[Lecture Notes] Last Third

Question 1

Brain Size: Proposals About General Intelligence

Answer 1

“more intelligent people have more neurons”

• problem with this is that it’s easily disconfirmed; e.g. whales have bigger brains and a certain species of whale has a better body-to-brain ratio, but they’re still doing whale stuff and we’re doing lots more stuff
• neural pruning during development: number of neurons goes down as intelligence goes up significantly; i.e. inefficient pathways are being lost as we grow
• there are lots of variations in brain size in the human species that doesn’t seem to correlate with how intelligent those people are
• note the role of development and plasticity in intelligence (i.e. neural pruning)
  
  • development is changing how much your brain is capable of knowing, not how much it knows
  • neuroplasticity is how your brain can reshape itself to change the types of things it can know
• in psychology, we’ve moved away from both brain size and speed for the most important factors in intelligence; they’re relevant, but not that relevant

Question 2

Speed: Proposals About General Intelligence

Answer 2

“intelligent people are faster in their processing”

• some evidence to support this as people with higher IQs have faster reaction times
• part of the common sense idea of intelligence being quickness
• Luciano et al. (2005): found there’s no causal link between speed of information processing and intelligence
  
  • why? being fast means you make more mistakes; it means you’re just doing more of something faster, not that you’re doing it better
  • speed is only a quantitative measure but doesn’t pick up on the qualitative measures that would be needed for intelligent processing
  • e.g. increasing computer speed was nowhere near sufficient for producing intelligence
  • i.e. not just the speed of your hardware but how the software uses it
• in psychology, we’ve moved away from both brain size and speed for the most important factors in intelligence; they’re relevant, but not that relevant

Question 3

Intelligence: The Neural Efficiency of Processing

Answer 3

• neural efficiency hypothesis (discussed in the textbook)
• Neubauer et al.: found that people with higher IQs activate less of their cortex
  
  • the idea that we only use 10% of our brain all the time is also ridiculous
  • our brains aren’t motors; an intelligent brain uses less to do more work, not putting in more energy to do the same work
• Friston, Hawkins and others have argued that what intelligent brains are efficient at is at making predictions

but there are still problems with this view:

• how do you make a brain more efficient at prediction?
• what do you predict? do you try to predict everything (like the number of socks in your drawer)?
• what scope of prediction do you use (short term vs. long term efficiency)?
• Garlick (2002): answers the first question; picks up on the connections between intelligence and plasticity that we saw in neural pruning

Question 4

Qualitative Development: Neuroplasticity and Increased Functions

Answer 4

• remember that Perceptrons were neural networks that couldn’t do basic functions like exclusive “or”
• but as you add in neurons between the stimulus and response neurons, and remember that greatest number of neurons your brain has are interneurons, then a network gains the ability to do new things
• adding the interneurons massively increases the functions a neural network can perform
• quantitative development: a measure of how much you know
• qualitative development: a measure of what kinds of things you’re capable of learning
• i.e. compare all the information you could gather with a function vs. how many different functions a machine/system has
• the more functions you have, the more kinds of problems you can solve; plasticity drives qualitative development
• one way of understanding intelligence is if you can solve many kinds of problems in many types of domains; i.e. the more plasticity your brain is capable of/functions you have/qualitatively developed
• adding/subtracting (rf. pruning) interneurons can alter the intelligence (the functions it can perform) of a network
• Garlick (2002) argues that the way you make a network more efficient is by creating the right architecture (structure of interneurons also known as hidden units) of the network
• so what we’re measuring when we measure intelligence is plasticity of a brain; i.e. how well it can redesign its architecture through synaptogenesis and neurogenesis

but there are still problems with this view:

• simple plasticity can’t equal intelligence
• simply adding or subtracting neurons randomly will produce chaotic changes in a brain
• simply adding connections will increase how much the brain can process but not what it’s processing
• intelligence is not just quantitative but also a qualitative improvement (i.e. not just more but better)
• Garlick himself notes we need an account of appropriate plasticity
• so we need an internal standard of goodness of plasticity
• how does the brain know or measure when it’s producing appropriate plasticity?

