Social Flashcards
What were the Manchester riots an example of?
A class riot, not race.
Give an example of group think, what is it?
Tony Blair and iraq. Nobody questioning each other or intelligence, trusting others too much. Reinforcing your hypothesis as you distort evidence, minimise conflict in discussion.
How did Williams and sommer measure social exclusion?
How would it affect behaviour? Ball bouncing, measured cooperation in taste, putting words in a bucket
Why is social exclusion bad?
No sense of belonging.
Decreased self esteem.
Lack of control in a situation.
A meaningless existence if nobody cares.
What did Williams, cheung and choi discover about social exclusion?
Cyberostracism, investigated link between belonging to a group and conformity. Pc vs mac, conformity increased when ostracised. If surrounded by in group people, there was little difference if excluded or not. In the outgroup, or mixed group, there was a big difference between sense of belonging between excluded or not.
What did eisenberger, lieberman and Williams find out about social exclusion?
Did a task in an fMRI scanner, the anterior cingulate cortex was active during exclusion. analogous go physical pain.
What is operationalization?
How to measure a concept. Ie are children happy at school? We must operationalization happiness
Are categories objective or subjective?
Subjective, no defined rules for British.
What is a prototype?
An abstract concept, perfect being.
What is an exemplar?
A real life example of a prototype.
What is social cognition?
Cognitive processes and structure influenced by social behaviour.
What is discourse analysis?
Non Quantatively analysis of events. We can only interpret things within their wider social context. For example they reject a questionnaire and it’s statistics, we should interpret what was being communicated in context.
A critique of conventional social psychological methods and theories.
What is functionalism?
Interpret events in terms of input to output, Alan Turing, Turing test.
What is a concept?
The building block of cognition?
Why is belonging to a social category important?
It influences your perception of other categories.
What is Gestalt psychology?
Not enough to look at the stimuli in isolation, need to look at the overall configuration in order to make sense of things.
ie. think about individual notes, or as all the notes as a whole and their melody.
whole influences constituent parts, not vice versa.
What is Tajfels accentuation principle?
Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the categorisation. The effect is amplified where the categorisation and/or dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value.
Shorter A lines than B. The Longest A and shortest B were accentuated by belonging to a category.
What is the minimal group paradigm?
Tajfel et al.
Does belonging to a meaningless group lead to prejudice? Art score, gave their group a lower score to be better than outgroup at their own cost.
Want to maintain a high self esteem by your group being better.
What is Roschs hierarchical approach to categories?
Super ordinate, basic level, sub ordinate.
Furniture, chair, kitchen chair.
What did Wittgenstein say in relation to categories?
Critising the defined features account of categorisation. Compared it to a game, there are no distinct rules of what makes a game.
A fuzzy probabilistic model of categorization is better, based on similarity to the prototype.
What is entitativity?
What can affect it?
Campbell. When you see a set of units as an entity, social system or group.
Size, cohesiveness.
What is the criticism from reductionism?
Why does it apply?
Being ablest reduce doesn’t allow the ability to start from the basics and reconstruct. Don’t answer the initial question.
Loss of explanatory power, the level of explanation doesnt not match so the orignal question is unanswered.
Applies particularly to neuroscience and evolutionary social psychology.
What is positivism?
Why is it a criticism of social psychology?
Non-critical acceptance of science as the only way to arrive at true knowledge.
Since we are studying ourselves cannot be completely objective.
What are the levels of explanation in social psychology?
Intrapersonal, interpersonal and situational, positional, ideological.
What is Völkerpsychologie?
Early precursor of social psychology, as the study of the collective mind, in Germany in the mid- to
late nineteenth century.
What was the first experiment in social psychology?
compared to racing cyclists who go faster when racing or being paced, than when riding alone.
