Early Years

Question 1

Week 2
Understand what social cognitions are

Answer 1

‘Cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behaviour’ (Hogg & Vaughan, 2017)
- Stereotypes
- Heuristics
- Impression formation
- Schemas
- Attributions

Question 2

Week 2
Discuss how people form impressions

Answer 2

• Asch’s configuration model
  
  • Central traits
  • Peripheral traits
• Biases
  
  • Primacy & recency (order of presented info)
  • Positivity and negativity
  • Implicit personality theories (certain characteristics combine to form specific types of personality)

Question 3

Week 2
Identify schemas and employ them in all social interactions

Answer 3

• Cognitive structures
• Set of interrelated cognitions
• Allow us to quickly make sense/form impressions/make judgements with limited information

Types
- Content-free schemas
- Event schemas / scripts
- Role schemas
- Person schemas
- Self-schemas

Question 4

(Week 2
Heuristics)

Answer 4

• Cognitive short-cuts
• Anchors and adjustment (inferences are tied to initial standards/schemas) - Strack, Martin & Schwartz (1988)
• Availability - frequency/likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances/associations come to mind
• Representativeness - instances are categorised on the bases of overall similarity

Question 5

(Week 2
Categories and Prototypes)

Answer 5

Categories
- Used to apply schematic knowledge
- Hierarchies of categories

Protoypes
- Cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a category

Question 6

(Week 2
Stereotypes)

Answer 6

• Widely shared and simplified generalisations of a social group and its members
• Central aspects of prejudice and discimination
• Difficult to change

How do we create stereotypes?
- Tajfel (1957, 1959) - it’s because of a process of categorisation - accentuation principle
- Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups
- Effect is amplified when categorisation has subjective importance

Studying Stereotypes
- Content of specific stereotypes is important:
- Analysis of the content of stereotypes provides evidence of different kinds of prejudice - Cuddy et al., 2008 model

Stereotype Content Model SCM
1 Perceived competition, status
2 Warmth, competence
3 Contempt, envy, pity, admiration
4 Facilitative, active, passive, harmful

Question 7

(Week 2
Actor-Observer Effect)

Answer 7

• Attribute own and others’ behaviour differently
  
  • Own = externally, others’ = internally

Reasons
1. Perceptual focus
- Actor & observer have different perspectives on the behaviour, so interpret accordingly
2. Informational differences
- Actor can draw on previous knowledge about their behaviour, observer cannot

Depends upon:
- Specific causal factor involved
- Individuals’ history in a given situation
- Individual differences

Question 8

(Week 2
Self-Serving Bias, Self-Handicapping & Belief in a ‘Just World’

Answer 8

Self-Serving Bias
- Distortions that protect our self-esteem/self-concept
- Attribute positives to internal factors
- Blame environment for failure
- Internal, stable, global attributions to positive events (Miller & Ross, 1975)
- Ego-serving

Self-Handicapping
- Setting up excuses that we can later use if we do poorly on a task
- If you fail, you have a built in excuse
- If you succeed, you’re that much better
- To protect self-esteem (Berglas & Jones, 1978)
- To preserve of enhance self-concept (Leary & Kowalski, 1990)
- To convince oneself and others that the person is a good person & in control (Higgins & Snyder, 1990)

Belief in a ‘Just World’
- Tendency to believe that the world is a just place - people get what they deserve and deserve what they get
- Illusion of control - belief of more control over our world than is true
- E.g., hard work reaps rewards, bad things happen to bad people
- Makes us feel secure
- Victims seen as responsible
- Can regain control by taking some responsibility

Question 9

Week 2 Tutorial
Examine how people make attributions

Answer 9

1. Theory of Naive Psychology (Heider, 1958)
   - Study of people’s naive/common-sense psychological theories
   - Based on three principles:
   - Behaviour is motivated
   - We identify stable and enduring properties of the world
   - We differentiate between personal (internal) and environmental (external) causalities
2. Covariation Model (Kelley, 1967)
   - People are like scientists - they identify a factor that covaries with behaviour, then assign a causal role
   - To make a judgement, people assess three classes of information:
   - Consistency - consistent over time, high/low
   - Distinctiveness - respond similarly to other stimuli, high/low
   - Consensus - similar responses from others, high/low
   - E.g.,
   - Co-occurrence of action - nervousness
   - Specific person - student
   - Cause - lecturer
   - Does the student always get nervous? Does the student get nervous about anything related to the lecturer or only during teaching? Does everyone get nervous or only this student?
3. Attributional Theory (Weiner, 1979, 1984, 1985)
   - Success/failure leads us to make an attribution based upon three performance dimensions:
4. Stability (success/failure is fairly permanent/unstable)
5. Locus of causality (factor is external/internal to individual)
6. Controllability (factor is/is not under individual’s control)