Question 5

The Generalization-Discrimination Problem: Fault with the Prediction Model

Answer 5

• the generalization-discrimination problem;
• as you make your predictions more generalizable, you make them more efficient in one sense because you can use the same function over and over again
• if I can make predictions about cats rather than this cat Bob, this cat Andrew, this cat Jake, etc., my brain uses less resources to come to the same conclusion
• but what happens if instead of cats, I make it all mammals, or all animals, etc.?
• as I make my predictions more efficient, I lose the ability to discriminate between cases; I lose information about important differences
• the problem in a nutshell: sometimes, the similarities (share properties) are important and sometimes the differences are important
• so just like there are people who argue that intelligence is prediction, some theorists argue that the ability to discriminate differences is the key to intelligence

Question 6

Psychologists Dealing with the Generalization-Discrimination Tradeoff

Answer 6

• Mercado (2008): consider visual acuity;
  
  • acuity is your ability to see things clearly (like wearing glasses)
  • you don’t want confounding and conflation of information that causes confusion in your predictions; if you can’t distinguish between two things, you can’t individually test them
  • sometimes, being able to discriminate the information is more important than trying to integrate it
  • the more representation power or cognitive acuity you have the more intelligent you will be
• this lines up with recent work by Wissner-Gross and Freer in that you can make a system more intelligent if it works to keep more of its options open
• this goes back to the scope of efficiency problem; efficient right now vs. efficient long term
• yet there are too many options, which lead to combinatorial explosion
• a system that can see more options, i.e. discriminate more will be more intelligent, but not too many
• there is a constant trade-off relationship and there’s no final answer
• we have two proposals for intelligence: integration for better generalization in prediction and differentiation for better acuity in prediction and long term keeping of options open
• Vervaeke and Ferraro (2013): argue that brains do both in a dynamical fashion and that is the process of realizing relevance
  
  • see also: Vervaeke, Lillicrap, and Richards (2012)
• relevance realization as opponent processing between efficiency and resiliency (long term differentiated efficiency)
  
  • i.e. your brain needs a lot of redundancy because the future is always changing; the more efficient, the more brittle and rigid and less likely to adapt to change it is
  • your brain is constantly doing opponent processing; constantly (cognitively) evolving its fitness to its environment, i.e. redesigning itself to solve more problems

Question 7

From Relevance Realization to Generalized Intelligence

Answer 7

• general intelligence explains:
  
  • problem formulation
  • similarity judgements
  • “education” of latent information from experience
  • adaption to unpredictable environments
  • solving ill-defined problems
• a system becomes more complex as it simultaneously integrates and differentiates
• complexification gives you qualitative development/emergent function
• if we can see that brains moves between compression and particularization, we can see it doing relevance realization

Question 8

Self-Organizing Criticality (SOC)

Answer 8

• Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfield (1988): sand piles; the sand piles break down as sand gets piled on it, but it builds a stronger base for a bigger pile; c.f. your brain is constantly oscillating between differentiating and integrating
• Stephen, Dixon, and associates (2009): gear diagrams for insight problem solving
• you can measure how flexibly a brain does self-organizing criticality
• Thatcher et al. (2008): phase shift (asynchrony; positively correlated with g), phase lock (synchrony; negatively correlated with g), and phase reset; the more smoothly your brain can go between these two things, the more intelligent you are
• but the plasticity issue has not been fully developed, i.e. what kind of architecture is produced and how does it relate to SOC?
• in order to address that we can turn to network theory (also known as graph theory)

Question 9

Network (or Graph) Theory

Answer 9

• the chaotic/random network, has the least path distance, and is most efficient, but it’s also the most easily damaged
• the small-word network is way more efficient than the ordered network and way more resilient than the random network; but it’s not as efficient as the random network, or as resilient as the random network
• so if the brain is trying to get both, it should probably go for the small-world network
• and this has actually been found; the more the brain wires like a small-world network, the more intelligent they are
• self-organizing criticality (SOC) and the small-world network (SWN) support each other
• as a system fires in a SOC manner, it wires in a SWN manner and vice versa
• i.e. they reinforce each other’s development in a mutually accelerating, mutually bootstrapping fashion

Question 10

Is intelligence a kind of development?