In the most famous of Triplett’s experiments, schoolchildren worked in two conditions, alone and in pairs. They worked with two fishing reels that turned silk bands around a drum. Each reel was connected by a loop of cord to a pulley two metres away, and a small
flag was attached to each cord. To complete one trial, the flag had to travel four times around the pulley. Some children were slower and others faster in competition, while others were little affected. The faster ones showed the effects of both ‘the arousal of their com-petitive instincts and the idea of a faster movement’ (Triplett, 1898, p. 526). The slower ones were overstimulated.
Triplett focused on ideo-motor responses – that is, one competitor’s bodily movements acted as a stimulus for the other competitor.
What is attribution?
People trying to make sense of their lives, ie through palmistry.
Describe the beyond realistic conflict experiment.
Realistic conflict theory - Sherif et al.
Intergroup competition, goals, conflict and hostility.
Middle-class boys at summer camp in different
gangs.
Sherif’s theory of intergroup conflict that explains intergroup behaviour in terms of the nature of goal relations between groups.
What is a cognitive miser?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviours.
What is a motivated tactition?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, motives and needs.
Describe Asch’s configuration model.
According to Asch’s (1946) configural model, in forming first impressions we latch on to certain pieces of information, called central traits, which have a disproportionate influence over the final impression. Other pieces of information, called peripheral traits, have much less influence. Central and peripheral traits are ones that are more or less intrinsically correlated with other traits, and therefore more or less useful in constructing an integrated impression of a person.
Describe Asch’s experiment relating to his configuration model.
Asch (1946) presented participants with a seven-trait description of a hypothetical person in which either the word warm or cold, or polite or blunt appeared. The percentage of participants assigning other traits to the target was markedly affected when warm was replaced by cold, but not when polite was replaced by blunt.
Asch found that participants exposed to the list containing warm generated a much more favourable impression of the target than did those exposed to the list containing the trait cold.
What is a primacy effect?
An order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
Perhaps early information acts much like central cues, or perhaps people simply pay more attention to earlier information.
What is a recency effect?
An order of presentation effect in which later presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
This might happen when you are distracted (e.g. overworked, bombarded with stimuli, tired) or when you have little motivation to attend to someone. Later, when you learn, for example, that you may have to work with th
is person, you may attend more carefully to cues.
What is a personal construct?
In society people create their personal ways of characterisnig people.
What is a schema?
Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
What is a script?
A scheme about an event.
What is a superordinate goal?
Goals that both groups desire but that can be achieved only by both groups cooperating.
What were Campbell’s thoughts on how entitative units are linked?
Similarity, proximity and a common fate.
What did Hamilton and Sherman say about entitative groups?
Highly entitative groups are similar to people.
How can entitativity affect the individual?
Negative - obediance.
Positive - helping.
Describe Group size and social loafing
Latané, Williams and Harkins
They predicted an inverse power function – as
group size increases, individual contributions to total effort decrease.
This is due to 3 reasons:
Output equity – people may loaf on collective tasks because they believe that people loaf in groups; thus they expect their partners to loaf and therefore loaf themselves in order to maintain equity, or avoid appearing to be a ‘sucker’.
Evaluation apprehension – the presence of group members provides a sense of being
anonymous and unidentifiable for people who are not
motivated on a task (e.g. an uninteresting, boring or tiring task; Kerr & Bruun, 1981). When performing individually or co-actively rather than collectively, people
are identifiable and thus apprehensive about performance evaluation by others, and they therefore overcome their unmotivated state.
Matching to standard – people loaf because they have no clear performance standard to match. The presence of a clear personal, social or group performance standard should reduce loafing.
Increased group size can lead to confusion of standard.
How important is membership of the group to its members?
Karau and Williams
Students on a secretarial course measured in terms of speed typing as a measure of effort. Either in an individual or group, and either with strangers or friends.
Increased effort with a group of friends, showing a group can increase effort not always cause loafing.
A look back: bystander intervention/diffusion of responsibilty.
Latané and Darley
We look at others to determine how to react.
People sitting in an office with smoke appearing, tested whether or not they reported the smoke.
alone vs passive confederates vs other naive subjects.