Question 10

Week 2 Studies
van der Zanden et al., 2022
Strack, Martin & Shwartz (1988)
Cuddy et al., 2008
Tutorial
- Napolitan & Goathals (1979)
- Ross et al., 1977
- Martin & Carron (2012)

Question 11

Week 3
Introduce cognitive development

Answer 11

• Theory first proposed by Piaget
• How a child learns to think, reason and use language

Child Development
- Physical
- Linguistic
- Emotional
- Psychosocial
- Cognitive

Question 12

(Week 3
To describe Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development)

Answer 12

• Constructivist - child has an active role in their own development

Key Aspects
- Schemas
- Adaptation
- Assimiliation
- Accommodation
- Equilibrium / disequilibrium

Stages
- Invariable & universal
1. Sensori-motor (birth to 18/24 months)
- Learn through senses & reflexes
- Manipulate materials
- Thought and language begins
- Object permanence:
- 4 months: no attempt to search for hidden object
- 4-9 months: visual search for object
- >9 months: search for & retrieve hidden object
2. Pre-operational (18/24 months to 7 years)
- Ideas based on perception
- Over-generalise based on limited experience
- Centration - focus on one variable at a time
- Fail conservation tasks
- Egocentrism
- Rigidity of thought
- More imaginative play
- Display animism
- Limited social cognition
3. Concrete operational (7/8 years to 11/12 years)
- Form ideas based on reasoning
- Limit thinking to objects & familiar events
- Can conserve
4. Formal operational (11/12 years onwards)
- Think conceptually
- Think hypothetically
- Abstract thought
- Applying logic
- Advanced problem solving

Question 13

Week 3
To consider and evaluate Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development

Answer 13

• Involves changes in cognitive developmental areas
• Spatial cognition
• Conservation
• Appearance-reality distinction
• Class inclusion
• Transitive inferences
• Perspective taking

Implications for Education
- Child-centred learning
- Children can only learn when ready and at right stage of cognitive development

Criticism
1. Experimental concerns
- Three mountains
- Conservation tasks
- May have underestimated children’s abilities
- E.g., Gelman (1982) - turtle conservation task

• Language
  
  • Potentially problematic in conservation tasks
  • Issue of language difficulties & question order (e.g., Donaldson, 1978; Rose & Blank, 1974)
• Social concerns
  
  • Social situation of conservation tasks: ‘naughty teddy’ (McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974)
  • Light, Buckingham & Robins (1979)
  • Object permanence - method of removal important (Bower & Wishart, 1972)
• A-not-B Task
  
  • (Diamond, 1991): Other reason children may fail:
    
    • Memory - children forget
    • Preservation:
      
      • Motor preservation: repeat movements
      • Capture error: use a once-successful solution
      • Have competence, lack performance skills
• Task Complexity
  
  • Martin Hughes - concerns about difficulty of three mountains task
  • Redone as policeman/boy experiment, young children able to do it

2. Theoretical concerns

Piaget Critiques
/ Inspirational insights into cognitive development
X Lack of detail about participants or success rates
X Fails to explain WHY transition occurs
X Overlooks cultural factors involved in change

Question 14

Week 3
To consider Piaget’s legacy

Answer 14

• Comprehensive theory - intellectual development from birth to adulthood
• Interaction between individual level of maturation and environment that offers right experiences
• Impact was delayed
• Explanations were challenged

Question 15

Week 3 Tutorial
Discuss theoretical issues with Piaget’s work

Question 16

Week 3 Tutorial
Compare Piaget’s work against the work of Vygotsky and Bruner

Answer 16

Vygotsky
- Devised a socio-cultural theory of development
- Culture is crucial - personal and social experience can not be separated
- Development driven by social interactions & learning from others
- ZPD - distance between actual developmental level and level of potential development through adult guidance

Bruner
- Developed and extensively tested Vygotsky’s ideas
- Role of scaffolding/child-centred learning

Scaffolding
- In practce (Wood et al., 1976)
1. Recruitment
2. Reduction of degrees of freedom
3. Direction maintenance
4. Marking critical features
5. Demonstration

Implications for Education
- Scaffolding to assist children in learning (ZPD)
- Joint construction of knowledge - ‘collaborative learning’
- Importance of language

Question 17

Week 4
Introduce the topic of attachment

Answer 17

• ‘Deep-seated emotional tie that one individual forms with another’ - Ainsworth, 1979

Importance
- Security (Ainsworth, Bowlby)
- Protect children from danger (Bowlby)

Signs of Attachment
1. Proximity to caregiver
2. Distress on separation
3. Happy on reunion
4. Orient actions to caregiver
- Attachment evident at 7-9 months; fear of strangers

Question 18

Week 4
Look at what attachment is and consider its importance

Answer 18

Assumptions of Attachment Theory
- Parent plays central role in child’s development
- Cognitive sensori-motor skills necessary for attachment, e.g. object permanence
- Learning in social interactions is important

