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