Advanced Social Flashcards
Two main approaches in social psychology?
Social cognition - from cognitive psych.
Social identity theory - motivationally orientated perspective.
Summary of social cognition?
Focuses on individual thought process, following a response to social stimuli. Defined by how people store, in memory, and process social stimuli. Perceivers viewed as information processors.
People expereince social stimuli and form impressions on them based on information stored in memory, through cognitively effortful thinking
Summary of social identity theory?
Focus on intergroup behaviour driven by shared identities with others. We have a preference for positive social identity defined by our affiliation with in-groups. Founded by Henri Tajfel, rejected what he called the excesses of cognitive theory.
How have humans evolved to think socially?
Mostly through our use of language, other species (primates) can form mental representations but can’t communicate them with other members of their species.
We form mental representations of ourself and others, and can communicate those representations.
Difference in neanderthal and humans in social cognition?
Neanderthals may have traded good visual perception at the expense of social cognition, then faced competition from homosapiens - perhaps the reason for extinction
Two theories (and their authors) on how we organise our social thinking?
Allport (1924) - social psychology should focus on the individual rather than the group/others
Festinger (1954) - social comparisons theory - we organise our thinking based on comparisons with others, ‘you’re better than me’ ‘I feel sorry for you’
What is the self-concept?
Set of beliefs or knowledge that a person has about him or herself.
Multi-dimensional construct, each identity is represented in the mind as self-schema
What is social identity theories’ take on self-concept?
There is both a personal and a social identity
Two theories behind how the self-concept forms?
Bem’s (1972) Self-perception theory: we make attributions about our behaviour
Festinger’s (1954) Social comparison theory: compare ourselves to others.
What are the three core motives that influence how we search for knowledge about the self?
Self-assessment: To seek accurate info about the self
Self-verification: to seek information that we are correct
Self-enhancement: to promote oneself - sometimes despite evidence to the contrary
What is self-esteem?
The evaluation of your self-concept as generally positive or negative.
Social identity theorists believe that we seek to boost self-esteem by thinking positively about our individual and group selves.
What is social inference?
The way in which we process social information to form impressions and make judgements
Three different theories regarding social inference?
Naive scientist - systematic processing, likely when we have time and motivation (cause and effect).
Cognitive misers - simple heuristics, we take shortcuts when we can
Motivated tactician - we choose between the two as and when necessary.
What are attribution theories?
Theories we construct to predict and explain how people will behave.
Weiner (19586)’s 3 dimensions of causality in attribution theories?
Locus - Refers to whether the cause of success or failure is internal (the individual) or external (the situation)
Stability - is the cause stable or unstable
Controllability whether the future performance is under control or not
What are key heuristics (Tversky and Kahnman 1974)?
May not always use attribution theories…
Representative Heuristic - how similar a particular target is to a typical member of that category
Availability heuristic - Associations coming readily to mind, considered more common and prevalent than they really are.
What is attribution bias?
Attributions can lead to errors and biases.
Types if attribution biases?
Fundamental attribution error: Tendency for people to attribute behaviour to stable personality dispositions
Actor-observer effect - internal attributions about others behaviour and external causes for our own behaviour.
Criticisms to attribution theories?
Do not think like naive scientists much of the time and Heuristics are often used instead.
Stereotypes can be viewed as heuristics and they often lead to generalisations.
What is social categorisation?
What does it do?
We have a need to achieve coherence, and so categorisation is the process of understanding what something is by understanding what other things it is equivalent to, and things it is different from.
Categorisation allows fast and efficient impressions
It creates coherence
What is individuation?
We cannot categorise sometimes - when heuristic processing is difficult, individuation can occur, this is when one differentiates between group members based on individual attributes, more effortful than categorisation.
Impressions vary in terms of categorical or individuating info, impressions are formed on a continuum (between individuation and categorisation.
What happens when people belong to conflicting social categories?
inconsistency resolution resulting in emergent attributes are used to resolve the conflict.
Emergent attributes allow smooth impression formation resulting in coherence.
Disadvantages of categorical thinking?
Often inaccurate due to generalisations.
Cohen (1981) showed a video of a woman’s birthday dinner. One group told she was a waitress, one told she was a librarian.
Waitress condition - more likely to recall her drinking beer
Librarian condition - more likely to recall her wearing glasses.
More positive info is recalled about ingroups than outgroups
Why do people stereotype?
It makes life easy - simplify information and reduces cognitive load.
