2. Research Methods

Facts, Theories, Hypothesis

A fact is an objective statement usually based on direct observation that can reasonably be accepted as true. A theory is a conceptual model (idea) that attempts to explain known facts and make predictions about new potential facts. These predictions are called hypotheses.

Three Important Lessons

1. Scepticism towards both miraculous claims and reasonable-sounding scientific theories maintains scientific integrity.

2. Careful observations must be made in controlled conditions for results to be taken as having a reasonable reliability.

3. Observer-expectancy effects are those in which the subtle behaviour of the observer indicates how the subject acts.

Research Strategies

There are three main categories of research strategies:

1. Research design, which includes experiments, correlational studies, and descriptive studies.

2. Setting in which the study is conducted, either in the field or in the laboratory.

3. Data-collection, through self-report and observation.

Research Design

Experimentation

Experiments are used to test a hypothesis about a cause-effect relationship between two variables. The variable that is the supposed cause is the independent variable, and the supposed effect occurs to the dependent variable. The independent variable can be manipulated to observe how the effect on the dependent variable differs. When all other variables are constant, it is easiest to observe real effects on the dependent variable and establish causation. People and animals that are studied in a research are called subjects.

Within-Subject Experimentation

In within-subject experiments, each subject is studied within different conditions of the independent variable. That is, many people may participate in the experiment, each tested with the different conditions of the independent variable.

Between-Groups Experimentation

In between-groups experiments, there is a separate group of subjects for each different condition of the independent variable. This usually also includes a control group, for whom the conditions are normal – this allows for data that can be compared against. In between-group experiments, random assignment is used to determine which group subjects will belong to. This helps control against possible confounding variables like age, sex, birthplace, etc. as well as the way people are treated.

Correlational Studies

In some cases, ethical and practical reasons prevent the conducting of experiments. A correlational study is one in which the researcher does not manipulate any variable, but instead measures two or more existing variables to determine relationships between them.

Correlation versus Causation

While it is tempting to treat correlational results as if one variable caused the other, without controlling the variables, it is not possible to determine causation. Causal relationships may go in two directions, or the reverse of what is assumed. There may also be a third, unknown variable which lies at the heart of the observed correlation.

Descriptive Studies

These studies aim to describe the behaviour of an individual or set of individuals, without assessing relationships between variables. These studies may or may not involve numbers. They can be narrow in focus, looking at one aspect of behaviour, or broader, aiming to learn as much about one group or individual as possible.

Research Settings

Laboratory

Conducting research in a laboratory allows data to be collected under controlled conditions. However, the clinical and abnormal atmosphere of a laboratory may have an effect on the subject’s behaviour. The results may not reflect reality.

Field Study

Any research conducted outside of the laboratory is called field research. These settings may include the subjects’ workplaces, homes, consumer areas, or other parts of the subjects’ normal environments. This has the disadvantage of being difficult/impossible to control, but the advantage of providing more reality-based results.

Data Collection

Self-Report

Procedures in which people are asked to reflect and report on their own mental states and behaviour, often done through a written questionnaire or an oral interview.

Observational

Observational procedures are those by which researchers observe and record behaviour without self-report. This type of data collection includes naturalistic observation, when the researcher avoids interacting with the subjects. It also includes tests, in which the researcher presents problems or situations to which the subject must respond.

Statistical Methods

Descriptive Statistics

Score Sets

All numerical methods for summarizing a set of data are descriptive statistics. The mean is the arithmetic average, determined by adding the scores and dividing by the sum of the number of scores. The median is the middle most score, determined by ranking scores from highest and lowest and noting the one in the exact centre. For some comparisons, the variability of a set of numbers must also be determined. When the scores cluster close to the mean, they have a low variability. Standard deviation is the most common measure of variability. The further the scores from the mean, the greater the standard deviation.

Correlation

When both variables of a correlational study are measured numerically, a statistic called the correlation coefficient can be determined. A formula produces a result between +1.00 and -1.00. The direction of the correlation might be positive (+: the increase of one variable causes the other to increase) or negative (-: the increase of one variable causes the other to decrease). To visualize the relationship between variables, a scatter plot may be used. From this, you can see how strong the correlation is and in what direction it goes.

Inferential Statistics

Inferential statistics are necessary to determine how confident a research can be in inferring a general conclusion from data.

Statistical Significance

When two means are compared, p is the probability that the difference is as big or bigger than if the independent variable had no effect and the result was a matter of chance. When the p is less than 0.05%, the results can be considered statistically significant.

Components of Statistical Significance Tests

1. Size of effect— If an effect is large, chances are it is also significant.

2. Number of subjects or observations in the study—the larger the sample, the more accurately the observed mean will reflect the true mean.

3. Variability of data within the group—when the group means are compared and an index of variability is created, it can be determined how different the scores are from one another. The higher the variability, the higher the possible randomness of the result.

Minimizing Bias

Ideally, bias and error should be minimized. Error is the random variability in results and is inevitable in most research. Error can often be measured and corrected for. Bias includes non-random effects caused by extraneous factors. Bias is hard to identify and cannot be corrected for with statistics.

Sample Bias

If members of one group are chosen differently than those in another group, the sample might be considered biased. A sample is biased when not representative of the larger population it is supposed to describe. Random assignment is a method for counteracting sample bias.

Measurement Bias

When a test can be repeated with a particular subject in a particular set of conditions and produce similar results, it is considered reliable. If the scores are greatly affected by the whims of the subjects, the test has low reliability. Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. If a test lacks validity, it is likely biased. Face validity is how valid a test seems to be, according to common sense. Criterion validity is determined by correlating scores with a more direct index of the desired characteristic of study.

Observer-Expectancy Effects

Researchers have wishes and expectations that might affect their behaviour and observations – this is the observer-expectancy bias. If a desire is communicated unintentionally, the subject might pick up on this and behave according to expectation.

Facilitated Communication

An example of observer-expectency can be seen in the development of “facilitated communication”, in which a facilitator would help autistic people type by holding their hands up to a keyboard. At first, it seemed as if the autistic children were truly communicating. However, further research discovered that the facilitators were subconsciously influencing he movements of the autistic child’s finger by the subtle motions of their hand, and the resulting text was not communication controlled by the autistic child.

Avoiding Observer-Expectancy in Regular Experiments

Observer expectations might not only influence the subjects’ behaviour, but also the observer’s observations. To prevent this, the observer can be kept blind (uninformed) about the aspects of the study that might lead them to form biased expectations. Ensuring that they don’t know which group in a between-group study has been exposed to an altered independent variable can keep observer-expectancy to a minimum.

Avoiding Subject-Expectancy

When subjects have expectations, the results of an experiment can be biased. A double blind keeps both the observer AND the subject uninformed of whether they are or are not in a control group, receiving a placebo.

Ethical Issues

Human Research

Three ethical issues must be considered when conducting research with humans:

1. Right to privacy: Informed consent should be obtained before the subjects take part, and they should be informed that they do not have to share information they don’t want to share.

2. Possibility of harm: If a study involves discomfort or harm, the psychologist must determine whether the same hypothesis can be equally tested in a harmless experiment. Subjects must also be reassured that they can quit at any time.

3. Deception: In some experiments, the independent variable involves a lie. Some believe that deception is intrinsically unethical and undermines truly informed consent. Others justify deception as necessary for the study of certain psychological processes.

3. Perception & Attribution

Social Perception

Social perception is the process of collecting and interpreting information about another person’s individual characteristics. Research by Asch shaped how psychologists understand perceptions of others. Asch provided participants with a list of adjectives describing a person people were supposed to meet. One list included a number of adjectives, one of which was “warm”. The other list included the same adjectives, but with “cold” instead. The change of this one word strongly influenced the participants’ perceptions of the person described. This suggests that warmth/coldness is a central trait, a dispositional characteristic viewed by social perceivers as integral to the organization of personality. Traits that do not have such a strong influence on a person’s perception of personality are called peripheral traits. When actually confronting a person after being given a list of adjectives, people will also perceive them differently with the inclusion of a word like “warm” or “cold”.

The Primacy Effect and Social Perception

The order of the listed traits also impacts perception, because the primacy effect , the tendency for earlier information to be more influential in social perception and interpretation, makes the first listed adjective more prominent.

How We Look at Others

People don’t just form a summation of people’s traits in their head, but actively construct meaning based on their ideas about how personality characteristics interact. People have implicit personality theories that help them make sense of others. The concept that people integrate social information to find a pattern is called the configural model. On the other hand, the cognitive algebra model suggests that we average bits of social information, so that our end impression is positively or negatively skewed based on the amount and strength of the positive and negative adjectives provided.

Critique

These two models (configural and cognitive algebra) rely on the idea that we form our social perceptions from descriptions. In fact, we get to know people in many ways. We may become friends with a person over email or text messaging before we ever meet them in reality. This gives us an impression based on words, but appearances also influence us. People with “baby face” traits are seen as less dominant and warmer than people with “mature” looking features. Adults with young-seeming gaits tend to be perceived as more energetic. Asch’s procedure also doesn’t allow for the interaction – our impression of a person changes based on how our interaction with them manifests. If we make an assumption or impression about a person before the interaction, it may cause us to act in a way that accommodates that impression, eliciting from the other person the response we expect.

This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy, when an originally false expectation leads to its own confirmation. If you think someone’s disagreeable, you may be angry or short with them, causing them to be disagreeable.

Attribution

There may be a specific area in the brain that helps us detect movement patterns that indicate animate activity and intentional behaviour. Attribution theory provides a set of ideas about how these causal inferences are made, which we use when observing the actions of others. This is called causal attribution. Attribution researchers look at how observers explain an actor’s behaviour towards an entity. In some cases, the actor and the observer are the same person. For instance, if you see your friend (the actor) yell at her mother (the entity), you might attribute her actions to her disagreeable nature, to her mother’s provocation, or to something else entirely. Heider is credited with coming up with attribution theory. This theory suggests that people pay more attention to personality dispositions in attributing causes to the behaviour of others. This tendency helps people predict the future behaviour of that other person, and allows them to form an organized view of that person.

Correspondent Inference

Correspondent inference theory suggests that observers infer correspondent intentions and dispositions for observed behaviour under certain circumstances. In other words, we tend to guess that people’s intentions and dispositions are related to their behaviours. Actors can be assumed to have behaved in a way that would help them reach a desired goal or result. Through the process of analysis of non-common effects, observers can infer intentions behind actions by comparing the consequences of the behavioural options that were available but rejected. People are more interested in finding the cause of unusual events, which they explain by comparing the circumstances of the unusual event to those of a normal situation. Observers tend to overestimate personal disposition and underestimate situation when attributing a cause to an actor’s behaviour. This is called the correspondence bias.

Covariation

Correspondent inference cannot always lead to the correct attribution. Covariation theory suggests that observers work out the causes of behaviour by collecting data about comparison cases. Causality is attributed to the person, entity, or situation, depending on which of these factors covaries with the observed effect. Essentially, we work out what caused something by looking at what factors are consistently present when that thing happens. In covariation theory, the observer looks for distinctiveness information, evidence relating to how an actor responds to different objects under similar circumstances. Do they always act that way? Have I seen them do this before?

Consistency information tells you whether the actor has behaved similarly across situations. Consensus information tells you whether different actors behave the same way towards the object. In situations with low distinctiveness, high consistency, and low consensus, observers not only tend to attribute the behaviour to personal characteristics of the actor, but also experience an activation of the part of the brain responsible for detecting intentional behaviour. Consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness form a triad of useful information called CCD. While Kelley’s theory is interesting and systematic, people are not usually so analytical and rigid about information collecting when coming up with attributions.

The Discounting Principle

We often need to make attributions when CCD information is not present. Kelley argued that we use causal schemas to fill in the missing information. Causal schemas are either abstract representations of general causal principles or domain-specific ideas about cause and effect. For instance, the discounting principles suggests that observers rule out other possible causes when they already know of factors that cause the observed effect. When there are multiple causes that could have produced the effect , making the effect easily produced, observers use the multiple sufficient causes schema. If the effect is hard to produce, observers use a multiple necessary causes schema, meaning that more than one cause must be present for the effect to occur.

The Augmenting Principle

The opposite of the discounting principle is the augmenting principle, which is something of a process of elimination. The assumption is that if there is an inhibitory influence working against an observed effect, the causal factors must be strong enough to overcome that influence.

Knowledge & Expectation

Tests have shown that people will use CCD information if it is provided to them and if it is the only information available, but when given the opportunity to seek it out themselves, they won’t necessarily do so. Instead, they rely upon their own knowledge about why an actor might behave in a given manner, based on personal experiences and expectations. People use their expectations as a reference point for their attributions. People don’t ask themselves, as Keller would suggests, why something would happen instead of it not happening. They ask why something would happen instead of the normal thing happening. This model is called the abnormal conditions focus, because people look for what has made a difference to the norm – the difference between the actual and the anticipated event sequence. People have cognitive scripts that tell them how particular kinds of circumstances tend to unfold.

Causation and Covariation

One of the problems of covariation theory is that just because two things occur at around the same time does not mean that one causes the other. Correlation does not imply causation. Covariation learning must be supplemented with the innate predisposition to attribute observed effects to an unobservable causal power of an object or event. We assume that covariation reflects hidden processes.

Achievement and Attribution

Weiner developed an achievement-related attribution theory that suggested that our attributions to achievements directly impact future expectations. Success and failure can be caused by internal or external forces, stable or variable forces, and controllable or uncontrollable forces. Weather, for instance, is external, uncontrollable, and stable. Skills are controllable, stable, and internal.

Encouraging certain forms of attribution can be more motivating than others – children who are told they did well because they are smart (internal, stable, uncontrollable) are less likely to try difficult tasks than children who are told they succeeded because of their effort (internal, unstable, controllable). Children in the second group feel they still need to try and that their effort will pay off. General mindsets about success can result from being repeatedly given a particular attribution by parents and teachers. Children in the first group get a fixed mindset that can stunt achievement, while children in the separate group get a growth mindset, leading to success.

Depression and Attribution

Learned helplessness theory suggests that depression is the result of learning that outcomes are uncontrollable, whether they are positive or negative. This theory extends the chart above, adding global and specific to the mix of variables. For if a person attributes uncontrollable events to internal, stable factors, and then globalizes that attribution “I’m unattractive nobody will ever love me”, hopelessness will result. This negative thinking style predicts subsequent depressed episodes. The theory of depressive realism suggests that people who are depressed lack the illusions of happier people to protect them from reality. Evidence shows that depressed people are more accurate in their ratings of their own social interactions. However, this is disputed as observer raters tend to be harsher than conversation partners, making more negative judgments. Negative beliefs may also act as self-fulfilling prophecies, causing a person to act in less socially adaptive ways.

Misattributing Arousal

Misattribution theory suggests that we may not feel depressed because we ARE depressed, but because we misattribute physical and situational cues as depression. For instance, it has been found that people attribute their physical arousal according to the situation – they may, having just experienced a fright, encounter an attractive person and misattribute their physical activation for sexual arousal. This theory was developed by Schachter and Singer, and has been disputed. Most appraisals of emotional situations tend to determine our automatic and emotional responses, leading most arousal to be unambiguous.

Biases

Attributional biases are systematic distortions in the sampling/ processing of information about the causes of behaviour. For example, the correspondence bias suggests that people tend to attribute the behaviour of others to their personality characteristics rather than to situational factors, even if the cause is really situational. Situational factors are generally more difficult to detect, and we allow our expectations about the behaviour of others to distort our perspective. The false-consensus bias causes us to mistakenly believe that others share our own experiences, tendencies, and perspectives, causing us to conclude that personality causes them to behave differently than we would. When processing demands are high, we will often fail to correct these gut inferences. These biases are a tool for quick judgment and assessment of behaviour, and if we are motivated to think about the actual causes of a person’s behaviour, we are able to shift to non-automatic, controlled reasoning processes.

Using the Correspondence Bias

The correspondence used to be called the fundamental attribution error, but it has been found to be less pervasive than previously thought. When people are asked to interpret a situation and not a person tend to find situational attributions automatically. According to Trope and Gaunt’s two-stage model of attribution, the first stage of recognizing behaviour already incorporates personal and situational information. In a cognitively challenging situation, the tendency is to fall upon whatever information is most salient. Salience is an attention-grabbing property of objects or events depending on perceptual features like vividness or perceiver sensitivity. Correspondence bias also varies across cultures, with more collectivist cultures tending towards situational attribution, perhaps because they are more sensitive to situational influences.

Actor-Observer Difference

The actor-observer difference is the tendency for people to explain their own behaviour more often in situational terms and the behaviour of others in dispositional terms. This may be because people have more information when assessing their own behaviour, including knowledge of previous situations in which they behaved differently. When we evaluate others, we have often seen them in only a restricted variety of situations. It may also be a matter of attention – when we look at other people, we try to understand them. We take ourselves for granted and tend to focus outward, on the situation around us. This bias may also have to do with the way the English language sets up a sentence so that subjects are responsible for action verbs, making us look at the subject (the person) as the cause.

Self-Serving Biases

Self-serving attributional biases are motivated distortions of attributions that help protect self-esteem. One such tendency is the self-enhancing bias, in which accomplishments are attributed to internal traits like personality and hard work. The self-protective bias occurs when failures are attributed to external situations. Interestingly, competing motivations can lessen the amount of self-enhancement if the person feels that demonstrating a self-serving bias would make them seem like a show-off or cause them to have to live up to an unreasonably high standard. Some situations need to be assessed more accurately so that improvements can occur in future. Depressed people adopt the opposite biases to what is seen in the self-serving pattern – they take the blame for negative events and don’t take credit for positive events. Self-serving biases are also weaker in more collectivist cultures.

