Quiz 2 Flashcards
How does our unconscious transform from the physical to the psychological
Relate the exaptation (re-use) of pre-existing innate concepts and structures from early learning concerning the physical world from evolved motives like survival and reproduction to metaphorically related physical concepts which activate the psychological concepts.
Bargh & Morsella 2008: did conscious replace unconscious
Conscious capacities did not replace unconscious mechanisms
Analogy- nuclear power plants still use transistors and cathode ray tube displays because they can’t be taken off-line to replace old technology
Daniel Dennett 1991: our use of analogies
We often use analogies for behaviour, for example: warmth searching = security seeking
Rozin 1976; Reber 1991: conscious depends on unconscious
Unconscious mechanisms furnish inputs into conscious choice and decision processes — the later evolving conscious circuits start with, and depend on, the unconscious mechanisms, so the later are ‘locked in’ the mind forever.
Gollwitzer et al. 2020: broken patterns
Dislike of broken patterns (non-social deviancy) predicts greater moral condemnation and punishment of harm and purity violations.
Gollwitzer 2017: Why do we dislike deviance? And how it’s related to prejudice
Children and adults dislike of broken patterns is correlated with measures of racism and prejudice. “Types” of people and types of behaviour that ‘break the pattern’ are different from what most people are like or do, can be disliked merely because they are different.
Hills, Gladstone et al: Forging through the mind
Participants that played a game where they searched for treasure, food, gold, etc were faster and more productive in searching their memories for examples of types of events or remembering various features of their past. Searching one’s mind for memories is akin to foraging for food, it’s that physical physiological relationship.
McDonald, Webster, Stillman, Tice and Baumeister: Does Tylenol cure breakups
Tylenol reduced the amount of physical pain but also the amount of emotional pain that the individual was feeling because our mind conflates emotional pain with physical pain
Esienberger, Lieberman, Williams: does rejection hurt
Same region of the brain lit up when feeling emotional pain as it does when feeling physical pain
Michael Anderson: Neural Re-use
Distributed representations and circuits that can be applied to analogous, more abstract contexts and situations. Our brain uses similar structures for different contexts that are similar
Gilbert et al. 2005; Xu et al 2015: hunger and shopping
Hunger makes you buy more both at the supermarket (Gilbert), but also at Walmart and Target (Xu). Self reported hunger is correlated with the amount of money spent on the shoppers’ receipts. Hungry people also take more free stuff if it is available
Huang, Sedlovskaya, Ackerman, & Bargh: Disease avoidance and political attitudes
Vaccination against a virus reduces negative attitudes towards immigrants
Using disinfectant after being reminded of the dangers of the flu virus reduces negative attitudes towards immigration
Concern for physical safety underlies concern for social/cultural safety
Zhong & Liljenquist: physical and moral cleansing
Study 1: Participants who imagine themselves committing moral transgressions were more likely to chose hand wipes as a gift rather than something else
Study 2: hand copied stories of moral transgressions then rated several products — rated cleaning products higher
Study 3: willingness to help a desperate grad student was very dependent on whether or not the participant washed their hands after remembering a time where the did something morally wrong. Participants who cleaned there hands were less likely to help.
Lee Schwarz 2019: cleansing of states
Washing hands also washes away temporary states, such as luck, or short term memory. Thats why hockey players don’t shave during the playoffs or athletes don’t wash their gear. Cleansing is a separation between two properties
Chapman et al. 2009: EMG muscle responses to stimuli
Same EMG muscle responses to physically disgusting stimuli and morally disgusting behaviour
Schnall et al 2008: moral judgments in dirty or clean rooms
Moral judgments are more negative and severe when made in clean rooms vs dirty rooms or after exposure to unclean vs clean objects. Highlights the relationship between disgust and moral condemnation (Haidt), and cleanliness and moral purity or goodness.