What are the three approaches to studying development?

Answer 10

• what we have seen is that intelligence is probably inherently developmental in nature
• it’s not just that intelligence develops; it is that intelligence is a way the brain develops
• intelligence is a kind of development
• so understanding development is crucial to understanding the nature and function of the mind
• there are three well established approaches to studying development: the Piagetian approach, the socio-cultural approach, and the information processing approach
• there’s also a new approach that we have just seen in our discussion of intelligence, viz. the dynamical systems approach

Question 11

The Piagetian Approach to Development

Answer 11

• prior to Piaget, intelligence testing had been going on for some time but people had only been looking at the correct answers on the tests; they had been ignoring the errors are irrelevant noise
• but Piaget wondered if there were any patterns in the errors; i.e. were they random or systematic?
• most intelligence testing was being done on children for academic reasons
• systematicity and the competence/performance difference; performance is what you’ve done, competence is what you’re capable of doing
• between your competence and performance are processes that implement your competence, e.g. all the processes that you need in order to speak
• performance errors (are random and) do not tell us about constraints on our competence, e.g. you can’t speak properly because you’re drunk or asleep
• systematic errors reflect limitations in your competence, e.g. you can’t speak properly because of brain damage
• performance errors are unsystematic because they’re due to idiosyncratic factors of circumstance in individual lives, e.g. Peter couldn’t sleep last night and is currently napping; this tells us nothing about why Susan currently can’t speak well
• Piaget found systematic errors in children’s performance; systematic errors reflect limitations in competence
  
  • e.g. the egocentricity error, the conservation failure

Question 12

Piaget: Schemas

Answer 12

• Piaget argued that these patterns of error indicated that the child’s thinking was being limited, but also enabled, by certain schemas
• schema: a way of organizing information so that it makes sense and problems can be solved
  
  • c.f. they’re ways of reorganizing problems
  • for example, in failures of conservation, children are using a schema that works according to centration
  • their attention is centered upon one variable (how much space is taken up by the candies) that they find super-salient, and that blocks (rf. learning theory) their relevance realization
• Piaget’s idea was that although these schemas were causing errors, they were actually adaptive and helped the child makes sense of its environment and solve its problems
• given the environment and problems a small child faces, the more space = more stuff heuristic can often make good sense
• what looks like bizarre behaviour to adults is actually intelligent behaviour from the child’s POV; this works both literally and metaphorically, based on how children’s bodies are structured

Question 13

Piaget: Assimilation and Accomodation

Answer 13

• Piaget argued that these schemas were formed by two opponent processes
• assimilation: the brain tries to fit information into its existing schemas
  
  • the schemas have worked and are metabolically expensive to form and maintain; so use them and try to make it work
  • to use language we have already developed: it is efficient to refuse existing schemas by making information fit in them even if it is somewhat distorting of the information
• however, overuse of assimilation leads to too much distortion
  
  • i.e. there’s too much confounding and conflating of variables and confusion, too little cognitive acuity, and so the cognitive system has to differentiate its processing
• for Piaget, accommodation: when the brain has to differentiate its processing and make new schemas
• this is the second of the two main processes that drive the development of schemas
• there is opponent processing between assimilation and accommodation
• there are stable periods in which a balance between assimilation and accommodation have occurred and this system is well adapted to its environment (the system is behaving intelligently)
• the development of cognition will show a step wise function, also known as a punctuated equilibrium
• for Piaget development builds up from sensory-motor interaction into symbolic representational thought that then develops into more logical thought, that then develops into abstract logical thought