Helps us justify existing social hierarchy - system justification theory
Automatic processes involved in social cognition?
Awareness - automatic processes are characterised by a lack of awareness
intention - Automatic processes are initiated without the deliberate intention of the individual.
Control - automatic processes are uncontrollable
Efficiency - automatic processes are cognitively sparing
What is behavioural priming?
Exposure to concepts can change behaviour automatically
Bargh (1996) priming politeness - less likely to interrupt an experimenter relative to participants primed with rudeness
- participants primed with stereotypes of the elderly take longer to exit the experiment than those primed with young attributes.
Replicated in some, but not all studies.
What is temporal primacy?
The fact we categorise on features encountered first
What is perceptual salience?
The fact we categorise when features are very salient
What happens when we meet someone who does not fit into categories?
Either (i) individuation or (ii) re-categorized as a subtype.
What are ‘naive scientists’ looking to do?
Testing hypotheses, looking for cause in our social world to achieve coherence.
What is Causal reasoning?
Causal reasoning is when an individual tries to determine the reason behind things - also referred to as complex reasoning
Individuation is an example of naive scientist or cognitive miser (heuristics)?
Naive scientist.
Is categorisation an example of naive scientist or cognitive miser?
cognitive miser - heuristics
What is dual-processing in social categorisation?
Switching between individuation and categorisation.
What is the most used model of dual categorisation?
Fiske and neuberg (1990) continuum model.
allocation of attention is done with the baddeley and hitch model of attention - with the central executive allocating attention.
Summary of Hutter and Crisp (2006)
More emergent attributes generated in low cognitive load condition in response to ambiguous social categories.
Summary of Hutter et al (2011)
Older adults more likely to categorise as they have less executive resources available
these perceivers find it more difficult to resolve inconsistency through the use of existing social categories, therefore they are more likely to use emergent attribution to create new categories instead of modifying the already existing categories
What did Mason and Mcrae (2004) show
Individuation relies on temporal and prefrontal resources, Right hemispheric dominance.
What did Cloutier, Turk and macrae (2008) find?
Judging the targets sex was associated with left fusiform gyrus (temporal cortex)
This is associated with face recognition and categorisation.
Evidence regarding the method used to form impressions of incongruent conjunctions?
Quadflieg et al. (2011) found that participants who did a social task and recognised incongruent conjunctions took longer - not easy to categorise
Also found (in incongruent conjunctions) activation of:
- Fusiform face area - for faces
- Extrastriate body area - for bodies
- Fusiform body area - for bodies
- Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - suggests executive control.
Together this suggests that incongruent conjunctions rely on individuation.
An explanation for intergroup bias according to social identity theory?
We see ourself as part of a group identity in certain situations. We are motivated to have a positive self-concept. If we see our group negatively we will have a poor social identity and low self-esteem. SO:
When our social identity is salient we are motivated to see our group as being better than others.
Evidence for social identity theory?
The minimal group paradigm:
Sorted boys (48) into one of two groups based on painting preference.
Identities of other group members were unknown - were then asked to allocate money to a series of unknown outgroup and ingroup members
Significant tendency to allocate more to ingroup members
This was unique because there was no personal gain, group history, no interaction and the categories were meaningless
This means the minimal conditions for discriminations was simply categorisation.
What is the Social Identitiy Theory (SIT)’s explanation for Tajfel’s minimal groups?
more money -> “our group is better” -> more positive self-concept -> higher self-esteem
Evidence for the self-esteem hypothesis of SIT?
Oakes and Turner (1980)
Ptps split into two groups, half took part in a resource allocation task (like money distribution), showing the usual ingroup bias of minimal groups. The other half just read a newspaper.
Those who did the resource allocation task showed higher self esteem at the end of the study.
Criticisms of the self-esteem hypothesis of SIT?
Contrasting evidence regarding part two of the hypothesis (those with low self-esteem show more discrimination).
Crocker and schwartz (1985) showed those with low self esteem showed more discrimination, however Abrams (1982) showed the opposite
What are basking in reflective glory and cutting off reflective failure?
Basking in reflected glory: Deriving self-esteem from the achievements of the group.
Cutting off reflected failure: If the group is doing badly try to reduce our association with it.
What are the three things the chosen strategy to enhance social identity depends on?
Legitimacy - is the group legitimate i.e. factory worker or management
Stability - Is the status likely to change over time
permeability - are you able to leave the group or not
What strategies are used to enhance social identity?
