Rob Flashcards
What is evolutionary social psychology?
Explains human social behaviour in terms of evolutionary processes
What is fitness?
The extent to which organisms with certain characteristics work in their environment
What is altruism?
Behaviour which helps another individual’s fitness despite a fitness cost for the donor
What is the problem of altruism?
- By helping others, you reduce your resources
- This may adversely impact your ‘fitness’ in your environment
What is selective altruism?
- Targeted helping improves survival of your genes (Helping organisms (family members) that ensures the survival of your genes)
- Reproductive success enables the continuation of your genes
- Relatives also share some of your genes
- A relatives reproductive success may be considered in addition to your own
- Selective altruism enhances genetic survival
Brunstein, Crandell & Kitayama (1994)
- Presented participants with hypothetical scenarios
- Ss asked if they would help individuals depicted
How woould selective altruism towards relatives elvolve
Dawkins (1979)
- Gene for selective altruism likely to survive than a gene for wholesale altruism
Hamilton (1964)
- Developed original model for selective altruism
- As relatedness, so does a tendency of self-sacrifice
What is inclusive fitness?
- Enables relatives to ‘thrive’ and therefore pass-on shared genes to later generations
- People help other in their own self-interest on the basis of genetic commonality, which is derived from cues
What is reciprocal altruism?
- Helping unrelated people
- “I’ll scratch your back…”
Is reciprocal altruism simply for the good of the group?
Axelrod & Hamilton (1981)
- Used a simulation involving a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem
- Across multiple helping incidents, the most efficient strategies excluded ‘cheats’ by eliminating indiscriminate helping
- Targeting their help to people who would reciprocate
What did Trivers (1971) say about reciprocal altruism?
- Reciprocal altruism improves fitness when favour is likely to be returned
What is social contract theory?
Cosmides & Tooby (1992, 2005)
- Reciprocal altruism requires detection of ‘cheats’ (people who don’t reciprocate)
- If cheat detection has a genetic basis, then reciprocal altruism can evolve
- Argue humans evolved to detect cheats within social exchanges
- People find it easier to solve problems when they are posed as a cost-benefit social exchange
What is a cooperative coalition?
- Humans often band together in cooperative groups
- For them to work there must be some way to stop ‘free-riding’
What is there to stop free-riding in a cooperative coalition?
Boyd & Richardson (1992), Henrich & Boyd (2001)
- Experimental evidence suggests cooperation increases where free-riders are actively punished
Price et al (2002)
- Highlight an evolved ‘punitive sentiment’
- Encourages social censure of slackers
- Enhances cooperation and removes free-riding
What is pro-social behaviour?
- Whole range of behaviour valued by society
Includes:
- Helping behaviour: intentionally helping another person or group
Social psychology definition of altruism
Helping behaviour, sometimes costly, that shows concern for fellow human beings and is performed without expectation of personal gain
Why do people help (pro-social behaviour)
- Person variables
- Situation variables
What are person-based factors of pro-social behaviours
- Biological factors
- Genetic factors (helping family increases likelihood of genes surviving)
- Mood - positive mood increases helping
Warm glow of success
Isen (1970); Isen and Stalker (1982)
- Teachers’ successful on a task (good mood) more likely to help with a subsequent fundraiser
- Argument is that people who are in a better mood are less self-focused and more sensitive to the needs of others
What are the social behaviours of bad moods
Different negative emotions = different effects
Anger leads to aggression
- Can be associated with righting an injustice (pro-social)
Guilt leads to increase pro-social behaviour
Why does guilt increase pro-social behaviour?
Cialdini et al (1982)
- Negative-state-relief hypothesis
- Being in a negative emotion induces a drive to reduce that emotion
What is empathy?
Sensitivity to the emotional states of other people
What are the two types of empathic state (Batson (1991))
Egoistic - less concerned about others
Altruistic - empathy triggers concern for others
Perspective taking and empathic concern
Oswald (1996)
- Empathic concern requires perspective taking
Batson et al. (1997, 2003)
Distinction between:
- Imagining how another person feels in a situation (leads to altruism and empathy)
- Imagining how we would feel in that situation (although distressing you are less likely to help cause it is more self-focused)
What are the situational factors that influence pro-social behaviour?
- The presence of other people
- People are more likely to act when they are alone
What is Latane and Darley’s (1968) Cognitive model
Bystander effect
- The more people are around, the less likely someone is to help
- People seek cues to action from others
Latane and Darley (1970) Smoke in Room Experiment
- Participants go to interview ostensibly about issues related to university life
- They complete preliminary questionnaire
- Smoke pours into room for several minutes
Conditions:
- Alone
- With two strangers (also study participants)
- With two confederates who take no emergency action
Results:
- Alone = 75% raise alarm
- Two strangers = 38% raise alarm
- Two confederates = 10% raise alarm
What is required for someone to help?
Latane and Darley (1970) Several phases to bystander intervention: - Notices 'situation' - Interprets situation as an emergency - Feel responsible - Decide whether to help
What makes bystanders apathetic?
- Diffusion of responsibility - you’re not the only potential helper
- Audience inhibition - don’t want to make a mistake in front of many people
- Social influence - people look to others to determine what to do
What are the 5 conditions of the Three-in-one experiment
- Alone
- Know they are alone - Diffusion of responsibility
- Ps knows there is another person, but can neither see nor be seen by them - Diffusion + social influence
- Can see the other participant (confederate), but knows the other participant can’t see them - Diffusion + audience inhibition
- Participant knows there is another participant who can see them, but the participant can’t see the other person - Diffusion + social influence + audience inhibition
- Participant and confederate see each other
What are the results of the three-in-one experiment
- As time passes the more likely it is for the participant to help
- The alone condition is the one where the participant is most likely to help
- Next is the diffusion condition, and then the diffusion + influence (or inhibition)
- Least likely condition to help is diffusion + influence + inhibition
What are the limits to the bystander effect
Latane & Rodin (1969)
- Apathy is less likely if the bystanders know each other
- Elevated if bystanders are strangers
Gottleib & Carver (1980)
- Among strangers, bystander effect is reduced if they believe they will interact with each other and account for their actions
Overall, bystander effect is strongest when observers are strangers for whom there is little prospect of interaction.
What is a group?
Johnson and Johnson (1987)
- Groups comprise a collection of interacting individuals
- Where two or more individual perceive themselves as a group
Where there is a collection of interdependent individuals - Where a collection of individuals work towards a common goal
- Where individuals strive to satisfy common needs through their collective with others
- Where roles and norms structure the interactions between a collection of. individuals
- Where. there is influence between individuals in a collection
What is group cohesiveness?
- How the group ‘hangs together’
- The property of a group that affectively binds people, as group members, to one another and to the group as a whole, giving the group a sense of solidarity and oneness
How do we measure group cohesiveness?
- Evaluate how much each member likes others in the group
- Look at the bonds that bind people to one another in groups
What are the problems with measuring cohesiveness?
-Problems with. reducing cohesiveness to level of interpersonal attraction
How can we explain shared phenomenon that makes a group at the individual level?