Motivation / Cognition

In the 1970’s, there were two opposing opinions on the self-serving qualification of the self-serving bias. Those who believed it was self-serving to distort reality in these biases were on the motivational side, those who believed that the distortion is just a cognitive short-cut that can lead to faulty conclusions were on the cognitive side. Miller and Ross argued that self-serving biases arise because effort covaries with success but not with failure, meaning that if trying hard doesn’t help, the problem is likely in the task. Most psychologists today agree that self-serving biases are cognitive shortcuts, but also admit that these biases are influenced by motivational factors as well.

Accuracy of Attribution

The point of attribution is to allow a person to make predictions about the future. Biases are often caused by the application of a usually valid rule to a special circumstance that does not fit into the rule. Even when an individual’s attributions are biased, this may be because the conclusions drawn are more useful to the person and do allow them to predict behaviour. This is especially true when we judge people who we only tend to meet in one type of context (parties, for example). If the behaviour only exhibits itself at parties, that is still a useful predictor.

Intentional Behaviour

The availability of information about an actor’s intentions overrides other factors in attributing attribution. People don’t just look for whether an action is caused by situational factors or personal characteristics; they also look for a motive. When judging a person’s behaviour, an observer will judge differently according to different motives – some motives are moral, others are not, yet the actions may be identical and situationally-driven.

The Naïve Scientist

The naïve scientist model suggests that people process social information by formulating a theory and using data to test their hypothesis, enabling them to predict and control behaviour. It is an assumption that has huge limitations – we do not always look at situations scientifically. Sometimes, we try to solve practical problems. Instead of collecting all the data and testing hypotheses, we may just look at data we expect will be relevant to our conclusion. We look at situational and personal characteristics, compare them to our own experiences. When explaining ourselves to others, we will tailor our attributions to the person. For instance, we may explain to a friend that we’re upset because they brought up a certain subject, but explain to a therapist that we’re upset because the touchy subject is an emotionally sore spot for us. The first explanation is external, the second is internal. Both factors can be true at the same time, but our choice on which to use depends on our audience. Another challenge is that people tend to use less situational explanations when asked for their answer “in particular”, and they also tend to assume that the purpose of a psychological study is to find out about personality, further skewing results towards personality-based explanations.

Social Perception and Reality

Further models of social perception (beyond the naïve scientist model) include the lawyer, the tactician, the pragmatist, and the politician. There are many strategies for dealing with social information. Social perceivers are automatically attuned to certain cues and may tend to ignore or fail to see other information. We also can tell if someone is doing something intentionally by the subtle characteristics of their movements. Attribution and social perception form the background of cultural norms, and sharing a social environment tends to lead to consensus on social perceptions. It depends, in part, on the information we can glean from others, their body language and expressed language.

Social Perception: Automatic and Controlled

Early theories of social perception address thinking about the actions others in ways that are methodical and considered, as if the person we are considering is a puzzle. We tend to more often make snap judgments and quick assessments of others. We often use simple perceptual cues as a way to confirm stereotypes or assumptions based on experience.

4. Social Cognition

Defining Social Cognition

Social cognition is concerned with how we think about ourselves and others, and how the processes this involves impact our judgments and behaviour in social contexts.

Judgment and Jumping to Conclusions

In the study of social cognition, there is a divide between two types of cognitive processing – the quick, automatic process, and the intentional, controlled process. These two fall under the category of dual-processing theories. The automatic process is one that occurs unintentionally, effortlessly, and without interfering with other cognitive processes active at the same time. The controlled process, on the other hand, is intentional, requiring effort and conscious awareness. The automatic process involves categorization, the activation of schemas, and the use of mental shortcuts. Schemas are cognitive structures/mental representations made up of our previously learned information about the objects or people in question, allowing us to categorize, make predictions, and define them. Heuristics are the mental tricks, the rules of thumb we use to arrive at judgments that may not be effective in all cases. These include stereotypes.

Automatic Processes

Stereotypes are the cognitive constructions that hold our knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies about particular social groups. Processes are automatic when we don’t have to think about them, when they’re easy and instant. When we’re multi-tasking, we are more likely to depend on automatic processes because our attention is divided, and because controlled processes take concerted effort.

Social Categorization

Categorization is something we do to help ourselves process information. We tend to group objects and people into discrete groups based on some characteristic that links them. When categorizing people, we can sometimes apply stereotypes to a general population without considering individualities. Categories can be useful, making large amounts of information easier to process. They simplify things.

Studying Automatic Stereotypes with Priming

In studying whether the process of stereotyping is automatic, researchers used the priming paradigm. Priming is the process of activating a stimulus that facilitates the subsequent processing of another stimulus (making use of word association, for instance). When a particular word or image is presented, all bits of knowledge associated with that word or image become easier for the brain to access. If I show you a picture of a dog, you’re more likely to think of the word “collar” as meaning a dog collar rather than a shirt collar.

One measure of accessibility is the lexical decision task. This measures how quickly people classify words as real or nonsense – quicker responses in certain word categories suggest accessibility. A study on automatic stereotyping involved providing one group with ethnic-related primers an another with fewer ethnic primers, then having them judge an ambiguous story for hostility on the part of the non-white character. Those in the ethnic-primed group judged more hostility than the non-ethnic-primed group, suggesting that the pointing out of ethnicity brought to mind automatic stereotypes about hostility and minorities. This automatic stereotype was present in most people studied, regardless of how they consciously felt about such stereotypes.

Schemas

As mentioned before, our schemas are cognitive structures that help us quickly process information. When we encounter a situation, we automatically encode that situation, translating what we see into a format that we can easily digest and store in our minds. This can be useful in dangerous situations, when a speedy response may mean the difference between life and death. However, the conclusion we leap to is not always correct. In an ambiguous situation, our activated schemas may bias us to interpret things in line with stereotypes. This explains the results of the Weapons Identification Task in which participants are shown images of black men and white men in different settings, half holding guns and half holding harmless objects. Participants would choose between pressing a “shoot” button or a “don’t shoot” button. They were found most likely to shoot the black men most often, biased to expect black men to be more violent and carry guns.

Schemas hold many types of knowledge about their categories – woman has a sub-categories business woman and mother, for instance, each with their own characteristics. We rely on schemas, especially subtype schemas, because they help us deal with differences in a way that can still be categorized. We use primed schemas readily, and schemas that our consistent to our current mood. Most importantly, we use schemas relevant to the control of our own outcomes, like power and hierarchical schemas.

Cognitive Heuristics

The representative heuristic is a mental shortcut in which something or someone is assigned to a category based on their similarity to a typical member of that category. Base rate information is information about the frequency with which certain categories are represented in the general population. If referenced appropriately, base rate information would inform our judgments, yet when shown an exemplar who seems to contradict that information, we will be more influenced by representativeness information. Another shortcut is the availability heuristic. In order to deduce the frequency or likelihood of an event, we draw upon information about how quickly related information comes to mind. For instance, if most of your friends are at the top of their classes in University, you may assume that most people are very smart and studious.

However, you’re drawing from a personal sample of some of the smartest and most studious people around, and thinking it’s the average.

The anchoring/adjustment heuristic is a shortcut in which we place weight upon initial anchors,standards/schemas, (we see a speed limit sign saying “20”) and not sufficiently adjust away from these anchors (we later sit as jury on a trial of a rapist, and lean towards a sentence of 20 years).

Why Judgmental Heuristics Occur

We are cognitive misers. We are often limited in processing ability, so we take shortcuts. For instance, the representative heuristic is used because we neglect to account for sample size in making judgments, using only a few exemplars out of people we have met. We also don’t always check our sources, relying on the judgment or assessment of someone ignorant rather than looking for a better source. The availability heuristic involves an assumption that the information we can easily retrieve is related to the volume of exemplars out there. We feel that if we can quickly come up with an example it must mean that examples are frequent. The feeling of how difficult something is to retrieve can matter as much as absolute numbers – if we’re asked to come up with 12 examples of our own assertiveness and can only think of 4, we feel like we’re unassertive. If asked to come up with 6 examples and we can only think of 4, we feel like we’re much more assertive.

The anchoring/adjustment heuristic occurs because we fail to properly adjust from irrelevant anchors. Why? We often will create our own anchor points, influenced by our motivation and ability. Adjusting from our anchor point requires effort, so we will often cheat and not adjust far enough. This is especially the case when our need for cognition (NFC) is low, for instance, when we’re drunk or cognitively busy with another task.

Schema Activation

In a study on priming, words pertaining to stereotypes about the elderly (seen subliminally) led to elderly participants walking slower than they had before seeing those words. The priming of schemas can influence our behaviour. It can also influence goal setting, as when a primer like the smell of cleaning fluid makes people more likely to set the goal of cleaning their house. This happens because of how we process information. First, we think or perceive something, which becomes the input. Traits, goals, and behaviour representations mediate this information, and we produce an output (walking more slowly). Traits are the adjectives we use to categorize different forms of behaviour, often learned in childhood. They have a strong unconscious effect on social behaviour. Goals give actions a long-term purpose, motivating us towards desirable end-states. These are learned through our experience of the positive and negative consequences of behaviour. Activating traits and goals using priming triggers the associated behaviour.

Overcoming Heuristics and Controlling Cognition

Stereotype De-activation

Implicit goal operation is when a goal can affect stereotype activation. If you want to overcome stereotypes, you are motivated to behave in a different way. Priming can elicit implicit goals, and people primed with a creativity goal will be less likely to think in automatic ways that lead to stereotyping. A wide range of target and perceiver-related factors influence and moderate stereotype activation, making the problem less bad than originally believed. There is evidence that category activation is goal dependent.

Reducing the Impact of Stereotypes

When aware of the tendency to stereotype, when we are not motivated to apply stereotypes, and when we have the cognitive resources to control our judgments, we are able to overcome the tendency.

Forming Impressions

Our impressions of other people are based on our knowledge of the group to which that person belongs, and to individuating information. This includes knowledge about a person‘s personal characteristics that is not derived from group membership and allows us to see a person as an individual. According to Fiske and Neuberg’s continuum model of impression formation, people’s evaluations of others fall on a continuum between category-based evaluation and individuating evaluation. Category-based responses take priority, and the move on the continuum towards individuated responses involves interpersonal, motivational, and intentional factors. We may make a concerted effort to get to know a person after we categorize them. This occurs if we have more than a passing interest in the person. When our interest is great, we may go beyond the trouble of subcategorizing and see the person as a true individual.

Goals that Elicit Individuated Processes

Goals more likely to elicit the process of seeing people as individuals include how important getting to know that person is (outcome dependency), whether the judgment will have to be justified to others (perceiver accountability), and whether the perceiver is asked to be as accurate as possible (accuracy-set instructions). However, despite the motivation to make an individuated judgment, if we are cognitively overloaded we will still make errors. Research suggests that the extent to which we can go beyond stereotyping judgments depends on the interplay between motivational and attentional factors.

Replacing Responses

In Devine’s dissociation model, she suggests that two different processes occur independently, and that one does not inevitably follow the other. Automatic stereotyping might not lead to stereotypic responding. Just because we have the stereotype, doesn’t mean we act upon it. If the activation of the stereotype conflicts with our internalized beliefs, we will engage in control processes that help us limit the effects of the automatic stereotype. This does, however, take both time and a conscious realization that the stereotype has been triggered.

Suppressing Responses

Does stereotype suppression work? Can we try to prevent an activated stereotype from impacting our judgments of a person in that group? In trying to suppress thoughts, our intentional operating process (IOP) tries to locate thoughts that will help distract you. Meanwhile, the ironic monitoring process (IMP) searches for evidence of the unwanted thoughts. This monitoring is counter-productive, as it keeps those thoughts in the working area of our minds. IOP is cognitively demanding, but IMP is automatic, so we end up succumbing to IMP when cognitive effort tires out. With stereotype suppression, this can create a rebound effect whereby suppression attempts fail and the impact of the stereotype is greater than it would have been in the non-suppression scenario. This rebound effect is not just present in the suppression of stereotype-related thoughts, as when jurors will be unable to fully suppress a defendant’s confession or a witness’s damning words when they are told to discount them. The problem that some studies into suppression have is that they have mostly dealt with stereotypes that people don’t feel an inherent need to suppress, as they do with more stigmatized groups. Rebound effects are weakened when a non-prejudiced participant is dealing with a stigmatized group, but are just as strong if the participant is prejudiced. Stereotype rebound is also less pervasive in collectivist cultures, possibly due to a cultural emphasis on maintaining harmony.

Social Perception vs. Social Behaviour

While evidence originally seemed to support the idea that the activation of stereotypes is inevitable, we have seen that they can be activated and not acted upon. Social perception does not necessarily cause social behaviour.

5. Aspects of the Self

The Social Self

The expressed self is experienced differently in different social contexts. We take a role in actively constructing the self, by choosing specific social environments, friends, appearances, and group memberships. Self-construals are the views and knowledge about oneself, shaped through an active construal process that plays out in one’s interactions with their social environment, motivated by the desire to see oneself as their ideal. The dynamic system of self is a structure made up of beliefs, values, feelings, expectations and goals.

Self-Knowledge

Introspection and Reflection

Among the many routes to knowing oneself is the process of thinking about oneself. Introspection – the process of observing and examining one’s own internal mental and emotional states. This method of obtaining self-knowledge is flawed not only because of the automatic element of much of our cognitive processing, but also because of personal biases and wishes that make it hard to judge ourselves accurately. People do not know how their minds work and when they feel like they do know, they’re often simply rationalizing their thoughts and behaviours.

Introspection can reduce the accuracy of self-knowledge, as analytical justifications can skew the often more accurate intuitive feeling. People are also motivated to keep unwanted thoughts and experiences out of their memory and consciousness, so true self-reflection is less possible than you might think. You might not want to see yourself as racist, and yet you might, in practice, discriminate against and fear minorities. Finally, people tend to focus more on the positive aspects of the self, entertaining illusions of their own control, success, and superior judgment. These illusions protect us and help us cope more actively, but do cloud our self-view. Introspection might help us know what we think and feel and help us gain understanding, but remains very flawed.

Self-Perception

Bem’s self-perception theory suggests that when people’s inner states are ambiguous, they can infer those states by observing their own behaviour. When there is not sufficient situational pressure for us to behave in a certain way, we tend to look for internal reasons why we might be behaving in that way. If your roommate forces you to clean, then you might still hate cleaning. If you clean on your own, you might conclude that you enjoy the activity. This is the difference between an extrinsic motivation and an intrinsic motivation. An extrinsic motivator might be money or social pressure, and an intrinsic motivator might be the pleasure of the activity or the challenge of the task. Interestingly, if we start being rewarded extrinsically for an intrinsically motivating activity, it will undermine our enjoyment.

For instance, someone who paints as a hobby and then starts selling their work may find themselves less motivated to paint any work that will not be sold. Independent judges tend to judge non-commissioned work higher than commissioned work. Rewarding children for receiving high grades may also be counter-productive if the children are highly intrinsically motivated.

Attachment and Social Appraisal

Another important source of self-knowledge is our interactions with others. The first of our relationships is our bond with our primary caregiver, usually our mother. Attachment theory suggests that if this relationship is consistent and the caregiver is consistently responsive, we develop a secure attachment style and form the beginnings of a positive self-concept. Neglect, unresponsiveness, and abuse can lead to negative self-concept and low self-esteem. As we grow up, we internalize other people’s appraisals of us, letting their reactions to us act as a mirror that shows us our looking-glass self. These reflected appraisals become integrated into self-concept and guide future behaviour. Of course, how we believe others’ see us is not necessarily how they actually see us. We are notoriously bad at guessing how others appraise our actions. This is especially true when the opinions of others are different from our own self-appraisals. We are often not receptive to negative or discrepant feedback from others.

Social Comparison Processes

Festinger’s social comparison theory suggests that one compares oneself with others in order to evaluate one’s own abilities and opinions. How do you know you’re fast without racing against other people or knowing the average speed of a person? We compare ourselves to others in order to see where we stand. This is most useful when the comparison is with other people who are similar to ourselves in relevant ways. Comparing oneself to someone more skilled (upwards social comparison) will either provide a role model or make one feel inadequate. Comparing oneself to someone less skilled (downwards social comparison) will make one feel better. This explains why, when graduating from high school and suddenly being surrounded by university students, many freshmen feel a drop in their self-esteem. They are now comparing themselves with a higher average of student achievement.

Self-Regulation in interpersonal Relationships

Our significant relationships can hugely impact our sense of self. We are shaped by our relationships, both during interactions with the other person, and by imagining how the other person would react when we act alone. Brief, non-consciously recognized images of people significant to us giving a disapproving scowl will make us feel anxious and less moral. Making new relationships with people who in some way remind us of old relationships (that new boyfriend is JUST like your father!) will sometimes cause us to behave in similar ways as we would in the old relationship. People in love will expand their self-identity to include traits of their relationship partner, blurring the lines between self and significant other.

Social Identity

People have social identities, extensions of the relational self that incorporate group memberships and roles, from gender to religion, profession to political leaning. People can experience a rise in self-esteem when their affiliated group succeeds or prospers. Because of a need for positive social identity, people will glorify their in-group and positively compare it against out-groups. This can help people in minority groups that encounter a large amount of discrimination maintain high self-esteem. Self-categorization theory suggests that people divide the world into in-groups and out-groups, but suggests that this isn’t motivated, it is just a side-effect of the process of perception and categorization. Personal identity includes the individual traits and attributes that distinguish a person from both other in-group members, and out-group members. Social identity includes self-views that are shared with other members of the in-group, contrasting with out-groups. When social identity becomes more important, personal identity might seem less important. This is part of what makes mobs function the way they do.

