Lecture 1 - Intro to personality and social psychology

Question 1

Emphasis of personality psychology

Answer 1

Tries to measure fundamentals of human behavior
Predicts how they behave in different situations and across time (such as via the big 5)
eg a high C person should ALWAYS act high C

Fellows the doctrine of traits

This is a historic perspective

In some ways they thought traits were similar to physical characteristics such as eye color.

Question 2

Doctrine of traits

Answer 2

Social behavior varies as a function of internal behavioral dispositions that render it coherent, stable, consistent and predictable.

Question 3

Doctrine of Situationism

Answer 3

Social behavior varies as a function of features of the external environment, particularly the social situation, that elicit behavior directly, or that communicate social expectations, demands, and incentives

Question 4

Social psych

Answer 4

Believes in the power of the situation to override individual differences

Question 5

Conformity study (Asch)

Answer 5

Lines, confederates picked not the shortest one as shorts.

Ptp went with group often even though clearly wrong

(power of situation)

Question 6

Bystander intervention (Darley and Latane)

Answer 6

Kitty Genovese

Supposedly no one helped her but apparently someone did, NYT made it a thing

More bystanders = less likely to act

Question 7

Stanford Prison “Experiment” (Zimbardo)

Answer 7

Randomly assigned to roles
Guards became abusive
Had to stop study
Power of Situation

Question 8

Social psychology equation (Lewin) - Classical

Answer 8

B = f(P,E)

Behavior is a function of personality and environment

Question 9

Person X Situation

What did Lewin feel about how people saw situations?

Answer 9

Lewin felt that peoples SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTIONS of situations and events are important.

While much of social psychology was aimed at exploring the power of the situation, it always had a person factor and later, this become more so

Question 10

Why did the person gain influence in social psych

3 things

Answer 10

(1) The rise of cognitive psychology reoriented the field towards the idea of the internal processes

Perception is internal and cognitive (and hence subjective) therefore the person must be relevant as they are the ones subjectively experiencing the environment.

(2) Ethics: there has been much more regulation of experiments (Milgram). SO now instead of creating powerful situation we create moderate ones and see if certain people are affected by them.
(3) Crisis in the 1960s: Personality coefficient =.3 therefore 10% of the variance in their behaviour is accounted for by traits

Question 11

Example: Sally as high C but late for work

How might the situation influence her Cness?

Answer 11

Sally h=is high in C

She is a responsible friend and parent
She is always late for work
Her house is messy

In what way is Sally conscientious?

We might expect her to be high C across all three. The low r of personality reflects this.

How do we account for this? Consider the situation.

Maybe she is at night school and has 2 kids; does not really care about work or have the time to be tidy but is super good with friends and kids as they are important to her.

Question 12

Case 1: Child athletes

Answer 12

Kids born in certain months are more likely to be pro athletes. (Jan, Feb, March for Hockey)

They are older than their peers
Bigger/faster etc
Noticed for this
Given more attention that this
Influences their perception of their ability athletically

Person/situation interaction

= more likely to become athletes

Question 13

Case 2: CEOs

Answer 13

Born March/April

They are older than their peers
Increased cognitive capacity
Noticed for this
Given more attention that this
Influences their perception of their intellectual ability
Person/situation interaction

= more likely to become CEOs

Question 14

Case 2: Newlywed Satisfaction

Answer 14

Everyone loses interest over a marriage
Newlywed wives are at peak satisfaction
All decrease with time
Those rated slightly lower decrease faster

Why?

Snowball

Wives marital satisfaction affects husbands negative behavior which affects wives negative behavior which affects wives marital satisfaction etc.

So a small difference in satisfaction at the start may precipitate a larger one, faster

Question 15

Case 4: Life Stress & Depression

Answer 15

Polymorphism in genes influences the uptake of serotonin
The short allele has lower efficiency
Stressful life Events (SLEs) cause depression for everyone but those with short alleles are more depressed and more likely to attempt suicide

BUT the serotonin uptake allele is not associated with the # of SLEs. It affects coping.

Therefore is a person/situation interaction

Question 16

3 ways of looking at persons and situations (equations)

Answer 16

Classical: B=f(P + E)
Two main effects, independent

More modern: B=f(P x E)
Interaction between Person and Environment
Still “separate” but can influence each other

Reciprocal Dynamism
Person, environment and behavior affect each other

Question 17

Reciprocal Dynamism

Answer 17

The person, the environment and behavior exist in an interlocking relationship characterized by bidirectional causality.

For example the child athlete earlier

Question 18

How do persons influence situations?

(1) Evocation

Answer 18

Physical presence of P in E alters E, independent of their traits and attitudes, even in the absence of behavior.

Physical appearance evokes behavior change which in turn changes the situation for the evoking person

Baby X - boys/girls treated different and then socialized into a role
Their physical characteristics change the environment they are in

Out groups change behavior of in groups

Question 19

How do persons influence situations?

(2) Selection

Answer 19

People make choices to enter one E over another

We chose Es that are congruent with P, which supports and promotes natural tendencies

Eg College major/ Partners are similar usually/ friends

Question 20

How do persons influence situations?

(3) Manipulation

Answer 20

We also change the B we use if we find ourselves in ourselves in Es we cannot change so the B conforms with our goals

eg cooperative actors with competitive partners make fewer cooperative moves

Competitive actors make even fewer cooperative moves when paired with a cooperative actor (they take advantage of the situation)

Self fulfilling prophecies

Think you will get X
Act in ways that make X more likely

Get more X

Question 21

How do persons influence situations?

(4) Transformation

Answer 21

Evocation, Manipulation and Selection all change E through overt behaviour

But people’s subjective representations of their environments can also alter E

This is subjective: E is changed for one person but not for others.