Mudrack (1989)
Hogg (1993)
- Self-categorisation can account for cohesiveness
What is the basis unit of categorisation?
A prototype
- People are categorised according to how similar they are to a group prototype
- Categorisation of people into groups de-emphasises individual differences between people (depersonalisation)
How does the cognitive system facilitate categorisation?
Turner’s self categorisation process
- Maximising similarities between individuals who match a prototype (Assimilation)
- Maximising differences between individuals match different prototypes (contrast)
- Cognition and evaluation operate on category-relevant lines
- The category matters to the way relevant information is processed and evaluated
- Accounts for prejudice towards out-group members, and favouritism to in-group members
What is group socialisation?
Hogg and Vaughan (2018) p 296
Dynamic relationship between the group and its members that describes the passage of members through a group in terms of commitment and of changing roles
What are norms?
- Shared beliefs about what is the appropriate conduct for a group member
- Attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups
What do norms do?
- Norms are one way groups differ
- Different groups have different norms
- Norms provide the framework of acceptable behaviour for group members
- Norms strongly influence behaviour
- A way by which group membership can influence behaviour
What was the autokinesis study about?
Sherif (1936)
- Argued that others’ behaviour indicates the range of acceptable behaviours
Range of possible behaviours = Frame of reference
- Extreme positions are perceived as unacceptable
- Middle range (average) behaviours = acceptable
Sherif’s (1936) autokinesis study method
- Demonstration of developing a group norm using optical illusion (Autokinesis)
Sherif’s (1936) autokinesis study results
- Groups of Ss formed group norm to which individuals adhered
- When subsequently tested alone, former group members still adhered to prior group norm
- Group reference frame was internalised
Asch line study (Solomon Asch (1952)
- In Sherif’s study, Ps uncertain of movement of spot
- Ps look to group for certainty -> follow group norm
- Asch looked at the influence of impact of norms when confidence (certainty) was high
Asch line study method
- Task is to judge which comparison line is same length as standard line
- Each member of a group calls out answer they think is correct
- All but one of the people in each group are confederates
How many Ps conform?
Asch line study results
- 25% Ss make no erros
- 28% Ss = eight (out of 12) errors
- 47% Ss = one to 7 errors
- Was a very easy task, when there are no confederates there was only a 0.7% error rate
- As the iterations go on the confederates say the wrong answer more and more
- Most of the time the participants went along with the confederates despite the fact that they know that the answer is incorrect
What is an explicit norm
Formalised rules governing behaviour of group members
What are implicit norms
“Unwritten” rules of social conduct
Harold Garfinkel (1967) implicit norms study
- Studied implicit norms through “ethnomethodology”
- Breaking norms may lead to rapid social breakdown
- Emphasises importance of implicit norms in everyday interactions
- Got students to violate everyday norms
- Forty students acted as if they were a lodger in their own homes
- Told to conduct themselves in a polite fashion and to avoid getting personal
Harold Garfinkel (1967) implicit norms study results
- Rapid and severe breakdown in cordial family relations
-
What are roles and what do they do?
- Important for group structure
- Differentiate people within groups
- Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different activities within the group, and that interrelate to one another for the greater good of the group
Roles vs. Norms
- Norms apply to the whole group
- Specific roles apply only to sub-sections of the group
- Norms distinguish between groups
- Roles function within groups to further group goals
What are the effects of roles on behaviour
- Leadership is a group-based role
- Influences the leader’s behaviour with respect to subordinates
- Stanford prison experiment (although now subject to empirical criticism)
What are the effects of roles on behaviour
Gersick and Hackman (1990):
- Describe how role-based routine (habits) may have caused flight crew to forget safety procedure for unusually cold weather
- Icing lead to an airliner crash
What are the two main issues with group performance?
- How and why does performance of an individual change when in a group setting
- How and why does group efficiency change as a function of its size
(as size increased performance diminished) - Other studies contradict this e.g. Green (1989) “Presence of others can both facilitate and inhibit performance”
Zajonc (1965) Drive Theory
- When other present, dominant responses are facilitated
- Dominant responses are familiar behaviours
- Non-dominant responses are less familiar behaviours (can be inhibited)
- Presence of others increases arousal
- Increases action readiness to respond to unexpected events
- Unfamiliar tasks show a performance deficit
- Familiar tasks show a performance increase
Criticisms of Drive theory
Evaluation Apprehension
Cottrell (1972)
- Mere presence not enough to automatically cause arousal
- The presence of. others implies evaluation
- Potential for negative evaluation = anxiety arousing
- Associated arousal leads to dominant responding
Markus (1978) - evaluation apprehension or drive theory study
- Male participants undress, then. dress. in unfamiliar clothes (lab coat), then put their own clothes back on
Three conditions:
- Alone
- Presence of a incidental person (low evaluation)
- Attentive audience (high evaluation)
Markus (1978) - evaluation apprehension or drive theory study
In the incidental (drive) condition:
- Dressing with unfamiliar clothes inhibited
- Dressing with familiar clothes facilitated
- Attentive audience did not significantly add to drive effects
- Results supported drive theory but not evaluation apprehension
Distraction/ conflict study (Baron (1986))
- Presence of others act as a distraction from task
- Distraction leads to attentional conflict
- Attentional conflict induces drive effects
- Increased arousal facilitates dominant responses
- Performance of difficult tasks -> inhibited
- Performance of easy task -> facilitated
Advantages of Baron’s distraction/conflict study
- Accounts for effect of any source that can facilitate (or inhibit) performance
- Can be applied to improve performance
What is the Ringlemann Effect?
(1913)
As group size increases, productivity of each individual drops
What is process loss (group performance)?
Group processes that prevent a group from reaching its potential productivity. Such losses include co-ordination losses and motivation losses
What are additive tasks
a group task that can be completed by adding together all individual members’ inputs
Social loafing Latane et al.
- Got Ss to shout as loud as possible
- Ss were blindfolded and wore ‘white noise’ headsets
3 conditions:
- Alone
- Dyad (2 people
Social loafing results
- The bigger the group, the less the volume of individual members
- Both groups showed a production loss
What is social loafing?
Hogg and Vaughan, 2019, p288
A reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task (one in which our outputs are pooled with those of other group members) compared with working either alone or coactively (our outputs are not pooled)
What is a disjunctive task?
An either/or group task that can be completed by selecting a single group member’s input to stand as the group product
Is the group product in a disjunctive task, necessarily the best input they could have chosen? (Thomas and Fink (1961))
- Most competent group members may hold back
- Group may reject best suggestion
What is a conjunctive task?
- A group task requiring that all members complete it successfully
Process loss example: Brainstorming
- A group technique aimed at enhancing creativity in groups by means of uninhibited generation of as many ideas as possible concerning a specified topic
- Considered brainstorming is a good way of generating ideas
Does brainstorming have process loss? (Diehl and Stroebe (1987))
- Participants generating ideas alone generated twice as many ideas
- When in a group of people you have to wait your turn to speak –> production blocking
What is inter-group behaviour? (Conflict)
- Behaviour among individuals that is regulated by those individuals’ awareness of and identification with different social groups
- Any perception, cognition or behaviour that is influenced by people’s recognition that they and others are members of distinct social groups
What are personality approaches?
