Marc's Lectures Flashcards
Two famous studies which show how psychology has tired to explain discrimination through ___.
Disrriminatinatory behaviour is the function of the situation.
(A) Milgram’s obedience study
(B) Asch’s social conformity
study.
The (4) usual suspects in psychology to explain negative interpersonal behaviour:
(A) The Authoritarian
Personality
(B) The Machiavellian
Personality
(C) The Social Dominant
(D) The PsychopathWhat is the Authoritarian Personality?
Facism scale-
Given the atrocities committed against Jewish, and other, groups the perpetrators must be dysfunctional in some way.
That perpetrators had a dysfunctional pathological personality which can be characterized into 9 traits:
(A) Conventionalism (child
should be seen and heard,
a woman belongs in the
kitchen I.e. strong
adherence to tradition and
resistance to change)
(B) Authoritarian Submission
(people should do as their
told by authority figures)
(C) Authoritarian aggression
(endorsement of people
who do not obey authority
figures deserve to be
punished).
(D) Anti-intraception
(disagreement with
interracial, cultural or
religious relationships or
marriage)
(E) Superstition and stereotypy
(excessive stereotyping,
and highly superstitious I.e.
Hitler had a wing of psychic
soldiers who were tasked to
find the spear that held
Jesus to the cross because
they believed if they could
harness its power, they
would be unstoppable).
(F) Endorsement of being
powerful and tough
(G) Being destructive and
cynical about the world
(H) Projecting your
weaknesses onto others
(I) A preoccupation of sex
How does someone develop an Authoritarian Personality:
Theorised that this dysfunctional personality pathology originates in childhood in response to excessively harsh and disciplinarian parenting intended to produce emotional dependence and obedience in the child.
Rooted in Freudian Psychoanalysis that it stems from a child’s childhoods experiences that leads to a ridged, rule bound submission towards authority.
(A) The child develops ambiguity (love hate) towards parents due to highly punitive parents who show little affection.
(B) Fear and guilt mean the child cannot act on this anger towards their parents
(C) Anger is displaced onto weaker others, while parents and power they represent are idealized (e.g. Germans directed their hate towards Jewish because Hilter sanctioned them).
*the broader context aspects are also important I.e. the fact that they were in the great economic recession
The Fascism-Scale: the original authoritarianism scale
This scale was used a lot for 20 years before we identified a fundamental flaw.
Higher scores on the F-scale did mean your behavior could be predicted to be significantly more likely to favor the ingroup and act prejudice towards the outgroup.
Flaws:
Poorly designed scale
Subject to acquiescence bias- the tendency to agree with items on the scale and this scale has items all worded in such a way that agreement correlates with higher authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is characterised by conforming to authority to this scale conflates the construct with the way it is assessed.
Fix this with reverse coded items (+ and -)
The (new) Authoritarian refers to…
RWA
The Authoritarian scale was revived by Altemeyer (1981)
He reduced the 9 characteristics of authoritarianism from the original scale down to three:
(A) Authoritarian submission
(submitting to authority)
(B) Authoritarianism aggression
(directing aggression to
sanctioned members of
society)
(C) Conventionalism
(adherence and
endorsement of tradition)
He has ten publications on this.
These (3) characteristics are measured using 36 items (I.e. it is vital that we have a strong leader who will crush evil and take us back to the path of righteousness- this is a poor item because it is double barrelled question).
Results on Fascism Scale and subsequent RWA-scores against American State Legislators (I.e. politicians)
(A) Republicans tended to
have higher RWA scores
than democrats
(B) Democrats have the lowest
RWA scores in Wisconsin
but also the highest RWA
score in Mississippi
(C) There is variation in scores
by party across states in
USA
*In NZ we would expect to see rural area’s more conservative (National) and Labor does well in urban areas (Liberal).
The Machiavellian Personality Scale (Christie & Gies, 1970)
Notoriously unsuccessful political personality scale I.e. lying is fine if you get your way the people who scored higher on this scale broke into his office to steal the answers for the upcoming test in his study.
The Social Dominant (Pratto, Sidanuis et al., 1994)
*people who score high on SDO see the world as a competitive jungle in which it is a dog eats dog world and they need to dominate the weak in order to stay powerful.
Author of the scale was African American.
He grew up in Chicago and new by age 10 that African Americans experienced differential treatment and overt prejudice behaviours. He was walking home with his white Jewish girlfriend when police spot him and tail him and ask him what he was doing, he was beaten and arrested the only reason he got let off was because there were witnesses and his girlfriend testified. The judge told him he would let him go this once and that he expected him to respect the law more.
This caused him to turn his back on America and traveled the world and finds himself in Sweden where there are not many African Americans. He found that there he was not discriminated against, but gypsy was discriminated against.
No matter where he went there was always a dominant and submissive group.
Conducted a study to see if higher SDO scores would predict participants responses to the Rodney King beating and Gulf War.