John Bowlby: Attachment and Loss
Physical warmth is naturally conflated with social warmth in early experience
Williams & Bargh 2008: physical warmth creates social warmth
Example: Drinking a hot beverage gives the feeling of physical warmth which is conflated with social warmth and unconsciously alters our behaviour
Solomon Asch: warm and cold as central traits
Warm or cold descriptors used as traits of individual’s personality
Fiske, Glick, Xu, Cuddy: warm and cold as traits
Traits perceived as either warm or cold dictate universal dimensions of outgroup stereotypes
Williams and Bargh: temperature priming and personality impressions
Replaced the words warm or cold with physical sensations of warm or cold given the same character traits otherwise, people tended to view a person more positively after feeling warm objects vs cold
Ijzerman et al. 2012: warmth priming of daycare aged children
Daycare children primed with warmth shared more if their stickers with other children
Kang, Williams, Clark, Bargh: social neuroscience research: the role of insula
Left anterior insula becomes more activated following cold versus warm temperature sensation , and also becomes more activated following betrayals of trust in the economics game.
Zhong & Leonardelli 2008: warmth after rejection
Greater preference for warm food such as soup for lunch compared to cold food after a rejection experience
Ijzerman & Semin: Room temperature estimation
People estimate room temperature to be colder after rejection experience, and warmer after inclusion experience
Ijzerman et al. 2012: room temperature and rejection (skin temperature change)
Skin temperature decreased by 1/2 a degree after an exclusion event and increased 1/2 a degree after inclusion evenly
Cacioppon 1984: social isolation effect on body
Social isolation and loneliness cause vascular constriction. That’s why you feel colder.
Ingaki & Eisenberger: shared neural mechanisms underlying social warmth and physical warmth
Reading socially warm and neutral messages from friends and family and holding physically warm and neutral temperature objects yielded the same results on in fMRI. Significant correlation between body temperature and feeling close to others at the same time.
Fetterman et al 2017: daily diary study
Reports of feeling warm or cold during the day are related to how many positive pro-social or negative antisocial behaviours the person preformed that day.
The scaffolding model
Evolved goals for survival and physical safety serve as the basis of goals that develop later in the individuals life for psychological and social safety.
Jean Mandler: language acquisition
Early spatial and physical concepts are the scaffold on which language acquisition is based
Early development scaffolding core concepts
We develop psychological concepts based on physical analogies to them
Jean Mendler: psychological concepts based on physical analogies
Infants can analyze and compare externally available information — formation of spatial concepts (left, right, up, down) with no access to internal states. Later those internal states are understood using available physical concepts in analogically fashion.
What are the earliest concepts formed by an infant?
Spatial and other directly experienced physical concepts. These concepts provide the foundational structure for subsequent abstract concepts.
Spatial concepts: Distance
Various forms of distance are swappable. Meaning physical distance can be conflated with social distance
Schubert 2005: your highness
Power and verticality share the same metaphor
Ex: looking up to someone
Nelson & Simmons 2007: spatial/verticality effects
People are more likely to travel south to buy a sale item than to travel north. Idea of conflation of physical distance and social distance.
Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh: haptic (touch) priming and metaphors
Metaphorical effects of physical touch on social judgement
Heavy = serious
Hard = ridged, difficult
Rough = effortful
Smooth = fluent, easy
Haptic priming : hard vs soft
Hard chair = less compromise in negotiations
Michael Schafer et al 2018: soft on crime
Feeling something hard vs soft activates somatosensory cortex. People were more lenient when judging crimes and how much punishment should be given after feeling something soft than something hard. Activation of somatosensory cortex is correlated with harshness of sentence
Haptic priming: rough vs smooth
Ratings of integration between supervisor and employee were rated as easier and more fluent if the participants felt something smooth, and more difficult if they felt something rough
Schaefer, Heinz, & Rotte: replicated studies of social priming
Replicated Ackerman et al. With rough and smooth physical primes. Rough primes caused judgements that interaction was less smooth and coordinated. There was a significant correlation between primary somatosensory cortex activation and rough judgements of interaction coordination.