- Grew from attempts to understand Nazi atrocities
- Argued such behaviour could only stem from an aberrant personality
What is the authoritarian personality
Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford 1950
- Over-disciplining parenting can lead the child to have an unconscious hostility to parents
- Society dictates that presenting this hostility to parents is not allowed
- Child learns to redirect hostility elsewhere
- Tendency to obey authority figures
- F-scale is used to measure authoritarian personalities
Criticism of authoritarian personality
- Focuses on the individual, ignores societal influences
- Pettigrew (1958)
- Personality did not differ between North and South USA despite higher prejudice in the South - Individual differences (in authoritarianism) cannot not explain wide-spread societal uniformity in prejudice
- Authoritarianism cannot explain sudden emergence of prejudice at certain points in history
How does realistic conflict arise?
Conflict arises from goal-striving
What is an incompatible goal
Groups competing for the same goal that only one can get
What is a concordant goal
Two or more groups that are all trying to achieve the same goal. One group cannot achieve the goal themselves, they need to work with other groups
Realistic conflict theory
Sherif, 1966
- Ethnocentrism originates in real conflicts of interest between groups
Robbers cave study
Sherif (1966)
- Participants attend a summer camp
- Ps are divided into two groups
Studies have 4 stages:
- Arrival at camp
- Group formation
- Inter-group competition
- Conflict reduction
Criticisms of Robbers cave studies
- Hard to generalise from this study as ps were 12 year old, middle class boys
- Set up is artificial
- Ethical issue because there was no consent from the kids
- Difficult to isolate variables responsible for realistic conflict
- Inadvertent researcher influence as they researchers were the ‘group leaders’
Other realistic conflict study replications
- Blake and Mouton (1961) - conflict in business management training groups
- Diab (1970) - inter-ethnic conflict among young people in Lebanon
- Brewer and Campbell (1976) - Study of competition among tribal groups in Africa
- Tyerman and Spencer (1983) - difficulty replicating conflict between different scout groups
What are minimal group experiments?
A set of experimental procedures designed to create ad hoc groups on essentially arbitrary criteria with no knowledge of who else belongs to each group. Once such a situation has been created, people’s perceptions of or reward allocations to the group may be measured.
Minimal group paradigm
Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament (1971)
- Group assignment on trivial criteria
- Ps knew which group they were in.
- Other group members anonymous
- Ps have to allocate money to individual group members (identified only by their code number)
- Ps could not award money to themselves
Minimal group paradigm results
- Tendency to assign more money to in-group
Social identity theory
Tajfel (1978); Tajfel and Turner (1986)
- Group memberships has self-esteem implications
- Tend to evaluate in-groups positively to maintain a positive identity
What is social identitiy?
The individual’s knowledge that he (she) belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him (her) of the group membership
How do you maintain positive self-esteem
- Achieved through differentiating groups based on features favouring the in-group
- Differences in value-laden features will be exaggerated
How does social identity theory account for the minimal group paradigm?
- A way to boost group esteem (and hence self-esteem) is to allocate more money to the in-group
- Thus the in-group is made ‘better’ than the out-group
How does social identity theory explain conflict between high and low status groups
- Conflict can occur when groups perceive the current status quo can be changed
- When status quo is seen as legitimate and cannot be changed there is social climbing and social creativity
How do people divide up their social world into groups?
Process of self-categorisation
Self-categorisation theory
Turner (1985); Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell (1987)
- Accounts for the cognition of categorisation
- The basis unit of categorisation is the prototype
What are prototypes?
- “Fuzzy” representation of the ideal object or group
- Represents a given group and helps differentiate from other groups
- Maximise the ratio of between-group differences to within-group differences
- Accentuates group entitativity (meta-contrast principle)
How does the meta-contrast principle occur?
Assimilation:
- Maximising similarities between individuals who match a prototype
Contrast:
- Maximise differences between individuals who match different prototypes
How does the meta-contrast principle work?
- Facilitates categorising individuals into groups
- Categorisation of people into groups de-emphasises individual differences between people (depersonalisation)
- Group members perceived as similar to the group prototype
- Extent to which a member ‘fits’ the group depends on similarity to prototype
Why is the meta-contrast principle (self-categorisation) a useful model?
- A single process accounts for how social groups are differentiated
- Cognition becomes organised along salient self-category lines
- When people perceive themselves as part of the group, they adopt the norms of the group
Definition of leadership
A social influence process through which an individual intentionally exerts influence over others to structure the behaviours and relationships between a group or organisation
What is great person theory?
Hogg and Vaughn (2018)
Certain characteristics acquired in early life may make for leadership
Traits that make a great leader
- Intelligence
- Talkative
- Taller
- Healthy
- Physically attractive
- Self-confident
- Sociable
- Dominant
Criticisms of traits that make a great leader
Stodgill (1948)
- Evidence did not support trait approach
Stodgill (1974)
- Correlation between traits and effective leadership low
- Average r = .3
What are the big 5 traits?
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Emotional stability
- Openness to experience
Why are people now using the big 5 as traits of an effective leader
Judge et al (2002)
- Big 5 traits r = 0.58 with effective leadership
Best predictors:
- Extraversion
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
What are the traits associated with bad leadership?
- Narcissism
- Machiavellianism
- Psychopathy
Definition of transformational leadership
Approach to leadership that focuses on the way that leaders transform group goals and actions - mainly through the exercise of charisma. Also a style of leadership based on charisma.
What are the key components of transformational leaders?
Bass (1985)
- Idealised influence
- Inspirational motivation
- Intellectually stimulating
- Individualised consideration
Why are transformational leaders good leaders?
Shamir, House and Arthur (1993)
- Inspire their workforce
- Enable the workforce to pursue ‘greater good’
- Give group tasks meaning and focus
Leadership styles: Lippitt and White (1943)
- After-school clubs: different leadership styles
Groups led by confederates in one of three leadership styles:
- Autocratic (leader is results oriented)
- Democratic (leader takes input of members)
- Laissez-faire (leader is hands-off)
Lippitt and White (1943) leadership styles study results
Autocratic:
- Better performance when leader was present
- Worse when leader was absent
- Group members depended on leader direction
Democratic:
- Reasonably high performance regardless of presence or absence of leader
- Members perform to an agreed norm
2 main leadership styles
Fiedler (1965)
- Relationship-oriented style
- Task-oriented style
A person can score high on both dimensions
If you score high on both you are the ‘perfect’ leader
What is contingency theory?
The leadership effectiveness of leadership behaviours or styles is contingent on the leadership situation - some styles are better suited to some situations or tasks than others are
How does Fiedler measure leadership style?
- Uses the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) scale
- Leader assesses subordinate whom they get on least well with
- High score indicates a relationship oriented style
- Low score indicates task oriented style
What are the situational factors for leadership style?
