Individuals and Groups Flashcards
Freudian defense mechanisms - Repression
- Primary repression - unwanted material is blocked or disguised before reaching conscious awareness (may leak into consciousness)
- After-expulsion/repression proper - unwanted material is detected and blocked or disguised
Freudian defense mechanisms - Freudian denial
no threat xperience, honest denial of experience - fooling yourself rather than other people
Freudian defense mechanisms - splitting the world
associating good with yourself and those you like and project negatively onto those you don’t
Freudian defense mechanisms - rationalisation
admittance but give a different account e.g. beating a child ‘for their own good’
Freudian defense mechanisms - displacement
authority figure upsets you so displace frustration to nearest thing similar to authority e.g. mad at boss so shout at wife
Freudian defense mechanisms - Altruism
Treat people like you would like to be treated - comfort of security - taking pleasure in helping others (Generative altruism as a choice to enjoy other’s improved welfare) TMT (Terror management theory) morality awareness triggers anxiety - coped with by being a good member of a good society
Freud’s topographical model
Conscious (currently thinking about), pre-conscious (not aware but could be - can draw into conscious), unconscious (can’t easily/at all bring into conscious)
Psychosexual stages of development
0-1 - Oral stage
1-3 - Anal stage
3-5 - Phalic stage
5-12 - Latency stage
Adolescence - Genital stage
Development since Freud
- Erikson’s age related ‘crises’ e.g. midlife crisis - positive and negative outcomes at every stage
- Identity status during adolescence - Marcia - we are told how to live our lives e.g. boys don’t cry - (e.g. ’if you haven’t asked ‘who am I?’ and just accepted societal expectations then you have foreclosed your identity)
Oral character/personality
oral incorporative (optimistic) aggressive (pessimistic)
Anal personality
- Anal triad - orderliness, obstinacy, parsimony
- Anal retentive - rigid and over-controlled, stingy, rule-loving ect.
- Anal expulsive - sadistic and ‘under-controlled’, messy, rebellious (maybe cruelty) ect.
Ideological attractiveness
Different people are attracted to different ideologies - ones that fit people’s needs - personality needs
Individual ideologies
- That adult political ideologies and preferences stem from and express and can therefore be used to reveal - underlying personality needs
- Needs - Personalities are made up of needs (primitive emotional needs) - avoid punishment and to keep the good will of the social group - needs to maintain harmony and integration within the self
(personality as a potential - mainly latent)
Affects on personality
- Experience affects personality - nurture more profound earlier in life (Freud) - parental decisions (child rearing) can affect personality for the course of a life
- Society affects personality - “changes in social conditions and institutions will have a direct bearing upon the kinds of personalities that develop within society” - common patterns will be discovered (can bear similarities to cultural ideologies e.g. fascism)
Social psychological ideology
common patterns with similarities to cultural ideologies when examining numerous individuals
If the role of personality can be made clear, it should be possible better to understand which societal factors are the most crucial ones”
When is authoritarian ideology most appealing?
when people’s psychological needs feel met by ‘bowing up while kicking down’ (obeying father figures and dealing firmly with outsiders)
TAP study sample
over 2000 white, non-Jewish native born, non-fascist americans, predominately middle class, relatively well educated and youngish, exclusion of minority groups (wanted to represent those who would oppress them), recruited via formal organisations
Scales used in TAP study
((AS- anti-sematic scale, Ethnocentrism (E) scale, Political and economic conservatism (PEC) scale, Potential for fascism scale (F) scale). - Qualitative comparison of low and high E people (used to inform subsequent questionnaires, interviews and projective techniques),
AS personality scale (anti-semitic)
(readiness to support or oppose anti-semitic ideas) - negative opinions regarding Jews, hostile attitudes toward them and moral values which permeate the opinions and justify the attitudes. - subscales - offensive, threatening ect.
E personality scale (ethnocentric)
readiness to support or oppose ideologies incorporating in-group/out group hostility - anti-black, patriotic ect. - people high in AS were high in E scale. An attachment to ‘things as they are’ a resistance to social change, elements of individual liberty and personal responsibility (opposition to state ‘interference’) - conservative
Recursive triangulation (in TAP study)
(learn lessons from studies and improve to do it again and achieve better results). - to study potentially anti-democratic individuals it was necessary to identify them. High and low results of E personality scale were interviewed and asked many relevant questions - looking for subtle measures for attention to fascism
F scale (potential for fascism)
target neutral items (don’t have to name group), all pro-trait (more potential = higher score) but people have different response types. People they were interested in were conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression ect.
