Official Psych Essay Plans Flashcards
Outline & Evaluate Milgram’s research into obedience
A01:
- Obedience is a form of social influence whereby a direct order is followed by an individual. Usually the person issuing the order has authority and the power to punish.
- The study: Aim= find out why the German soldiers followed Hitlers orders and killed the Jews. Procedure= Involved 3 people in each trial, learning test was administered by each ppt, when the learner (confederate) made a mistake, the ppt as the teacher had to administer an electric shock.
- Results= 65% continued to 450v.
AO3:
Strength= Psychological harm has less of an effect as PPts were debriefed. In a follow up study, 84% of ppts said they were glad they took part. Suggesting there was no long term harm.
Weaknesses= Lack of ecological validity, tasks are not like real life so methodology lacks mundane realism.
Psychological harm, Ppts were trembling, sweating..
Milgrams 3 factors affecting obedience
Proximity: PPts obeyed more when the experimenter was in the same room. This was reduced to 40% when the experimenter and ppt were in seperate rooms
Location: Ppts obeyed more when the study was conducted at a prestigious university eg Stanford university. Respect and integrity for the location demands obedience
Uniform: Ppts obeyed more when the experimenter wore a lab coat. More likely to obey as higher status and legitimacy.
Discuss Ash’s study
A01:
Procedure: 123 male American undergraduates in groups of 6 with 1 true ppt.
PPts presented with 4 lines, 3 comparison and 1 standard line and asked to state which of the three lines was the same length.
Aim: to investigate conformity (yielding to group pressure)
Findings: 36.8% conformed, 75% at least once.
A03:
Strengths= Lab experiment, extraneous & confounding variables controlled, replication is easy which increases reliability of findings.
Weaknesses= Lacks ecological validity, lab experiment and task used artificial stimuli and task meaning findings can’t be generalised.
Lacks temporal validity, social context of 1950s, period of anti communist period in America so people were scared to disobey or be different, findings cannot be generalised across all time periods.
Asch’s 3 factors affecting levels of conformity
1) Group size
- An individual is more likely to conform when in a larger group.
- Any more than 3 confederates conformity rose by 30%
- decreases confidence in your opinion
2) Unanimity of majority
- More likely to conform when the group gives the same answer
- When another ppt or unaffected confederate gave the correct answer, conformity fell
- provides normative social influence (people conform to be accepted by the group)
3) Task difficulty
- More likely to conform when the task is difficult
- Asch altered the comparison lines making them more similar in length so answer conformity increased.
- informational social influence (we conform to be right and look to others to have the correct answer)
Discuss Zimbardo’s study
A01:
Procedure: 24 American male students, wanted to investigate how readily people would conform to the social roles. They were randomly issued one of 2 roles guard or prisoner.
Findings= identification occurred very fast as both the prisoners and guards adopted their roles. Guards tormented prisoners who became more submissive.
A03:
Weaknesses= Demand charecteristics, Ppts knew they were in a study so might’ve changed their behaviour either to please the experimenter or a response to being observed.
Weaknesses= Lacks population validity, sample only American males, findings cannot be generalised across other genders and cultures. Eg collectivist cultures may be more conformist.
Weaknesses= Psychological harm, Ppts not protected from stress and anxiety. One prisoner has to be released due to uncontrollable screaming and crying
Explain and evaluate obedience: Legitimacy of Authority and the Agentic State
A01:
Agentic state= person believes that someone else will take responsibility for their actions. When a person shifts from an autonomous (responsible for their own actions) state to the Agentic state it is called Agentic shift. Therefore, agency theory is the idea that people are more likely to obey when they’re in the Agentic state & believe they’re only acting on behalf of someone else.
Legitimacy of authority= people are more likely to obey someone if they’re are seen as credible. Students are more likely to listen to teachers etc.
A03:
Both can successfully explain real life obedience towards authority figures. Kilham and Mann investigated the My Lai Massacre where thousands of American soldiers through Vietnam’s villages and murdered civilians under an order from their general.
Discuss the authoritarian personality as a dispositional explanation for obedience
A01:
Proposed by Adorno et al describes a type of personality which is especially susceptible to obeying authority. They believe people should obey and admit to authority figures.
Psychodynamic approach: impacted by childhood, AP grew up with strict, oppressive parents.
Fascism scale measures this, investigated middle class white Americans and they were found to be submissive to superiors and dismissive/prejudiced to inferiors.
A03:
Weakness= methodological issues with f scale, could be biased and respondents may write all the same scale etc
Weakness=
Not a full explanation as doesn’t account for obedient people without authoritarian parents
Discuss resistance to social influence, locus of control and social support
A01:
Locus of control= measurement of an individual’s sense of control over their lives, to what extent they feel their life is in their own hands. External vs Internal
Social support= People may resist pressures to conform or obey if they have support from a dissenter (someone who disagrees with the majority or refuses to obey). This frees the individual from the pressure to conform or obey, allowing them to act independently.