Leader style may interact with situational factors to determine group effectiveness
- Leader-member relations
- Task structure
- Position power
- Factors combine to form 8 types of situation
- Fiedler presented correlations between leadership style and group performance for each of these 8 situations
- Relationship oriented leadership most effective when conditions neither highly favourable or unfavourable
Social identity and leadership
Haslam et al (2011)
- Effective leaders tend to be those who embody group prototype most closely
- Prototypical leaders are more effective than non-prototypical
What are prototypical leaders?
- Embody the group’s attributes
- Make popular leaders so wield more influence
- Are invested in the group and so are more likely to behave in group-serving ways
- Attract attention because they embody the group’s prototype
Risky shift
Stoner (1961)
- Ps must decide on one of two courses of action
Course 1: more desirable outcome but higher risk
Course 2: less desirable outcome but lower risk
- Ps decide alone
- Ps then placed in groups
Results:
- Risky shit
- Groups opted for the riskier option than individuals did
Group polarisation definition
Tendency for group discussions to produce more extreme group decisions than the mean of members’ pre-discussion opinions, in the direction favoured by the mean
What causes group polarisation?
Brunstein and Vinokur (1977)
- Persuasive arguments theory
- People form opinions based on currently available information
- Prevailing opinion expressed more
- This polarises each person’s own position
How does social comparison/normative conformity cause group polarisation?
- People seek social approval
- Seek what the group norm is and shift position to this
How does social identity theory account for group polarisation?
Assimilation:
- Where group. members’ views polarise to a perceived norm
Contrast:
- Where polarisation acts to exacerbate difference between in-group and potential out-groups
What is groupthink?
A mode of thinking in highly cohesive groups in which the desire to reach unanimous agreement overrides the motivation too adopt proper rational decision-making procedures
What do groups who make bad group decisions have in common?
- Very close knit
- Expressing alternative solutions not possible
- Leader favours a particular solution
- Creates an illusion of vulnerability
What is required for an act to be defined as ‘aggressive’
Any form of behaviour directed towards the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment
What are bio-social models of agression?
- Theories which incorporate biological drive and a psychological element
- In humans, the expression of aggression is not necessarily inevitable
Bio-social models of aggression: Frustration-aggression hypothesis
Dollard et al (1939)
- Aggression arises from state of frustration
- Frustration is a pre-requisite for aggression
- Goal striving causes arousal
- Achieving a goal is cathartic
- When goal attainment is frustrated, aggression often used to vent psychological arousal
- Aggression is usually targeted towards the source of goal thwarting
- Displacement (scapegoating) occurs if this is not possible
Evidence for frustration-aggression hypothesis
Marcus-Newhall et al (2000):
- Meta-analysis of 49 studies
- Frustration leads to displaced aggression
Criticisms of frustration-aggression hypothesis
Berkowitz (1962); Bandura (1973)
- Frustration does not always lead to aggression
- Aggression can occur in the absence of frustration
How has the frustration-aggression model been modified in previous years?
- Frustration did not always lead to aggression
- Aggression is a dominant response in a hierarchy of responses
- Frustration leads to an action readiness
- This can lead to aggression depending on presence of aggressive cues
Study of effect of weapon cue on frustrated participants
Berkowitz and LePage (1967)
- In the presence of weapon cues, frustrated individuals responded more aggressively than non-frustrates Ps
- The ‘weapons effect’
Bio-social models of aggression: Excitation transfer
Zillmann (1979, 1988)
- Residual arousal from an unrelated event can feed readiness to aggress in a new situation
- Residual non-specific arousal is labelled from cues in the environment
- If the cue primes an aggressive response, then aggression becomes the dominant response
Evidence for excitation transfer
Zillmann and Bryant (1974)
- Group 1 do non-arousing task
- Group 2 do physical exercise (arousal) task
- Two minutes later, half the Ps receive provocation (loud sound blast)
- Six minutes later, Ps given opportunity to administer noise blasts to the person who provoked them
- Participants in high residual arousal group administered more intensive sound blasts
What are learning models of aggression
- Consider where repertoire of aggressive responses arise from
- Aggressive responding can be learned
Learning models of aggression: Operant (instrumental) conditioning
Walters and Brown (1963)
- Acquisition of a desired object through aggression can reinforce aggressive behaviour
Learning models of aggression: Social learning theory
- Anti- and pro-social behaviour can be learned
Socialisation and learning influences the:
- Acquisition of aggressive behaviour or behaviour sequences
- Instigation of overt acts of aggression
- Maintenance of aggression
- By watching another person successfully enact a behaviour, an observer can learn that behaviour (Vicarious learning)
Learning models of aggression: Vicarious learning
- Seeing someone successfully aggress may produce changes in the observer’s aggression-related expectancies
- Learning is enhanced if the actor is seen to be rewarded for the aggression (Vicarious reinforcement)
Learning models of aggression: Aggressive scripts
Huesmann (1988, 1998)
- People gain certain ‘scripts’ from experiences in life
- If someone comes from a routinely aggressive household, they are more likely to be aggressive
Green (1998)
Ambiguous situations more likely interpreted as aggressive by people with a history of aggression
What is the social information processing (SIP) model
Dodge (2006)
Sets out the information processing steps involved in aggressive responses
What is the general aggression model (GAM)
Anderson et al (2011)
Brings together a range of previous approaches into a unified whole
Bobo doll experiment criticisms
Baron and Richardson (1994)
- Was use of Bobo doll target actual aggression?
- Was it realistic to allow children to aggress in exactly the same circumstances as modelled aggression
- Adult modelling in Bobo doll set-up very unlike aggression depicted on TV
Further research of the bobo doll experiment
Libert and Baron (1972)
- Children ages 5 to 9 watch a short clip from a film
- Aggressive-programme group
- Non-aggressive programme group
- Subsequent task: Each child presented opportunity to help or ‘hurt’ another child with a task
- Children in the aggressive-programme group pressed chose to ‘hurt’ significantly more
Criticisms of the Libert and Baron (1972) further research on the bobo doll experiment
- Button-pressing unrealistic of everyday aggression
- Task does not allow for retaliation
- Exposure to TV unrealistically short
- Exposure to single TV clip unrepresentative of normal ‘TV diet’
- Children may have thought experimenter approved
Aggression field studies
Black and Bevan (1992)
- Respondents cueing for cinema complete a questionnaire in one of four conditions:
- Waiting to see a violent film
- Having just seen a violent film
- Waiting to see a non-violent film
- Having just seen a non-violent film
- Violent films lead to a tendency to be violent
- In the violent film condition, there is a tendency to be more violent after watching the film
Violent video games study
Barlett, Harris and Bruey (2008)
Studied violent cues depicted in video games and effects on:
- Hostility (hostile cognitions)
- Physiological arousal
Violent video games study: Results
Barlett, Harris and Bruey (2008)
Players on maximum and medium blood settings showed:
- Increased hostility
- Increased physiological arousal
- Used character’s weapon significantly more
Results of Anderson and Bushman (2001) Video game meta-analysis
Meta-analysis of 35 research reports
Video game exposure associated with:
- Increased aggressive behaviour
- Reduced pro-social (helping) behaviour
- Increased aggressive thoughts
- Increased aggressive feelings
- Increased physiological arousal
What are the associations between video games and real crimes?
