Existential social psych Flashcards
Lecture 13
What are the existential problems?
I am going to die: how does awareness of death influence us socially, culturally, and psychologically?
The meaning of life: how do people find meaning? What do disruptions in meaning do to people?
The existence of God and a next life: what is the social-psychological impact of religious beliefs?
The isolating nature of human existence: what is existential isolation? How can it be bridged?
Defining what it means to be human: how do people define humanness? What impact does this have on how we treat non-humans?
Free-will: what impact do free will beliefs have on society and the individual?
Existentialism as philosophy
Each individual creates their own value and determines their own meaning.
The world is absurd; there is no good or bad - what is done is done, and it is up to us to determine whether that is moral or immoral.
Freedom and authenticity are both key concepts:
- To live authentically, you must have freedom, you must know onself.
What is existentialism?
Angst and dread:
- Negative feelings arising from the burdens of freedom and responsibilities and the strain of realising there is no objective moral truth, or proper behaviour, or correct roles or norms, apart from human creation.
- In the absence of pre-defined norms and meaning systems, there is a feeling of possibility and of disorientation and fear.
Who are I? Why am I here? What difference does anything make?
Existential problem: death
Terror management theory:
- Humans have this incredible capacity for self-awareness.
- But this awareness renders us aware that ultimately, we will die.
- So too will everyone we value.
Thus, the desire to live and the awareness of death creates the potential for a lot of angst and anxiety - TMT argues this could create ‘terror’.
The uniquely human problem of death awareness is solved in a uniquely human way: culture.
Culture worldviews: culturallu shaped belief systems that provide people with meaning, stability, and purpose. These tell people what is values, how best to act, and what matters.
Self-esteem: the extent to which a person believes they are living up to their cultural values and norms.
Hypothesis 1: when reminded of death, people will defend their beliefs more strongly.
Hypothesis 2: self-esteem protects people against morality concerns.
Evidence:
Morality salience (compared to control topics):
- Increases support for aggression that is used by your culture/society.
- Increases aggression towards people who are of different beliefs.
- Increases desired punishment for people who commit moral transgressions.
- Increases support for people who uphold cultural values.
Self-esteem as buffer:
When death is salient:
- People display increased effots to either protect or increase self-esteem.
- Attributions for success, for instance; humor study; agreement with positive feedback.
High self-esteem individuals initially experience increases in negative mood after being reminded of death; but after a delay this only applies to low self-esteem individuals.
Other findings:
Morality salience impairs healthy decisions when those unhealthy decisions are a key part of a person’s self-esteem or identity or provide an escapy from self-awareness.
Morality salience also increases the desire for clear, well-structured environments and information (the need for structure).
Existential problem: the meaning of life
What is meaning?
- Significance.
- Purpose.
- Sense-making.
Meaning maintenance model:
Posits that people have a general need to pursue meaning.
When meaning is ‘threatened’ people will thus show increased efforts to restore meaning.
Meaning threats:
- Mortality salience.
- Viewing red spaded and black hearts (card colours switched).
- Reading studies without endings; or viewing abstract art.
These have been found to:
- Increase worldview defence, need for structure, preference of meaningful/clear art, increase detection of patterns.
Meaning as information
Argues that meaning is an important source of information (just like emotion is, but the two are distinct in some ways).
When meaning is salience in the environment in one domain, it will increase meaning in other domains.
Supporting this, viewing well-structured (patterned) environment increase the overall meaning people feel in their lives.
Little me, big world:
- A series of studies manipulated how people think about themselves in relation to the world.
- When primed to think about how little you are in the vast cosmos, people with low self-esteem had reduced psychological wellbeing.
- People with high self-esteem increased psychological wellbeing.
Correlates of meaning in life:
- Life satisfaction, joy, intrinsic religiosity, extraversion.
Does not correlate with: hedonism, conformity, achievement, power, security.
Correlates negatively with: sadness, neuroticism, anger, fear, shame, depression.
Correlated of search for meaning:
Fear, sadness, depression, neuroticism.
However, for approach oriented people, search for meaning and presence of meaning both correlated with positive variables and positively with each other.
Approach oriented people seek out and do things for possible benefits as opposed to doing things to avoid bad things.
Existential problem: is there god or next life?
In some cultures, as much as 90% of people report belief in god and an afterlife.
This belief has persisted throughout human history.
Studies show that ‘evidence’ in life after death (near death experience reports) reduces the effects of thinking about death in Terror Management theory studies -> some evidence this is even true for atheists.
Belief in God can also provide important ‘control’ beliefs -> compensatory control theory (Aaron Kay).
God and social morality:
God primes can increase pro-social behaviour.
Belief in hell correlates with less crime cross-culturally.
Priming a punishing God reduces retaliation when people are cheated.
Belief in hell and god’s punishment also increases when people read about unpunished moral violations (unless the violations are extreme, like murdering a child).
