Lecture 2 - Historical Foundations Flashcards
Fill in the blank: In ____, _____ started the first psychology lab at Harvard and was considered the first ____ psychologist. He mainly studied sensation, perception and ____. He also published ______ in 1890.
1875, William James, empirical, emotion, Principles of psychology
Who is being described: In 1945 becomes the Direct of ‘Center for Group Dynamics’ at MIT. He was widely recognized as the first social psychologist to use an experimental approach to study issues related to group dynamics and on the impact of one’s social environment on individual behaviour
Kurt Lewin
Explain scientific racism and give some examples
Definition: using the existing disparities within the culture and working backwards to come up with a scientific reasoning, using the vail of science to explain strict hierarchies in society
Examples: phrenology, McDougall social psychology textbook, Johnson-Reed Act
What is being described: a quota of 165 000 immigrants was imposed for countries outside of the Western Hemisphere, while barring all immigrants from Asia. This disproportionately favoured immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. Justification for the law drew heavily from research on eugenics and other forms of scientific racism.
Johnson-Reed Act
Who created social Darwinism and what is it?
Who created it: Herbert Spencer. What is it: the survival of the fittest, differences/disparities between groups are innate and natural. This is wrong from an evolutionary standpoint and it’s a naturalistic fallacy (whatever IS, is right).
What is an example of social Darwinism
Virginia Sterilization Law of 1924: forcible sterilization to prevent psychological disorders to be passed on to future generations
Who stated to move away from scientific racism and what did he acknowledge by doing so
Floyd Allport; acknowledged that structure is also at play and we need to look beyond psychological factors
Fill in the blanks: Many researchers began to recognize that any supposed _____ differences between groups could not be solely responsible for the intergroup disparities seen across society. ______ forces and ______ must be contributors.
Biological, structural, prejudice
What did William Graham Sumner do?
Published “Folkways”: a sociological study of how moral systems develop across different cultures and influenced the study of intergroup relations by coining the terms “ingroup”, “outgroup” and “ethnocentrism”
What was the influences of “Folkways”
Defining in groups and out groups and instinctual conflict between groups referred to as war and plunder and the fundamental need to be part of a group (having an active social identity)
What is an active social identity
How someone feels about themselves is deeply related to their group identity
What did Walter Lippman do?
He published ‘Public Opinion’ which was a negative assessment of individuals’ ability to act rationally and self-govern. He adapted a term from the printing industry to describe the process through which someone takes impressions towards one group member and applies them to all group members which is a stereotype.
Why do we stereotype?
to prevent cognitive load, we cannot individualize we need to generalize, there is only so much information that we can keep in our mind and if we tax some of the available resources, our reliance on stereotypes goes up.
In public opinion by Lippman, stereotypes arise from the need to abstract, Why?
It’s structure that helps us interact with the world, uncertainty is uncomfortable to us and information given to us by others helps to shape our stereotypes/expectations of others
True or false: stereotypes may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies
True - we are set up to interact with the world in a certain way and we reinforce pre-existing beliefs. We define and then we see
Explain the Princeton Trilogy Studies by Katz and Braly
This was the 1st empirical study on stereotypes. It looked at how much the traits presented agreed with the groups they were ascribed to and vice-versa. More often people are agreeing that the traits/stereotypes coincide with the groups.
True or false and explain why based on the motivated perception of stereotypes: individual experience enters into the students’ judgment to confirm the original stereotype that has been learned.
True - there may be a bias towards remembering what conforms with the stereotype and forget instances that do not
Describe LaPiere’s study on Attitudes vs. Actions
Travelled for 2 years with a Chinese couple to observe if they would be refused service at hotels/restaurants based on their race. In person, they were only refused once but when LaPiere contacted the hotels and restaurants 6 months later, 92% said that they would refuse service. There is a large discrepancy between what people say and what they actually do.
Why might we see discrepancies between attitudes and actions in LaPiere’s study?
Abstract = easier to discriminate, a white man was travelling with a Chinese couple, social pressure to not discriminate and people are running a business and want to make money
What did Gordon Allport do?
He published ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ which was the first psychological analysis of issues related to prejudice and discrimination. The book laid the foundation for many influential research topics in intergroup relations.
Important points of the book:
1) taking a social cognitive perspective of prejudice
2) arguing for the importance of studying intergroup contact
Where would we be most likely to read this excerpt: “two essential ingredients that we have discussed are natural and common capacities of the human mind”
In the Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport
What is being described here: our minds have the same basic tools/capacities that are used for all different types of processes
Social cognition
True or false: The field of intergroup relations is fairly new
True
What was Allport’s hypothesis to reducing intergroup hostility and prejudice and this laid the groundwork for who’s work
The contact hypothesis laid the groundwork for Sherif’s work