Beerthuizen, Weijters and van der Laan (2017)
- Crime among young adults is associated with boredom
- Computer technology gives young people something to do
- New video games occupy the criminal so reduce crime
Relationship between video games and violent crimes study
Markey, Markey and French (2015)
Compared changes in USA violent crimes with :
- Monthly changes in video game sales 2007-2011
- Changes in internet searches for violent game walkthroughs and guides
- Violent crimes following release of three popular games
Relationship between video games and violent crimes study : Results
Markey, Markey and French (2015)
- Higher video game sales were associated with lower concurrent violent crime
- Higher game-related internet searches were associated with lower subsequent (after two months) aggravated assaults and homicides
- Homicides significantly decreased 3-4 months following release of three popular games
Why do we study attitudes?
- Attitudes may influence behaviour
- They can predict behaviour
- They can change behaviour
- They are thus useful to social investigators
Do attitudes guide behaviour?
LaPiere (1934)
- Actual vs self-report prejudice for chinese people in american restaurants
- Found clear discrepancy between expressed attitude and actual behaviour
What are the two routes through which an attitude can predict behaviour
- Automaticity (implicitly)
2. Volitionally
What is the function of attitudes fir behaviour?
- Efficient processing of information: processing shortcuts (Smith and Mackie, 2000)
- Attitudes are pre-established evaluations which easily come to mind
- Efficient “guides” to behaviour
What characteristics do automatic processes have?
- Occur outside of awareness
- Unintended
- Uncontrollable
- Efficient
Social psychologists focus on two characteristics:
- Efficiency
- Lack of awareness
What is an automatic attitude?
- When attitudes come to mind effortlessly and inescapably
- Automatic attitudes are uncontrollable and unintended
What is an attitude?
Fazio (1995)
Association between the internal representation of an object with an evaluation
What is attitude strength?
- ‘Strength’ refers to the strength of the association between object representation and evaluation
- Strong object-evaluation association leads to faster attitude accessibility
- Attitude accessibility is the speed and ease of attitude activation
How are automatic attitudes developed?
Smith and Mackie, 2000
- Whenever object representation and evaluation are paired in memory
- Over time, the evaluation is incorporated into the representation of the object
Automatic attitude development study
Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio, 1992
- Ps evaluated a series of attitude objects (attitude rehearsal)
- Control: Ps gave non-evaluative responses
- Subsequent testing: Ps provided evaluations of the previously presented objects as quickly as possible
Results:
- Attitude rehearsal led to faster responding
- Repeated object-evaluation pairing enhanced attitude accessibility
Study to see whether attitudes are accessed automatically
Fazio et al. (1986)
- Phase 1: Identified response speed to 70 ‘good’ or ‘bad’ object words
- RT indicates strength of feeling toward each object
- Phase 2: Ps shown positive words and negative words
- Ps indicate if word is positive or negative
- A prime is presented just before each target word
- Prime is a word from phase 1 identified as either positive of negative which Ps reacted to quickly
Study to see whether attitudes are accessed automatically: Results
Fazio et al. (1986)
- Faster responding when target and prime had some valence
- Slower responding when valences inconsistent
- Prime facilitated or interfered with task of indicating positivity or negativity of target words
- Automatic evaluations (of the prime) occurred
What is spontaneous behaviour in terms of automatic attitudes?
Fazio and Zanna (1981)
- Attitude accessibility determines attitude-behaviour consistency
- Spontaneous behaviour will occur when attitudes are easily activated
How do attitudes guide spontaneous behaviour: Focusing attention
- People attend things which are evaluatively salient
Roskos-Ewoldsen and Fazio (1992)
- Those who rehearsed their attitudes more likely to subsequently notice attitude object
Calitri, Low, Eves and Bennett (2009)
- Implicit attitudes to exercise were associated with visual attention to exercise cues
How do attitudes bias our interpretations of things
- Through assimilation and contrast.
- Ambiguous information may be interpreted as supportive of attitude
What is the MODE model (Fazio, 1990)
- Spontaneous behaviour occurs when either the motivation or the opportunity to make a reasoned decisioned is low, only attitudes that are highly accessible will predict spontaneous behaviour
- Behaviour will not always be consistent with automatic attitudes when people are motivated or able to deliberate about doing the behaviour
Critique of Fazio’s approach to attitudes
- Fazio posits that attitudes are object-driven evaluation associations stored in memory
- What is the nature of the memory associations?
- is memory involved?
Are object evaluations simply recalled from memory? (study)
Bargh, Chaiken , Raymond and Hymes (1996)
- Ps unaware that they are making evaluative judgements
- Ps presented normatively +ve and -ve words as subliminal primes
- Primes followed by target. words which they merely have to pronounce
Are object evaluations simply recalled from memory? (study results)
Bargh, Chaiken , Raymond and Hymes (1996)
Results:
- Valence consistent –> faster response
- Valence inconsistent –> slower response
- Evidences automatic evaluation
- Some prime-target pares were semantically unrelated –> the only thing they had in common was valence
- Processes requiring memory of shared meanings between concepts can not explain these results
Either:
- All positive objects shared a common memory representation
or
- People were making evaluative judgements ‘on line’ e.g. without reference to memory. of a single specific individual object-evaluation
- Memory for a ‘single tag’ object-evaluation could not account for this
Does context influence automatic attitudes?
Mitchell, Nosek and Banaji (2003)
- Show attitudes are heavily influenced by contextual features of the situation
- Attitude toward a target can change depending on the target’s salient feature (s) at the time of the evaluation
Context influence on automatic attitudes study
Mitchell et al (2003)
- Black athletes vs white politicians
- When a task emphasised occupation ps automatically. evaluated black athletes as more positive than white politicians
- But when a task emphasised race participants evaluated white politicians more favourably
What is the more modern view on automatic attitudes
- Attitudes are an evaluation of an ‘object-centred context’
- All salient value-loaded information contributed (target and context)
What is an expectancy-value model of attitudes?
Peak (1955); Carlsoon (1953, 1956); Rosenberg (1953, 1956)
Attitudes comprise:
- Expectancy of object having an attribute
- Evaluation of attribute
- An attitude is an overall summary of all salient attributes and their associated evaluations
(salient = relevant in that moment)
What is overall attitude?
Combination of all relevant expectancy and evaluation terms
Attitude = sum of expectancy x value
Do attitudes predict behaviour?
LaPierre (1934), Corey (1937)
- Attitudes not predictive of behaviour
What is the correspondence (compatibility) principle?
Fishbein and Ajzen (1975); Ajzen and Fishbein (1975)
- Measured appropriately, attitude can predict behaviour
Each behaviour has 4 characteristics:
- Specific action
- Directed toward or on a specific target
- In a context.
- At a particular time
Study to demonstrate compatibility principle
Davidson and Jaccard (1979)
- Predictions of birth control pill use over 2 years
Used attitude measures differing in specificity
- “Attitudes towards birth control” (.08)
- “Attitudes towards birth control pills” (.32)
- “Attitudes towards using birth control pills” (.53)
- “Attitudes towards using birth control pills during the next 2 years” (.57)
Principle of compatibility in relation to organ donation study
Siegal et al (2014)
Students (non donors) completed questionnaire assessing:
- General attitude to organ donation
- Specific attitude to registering as a donor
- Outcome measure: subsequent return of completed donor registration form
Principle of compatibility in relation to organ donation study: Results
Siegal et al (2014)
- General attitude: 18.5% variance in organ donation registration behaviour
- Specific attitude: 46% variance in organ donation registration behaviour
How do attitudes predict volitional behaviour?
Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 1980)
- Attitudes can predict behaviour so as long as principle of compatibility. is followed
- Attitudes predict behaviour via behavioural intentions
(Intentions = mental link between attitude and behaviour)
What is the theory of reasoned action (TRA)
Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 1980)
- Volitional behaviour is a product of rational decision process
- Decision based on salient beliefs
- Intention is most immediate influence on behaviour
- Complete personal control is assumed
- TRA identifies underlying determinants of behavioural intentions
What are the two components of intention?
- Attitude towards the behaviour
2. Subjective norm
What are subjective norms?
- Comprise of approval/disapproval of referents towards behaviour
Function of:
- Normative beliefs (expectancy term )
- Motivation to comply (value term)
Social norm = sum of normative beliefs x compliance motivation
How good is the TRA at predicting intentions and behaviour (meta-analysis)
Sheppard, Hartwick and Warshaw (1988)
- Multiple correlation for predicting intentions: R = .66
- Correlation for predicting behaviour: r = .53
- Many daily activities are not under complete control
- Need to include control component to predict these
What is the theory of planned behaviour (TPB)
Ajzen (1985, 1988, 1991)
- Incorporates control factors
- Accounts for behavioural intentions in situations lacking complete control
- Attitude towards the behaviour and subjective norm remain
- Adds perceived behavioural control (PBC): ease of performing the behaviour
What is perceived behavioural control?
- PBC is a function of. control beliefs
- It is the likelihood of helping or hindering factor being present (expectancy term)
- Has the power to help or hinder (value term)
Two types of control factor:
- Internal factors (e.g. skills, abilities, knowledge)
- External factors (e.g. barriers, dependence on others)
PBC = sum of likelihood of factor x facilitating/inhibiting power
- PBC influences intention because people intend to do behaviours which they have a chance of completing
- Direct link between PBC and behaviour reflects extent to which PBC measures actual control
How good is the TPB over the TRA study
Schifter and Ajzen (1985)
- Study of weight loss among college students
- Addition of PBC improved prediction of intention from r = .65 to .72
Comparing highly controllable with less controllable behaviours study
Madden et al (1992)
- Compared highly controllable behaviours (e.g. taking vitamin supplements) and less controllable (e.g. getting a good night’s sleep)
Results:
- Inclusion of PBC only improved prediction of intentions and behaviour for the less controllable behaviour
- PBC useful only when complete control is not possible
How good is the TBP for predicting behaviour?
McEachan et al. (2011)
- Meta-analysis
- Attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control predicted between 40% and 50% of variance in intention
- Intention and perceived behaviour control predicted between 19% and 36% of variance in behaviour
Critique of the TRA and TPB: The intention-behaviour gap
Gollwitzer (1993)
- Lack of 1:1 correspondence between intentions and behaviour
Gollwitzer (1993) Bagozzi (1993)
- TRA and TPB do not explain how intentions lead to behaviour
What is the Rubicon Model?
Gollwitzer (1993)
- Goal-directed behaviour is a 2 stage process
1) Motivation phase: form intention (goal intention - what you want to achieve)
2) Action phase: Form plan to pursue goal (implementation intention)
What is an implementation intention?
Implementation intentions have 3 elements:
1) Specifies context (“where”)
2) Specifies time (“when”)
3) Specified action to achieve the goal (“how”)
E.g. “If I am on my way to college (where) tomorrow morning (when), then I will post this letter in the pillar box (how)”
- It is a commitment to act in a specific situation
- Situation cues memory for intended action
- The situation is chosen to ensure opportunity for action
Example of research that shows implementation intention: writing a report
Gollwitzer and Brandstatter (1997)
- Students volunteer to write a report
- Everyone intended to write the report (goal intention)
- Condition 1: Ps provided implementation intention (state where, when, and how they will write their report)
- Condition 2: Ps did not provide implementation intentions
Results:
- Implementation intentions –> 71% wrote report
- No implementation intention –> 32% wrote report
Example of research that shows implementation intention: Breast cancer
Orbell, Hodgkins and Sheeran (1997)
- Breast self-examination (BSE) intentions
- All women intended to self-examine over next month (goal intention)
- Intervention group provided implementation. intentions
- Control group did not
Results:
- Intervention group: 64% performed BSE
- Control group: 14% performed BSE
Example of research that shows implementation intention: Fruit consumption
Armitage (2007)
- Implementation intentions as an intervention to increase fruit consumption
- 120 participants allocated to either an implementation intention or a control condition
Results:
- Significant increases in fruit consumption in the experimental condition
- No significant increase in the control condition
- Findings supportive of Gollwitzer’s model
Deliberative (volition) vs automaticity in the MODE model (Fazio, 1990)
- TPB may be compatible with models of automatic attitudes and spontaneous behaviour
- Where opportunity or motivation exists behaviour is volitional, and there is a reasoned action approach to behavioural decision making (TPB)
- Where opportunity or motivation is absent spontaneous behaviour may be influenced by automatic attitudes
What are the 5 stages of persuasion?
McGuire (1969, 1986)
Interruption to any step can negate persuasion
- Get audience attention
- Get audience to comprehend message
- Get audience to accept (yield to) message
- Get audience to retain their new attitude
- Get audience to act on new attitude
What is the message-learning approach to persuasion?
Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1953)
3 important characteristics:
- Source or communicator
- Message
- Audience
3 characteristics of the message-learning approach: Communicator (who)
- The expertise heuristic
- People tend to believe experts
- This is a function of credibility
- A critical feature of the expertise heuristic is the perceived competence of the communicator
Study looking into the expertise heuristic
Bochner and Insko (1966)
- Study of beliefs about necessary sleep hours
- Students indicated how many sleep hours per night they thought was necessary
- Average was 8 hours
- Ps divided into several groups
- One group given information about necessary sleep hours supposedly provided by YMCA instructor (low credibility)
- Another group given some information but supposedly from a Nobel Prize winning sleep scientist (high credibility)
Study looking into the expertise heuristic: Results
Bochner and Insko (1966)
- Ps much more likely to believe the Nobel scientist
- Maximum change in Ps attitude occurred when scientist recommended 1. hour (7 hours difference from Ps 8 hours)
3 characteristics of the message-learning approach: The message
Arkes, Boehm and Xu (1991)
- Repetition (Familiarity heuristic)
- Simply repeating a statement makes it seem more true
- However, repetition may not work with a new or unfamiliar product: some ‘brand familiarity’ helps (Campbell and Keller, 2003)
What is a fear message
Janis (1967)
- The message in the message-learning approach being one that. causes fear
- Fear will have the biggest impact on attitude change when the fear is moderate
What medium is best for a message (message-learning approach)
Chaiken and Eagly (1983)
Best medium (written, audio, video) depends on message complexity
Simple messages: video
Complex messages: written material
3 characteristics of the message-learning approach: The audience
Janis (1954)
- Low self esteem –> more easily persuaded
McGuire (1968); Rhodes and Wood (1992):
- Those with high or low self esteem are less easily persuaded
- People with low self esteem tend to be more socially anxious and therefore may be distractible –> less likely to pay attention to the message
- People with high self esteem are more self assured and therefore tend to have their own views and opinions and so are harder to persuade
What are the complications of the message-learning approach?