Question 14

Piaget: The Four Stages of Development

Answer 14

• (Chapter 10.2) he thought that there were four basic stages of development:
  
  • sensory motor stage; 0-2 years, main accomplishment is object permanence
  • pre-operational stage; 2-6 years, main accomplishment is symbolic thought
  • concrete operational stage; 6-11 years, main accomplishment is logical thought
  • formal operational stage; 12 years and on, main accomplishment is abstract, hypothetical, logical thought that is used in science
• there are some major assumptions in Piaget’s theory that have been challenged:
  
  • the whole of the mind moves from one stage to the next
  • the timing of stages is invariant
  • the direction of development is one way, i.e. from sensory motor to pre-operational
• there are reasons for doubting all of these assumptions

Question 15

Baillargeon (1987): Object Permanence

Answer 15

• did a series of famous experiments with 4.5 month-olds testing for object permanence, which for Piaget is not in place until around 2 years of age
• how do you test the cognition of such young children? answer: habituation
• if you have object permanence, you expect the object to stop; if it goes over it, you would be shocked
• if babies have object permanence, they won’t show any interest if the plank stops, but they will if it goes all the way down
• this is exactly what Baillargeon found; at 4.5 months, babies are startled when the planks go down
• however, this is not full object permanence; it’s not very accurate
• but it does show some kind of object permanence and that it’s achieved way more sensory-motor competence has been completely
• and just because there is object permanence in this sense, it doesn’t mean that all the other abilities Piaget associated with it have been achieved

Question 16

Kolberg (1958): Moral Development Theory

Answer 16

• took Piaget’s theory and applied it to moral development
• there are serious problems with this model
• there’s a difference between moral reasoning and behaviour; just because someone can reason in a particular way doesn’t mean they’ll act that way
• again, there’s the assumption of a unified mind moving between the stages
• it emphasizes rules, abstract symbols as the goal of morality, and neglects that morality may be more about skills and ways of paying attention to other people; it emphasizes a very simple one directional line of development
• i.e. you may know that you should treat people kindly, but how do you do it? and how do you balance kindness with something like honesty?
• the theory emphasizes abstract principles of morality, but many have argued that it’s a very manly and dominating view

Question 17

Vygotsky: Internalization and Transcendence

Answer 17

• Piaget’s theory is problematic in that it’s overly individualistic, i.e. it emphasizes that development is just what is happening within one individual
• the socio-cultural approach rejects this assumption and argues that development is largely about internalizing values and skills from one’s culture
• Vygotsky: proposed that the mind develops largely through a process of internalization
  
  • c.f. imitation and social learning, and how human beings are the best imitators and children will imitate adults even when it’s not directly to their advantage
• imitation of a higher perspective on one’s perspective, overcoming bias, and acquiring interests affords self-transcendence
• that imitation is practiced until it no longer needs the adult, i.e. it becomes internalized as meta-cognition
• we become meta-cognitive through other people
• (Chapter 10.2) the best learning takes place in the zone of proximal development
  
  • what the adult knows and the child cannot learn even with the adult’s help / zone of proximal development: what the child can learn only with the adult’s help / what the child can learn on its own
• Vygotsky’s theory is very powerful and has some empirical evidence backing it
• however, it doesn’t present as unified an account of development as Piaget’s

Question 18

The Information Processing Approach to Development

Answer 18

• the information processing approach is more individualistic like the Piagetian approach, but it rejects the ideas of monolithic stage-like development
• instead, it argues for different functions developing at different times and to differing degrees
  
  • so reading may develop to an adult level way before moral reasoning does, etc.
• the information processing approach sees development as the on-going response to problems of information processing that human beings face
  
  • e.g. such an important problem is the working memory bottleneck
  • rf. what we learned about working memory
• the information processing approach talks about three processes that develop and that interact in development:
  