The prototypical authoritarian
some characteristics are hidden, aggressive impulses but dare not direct them - not thoughtful - don’t question stuff - do what they are told.
Right wing authoritarianism (RWA)
authoritarian submission - Submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society, Aggression in the name of those authorities, Conventionalism (keep status quo) - dangerous worldview
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
authoritarian dominance - “the extent to which one desires that one’s in group dominate and be superior to out-groups” - correlates e.g psychotics, gender ect. (dominate other groups) - competetive worldview
Splitting of Social dominance orientation (SDO)
- SDO-E - anti-egalitarianism - group equality should not be our primary goal that is unjust
and SDO-D - dominance - an ideal society requires some groups on top and others on the bottom as some are simply inferior
Jung’s types
more introverted - dominant concern with internal objects of knowledge (the self)
-More extraverted than introverted - dominant concern with external objects of knowledge (the world) - both ‘types’ use all 4 functions
4 functions (Jung)
Sensing (perception), thinking (logic), intuiting (via unconscious thought), feeling (evaluation) - by which people know themselves and the world
Myers and Briggs
modified and extended Jung’s ideas
- Sensation vs intuition
- judging vs perception
- intraversion vs extraversion
- thinking vs feeling
(controversy - not reliable, valid, comprehensive or independent)
Traits
dimensions of personality on which individuals vary - people both introvert and extrovert, differs over situations - most traits have a normal distribution of opposite traits - dimensions (can be bipolar - linear line with opposites on each side) - traits fall on dimensions
- Personal, stable, consistent, broad vs narrow, potentially different dimensions
- drowning in traits
Lexical hypothesis
all aspects which are useful are already recorded in language
Allports’ non-common traits
cardinal traits - single defining traits that rarely characterise some individuals
central traits - brief description (e.g. helpful) typically 5-10
secondary traits - like central but more specific to particular stimuli, responses or situations
Factor analysis
the principal statistical method of most trait theorists, data reduction technique, possible identification of key indicators of ‘human nature’ - clusters of measures which correlate strongly with each other (inevitable if almost identical) - only found for measures that have been included
Replication of factors is weak support for the existence of real entities
Raymond Cattell’s 16PF
analysed ‘representative’ items from Allport and Odbert’s list - wanted everyday and specialist words - created the 16PF from list of words
- e.g. warmth, reasoning, emotional stability ect.
(can be used for job allocation)
Hans Eysenck’s ‘Big Two’ and ‘Big Three’
Big 2 - unstable vs stable
introverted vs extroverted
big 3 - adds psychotism vs impulse control
Five factor model (FFM) - Costa and McCrae
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
(BF-2 - evaluation - stable)
Comprehensiveness and Validity of traits
Comprehensiveness - hypothesises that that every personality trait is related to one of the 5 factors - remaining traits form a miscellaneous category
Validity - multiply recovered, neuroscience support, convergence (if we have a number of different measures then they should all point in the same direction)
Recent developments: Facets of agreeableness (development to FFM) and others
- can have some traits and not others of agreeableness
(trust, altruism, modesty, compliance)
Also: - BFI-2 A-facet question
- Twixt traits and facets
- HEXACO model splits FFM’s agreeableness into 2 - honesty-humility and agreeableness
- The Big One - only one trait - stability vs plasticity
McAdams traits
level 1: dispositional traits (unchanging biology potentially), level 2: personal concerns (enduring but developing motivational and strategic individual concerns), level 3: Life narrative (actively choosing a meaningful life story)
Individual personality change
context effects, life-changing events, dissociative identity disorder
DSM-V personality psychopathy
a hybrid dimensional-categorical model - six-ten specific personality disorder types, multiple traits
Mischel - social cognitive theories
- reviewed correlations between trait scores and behaviours across situations (didn’t really find correlations above .30) - 9/10% of how people behaved could be explained through traits
- Suggests that assessments of cross-situational consistency may be based on judgements of situation-specific behaviours - would find more consistency if you looked at similar situations - more informative to find how they act in different situations
- Could have opposite characteristics in different situations (more caring for family means less caring for strangers ect.)