A03:
- Oliner and Oliner interviewed two groups of non Jewish who had lived through the holocaust. People who helped Jewish people were found to be more internal
- Milgram found when there were to other confederates who disobeyed the experimenter, the presence of the other person caused obedience in the PPts to reduce to 10% shows social support can cause rejection to authority.
Discuss Moscovici’s Study into minority influence
A01: Randomly selected Ppts and confederates aimed to observe how minorities can influence a majority. Lab experiment, everyone shown 36 blue slides, asked to say whether the slide was blue or green. Confederates deliberately said green mostly, providing a consistent minority view.
Findings: when the confederates answered inconsistently 1% Ppts said the slides were green. Consistent condition 8% said slides were green.
Conclusion: consistency is crucial to exert maximum influence on a majority.
A03:
Strengths= Real life support eg suffragettes, other groups can use this method.
Weaknesses= reliance of artificial tasks and stimuli, tasks do not reflect scenarios minority groups would act in real life. Findings may therefore lack ecological validity.
Discuss the role of social influence processes in social change
A01:
Social change= a shift in the beliefs or behaviour of an entire population, where the previously widely accepted norm changes to be something new.
Minority influence= minority group manages to persuade the majority to adopt their point of view by being consistent, committed and flexible .importance of consistency, flexibility was found by Nemeth and comm. When the minority behind to b successful in their attempts to influence the majority, this triggers a snowball effect and the opinion eventually becomes the majority held.
Discuss the Multi - Store Model of Memory. Refer to research evidence in your answer.
A01:
- Developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin to explain how memories are stored. Model begins with the sensory register, here sensory stimuli is detected by the sense and held.
- Sensory register has unlimited capacity due to the large amount of info the senses receive on a daily basis, but they have a limited duration.
- Most of this information receives no attention and doesnt enter into the short term memory. The STM has limited capacity (7+-2) and a duration of 18-30seconds, and info will decay from here if it doesnt enter into LTM.
- Maintenance rehearsal involves repeating info that people are trying to remember over and over again, doing this this prevents information from decaying and allows it to enter the LTM.
- The LTM store has both unlimited capacity and duration, info here can be accessed by the STM for use by retrieval.
A03:
- There are different types of LTM, proposed by Tulving: procedural, semantic and episodic. The MSM doesn’t account for this because it sees the LTM as single ad unitary store. Doesn’t outline retrieval through conscious and unconscious, only states a universal process of information being consciously transferred to the STM during retrieveal.
- The STM is not one unitary store, supported by patient KF’s case study which found though he had poor recall for auditory stimuli, he had accurate recall for visual stimuli eg drawing a star. Suggests there are different types of stm.
- Face validity, makes sense as a model for memory
Describe and evaluate types of Long Term Memory
A01:
- It has been found that LTM exists in 2 different forms, procedural memories, which are concerned with knowing how to do things and declarative memories which are concerned with knowing things.
- Declarative memories can be further divided into semantic memories, knowledge of factual information like the capital of France . Episodic memories, knowledge of life events like your 3rd birthday.
- Procedural memories are concerned with knowing how to do things using motor skills, like riding a bike. They become automatic through repetition
A03:
- Brain scans provide evidence for the existence of different types of Long term memories. Tulving et al got their PPts to complete memory tasks whilst under a PET scanner. Showed episodic and semantic memories were both recalled from an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is divided into the left and right hemisphere. Left active during a semantic task, right side active during the episodic task.
- Patient hm, provides evidence for the distinction between procedural and declarative memories. HM was unable to form any new semantic or episodic memories but retained the ability to form any new semantic or episodic memories but retained the ability to form new procedural memories, drawing a star. He was able to draw but couldn’t remember learning to do so.
Discuss the Working Model of Memory
A01
- Baddeley and Hitch developed an alternative to the MSM as due to the dual task effect, they believed the STM was not a unitary store. Dual task effect states simultaneously performing tasks that are similar, performance is impaired but this is not the case when performing tasks that are different.
- Model begins with the central executive which divides attention to asks and controls the slave systems, first is the phonological loop, deals with auditory info and has limited capacity. Further divided into the articulatory process (silently repeats info) and the phonological store which holds info.
- Visio-spatial sketchpad is used to plan spatial tasks, divided into the visual cache which stores info about visual items and the inner scribe which stores the arrangement of objects.
- Baddeley added the episodic buffer as a general store which combines information from other stores and send it to the LTM.