  • mnemonic strategies: improved chunking/relevance realization
  • meta-memory: improved knowledge about and awareness of memory processes
  • increasing proceduralization and automatization to liberate working memory
• all three interact; better meta-memory helps select an appropriate mnemonic strategy, and that choice is effected by how automatic it has become
• the main problems facing the information processing approach are those it inherits from the framework to which it belongs, viz. the information processing/computational framework
  
  • rf. Lecture 2
• but it does suffer from being too individualistic
• while Piaget’s approach sees the forest but not the trees, the information processing approach sees the trees but not the forest, i.e. it does not have a unifying theory of approach

Question 19

The Dynamical Systems Approach to Development

Answer 19

• emphasizes genetic-environment interaction
• within each person’s lifetime, your genes aren’t being altered by the environment
• there can’t be Lamarckian evolution (e.g. a giraffe got its long neck because it kept stretching to reach the leaves, was successful, passed it onto its offspring, and its offspring did that too, until we got a giraffe); we agree that Darwinian evolution is what happens
• your activity can’t change your genes
• for a long time, people thought that genes determined your behaviour; i.e. genetic determinism
• what we’re talking about is gene activity, not genes; i.e. structural genes and regulatory genes
• structural genes: the code in your DNA; they code for how your cells make enzymes (proteins)
• regulatory genes: turn on and off the structural genes, i.e. regulate gene activity
  
  • e.g. you may have five genes for something, and the regulatory genes turn on and off combinations for that
• most traits are polygenetic in nature, i.e. many are operating; the genes are often changing in which one is active
• behaviour within your environment can alter which sets of genes are being turned on and off
  
  • e.g. you start doing a lot of long-distance running; your body goes into a starvation mode, and some of your metabolic genes will turn on and off to change how you metabolize things
• having polygenetics and being able to turn genes on and off allows us to be very resilient and adaptable to our environment
• it’s a dynamic interaction between biology and environmentally embedded behaviour; there are three models of the dynamic approach: range model, the niche picking model, and the biopsychosocial framework of layered and interacting environments

Question 20

The Dynamical Systems Approach: The Range Model

Answer 20

• argues that biology determines the range of a specific trait
• and the environment picks the specific value
• e.g. height; you will grow to a genetically predisposed height, but all your genes do is determine a range that you’ll grow to in order to be healthy; how tall you actually grow is determined by how well you can get nutrition in your environment
  
  • if you have low nutrition, you go to the lower end of the range; better nutrition, higher range; average nutrition, average range
• it’s not good for many of your traits, but gives the organism too passive a role in its own development

Question 21

The Dynamical Systems Approach: The Niche Picking Model

Answer 21

• the organism’s behaviour at first evokes responses from the environment, and then increasingly shapes the environment to suit the development of its traits, i.e. an environmental niche is formed
• niche: a set of environmental conditions that optimally affords an organisms life, and towards which its biology is specifically adapted
• but interestingly, humans moved out of their niche; they originally evolved to live on the African savannah, but there’s pretty obvious evidence that we don’t anymore
• the niche picking for humans is different; we’re socio-cultural beings
• we use society to run culture, which is a process by which people are shaped to fit the environment (e.g. wearing clothes) and the environment is shaped to fit people (e.g. a building)
• we’re unlike other organisms because we do this to such a significant degree; we make our own niches, our evolutionary strategy wasn’t to adapt, but to make niches wherever we go
• e.g. the colicky baby; it will evoke certain patterns of behaviour from its pattern
  
  • those patterns of behaviour will lead to the parents being a little less affectionate and more fatigued and angry at the baby
  • the baby’s behaviour will actually evoke from its parents certain behaviour; the behaviour of the parents will influence the baby, and reinforce it to be more colicky, and limit other traits from developing
• as certain traits solidify and others to disappear, the child will select certain traits for its behaviour (e.g. its friends and how it decorates its room)
• this then influences your gene development, and so on
• this creates a self-reinforcing cycle; it’s a dynamic system between the biology of the individual (gene activity), behaviour, and the environment
• however, the niche picking model is still too simplistic in nature
  