Instrumental conditioning
(associative learning) - (operant conditioning) - rewards (new positives or remove negatives) promoting reinforcement, punishments promoting extinction
Vicarious conditioning
witnessing other’s negative responses to a stimulus (e.g. pain after a buzzer) can lead to manifesting similar responses (e.g. physiological arousal) to that stimulus) (- Mikeka)
Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory
- Observational learning - Bobo doll experiment - imitation of aggressive models (don’t forget aggression priming - frustrated children)
- Humans learn possibilities - how can they get the best rewards whilst avoiding punishment
Other Bandura study:
All participants saw a film of a man beating a Bobo doll who “refused to move out of his way when told to do so”
Condition 1: Straight to aggression measure
Condition 2: First saw the man rewarded for his behaviour with praise and confectionary
Condition 3: First saw the man called a bully, spanked with a rolled-up magazine, and threatened with a firmer spanking for any repeat of his aggressive behaviour
- Actions were copied least if saw adult punished with no incentives, the kids were offered stickers and juice if they could copy what they had seen the man do
Social cognitive theory - competencies and cognitions
- Competencies (skills) - intelligence (understanding, problem solving), behavioural (performance, gratification delay)
- Cognitions (beliefs); -Expectations - conditional(if…then)/perceived self-efficacy
-Standards and goals and self-regulation
Social cognitive theories - Self-efficacy
goal selection, effort, persistence and performance, approach mood and attitude, ‘threat’ appraisal and anticipated coping
Mischel - high/low delayers - marshmallow experimen
Japanese children had no problem delaying gratification for marshmallows - can’t delay for a wrapped present - gratification delay is a skill that can be taught and learned in specific situations
Behaviours result from combinations
inherited temperaments, enduring personality characteristics and situational apprasials.
Attitude
a person’s general feeling of favourableness or unfavourableness for that concept (useful for understanding/predicting behaviour) - determine behaviours to engage in
- Affect - people’s feeling and values related to the attitude object
- Behaviour - observation of how one behaves toward an attitude object
- Cognition - a person’s beliefs about the properties of an attitude object
- come from experience, social roles and norms, classical and operant conditioning and observing people in environment
Measuring attitudes
- Explicit measures - ask how positive/negative their feelings are (explicit attitudes - a deliberate, controlled and conscious appraisal process of an object and its evaluation)
- Implicit measures - recording unconscious reactions (implicit attitudes are automatic, unconscious, and intuitive association between an attitude object and its evaluation) (implicit association test - evaluating two objects together - predicts how people act in the real world)
Attitudes best predict behaviour when:
- Social influences on attitudes are minimised
- The level of specificity of attitudes and behaviours matches
- Attitudes are strong
- Explicit measures are used to predict deliberate behaviours, and implicit measures to predict automatic behaviours
The theory of reasoned action - Ajzen and Fishbein
Behavioural beliefs and outcome evaluation -> attitude
Normative beliefs and motivation to comply -> subjective norms
Attitude and subjective norms -> behavioural intention -> behaviour
Subjective norms
a person’s perception of the social pressures put on him to perform or not perform the behaviour in question” Ajzen and Fishbein (1980) (if your friends approve and if you want them to approve)
The theory of planned behaviour
outcome belief x evaluations of outcome -> attitude
Normative beliefs x motivation to comply -> subjective norm
Control beliefs x perceived facilitating or inhibiting power -> perceived behavioural control
Attitude and subjective norm and perceived behavioural control -> intention -> behaviour
Self efficacy and perceived behavioural control
self efficacy - the belief we have the ability to engage in the behaviour thats required to produce the outcome you
want
Perceived behavioural control - “the person’s belief as to how easy or difficult performance of the behaviour is likely to be” (Ajzen and Madden 1986)
outcome evaluation and behavioural beliefs
Outcome evaluation - component of attitudes where you think the behaviour would have a good outcome and do you want that outcome
Behavioural beliefs - whether or not you believe the behaviour would have a good outcome
How well does the theory of planned behaviour predict behaviour?