Bowlby’s Phases of Attachment (1969)
1. No discrimination in orientation/signals
2. Preferential people - smile, comforted by caregiver (5-7 months)
3. Preferential proximity to discriminated person (7-9 months), attachment
4. Goal-corrected partnership - caregiver’s & child’s needs (2-3 years)
5. Lessening attachment (proximity) - trust, affection (school age onwards)

Who are attachments formed with?
- Previously believed to be only with mother
- But there is evidence of multiple attachments
- Qualities of caregiver important
- Schaffer & Emerson (1964) - Study of Separation Project:
- 7-9 months: 29% + 1 attachment figure
- 18 months: 87% + 1 attachment figure
- 33% of infants had strongest attachment to someone other than the mother - e.g., father, sibling, grandparents

Question 19

Week 4
Consider issues raised by attachment theory and the wider implications

Answer 19

Limitations
- Cultural and individual differences
- Bowlby: attachment as a lifespan construct
- However, attachment is often not assessed beyond infancy
- Newer work assesses attachment in pre-school, school ago, and adult populations

Issues Raised
1. Role of mother or other caregivers
2. Childcare and attachment
3. Attachment beyond infancy

Wider Implications
- Early entrance to childcare:
- Belksy (1988) - 20+ hours per week of non-maternal care in 1st year -> insecure attachment patterns, less compliance, more aggression
- Clarke-Stewart (1991) - better intellectual and social development than those in home care
- Other studies: no evidence of differences in attachment (e.g., Scarr, 1998)
- Character of mother(/father) is crucial
- Childcare quality is more important than quantity - benefit of quality childcare can offset poor parenting

Implications of Attachment Types
- Attachment type can predict other types of development
- Kochanska (2001) - Infants studied from 9-33 months
- Assessed in laboratory episodes aimed to elicit fear, anger or joy
- Avoidant (A) - more fearful
- Secure (B) - less fear, anger and distres
- Ambivalent (C) - less joyful
- Disorganised (D) - more angry
- Further benefits aged 10-15 (Sroufe et al., 2005)

Adult Attachment
- Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) - George, Kaplan & Main (1985)
- Semi-structured interview, widely used
- Classifications:
- Dismissing (A)
- Autonomous/secure (B)
- Preoccupied/enmeshed (C)
- Unresolved mourning/loss (D)

Question 20

Week 4
Introduce the topic of deprivation and consider its importance

Answer 20

‘Maternal Deprivation’ Hypothesis
1. Critical period for attachment formation
2. Observable distress when child separated from mother
3. Developmental delays in institutionalised children
4. Harlow’s isolated rhesus monkeys
5. Delinquency in children who had undergone a ‘separation experience’

• Now generally disputed
• Induced guilt in working mothers
• Positive effects
  / Improvements in institutional care
  / Increase in fostering of children
  / Easier parent access to children in hospital

Question 21

Week 4
Review key studies of deprivation

Answer 21

Harlow’s Rhesus Monkeys
- Harlow, 1959
- Isolated 8 newborn monkeys from mother
- Put in cage with 2 surrogate mothers (1 cloth, 1 wire) - 4 fed by wire mother, 4 fed by cloth mother
- 165 days with surrogate mothers
- All monkeys clung to cloth mother for support
- Those kept isolated- socially inept (deprivation: Harlow & Harlow, 1962)

Question 22

Week 5
Introduce basic components of language

Answer 22

• Symbolic communication
  
  • Rule-governed
  • Conventional, arbitrary
• Social
• Intellectual
• Doesn’t have to be spoken
  
  • Written language
  • Sign language

Phonology (Sounds)
- Perception & production of sounds used in language
- Phonemes - smallest unit of sound
- E.g., /b/, /p/, /a/
- Speech is a continuous stream
- Vocal apparatus can produce 100s
- Rules govern combination (Chomsky & Halle, 1968)
- Can’t produce
- Aren’t produced (language specific - e.g., rz / dz)

Orthography (Letters)
- Graphemes - smallest unit of text
- Letter(s) correspond to phenomes, but not 1-to-1
- Rules for combination:
- Corresponding to phonology
- Specifically orthographic rules
- E.g., adding ‘-e’: mat -> mate

Semantics (Meaning)
- Morphemes - smallest meaningful unit
- [dog][s] - free noun, bound plural suffix
- Words - multiple meanings - e.g., roll
- Phrases and sentences:
- Grammar and syntax
- S - V - O

Pragmatics (Non-Linguistic)
- Considers communicative function
- Adjusting language for context
- Speech, writing - text vs academic essays/emails
- Social conventions - e.g., turn-taking
- Perspective taking
- Intonation and prosody