70% 10% 40%
How did Levine and Crowther show the bystander effect is not inevitable.
Empathy and the relationship between bystander
and victim is important.
Shared valued social membership between
bystander and victim could aid intervention and help;
we care about other group members.
Female post grad asking for help after an experiment, man aggressive. larger group of women asked to help.
What is social facilitation?
an improvement in performance produced by the mere presence of others
An improvement in the performance of well-learned/easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learned/difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species.
What is drive theory?
Zajonc’s theory that the physical presence of members of the same species instinctively causes arousal that motivates performance of habitual behaviour patterns.
What is the Ringelman effect? What was his experiment?
The individuals effort on a task diminishes as group size increases.
Tug of war with pseudo groups.
The results indicate a decrease in
individual performance in pseudo-groups. Because there was no coordination, there can be no loss due to poor coordination; the decrease can be attributed only to a loss of motivation. In real groups, there was an additional decrease in individual performance that can be attributed to coordination loss.
social loafing
What is the free rider effect?
Coasting while other people do the work.
What is social compensation?
Increased effort on a collective task to
compensate for other group members’ actual, perceived or anticipated lack of effort or ability.
Male and female participants constructed ‘moon tents’ out of sheets of paper in co-active two- or four-person groups – the usual loafing effect emerged. However, other participants who believed they were competing against an out-group and for whom the attractiveness and social relevance of the task were accentuated, behaved quite differently. The loafing effect was ac tually reversed: individuals constructed more ‘moon tents’ in the larger group.
What is the difference between social and personal attraction.
personal - true interpersonal attraction based on close relationships and idiosyncratic preferences.
social - inter-individual liking based on perceptions of self and others in terms not of individuality but of group norms or prototypicality.
What are the benefits of looking at social and personal attraction?
It does not reduce group solidarity and cohesiveness to interpersonal attraction.
It is as applicable to small interactive groups (the only valid focus of traditional models) as to large-scale social categories, such as an ethnic group or a nation (people can feel attracted to one another on the basis of common ethnic or national group membership)
What is a metatheory?
Set of interrelated concepts and principles concerning which theories or types of theory are appropriate.
What is intergroup behaviour?
Behaviour among individuals that is regulated by those individuals’ awareness of and identification with different social groups.
What is relative deprivation?
Why is it relevant?
A sense of having less than we feel entitled to, it’s a crucial precondition for intergroup aggression, but not neccessary as often linked to other factors.
Egoistic relative deprivation - A feeling of personally having less than we feel we are entitled to, relative to our aspirations or to other individuals
What is the general series of events that leads to collective violence?
relative deprivation.
frustration.
Aversive environmental conditions (e.g. heatwave)
amplifies frustration.
Individual acts of aggression .
Individual acts of aggression exacerbated by
aggressive stimuli (e.g. armed police).
Aggression becomes more widespread and
assumes role of dominant response.
Aggression spreads rapidly through social
facilitation process.
What is the J curve hypothesis?
A graphical figure that captures the way in which relative deprivation arises when attainments suddenly fall short of rising expectations.
In his J-curve hypothesis (see Figure 11.2), Davies (1969) suggested that people construct their future expectations from past and current attainments, and that under certain circumstances attainments may suddenly fall short of rising expectations. When this happens, relative deprivation is particularly acute, with the consequence of collective unrest revolutions of rising expectations.
What are the types of relative deprivation?
egoistic relative deprivation, which derives from the individual’s sense of deprivation relative to other similar individuals.
fraternalistic relative deprivation, which derives from comparisons with dissimilar others, or members of other groups. sense that our group has less than it is entitled to, relative to its aspirations or to other groups
What is social identity theory?
Tajfel & Turner
Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.
Focus on intergroup relations.
What is Ethnocentrism?
Evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to other groups.
What is behaviour differentiation?
Behaviour that emphasises differences between our own group and other groups
How is the social identity theory distinguishable from personal identity?