- Especially effective at predicting eating and exercise
- Intention doesn’t always lead to behaviour - intention-behaviour gap (different intentions when intoxicated, fail to act on intentions for multiple reasons (e.g. encounter obstacles, don’t know how to act ect.) - TPB better at predicting intentions than actual behaviour
- TPB better at predicting rational, deliberate behaviours than spontaneous ones, does not take into account implicit attitudes and how these can also influence our behaviour
- Tells us attitudes are important but doesn’t tell out how/whether they can be changed
Reasoned action approach
Reasoned action approach - replacement of subjective norm with perceived norm
- Injunctive norm - moral rules
- Descriptive norms - perceptions that others are or are not performing the behaviour
Cognitive consistency
Cognitive consistency - maintaining consistency is an important human motive, especially when inconsistencies threaten our self-view
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance - a state of emotional discomfort that people experience when they hold inconsistent attitudes or engage in behaviour that is inconsistent with their attitudes or beliefs
Cognitive dissonance theory
Cognitive dissonance theory - based on the idea that we are sensitive to inconsistencies between our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours (the principle of cognitive consistency), if there is inconsistency we experience this as aversive, motivates us to reduce or eliminate the dissonance
Causes of dissonance:
- Insufficient justification - when a person finds an internal cause for an explanation to a behaviour because there isn’t an external cause - Festinger and Carlsmith (students justified themselves as liking a task more when they had a smaller reward)
- Post-decisional dissonance - making a decision that involves rejecting options that had desirable attributes (reduced by enhancing the attractiveness of the chosen alternatives and devaluing the rejected alternatives) - Brehm (increasing rating of the choice they made)
- Effort justification - choosing to put effort into a task that doesn’t turn out as well as we hoped it would (the tendency for individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard to attain) - Aronson and Mills (students rated psychology of sex higher when worked to get in)
Factors influencing the experience of dissonance:
- the more important our beliefs or decisions
- When it threatens our self-image
- when they have significant consequences and when they are not easily undone
Emotions
not whats in your head but also your body, physical arousal, expressive behaviour (e.g. facial expression) and conscious experience (feeling) - coordinated physiological, behavioural and cognitive states, influence thoughts and behaviour in ways that might have helped us to survive as we evolved
Mood vs affect vs emotion
Mood - less intense, longer lasting, no cause
Affect - generic - good/bad
Emotion - intense, short-lived, specific feelings
Why do we have emotions - intrapersonal
- evolutionary perspective - adaptations to help us solve problems - signal action to others through expressions - ‘right’ response e.g. fighting, falling in love, escaping predators (positive emotions - feel safe and improve skills for survival in the long run) not always helpful in the situations we are in now
‘hot-cold empathy gap - Loewenstein
Emotions can affect how we think and behave - we underestimate this influence - the ‘hot-cold empathy gap’ - neglect the influence that emotions are having - can’t imagine how we’d feel in a different emotion
Emotions influencing judgement
- mildly depressed people make accurate self-ratings, no self-serving bias (better than average affect) - but positive bias when rating others (not more accurate overall) - Alloy and Abramson
Dutton and Aron - emotions influence the judgements we make about other people
Schwarz and Clore - more likely to think they had attraction to female researcher on scary bridge than non-scary bridge - misattribution of arousal (explains call of the void)
If no emotions:
damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs emotional processing
not more rational but impairs ability to make decisions and learn from mistakes - in the long term our bad feelings guide us to better decisions (Bechara)
Baumeister -
- We are influenced both by our current emotion and the predicted emotional consequences of our actions. Decision making is impaired without them, suggesting these effects are functional (Baumeister)
Why do we have emotions - interpersonal
- We evolved as a group - social emotions - e.g. falling in love
- Emotions evolved for survival and reproduction
- “When emotional processing is compromised, most things social go awry” - we lose social relationships without emotions - Niedenthal & Braue
(Social and physical pain involve the same parts of the brain)
Tracy and Robins - self conscious emotions
self conscious emotions (e.g. pride, shame, guilt ect.) - develop later - to regulate the self in the context of social groups and relationships - to avoid breaking social norms
(Parkinson - emotions are social)
The Emotions as Social Information Model (EASI) - van Kleef
Expressing sadness do not cause the same reactions in different social situations, other’s emotional expressions change how we feel and how we interpret the situation, and thus trigger changes in our behaviour, influenced by factors such as our relationship with the other person - we use other people’s expressions of emotions to make sense of social situations.