  • it fails to recognize how developmentally dynamic a machine the brain is
  • and layered and dynamic the environment is
  • we talk about the environment as if it was a “thing” but there are lots of different processes, layers, and things in the environment
• the SOC and SWN nature of the brain is scaled and variant, i.e. found at many different layers and levels of the brain
• that is the case throughout our biology and beyond our biology into our culture
• one problem; the chemical environment constraints the gene activity, the cell environment constrains the chemical interactions, the tissue environment constrains the cell behaviour, the organ environment constraints the tissue behaviour, the system environment constraints the organ behavior, the overall organism morphology constraints the systems the immediate family environment constraints the behaviour of the organism, the extended family and peer groups constraint the family behaviour, the community constraints the extended family and peer groups, the communities are constrained by the socio-economic political systems, etc.
• where in all of this is the “environment”?

Question 22

The Dynamical Systems Approach: The Biopsychosocial Model

Answer 22

• development is a massively recursive biopsychosocial dynamic process
• the embodied brain is the type of machine suited for such a developmental process
• the main problems with this framework are its infancy and the complexity of the modelling it requires
• this makes it difficult to know how to specifically test it and establish specific claims within it as true
• but this is still the best dynamical model

Question 23

Five Main Frameworks of Personality

Answer 23

• there are complex interactions between biology and the socio-cultural-ecological environment
• this can be clearly seen both in the psychology of personality and social psychology
• there are five main frameworks for studying personality: the trait framework, the cultural framework, the biological framework, the psychodynamic framework, and the humanist/existential framework
• many of these are just specific versions of the overarching frameworks discussed in Lecture 2
• there isn’t good psychological research to reinforce all of these, though

Question 24

Personality: The Trait Framework (Big Five)

Answer 24

• this is the most dominant framework right now
• a personality trait is a person’s habitual pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving
• there are five big factors, which can be summed up with OCEAN
• Openness; high: creative, curious, artistic, and imaginative; they tend to be willing to explore new experiences and ideas, are non-confirming, abstract in their thinking, and tend to be more open in their emotions; low: status quo, tangible, practical, straightforward, simple, learn things that confirm their beliefs
• Conscientiousness; high: organize, efficient, self-disciplined, and dependable, great with schedules and lists and meeting deadlines and goals; low: easy-going, fun to hang out with, disorganized, careless, difficulties meeting deadlines and getting things done, plans, lists, and schedules
• Extraversion; high: social, sensation-seekers, stimulating environments, love company, assertive, talkative, enthusiastic; low: (introverts), quiet, overwhelmed by social interaction and stimulation
• Agreeableness; high: kind, compassionate, empathetic, altruistic, not great at leadership because they’re always deferring to the interests of others; low: self-assertive, authenticity, engage in conflict to defend their beliefs and interests, less trusting and more skeptical, and are perceived as cold and uncooperative
• Neuroticism; high: negative affect, emotionally volatile, sensitive and strong emotions towards stressful situations, interpret situations as overly threatening and magnify small problems into major ones, difficulty letting go negative feelings, and make them persist, prone to anxiety and depressive disorders as a result; low: secure and confident, let go of negativity easily, resilient to stress take problems as they come, perceived as stable
• the big five form a very powerful explanatory framework for a lot of behaviour; there have been proposals for adding to the big five framework

Question 25

Michael Ashton: The Honesty-Humility Factor

Answer 25

• Michael Ashton has proposed adding to the Big Five an additional factor, honesty-humility;
• high: sincere, honest, faithful, and modest, altruistic, and pro-social; low: deceitful, greedy, and pompous, materialistic, use people as means, and feelings of self-importance with an attitude of entitlement
• but again, culture and education can deeply influence you