Social identity theory distinguishes social from personal identity as a deliberate attempt to avoid explaining group and intergroup processes in terms of personality attributes or interpersonal relations. Social identity theorists believe that many social psychological the-ories of group processes and intergroup relations are limited because they explain the phe-nomena by aggregating effects of personality predispositions or interpersonal relations.
What is the frustration-aggression hypothesis?
Theory that all frustration leads to aggression, and all aggression comes from frustration. Used to explain prejudice and intergroup aggression.
What is the metacontrast principle?
The prototype of a group is that position within the group that has the largest ratio of ‘differences to ingroup positions’ to ‘differences to outgroup positions’
Describe how a prototype is selected.
Not simply the average, it is the ideal features present. It could be possible nobody in the group fully encompases the prototype but they all strive toward it.
Depends on context, ingroup/outgroup can affect how the prototype is seen.
What is depersonalision?
The perception and treatment of self and
others not as unique individual persons but as prototypical embodiments of a social group.
What is the social mobility belief system?
Belief that intergroup boundaries are permeable. Thus, it is possible for someone to pass from a lower-status into a higher- status group to improve social identity. ‘MERICAA
What is the social change belief system?
Belief that intergroup boundaries are impermeable. Therefore, a lower-status individual can improve social identity only by challenging the legitimacy of the higher- status group’s position. VIVALAREVOLUTION
What are cognitive alternatives?
Trying to concieve an alternate social structure
Belief that the status quo is unstable and illegitimate, and that social competition with the dominant group is the appropriate strategy to improve social identity.
What is social creativity?
change how you view the world by taking on a different perspective, we may be worse at x but it makes us better at y.
Group-based behavioural strategies that improve social identity but do not directly attack the dominant group’s position.
What does it mean to see yourself as interpersonal or intergroup?
interpersonal is as an individual, intergroup is as part of a group - ie war soldiers.
Describe individual mobility.
Disidentification, although some groups cannot be left, ie gender or race.
What is social competition?
Direct intergroup conflict.
Group-based behavioural strategies that improve social identity by directly confronting the dominant group’s position in society.
What is the system justification theory?
Protecting the status quo even at yourown disadvantage.
It is quite possible that the motivation to do this is uncertainty reduction – better to live in disadvantage but be certain of one’s place than to challenge the status quo and face an uncertain future.
What is the self categorisation theory?
social identity theory of a group.
Turner and associates’ theory of how the process of categorising oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviours
A theory to explain how individuals act and think
as a group.
Followed SIT. Explains how group behaviour comes about through variously abstracted cognitive representations of the self.
- Need to examine cognitive principles relating to the categorization of self (as with other social stimuli)
- Importance of social context in determining self-categorization
How do you decide if somebody is in an ingroup or outgroup?
Prototypicality.
difference between target and outgroup/ tagret and ingroup.
What did Levine et al find out about self categorisation in relation to helping out in emergencies?
Man u vs Liverpool fans.
if primed with Man U fan, helped more Man U fans, then plain shirts, then Liverpool.
If primed with football fan, helped Man U and Liverpool equally, then plain less.
What is a self schema?
A meta analysis of the self - it influences and guides our self related info in subsequent experiences, it allows us to know how to behave and make accurate predictions about the future.
people are self-schematic on dimensions that are important to them, on which they think they are extreme and on which they are certain the opposite does not hold (Markus, 1977). For example, if you think you are sophisticated, definitely not unsophisticated, and being sophisticated is impor-tant to you, then you are self-schematic on that dimension – it is part of your self-concept. If you do not consider yourself sophisticated, and you do not really care much about being sophisticated or about the attribute sophisticated, then you are aschematic on that dimension.
Why did a sense of the self begin to arise?
Secularisation – the idea that fulfilment occurs in the afterlife was replaced by the idea that you should actively pursue personal fulfilment in this life.
Industrialisation – people were increasingly seen as units of production that would move from place to place to work, and thus would have a portable personal identity that was not locked into static social structures such as the extended family.