Mood/Emotion contagion
can spread emotions to others - a person living with a depressed roommate are more likely to become depressed themselves - Joiner and Neumann & Strack
- unconscious processes ( motor mimicry), conscious processes (social comparison)
Facial feedback hypothesis
found things funnier when easier to smile (holding pen in teeth) than unable to smile (holding pen in lips) - states that people’s facial activity influences their affective responses - Strack
Botox changes emotions - changes your ability to understand other’s emotions and reduces your own emotional responses - Neal and Davis
Universalist views vs constructivist views
Universalist - emotions are products of biological processes
Constructivist views - emotions depend upon social concepts (and subject to cultural influence)
6 basic emotions
anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness (Ekman)
don’t learn from copying emotions - Matsumoto and Willingham
- Don’t learn emotions from copying - blind from birth athletes made similar facial expressions as sighted athletes - something universal across all cultures - Matsumoto and Willingham
- basic emotions universal across cultures - Ekman and Friesen, Elfbein and Ambady
different emotional preferences in different cultures
- Have the potential to experience the same emotions but don’t necessarily experience them in everyday life (Mesquita and Frijda) - emotional experiences differ across cultures (Eastern cultures less positive and more neutral emotions - collectivist) - influences what is normal vs abnormal (lower classes experience more negative emotions than upper class, higher class people more likely to express anger in Japan)
- Eastern cultures would rather experience lower arousal emotions than Western cultures (Moon and Tsai)
Emotional concepts differ over cultures
- Cultures vary in the number of terms they have for particular emotions; an emotion with many different labels is hypercognized (levy)
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - structure of a language determines how speakers categorise and perceive the world
- Feldman-Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion - Emotions can be created by being given names - no such thing as a universal emotional experience - use context to categorise emotions - differences in labelling could be why cultures experience emotions differently
Gustav Ichheister - person perception
- Raw material of social perception (physical appearance, situational, other people’s opinions, communications from them ect.)
- Physical appearance: very important (college students on blind date - dancing and talking and rated for attractiveness and social skills (then obtained IQ/grades/personality tests) (Twele - Facemasks had a limited effect on first impressions)
- we assume people are the same in all contexts, successes and failures
Solomon Asch - primacy effects
Primary effects of forming impressions
- lists traits of people and formed opinions on first word (central also plays a part) (similar findings in recent work - File - warms and competence as important traits)
Fritz Heider - attribution theory
Fritz Heider - attribution theory - we want to understand our lives and so we want to look at cause and effect (pay attention to behaviour not situation and context)
(Jones and Davis - students who had written a pro Castro essay were more favourable)
(Taylor and Fiske - Attributed greater causal role in argument to person they directly faced)
Correspondence bias and fundamental attribution error
Correspondence bias - draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions and ignore situational
fundamental attribution error - overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational in controlling behaviour
Gilbert and Malone - dispositional over situational
- suggested that attribution processes happen in 2 stages - Dispositional inference and Situational correction - found that increases in cognitive load can undermine situational correction
(Seeing someone act as a villain means we see them negatively (Tukachinsky))
Self fulfilling prophecies Behavioural Confirmation
- Perceivers can shape target’s future
- Thomas and Thomas - if you believe something it will become true - fleshed out by Merton - make the false true by belief
Rosenthal and Jacobson - told primary teachers some students would be growth spurners
Snyder and Swann - more likely to label targets hostile if told they were
Bem - Self-perception theory
We observe our behaviour in the same way we observe each other’s (understand ours and others’ behaviour in the same way)
subtle and automatic, can inform what we think of ourselves (studies of embodied social cognition)
(Not accurate making self analysis (Sell and Krizan))
We can engage in self-perception work to differing degrees
- more likely to infer characteristics about ourself when doing freely chosen behavior
- more likely to infer something when we have no prior ideas of ourselves, if we think we are good at something then doing it badly will have no effect
- more likely to infer a characteristic when our behavior is observed by an audience - especially when we expect to meet audience again
Self serving attributions - Heider
people selectively tend to attribute successes internally and failures externally (self-serving bias) (when positive self image threatened we are more likely to engage in self serving attributions)
Self comparison theories - Festinger