- Social mobility - moving out of that group into a different one - used if there are legit and stable differences in groups, and if there are permeable barriers
- Group challenge - challenge and compete with the higher status group - may be used if there are impermeable barriers - and if the high status group is illegitimate or unstable
- Social creativity - used if there are impermeable boundaries and if high status group is legitimate and stable - Redefine dimensions of comparison i.e. “black is beautiful” or find new dimensions. or finally compare to a third group and claim superiority over them.
What is self-categorization theory?
Wen you switch from seeing the self as an individual to seeing the self as a group member
What is identity shift?
When the membership of a group becomes salient we define ourselves less in terms of personal identity and see ourselves as an interchangeable representative of that social group.
Called depersonalisation
What did jetten, spears and manstead (1997) show about identity shift?
Ptps divided into two minimal groups
Ptps told that the other ingroup members are either fair or discriminatory
Asked to allocate resources amongst groups
People showed more bias in the discriminatory groups
Two types of threats to social identity?
Threat to group esteem - arises when another group derogates us
threat to group distinctiveness - arises when we are too similar to another group
How do we respond to threats to group distinctiveness ?
Ingroup favouritism - make your group as different from other outgroups as possible
What did crisp, stone and Hall (2006) show about group distinctiveness?
ptps completed an assessment of ingroup identification
Birmingham students told that their uni would be merged with Aston - in intervention group, in control - not told that.
ptps then completed measures of intergroup bias
Clear difference in those who highly identified woth the uni in the intervention group (who produced more bias) - control had little difference
What is (i) intergroup bias, (ii) prejudice, (iii) stereotypes and (iv) discrimination?
Intergroup bias: Preference for an ingroup over an outgroup
Prejudice: Negative attitude or feelings towards a specific social outgroup.
Stereotypes: Common characteristics applied to members of a particular social group
How has prejudice changed over time? (Clark and Tate, 2008)
Used to be blatant expressions of negative attitudes and stereotypes, racial segregation in the US and SA for example.
Now: Covert or subtle, not wanting to associate with certain groups, and blaming certain groups for issues.
What is ambivalent racism?
Katz and Hass (1988):
Ambivalence: co-existing of conflicting feelings.
Conflicting attitudes/values lead to more polarised view of minority groups.
I.e. you can have 2 views of the world:
- You work hard and you get deserved wealth
- People are created equal, so you should help the less fortunate
These lead to conflict if both are held, so in an effort to reduce conflict people identify with either end of that spectrum of thought (i.e. closer to 1 or 2).
Susan Fiske’s take on the development of prejudices towards social groups?
Two underlying dimensions to peoples’ views of others are:
- Status, which predicts competence
- Level of cooperation, which predicts warmth
SO this leads to 4 groups
- High warmth (cooperative) and Low status:
- older people, disabled people: pitied, sympathy - High warmth (cooperative) and high status:
- In-group, allies, reference groups: pride, admiration - Low warmth (competitive) and Low status:
- Poor people, Homeless, immigrants: disgust and contempt - Low warmth (competitive) and high status:
- Rich people, lesbians, jews, feminists, asians: envy, jealousy
What is aversive racism?
Gaertner and Dovidio (1985)
Seemingly egalitarian views, but when interacting with an outgroup behaviour changes.
Implicit bias (unconscious)
If prejudice can be attributed to something else it will be
e.g. people run over by car, choose ingroup member, and attribute that to the fact others were helping
What is benevolent sexism?
(Sidanius, Pratto & Brief, 1995)
Seemingly positive views of a gender, but are in fact prejudiced.
i.e. Women are the best carers of children, men should protect women.
Glick et al (1997)
For example positive perceptions about women as long as they confine themselves
Benevolent sexists asked to think about women in traditional and non-traditional roles:
- Traditional roles promoted positive feelings
- Non-traditional promoted negative feelings
Becker 2010 showed that women are just as likely to hold a benevolent sexist attitude as men.
Findings of Hedig & Ferris 2016 regarding benefits of benevolent sexism?
Measured participants using Benevolent Sexist (BS) trait measures.
Then measured attitudes towards affirmative action (AA)/employment equity - favouring disadvantaged groups for employment in (i) masculine and (ii) feminine jobs
Found BS increases positive attitudes, (in reference to women) ONLY for feminine jobs
How do biases change during childhood?