Enlightenment – people felt that they could organise and construc
t different, better, identities and lives for themselves by overthrowing orthodox value systems and oppres-sive regimes (e.g. the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century).
Psychoanalysis – Freud’s (e.g. 1921) theory of the human mind crystallised the notion that the self was unfathomable because it lurked in the gloomy depths of the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis has probably done most to problematise self and identity, because it attributes behaviour to complex dynamics that are hidden deep within the person’s sense of who they are
Why is the idea of a collected self not common anymore?
This is largely because social psychologists have considered groups to be made up of individuals who interact with one another rather than individuals who have a collective sense of shared identity.
Used to see a collected self and not individuals.
What is the looking glass self?
The self derived from seeing ourselves as others see us.
What is symbolic interactionism?
Theory of how the self emerges from human interaction, which involves people trading symbols (through language and gesture) that are usually consensual, and represent abstract properties rather than concrete objects.
What is Higgins self discrepancy theory?
actual self - how we currently are
ideal self – how we would like to be
‘ought’ self – how we think we should be
Higgins’ theory about the consequences of making actual–ideal and actual–‘ought’ self comparisons that reveal self-discrepancies.
Actual-ideal: dejection-related emotion
Actual-ought: agitation-related
What is self regulation?
Discrepancies between actual, and ideal or ‘ought’ can motivate change to reduce the discrepancy – in this way we engage in self-regulation.
What did Brewar and Gardner argue were the three types of self?
the individual self, defined by personal traits that differentiate the self from all others;
The relational self, defined by dyadic relationships that assimilate the self to significant other persons.
the collective self, defined by group membership that differentiates ‘us’from ‘them’.
What are the 3 main causes of threat to our sense of self worth?
Failures – these can range from failing a test, through failing a job interview, to a marriage ending in divorce.
Inconsistencies – these can be unusual and unexpected positive or negative events that make us question the sort of person we are.
Stressors – these are sudden or enduring events that seem to exceed our capacity to cope; they can inclu debereavement, a sick child and over-commitment to work
How can people respond to self conceptual threats?
Escape, denial, attack the cause, self expression, downplay the threat
What is the terror management theory?
They argue that knowledge of the inevitability of death is the most fundamental threat that people face, and therefore it is the most powerful motivating factor in human existence. Self-esteem is part of a defence against that threat.
Through high self-esteem, people can escape from the anxiety that would otherwise arise from continual contemplation of the inevitability ofn their death – the drive for self-esteem is grounded in terror of death. High self-esteem makes people feel good about themselves – they feel immortal, and positive and excited about life.
Describe Markus experiments based on self schemas.
study 1:
3 conditions - independent, dependent and aschematic.
asked if words describe me or not, differences in no of traits and response times.
study 2:
given a suggestibility rating, independents told they were suggestable, dependents told not, aschematic random.
aschematics took on the new info as truth/accurate. The people with a schema rejected it.
What is the fluid self? Onorato & Turner.
There is not a single self scehma, it is dependent upon context.
What is self stereotyping?
Applying in group traits to your self.
Describe Onorato & Turner’s experiments based upon the fluid self.
Study 1:
Use of Markus’ (1977) independence/dependence classification, replaced i with us, ie does this reflect your chracteristics as a woman?
Males endorsed more independent than dependent
words, and females endorsed more dependent than
independent words.
Males and females self-stereotyped, no effect on personal self schemas.
What did Markus and Kitayama say with regards to the view of self and culture?
The view of self is culture dependent.
Western - inderpendent.
Non-western - interdependent, motivated to find a way to fit in with relevant others, to fulfill and create obligation.
What do reaction times indicate?
How closely concepts are associated.
How does priming affect ones thought processes?
Priming brings an idea to mind and affects how you process new information.
Describe the social cognition and stereotyping experiment created by Dovido, Evans and Tyler.
A priming experiment.
White participants.
2 words.
White, black, or neutral word like house.
typical racial stereotypes, positive and negative.