we try to evaluate our opinions and abilities accurately, if no objective means we compare with similar others (look to people doing less well - comparing down to avoid ego threats (Wills)) (useful upward comparison if we think we can improve (Collins))
Better-than-average effect
most people seem to think they are better than average e.g. American and Swedish college students think they are above 50th percentile on driving safely (Svenson)
- Zell shows it is a large effect in the West and smaller in the East (especially in America) - more research needed for traits valued for culture)
- Some people are also right (are better than average)
- Negative connotations of ‘average’
Self evaluation - Cialdini and Tajfel & Turner
Self evaluation via basking in reflected glory - Cialdini - football studies - General pattern: “WE won” but “THEY lost”
Self evaluation via positive group distinctiveness - Tajfel and Turner - membership within group - eg. football supporters - decides self, comparisons with other groups (want to be the best), individual mobility = move to a better group, social competition = try to improve group’s status, social creativity = try to look at things differently (eg. richness vs niceness)
Self enhancement vs self consistency
- Self-enhancement predicts people will prefer positive feedback regardless of their self-views
- vs -
- Self-consistency predicts people with negative self-views will prefer negative feedback
(People feel better about positive feedback but question the competence of people evaluating if say more positive when selves think negative) - Swann
Sedikides and Strube - tactical self-enhancement - self-improvement, self-assessment, self-consistency
Cultural differences in self perceptions
- Heine - self criticism rather than self enhancement among East Asian populations and had lower levels of self esteem)
- Pan cultural self-enhancement - more about how you see yourself positively - Sedikides, Gaertner & Toguchi (2003) - individualist vs collectivist
- More modesty, close others understanding (Muramoto)
- More modesty relates to negative with explicit self esteem in China (not us), and positively with implicit self esteem (Cai)
- Culture moderates self-evaluation (affects what is positively valued)
Sarah Hampson - social process to construct identities
The actor - characteristics residing in the individual - personality psychology Single trait theories and multiple trait theories), hereditary and environmental influences
The observer - how people are perceived and judged by others - social psychology
- Person perception
- Attribution theories
- Impression formation
The self observer - beliefs about own characteristics - social and clinical
- Self-perception
- Self-concept
- Identity
- Self-evaluation
Self-verification theory - Swann
we work hard to verify existing self-conceptions, cognitive strategies, selective interaction, Identity cues, interpersonal prompts
Identity negotiation - self-verification makes a stable self-concept (conflict with behavioural confirmation and self perception) - negotiate ideas together - less conflict over life-span (other’s expectations help to make self conceptions and self verification helps to maintain them)
Kitzinger and Wilkinson - interviews with lesbians
- barriers to identity change, thought they had to fit stereotype to be in group, making the transition and adjusting to a new identity
- identity maintenance and change requires work
Steele - how stereotype threats affect individual outcomes
If you belong to a group that is negatively stereotyped, that can interfere with educational performance. - e.g. White and African Americans (Steele and Aronson)
- similar results for women vs men in maths tests (Spencer, Steele and Quinn)
Stereotype threat mechanisms - people who care most worst effective, extra pressure, threats to self integrity and belonging (leads to lower aspirations)
Carol Dweck - implicit theories
people have implicit theories about the nature of personality, intelligence, morality and other individual differences - influences school performance
Entity theories - can’t change (want to do well) vs Incremental theories - can change (want to learn)
- When incremental reduced stereotype threat - Aronson, Fried and Good
- Praise effort not intelligence (Mueller and Dweck)
Entity theorists vs incremental theorists are more likely to
- Entity theorists are more likely to
- make faster dispositional attributions about people based on their behaviour
- believe in ‘punishment’ as social justice
- believe in the truth of stereotypes
- Incremental theorists are more likely to
- be more cautious about inferring dispositions
- believe in ‘education’ as social justice
- question the truth of stereotypes
Global self esteem - James
a certain average tone of self esteem - independent objective reasons for satisfaction of discontent (scale items e.g. At times I think I am no good at all. - agree or disagree with point)
Self esteem = success/pretensions (what we aspire to be)
(socially and individually constructed - not James)
State vs trait self esteem
a questionnaire to measure what you are thinking in the moment e.g. i feel good about myself - current state vs how you feel generally
Self discrepancy theories - Higgins
domains of the self (actual self, ideal self (what you want to be), ought self(how you think you should be - society and cultural) (how people see themselves and how they want to be)
- Particular domains people value e.g. looks/ academic
Implicit self esteem
People may associate positive words with the self more quickly ect.