Gender and ethnic biases emerge between 3-4yrs, and peak around 6-8yrs, and then decline
What measures can you use to assess prejudice in childhood
Preference tasks - e.g. identical dolls apart from skin colour (clark 1947) Trait assignment Structured interview Behavioural observations Simple questionnaires
Benefits and limitations of Clark (1947)’s doll task?
Benefits:
- easy to administer
- comprehensible to children
Limitations:
- Forced choice between only 2 alternatives
- Artificially enhances the saliency of race (only difference)
- social desirability bias (e.g. if the researcher was white, more likely to pick white doll to fit in)
Explanation and limitations of trait attribution task - preschool racial attitude measure (PRAM)? (williams et al 1975)
Children asked to assign positive and negative to two stimuli (e.g. white picture of kid and black picture of kid)
Limitations: it’s a forced choice between only 2 alternatives, this doesn’t disentagle in-group favouritism and outgroup derogation
What is the multiple response attitude (Doyle & Aboud 1995) Limitations?
Assign multiple categories to one of two stimuli (whit kid/black kid). Categories are like.. healthy, good, naughty, selfish
Positives and negatives summed to produce a trait score for each stimuli.
Produce:
1. Positive bias score = subtract out out-group positive trait score from the in-group positive trait score
- Negative bias score = subtract the ingroup negative trait score from the outgroup
- Intergroup bias score = positive bias score + negative bias score / 2
Limitiations:
- Still only two categories, ptp uses ingroup/not-ingroup logic, only a measure of ingroup bias
- social desirability
What is social reflection (socialization) theory?
What is the social learning approach to development of childhood prejudice?
Limitations to this?
Social reflection: Theory that children pick up their prejudices as a result of social context
Bandura 1977, children learn their attitudes either by directly observing/imitating parents or direct training.
Would expect to see a positive trajectory as children increase with age
Limitations:
Mixed findings regarding parents attitudes and childs
Empirical work doesn’t always support the expected trajectory
children are not simply empty vessels (or templates)
What is cognitive developmental theory? Aboud (1990)
Evidence in support?
Limitations?
Posits that prejudice is caused by information processing errors due to young childrens’ poor cognitive ability to perceive people on an individual basis
Cognitively immature children are prone to prejudice because they cannot process multiple classifications
With age children are able to make judgements in terms of unique interpersonal qualities.
In support:
- The theory supports the ‘bellcurve’ of a peak of prejudice at 7-8. This is consistent with cognitive developmental stages - at around 7 ‘centration’ (focusing on only one aspect of an individual) declines
However:
A decrease in racism is not seen in all domains
There are also other explanations for the decline - the development of social emotions, such as guilt and shame.
Possible causes for prejudice in adulthood?
Authoritarian personality (adorno et al 1950)
Social dominance theory
Terror management theory
Intergroup emotions theory
Evidence around authoritarian personality explanation for prejudice?
- Trait/behavioural style characterised by a high regard for authority/rigidity/conventionality
Difficult upbringing can lead to an authoritarian personality - as a defensive reaction to fear and weakness
- highly prejudiced individuals
Theory has been mostly discredited:
- Prejudice changes
- likely cultural influences trump personality
Social dominance theory? (Pratto, Sidanius & Levin) (2006)
Evidence?
Limitations?
(Pratto, Sidanius & Levin) (2006)
Does rely quite a lot on personality still
Societies are made up of group-based hierarchies
These hierarchies are formed and maintained through discrimination
Justified through hierarchy-legitimising myths, i.e. groups are actually unequal
Some people have a social dominance orientation:
- General orientation towards and desire for unequal and dominant/subordinate groups
- Highly supportive of a hierarchy
Pratto et al, (1994) showed social dominance orientation predicted sexism, nationalism and racism,
It also predicts hierarchy legitimising policies and ideologies: political conservatism, civil liberties, immigration and gay rights.
Some suggestion that is doesn’t take into account situational factors that contribute to prejudice
What is terror management theory?
Limitations?
Greenberg, pyzynczyski & soloman, 1986
Humans have strong survival instinct and a fear of our future death, to control this:
We adopt a cultural worldview:
- A set of values of how we think we should behave
- Provides senso of meaning
- Allows us to transcend death? e.g. religion
- Motivated to protect this worldview
- Biased against those who don’t share our worldview
Limitations:
- Alternative explanations, such as a general threat activates it (not just mortality)
- Effect of associated factors, such as pain form dying
- The effect only exists when thinking about death, may not explain why we are prejudiced in everyday life