Question 26

The Dark Triad

Answer 26

• you have to be cautious; you can’t simply observe people’s behaviour and assert a personality trait
• one set of traits seems to be particularly lacking in honesty-humility, is what’s known as the Dark Triad, which seems to be a personality trait configuration associated with individuals that we find to be evil
• it’s made up of: Machiavellianism, psychopathology, and narcissism
• Machiavellianism: the tendency to use people and to be manipulative and deceitful
• psychopathology: a general tendency to have shallow emotional responses and in particular a lack of empathy (or they can just turn it off or ignore it); tend to lack a moral code, i.e. they can’t see how humans are fundamentally valuable
• (in contrast, a sociopath has an alternative and usually immoral—by our standards—moral code; one individual can be both, e.g. Hitler was probably a psychopath and sociopath)
• narcissism: the tendency to be preoccupied with one’s own ego and egocentric perspective; the narcissist is very concerned with their self-image and has a tremendous sense of self-importance; often structures interactions so that they’re the center of attention
• the three traits of the Dark Triad can occur together and reinforce each other; e.g. the psychopath’s lack of empathy can make them Machiavellian, and reinforce a narcissistic attitude

Question 27

Atlemeyer: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)

Answer 27

• Atlemeyer has proposed another set of personality traits that should be studied, the set of traits that make up Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)
• RAW is made up of: the tendency to obey orders and defer to established authority, support for aggression against those who dissent or differ from the established order, and want to uphold the current established order
• tend to be very dogmatic
• more likely to be prejudiced, positive attitudes towards corrupt governments and disruption of civil liberties, and can be instrumental in the rise and maintenance of dictatorships

Question 28

The Cultural Approach to Personality: WEIRD People

Answer 28

• the trait approach tends to be highly individualistic in its understanding of personality
• the cultural approach emphasizes the role of culture in shaping personality
• the cultural framework to personality is very influenced by the socio-cultural approach to development
• most studies are done on WEIRD people, but these people only make up 12% of the world’s population
• is that really a good sample size?
• we should be more cautious about generalizing our conclusions
• we need to pay more attention to cultural variation, especially regarding personality
• 127 authors tested 17,000 people speaking 28 different languages and inhabiting 56 countries on six continents for the Big Five factors of personality
• despite the many differences the researchers reliably found the Big Five factors
• people across cultures share the same personality structures
• this is a very impressive result indicating that the basic machinery of personality is deeper than culture and the human personality system is largely universal
• does that mean culture plays no role at all?
• no, when the personality tests use personality descriptors found in other languages culturally unique personality traits emerge
• e.g. Cheung et al. did this and in addition to personality factors that line up with four of the Big Five, they found one that didn’t align with any, interpersonal relatedness, which emphasizes relations between people and society, which seems to be unique to Chinese culture
• in connection with the previous point cross cultural studies of personality have revealed important methodological concerns
• on average, the Japanese score lowest for openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; are the Japanese really that bad?
• what we may be seeing is response styles that may effect how individuals answer the questions on personality tests; Japanese culture discourages people from emphasizing their strengths and successes, and instead encourages them to be modest and self-critical
• so we should be careful about concluding from average difference in trait ratings, that there is anything like a national character
• in fact, the authors of the 17,000-person study stated that: “No convincing evidence has demonstrated the beliefs about national character” have any basis in fact “despite their wide adoption and resistance to change”

Question 29

Social Psychology

Answer 29

• one of the most important things social psychology studies is the social influence on behaviour
• the various domains of psychology are almost always interacting with each other in a complex and dynamical manner
• we’ve returned to where we’ve started: studying psychology is hard
• but it’s also a process of self-liberation through the acquisition of knowledge