Self-Narratives

Autobiographical Memories

There are a number of mechanisms that allow us to maintain a coherent sense of self. For instance, our autobiographical memories are made up of the sequence of events we can recall, as specific as the first day of school and as broad as your overall experience of school. By connecting past memories to present experience, we like continuous beings. These memories may be biased reconstructions with varying degrees of accuracy, often revised to fit into our self-concept.

When we add all of our autobiographical memories together, we form a personal self-narrative that gives those memories meaning, that explains our motivations and makes sense of conflict. This narrative includes settings, scenes, characters, plots, and themes. Common self-narrative themes include redemption and the overcoming of adversities. Eastern narratives from collectivist cultures tend to be less self-focused. Autobiographical narratives are thus culturally influenced.

Mental Representation: Self-Concept

Self-concept is the cognitive representation of our self-knowledge, the total of all our beliefs about ourselves, giving coherence and meaning to experience and relations with others.

Self-Schemas

Self-schemas are the elements of our self-concept. They are structures that help us organize and guide the processing of self-related information. People are quicker to identify themselves with behaviours that fit into their personal self-schemas. If you feel that extraversion is central to your self-concept, you will more quickly identify with a statement that says you like to party more than relax at home. This is because of something known as the self-reference effect. Information that is related to the self is processed faster and easier to remember than other information. The more you relate new information to yourself, the easier and better you will store it in your memory. When judging others, we compare them instinctively to ourselves.

Active and Stored Self-Schemas

Self-concept being at the centre of our information processing, it needs to be activated quickly. Being far too complex to be at the forefront of our minds, we develop a working self-concept related to the situation we’re in. This is a subset of relevant self-knowledge that guides behaviour in our current situation. Business-woman Joan comes out in an office meeting, Fun-loving Joan emerges at a party. Situational contexts may act as cues to bring out a self-concept. People tend to activate whatever self-concept sets them apart. For instance, Americans living abroad will tend to see themselves as more American than they would in their own country. Not only is working self-concept influenced by our current situation, but also by our own interpretation of that situation, and how ambiguous the situation is.

Possible, Ideal, and Actual Self

Self-concept includes our actual self and our desired-self, our potential self, our wishes and aspirations, and our duties and obligations that we and other people hold for us. Our ideal self acts as a motivation, and our ought-self, the duty-fulfilling potential self, motivate us to act on the behalf of others, and can make us feel guilty if we don’t live up to it.

Self-Knowledge, Implicit and Explicit

Some elements of self-concept are explicit, resulting from self-reflection. We can control these to some extent. Implicit elements of self-concept are automatic and harder to control. And they are just as fallible and not necessarily any more accurate.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is one’s personal evaluation of oneself, falling on a positive-negative dimension. High self-esteem means you view yourself more positively. Global feelings of self-esteem direct how we feel about many aspects of the self. Even when someone with high self-esteem is objectively equal on those aspects as someone with low self-esteem, there is a difference in evaluation.

Trait and State

Trait self-esteem is a general, stable level of self-esteem a person tends to have, with some people scoring generally higher than others. State self-esteem refers to the variable moment-to-moment levels of self-esteem that occur in response to personal successes and failures, to praise and criticism. Some people’s self-esteem is more stable, while others experience greater highs and lows in response to experiences. This instability makes people sensitive to all potential self-esteem threats. This causes them to react more strongly to performance reviews and more defensively to criticism.

Contingent Self-Worth

People differ in which elements of their lives are important to their self-esteem. It can hinge on social success, or looks, or the approval of family members, or any number of other domains. One either builds their life so that their success in these domains is achievable, or they need to modify the importance of these self-worth contingencies. Internal contingencies are easier than external contingencies – the less your self-worth depends on attaining a certain outcome, the more genuine and strong it is.

Self-Esteem, Implicit and Explicit

Self-esteem is also implicit and explicit. Implicit self-esteem is how positive a person’s automatic evaluation of his or her self is. One way to test this is to see the extent to which the individual has a preference for the letters in their name. People with a positive explicit self-esteem but a negative implicit self-esteem will be more defensive, feeling especially threatened by negative feedback.

Cultural and Gender Influences

Gender and culture influence self. For instance, people who move to a new culture may form two simultaneous cultural identities. People adopt a different “self” when in different social situations. Cultures also vary in how much emphasis and importance they place on the self.

The Independent and Interdependent Self

The independent self is a notion most present in the Western world, emphasizing autonomy and uniqueness as what defines the self. The interdependent self is a more Eastern notion, with the self as a fundamentally connected element in society, with harmonious relationships playing a defining role. Eastern people tend to be less consistent in their self-image across situations, as they see themselves in more relational terms. People with an interdependent sense of self don’t see themselves (as Westerners do) as better than average, and thus score lower on self-esteem tests. That being said, they differ on how self-enhancement is expressed, and so cannot be accurately measured with the existing tests, which do not account for differences in modesty.

Gender and Self

Women tend to develop more interdependent self-identities and self-esteem than men. This is likely due to gender-specific socialization.

Individual Differences and Context

Given that there are general trends in self-esteem within cultures, it is important to note that every culture includes within it a number of individuals who vary as widely. Many people can switch between an independent and interdependent self-view, based on something as simple as the language in which they are tested. This change is called cultural frame switching.

Neurological Self

Research shows that the medial prefrontal cortex is in charge of processing information about the self. It is not, however, the sole area of the brain responsible for our sense of self. For instance, the parts of the brain that are responsible for comparing predicted and actual action-effects are also activated when someone experiences a sense of agency. The self is not localized, but seems to be a function of an interrelated group of systems that interact in complex ways.

Motivation towards Self-Knowledge

Self-Assessment Motive

The attempt to arrive at an accurate and objective understanding of the self is called the self-assessment motive. Studies show that people prefer high diagnostic tasks to assess their own abilities than ones that are less accurate. However, along with the motive towards accuracy, we are also motivated towards a better, more euphemistic view of the self. We’d rather learn about our good side than our mediocre side.

Self-Enhancement Motive

According to the self-enhancement view, our need for self-esteem makes us look for positive feedback about ourselves. Self-enhancement tendencies are positively correlated with longevity and mental and physical health.

Illusions

We tend to adopt self-enhancing beliefs, personal illusions. This is healthy. We see ourselves as superior when we may not be – as above average. We think we are more physically attractive than we are, and tend to exhibit unrealistic optimism. This extends to in-group favouritism and the false consensus effect.

Information Processing

In order to maintain our self-enhancing beliefs, we also process information in self-enhancing ways. We maintain an illusion of objectivity by collecting sources of information that support our desired conclusion and ignoring or discounting information that disagrees. We act as an intuitive lawyer. The process has three steps:

1. Collection of evidence that is favourable to the self

2. Consideration of the implication of self-relevant information, leading to a reassessment of possibly threatening information.

3. Assembly of available information into a coherent account that favours the most positive information.

Implicit Enhancement

Most of our self-enhancing activities occur without our awareness, possibly due to the self-deceptive aspect of the whole thing. When we fail at self-enhancing, we experience negative affect. This provides feedback that may prompt us to subconsciously begin self-enhancing efforts again. One example of implicit self-enhancement is that objects and people we associate with ourselves are rated more positively than others. We have a tendency to gravitate towards people, places, and things that resemble the self. This is called implicit egotism.

Self-Presentation

Self-presentation includes a range of strategies that help us manage and shape how others think of us. This can vary contextually – we may want our in-laws to see us as proper and kind, but we want our friends to see us as stylish and exciting. Self-presentation strategies include:

1. Self-promotion: trying to look competent and arouse respect in others.

2. Ingratiation: trying to look likeable and arouse affection in others.

3. Exemplification: trying to look worthy/dedicated and arouse shame or guilt in others.

4. Intimidation: trying to look dangerous and arouse fear in others.

5. Supplication: trying to look helpless and arouse nurturance in others.

Self-handicapping is an advanced form of self-presentation. It involves engaging in self-defeating behaviours in order to provide an excuse for possible failure and make the self-enhancing benefits of possible success greater. Sort of like gambling on the worst horse – if you lose, that’s to be expected, but if you win, you get a huge payout. With self-handicapping, self-esteem is always maintained but success is less likely. We can bolster our self-image by associating ourselves with other people who are successful, and try to maintain modesty around our friends. We use tactics appropriate to the people we’re with.

Self-Enhancement Across Cultures

People from Eastern cultures tend to have less of a self-enhancing tendency, sometimes even exhibiting a self-critical bias. However, people from Eastern cultures may be more likely to self-enhance on scales related to cultural roles like respectfulness and loyalty.

Self-Verification

Some people see the self more negatively. Our desire to maintain a coherent view of ourselves creates a self-verification motive. We seek to affirm our self-view. Most people have a positive self-view, causing them to self-enhance. For people with negative self-views, self-enhancement feels inconsistent with the self-view. This conflict is one of self-verification. People with a negative self-view will try to maintain it, holding on to psychological pain. People with a negative self-view will feel as if positive feedback does not describe them accurately, and will feel better understood by partners who evaluate them negatively.

Sociometer

The sociometre theory suggests that our self-esteem acts as a guide that tells us how much we are accepted or rejected by other people. While this theory generated a great deal of research, a meta-analysis has shown that social exclusion has no real impact on self-esteem, but does impair self-regulation and reduce pro-social behaviour.

Terror Management

According to terror management theory, self-esteem is a way to cope with the fear of death, which due to human self-awareness might otherwise be anxiety-inducing. Research seems to support this – positive beliefs about the self have been found to reduce thoughts about death. Reminding people about death increases their attempts to self-enhance. Death reminders increase showing off, making high-status items more appealing.

Pursuing Self-Esteem

High self-esteem can be a good thing, improving health and mental well-being. However, it can also increase risk-taking behaviour like drug abuse and unsafe sex. It is associated with high in-group bias and prejudice. When self-esteem is threatened, people may lash out aggressively. Extremely high self-esteem underlies narcissism. In its disordered form, narcissism involves a grandiose sense of self and lack of empathy for others. In its milder form, narcissists have high self-esteem and see others as vehicles for their own self-enhancement, showing off and seeking admiration. These behaviours can backfire and damage the narcissist’s fragile self-esteem. Narcissists have a latent self-doubt that is easily activated and masked by the grandiose self-view at the explicit level. Both modesty and self-enhancement have their place. Self-esteem is also touchy – when genuine it causes people to feel secure against criticism, but when false it can lead to explosive reactions.

The Self and Control

Self-Awareness

The self allows people to plan their actions, make goals and have aspirations. According to the theory of self-awareness, focusing attention on the self motivates people to look at the degree to which they are living up to behavioural norms and encourages them to adjust back towards these norms. Self-awareness increases when we are faced with anything that makes us pay attention to ourselves – a mirror, a photo, the mention of your name, etc. Self-focus can make people work harder at a difficult task, lead people to offer more help to the needy, or do other things that are considered good. Of course, if self-efficacy is low, another reaction is common – you may give up.

Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the process of controlling and directing one’s own behaviour in order to achieve desired thoughts, feelings, and goals. Carver and Scheier developed an explanation of how we self regulate, called the TOTE loop. This stands for Test – Operate – Test – Exit. The first step involves comparing current circumstances to a standard. If there is a discrepancy, an operation is done and you’ll act to reduce the discrepancy. You test again to see if you’ve met the standard, and if so, you need not act further. If not, you repeat the loop.

Standards of Self-Regulation

Self-regulatory standards may be based on a personal goal, social norm, the expectations of others, or other such motivators. They operate on four levels:

1. System concepts – personal characteristics of the ideal self. (ex. Generosity)

2. Principles – global behavioural aspirations (ex. Sharing with others)

3. Programmes – specific behavioural aspirations (ex. Giving a large tip, Donating money to charity)

4. Sequences – the motor behaviors that make up programmes (ex. Opening the wallet to take out the money and give the big tip)

We tend to think of our goals in the highest level, as concepts. Abstract high-level goals are more related to the self. Thinking of these abstract goals helps us delay gratification. Linking behaviour to higher concepts makes it feel more meaningful.

Monitoring the Self

Self-monitoring is a function of self-awareness. We assess ourselves to see if we meet our goal standards. We seek out information about performance norms and compare.

Regulating Strength

Self-regulation can be extremely hard – think of dieting and quitting smoking. Self-regulation requires strength, drawing upon energy resources that can become depleted. Too much self-regulation can cause a backlash in other areas. For instance, a person quitting smoking might eat too much because their defenses against indulging have broken down. This is also called ego depletion. The effects of ego depletion are hard to distinguish from lack of monitoring, and reminding people with ego depletion to begin monitoring again can help increase self-awareness and help them get back on track. The strength model is only one way to look at it – there is still hope. Sometimes performing an initial self-regulating task can improve self-regulatory performance. Saying no to one cigarette makes saying no to the next one easier.

Problems with Self-Regulation

Self-regulation can lead to positive outcomes, but as with most things, excessive self-regulation is dangerous. In high-pressure situations, people can engage in too much self-regulation, causing them to choke under pressure, to perform worse. It can also lead to getting stuck in negative emotions, as we consistently compare ourselves to others and find ourselves not good enough. This can lead to depression. Sometimes it is actually better to disengage from unattainable goals.

Escapism

We want to regulate, but we also want to avoid self-awareness sometimes. This leads to escapist behaviours like drug use or alcohol consumption, which lower self-awareness. Highly self-aware people are more likely to drink too much, more likely to binge-eat, and more likely to engage in other self-destructive behaviours, especially if their expectations for themselves are unreasonably high.

Autonomous Self-Regulation

According to self-determination theory, if self-regulation is motivated by external pressure, it is effortful. If it is freely chosen, it tends to be efficient and less ego-depleting. In fact, autonomous self-regulation may even boost energy. The pursuit of intrinsic life goals like personal growth and relationships are associated with greater vitality, while extrinsic life goals like the pursuit of money or game display reduced vitality.

6. Attitudes and Beliefs

Defining Attitudes

Attitudes are a positive or negative evaluation of a person, object or idea. An evaluative judgment can differ on two dimensions – valence (the positivity or negativity of the evaluation) and strength (the extremity or weakness of the evaluation). Any stimulus that can be evaluated on these dimensions can be an attitude object. This includes abstract concepts, individuals, and things as minute as coffee preferences.

The Basis of Attitudes

According to the multicomponent model of attitude, attitudes are summary evaluations with cognitive, affective, and behavioural precursors.

Cognitive Aspects of Attitude

The cognitive component of attitude includes all beliefs, thoughts, and attributes associated with the attitude object. For instance, a person may evaluate an object on the basis of its flaws and its positive attributes. Stereotypes are considered beliefs about the attitudes of a group, and the processing of negative stereotypes is associated with prejudice. The expectancy-value approach suggests that an attitude towards an object is the expectancy x value. Expectancies are beliefs that an object possesses a certain attribute, while values are the positive/negative evaluations of the objects. This model allows researchers to apply numerical values to the two dimensions of attitude.

Affective Aspects of Attitude

The affective component of attitude includes the feelings and emotions associated with the object. Feelings become associated in many ways, the first of which is evaluative conditioning. This occurs when the liking or disliking of a stimulus is changed by its repeated pairing with a more clearly positive or negative stimulus. If you see frightening or disgusting images before meeting a new person, your attitude may be more negative than if you see pleasant images before meeting them. This even occurs on a subliminal level. Another change in affective attitude can occur by mere exposure. Seeing something very often can make the unfamiliar familiar. The more familiar those stimuli, the more liked they are. This occurs, for instance, when you hear a song over and over that you initially didn’t care for. Even subliminal exposure has an impact on attitude.

Behavioural Aspects of Attitude

The behavioural component of attitude includes past, present, and anticipated behaviours associated with the attitude object. We can infer our attitudes and beliefs by observing our own behaviours, and we often do so. If you have signed a petition against tuition hikes, even if you didn’t really care at the time, you will probably now infer that you are against tuition hikes. This is in line with self-perception theory which suggests that in the face of ambiguous inner states, people infer their states by observing their own behaviour. This even occurs if you believe that you have performed a behaviour, but really haven’t. People can change their attitudes in order to explain contradictory behaviours. People can think one way and act another. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests that it is uncomfortable when our actions and attitudes do not align. When two elements of our attitudes, beliefs, or behaviour are dissonant, we are motivated to reduce this dissonance. This is dealt with in 3 ways:

1. The attitude changes

2. The behaviour changes

3. New cognitions are added to justify one of the dissonant elements

The third option allows us to behave the way we are used to even when our attitude has changed. Dissonance can be reduced when people feel they have less choice in a situation.

Inter-related Components

Some people are more likely to have cognition-based attitudes, while others are more affective. Attitudes on some issues tend to be more affect-based, while other issues are more cognitive.

Attitude Structure

One-Dimensional Attitudes

The one-dimensional perspective on attitudes suggests that positive and negative elements are stored as opposite ends of a single dimension, and that people experience either end of the dimension, or any place in between.

Two-Dimensional Attitudes

The two-dimensional perspective on attitudes suggests that people can experience any degree of positivity and negativity in an attitude at any given time. This can mean that sometimes we experience positive and negative attitudes about an object simultaneously, causing attitudinal ambivalence. This perspective is somewhat more useful because it allows for the middle of the scale to be defined – either as ambivalence, or as disinterest.

The Purpose of Attitudes

Attitude functions are the psychological needs fulfilled by an attitude. One of these is the object appraisal function. This allows people to save energy by summarizing the positive and negative aspects of the things around them. The utilitarian function is when attitudes help us maximize rewards and minimize costs. The social adjustment function is how attitudes help us identify with other people that we like and dissociate from people we don’t like. Attitudes are ego-defensive when they serve to protect your self-esteem (for example, disliking a game you are bad at). Attitudes can also serve a value-expressive function, helping you express your personal values.