Measure self esteem with implicit measures
Poor convergent validity
Single item self esteem scale
I have high self esteem (rate 1-5 - very true to not very true) (Robins)
Predictors of global self-esteem
- Harter - self evaluations with important domains correlate with global self esteem
- individual differences don’t moderate importance (doesn’t change the contribution to global self esteem)
- cultural values as moderators
Heritability of self esteem
- genetic influences have significant results, shared environment minimal - Ness and Sedikides
- studies don’t explain if there is a gene, certain characteristics seen as positive leading to higher self esteem
Positives of self esteem
- Lower self esteem in adolescence, predicts negative outcomes in adulthood
- Strauman, Lemieux and Coehealth - anxious, dysphoric and non-distressed participants had different discrepancies but thinking about them bad for health
- buffers for anxiety - Greenburg - smaller effect of threats with higher self esteem
- good for managing terror management theory
- sociometer - connected to others - belongingness (lower when disconnected) (evidence - fluctuates and higher when included)
The ‘Positive illusions’ debate
- Controversial article by Taylor and Brown in the late 80s - positive illusions are characteristic of normal human thought (better than average effect) illusions weaker or absent in people with depression or low self esteem - make us happier
- Critiqued by Colvin and Block - e.g uni students in lab, really illusions? - did an empirical study and self enhancement had a negative correlation with ego-resilience vs. ego brittleness
- Taylor and Brown (1994) clarified their position - accuracy is not necessary for mental health, illusions foster happiness, caring ect.
- remaining problems: measuring positive illusions, defining mental health benefits
Baumeister, Smart and Boden reviewed evidence suggesting high or low self esteem among perpetrators of violent crimes
little direct evidence so based on qualitative review of literature considerable convergence in findings - no evidence for low self esteem, violent people have favourable views of
themselves
- Kernis, Granneman and Barclay - no relation between level of self esteem and hostility until stability of self-esteem taken into account
Narcissism
extreme self esteem, unstable high self esteem, disregard for others, strong motive for self enhancement, increased sensitivity to ego threats e.g. ‘I am more capable than other people’
- Narcissism does resolve debate, correlates with undesirable outcomes - could be just relabelling with narcissism
Narcissism and aggression - Bushman and Baumeister
Found self esteem level did not predict aggression, higher narcissism more aggressive, negative evaluation more aggressive, more male aggression (interaction between narcissism and ego threat - more aggressive when person had evaluated their essay - targeted aggression
Rethinking self esteem - Heppner and Kernis
need to think if secure not just high or low (fragile or insecure = instability)
Claude Steele - self affirmation theory
- Women in study more cooperative when called uncooperative - want to be reaffirm personal integrity when threatened - (maintain positive self-regard)
Prejudice and self affirmation - Fein and Spencer
- used the values affirmation method (write about why a positive value is important to you) and then rated interview candidates no differently between Italian or Jewish when did the self affirm vs when didn’t
Caffeine consumption - Reed and Aspinwall
those who drank more to start with and had self affirmation rated risk confirming information higher (made people less defensive and more willing to accept information) - high caffeine users with self affirmation - less likely to intend to drink less caffeine
Remaining issues with self esteem
- Mediating mechanisms still unclear - not a self esteem boost, meaning of self integrity is quite vague, sometimes backfire effects,
- How to translate into real-world settings
The minimal group paradigm - Tajfel and Turner
- randomly allocated to groups using a painting, had group favouritism
- competitive norms in West, cognitive process of social categorisation
- doesn’t mean intergroup discrimination is inevitable
Social identity theory - Tajfel and Turner
- Social categories do not simplify and bring order to our world - basis of sense of who we are - people strive fir a positive identity
- positive social identity = groups positivly distinct - threats lead people to leave group or make them more discrete - how respond to threats
- social competition, individual mobility (move groups), social creativity
Testing social identity theory - Ellemers et al
- those who told change was possible less likely to identify with their group and with another group
- When thought it was unstable most likely to work harder and improve position
Collective climate action - furlong and Vognoles
3 Key predictors - social interaction, collective efficacies, anger about a perceived injustice
Limitations of social identity theory
- SIT presupposes that identity categories already ‘exist’ in the social world
- How do categories come into being?
- What leads people to categorise themselves?
- Focus on positive distinctiveness
- What about other identity motives?