The SDO argues (4):
(A) The world is stratified into
groups based on fixed set
memberships
- Age
- Gender (the invariance
hypothesis- you will always
find that men endorse
hierarchy more than women,
no matter where you go)
- Arbitrary (other factors that
people are grouped by their
arbitrary set I.e. race
because it varies across
cultures on their hierarchy)
*things that you can look at an individual and tell if they fit into the binary group memberships dictated by societal norms.
(B) Hierarchy Enhancing
(endorse societal inequality
I.e. police, tax accountants,
commerce student,
prosecutor lawyers, and
military) vs. Hierarchy
Attenuating (job which serve
to reduce discrepancies
within society I.e. social
workers, teachers, public
defender lawyers, art
students).
(C) Legitimising Myths:
- Paternalistic: that the weak
are guided by the stronger
groups e.g. it’s a great idea
that women aspire to go to
university but is it really in
their best interest they're
such delicate and fragile
beings.
- Reciprocal: that there is a
reciprocal relationship where
the weak and the dominant
rely on this relationship e.g.
racism no longer exists, we
had a black president- that
stratification no longer exists.
- Sacred myths: the belief that
a higher being or deity
decides which group is on
top and who is on the bottom
of the social hierarchy e.g.
the belief that gaps in pay
are due to people being
rewarded for working harder
then other people.
(D) Behavioural Asymmetry:
- Out-group
Favouritism/deference e.g.
when given the option white
children prefer the white
barbie doll then the black and
with African American
children, they also favoured
the white doll due to
legitimising myths telling
children being white is
something to aspire to.
- Asymmetric in-group bias e.g.
the further up the pile you are
the more biased you are
towards the in-group.
- Self-Handicapping e.g. people
in the weaker group tend to
act in ways that keep them
subordinate to the dominant
group. Reflecting the
internalisation of the social
order.
- Ideological Asymmetry e.g. the
further up the pile you are the
more you legitimise these
myths.
Higher SDO scores are correlated with….
Higher SDO score is predicted by male (gender) and higher socio-economic status (rich) I.e. the invariance hypothesis.
Which directly predicted their attitudes towards the gulf war and Rodeny King video I.e. endorsed gulf war and accepted the Rodney King beating.
High SDO correlated with higher awareness of your racial superiority and endorse cast maintenance (people staying in their place within society).
Higher SDO predicts higher political conservatism which in turn predicted attitudes towards gulf war and King beating.
*Social dominance had a direct and indirect effect on political conservatism and the gulf war or king
Beating.
The Psychopath (Kraeplin, 1904)
Superficially charming, unemotional, not remorseful and unemphatic individuals.
Moral insanity, only insane in terms of an impairment to their moral capacity to determine right from wrong.
Clercky (1941) identified a primary (personality) and secondary (lifestyle) psychopath.
Levinson et al. 1995 introduced a psychopathy scale. It is highly correlated with Machiavellian and SDO scales.
Interpersonal psychopath: individual wants to dominate other individuals (Machiavellian).
SDO: psychopath wants group-based dominance.
RWA, SDO and Meat:
Higher scores in RWA and SDO is correlated with eating more meat. Hierarchies nature and animals are placed subservient to humans, thus high scores eat more meat.
RWA, SDO and Donald Trump:
How may we characterise Donald Trump?
In a study participant were asked to imagine you were Donald trump, Barack Obama or Adolf Hilter, John Key, John Campbell or Vladimir Puttin and then fill in the RWA scale and SDO scale.
People though Hitler scored higher on SDO and RWA
Trump was close second to Hitler on both RWA and SDO
Puttin was slightly more RWA than SDO
John key was equal on RWA and SDO
Obama was more RWA than SDO
Is scoring high on SDO common?
• Less than 5% of NZ’s will score over the theoretical midpoint score of 4 (i.e. NZ is low on SDO) • Few nations in the world would have 10-15% of the population will score high in SDO
*Therefore, when papers argue that people who score higher in SDO do this, it’s lying because high scores in SDO are not common.
Is the SDO scale unidimensional?
Is the SDO a unidimensional scale?
Method Factor Analysis:
Items are reverse coded: items 9-16 are reverse coded. A factor analysis suggests that the SDO scale has a two-factor structure (1-8, 9-6). Thus, SDO is a unidimensional construct which factors into two factors- pro-trait (worded in the direction of the construct) and con-trait items (worded in the reverse direction of the construct).
- In essence, these two factors represent method factors: something about the way items are
coded.
Content Factor Analysis:
The first, 8 items are about group-based dominance (the opposite of dominance is not necessarily equality) and the second set are about egalitarianism which has been reverse coded into anti-egalitarianism.
• They further argue that due to methodological flaw in the scale even
with factor analysis we are unable to disentangle the methodological factor (8 pro-trait and 8 con-trait items) from the content (group-based dominance vs. Anti-egalitarianism).
Thus, they argue that original SDO scale is actually a group-based dominance scale and anti-egalitarianism scale.