Appraising Objects

Attitudes classify objects so that we can deal with them appropriately when encountering them. This function is best with strong attitudes, which strongly influence relevant judgments and behaviour. It is also most active when the attitude is highly accessible. Differences in the strength of the object appraisal motivation are influenced by differences in the need for closure. Need more closure? That means you will be less satisfied with feeling ambiguous about an attitude object.

Value-Expressive Attitudes and Utilitarian Attitudes

Utilitarian attitudes help people achieve desirable outcomes and value-expressive attitudes help people express their concerns about self-image and values. People are more utilitarian about their attitudes on coffee and air conditioning, but more value-expressive about greeting cards and flags. Messages that argue in line with the function of a person’s attitude will be more persuasive. For instance, saying “turning your air conditioner off will save you money” will likely be more persuasive than “turning your air conditioner off will help the environment”. Individual differences in self-monitoring affect the persuasiveness of different types of advertisements as well – people high in self-monitoring are more adaptive to their social situations and more attentive to situational cues, meaning that they will be more influenced by advertisements that are value-expressive.

Content, Structure, and Function

The strength of an attitude might be conceptualized as how certain the attitude is, how important it is, or how far it is from the middle of a scale. Extremity has been found to have important outcomes. Attitudes that are easily retrievable are accessible attitudes. Strong attitudes are more persistent over time, resistant to change, more likely to influence information processing, and more likely to guide behaviour.

Explicit Attitude Measures

Explicit measures of attitude straight out ask what a person feels about an attitude object. These are usually self-report questionnaires.

Likert Scales

Likert scales are those 5-star type ratings. A statement is given and you’re asked to agree or disagree, on this scale from “strongly agree” to “neither disagree nor agree” to “strongly disagree”. Researchers often will include two similar questions that would elicit opposite responses in order to control against some people’s tendency to agree or disagree with all items on a scale, regardless of content. Lickert scales are scored numerically, with a low score indicating a strong negative attitude.

Semantic Differential Scales

The semantic differential approach is used as a standard to measure how people feel about a variety of attitude objects. They are measured similarly to the Likert scale. They provide bipolar adjectives (like-dislike, negative-positive, bad-good) and ask the participant to rate their attitudes according to those dimensions.

Issues

While explicit attitude measures are widely used, people are often unaware of their attitudes towards certain objects. Subtle differences in how things are presented may skew attitudes. Furthermore, explicit measures are subject to the motivations of the participant, who may choose a socially desirable response that doesn’t actually express their real attitude.

Implicit Attitude Measures

Evaluative Priming

Evaluative priming is one of two most commonly used techniques for measuring implicit and indirect responses. Evaluative priming operates on the idea that a strong implicit attitude towards an object is more easily accessible than a strong explicit attitude. The memory of “broccoli” and “hate” might be so thoroughly connected that seeing one primes the other. Evaluative priming asks the participant to respond to an evaluative word after being flashed an image of the attitude object. The participant must describe whether the adjective they see is positive or negative. Speed of response reflects the accessibility of the attitude. If the attitude object shown is one that the participant implicitly dislikes, they will be faster to suggest the adjective is negative, regardless of its true valence. Implicit racist attitudes can be effectively tested using this method.

Implicit Association Test

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a test that can be used to assess implicit attitudes, and has been used to test racial prejudice. The test requires the participant to differentiate between two images by choosing the key (the s-key or the k-key) assigned for the image. In the racial prejudice test, the first selection of images would link white faces to the s-key and black faces to the k-key. The 2^nd selection would link positive adjectives to the s-key and negative adjectives to the k-key. The 3^rd selection is important – the participant must respond to either white faces or positive adjectives with the s-key, and black faces or negative adjectives with the k-key. For people who have a racial prejudice against black people, responses will be faster and easier. The 4^th selection reverses the second – negative adjectives are now linked with the s-key and positive with the k-key. The 5^th is another important one, reversing the 3^rd, linking white faces and negative adjectives under the s-key, and black faces with positive adjectives under the k-key. In people racially prejudiced against black people, responses to the 5^th selection will be hardest.

Critics of implicit measures suggest that low correlation with explicit results suggests that the two types of attitude measures study different things.

Reliability and Validity of Attitudes

For attitude measurement, test reliability is important in that internal consistency (whether individual items measure the same construct) is vital to comparisons between the results of different measures. Test-retest reliability, consistency over time, is important when measuring the stable, long-term attitudes. Explicit measures have scored well in these two categories, while implicit measures have not yet been thoroughly tested. Are attitude measures valid? Do they test what they set out to test? Research shows that explicit measures are valid. Implicit measures have convergent validity and predictive validity. This means that scores are similar to those of comparable tests, and scores predict related scores that they ought to predict.

Attitudes as Predictors of Behaviour

Research in the past found that attitudes are actually a relatively poor predictor of behaviour. The attitude-behaviour relation is the degree to which an attitude predicts a behaviour. More recent research has found that the average correlation between attitude and action is .38, better than historical results suggest. The difference is likely due to better modern measures which are higher in validity and reliability.

Circumstances in Which Attitudes are Predictive

(1) Correspondence between Attitudinal and Behavioural Measures

Attitudes predict behaviour when there is a correspondence between attitudinal and behavioural measures. Measures of attitude and behaviour need to correspond on four elements:

1. Action: the behaviour being performed

2. Target: the target of the behaviour

3. Context: the environment in which the behaviour is performed (alone, with others, at work…)

4. Time: the time frame (immediately, in a year’s time…)

The more specific the measure, the more likely it is to predict the corresponding behaviour.

(2) Behavioural Domain

Topics vary in the degree to which attitudes predict behaviour. For instance, political party attitudes are highly predictive of voting behaviour. However, attitudes towards blood donation are not very predictive of the act of donating blood. This may be due to the increased difficulty of the task.

(3) Attitude Strength

Some attitudes are stronger than others. Really strong, fundamental attitudes are more likely to predict behaviour than week attitudes. For instance, one may be strongly against eating meat for moral reasons, and thus eat vegetarian. However, if one simply mildly against eating meat, they may continue to do so.

(4) Person Variables

People differ in their tendency to behave in line with their attitudes. Differences in personality (for instance, in the self-monitoring trait) impact the attitude-behaviour relation. People with less crystallized attitudes (students, for instance) will have attitudes that are less predictive of their behaviour.

Explicit and Implicit Measures & Attitude Prediction

Explicit measures may be more likely to predict deliberate, planned behaviour, while implicit measures may be better at predicting spontaneous behaviour. Testing this, experimenters have found that verbal behaviour correlates with explicit attitudes while non-verbal behaviour correlates with implicit attitudes.

Theory of Reasoned Action

The theory of reasoned action (TRA) is a model that predicts behaviour by looking at behavioural intentions determined by attitudes and subjective norms. In simpler words, if you intend to behave in a certain way, TRA suggests that you will. A person’s attitude towards a behaviour is related to the expectancy that the behaviour will lead to a desired consequence that is highly valued. Expectancy x value = attitude. Subjective norms are the individual’s belief about how significant others view the relevant behaviour. TRA is reasonable at predicting behaviour, but does not take into account that actions are also influenced by self-efficacy. Wanting to do something is all well and good, but if you think you’re unable to, you might not bother trying. TRA was amended to include the concept of perceived behavioural control, and was renamed the theory of planned behaviour.

Theory of Planned Behaviour

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) is a framework for understanding the relationship between attitudes and behaviours. It suggests that the best predictor of behaviour is the intention to act, caused by three constructs:

1. Attitude: the person’s evaluation of the behaviour.

2. Subjective norms: the person’s beliefs about what other respected people think they should do.

3. Perceived behavioural control: the person’s belief about how achievable the behaviour is.

This theory includes the compatibility principle, which suggests that attitudes, norms, behavioural control, intentions and behaviour should be assessed on the same level of measurement to determine behavioural intention. Implementation intentions are if-then plans that specify a behaviour one will need to perform in order to achieve a goal, and the context in which that behaviour will occur.

MODE Model

The MODE Model is a model of attitude-behaviour relations in which motivation and opportunity are necessary to make a deliberative consideration of available information. MODE stands for Motivation and Opportunity as DEterminants of behaviour. If a person has sufficient motivation and opportunity, they may base their behaviour on a consideration of the available information. However, if either motivation or opportunity is low, only highly accessible attitudes will inform behaviour.

RIM Model

The reflective-impulse model (RIM) suggests that behaviour results from two interlocking systems. The reflective system involves reasoned consideration and the impulse system guides behaviour more automatically.

7. Attitude and Behavioural Change

Persuasion

Persuasion is the use of communication to change the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour of others. Research in this field was boosted following WWII, when people looked for ways to counteract enemy propaganda.

Systematic Processing Theories

Systematic processing is a thorough, detailed processing of information that involves attention to arguments used in persuasive communication. This sort of processing is effortful and requires skill.

Information Processing Model

According to McGuire’s information processing model, the persuasive impact of a message results from five steps:

1. Attention – the audience must notice and listen to the message.

2. Comprehension – the audience must understand the message.

3. Yielding – the audience must accept the message and change their attitude.

4. Retention – the audience must not change the new attitude or revert back.

5. Behaviour – the audience must act on the attitude.

This model has been reduced to a two-step model of receiving information and yielding to it. However, even this two-step model has been called into question as it lacks specific theoretical principles and since attitude recall does not necessarily correlate with attitude change.

Cognitive Response Model

The cognitive response model assumes that attitude change is mediated by the thoughts (cognitive responses) that recipients generate as they receive and reflect on persuasive messages. Listeners relate what they hear to their own experiences and beliefs, testing its fit and generating their own arguments for and against. The cognitive response model suggests that it is these thoughts that are what change a person’s attitude. To look at these thoughts, a measure called thought-listing was developed. Message recipients are asked to list all the thoughts that occurred to them while listening to a given message. These are divided into pros and cons.

The cognitive response model has been conceptually broadened by the notion that a strong, well-argued message will lead to self-generated supporting arguments that enhance persuasion. Research has also shown that distraction has an impact on attitude change. Counter to what the information processing model suggests, distraction has been found to actually increase the persuasive impact of communication, because it reduces a person’s ability to form counter-arguments in their minds.

Duel-Process Theories

Dual-process theories of persuasion suggest that there are two modes of information processing. Systematic processing is the thoughtful, reflective type listed above, characterized by engagement in content-relevant thoughts and critical evaluation. Non-systematic processing works under different circumstances. The two dual-process models are explained in the following sub-sections.

Elaboration Likelihood

One theoretical perspective is the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) which suggests that there are different roots to persuasion. In the central route, the person pays attention to the specifics of the message, considers and elaborates on the merits of the message, and only succumbs to influence if they agree with the message. The peripheral route is used when messages are processed superficially, the specifics overlooked. A person can still be influenced in this way, usually when the message appeals to them. Thus, the central route is characterized by high elaboration and the peripheral by low elaboration. Central route processing results in stronger, more lasting influence.

Heuristic-Systematic Model

The heuristic-systematic model assesses the validity of a communication through reliance on heuristics. Heuristics are simple rules that can be applied when cognitive efforts are otherwise engaged. For instance, the rule “experts must be more accurate in their statements than non-experts”. While not always true, it is an easy assumption that can be useful in the quick processing of information. There are two strategies used to assess the extent to which recipients of a message actually process the message. An attitude due to central processing will involve the development of positive thoughts about the arguments presented. Furthermore, the favourability of these thoughts should be correlated with attitude change. Another strategy is the systematic variation of argument quality. Recipients are given a variety of communications with either strong or weak arguments. Strong arguments should lead to more positive responses than weak arguments if central processing is used. However, if peripheral processing is underway, they will have equal weight.

Incentives and Attitude Change

The government and other powerful institutions have other means than mere persuasion at their disposal. Many use incentives in the form of taxation, laws, and policies in order to encourage attitude and behaviour change. For instance, the seatbelt laws have drastically increased seatbelt use and reduced fatalities in vehicle accidents. Governments may tax items like cigarettes and alcohol in order to discourage their consumption, and this has shown to be reasonably effective. Taxes like these, unfortunately, only change attitudes on buying alcohol & cigarettes. When freely available, people still indulge to excess. Furthermore, in order to be effective, sanctions must be properly enforced and monitored. This is expensive and not always feasible.

Counter-Attitudinal Change

Counter-attitudinal behaviour is behaviour that is inconsistent with the actor’s beliefs and attitudes, usually induced by monetary incentives or threat. In some cases, people learn that counter-altitudinal behaviour is not as bad as they had anticipated, which can change their attitudes. This occurs especially when behaviour becomes habitual. If the behaviour really is effortful and unpleasant, the best option is cognitive dissonance theory, in which people are motivated to change their attitudes when they find themselves performing counter-attitudinal behaviour.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable tension when our beliefs and our actions don’t match, a state which we are highly motivated to reduce. Because this causes strong motivational reactions, it can be helpful in interventions to highlight and arouse dissonance, in ways sometimes as simple as getting people to reflect on the negative impact of their behaviour. Dissonance strategies have been found effective when applied to large-scale problems. The one downside to this strategy is that people may also reduce dissonance by changing their attitude, rather than their behaviour.

8. Influence

Incidental Influence

Incidental influence is that which occurs not due to any explicit attempt at influence, but due to the effect of a person’s presence and role in a situation.

Social Facilitation

Social facilitation is a phenomenon of incidental influence in which the presence of another person leads to improved performance. This is not a straightforward relationship and three equally valid explanations have been proposed.

Mere Presence

Zajonc suggested that the task being performed in the presence of others is vital to whether other people facilitate or hinder performance. If a task is well-rehearsed and easy, it will be facilitated, but if a task is newly learned or difficult, social inhibition will hinder performance. The presence of others inhibits novel and complicated responses. To explain this, Zajonc uses the Hull-Spence drive theory, which sauggests that the physiucal presence of other members of the same species heightens the base level of arousal, increasing the likelihood of dominant over non-dominant behaviours.

Apprehension of Being Evaluated

Cottrell suggested that increased arousal in human company is a learned response, not innate as Zajonc suggests. We learn that others will evaluate our performance, which causes evaluation apprehension. This state of arousal has social facilitation/inhibition (SFI) effects. These effects decrease when the actor believes that his/her audience is non-evaluative. This has to do with expectation – if we expect to do well on something, an audience will help us.

Conflicting Attention

Sanders and colleagues suggest that the presence of others gives us a conflict in attention, forcing us to juggle between our task and the other people. On a simple, well-learned task, we can more easily switch to pay attention on the subtle cues of approval/disapproval, gestures and utterances of our audience. However, a complex task that demands full attention results in conflict and the distraction of other people hinders performance. This theory does not explain social facilitation so well.

Integration

These three perspectives have recently become more integrated with one another, and a meta-analysis shows that the influence of others on individual productivity is relatively minor, though can be significant.

Social Norms

Norms are belief systems about how to behave, which guide behaviour. They tend to be spoken and unspoken rules, formed of the shared expectations of group members about typical and desirable activities. They tend not to be codified, like laws, and are enforced through social pressure. Within the study of social influence, norms are fundamental. They reduce uncertainty about how to behave in a new situation because they act as a source of social knowledge. They constrain us in that they can sometimes be inconvenient, yet help the whole system run a bit smoother, with less conflict. While compliance with a norm is unremarkable, defiance of a social norm without significant explanation will earn you negative responses.

The two types of norms are descriptive norms (how do others act in a situation like this?) and injunctive norms (what should I do if a homeless person asks me for change). In some situations, multiple norms can apply, and conflicting norms can cause us to look to others for how to behave.

Forming and Transmitting Norms

The three main ways that norms are transmitted are:

1. Deliberate instruction and demonstration

2. Nonverbally, through behaviour and implicit activation of standards

3. Inference of the norm through the observation of the behaviour of others

In order for norms to have an effect on behaviour, they must be transmitted in some way. Sherif’s research found that people will form a personal norm when asked to estimate an ambiguous perceptual stimulus. However, if in a group, the judgments of the participants will all converge toward a common group norm. The individual’s subsequent judgments will no longer conform to their personal norm, but to the newly adopted group norm. The truth about a situation can change as people interact with one another and share their interpretations. Interestingly, a group member with an extreme standpoint can shift the group norm. If they leave and are replaced by a new group member with more moderate views, the group tends to retain the originally established group norm. Once all the group members are replaced, the group norm often stays.

Social Settings

Beyond the laboratory, norms guide our behaviour in most social settings. For instance, if a street is covered in litter, people are much more likely to add to the mess than if they are walking on a clean street. Furthermore, if one norm has been violated, others are more likely to be violated as well. If there is litter on a street, it is more likely to be vandalized.

Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, Zimbardo and colleagues conducted a prison experiment. 24 male college students participated, half assigned to be guards, the other half prisoners. The guards were not trained but told to do what they thought necessary to maintain order. Within a few days, those given the roles as guards became aggressive and sadistic, while those given prisoner roles became submissive and frightened. When they thought they were unsupervised, guards escalated their abuse and harassment of the prisoners. Arbitrary rules were challenged by no one. Due to the intensity of the participants’ reactions, the two-week experiment was shortened to 6 days.

This is an extreme example of de-individuation, a state in which individuals are deprived of their sense of individual identity and are more likely to behave in an extreme way that violates norms and is anti-social. In this case, individuals lost their identity and were given a simple role “prisoner” or “guard”. This established new, more extreme norms.

Reasons for Social Influence

Some forms of social influence are deliberate, while others are low-level and unintentional. Festinger argued that norm-formation and norm-following were a result of the pressure people feel towards uniformity. This uniformity gives group-members the assurance that their behaviour and perceptions are correct (social reality testing) and helps groups move forward towards their goals (group locomotion). Social comparison is occurs most often in ambiguous or new situations. People look first to others who are similar to themselves for information on how to behave in a new situation.