Question 23

Week 5
Understand how language develops

Answer 23

Prelinguistic
- Newborn
- Reflexive vocalisations
- 1 month
- Discriminate virtually all phonemes
- Different smiles
- 2-3 months
- Coo, smile, laugh
- 4-6 months
- Babbling, echolalia
- Cross-culturally similar sounds and ages
- Pragmatics - joint attention & turn-taking
- 6-9 months
- Canonical babbling
- Reduplicated babbling
- 9-12 months
- Modulated babbling
- Infant begins taking active role (Reddy, 1999)
- Dyadic -> triadic interaction
- Meaningful gesture
- Pointing from 8 months
- Comprehension of simple instructions

First Words
- Comprehension precedes production
- Phonologically consistent forms
- First conventional word around 1 year
- Predictable semantic categories (Dromi, 1999; Nelson, 1981)
- Vocabulary development
- Initially very slow: 1-3 words per month
- 18-24 months: 10-20 words per week (Fenson et al., 1994)
- 6 years = 15,000 words

Sentences
- Grammar
- Holophrases: 12-18 months (Tomasello, 1995)
- 2 word utterances: 1.5-2.5 years (Bloom, 1998)
- 3 word utterances: 2-3 years
- Logical errors -> knowledge of grammar
-> Over-regularisation, e.g., ‘deers’
- Playing with language - e.g., rhyming
- 4-5 years: most grammatical constructions

Question 24

Week 5
Identify popular theories of language development, and highlight their limitations

Answer 24

Interactionist
- Behaviourist (e.g., Skinner) + Nativist (e.g., Chomsky)
- Nativists (e.g., Chomsky, 1957; Pinker, 1994)
- Only human, virtually all humans
- Cross-cultural similarities, universal grammar
- Innate capacity, explicit teaching unnecessary
- ‘Language Acquisition Device’ (Chomsky)
- Behaviourists (e.g., Skinner ,1957)
- Different languages, dialects, accents
- Imitation and reinforcement

Question 25

Week 5
Consider literacy acquisition

Answer 25

Literacy: ability to read and write

Written Language:
- Develop after spoken
- Not all humans acquire (easily)
- Requires explicit education
- Development = matching written to spoken

Development Stage Models (e.g., Frith, 1985; Ehri, 1995)

• Logographic stage (pre-school)
  
  • Salient visual cues
  • E.g., SmaLLer misread as yeLLow ‘because it’s the one with two sticks in it’ (Seymour & Elder, 1986)
  • Expect large objects to have long spellings
  • Inefficient
• Alphabetic stage (aprox. 5+ years)
  
  • Use phoneme-grapheme correspondences
  • E.g., /k/ /a/ /t/
  • Convert to known spoken words
  • Dependent on knowledge of phonology
  • Must eventually acquire additional strategies
• Orthographic stage (approx. 8+ years)
  
  • Orthographic knowledge
  • Morphological knowledge
    
    • E.g., dogs, cats, horses -> +<s></s>
  • Vocabulary development directly from text
  • However, strict stage models of literacy largely discredited

Literacy Development: Piaget

• Sensorimotor
  
  • No/limited language skills
  • Sensory exploration of world
• Preoperational
  
  • Rapid language development
  • Children begin to categorise with words
• Concrete operational
  
  • Use concrete objects to think about abstract concepts
• Formal operational
  
  • Use language in abstract way

Literacy Development: Holdaway
- Leaning to read is a natural developmental phase linked to natural oral language skill development
- Four key components:
1. Observation
2. Collaboration
3. Practice
4. Performance

Question 26

(Week 5
Relationship between spoken and written language)

Answer 26

• Bi-directional relationship
• Exposure to different language forms
• Metalinguistic development
  
  • Language as an object of thought

Question 27

Week 6
Discuss what social identity is

Answer 27

• ‘Defining the self in terms of group memberships, for example one’s ethnicity’ (Hogg & Vaughan, 2017)
• ‘Part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his/her knowledge of his/her membership of a social group’ (Tajfel, 1981)
• The ‘we/us’ aspect of our self - concept that comes from our group membership

Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986)
- The theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparisons, and the construction of the shared self-definition in therms of the intergroup defining properties.

Question 28

Week 6
Examine key studies

Answer 28

Dawes (1991) - The Prisoner’s Dilemma
- 2000 studies with students
- Communication is the key to unlocking ‘social traps’
- By not cooperating, both parties end off far worse than if they had trusted each other for mutual benefit

Sherif’s Summer Camp (1953-61)
- Three-stage study
- 11/12 y/o boys
- No pre-existing relationships, few days of forming relationships
- 1st study - 22 boys divided into 2 groups to go to a camp on two separate buses
- Rattlers & Eagles
- 1st week - mostly unaware of the other group’s existence, cooperating in various activities
- Group identity established
- 2nd week -> Win or lose competitions
- Series of contests/micro-experiments
- Prize for winners -> Conflict
- Groups became interdependent
- Consistent in-group favouritism, negative image of out-group, strong in group cohesiveness
- 3rd week - groups were brought together for non-competitive activities
- Groups became less aggressive toward out-group members
- Reduction in amount of in-group favouritism
- However, hostility was still high
- Findings:
- Some latent ethnocentrism without intergroup competition
- Prejudice, discrimination and ethnocentrism arose as a result of real intergroup conflict
- Boys did not have authoritarian or dogmatic personalities
- Less frustrated group expressed greater intergroup aggression
- In-groups formed even with friends in the out-group
- Simple contact did not improve intergroup relations:
- Mutual goals -> cooperation
- Mutually exclusive goals -> competition
- E.g., Zimbardo SPE