An example is Mischel’s marshmallows. Children told to imagine the marshmallows were cotton wool lasted longer without eating vs the kids who focused on their taste and texture.

Question 22

Upper limits of personality

Answer 22

Predictability ceiling of 0.3 for personality psychology. Is an upper limit, is not always that high. Commonly believed though.

Question 23

Bystander effect

Answer 23

Bystander effect – Darley & Batson (1973)
Religious people on their way to a seminary (about the good Samaritan).
Found a person slumped
If they were in a hurry, 10% helped
If they were not, 63% did.

Question 24

FAE

Answer 24

Fundamental attribution effort – focusing on person and not situation.

Question 25

Weak powers of situation effect examples

Answer 25

Some situations are surprisingly weak
Long term effects of physical and sexual abuse in kids
Long term effects of teenage pregnancy
Long term effects of POW camps
Lottery winners are not happier long term.

Question 26

Cambridge-Sommerville study

Answer 26

Cambridge-Sommerville study – took boys likely to be delinquent (poor) some had loads of expensive interventions, some had none. No effect on likeliness to become delinquent, At 30 year follow up the experimental group did worse. No effect even if you divide the kids into groups based on their home lives, even when some had easy times and other’s had alcoholics and schizophrenics.

Shows that even large single events (positive) do not always have large effects

Question 27

Authoritarian/democratic clubs

Answer 27

Lewin set up recreation clubs. Some were designed to foster democratic and some authoritarian climates. The club members in the authoritarian clubs did scapegoating, submission to authority and hostility (authoritarian personality).

Question 28

3 pillars of social psychology

Answer 28

Situationism – situation has a big effect
Construal – all situations are influenced by the subjective way there are construed.
Tension Systems – Individual psyches and situations are subject to many interacting and oppositional forces

Question 29

Situationism

Vaccine study

Answer 29

Situationism
Channel factors – seemingly minor but actually important factors in a situation. (Lewis)

Experiment: turning personal health intentions into concrete actions
Give info about tetanus and the value of inoculation
Changes belief, does not make them go and get inoculated
When given the info with a map of the campus with the health center circled and encouraged to check their schedules to see when they could go, 3% became 28%
Individual factors are not good at predicting who shows up at clinics, distance of the individual from the facility is a abetter predictor

Question 30

Construal

Schema

3 Errors

Answer 30

Construal
Schema – Piaget
laypeople do not take subjective construal into account. Make 3 errors:
(1) Do not recognize how much one’s own understanding of a stimuli is influenced by construal
(2) Do not appreciate the inherent variability of situational construal - people might bot see things the way you do
(3) Do not recognize the extent to which observed actions are influenced by the situation and not the personality.

Question 31

Tension systems

(3 things)

Example of rate busting in factories vs. cash incentives

Answer 31

Tension systems
1 – An analysis of restraining forces can be as important to anticipating the effects of a new force as the analysis of the force itself.
e.g. a norm in a factory may stop people from working harder if this is considered rate busting, such that a performance based increase in pay wont work to increase productivity. You might find it easier to change the norm against rate-busting than force behavioral change with higher salaries.
2 – Some systems are in a state of precarious balance. It takes relatively little to change them.
3 – The combination of (1) and (2) explains why sometimes huge interventions do nothing but little ones do lots. Big forces might be opposed by even bigger forces that are not obvious at first glance. Small manipulations might take advantage of the precarious balance of a system, or facilitate an important channel factor, moving the system by redirection rather than brute force.

Question 32

Dissonance as an example of a tension system

Answer 32

Dissonance might be an example of this. Festinger said attitudes within one’s head are in a state of tension. Contradictory attitudes exist in a state of tension called “dissonance” which must be resolved.

Example: People paid to write a speech about a political position do not change their opinion of the position. Those not paid, become favourable towards it. Resolves the tension caused by writing a speech you might not agree with and the lack of motivation to do it. You must have agreed with it. Being paid for it explains this away.

Question 33

Why are peopls predictions about behavior often right?

Answer 33

Laypeople predicting can be accurate because they do so with the personality and situations entangled. People will select situations based on personal =factors. Other people will choose situations for people based on their idea of their factors. Social roles can make people feel obliged to act a certain way. Due to this, people can correctly predict a social world, especially one well known to them.
People may also construe things in predictable ways or have certain goals or strategies they regularly use or pursue.
As such, people can often accurately predict the behavior of individuals but mistakenly believe this is die to their personality when it is actually a mix of a person’s traits, goals, strategies and the situational context that they continuously select, are placed in and are influenced by. They were right for the wrong reason.

Question 34

Statistical criteria of size

Answer 34

Statistical criteria of size – And effect can be made statistically significant (unlikely to be due to chance) by collecting a large amount of observations. Thus you may have a significant effect that does not matter as the magnitude of the effect size is extremely small and inconsequential. Cohen’s method of measuring effect sizes is to judge them relative to the variability of the measure in question. So, a difference of two means that corresponds to 25% of an SD would be small but 2 SDs huge.

Question 35

Pragmatic criteria of size

Answer 35

Pragmatic criteria of size- Sometimes we don’t care about the statistical criteria. If something has a huge elongation of life for a disease, say of 25% but that disease is fatal in 4 hours, that amounts to two hours of life extra. If the treatment is expensive, we will never do this. A politician might spend a fortune on an intervention than increased their votes by 2%, if 2% would win an election.
So, effects can be considered big or small based on the obstacles that stand in the way of the effect.

Question 36

Expectation criteria of size

Answer 36

Expectation criteria of size – Effects can be big or small relative to what we expected them to be. Effects are big of they require us to change our previous beliefs. For example, if someone is expected to come fifth in an election but comes second, we say they got a “big” share of the vote even if in absolute terms it is not. Small effects may call a theory into doubt.