Normative Social Influence

Normative social influence is influence based on conforming to the positive expectations of others. People want to be good, to act in ways that will be rewarded by others rather than punished or disapproved of.

Informational Social Influence

Informational social influence occurs because people need to reduce their own uncertainty. To do this, they accept information obtained from others as evidence about reality.

The normative-informational distinction suggests that normative influence is temporary and exits in public but does not translate to the privacy of the home. Contrasting views, however, suggest that elements of normative influence do bleed over into home life.

Four Motives that Enable Social Influence

1. Effective action

2. Building and maintaining relationships

3. Managing self-concept

4. Understanding

Deliberate Influence

Compliance

Compliance is when the person being influenced gives in to a request of the influencer. This includes situations in which people change behaviour to suit a norm but do not extend that change to their private life. Attitude hasn’t changed, but behaviour has. Compliance often occurs in sales – people will give in when a salesperson uses certain influence techniques.

Door-In-The-Face

The door-in-the-face technique is one in which the requester (the salesperson) makes an extreme request that is often refused, then makes a more reasonable request. The reasonable request is usually the intended result, as the target will feel obliged to also make a concession by agreeing to the second request.

Foot-In-The-Door

The foot-in-the-door technique observes that people who comply with a small request are more likely to comply with a subsequent larger request. This is thought to be due to a desire for internal consistency – if I felt alright giving this person a glass of water, it should be okay to donate money to their charity, too!

Lowballing

In the lowballing technique, a salesperson will make a really good sounding deal (too good to be true!). Once the target agrees, the salesperson will change the deal to be more costly and less beneficial. Having already decided, the target feels obligated to the requester and psychologically committed to the purchase, so will continue the deal.

Integrating Compliance Techniques

Compliance techniques rely on equity, reciprocity, and self-consistency. Furthermore, they tend to work best if the costs are low, but not if the costs are very high.

Majority and Minority Influence

Majority influence (conformity) is social influence that results from the exposure to the opinions of a majority. Minority influence (innovation) is when an individual or smaller group can influence a majority.

Majority Influence

While Sherif’s experiments highlighted that ambiguous stimuli tend to lead to the development of group norms, Asch argued that in situations where there is a clear correct answer, people would maintain their correct opinion instead of bowing to the group. He was, however, wrong. Studies conducted where there was a clear answer showed that people, if hearing the wrong answer spoken by the rest of the group members, whether or not their own answer would be heard, would side with the wrong answer over their own judgment. Conformity still manifests when face-to-face interaction is taken away, and the group only implied by statistics.

Conformity

Important factors that impact the level of conformity include:

1. Group size: conformity increases drastically between 1 and 3 people in a group. When more people are added, conformity increases only minimally and then levels off, unless the new group members are seen as independent and not just “sheep”.

2. Unanimity: if even one person breaks the unanimity of the group decision, this can have an impact on conformity.

3. Social support: social support from another dissident also decreases conformity.

4. Culture: greater acceptance of the judgement of others has been found in Eastern cultures.

Reasons for Conformity

When asked why they conformed when their opinion differed from the group, people in Asch’s studies cited that they did not want to feel ostracized, or began to doubt their own perception. Conformity comes from a need to validate a group’s opinions and move the group towards its goals. It allows the individual to feel that they see things more accurately, are accepted, and are not “weird” or “different”.

Minority Influence

In some cases, the minority can have an influence on the majority. Because minorities tend to be distinctive, standing out from the crowd, they can challenge the dominant majority and cause conflict. Because of this they are quickly dismissed on the grounds of “craziness” or “provocativeness”. To overcome this, minorities must display a clear and consistent position.

Theoretical Approaches

Theories involved in the concept of majority-minority influences are explained either by the conflict approaches or the social categorization approaches.

Conflict

Moscovici was a supporter of the conversion theory, a conflict theory that suggests there are different processes involved if the conflict source is the majority or the minority. The first process, comparison, occurs when the majority influences, causing a focus on the discrepancy between one’s current position and that of the majority. Validation, on the other hand, is the influential tool of the minority, leading people in the majority to convert on a private level. Links have also been made between comparison and validation, and systematic vs. non-systematic thinking. There is disagreement on which condition (the minority or majority) should invite the scrutiny of systematic thinking. Argument quality has the greatest impact in high elaboration conditions, while source quality (majority membership) has a greater impact in low elaboration conditions. Since attitudes formed in a systematic, high-elaboration condition tend to be stronger and more resistant to counter-persuasion, minorities have a good deal of long-term power to change attitudes.

Being outnumbered, minorities must take multiple perspectives in order to reduce the threat of invalidation.

Social Categorization

Self-categorization theory explains how the process of categorizing oneself as a group member forms social identity and brings about various forms of group and intergroup behaviours. People begin to behave in line with what they see as the prototypical group member. This is called referent informational influence. The theory suggests that people will adopt in-group positions to reduce uncertainty. In the case that they come across others similar to them, but with incongruent positions, they will be motivated to secure their position by influencing the dissident person.

Decision Making in Groups

Decision-making in a group setting involves defining a problem, gathering information, discussing it, and deciding on a course of action. Groupthink is a way of thinking that can occur in a cohesive group. This is when the desire for agreement and conformity is larger than the motivation to make a realistic and effective decision. Groups have a tendency to make more extreme decisions than those an individual might make. This is group polarization. Interestingly, a group might either make riskier decisions than the individual (the risky shift phenomenon) or make much more conservative decisions. Groupthink has been responsible for a number of bad group decisions, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Challenger space shuttle launch. Symptoms of groupthink include interpersonal pressure, illusions of invulnerability, and lack of open discussion with dissenting views. It can lead to extreme decisions, failure to adopt contingency plans, and distraction from the big picture objectives. One of the best ways to prevent groupthink is to seek out dissenting views and consider different perspectives and courses of action. Making subgroups can also be effective.

Persuasion

Three kinds of information circulate among group members – people express pros or cons, contribute information that is somehow new, or information that is persuasive. Arguments consistent with the dominant way of thinking tend to be rated as more persuasive as people seek justification for their already held beliefs. The repetition of certain arguments or viewpoints also serves to make already held beliefs more extreme.

Social Comparison Theory and Groups

The normative explanation for polarization suggests that when people compare themselves with others, they are seeking approval. They want to be different, but in a good way. Because of this, they tend to lean to the extreme viewpoint that they see others around them holding.

Self-Categorization in Groups

Group membership is essential for polarization. This is because a person within a group will feel a strengthened in-group bias and antipathy towards out-groups. This explanation holds that a group is more likely to have an extreme stance in comparison to individuals. Essentially, people in a group seek to define themselves as NOT in another group, so they emphasize the elements of their thoughts and personality consistent with the in-group’s.

Groupthink

Groupthink is the tendency for members of a cohesive group to conform really strongly to the group norm, stopping critical thinking and discarding dissident ideas. Problems with the groupthink model is that it doesn’t allow precise predictions to be made, and the concept is not operationalized.

Obedience

Milgram’s Experiment

Obedience is continuous compliance to the requests or orders of an authority figure. Obedience was studied in the famous Milgram experiment. In the Milgram experiment, the subject is brought in and given what they think is the arbitrary role of “teacher”, while a second person (pretending to be a subject) is given the role of “learner”. The learner is strapped into a chair and electrodes are taped to his wrists. The subject is told that the learner will receive a shock at every wrong answer, and the learner mentions he or she has a heart condition. The subject is then moved to an adjacent room in which they can communicate with the learner through an intercom. The subject is instructed to perform quick tests of verbal memory, and administrate shocks after every wrong answer, gradually increasing the degree. As you administer the shocks, the learner shouts into the intercom, more and more frantic. At the highest level of shocks, the learner screams with pain and exclaims that he cannot handle more, but the experimenter prompts the subject to continue onwards.

While the subject tends to believe the learner is suffering, most subjects go on when prompted up to the maximum voltage, even while pleading with the experimenter to let them stop.

Situational Determinants

After the original test, Milgram varied the conditions to see what exactly caused people to obey authority to such extremes. Four of these varied the emotional proximity of the victim, two conditions had the victim in the same room, and one made the teacher have to physically press the victim’s hand to a shock plate. Emotional proximity caused obedience to diminish very greatly. In situations where the authority was considered to be on equal level to the subject, few subjects went all the way and most physically stopped the authority from taking over.

Reasons for Obedience

Social psychologists have come up with a number of explanations to why people obey authority:

• Society trains people to obey legitimate authorities and play by the rules. This is the norm of obedience.

• Obedience is often based on an assumption that the person giving the orders is in control and responsible for the outcome. The more self-assured and confident the authority seems to be, the more obedient the subject would be.

• The physical proximity of the experimenter and the distance of the learner are important factors in the obedience of the subject in Milgram’s experiment.

• Without an alternative model as to how to behave, people follow the only one provided when a situation is stressful and unfamiliar.

• Because the shocks were given incrementally, to stop later on would be to admit that all previous shocks were also wrong.

Ethical Issues and Alternatives to Milgram

Milgram is criticized for allowing his participants to suffer emotionally. These ethical concerns now mean that further studies of the Milgram paradigm cannot be conducted. Some tests have been conducted that work around the ethical issues by using virtual Learners, dogs, and other such variations.

What Causes Disobedience?

The evidence of disobedience in the Milgram experiment is just as interesting as the evidence of obedience. 35% of participants disobeyed at some point. Those who resisted did so early in the experiment. Whistle blowing, a form of disobedience in which people report corruption and unethical practice in the organization for which they work, is relatively rare. This is partly because the costs of whistle blowing include ostracism and harassment. This kind of disobedience has been found to decline when people are trained for longer periods of time.

10. Altruism and Prosocial Behaviour

Introduction

While some people operate on the theory that humans are inherently selfish, there is a great deal of evidence to show that altruism and prosocial behaviour exist. However, not everybody helps, and when they do, they don’t help an equal amount in comparable situations.

Prosocial Behaviour and Helping

Defining Terms

Empathy is the experience of understaning or sharing the emotional state of another person, and is considered the basic emotion of prosocial behaviour. Helping (pro-social behaviour) is any behaviour that increases the survival chance or reproductive capacity of another individual. This includes cooperation and altruism. Prosocial behaviour is defined by society as beneficial to others, and excludes behaviour motivated by professional obligations. It may be driven by selfish (egoistic) or selfless (altruistic) motivations. Altruism is when and individual helps another while decreasing their own survival chance. Cooperation is when one helps another while they help themselves. It occurs often in the animal world, as there are many advantages to cooperation in social living, and a greater chance of survival in a cooperative group.

Altruism vs. Egoism

While less common, altruism occurs in many species. It has been suggested by some that pro-social behaviours are actually have selfish motives – we are nice to others because it manipulates others into being nice to us. However, there is evidence that pro-social behaviour is inborn – we don’t just learn to be pro-social because the behaviour is rewarded. One of the main distinctions in social psychology in helping motivation is that it may be egoistic (selfish) or altruistic (selfless). However, there is also principlism (acting to uphold a principle), and collectivism (acting to benefit the group). Distinguishing egoism from altruism has been a challenge. It has been found that the feeling of empathy is the one that evokes an altruistic motivation.

Many have contested that true altruism doesn’t exist. Cialdini’s negative state-relief model suggests that humans have an innate drive to reduce their negative moods, and that helping behaviour can elevate mood, making it egoistic. People with higher empathy feel more sadness at the suffering of others, and thus are more motivated to help. However, a study has found that people are more likely to help when they have experienced a type of problem, regardless of their amount of sadness.

Prosocial Behaviour

There are three related but distinct levels of prosocial behaviours – micro, meso, and macro. Micro-level analysis looks at the origins of prosocial tendencies, while macro-level research looks at prosocial behaviours in the context of organization. Among different categorizations of prosocial behaviour are cooperation, courageous resistence, selfless helping (where the behaviour is risky to the helper and is sustained over time), volunteering (activity in which time is given freely to benefit another or a group), emergency intervention (responding to an urgent, unpredictable, risky situation), and bystander intervention.

When don’t people help?

The Bystander Effect

The most prominent example of the bystander effect is found in the case of the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. There were 38 witnesses to this woman’s murder, but none came to the woman’s aid. Subsequent studies have found that an increased number of bystanders to an emergency decreases the likelihood that the witnesses will intervene. There is a five-step decision-making model that governs bystander behaviour:

1. Noticing the event.

2. Interpreting the event (is it an emergency?)

3. Deciding the degree of personal responsibility.

4. Deciding on how to intervene or whether this is possible.

5. Implementing the intervention.

A negative decision at any of these stages will result in the victim not being helped.

Diffusion of Responsibility

Part of the bystander phenomenon is the diffusion of responsibility. If you are the only witness, you know that it is your responsibility to help. However, the more people there are witnessing an event, the less responsibility each individual feels.

Pluralistic Ignorance (Dumb Sheep)

Emergencies are unpredictable, infrequent, and risky. When presented with a situation that is sudden and unfamiliar, we may spend time trying to figure out what’s going on – the more people are around us, the more we will look for others for cues. If everyone is doing this, nobody will act.

Audience Inhibition (Audience vs. Actor)

When others are present, the individual is also aware that whatever they do will be seen by multiple people. Evaluation apprehension may prevent them from acting because they don’t want to feel embarrassed. The bystander effect has been demonstrated time and again. However, it sometimes doesn’t occur – when, for example, there is a high threat of danger to both the victim and the bystanders. Furthermore, the knowledge of the bystander effect actually decreases a person’s likelihood to succumb to the effect. Because part of the effect is the disbelief that one has the ability to help, training in first aid and emergency situations can increase self-efficacy.

When do people help?

Costs and Benefits of Helping

The subway experiment involved having an actor (black or white, with a cane or with the smell of alcohol and a brown bagged bottle) stagger and fall. The white actor was helped whether he had the cane or the alcohol in 100% of the trials. The black actor was helped when he had the cane 100% of the trials, but only 73% when he was seen as drunk. In this case he was more quickly helped by other black people. The longer the emergency went on without intervention, the fewer people got involved. To explain this, the arousal: cost-reward model was developed. This suggests that when people observe an emergency, they become excited in a way that is increasingly unpleasant – they respond by considering the costs and rewards of helping or not helping. Costs may be time investment or physical danger, while rewards might include praise or raised self-esteem. There are also costs to not helping – guilt, unpleasant empathy, etc.

In emergencies that are clear, real, involve a known victim, and in which the bystander is close by, some people respond immediately and impulsively, not looking to other bystanders nor considering costs and benefits. This suggests that there is another factor at play – the degree to which the bystander feels connected to the victim (we-ness). This we-ness increases the arousal of the bystander and lessens the costs of helping.

Groups, Identity and Prosocial Behaviour

While groups have often been considered a force that lessens individual responsibility, recent research has taken note of the opposite, collaborative force of groups towards prosocial (rather than anti-social) behaviour. For instance, the common ingroup identity model seeks to reduce bias between groups by changing the nature of categorization from ingroups vs. outgroups to a single, more inclusive identity. This model uses ingroup favouritism to reduce bias and promote helping. This greater identity is called common superordinate identity. For instance, republicans and liberals are diametrically opposed but they can both identify themselves as Americans to overcome differences.

Helping the “Other”

Helping also occurs towards outgroups. It can be considered a non-reactive form of prejudice- sometimes as a way to avoid being perceived as prejudiced. Social identity and group norms may encourage members to help outgroup members more than ingroup members (as when a country club of rich elites values donating to charity).

Social Identity & Bystander

That people are less likely to help when there are other witnesses to an emergency is not entirely true. It depends on the psychological relationship of the bystanders to the individual. It also depends on the type of helping that is needed. The behaviour of other bystanders is more influential in an emergency if they are seen as ingroup members.

Emotion and Bystander Intervention

Social identity relationships moderate empathy-motivated helping. Research has found that there are different psychological pathways for ingroup and outgroup helping.

How to Research Prosocial Behaviour

Violence and Help

Research on the nature of helping in a violent emergency (like a mugging) shows different results than can easily be explained by the bystander effect. In violent emergencies, the presence of other bystanders can actually increase the likelihood of helping (either direct or indirect helping). In a bar-fight study, researchers found that the type of intervention had an important effect on the outcome of the situation – an aggressive intervention often worsened the fight, while a non-aggressive intervention would diffuse the situation.

Gender and Help

In studies of violent emergencies, researchers have looked at gender as a possible factor in helping behaviour. Of all configurations, men were least likely to help when observing a man being violent to a woman. Females showed lower overall intervention. Bystanders of both genders were more likely to intervene if they thought male-female conflicts were between strangers rather than spouses. This gender difference in helping is likely due to the short-term, high-risk nature of the violent situations. In more long-term situations, women have been shown to provide more long-term help.

Long-term Help

Identity theory is a sociological theory that suggests people have different role identities, related to social structure. The more a person voluntarily performs a particular role, the more their identity will grow to fit that role. Blood donation, charity, and volunteering have been looked at as examples of long-term helping. Perceived expectations, personal norms, past behaviour, and role-identity predict the intention to donate (blood, money or time).

Volunteerism

Volunteerism is when people give their time and effort willingly, without expecting rewards. Research looks at the antecedents, experiences and consequences of volunteering. These operate at different levels:

1. Individual

Antecedents: prior experience, personality

Experiences: performance and role

Consequences: knowledge, behaviour, attitude, motivation changes

2. Interpersonal

Antecedents: social support networks

Experiences: relationships with volunteers and recipients of service

Consequences: recruitment of other volunteers

3. Organizational

Antecedents: volunteer recruitment

Experiences: volunteer supervision

Consequences: quantity and quality of service

4. Societal

Antecedents: community resources

Experiences: recipients of services

Consequences: public education and service delivery

Prosocial Personality

It may be possible to identify a prosocial personality, an enduring tendency to think about the rights and welfare of others, to feel concern and empathy and act in a way that benefits others. The Prosocial Personality Battery looks at other-oriented empathy and helpfulness.