Zimbardo (1971)
- 24 psychologically stable male volunteers at Stanford University
- Randomly assigned to be a guard or a prisoner
- 2 week study cancelled after 6 days
- Some guards behaved in a brutal and sadistic manner
- Some prisoners became docile with severe emotional disturbance
- Zimbardo explained that they complied with the expected role
- Haslam and Reicher (2012) argued that uncertainty resulted in an internalisation of the available identity

Key Elements of Prejudice
Allport (1954) - Three main components:
1. Cognitive - beliefs about a group
2. Affective - strong feelings about a group (usually negative)
3. Conative - intention to act in a certain way towards a group
- Contact hypothesis:
- Prejudice as a consequence of people’s understanding of ethnic minorities - to tackle it, we need to work on individuals’ prejudices
- Sherif’s realistic conflict theory:
- Hostility between groups can be explained in terms of competition for resources
- Goffman (1961) - institutionalised norms play a role in creating conflict between people from different groups

Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968)
- IQ of ‘bloomer’ students increased based on belief of potential by teachers

Masculine & Feminine Tasks (Deaux & Emswiller, 1974)
- Assumptions that what skill is for the male, luck is for the female based on gender-stereotyped tasks

Backlash (Heilman, et al., 2004)
- Students given information about employees in a male-stereotypical ob
- Employees identified as male or female
- Record of clear or ambiguous success
- Previous success was:
- Clear: rated equally competent & males more likeable
- Ambiguous: males more competent, equally likeable

Tokenism (Chacko, 1982)
- Equal employment opportunity legislation
- Women managers who felt they were hired as a token woman report less organisational commitment & job satisfaction than hired on ability

Question 29

Week 6
Evaluate the practical implications of the topic of social identity

Answer 29

Stigma
- ‘Stigmatised individuals possess (or are believed to possess) some attribute or characteristic that conveys a social identity that is devalued in a social context’ - Crocker et al., 1998

Deinvididuation
- In some situations, people are more likely to abandon normal restrains and become responsive to the group/crowd norms:
- Group size
- Physical anonymity
- Arousing and distracting activities

Question 30

Week 7
Aggression

Answer 30

Defining Aggression
- ‘Behaviour intended to harm another of the same species’ (Scherer et al., 1975)
- ‘Behaviour resulting in personal injury or destruction of property’ (Bandura, 1973)

Operationalising Aggression:
1. Analogues of behaviour (punching a doll - Bandura, 1963)
2. Signal of intention (express willingness to use violence - Geen ,1978)
3. Self-ratings (Levens et al., 1975)
4. Rated by others (Eron, 1982)
5. Indirect spreading rumours (Lansford et al., 2012)

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939)
1. Personal goals
2. Psychic energy activated to achieve goals, state of psychological readiness
3. Frustration of goal achievement
4. Frustration-induced undissipated arousal, instigation to aggress, source of frustration too powerful
5. Location of scapegoat, catharsis achieved by displacement of aggression

Situational Influence
- Kenrick et al. (2003)
- Behavioural manifestation of a given genotype depends critically on inputs from, and reactions to, the environment

Spanking Children (Straus et al., 2003)
- Longitudinal study over 2 years
- Recorded how often the child was spanked (0-3+/week)
- Positive relationship between spanking and anti-social behaviour of the child
- Children who were not spanked showed less ASB after 2 years

Violent Lyrics (Anderson et al., 2003)
- Listening to violent lyrics - rate previously ambiguous words as aggressive

Violent Films (Black & Bevan, 1992)
- People who attend screenings of violent films may be generally more disposed to aggression, according to their scores on an aggression questionnaire
- Viewing a violent film has an additional effect - aggression scores rise afterwards

Placebo (Begue et al., 2009)
- Controlled naturalistic field experiment
- Male students given non-alcoholic cocktail
- Thought it was alcoholic (placebo effect)
- Acted more aggressively

Question 31

Week 7
Prosocial Behaviour

Answer 31

• Behaviour that has positive social consequences and that contributes to the physical or psychological wellbeing of another person (Wispe, 1972)
• Altruism - an act that is meant to benefit another person rather than oneself - true altruism is selfless