- McGuire assumed the audience actively processes the material
- Ancillary features can also influence persuasion
What are the dual-process models of persuasion?
- Information processing models
- Emphasise two routes for persuasion:
- High effort - deliberative route
- Low effort - automatic route
What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
Petty and Cacioppo (1986)
- Deliberative = central route
- Low effort route = peripheral route
- Elaboration likelihood = likelihood of using central route
Function of:
- Motivation
- Capacity/ability
- Central route processing lead to stronger attitudes
What are the additional ELM variables?
Peripheral cues:
- Increase persuasion when processing via peripheral route
Motivation:
- Motivation plays a role when elaboration likelihood is moderate
Argument quality:
- If engaging in central route processing then persuasion is more likely when your argument is good
Need for cognition:
- Individual difference influence
- Some people are more likely to use central route processing because they like to think more
What are the differences between the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) and the ELM
- The HSM overcomes some weaknesses in the ELM
- Specifies when high- and low-effort processing might be used
- The ‘sufficiency principle’
What are the similarities between the HSM and ELM
- HSM has a high- and low-effort routes to decision making
- Which route used depends on motivation and capacity/ability
What is the Heuristic- Systemic Model (HSM)
Chaiken (1980, 1982, 1987)
- High-effort route = systematic route (HSM)
- Processes all available information in a comprehensive way
- Low effort route defined more rigidly than for ELM
- Low effort = heuristic route
- Requires the presence of an existing heuristic (cognitive shortcut)
Examples of heuristics
- Experts are generally right
- All these people agree so it must be true
- Tabloid papers can’t be trusted
What is the bias hypothesis?
Unlike the ELM, the HSM argues that even under systematic processing, heuristic information may still be used
What is the sufficiency principle?
- The HSM is more specific than the ELM in when systematic processing will be engaged
- People want sufficient confidence in their judgements before accepting a position
Confidence sufficiency is determined by”
- Sufficiency threshold
- Confidence in the communication
- If Confidence lower than sufficiency threshold person uses systematic route
What is cognitive dissonance in the Hogg and Vaughn textbook
- An unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together
- Festinger proposed that we seek harmony in our attitudes, beliefs and behaviour , and try to reduce tension from inconsistency between these elements
What is cognitive dissonance?
- Co-occurrence of inconsistent beliefs, attitudes or behaviours
- Cognitive tension resolve by changing one of the beliefs/attitudes so both are consistent
- Therefore, cognitive dissonance can be a route to attitude change
What is the selective exposure hypothesis
Dissonance can lead to denial/avoidance and therefore there can be a resistance to persuasion
When is avoidance of dissonance less likely?
- Attitude is strong –> resources to rebut contradictory communication
- Attitude is weak –> motivation to find out more –> attend communication
What is self-perception theory?
Bem (1972)
- Alternative to cognitive dissonance
- People infer attitudes from behaviour
What if attitude is inconsistent with behaviour (self-perception vs. dissonance)
According to dissonance, you might change your attitude to resolve the inconsistency
According to self-perception, behaviour provides information about what the attitude should be
What is the fundamental attribution error? (The correspondence bias)
Fiske and Taylor (1991, p67)
To attribute another person’s behaviour to his or her own dispositional qualities, rather than to situational factors
Correspondence bias:
- Where behaviour seems to match a corresponding trait, there is a tendency to assume the trait is the cause
- Changed because fundamental attribution error is not fundamental
Study of correspondence bias (Castro essay)
Jones and Harris (1967)
- Os read a pro- or anti-Castro essay
2 conditions:
- Ps told writer has a free. choice of pro- or anti-Castro stance
- Ps told write instructed on stance
Study of correspondence bias (Castro essay): Results
Jones and Harris (1967)
- In both conditions, Ps believed essays reflected the writer’s attitudes
- Failure to consider situational influence in condition 2
What is focus of attention (“Field” explanation of attribution bias)
Heider (1958)
- Attributional processes are a function of perceptual experience
- The actor is the most salient (i.e. obvious and animate) part of the ‘scene’
- Scene therefore focus for any explanation
- Background factors attract less attention
Focus of attention experiment
Rholes and Pryor (1982)
Got people to re-focus attention onto the situation (rather than the actor)
Result:
Increased situational attributions
Other influences of correspondence bias: Developmental factors
Kassin and Pryor (1985)
Dispositional explanations take time to develop in children
Other influences of correspondence bias: Cross-cultural factors
- Fundamental attribution error is not universal
- Common in western cultures; less so in non-western cultures
Other influences of correspondence bias: Linguistic factors
Nisbett and Ross (1980)
- In English language, actor and action are often described in the same terms (He was an honest man; he acted honestly)
- Does not extend to describing situations
- English language facilitates person-centred explanations
Other influences of correspondence bias: Differential forgetting
Moore et al (1979); Peterson (1980)
- People tend to forget situational factors more easily than dispositional factors
- Causes shift towards dispositional explanations across time
- Miller and Porter (1980) found conflicting evidence
Does the fundamental attribution error have an adaptive role?
Fiske and Taylor (1991)
- If a person acts in a particular way they are likely to act the same way in the future
- Confers power of prediction
What is the actor-observer effect?
Jones and Nisbett (1972)
- An extension of the Correspondence Bias by including biases on an observer may have when explaining their own behaviour
- Observers tend to attribute their own behaviour to situational factors
What is the false consensus effect?
- People ‘invent’ what they think other’s believe to explain (justify) their own behaviour
- Assumed people use consensus information to validate own explanation of the social world
- Research shows people do not use ‘real’ consensus information
Perceptual focus (field) explanation in terms of the actor-observer effect
- Similar to field explanation for FAE
- Actor is more salient than background situation
- Explanations of actor behaviour tend to be dispositional
- Observer can not see their own behaviour
- The situation forms the perceptual field
- Observers explain own behaviour with reference to situation
Perceptual focus study.