Selfish Evolution

Early research in evolutionary biology led researchers to suggest that what seems to be altruism may actually just be a sort of long-term selfishness. Genes seem to work towards making many copies of themselves, and having those copies survive to make more. In that sense, it is plausible that we might have evolved to help those who might share some of our genes to survive, our relatives. The coefficient of relatedness (r) between two individuals can be calculated by knowing how many steps removed these individuals are from a common ancestor.

Thus, the relatedness coefficient of children to their parents would be .5, and to their grandparents would be .25. The coefficient of relatedness can be used as a way to explain how altruism evolved. Kin selection theory proposes that we have evolved to favour people genetically related to us and are more likely to help close relatives than strangers. The coefficient of relatedness is not the same as the proportion of shared genes, the amount of genetic material shared by humans and non-human animals.

Reciprocal Altruism

Reciprocal Altruism is a theory designed to explain altruism towards strangers. It proposes that helping non-kin may have evolved if the cost of helping another was less than the likelihood of a return benefit, like the increased kindness of strangers. Food sharing has been used as a prime example, as giving food to needy strangers in times of plenty was a way of ensuring the receiving of food in times of scarcity.

Non-Selfish Helping

Recent research has found a type of helping strangers that cannot be accounted for by self-interest. In the public goods game, people are given tokens. In secret, they decide how many tokens to keep and how many to contribute to a public pot. Not contributing anything is called free riding. Were players purely self-interested, they would naturally become free-riders. Most participants actually share half of their tokens, sharing less and less as time goes on. If they detect a free-rider, they feel the need to punish that behaviour even if the punishment costs them. This urge to punish the selfish behaviour contributes to the maintenance of cooperation, and is actually a form of helping towards group interest. This reveals a third principle of altruism called strong reciprocity: the human predisposition to cooperate with others and punish defectors, even when this behaviour cannot be justified by self-interest, extended kinship, or reciprocal altruism.

Neuroscience of Helping

When observing unfair behaviour, an area of the brain called the bilateral insula is activated, an area of the brain associated with pain, distrust, and hunger. When encountering altruistic and trusting behaviours, reward centres in the brain are activated. Given the opportunity to help ingroup members who are seen to be in pain activates the anterior insula (an empathy centre in the brain), while denying the opportunity to help outgroup members who are in pain activates the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain that also activates when people derive pleasure from the misfortune of others. This suggests that there are two motivational systems involved in helping.

Applying Help Research

Not all helping has a positive outcome, and some help can do more harm than good. Helping involves power relations. If one person helps another, this means that they are stronger or better in some way to the person who needs help. It signals the generosity of the helper and the weakness and dependence of the recipient. This esteem threat can cause the recipient to reject the help. Assumptive help (when people or groups offer help without asking if it is needed) can be bad for personal or collective self-worth. Nadler identified two types of helping – dependency-oriented help and autonomy-oriented help. The first type “gives a man a fish”, fixing the symptom but not the problem. The second “teaches a man to fish”, giving the recipient more power to help themselves in the future.

Selfishness in Life-Threatening Circumstances

It used to be thought that in life-threatening circumstances, people could become irrationally and competitively selfish, undermining rescue by being uncooperative. Research on the deaths of people in the Titanic and the Lusitania disasters found that in a slower sinking that gave men time to think, social norms about saving women and children first were given time to activate and thus more women and children survived. In the Lusitania sinking, which was fast, more men survived because they were reacting without considering social norms. In the World Trade Centre tragedy, people escaping the buildings via the stairwells did so in an orderly, cooperative fashion that emergency planners didn’t expect. Drury suggests that when an emergency produces a sense of a common fate amongst victims, a shared identity forms that allows victims to band together and act in a mutually supportive way.

11. Affiliation and Close Relationships

Relationships are Important

Psychological Wellbeing

People display a more positive mood around other people, especially when they are experiencing closeness or intimacy. A large social network is positively related to happiness, and people tend to feel their most negative when they are alone. A steady and satisfying romantic relationship is enough to make people generally happier than their single counterparts, and divorce is related to sharp decreases in happiness. That being said, dispositionally happy people are more likely to develop successful long-term relationships because people like being around them more.

Physical Wellbeing

Social relationships impact physical well-being as well, increasing the chance of survival in the case of illness. Social ties with friends, relatives, and partners, extend a person’s life expectancy, across all socioeconomic classes. Lack of close relationships is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease that is as dangerous as smoking.

Social Support

Social support is a partner’s responsiveness to another’s needs. It is this social support that helps people live longer and more satisfying lives. This can be categorized into emotional support (behaviour directed at providing reassurance in stressful times), and instrumental support (behaviour that offers practical assistance in dealing with a problem). Social support can encourage better self-care, as well as act as a buffer against stress.

The Effects of Social Exclusion

The effects of social exclusion are immediate. The perception of being excluded can be frustrating and cause an intense need for belonging. Rejection causes a lowered mood, low self-esteem, loss of control, and strong psychological arousal.

The Need for Belonging

The need for belonging is the intrinsic motivation to affiliate with others and be socially accepted. This evolved, theoretically, because affiliation increased the chance of our ancestors’ survival, allowing them more access to food and security. The need to belong is demonstrated in our strong reactions to a sense of belonging or a sense of rejection. Children quickly form friendships, and in a new situation, people quickly seek to affiliate with others. We need allies.

Attachment Theory

Attachment theory suggests that people unconsciously learn an attachment style in infancy that influences the way they deal with relationships later on in life. There are three attachment styles:

1. Secure attachment style: Carers are responsive, dependable, and available. The child will view others as trustworthy and have positive self-image.

2. Avoidant attachment style: Carers show rejection, neglect, or are abusive. The child will develop a cynical view of others as untrustworthy.

3. Anxious-ambivalent attachment style: Carers show an inconsistent responsiveness to the child’s needs, causing them to have a strong desire to be close to others but a fear that others will not respond.

Avoidant attachment style has been argued to be more complex, and can be split into two styles. In fearful attachment style, the person wants intimate relationships but avoids them for fear of being hurt. In dismissing attachment style, the person prefers freedom and independence over closeness with others.

Attachment and Relationship Quality

The four-group model of attachment includes these styles:

1. Secure: positive model of self, positive model of other

2. Dismissing: positive model of self, negative model of other

3. Preoccupied: negative model of self, positive model of other

4. Fearful: negative model of self, negative model of other

Attachment styles are often measured using a questionnaire. It has been found that people with secure attachment styles have higher levels of trust and satisfaction in their relationships. Preoccupied and avoidant attachment styles lead to distrust. Preoccupied and fearfully attached people experience higher than average blood pressure in the face of relationship stress, while dismissive people show less than average.

Interpersonal Attraction

The Benefit of Beauty

People tend to attribute intelligence and confidence to beautiful people. Beautiful people earn more, and the reward centres of people’s brains trigger when they gaze upon this beauty. Mothers with attractive babies tend to be more playful and affectionate towards their child.

Beauty and Goodness

People assume that attractive people are also nice, good people. They are rated as more trustworthy and sociable. On average, it seems that this is correct – attractive people do tend to be more social. This is likely due to the preferential treatment and kindness they are shown throughout their lives on the account of their beauty. It’s easy to be social when everyone is so nice to you. This is an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

According to evolutionary psychology, in the past it is possible that physical attractiveness was representative of a person’s good health, meaning that they were a better candidate for the survival of the genetic line. These days, there is little evidence of any correlation between beauty and health.

Features of Beauty

People typically agree on what is beautiful. Even infants can guess what’s more attractive. Some elements of beauty are hormone markers, associated with the level of estrogen or testosterone the person possesses. For instance, women are more attracted to men with large jaws, prominent brow ridges and cheekbones. Men are more attracted to women with high cheekbones and smooth skin. Both prefer symmetry, and faces with features that average the looks of others. People also prefer symmetry in the body. Women prefer men with a narrow waist and broad chest, while men prefer women with an hourglass shape. This is related to reproduction advantages.

Context and Beauty

Context also has an influence on whether we find someone attractive. People in long-term heterosexual relationships tend to rate others of the opposite sex slightly lower than a single person would. Around closing time at a store, employees find customers more attractive than earlier in their shift.

Psychological Beauty

People often choose relationships with others without actually thinking about it consciously. When thinking about it, people think they’d prefer friends with admirable qualities. In reality it is more complex – it’s about sense of humour, rapport, how the other person makes them feel, etc. People lack insight into their own preferences. Research has come up with three main factors of psychological attractiveness: proximity, familiarity, and similarity.

Proximity and Attraction

Being physically close to others (proximity) has been shown to increase the chance of becoming friends with them. This means that you’re more likely to be friends with your roommate, or your neighbor, than you are with someone who lives a 10 minute drive away. Sometimes, though, proximity leads to increased disliking. This is because proximity lets you get to know someone better, and if you don’t like what you learn, you might feel worse about someone. Part of the reason is that it is easier to come in contact with someone who is physically close to you a good deal of the time. Physical separation ends many friendships, and can lead to an end in marriages as well.Familiarity and Attraction

Familiarity is linked to attraction. According to the mere exposure effect, merely being in the presence of something repeatedly, without reinforcement, increases liking. This means that even without interacting, we like the people we are exposed to frequently.

Similarity and Attraction

The similarity-attraction effect suggests that we like others who are similar to us. Similar in attitude, in looks, in background, in name… even people who find out they have the same birthday like each other more. Similarity is important in attraction but also in feeling understood by one’s partner or spouse. People who are similar to us act as validation for our own traits. They tend to agree with us, which is gratifying. This effect runs entirely counter to the traditional thought that opposites attract. The only exception is that dominant people tend to prefer people who take a more submissive role.

Underestimating the Situation

Situations have a big influence on attraction. In exciting situations, people can mistakenly attribute their arousal to an external stimulus that is not the actual cause of their arousal. This is called misattribution of arousal.

Romance

Love

There are ways in which love is an addiction. When shown images of their lovers, people experience an activation of anticipatory reward systems and heightened attention. Being in love can be seen as a strong motivation to be with another person, like an addictive craving. People don’t generally remain in this state of intense love throughout their relationship. The intense state is called passionate love, and is usually characterized by intrusive thinking and preoccupation with the partner, idealization of the other and the desire to know the other and be known by them.

Another form love takes is companionate love. This is the affection and tenderness we feel with the people deeply entwined in our lives. This extends to familial love. Sternberg suggested that love is made up of intimacy, commitment, and passion. Love consists of any variety of these three types of love.

Relationship Satisfaction

In the tradition of behaviourism, equity theory seeks to explain relationship satisfaction in terms of perceptions of fair vs. unfair distributions of resources. This means that the ratio of costs-rewards should be the same for both partners. More recent research suggests that it’s more the absolute level of rewards that increases relationship satisfaction. Of course, people have different expectations about what they should expect from a relationship. How we feel about a relationship is related to the standard to which we compare that relationship. Attractive alternatives are one of the biggest threats to relationships – extramarital affairs are one of the biggest causes of divorce. If the quality of alternatives is low, then a person will be dependent on their relationship.

Another element to relationship satisfaction and for staying in relationships that are unsatisfying is the number of investments that have been made. This means the level of resources (time, money, emotional involvement, etc.) that have been put into the relationship and increase the cost of breaking up. A person’s relationship commitment is their intent to maintain a relationship and remain psychologically attached to it.

Relationship-Enhancing Behaviours

There are certain thoughts and behaviours that enhance how a relationship functions. For instance, behaving constructively in the face of destructive behaviours is called accommodation. Forgiveness is a prosocial motivational change toward a person who has offended you. To forgive rather than retaliate helps promote relationship satisfaction and longevity. Commitment is a predictor of forgiveness. However, some people are dispositionally better at forgiving other people. People with high self-control, high agreeableness, and low neuroticism are the best at forgiving their relationship partners. Forgiveness also positively impacts the psychological state of the forgiver. Willingness to sacrifice, the tendency to forego self-interest for the sake of the partner’s well-being, is also related to levels of commitment. These acts all communicate commitment levels, thus increasing a relationship’s longevity.

Relationship-Enhancing Though

People who are committed to their relationship often experience relationship superiority- the belief that their relationship is better than the average. This is especially important when the relationship is in jeopardy. Commitment boosts perception of the relationship’s good qualities. It also causes the couple to give lower attractiveness ratings to alternatives. According to the self-expansion model, all of these mental tricks are a result of the individual identity expanding to a couple identity.

Relationship Processes

Relationship Types

A relationship means mutual interdependence. This means that the cognitive, affective, and behavioural outcomes of one person are dependent on the other. Anger is one of the leading causes of break-ups, but so is indifference. Two types of relationships have been distinguished: exchange relationships and communal relationships. Exchange relationships are an interpersonal association between individuals who are concerned with what their partner gets and what they themselves receive to ensure equitable benefits. A communal relationship is one in which the individual is more concerned with what their partner gets than what they themselves receive, and tend to put the other person’s concerns above their own. Exchange relationships tend to be less close and intimate than communal relationships.

Horizontal / Vertical Relationships

A horizontal (reciprocal) relationshop is egalitarian and involves the exchange of knowledge, care, support, and disclosure. A vertical (complementary) relationship is one in which involves an unequal exchange of benefits, as happens between a parent and a child.

Voluntary Relationships

Voluntary relationships like friendships are more easily lost because they are not maintained by formal bonds. Friendships have six functions:

1. Companionship (doing things together)

2. Help (assisting one another)

3. Intimacy (sharing secrets)

4. Alliance (loyalty)

5. Self-validation (helping maintain positive self-image)

6. Emotional security (comfort in threatening situations)

Skills learned in adolescent relationships are useful for relationships developed later in life and increase the chance of later relationships surviving.

Disclosure

Revealing private information is called self-disclosure. It is important for every type of interpersonal relationship. We disclose more to people we like, like people more after we have disclosed things to them, and like people who disclose more. Liking and intimacy are needed for us to disclose our more personal information. Disclosure reciprocity is the tendency to match our conversation partner’s level of disclosure. Disclosure increases with liking and decreases with disliking. Sharing intimate information and secrets requires trust, and signifies the strengthening of a relationship. People tend to disclose more online, becoming hyperpersonal. People tend to be happier when they feel that their relationship partner discloses more to them than to other people.

Perceived Partner Responsiveness

Perceived partner responsiveness is the perception that a relationship partner is responsive to our needs. To disclose intimate information, a person needs to feel that the other person cares, values, and understands them. If a person feels that the other individual is trying to change them, that they do not pay attention, this makes them feel rejected and worry about the relationship. People disclose more to those who are non-judgmental and responsive to their need to be accepted as they are. Both levels of self-disclosure and perceived partner disclosure are predictive of spousal intimacy.

12. The Dynamics of Groups

Groups and Their Distinctions

A group exists when two or more individuals define themselves as members as a group. Religious groups, national groups, organizational groups and friendship groups are all types of groups. There are also no objective characteristics that make up groups. Some groups are also more tight-knit than others.

Why do Humans Form Groups

There are three main perspectives on why humans group up:

1. Sociobiological perspective: forming groups is an adaptive process, allowing more effective defense against predators, cooperation in areas like farming, hunting, and child-rearing. Groups allowed people to survive and reproduce, and thus people who were more inclined to group formation were able to pass down their genes more effectively. This predisposition to form groups is demonstrated in the need to belong.

2. Cognitive perspective: Social comparison theory argues that we want to have an accurate view of the world, and we look to others as examples from which to judge our own beliefs. Social identity theory and self-categorization theory suggest that we like to identify and categorize ourselves according to our group membership.

3. Utilitarian perspective: People derive benefits from groups. Social exchange theory suggests that our social connections fulfill material and immaterial needs. People are unhappy in relationships where they invest more than they get back.

Types of Groups

The entitativity of groups is the degree to which the collection of people is perceived as being bonded together in a coherent unit. Groups vary on this and a number of other levels. There are four types of groups:

1. Intimacy groups: high interaction, high importance, common goals & outcomes, high similarity, long duration, low numbers, low penetration, high entitativity. (ex. Family)

2. Task groups: moderate interaction, moderate importance, moderate goal commonalities, moderate similarity, moderate duration, moderate permeability, small size, high entitativity. (ex. Sports team)

3. Social categories: low interaction, low importance, few common goals, low member similarity, long duration, low permeability, large numbers. (ex. Men)

4. Loose associations: low interaction, low importance, few common goals & outcomes, low similarity, short duration, high permeability, moderate size, low entitativity. (ex. People in a grocery store)

Different group types have different functions. For instance, task groups are often utilitarian, goal-oriented groups, while intimacy groups are socially supportive. Social categories fulfill the need for identity.

The Individual in the Group

Group socialization is the collective effort a group makes to assimilate new members to existing group norms and practices. There are five stages of group membership.

1. Investigation: the prospective member decides to join a group. This leads to entry.

2. Socialization: having entered the group, the member is socialized and then gains acceptance.

3. Maintenance: a full member, who continues their role. However, at some point they may begin to reach divergence.

4. Re-socialization: in the case of divergence, a person will become a marginal group member, until they exit.

5. Remembrance: the individual is now an ex-member.

Moving from one stage to the next is called a role transition.

Joining Groups

During the investigation stage, people will try to join groups that align with their personal goals. Task groups want members who have certain skills, while intimacy groups value compatibility.

Initiation

Initiation is the role transition of entry into a group, and is often accompanied by a ritual of some sort. This ritual may be unpleasant or painful in some way, or it may be something like a party or a welcome speech. Severe initiations (as in the military or fraternity groups) are argued to increase liking for a group by triggering cognitive dissonance. If you didn’t think the group was worth it, why would you let them treat you like this? However, studies have shown that the opposite effect actually occurs – severe initiations decrease the liking of groups. Harsh initiations do, however, deter potential members who are not eager to join a group from bothering.