Biological Perspective
- Humans have innate tendencies to help others, as this promotes survival
- Stevens et al. (2005):
- Mutualsim: cooperative behaviour benefits the co-operator as well as others
- Kin selection - those who cooperate are biased towards blood relatives because it helps propagate their own genes
- Fitness altruism - Turner (2005) - natural selection won’t favour organisms that sacrifice reproductive fitness for another’s benefit

Empathy (Batson et al., 1996)
- Only women with prior experience showed empathy with a distressed teenager, no men

Modelling (Rushton & Teachman, 1978)
- Boys 8-11 y/o watched an adult who played a game to win tokens
- The adult would donate some tokens by putting them in a bowl for a child pictured in a poster
- Verbal reinforcement when the child donated their own tokens - ‘good for you’/’that was silly’
- Both demonstration and verbal reinforcements had strong effects on how the boys behaved, immediately and after a 2-week interval

Bryan & Test (1967)
- Modelling for adults
- Condition 1 - driver passes a woman whose car had a flat tyre and was being helped by a man, driver then passes another woman by her car needing assistance
- Condition 2 - driver only passes 2nd car
- Drivers in condition 1 were 50% more likely to help

Question 32

Week 7
Bystander Behaviour

Answer 32

• People are less likely to help in an emergency when they are with others than when they are alone
• The greater the number, the less likely someone is to help

Emergency
- Involves danger for people or property
- Unusual event
- Not foreseen
- Requires instant action

Latane & Darley (1968) - Smoke-Filled Room
- Alone - 75% took action
- 2 strangers - 38% took action
- 2 passive confederates - 10% took action

5-Stage Cognitive Model (Latane & Darley)
1. Attend to what is happening
2. Define event as an emergency
3. Assume responsibility
4. Decide what can be done
5. Give help

Gaertner & Dovidio (1977)
- When no potential other helpers available - white women slightly likely to help black/white confederate who had suffered an emergency
- When other helpers were available, they were not inclined to assist black confederate

Hornstein (1970)
- People observed a model returning a lost wallet
- Model was:
- Pleased to help (Condition 1)
- Neutral about helping (Condition 2)
- Displeased about bother (Condition 3)
- Participants then found a lost wallet
- Likelihood to help: 1 > 2 > 3
- Learning by vicarious experience

Kitty Genovese Murder (1964)
- In the half an hour it took to kill her, no one helped
- Half an hour later, anonymous call ‘didn’t want to get involved’
- 38 people heard the screams, but did not act

Explaining the Bystander Effect
- Diffusion of responsibility - passing the responsibility to act to other people
- Audience inhibition - fear of a social blunder
- Social influence - passive behaviour of others represent a model for how to act

Question 33

Week 8
Discuss the nature and significance of peer relationships and friendships

Answer 33

Types of Peer Relationships

Peer group
- One that is of equal standing with another
- Horizontal or symmetrical
- Both parties have equal amounts of social power
- First two years:
- Show clear interest in other infants
- Direct gaze, gestures and smiles at other infants
- Respond to other infants’ play behaviours (Lewis et al., 1975)
- Interactions become longer and more patterned - usually involving mutual imitation
- Children show preference for some peers over others
- Show changes in behaviour when excluded (e.g., Tremblay-Leveau & Nedal, 1996)
- Changes with age
- Increased interactions through environments
- Group play increases (Smith, 1978)
- Groups become larger (Eiferman, 1970)
- Become increasingly segregated by sex over middle childhood - by around 6 onwards (Maccoby, 1998)
- Gender differences in group size and activities (Maccoby, 1998)
- Changes in later adolescence from same-sex to mixed-sex ‘cliques’

Friendships
- Close, mutual and positive relationship that offers intimacy, companionship, and emotional and social support
- Key features: (Newcomb & Bagwell, 1995)
- Reciprocal
- Intimacy
- More intense social activity
- More frequent conflict resolution
- More effective task performance
- Characteristics of friendships (Bukowski et al., 1994)
- Companionship
- Help
- Security
- Closeness
- Low conflict
- Interactions among friends
- Differences in pretend play and more communication (Howes et al., 1994)
- More conflict resolution (Fonzi et al., 1997) - negotiating, sharing, making compromises
- Task performance (Azmitia & Montgomery, 1993)
- Better problem solving among friends
- Discuss ideas and critique constructively
- Links with cognitive development

Bully-victim
- Verbal, physical, indirect aggression
- Occurrence varies
- Bully characteristics:
- Gender differences
- Peer status
- Deficient social skills / skilled manipulators
- Often unnoticed by teachers and remains ‘secret’
- Consequences: loneliness, avoiding school, depression, low self-esteem (e.g., Hawker & Boulton, 2000)
- Can be a group process - seek social dominance, and often get it
- Bystanders take on participant roles: (Salmivalli, 2010)
- Assistant
- Reinforcement
- Outsiders
- Defenders
- Interventions should be targeted at peer-group level
- Friends can act as buffers against effects of victimisation