Meier, Robinson et al: physical and social sweetness
Eating sweet foods is related to prosocial behaviours such as helpfulness, smiling and pleasantness. We also believe that people who like sweet foods are more agreeable and have more prosocial personalities, intentions and behaviour.
Tasting something sweet increased self reports of helpfulness and agreeableness
Stepper & Strack: Postural feedback
Slouching or upright posture during tests; sloucher’s feel less proud upon learning they’d succeeded in a test. Effect directed from body to emotions
Chen & Bargh: evaluation and muscular readiness
Positive evaluation produces approach muscular tendency, negative evaluation produces avoidance muscular tendency
Tom et al: Head shaking and evaluation
People liked the pen they were using more when they happened to be shaking head up and down compared to when they were shaking their head from left to right
Strack et al: reverse engineering the emotion-expression connection
Holding pen between teeth or lips (simulating a smile or frown) affected the participants judgement on how funny a cartoon was
Lakoff & Johnson: metaphorical thought
We think and communicate easily in terms of analogies. Abstract terms are metaphorically related to basic physical terms: hot-head, close relationship etc
Barsalou: embodied cognition
The physical direction which you looked affected how many birds (looking up) you could name or flowers (looking down) you could name in an unfurnished room.
Akpinar & Berger: analogies with physical experience
Phrases and concepts that contain physical experiences are much more likely to catch on in popular usage than other forms of description
Ex: Hot topic
Embodied cognition
Memory encodes bodily states associated with experiences, including psychological states associated with emotional experiences
Innate
Hard-wired connections have developed over evolutionary time between physical states and common concepts and motives
Early learning
Scaffolding of more abstract, higher order concepts onto early formed original concepts based on physical experiences
Shared reality/ social communication with analogies
We all share the same physical experiences and easily talk to one another, and understand one another, when we make analogies to those physical experiences
Early-developed guides to adaptive behaviour
Genetic: genetic motives such as survival, reproduction, food etc
Epigenetic: very early life experiences (with care takers)
Cultural: behaviour influenced by cultural norms and current environment
Learning: even more fine-tuned guides, given local circumstances
Jeff Simpson and colleagues: early attachment
Attachment at age 1 predicts:
Social abilities in grade school
Number of friends in high school
How long their relationships last in their 20’s
Mischell: the marshmallow test
Measured how long the child could wait and eat the marshmallow or pretzel stick. Kids that could wait at age 4, had better grades in high school, had lower chances of teen pregnancy, and drug abuse, lower arrest rates, and greater income at 30, and lower divorce rate.
Block & Block: physical safety motivations and political attitudes
Fearful 4 year old children were more likely to report conservative attitudes at age 23
Dunham et al. 2008: stereotypes and inter group biases
There exist tendencies at birth to favour one’s in group and stereotype out groups — also children soak up cultural views about social values at early ages
IAT: implicit association test
Measures the associative strength between pairs of concepts such as social categories and attributes. Measures implicit biases.
Gilbert 1993: soaking up cultural influences “the assent of man”
Similar to automatic disposition model — first stage is to accept what you’re told as true, second stage is to correct, but only if you have time, ability and motivation to do so. Accept cultural influences as true. This develops stereotypes.
Chanowit & Langer 1981: premature cognitive commitment
We accept cultural stereotypes early on and don’t counter-argue because it is not relevant to us at the time — but it can come back to bite us later in life
Steele & Aronson 1995: stereotype activation (group identity)
Activating or making group identity salient has effect in persons motivation and performance
Ambady, Shih, Pittinsky: cultural infusion of stereotypes
Made gender or ethnicity salient through simple drawings of two children playing together and then administered an age appropriate math quiz. Asian American 5 year old math performance increased when priming their Asian identity.