Role-taking

The socialization process of group membership is when the person takes up a role. They must learn their role in the group, which is usually determined partially by their skills and knowledge, and partially by existing group dynamics. During socialization, group commitment of the member towards the group, tends to increase when the member is satisfies. When the criterion for acceptance are reached, the group member will be treated the same as every other member, sometimes gaining access to information that was previously hidden. They are then critiqued less harshly. In some groups, acceptance is easier.

This depends on the group’s staffing level, the degree to which the actual number of group members is similar to the ideal number of group members. Understaffing leads to a lack of resources, while overstaffing can lead to apathy and alienation.

Group Membership

Maintenance begins after acceptance, and is characterized by high group commitment. Roles are negotiated as the group wants its needs fulfilled, while the member might want his/her individual needs fulfilled. There are other roles, like recruiter or trainer that need filling. When role negotiations are successful, the member will feel their group membership to be rewarding.

Leaving a Group

Divergence

Gradually, some members will lose interest in a group, either due to role dissatisfaction or the prospect of new groups that may be better. At this point the member may be categorized as marginal or deviant, and the member will be gradually treated as a less important group member. They may be pressured then to leave the group.

Exit

Groups may try to re-socialize deviant group members. If successful, this can lead to re-entry into the group. If not, the deviant group member will exit, either by force or voluntarily. This can be congenial (a retirement) or bitter (an ex-communication). It can be quite painful, similar to the feeling of social exclusion and rejection.

Remembering

After the ex-member leaves, both the group and the ex-member remember and evaluate each other. If the remembrance is positive, some loyalty will remain. If not, ties will be severed. Ex-members who negatively evaluate their ex-group may be inclined to enact revenge.

Group Structure and Development

Group Development

Status is a group’s evaluation of any given individual role within that group. Groups vary in a number of structural aspects, including how status is distributed. There are five stages of group development, as established by Tuckman & Jensen:

1. Forming: high uncertainty as group members get to know eachother.

2. Storming: high conflict as group members resist influence and disagree.

3. Norming: high cohesion as group members share a common purpose.

4. Preforming: high performance as group members work towards their goals.

5. Adjourning: grief or relief when group members leave, feel accomplished or failed.

Group interactions can be coded, according to the interaction process analysis (IPA). This distinguishes between task behaviours (directed at task completion) and socio-emotional behaviours (directed at interpersonal relations). Task behaviour is important for goal achievement, but can cause conflict. This is when socio-emotional behaviour enhances group harmony.

Group Norms

Group norms are the shared belief systems that groups develop as a guide on how to behave. These are typically unofficial rules – some prescribe what behaviours and attitudes are appropriated, others describe typical group behaviour. Groups function more smoothly when they operate according to group norms. They help people understand the dynamics of the group, and conformity illustrates commitment and cohesion. Deviant group members tend to get a negative reaction from their fellow group members. Norms change as groups change.

Shared Cognition and Affect

Groups can develop shared cognition, where their understanding of the intricacies of the group is unified. This makes cooperation and communication easier. Transactive memory is a system of knowledge available to group members with shared awareness of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. People learn who to ask when they need a particular bit of advice or a task done. Emotional contagion is the transfer of moods and emotions among people in a group. When one person seems unhappy, other members of the group will adopt the same attitude.

Group Cohesiveness

Group cohesion is the force that binds members to the group. This can be divided into task cohesion, the attraction of group members to the task at hand, and interpersonal cohesion, the liking of other group members.

Being Different

Group members take different positions in the group, either formally or informally. The previously mentioned interaction process analysis (IPA) is useful for looking at roles and status. There is a speaking hierarchy within a group, based on who talks the most. The bigger talkers are seen as the more influential group members. It is common that people participate unevenly, talking a number of times in a row, then holding back. This is called holding the floor. Some people are consistently more task-oriented, and are labeled a task specialist. Others are socio-emotional specialists, more concerned with group cohesion. While task specialists are seen as more influential, they are liked less than socio-emotional specialists.

Personality and ability determine the talkers and the followers. Extroverts will talk more, but many factors go in to who is more influential. According to the expectation states theory, status differences within a group result from different expectations held by group members about each other. Some inequalities come from performance expectations. Performance expectations are influenced by status characteristics that are either diffuse (not related to the group task, e.g. gender) or specific (necessary to the group task, e.g. skills).

Groups in Context

Intergroup Context & Salience of Group Membership

Group membership is not always the first thing on an individual’s mind. Self-categorization as a group member must be triggered (made salient). This can happen when someone is exposed to a different group. For instance, you might forget that you are a Dutch person until you visit England and notice how very un-English you are. Being reminded of group membership can lead to implicit or explicit forms of competition. Group membership has to be salient to impact behaviour, but the context in which that happens determines the behaviour. Our group’s status compared to other groups can impact how we feel about ourselves, since we prefer to be favourably compared.

Group Perceptions and Social Influence

Groups have are defined by what they stand for, but also defined by the fact that they are not the other group. People’s perception of group members is determined in part by how they compare their group to other groups. Changes in intergroup context occur because some groups can leave the scene and new groups can emerge. Those changes can affect the comparisons a group makes, and thus affect group identity.

13. Performance and Leadership

Group Performance, Group Potential, Task Type

Actual vs. Potential Performance

In order to evaluate group performance, there must be a baseline upon which to measure performance. While individuals make up a whole, group performance researchers are less interested on the individual contribution than on how this performance is affected by group dynamics. The baseline used to measure performance is potential group performance, a calculation of how productive each individual member would be if the task was split up. Actual group performance is how productive the group is when working as a group.

Dimensions of Group Tasks

Group task types are distinguished on a few qualities. Some tasks are unitary, requiring all group members to perform the same tasks. Others are divisible, where parts of a greater task can be given to different individual group members. Tasks that focus on quantity are maximization tasks, and those that focus on quality are optimization tasks.

Additive

Additive tasks are those in which performance is the sum of individual performances. One example is brainstorming, a technique aimed to enhance group creativity by allowing the uninhibited generation of ideas. Additive tasks have a high group potential, because it is the sum of the performance potential of each individual involved.

Disjunctive

Disjunctive tasks require a choice of several proposals, as in problem-solving when only one solution out of many suggestions is chosen. Performance depends on the chosen proposal. A larger group size means a greater chance that a good proposal will be chosen. Some disjunctive tasks have the eureka effect, when the one solution to a problem can be immediately identified by all group members as being the correct solution. This increases the possibility of group potential being reached.

Conjunctive

A conjunctive task requires that each group member is successful. For instance, a rowing team needs each rower to perform at their best to win the race. Group potential decreases with an increased team size, because it raises the likelihood of having a weak member.

Process Losses vs. Process Gains

Types

Group potential and actual performance diverge due to process losses and process gains. Group dynamics like social interdependence and interaction can affect outcomes. If the actual performance is lesser than the potential performance, a process loss must have occurred. There are different types of process losses and gains.

Coordination Loss

Coordination losses occur when a group fails to coordinate the contributions of its individual members in an optimal manner. This can be seen in the Ringelmann effect. In physical tasks like tug-of-war (a weight-pulling game), the average performance of individual group members decreases as the group size increases. Individual members do not coordinate their exertions of maximal effort. That’s why saying “heave-ho!” is useful – it coordinates the efforts. Similarly, brainstorming can yield fewer new ideas than individuals might come up with themselves. Nominal groups are made up of a number of individuals who are asked separately to work on a task, independently of other group members. These groups are used to test potential group performance.

Another type of coordination loss is production blocking. This occurs in brainstorming-type tasks. If only one person can be talking at one time, other members don’t express their own ideas. Furthermore, an individual’s group status can impact their ideas are taken seriously, even when they offer the correct solution.

Motivation Loss

Sometimes losses are due to differences in motivation and in individual contributions. There are three main effects that have been identified as causes for motivation losses:

1. Social loafing: a motivation loss in which everyone puts in less effort because their individual contribution to the group cannot be easily identified.

2. Dispensability effect: when individuals don’t try hard because their effort seems to make little impact on group performance.

3. Sucker effect: when an individual group member suspects that others are slacking off, they lower their own efforts to avoid becoming the “sucker”.

Additive tasks allow for all of these effects to occur. Furthermore, the larger the group, the more likely these effects will occur. In disjunctive and conjunctive tasks, the problem isn’t social loafing because individual efforts are noticeable. However, dispensability and the sucker effect can still occur.

Motivation Gain

There are three main types of motivation gain in groups:

1. Social competition: When individual contributions are identifiable, the individual may be motivated by competition with other group members, especially if group members have relatively equal abilities.

2. Social compensation: stronger members may work harder to compensate for weaker members’ poor performance.

3. Köhler effect: members may work harder than they would individually because they don’t want to be responsible for weak group performance.

Social competition can happen with any type of task as long as individual contributions are recognized. Social compensation is usually limited to additive tasks. The Köhler effect is more likely to occur in conjunctive tasks, since in those the team is only strong as its weakest link.

Further variables on motivation losses and gains include the importance of group goals. If the goal is of high importance, social compensation is more likely to occur.

Individual Capability Loss

While the individual might not contribute their full potential due to motivation losses, they might also just lack the ability to contribute thanks to group dynamics. Social interaction can restrict attention, but may also allow members to make better contributions by providing intellectual stimulation or demonstrating effective strategies. Individual capability losses and gains are not looked at enough in performance research. There are, however, two effects which have been identified.

1. Cognitive restriction: capability loss in idea generation tasks which occurs when an idea mentioned by another group member makes people focus on that category of idea and stop attending to ideas from other categories.

2. Cognitive stimulation: capability gain in idea generation which occurs when idea generated by a different group member stimulates a cognitive category which might otherwise not have been thought of.

Managing Group Performance

Three Principles of Performance Management

The three principles of performance management are:

1. Groups should be composed with the best people for the type of task.

2. Group processes should be synchronized to work well with the type of task.

3. Groups should be given the chance to learn by allowing them practice tasks

The Composition of Groups

Group composition refers to the type of people who are put together. For instance, the hidden profile is a group decision situation in which information is distributed among members such that no individual group member can detect the best solution based on his own information. This situation means that between any two group members, there is both shared information and unshared information. In this situation, the task is un-performable without cooperation. Studying hidden profile situations is the key to determining process gains in group decision-making. Unfortunately, most groups fail to solve hidden profiles. This is due to a few unhelpful group tendencies:

1. Focus on negotiation: groups will negotiate decisions based on what they know of the pre-discussion preferences of other group members.

2. Discussion bias: groups tend to discuss more shared information than non-shared information. They may focus on advocating for a specific option rather than for solving the hidden profile that is unshared and inconsistent with individual preferences.

3. Evaluation bias: groups will evaluate information in a biased way that favours shared and preferential information. They will also judge consistent information as most credible.

When group members each favour different alternatives prior to discussion, the information exchange will be less biased.

Synchronization

Group synchronization is the sum of activities aimed at optimizing collaborative generation, modification, and integration of individual contributions. People have a tendency to believe that their group task is to suggest and defend a particular solution. There are many ways to promote group synchronization. One useful means of group synchronization is allowing for continuous visibility of individual contributions. This might be by providing individual feedback or documenting group members’ ideas. This reduces motivation losses and allows for people to coordinate more easily. Guided group discussions can get around our mistaken notions about the best way to make decisions. Dialectical techniques implement formal debating techniques in a group to force a devil’s advocate.

Learning

Group learning occurs when several people work interactively on the same task. There are four main group learning processes:

1. Individual-to-individual transfer: a group member’s ability to perform a task improves because they must repeat the performance (practice).

2. Group-to-individual transfer: social interaction within a group improves a group member’s ability to perform a task alone (training).

3. Group-to-individual-in-group transfer: the group member’s ability to perform a task within the group improves because of social interaction and group practice (teamwork).

4. Group-to-group transfer: the group’s ability to perform improves because of the social interaction of its group members (transactive memory).

14. Prejudice

Introduction

Prejudice can be as extreme as genocide and as simple as treating a person differently because of their gender. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to judge ingroup attributes as superior to those of the outgroup and to judge outgroups from an ingroup perspective. Determining who the ingroup and the outgroup members are is very psychological. Prejudice is defined as an attitude or orientation towards a group or its members that devalues it directly or indirectly, often to the benefit of the self or one’s own group.

Personality and Prejudice

Authoritarian Personality

There are certain aspects of personality which may predispose a person to prejudice behaviour. In the wake of World War II, psychologists were interested in explaining the sort of person who could be so prejudiced. Adorno came up with the idea of an authoritarian personality, a personality syndrome characterized by a simplistic cognitive style, a rigid regard for social conventions, and a submission to authority figures that is associated with prejudice towards minority groups and a susceptibility to Fascism. They theorized that this personality syndrome developed out of early childhood experiences with overly strict parents. They would measure this personality style using a fascism scale (F-scale).

Later research on the F-scale re-conceptualized authoritarian personality style as right-wing authoritarianism. A right-wing authoritarian can be characterized by having highly conventional attitudes, displaying a high degree of submission to established authorities, showing aggression in the name of these authorities, and a willingness to help the authority persecute other groups. Altemeyer’s scale includes three sub-scales: authoritarian submission, conventionalism, and authoritarian aggression.

Prejudice and Social Dominance

Another explanation of personal differences in prejudice comes in the form of social dominance orientation. A person who is oriented to social dominance desires hierarchical group relations. This is based in social dominance theory, which suggests that group-based hierarchies are a human tendency in which institutional discrimination is justified using legitimizing myths. These values, attitudes and ideologies provide moral justification for inequality and oppression. While these can be obvious, like racism or sexism, they can also be more subtle.

The meritocracy idea that people who are intelligent and successful should be rich also implies that people who are poor are that way because they are unintelligent or don’t try hard, without recognizing the importance of opportunities and circumstance. There is evidence that people higher in social dominance orientation are more sexist, racist, and prejudiced.

Social dominators are different than authoritarians in that they do not typically support submission to authority or value conventions like religion. They are most likely to be male and to manipulate others for their personal gain.

Ideologies of Authoritarianism and Social Dominance

There is a great deal of evidence, however, that personality plays a much more minor role in prejudice than does social context. For instance, members of socially dominant groups tend to develop more of a social dominance orientation. Similarly, people in societies which are perceived as threatened will be more likely to adopt an authoritarian mentality. While theorized to be personality traits, it seems like social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism can more appropriately be categorized as ideological beliefs determined in part by social context and in part by personality dimensions. People who think of the world as a competitive jungle will be higher on the former, while people who believe the world is a threatening place will be higher on the latter.

Cognition and Prejudice

Accentuation effects occur when social categories are correlated with a continuous dimension like skin colour, there is a judgmental tendency to overestimate similarities within and differences between the categories on this dimensions. For instance, people will overestimate the differences between black and white skin, but see all shades of black as the same. People tend to see out-group members as homogenous and tend to overgeneralize. This tendency can also be seen as a form of prejudice different from the negative evaluation of a group.

Outgroup Stereotyping & Homogeneity

The outgroup homogeneity effect is a tendency to see the out-group as more homogenous than the in-group. This might be related with the ways we structure and code information about groups. There may be some circumstances in which the opposite is true, as when people see members of their own group as all being good or intelligent.

Illusory Correlation

The illusory correlation effect is a tendency to perceive a relationship that does not exist or to see one that does exist as stronger than it actually is. This is related to the availability heuristic – people tend to use their own experiences with a group to make a judgment, even if those experiences are limited. They will predict that a behaviour they note only once or twice must occur all the time if they happened to see it.

Cognitive Misers

People are cognitive misers, preferring to take the simplest cognitive route to information processing. We stereotype partially because it is less of an intellectual burden to categorize people and judge them based on other people in that category. We tend to remember characteristics and behaviours that agree with our held stereotypes than those that do not, further exacerbating the issue. People who are inconsistent to our stereotypes take more cognitive effort to figure out, so we are more likely to ignore the differences.

Explicit vs. Implicit Prejudice

Social norms have been changing, making discrimination and prejudice less acceptable. Instead of going away, however, prejudice has become more subtle and harder to detect. Remember that the implicit and explicit bias are part of dual-process models that distinguish automatic processes from deliberate processes. We all have prejudiced stereotypes that can be activated automatically, outside of our control. Because implicit and explicit measures of prejudice do not measure the same thing, they are not always correlated. We may experience implicit prejudice but also not endorse those prejudices. Implicit measures also differ in what they measure. Some have been developed to measure prejudice, while others measure implicit stereotyping. This is an important distinction, because stereotyping may not be prejudiced, and can be positive.

Groups and Prejudice

Intragroup Processes

Groups have had an evolutionary advantage for humans, and many of our adaptations have allowed us to become better group members. Related to prejudice, it may be that we favour in-group members due to an expectation of reciprocity that we do not get from out-groups. This doesn’t, however, explain why we derogate out-groups.

Intergroup Discrimination

One of the first intergroup explanations for prejudice and discrimination is the realistic conflict theory, which suggests that discrimination reflects real conflicts of interest between groups that compete for limited resources. In order to reduce intergroup prejudice, one can provide a superordinate goal that both groups will band together to solve – this allows them to identify themselves as a larger group. Positive interdependence is a situation in which there are positive bonds between individuals and groups characterized by cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual benefits. Negative interdependence is when bonds between groups are characterized by conflict, leading to antagonism and realistic conflict.