Question 34

Week 8
Outline sociometry and the notion of peer status

Answer 34

Sociometry - measuring children’s social standings; their position or status within the peer group
- Watching children’s behaviour
- Asking teachers
- Asking children

Sociograms
- Represent a child’s relationship with others in their peer group
- Early studies - liking & popularity; later studies included dislikes
- Status types: popular, controversial, neglected, rejected (Coie, Dodge & Coppotello, 1982)

Peer Status: ‘Rejected’ Children
- Differences in play behaviours (e.g., Dodge et al., 1983)
- Different types of rejection (Cillessen et al., 1992)
- Rejected-aggressive, rejected-submissive
- Long-term, ‘rejected’ children have the most sociometric stability (Coie & Dodge, 1983)

Escaping ‘Rejected’ Status
- Peer rejection can amplify behaviours that lead to further rejection
- E.g., a lack of social support to help with coping and adjustment
- Other factors to consider:
- Group norms
- Social visibility
- In-school difficulties
- Peer status is part of a developmental pathway

Peer Status and Outcomes
- Peers are important for developing social, emotional and cognitive skills
- Influential in shaping behaviour, language, values and beliefs, emotional regulation, and psycho-social functioning
- Associated with a range of social and psychological outcomes, but causation is difficult to establish
- Academic performance and attendance
- Mental health symptoms

Question 35

Week 8
Outline the development of children’s friendships

Answer 35

Preschool (3-4 yrs) - start of stable relationships form
- Instrumental relationships - mostly about liking the same things, spending time together, doing shared activities
- Conflict and hierarchies among toddlers initially revolves around access to objects (toys), but becomes more about difference of opinion

Friendships in Middle Childhood
- Instrumental to intimate relationships
- Friends have similar attitudes and values
- Friendship becomes more about caring, loyalty, trust, shared feelings, etc.
- Friendship expectations change: Bigelow and La Gaipa (1980)
- Issues with bullying, victimisation and aggression

Friendships in Adolescence
- Focus on intimacy, self-disclosure and emotional support becomes increasingly important
- Groups are increasingly based on values and beliefs rather than shared activities
- Friendships are fairly stable - particularly better-quality friendships
- Romantic relationships begin

Differences in Friendships
- Friendships are important, but quality > quantity
- Aggressive children have aggressive friends, less stable friendships, and fewer friends
- Socially withdrawn children have poorer quality friendships
- Temperament, attachment, and ability to regulate emotions are among predictors of friendship and peer relations

Question 36

Week 8
Outline antisocial and prosocial behaviour

Answer 36

Prosocial
- Benefit others
- Driven by emotional processes: empathy and sympathy

Antisocial
- Intentional behaviour that hurts another person
- Largely predicted by temperament - ‘lack of control’
- Difficulties regulating emotion and more likely to experience negative emotions
- Can be related to adult antisocial behaviour (Capsi et al., 1995)

Question 37

Week 9
Introduce the topic of play

Answer 37

• Functional: purpose of behaviour
  
  • No external goal
• Structural: behaviours performed
  
  • Play signals
  • Repeated / fragmented / exaggerated / re-ordered (Loizos, 1967)
• Distinct, not opposing approaches

Descriptors (Features) of Play
1. Intrinsic motivation
2. Positive affect
3. Nonliterality
4. Flexibility
5. Means/ends

Garvey (1991) - Play:
- Is pleasureable
- Has no extrinsic goals
- Is spontaneous and voluntary
- Involves active engagement on part of player
- Has certain systematic relations to what is not play

Question 38

Week 9
Consider the functions of play

Answer 38

• Motivates children to learn
• Play must have a function (Vandenberg, 1978)
• Exploration-play application sequence (Vandenberg, 1984; Wilson, 1975)
• Helps children gain skill in manipulating objects (Ceyne & Rubin, 1983)
• Build confidence
• Linked to language learning
• Linked to cognitive and social development (Lillard, 2002 - Piaget, 1962 - Pelligrini, 2000)
• Learn adult roles
• Understand emotions (Denham, 1986)
• Development of friendships (Gottman, 1983)

Question 39

Week 9
Begin to look at different types of play

Answer 39

• Parten (1932): 42 children aged 2-4.5
  1. Unoccupied
  2. Solitary
  3. Onlooker
  4. Parallel
  5. Associated
  6. Cooperate

Question 40

Week 9
Consider Piaget’s theory of play

Answer 40

3 Types of Play
1. Practice/sensori-motor
2. Symbolic/representational
3. Games with rules
- Very simplified view
- Move to detailed explorations of play:
- Smilansky (1968) - 4 stages
1. Functional
2. Constructive
3. Dramatic
4. Games with rules

Sensori-Motor Play
- Corresponds with sensori-motor period (approx. 0-2 years)
- Concern with bodily sensation and motor development
- In 2nd year: gain awareness of functions of objects in social world