Storms (1973)
- Experiment reverses perceptual field of actors and observers
- Two people have conversation across a table (actor 1 and 2)
- Each watched by an observer (observer 1 and 2)
- Video cameras also record each perspective
- Used recordings to change the actor/observer perspective
- Actors now observe themselves and vice versa
Perceptual focus study: Results
Storms (1973)
- Actors and observers reverse attributions
- Actors now attribute own behaviour to dispositional factors
- Observes explained other actor’s behaviour to situational causes
Information explanations of perceptual focus
- Actors know their own motive, past behaviour, and context of current situation
- More likely to attribute to situational factors
- Observers unaware of contextual influences on behaviour
- Less likely to make situational influences
False consensus study
Ross Greene and House (1977)
- Ps asked to walk around in a sandwich board proclaiming “Eat at Joe’s”
Results:
- Ps who agree estimated that 62% of other students would also agree to walk around with the sandwich board
- Ps who declined estimated that 67% of other students would also decline
- Ps created their own consensus
Explanations of false consensus: Company of others
Fiske and Taylor (1991)
- People seek company of people similar to themselves
- Falsely assume most people are similar to themselves
- People similar to ourselves more likely to be salient when trying to recall census information
Explanations of false consensus: Opinion salience
- When inferring consensus information we tend to only consider salient information (our own opinions)
- Therefore falsely believe other’s share our opinions
- Considering alternatives reduces false consensus effect
Explanations of false consensus: Self-esteem enhancing
- Motivated to see ourselves as good, typical people
- Maintains self-esteem
- Therefore, falsely attribute our attitudes/beliefs to others
What are self-serving biases in attributions?
Attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-esteem or the self concept
What are the 2 types of self-serving bias?
- Self-enhancing bias
2. Self-protecting bias
Explanations for self-protecting bias
- People will accept ‘blame’ for failure if likely to have future control over cause
- People with high and low self-esteem tend too take credit for success (Campbell and Fairey, 1985)
- High self-esteem shows self-protecting bias with failure
- Low self-esteem does not show self-protecting bias with failure
Explanations for self-enhancing bias
Miller and Ross (1975)
- People tend to do things they expect to succeed in
- People work at succeeding
- Self-enhancing bias reflects co-occurence of effort and success
What is Group-serving biases (group attributions)
Pettigrew (1979)
- Ultimate attribution error
In-group members attribute:
- Dispositionally for in-group success
- Situationally for in-group failure
- Situationally for out-group success
- Dispositionally for out-group failure
Evidence for ultimate attribution error
Hewstone and Ward (1985)
- Studied these group-serving biases in Malaysia
- Used vignettes depicting desirable and undesirable behaviours
- Vignettes identify actors in vignettes as either Malaysians or Chinese
- Ps provide explanations for vignette actors’ behaviour
Evidence for ultimate attribution error: Study
Hewstone and Ward (1985)
- Demonstrated group-serving bias among the Malaysian participants
- Desirable behaviour by Malaysian actor attributed disposition more than for Chinese actor
- Undesirable behaviour by Malaysian actor attributed to situation more than for Chinese actor
- Vice versa for Chinese
Why do group-serving biases occur: Automaticity explanations
Bell et al (1976), Rosenfield and Stephan (1977)
- Use of stereotypes
- Expectancy-consistent behaviour attribute to internal factors
- Expectancy-inconsistent behaviour attributed to external factors
Why do group-serving biases occur: Self-esteem explanations
- Derived from social identity theory
- In-group members boost self-esteem from group-serving biases
- Maintain positive in-group identity with favourable comparisons to out-groups
What is the two-factor theory of emotion
Schachter and Singer (1962)
- People use cues to ‘label’ (explain) ambiguous arousal
- Emotions differ according to how arousal is attributed
What is emotion a product of?
- Ambiguous physiological arousal
- Cognition which labels arousal
- Links arousal to an emotional situation
- Identifies which emotion is experienced
What are systematic attributions?
- Attributions as trait-like
- “Attributional style”
How can we use attributions to understand depression?
- Learned helplessness
- Attributional style
What is attributional style?
A tendency to make particular kinds of casual inferences, rather than others, across different situations and across time
What is learned helplessness?
Seligman (1975)
- Depression result of learned helplessness
- Phase 1: Dogs receive electric shocks which they could not escape
- Phase 2: 24 hours later the dogs were placed in a two-compartment box, shocks administered, dogs could easily escape shocks
Results:
- Two thirds failed to attempt to escape
- Control dogs (no phase 1) all escaped
What was Seligman’s conclusion about learned helplessness
- Phase 1 dogs ‘learned’ there was no connection between actions and receipt of shocks
- Learned helplessness generalised to Phase 2 environment
- Dogs look depressed
How does learned helplessness have parallels to human depression?
- People experience events attributed as uncontrollable
- Reinforces helplessness
- Leads to passive behaviour in adverse situations and…
- Inability to learn from successful escape responses
Defibrillator experiment
Goodman and Hess (1999)
- Looked at depression in people with and implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD)
- Shocks are not predictable, and can be distressing
Results:
- Number of ICD shocks significantly predicted depressive symptoms
- Depression could be linked to the (unpredictable) ICD shocks
Criticisms of learned helplessness as account of depression
- Critical feature of Seligman set-up was lack of controllability
- More to depression than a lack of control
- Learned helplessness does not account for the chronicity and generality of depression
What are the two important factors in depression (attributional style)
- Attributions of why the bad situation occurred
- Dispositional way people make attributions
Three dimensions that make someone more vulnerable to depression?
Abramson et al (1978)
- Attributions made along three dimensions
Internality - externality
- Locus of cause
- Accounts for self-esteem deficits in depression
Stable - unstable
- Temporal permanence of cause
- Accounts for chronicity of depression
Global - specific
- Degree of influence cause has over other aspects of life
- Accounts for generality/pervasiveness of depression
What do people with a pessimistic attributional style do?
Tendency to attribute negative events to causes which are:
- Internal (caused by themselves)
- Stable (is an enduring factor)
- Global (affects many aspects of their lives)
Also tend to attribute positive events to causes which are:
- External (not caused by themselves)
- Unstable (unlikely to be a causal factor again)
- Specific (affects only this one aspect)
Evaluation of attributional style as an account of depression
- Attributional style implies consistency across time
- Peterson et al. (1982)
- Used attributional style questionnaire (ASQ)
- Correlations of dimensions between two time-points (5 weeks) were .57 to .69
- Attributions relatively stable (dispositional)
Is attributional style related to depression (Study)
Seligman et al (1979)
- 143 students provided information on attributional style and depression (BDI)
Results:
- Correlations between attributional components and depression were:
- Internality: .41
- Stability: .34
- Globality: .35
Depressive realism study
Alloy and Abramson (1979, 1980, 1982)
- Ps decide whether to press a button when a yellow light comes on
- Either pressing the button or not pressing the button may be ‘correct’ depending on rules of the program
- The Ps do not know rules
Two conditions:
- Loose condition
- Ps start with $5 but loose up to 25 cents with a wrong decision - Win condition
- Ps start with no money but gain 25 cents on a correct decision
- At end of experiment, Ps estimate how much control they thought they had
- “Correct” answer should be zero control
Depressive realism study: Results
Alloy and Abramson (1979, 1980, 1982)
Non-depressed people took the bright view:
- Claimed control for winning
- Externalised control for losing
- Self-serving bias
Depressed people (indicated on BDI) more realistic: - Estimated around zero control whether winning or losing
- Depressive attribution was more realistic
How can self-serving bias be adaptive if it distorts perceived reality?
- Studies of coping with life-threatening illness show optimism as being adaptive
Carver et al (1993)
- Study of adjustment to breast cancer
- Found optimists less likely to ‘give-up’ than pessimists