Self-Categorisation Theory (Fluidity of social identities) (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell 1987)
- We categorise people similarly to how we categorise objects
- Comparative fit (bottom up), Normative fit (top down), Perceiver readiness (accessibility)
- Identity salience varies within context
- Group stereotypes (vary with context)
- Self-stereotyping (or depersonalisation)
- Identity categories are formed and can change with context
- tested by Gaertner et al - reduce discrimination via common in-group
Problems with the common ingroup identity strategy
- What about real world identities?
- Existing group identities are highly valued – strong resistance to giving them up
- Power differences between existing groups?
- Shifting prejudice to a different level?
- Failure to generalise to rest of group?
- Is Dual Categorisation a possible solution?
- e.g. Multiculturalism
Benefits of social identification
- Support in emergency situations
- Coping with stress (social identification lowers stress)
- Identity-based leadership
Social cure perspective
have benefits but social identities can be a social curse when stigmatised or devalued
Benefits of social identities for health and wellbeing
The self protective altruist - Hirschberger
- Study 1 - do primes of death impact motivation to behave prosocially, increased unless reminded them of death - undergraduates giving contributions to charity
- Study 2 - morality salience led to a larger percentage of donations from flyers but less likely to donate organs
- Study 3 - Wheelchair/walking - same finding
- proximal and distal defences take place along a temorpal sequence
The Authoritarians - Altemeyer
- Authoritarians submit to authority, attacks others in their name, personality aspect, send people to prison with higher sentences, higher importance of being normal
- RWA - gives scores of groups not individuals, higher is more authoritarian
Compassionate liberals and polite conservatives - Hirsh
Study 1 - Questionnaires (BFAS), republicans higher in conscientiousness, lower in openness, liberals higher in openness-intellect
Study 2 - found the same
- political practices reflecting on an individual’s psychological needs
Honesty as the 6th factor of personality - Ashton
- Other factors can be centred as honesty
- Undergrad South Korean students, investigated Korean variant of honesty
- correlational results not evidence of psycholexical importance
Functions of emotions - Hwang
Interpersonal functions - facilitate specific behaviours in perceivers
Intrapersonal functions - help us to act quickly with minimal conscious awareness
Cultural - tells us what to do with our emotions
Towards a psychology of human agency - Bandura
- 4 properties - intentionality, forethought, self-reflectiveness, self-reactiveness, 3 modes of agency - individual, proxy and collective
- Humans develop more from brains than physicality or genetics
- Psychological theorems formulated before changes in communications
Binge drinking among students - Norman
- intention as proximal determinant of behaviour
- binge drinking as response to environmental cues
- predicted future drinking - TPB and habit strength
- interaction between intention and habit strength not significant
Ashanti names - Jahoda
- Boys born on Wednesday more likely to get into trouble (Kwaku), Monday boy peaceful (Kwadwo), certain kra enters the body
- Examined juvenile court records (only Ashanti boys) - Kwaku boys had 1/4 more offences against another person
Stereotype threat against women - Davis
- less women in subjects with maths
- Men and women performed the same with no stereotype
- women primed with stereotypic/not tv commercial (not maths related), then performed worse and were more likely to avoid maths questions when been shown stereotype
- men experienced stereotypic lift
- women could have modelled the commericals
- long term implications would lead to disidentification
Self esteem: Nature, origins and consequences - Bosson and Swann Jr
- High self esteem linked with nasty tendencies - negative views of those with high self esteem
- low self esteem with higher sensitivity to rejection and withdraw themselves
- Seek relationship partners who confirm self views
- Low self esteem more likely to develop physical and mental health difficulties later in life
Social Identity theory and self categorisation theory - Hornsey
- Social identity theory - social context affects intergroup relationships - want positive self concepts
- self categorisation theory - different levels (human, social and personal) - depersonalisation in group - more likely to fit in if in line with stereotype expectations
- awareness that individuals and groups influence each other
- A very broad theory resting on simple testable ideas (criticism is that it has become so broad that it cannot be falsifiable)
Feelings as information theory proposes that:
people are more sensitive to how they feel than to why they feel that way
What is the phenomenon of ‘mnemic neglect’, as described by Sedikides et al. (2016)?
Selectively poor memory for negative information about the self
Mark Leary defines self-esteem as a “sociometer”. What does he mean by this?
A general indicator of how one is doing in the eyes of others
