Book Report #2

The next two chapters in my book, The Social Animal, Aronson discusses how we live in a society where mass communication is an important approach used in the business environment. In order to grow in size, make profit and be a strong successful business, owners need to reach out to the buyers and convince them that their product is the best choice in the buyer decision process. Companies try to persuade consumers through advertisements on the television, internet, in magazines and newspapers. They may compare their prices to the competitors’ prices to physically show the public they’re cheaper. This is an approach businesses use to persuade consumers to buy their product. Aronson whom identifies himself as a social psychologist, takes a psychological approach and conducts several experiments to prove that businesses are capable of presenting their product in certain ways can actually influence the publics’ buyer decision process.  For example, an experiment conducted was proving the point that the more familiar one is with a product, the chances of them purchasing will be increased. The company Aronson studied is A&W Root Beer. They spent two week designing and $1 million worth of television advertising. With repeatedly seeing commercials on TV, A&W boosted their share of the market from 15 percent to 50 percent after 6 months of advertising.

While reading Aronson talk about his experiments he conducted it made me think of the article we read in class called Should This Team Be Saved? When doing our case analysis my partner and I were thinking of ways we could save the team. We came up with a method of persuading the members of the group to works efficiently as possible. Our method was composed of incentive ideas the members would receive within the company. We used persuasion ideas such as bonuses, salary increases, and promotions within the company. By offering these incentives we believe the team would have been successful with their product, Ageless Vigor.

The second chapter I read was discussing social cognition. According to wespace.ship.edu, social cognition is defined as “the study of how people make sense out of themselves and others. It focuses on how people think about other people and how they think about others and themselves.” That is, we usually have a first impression the first time we meet someone. Generally, if someone is clean cut and nicely dressed we will assume they are very successful and vice versa. Aronson describes this in the book as stereotyping and states “once we categorize a person or and event, we base our expectations about future interactions on the accompanying stereotypes.” (140) Once we have “stereo typed” and individual that is our foundation of what we expect from them.  Say for example we are working in a group and two members don’t necessarily get alone for some reason. It could be that they have formed this attitude because the other member failed to meet a deadline for a project. If working together in the future, you might view to them as lazy and not able to work efficiently therefore you don’t expect much from them.

The other half of this chapter is discussing how we categorize people into two groups: the “ingroup” and “outgroup.” Ingroup people are ones that you are surrounded by. Typically you have the same ideas, beliefs, and interests when working together. An outgroup is the complete opposite to ingroup. Outgroups are people that you do not necessarily agree with on certain aspects. Arguments are common between what you belief in and what they believe in. While reading about the two groups a process that we have done in class and read about numerous times is the best way to solve problems between these two groups. This process is known as negotiation, which allows problems to be discussed until an agreement is made. In class we practiced the negotiation process with the Pemberton activity. In pairs of two we had to decide if we wanted our store to stay open or closed. The trick to this was another local store had to make the same decision. Our total earnings were going to be based off whether our competition was going to be opened or closed. Twelve rounds were played and at the end of each week we were allowed to negotiate with our competition to work out a plan to maximize our revenue. My partner and I agreed with our competitors that we were going to be closed saving each other losses in sales. In the end we learned that sometimes negotiation is not always the best choice in the business setting. The other group changed their decision in the last round, allowing them to quadruple their profits for that week.