Psychology Sociocultural

Question 1

Social Identity Theory (SIT)

Answer 1

-argues that a person has not just one “personal selfs” but rather several social selfs, that correspon to group memebership
Social categorization: The process by which people categorize themselves and others into groups. This simplifies and helps us make sense of our social world.

Social identification: The process of conforming to the behaviors and values of your in-group. In this process, your self-esteem is linked to your in-group.

Social comparison: If our self-esteem is to be maintained our group needs to compare favorably with other groups. We look to other groups to justify our membership in our own group.

In-group bias: the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others who belong to the same group that they do. This can happen even when people are randomly assigned to groups.

Out-group homogeneity bias: The tendency to assume that the members of other groups are very similar to each other, particularly in contrast to the assumed diversity of the membership of one’s own group.

Salience: This is when we are very much aware of one of our social identities. It is argued that we make a social identity salient, it will play a key role in behaviour.

Question 2

Tajfel (SIT)

Answer 2

aim: to demonstrate minimal paradigm creating in-group bias, in-group membership
method:
- school boys from bristol were randomly allocated into groups (told it was based off of a preference of artwork for Kadinsky or Klee)
- told they were participating in a decision making experiment
- they individually assigned points based off of a matric to thier group or the other group
- allowed no face to face contact or communiciations

results:
- boys favored ingroup members over outgroup members
- boys maximised differences between group, even if it was potentially disadvantageous to their own group

conclusion:
- the idea of being in a group is enough to indice own group bias

Question 3

Tajfel Evaluation

Answer 3

• high level of control
• confoundign variables were limited
• task was highly artificial, lacks ecological validity and may not reflect actual behavior, in naturalistic setting
• boys may have shown demand characteristics to please researcher, boys may have interperated the task as competitive and try to win
• procedure can be replicated to establish reliability
• sample: all boys, british, hard to generalize results onto other genders or cultures
• Ethics: deception - participants didn’t know it was. a study on group bias, consent: therefor, couldn’t give informed consent

Question 4

Levine (SIT)

Answer 4

aim: to see the effect of in-group bias on helping.
Method:
- The sample was a group of 45 male students who were self-identified Manchester United fans.
- When arriving for the experiment, they were told that the experiment had to be moved to a larger room across campus.
- As they walked to the other room, a confederate fell, holding onto his ankle and shouting out in pain.
- The confederate was either wearing a Manchester United team shirt, a Liverpool FC team shirt, or plain t-shirt.

Results:
- The students were most likely to help the confederate if he was wearing a Manchester United shirt and less likely to help a plain-shirt or Liverpool shirt.
- The difference between the other two conditions was not significant.

Conclusion:
- in-group memebership and favorism
- more likely to help an group memeber

Question 5

Levine Evaluation

Answer 5

• only males participated in the study, the results are not generalizable to how females would behave in similar situations
• • Behavior in a field experiment is more likely to reflect real life because of its natural setting, i.e. higher ecological validity than a lab experiment
• There is less likelihood of demand characteristics affecting the results, as participants may not know they are being studied. This occurs when the study is covert.
• There is less control over extraneous variables that might bias the results. This makes it difficult for another researcher to replicate the study in exactly the same way.
• ethics: participants were deceived about the true aim of the experiment, it can also be assumed that there was not informed consent. the identities of the participants remained confidential, they could presumably withdraw their data from the experiment, they were debriefed, and they were protected from harm.