Criticisms to the Intergroup Discrimination Theories

One of the criticisms of intergroup studies is that while they try to rule out self-interest as a factor in group prejudice, people still have expectations of positive interdependence and reciprocity. Evidence of minimal in-group bias may therefore not be an intergroup explanation. The intragroup explanation could explain the maximum in-group profit strategy (as the in-group maximizes profits), but not the maximum difference strategy (in which in-group members try to ensure that there is a big difference between their own rewards and the rewards of an out-group, even if that means that the overall rewards are fewer. Maximum difference actually is more of an intergroup strategy that emphasizes antagonistic relations between groups. Social identity is a gateway for psychologists looking to study intergroup relationships. Social identity is both connected to group identity, as well as an essential part of personal identity.

Neuroscience and Social Identity

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) is crucial to the understanding of the self, activating when the self-concept is implicated. When people demonstrate in-group bias, that part of the brain activates, indicating that the group becomes something like an extension of the self. When the individual did not identify with their group, this area did not activate.

The Individual and the Group

It is possible to measure group identification, the degree with which the individual identifies with their group. Identification can vary depending on the social context the person is in – it is about salience. Group membership is both objective and subjective. Positive-negative asymmetry describes evidence that people show more in-group bias when distributing positive rewards than punishment or penalties. This means that out-group derogation is harsher.

Threats to Group Existence

Threats to the existence of a group or to group security can increase prejudice, possibly for evolutionary reasons. Groups more worried about disease tend to also show more xenophobic tendencies. According to the terror management theory, being reminded that we may die someday causes existential angst that can cause us to retreat into reassuring in-groups. The feeling that the group will continue after you die can raise self-esteem and fulfill the need to belong. Minority groups may experience a different type of group threat in the restriction of their language and culture.

Resource Threats

Resource threats are also a possible cause of prejudice. Relative deprivation is a resentful feeling that the self or in-group is worse off than another group. This can lead to realistic conflicts over resources.

Status Threats

Social identity theory looks at how a group is valued compared to other groups, according to social comparison. Making social comparisons with groups that rank higher can then act as a threat to the group. Positive differentiation is the process of making a group positively different from a comparison out-group. This can occur through discrimination or through evaluative ratings that see the in-group as superior. The self-esteem hypothesis suggests that in-group bias will lead to an increase in group level self-esteem and satisfaction. When a group has low status, social reality constraints can occur. This means that when a low status group is aware that an out-group has clear superiority on a certain dimension, in-group bias on that dimension is too difficult to justify. Since groups differ on many dimensions, however, group esteem is usually saved by people recognizing their own group’s strengths and putting more emphasis on those. Discrimination may continue on the part of the low-status group because better rewards are easily justified by pointing out that the higher status group always gets the better rewards.

Value Threats

In looking at religious conflict, it is clear that there are also threats to a group’s values. Simply having strong values can be a basis for prejudice towards out-groups. Integrated threat theory states that a symbolic threat includes out-group values that threaten an in-group’s way of life. Self-categorization theory suggests that when we interact with an out-group, our in-group values become more salient. Furthermore, in-group members who are found to have opposing values to the accepted group values are treated even more harshly than out-group members.

Group Distinctiveness Threats

When there is too much similarity to an out-group, this can be a threat to group distinctiveness. For instance, Canadians may feel threatened by Americans when a foreigner guesses their nationality wrong. People like to be categorized within the groups they identify with. They also like to be in a group that is unique. People who identify highly with their group are more likely to respond to distinctiveness threats. Minorities may have a higher stake in maintaining their distinctiveness, as they are more likely to be assimilated into the larger culture.

Socio-Structural Theories

Discrimination and in-group bias do not always result from threats. When they do depends on whether the status relation is seen as legitimate, and how stable it is considered. While the absence of conflict might seem like a good thing, a certain amount of social conflict is necessary for social change to occur. Another contributor to the stable status quo is the ideology of individual mobility. Social change is method of changing group status. If that is not feasible, individuals will seek to develop a positive identity by moving into the high-status group. This cannot be achieved by many, and changes nothing in the overall societal structure when the rare individual crosses class boundaries. Interestingly, a small chance that individuals might have upwards mobility is enough to prevent group movements towards social change.

When We Do Not Discriminate

There are times when an in-group does not discriminate against an out-group. System justification theory suggests that in-group bias may not occur, since some members of low-status groups are motivated to justify a hierarchical system, even when it keeps them disadvantaged. Out-group bias is a tendency to favour the out-group over the in-group in terms of evaluations and reward allocation. This can occur from low-status groups to high-status groups.

Emotion Theories

Emotion-based approaches to the question of prejudice have suggested that it is vital to look at the emotions that the out-group inspires in in-group members. Emotions can be characterized by feelings (anger, sadness) or by appraisals (determining the situation’s emotional valence and direction) and action tendencies (responses cued to different appraisal results). New researchers suggest that emotions can occur on a group level as well – group emotions are experienced on the level of social identity, reflecting the appraisals of events in terms of group-level concerns and coping resources. These may be empathetic emotions experienced on behalf of other group members, and can change depending on the salience of the group membership. This can explain more extreme types of group prejudice like out group derogation. For instance, group Schadenfreude (pleasure at the failure or derogation of others) can be much nastier than Schadenfreude experienced at an individual level.

Psychological Interventions

Contact

Certain interventions have been suggested that might lessen prejudice. The first major contribution to prejudice-prevention research is the contact hypothesis. This suggests that intergroup contact will reduce prejudice if it has acquaintance potential, takes place under an equal status condition, involves cooperation towards a common goal, and takes place in a supportive, normative environment. Allport’s contact hypothesis has sprung a good deal of research. One intervention that resulted is the jigsaw classroom, a cooperative teaching method designed to reduce prejudice in diverse classrooms. The problem may be that the benefits of contact may not generalize from the encountered out-group member to the group as a whole. This depends on how close the out-group member is to the in-group member’s stereotype of the “typical” out-group member. The more similar they are, the more likely that generalization is possible.

Categorization Levels

Researchers have come up with three theoretical models examining the nature of cognitive group categorizations during contact, and which categorizations are more effective. Some approaches to prejudice-reduction emphasize assimilation, while others promote a form of multiculturalism in which group differences are acknowledged and appreciated.

De-categorization

The de-categorization approach involves reducing the salience of intergroup boundaries through personalized contact. This means reducing the cognitive processes involved in interaction to either differentiation (making distinctions that generalize to the group), or personalizations (stressing the uniqueness of the individual out-group member). By paying attention to the idiosyncratic, people focus less on the stereotypical elements of a person. This approach has found a good deal of support, but is unfortunately not always feasible.

Re-categorization

The re-categorization approach involves replacing salient in-group/out-group distinctions with a greater commonality. For instance, she may be black and I may be white, but we’re both Americans. Re-categorization reduces in-group bias. The main problem with re-categorization is that it comes with a degree of distinctiveness threat.

Mutual Differentiation

The categorization model, mutual differentiation, suggests making group affiliations salient during contact in order to give members distinct but complementary roles. This would mean keeping the intergroup interaction structured. Instead of aiming to change category structure, this model attempts to make the level of interaction more positive and cooperative.

Integrative Models

Pettigrew combined the de-categorization, re-categorization, and mutual differentiation models into a three-step longitudinal model. On first contact, de-categorization should be encouraged. Subsequently, re-categorization would further reduce prejudice. If original group memberships are not easily abandoned, mutual differentiation would be put in place.

Psychological Processes

Focus on the psychological processes involved with prejudice used to directed upon cognition but now has begun to turn to affective processes. Some of this research looks at intergroup anxiety, a negative affective state experienced when anticipating or experiencing contact with an out-group member, stemming from the expectation of negative consequences like embarrassment or rejection. Negative out-group stereotypes can exaggerate this anxiety. This can undermine the positive effects of contact. Interventions directed at reducing anxiety in contact situations have been found helpful in prejudice reduction.

Studies show that contact has a positive impact on cognitive and affective aspects of empathy, explaining why it is so good at prejudice reduction. In-group re-appraisal is the realization that in-group norms are not inherently superior to those of out-groups. This process helps ensure that positive contact effects can be generalized to other out-groups.

Other Prejudice-Reduction Interventions

Stereotype Disconfirmation

One of the other methods of reducing prejudice is to disconfirm stereotypes about the out-group. One model of stereotype change is the bookkeeping model, which involves the gradual accumulation of stereotype-inconsistent information. The conversion model suggests that a single, dramatic bit of disconfirming information can change a stereotype. The subtyping model suggests that disconfirming information allows the brain to make a stereotypical sub-type that makes the out-group more complex. Subtypes may be a way to maintain stereotypes in the face of disconfirmation.

Extended Contact

The extended contact hypothesis suggests that knowledge that an in-group member has a close relationship with an out-group member can improve out-group attitudes. Observing a group member interacting positively with an out-group member adjusts the in-group member’s ideas about group norms, making positive attitudes towards out-group members more acceptable. This extended contact can also happen through the media – people watching television shows with gay characters (Will & Grace or Modern Family) showed a reduced prejudice that generalized towards gay people in real life.

Perspective-Taking

Perspective-taking exercises are typically a sort of role-playing in which the in-group member pretends to be an out-group member. This sort of intervention can significantly reduce prejudice by improving empathy.

Prejudice Reduction’s Wider Impact

There is an issue called the principle-implementation gap, that acceptance of equality in principle may be undermined by resistance to policies that would bring about equality. For instance, the belief in gay rights and equality may nevertheless be accompanied by a belief that gay people should not marry. Contact does not necessarily reduce inequalities and real discrimination, only negative attitudes towards other groups. It may also cause the disadvantaged groups to become less aware of the fact that they are treated unequally

15. Culture

Culture

Definitions

One important issue in psychology is the generalization of psychological tests and treatment. Some classical studies when conducted in Europe or Asia have produced surprisingly different results. In most cases, the results are similar but different in magnitude. Culture can be defined as a social system characterized by the shared meanings attributed to people and events by its members. People interpret the meanings of behaviours in different ways according to their culture, and can have trouble interpreting the meanings of out-group behaviours.

Nations

The argument that different cultures are derived from the demands imposed by different physical climates and environments is called eco-cultural theory. Physical environments can lead to different types of survival habits, which lead to different institutions and socialization practices. For example, islanders may be more suspicious of strangers than people from inland continents.

Quantifying Culture: Hofstede

Hofstede came up with a method of measuring culture at the national level. He looked at survey results from IBM company employees in 50 different countries and conducted a nation-level factor analysis, taking the mean response for each survey item for each nation and treating it as a unit of analysis. This resulted in a few dimensions of culture:

1. Individualism vs. Collectivism: individualist cultures emphasize autonomy and freedom, while collectivist cultures emphasize the importance of community.

2. Power distance: The extent to which hierarchy and deference are accepted within a nation.

3. Uncertainty avoidance: The extent to which a nation is averse to risk and uncertainty.

4. Cultural masculinity vs. femininity: The extent to which gender roles are seen as differentiated (masculinity) or similar (femininity).

Studies are most frequently conducted in the US, and there is a term to describe the demographics they tend to cover – WEIRD, white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. While influential, Hofstede’s dimensions were the result of a limited measure reliant on a questionnaire designed for other purposes.

Quantifying Culture: Schwartz

Schwartz came up with three dimensions of culture after conducting a nation-level analysis reliant on values with consistent meanings.

1. Embeddedness (relationships with long-term members are prioritized) vs. autonomy (emotional and intellectual separateness is encouraged)

2. Hierarchy (inequality is accepted and deference is given to one’s seniors) vs. egalitarianism (equality is granted to all people)

3. Mastery (achievement is sought) vs. harmony (balance is sought)

Methodology

Some methodological issues involved in cross-cultural studies include the translation problem – test items are not always understood in the same ways in different cultures. To be sure that something is translated properly, back translation is used. This involves translating a questionnaire that has already been translated back into the original language, and assessing whether the double-translated version is the same as the original. This way, discrepancies can be found and addressed. Even after successfully translating a questionnaire, the test may have different psychometric properties in different context, thanks to variances in the emotional overtones of certain words. Respondents to questionnaires also differ. Some cultures express their opinions by agreeing or disagreeing while others would rather be neutral. Researchers need to control for acquiescent responding, the tendency for a respondent to agree with everything.

It is important to be aware of cultural subjectivity – what might measure conformity in one culture could be measuring good social grace in another. Measures should include a check on whether the respondent endorses their culture’s values. Finally, there are an increasing amount of bicultural people in the world, opening up the possibility of new studies.

Cognition and Culture

Cognitive Styles

There are two main cognitive styles. Holistic thinkers focus on the relationships between different elements of a situation, looking at the big picture. Analytic thinkers tend to focus on the main element within the information they are processing, looking at details. Nisbett suggested that these cognitive styles have arisen because of the differing environments people have adapted to. Hunting requires focus and analysis, while agriculture requires cooperation and holistic thinking, for example. People with an analytic cognitive style will explain the behaviour of others in terms of their personality, while a person with a holistic style will explain behaviour in terms of the situational context. However, when not given information about context, both conditions looked at personality for an explanation. Furthermore, when told that the person was acting according to role constraints, the respondents all showed correspondence bias.

Self-Concept and Culture

People in the US are more likely to have an independent view of the self (seeing themselves as independent agents), while people in collectivist cultures like Japan are more likely to hold an interdependent view of the self. Many measures of self-construal have been developed.

Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement has been difficult to test cross-culturally because of the measures used to assess it. The better than average effect, that more than 50% of most people studied report themselves to be better than average on a number of criteria, has been found to be just as strong in collectivist cultures, providing evidence that self-enhancement is universal. It has been found, however, that in cultures that put a high value on modesty, results seem to indicate a lower self-enhancement. However, upon deeper research, it is more likely that the modesty value affects the results of the tests.

Self-Construal Differences

Differences in self-construal can be explained in part by display rules, a culture’s stance on whether emotions should be expressed openly. Collectivist cultures have lower display rules while individualist cultures tend to have higher display rules.

Self-Construal across Time

Do independence and interdependence vary over time? In studies of self-construal, people primed with independence-related stimuli tended to express a more independent self-construal, however results clearly show that people from more collectivist cultures are more stably interdependent, and vice-versa. That self-construal can be primed, however, has implications on what causes differences in self-construal. There are many elements of culture that act as primers, especially language use.

Interpersonal Relations

There is a contrast in how independent cultures differ from collectivist cultures in terms of interacting with out-group members. People with independent self-construals tend not to see a difference between how they behave with people from their own culture vs. people from other cultures. People with interdependent self-construals, however, report communications with in-group members as being more socially connected and more communicative without the need to be explicit. High interdependence predicts having closer, intimate friendships, but also having fewer friends.

Prosocial Behaviour

Some studies have found evidence of more prosocial behaviour in collectivist cultures.

Intimacy

Across all nations, men have been found to prefer young, healthy, and beautiful women, and women have been found to prefer ambitious, high-earning men. However, cultural variations occur in preference for pre-marital chastity (stronger in collectivist nations). Wealthier nations showed a higher preference for love-based relationships.

Groups and Collectivism

Conformity is highest in natures that are more collectivist and high in embeddedness values. Cultures that value hierarchies cannot be tested as if all group members are equal, as they can in low-hierarchical countries. Furthermore, in democratic cultures, democratic leadership styles tend to be preferred, but in countries where there is an authoritarian leader, the opposite is true. Teams are often composed of people coming from different cultures. This means that there are likely to be different preferences on how a group is run. Some value assertiveness while others wait for leadership. Effective multicultural teams do best to establish a new shared culture.

Intergroup Interactions

In collectivist cultures, group memberships are more permanent and central to individual identity. In an interesting comparison of the collectivist Samoan culture versus the individualistic New Zealand culture, it was found that New Zealanders (like Americans), sought to increase the difference in rewards between in-group and out-group, while Samoans actually sought to distribute rewards more equally. This might be due to perceiving a higher level of in-group membership (not team A and team B, but team Samoan), or due to the fact that gift-giving is a way to achieve higher status in Samoan culture.

Honour

The need to maintain the honour of one’s group is high in collectivist cultures around the world. In the Netherlands, honour is associated with the endorsement of self-respect and other independent values. In Spain, honour is associated with interdependent values like honesty and loyalty. An interdependent definition of culture is associated with a more vigorous defense of group honour, such that insults focus more on group-association in these areas. This can be extreme as honour killings occur in nations where sexual infidelity is seen as a threat to group honour.

Negotiating Culture

International business requires a good deal of negotiation across cultures. There are different negotiation styles that are more useful in different cultures. Americans prefer competitive negotiations while Chinese people prefer more conflict-avoidant negotiations. One must adapt their behaviour in international negotiation situations if one wants to achieve the best results. Negotiators in collectivist cultures take more account of their context and tend to be the best adapters to international negotiation situations. However, this adaptation is only effective insofar as behaviours have shared meanings.

Intercultural Interactions

There are certain values that are overcoming the geographical boundaries of culture. An international study of world values has come up with a dimension of post-materialist values. This includes people who believe self-expression and happiness are worth more than economic and physical security, that they are happy, that homosexuality is justifiable, that people are trustworthy, and people who have signed petitions. There are an increasing number of post-materialists appearing throughout the world. Nation-level scores of post-materialism do coincide with measures of individualism, but there is nevertheless an increasing endorsement of these values.

Migration

Acculturation is the process of adapting to a new culture. The four main acculturation strategies are:

1. Integration: maintain cultural identity but relate positively with host country

2. Assimilation: only positive relations with host country are important

3. Separation: only maintaining cultural identity

4. Marginalization: none of these are important

Migrants tend to prefer integration, while countries differ in what they prefer migrants to do. The Netherlands, for instance, prefers assimilation. Turkish migrants to the Netherlands prefer integration in public and separation at home.

Bicultural Identity

Those who favour integration tend to develop a bicultural identity, in which the individual sees themselves as having simultaneous membership of two culturally distinct groups. Bicultural identity integration is when the person sees their alternate identities as compatible with one another.