Factors related to belief:
Morality salience increases explicit belief (at least for religious people/people who are dualistic thinkers) -> and implict belief even for atheists.
Unexplained suffering.
Religion as a group vs belief system
Religion serves many functions similiar to a social group as well.
Thus, some people belong to religion as it is a type of group/serves social functions.
And others are religious more for the beliefs associated with it (afterlife, god, etc).
Other factors:
- Feeling a lack of personal control.
- Framing neuroscience as unable to explain the mind/consciousness.
- Poor prospects for careers.
- Feeling lonely (increases prayer at least).
- Positive emotions can also sometimes increase beliefs (awe, wonder, etc.).
Religion as ultimate justification:
Berger and Luckmann:
- The legitimacy of any beliefs/ideas is socially/culturally created (or at least maintained).
- What is true is largely what a culture says is true.
- Subjective values take on a similarity to objective truths.
- When beliefs are challenged (or norms) people seek out sources of legitimacy.
- God is like our ultimate source of legitmacy because god can’t be challenged on any grounds.
- Thus, religion serves as a sort of special, cosmis layer of legitimacy for beliefs.
Existential problem: social isolation
Shared reality theory:
- People seek out mutual understanding (‘shared reality’) in order to regulate relationships, and to perceive their environments as stable and potentially controllable.
- Thus, two motives - to have relationships/belong and to have knowledge about the external world - are served by seeking out mutual understanding.
Research shows that:
- People adjust their beliefs in accordance to others.
- In close relationships, belief systems often merge - you sort of become part of each other and this isn’t even always conscious.
- People have a tendency to conform; deviants are often not liked or excluded.
Existential isolation:
- This is the notion that we do not feel like other people ‘get’ us.
- There is this gulf between us and other people not matter how hard we try.
- This isn’t loneliness; loneliness is just feeling like you have no friends or company or adequate social support.
- Existential isolation has to do with feeling in a sense like you live in a different world to others.
- Existential isolation is higher among men, this is due to less valuing of communal traits.
Research on i-sharing shows that:
- It reduces selfishness.
- It reduces prejudice towards out-groups.
- It reduces humanness perceptions.
Our view of what is real, in a sense, is predicted on other people.
We need others to validate our beliefs (how we see the world), our values (what is important to us) and who we are.
If we don’t have this mutual understanding, this shared subjectivity, it will be extremely difficult to maintain our trust in ourselves (including our ideas).
Thus, our relationships are extremely important not just for feeling good, but for daily functioning both socially and psychologically.
Existential problem: what does it mean to be human?
Defining humanness:
- As unique from other animals (lacking culture, not civil, coarse, a-moral or immoral, irrational).
- As unique from machines (cold, inert, passive, rigid, superficial, fungible (replaceable)).
- Warmth and morality and competence as ‘humanness’.
- Study where people classified as low warmth/low competence were ‘dehumanised’ at a neural level.
- Also some evidence that things that reduce warmth and morality and competence perceptions of others also reduces human nature ratings.
Why do we humanise things? (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo, 2007)
When feeling lonely.
When feeling incompetent.
When anthropomorphised thoughts are salient.
Morality and human uniqueness:
When death is salient:
- People are more negative towards animals (even pet owners).
- People believe less in evolution (we did not come from animals).
- People rate essats worse that describe human-animal similarities.
- People rate their own groups as higher in humanness.
- People distance from their physical bodies (if perceived as animalisitic) -> even if this leads to unhealthy choices; even if this denies pleasure.
We are not animals:
When people eat meat, studies show a short-term reduction in the amount of emotions and thoughts animals have.
We also animalise groups of people we watn to distance from or harm.
The human/animal distinction plays an important role in cultures and societies and in psychology.
Existential problem: free will
Free will: the idea that our actions are freely chosen, that we can act, think, and feel in ways that are entirely under our own violation.
Implications for nature vs nuture:
- Although both sides of this can be framed as limiting free will, this applies typically more to nature (genetics, etc.)
Denial of social influence and biases:
- By denying social influences, we protect free will beliefs (alone in crowd of sheep effect).
Pronin’s work:
- This shows that people will rate themselves as having more free will than others.
- That is, they think their actions are more freely chosen.
(the alone is a crowd of sheep effect).
Belief in free will:
- When the link between action and intentions is promoted, belief in free will increases.
- Reducing belief in free will promotes aggression and reduces helping.
- It also increases cheating.
- It also reduces retribution and conformity.
Psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966; 2013)
The idea that telling someone not to do something increases the desire for them to do it.
Whether this actually influences behaviour depends on loads of things: punishment for the actions; rewards for action; chances of getting caught; presence of others, etc.
But…
Too much freedome can sometimes backfire and cause people to act in unifying ways that restricts their freedom.
