalf of members.

The bystander effect, also known as bystander apathy or bystander effect. is a phenomenon of social psychology that exposes that people don't offer their help someone in trouble when other people are present.

The probability of intervention is inversely related to the number of viewers. In other words, the larger the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any of them will help. Numerous variables are involved in determining the bystander effect, such as ambiguity, social cohesion and the extent of responsibility.

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute the cause of a behavior as one's own, underestimating the influence of the environment or context. This effect is also described as tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are.

The classic example that is exposed to understand this social psychological phenomenon is the following:

A driver is stuck in traffic because of another driver.

• The first attributes the behavior of the other to his personality, for example, to the fact that he only thinks of himself, that he is selfish or that he is an inexperienced driver. Even so, this does not mean that his behavior is also influenced by external factors, such as example, that he is about to miss his flight, his wife is giving birth in the hospital, or that she has had a bad day. horrible.
• The other driver makes the same mistake and apologizes saying that he was affected by contingent causes, for example, that he's late for his job interview, that he has to pick up his son to take him to the dentist, or that he thinks he's not good driver.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Surprising social psychological phenomena, we recommend that you enter our category of Social psychology.

• Hogg, M. A, Graham, M. v. (2008). Social psychology. Madrid: Pan American Medical Editorial.
• Myers, D. g. (2009). Social Psychology. Milan: McGraw Hill.
• World Open News (2020). 10 little known psychological phenomena of cui quasi tutti abbiamo fatto experienza. Recovered from: https://www.wonews.it/post/10-fenomeni-psicologici