Discuss one explanation for forgetting
A01:
- One explanation for forgetting is interference: two types. Retroactive, when current attempts at learning interfere with the recollection of past learning. Ppts were given a word list and recollection of the word list was impaired if they were asked to describe landscape paintings during retention interval.
- Second type of interference: proactive interference, which refers to when past learning interferes with attempts to learn something new. When ppts learned word lists they had better recollection of words encountered earlier in the list than those encountered later.
A03:
-Support= Baddeley and Hitch, Rugby players were asked to list the teams they’d played against that season. Those who had played in more games were not as able to recall the names as easily, as the greater number of intervening games provided greater interference. As this study involved real life memory situations, it is able to effectively provide support for the role of interference in forgetting.
-Support= Interference has been demonstrated in lab experiments, increasing the validity of the theory, due to the use of highly controlled conditions, standardised instructions alongside the removal of the biasing effects of confounding or extraneous variables.
- Weaknesses= Artificial stimuli used in these tasks, such as learning lists of random words with no personal meaning to the participants, means that the findings of interference studies have low mundane realism. In real life we learn meaningful info, this may affect the extent of forgetting.
Discuss retrieval failure
A01:
- Suggests that forgetting occurs when the cues (trigger of info recollection) present at the time of encoding but not at recall. “Encoding specificity principle”, Tulving
- 2 types of forgetting: context-dependent and state-dependent.
- Context dependent = Godden and Baddeley found deep water divers recall at all the matching conditions was higher than non matching (underwater vs on land)
- State dependent= drunk vs non drunk
A03:
- Weaknesses= Godden and Badeleys study lacks ecological validity, doesnt represent real life
Discuss research into the effect of misleading information on eyewitness testimony
A01:
-Loftus and Palmer conducted research into the effects of misleading information on eyewitness information.
- In Loftus and Palmers study, participants were shown traffic incidents and had to answer questions after viewing them including a critical question: “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other”. The word “hit” was substituted with contacted,collided, bumped, and smashed. Those asked with “hit reported speeds 10 mph slower than those asked with smashed.
- In another study, they were shown a traffic incidents and asked the same questions. Later, they were asked if they saw any broken glass. There wasn’t any, but those asked the speed question with aggressive adjectives were likely to report some.
- This showed how leading questions can potentially alter the memory witnesses have of events.
A03:
- Gabbert found when PPts viewed an incident separately from their partner and were allowed to discuss what they’d seen, 71% of them mistakenly included info from their partner in their testimony. This showed how post event discussion can impact accuracy.
- Larousse found that repeat interviewing especially of children increases the likelihood that they include info given to them by the interviewer.
- Yuille and Cutshall found that the effect of misleading information on EWT is not as major in real life. Witnesses to a bank robbery were able accurately recall the events of the robbery 4 months post incident, despite leading questions.
Discuss research into the effect of anxiety on eyewitness testimony
A01:
- Anxiety has been shown to lower the accuracy of EWT
- With the weapons focus effect (when a weapon draws attention away from the person holding it) being demonstrated in a study by Johnson & Scott
- Parpts heard an argument and then saw a man run past holding a grease covered (low anxiety) or knife covered in blood (high anxiety)
- In the low anxiety situation identification of the man was 49% accurate but only 33% in the high anxiety scenario, showing how the presence of a weapon draws attention away from the person holding it.
- Researchers found it increased anxiety can increase accuracy. High anxiety witnesses to a bank robbery were able to remember the events of the robbery more accurately than low anxiety witnesses.
Yer,es-Dodson effect explains how anxiety affects EWT, too much or too little anxiety reduces the accuracy of EWT.
A03:
Pickle believed the weapon focus effect was due to surprise, not anxiety. PPts were least accurate in identifying a man they saw run into hair salon when was carrying a high suprise object (whole raw chicken) than high threat (handgun)
Discuss the cognitive interview as a means of improving the accuracy of memory
The cognitive interview was developed by Geisel,an to increase the amount of accurate information provided by witnesses. The interview consists of four components:
1) Report everything = may trigger the recall of further memories, allow small pieces of information to be pieced together.
2) Change the perspective= minimised effects of schemas
3) Reinstate context= done to provide context and emotional cues to make memories more accessible 4) Change the order= remove any schemas that may impact
Discuss research into the role of the father
A01:
- Schaffer and Emerson study found 75% of infants formed secondary attachments with their fathers which was evident through seperation anxiety.
Field- filmed 4 month old babies and found that fathers can be primary caregivers and they were seen to adapt behaviours if mothers.
Verrisimo- Found better quality of father toddler relationships the more the child has st pre school.
Grossman- quality of father attachment was less important for teenager attachment type than the quality of the mothers.
A03:
1. Evidence undermines the secondary role of the father. Grossman fathers are important in play and stimulation rather than nurturing. Same sex couples have functional children suggesting the role of the father isn’t significant