Question 30

Asch: Conformity

Answer 30

• experiments where participants and confederates were asked to answer something that’s very obvious
• 75% of people gave the wrong answer on at least one of the 12 trials, and on each trial where the confederates gave the wrong answer, 1/3 of the participants conformed
• normative influence: a social pressure to adopt a group’s perspective in order to be accepted rather than rejected by the group; this leads to public but not necessarily private acceptance
• informational influence: internalizing the values and beliefs of the group, coming to believe the same things and feel the same ways oneself; this leads to both private and public acceptance
• follow-up experiments by Asch showed that the size of the group has an effect; there’s a low conformity if there’s only one or two people giving the wrong answer
• once there are 3 or more the conformity rates jump to their maximum
• perhaps an inter-subjective test for realness heuristic is being used; it may be a heuristic designed to overcome individual bias and increase the plausibility of a belief
• follow-up experiments are in line with this and how the power of an individual; if just one confederate gives the right answer then the conformity rate would drop to ¼ of its original level

Question 31

Zimbardo: Stanford Prison Study

Answer 31

• Zimbardo (1971): a group of student participants randomly assigned to roles of either prisoners or guards
• both groups quickly fell quite deeply into their roles as did Zimbardo as prison superintendent, until a graduate student pointed out to him the unethical behaviour that was occurring only 6 days into a planned two-week simulation
• there was variation among both groups but all, including Zimbardo, were effected by their role
• it provides some evidence for the important role that social roles have on human behaviour

Question 32

Milgram: Studies of Obedience

Answer 32

• the power of roles and social situation was demonstrated in a classic experiment by Milgram on obedience to authority
• participants told the study was bout the effects of punishment on learning, but the learner is actually a confederate
• increasing shock for wrong answers going from 15 volts to 450 volts (which was labeled with a “xxx”)
• sounds of displeasure from confederate, by 150 volts protesting loudly, pleading, mentioning heart difficulties, at 330 volts the learner falls silent, and the teacher is informed to treat silence as a wrong answer
• if the teacher tries to stop the experimenter in the lab coat simply says “please continue” or “experiment requires that you continue”
• 65% of participants go to the maximum voltage, 92.5% if the participants only read the word pairs and someone else administered the shock

Question 33

Latane and Darley: The Bystander Effect

Answer 33

• the presence of other people actually reduces the likelihood of helping behaviour
• one explanation of the effect is what Latane and Darley called diffusion of responsibility: occurs when the responsibility for taking action is spread across more than one person, thus making no single individual feel personally responsible
• pluralistic ignorance: this occurs when there’s a disjunction between the private beliefs of individuals and the public behaviour they display to others
• Latane and Darley (1968): smoke filled a room; when there’s one person, 75% of subjects get up within 6 minutes to investigate; but then there were two other people in the room who did nothing, then only 10% of people took action
• again, people are using others to determine the “realness’ of an event, people look for informational influence, and this makes them act as if they’re ignorant of the situation
• here we see some of the factors Asch studied possibly influencing the bystander effect
• when in an emergency situation, make specific requests of specific people or when observing clearly ask if anyone has done anything

Question 34

Social Psychology: How Individuals Relate to the World

Answer 34

• so we’ve seen the society to individual connection, but social psychology also studies the other direction, i.e. how individuals relate to the social world
• two important effects along this direction are:
• false consensus effect: the tendency to project the self-concept onto the social world; one tends to over-generalize from one’s own case into society
  
  • it’s not clear what drives this; perhaps it’s about realness—you want other people to believe your beliefs to confirm that your beliefs are real/true
• fundamental attribution error: the tendency to over-emphasize internal (dispositional) attributes and under-emphasize external (situational) factors
  
  • internal attribute: some inner quality of a person that explains their behaviour
  • external attribute: some situational quality of a person that explains their behaviour
  • however, you have to adjust the application to the definition according to the type of evaluation
  • when it’s negative, it’s usually due to their internal factors, and positive it’s due to external factors
  • but when you think about yourself, it’s usually the opposite
  • there’s a possible variation on this; depressed people might reverse the fundamental attribution error to their detriment
• psychological factors might be interacting with personality factors, such as neuroticism, and reasoning factors, such as the confirmation fallacy, and memory factors such as encoding specificity
• all of these probably interact with developmental factors that we saw in the biopsychosocial framework of development