Symbolic/Representational Play
- Approx. 2-6 years
- Children capable of reasoning that one subject can symbolise another
- Children learn and take on social roles (& gender roles)
- Act out experiences, e.g., via role play

Games With Rules
- Begins school age (~5 yrs)
- Most prominent form of play in middle childhood (Piaget, 1962)
- Explicit rules to govern behaviour
- Winners and losers
- Children learn to negotiate, reason and compete

Problems with Piaget’s Views
- Assumes play inextricably linked to cognitive development
- Children only do certain types of play at certain ages
- Limited perspective
- Challenged by others:
- E.g., Garvey (1991): play is inherently social from outset

Question 41

Week 1
Self and Identity

Answer 41

Cycling
Possible Explanations:
- Front rider provided suction that pulled the cyclist along, helping to conserve energy
- Front rider provided shelter from the wind
- Solo cyclists worry that they are not going fast enough - this exhausts their muscles and brain, inhibiting performance
- Friends usually rode as pacers and this kept cyclists’ spirits up
- Cyclist is hypnotised by wheels in front - rides automatically, leaving more energy for final burst
- Presence of another arouses ‘competitive instinct’ that releases ‘nervous energy’

Triplett (1898)
- Children were alone or in pairs
- Task = fishing reels turned a silk band around a drum, connected to a pulley by a chord - flag had to travel around pulley 4x
- Results - children were faster, slower or not impacted by being in a pair
- Faster children had the ‘arousal of competitive instincts and the idea of a faster movement’
- Slower children were ‘going to pieces’

Question 42

Week 1
Understanding the ‘Self’

Answer 42

History
- Medieval - identity shaped by family membership, social rank, place of birth
- 16thC - started to change due to issues including secularisation, industrialisation and enlightenment
- Early 20thC - Psychodynamic self
- 1990’s - Over 31,000 articles about the self in the past 20 years (Ashmore & Jussim, 1997)

Searching for the Self
1. Self assessment - seeking out new information about ourselves to find out what sort of person we really are
2. Self verification - seeking out information that confirms what we already think we know about ourselves
3. Self enhancement - motivation to promote a favourable image of oneself
- Sedikides (1993) - Enhancement stronger than verification, stronger than assessment

Looking Glass Self

Van Gyn et al. (1990):
- 4 Conditions:
1. Power training on bike + imagery
2. Power training on bike w/o imagery
3. No power training + imagery
4. No power training, no imagery
- Findings:
- Power training improved performance
- Using imagery improved performance
- Conc: imagery improves self-conception, which improves performance

Harre et al., (2005) Driving
- Young drivers compared attributes of their driving behaviour with their peers
- Most showed a self-enhancement bias - above-average ratings of 5, 6, 7

Medvec et al., (1995)

Meta Perspective
- Shrauger & Schoeneman (1979)
- Reviewed 62 studies
- People did not see themselves as others saw them
- They saw themselves how they thought others saw them

Self Awareness
- Carver and Schier (1981): 2 forms of self
1. Private self - try to match behaviour with internal standards
2. Public self - presenting yourself in a positive light

Steele (1975)
- Mormon women received 2 phone callsL
- Called to ask if they would list everything in their kitchen to help with a new community food cooperative project (baseline 50% agree)
- Few days later - called by a ‘pollster’ and told one of 3 things:
1. A. uncooperative with community projects (95%)
2. B. Not concerned about driver safety (95%)
3. C. Cooperative with community projects (65%)

Question 43

Week 1
Key Concept: Self-Discrepancy Theory (Higgins, 1987)

Answer 43

• Ideal self
• Actual self
• Ought self
• Priming ideal self = dejection
• Priming ought self = agitation

Question 44

(Week 1
19th Century)

Answer 44

• Wundt (1879) - first dedicated laboratory to experimental psychological research
• Freud - psychoanalytic school of psychology
• Early 1900’s - rapid growth of laboratory research in the USA
• Allport (1924) - social psychology would only flourish if it became an experimental science
• Murphy and Murphy (1931-1937) - book, Experimental Social Psychology

Question 45

(Week 1
Social Psychology in Crisis?)

Answer 45

Positivism
- Non-critical acceptance of scientific method as the only way to arrive at true knowledge
Reductionism
- Explanation of a phenomenon in terms of the language and concepts of a lower level of analysis
Level of Explanation
- Types of concepts, mechanisms and language used to explain a phenomenon
Doise (1986)
- Need to construct theories that formally integrate, or ‘articulate’, concepts from different levels

Question 46

(Week 1
Non-Experimental Methods)

Answer 46

• Experiments are not always possible, practical or ethical
• Archival research - assembles data from a range of sources
• Janis (1972) - archival research regarding Bay of Pigs

Case Study
- Collection of data regarding a single case (e.g., individual, group or community)
- Range of methods such as interviews, questionnaires, observations or document analysis

Field Study
- Like field experiment but without any interventions or manipulation