If primed with white, a shorter response time to categorise a white stereotype, longer for black. vice versa.
What did Devine state about stereotypes?
Knowing about a stereotype and actually acting upon it are different things.
What were Devine’s experiments about automatic and controlled stereotypes?
Study 1:
Complete the modern rascism scale, assigned into high or low prejudice.
No difference found between high and low prejudice participants in knowledge of the Black cultural stereotype.
Study 2:
Stared at dot in centre of screen, flashed with words either side, either neutral or offensive stereotypical words.
Then told a story about Donald, no race specified and ambiguous motivation.
He was judged as more hostile with black priming regardless of high/low prejudice category. Automatic
Study 3:
Anonymously able to list thoughts about blacks, high prejudice more negative words, low prejudice rejected stereotype. When given the chance it was rejected, despite study 2.
Describe the dual task paradigm - Macrae, Milne and
Bodenhausen
Doing two things at once, categorisation helps “free up brain power”, less effort required.
Study 1:
Impression formation task, read about people, give conclusion about them.
also had to listen on headphones about mundane task.
test later on mundane task.
Either got a stereotype or not in the IF task.
When stereotype was present, remembered more traits, also did better in the quiz.
Study 2:
Subliminal priming, the same results as study 1.
Automatic, not consciously aware.
What did the Police officer’s dilemna show?
Came to the decision not to shoot an unarmed man more quickly is white, and to shoot more quickly if armed and black.
Also more mistakes made, not shoot armed white or shoot unarmed black.
What did Wegner et al say about suppressing stereotypes?
Paradoxical effect of suppression, you think about it more. White polar bear.
Some part of your brain has to be active to suppress the thought, which in turn makes it more accessible - hyperaccessible.
Describe Macrae et al’s experiments regarding suppressing stereotypes.
Study 1:
Participants shown photo of skinhead, write a passage on a ‘day in the life’. Half were asked to avoid thinking stereotypically Then given a new skinhead photo. No information provided here. Participants write another passage.
•Independent raters scored the passages for stereotypicality, 1 (not at all) to 9 (very stereotypic).
Passage 1 had a lower stereotypical score if asked to suppress.
Passage 2 had a higher stereotypical score if asked to suppress.
Control stayed the same.
Study 2:
Looked at a behavioual measure.
The same as study 1, but then asked to talk to a skinhead, measured the distance in chairs from skinhead.
People told to suppress stereotype sat further away.
What is a stereotype threat?
Performance on a task may be impaired by the knowledge of a negative stereotype, since you are aware that you may confirm the stereotype.
What did Spencer, Steele and Quinn find about stereotypical threat?
Women and maths, no other reason for underperforming.
Describe the gender bias in academic sciences.
‘Application’ for a lab manager job sent to scientists
in biology, chemistry and physics in 6 US universities
Participants asked to evaluate the application
(Cover story: feedback on the application materials)
Manipulated gender of applicant
Asked to rate competence, ‘hireability’, recommended salary, willingness to mentor, ‘likeability’.
Females scored lower on everything.
Is it possible to reduce stereotypes at an automatic level?
A skill that must be learnt, eventually it becomes like muscle memory.
After concept pairing negation training they decreased their automatic stereotyping.
What is cognitive dissonance?
Behaviour doesn’t align with your thinking.
Contradicting your own opinion, which do you change?
Fox - want something, can’t get it, changes opinion and now doesn’t want it.
Describe cognitive dissonance experiment -
Festinger and Carlsmith
Tedious task, turning square pegs.
Had to persuade somebody else to do the task, paid either a dollar or 20 dollars.
Had to rate how enjoyable they found the task,
Control not enjoyable.
$1 said the task was really fun
$20 said it wasn’t fun.
$20 have a good reason to lie, ie money, the $1 had to resolve their cognitive dissonance by altering how they found the task.
fucku behaviourism, $20 not most enjoyed.
What is the foot in the door method?
Start with a smaller request, then the bigger request
is more likely to be complied with.
Small request: Are you willing to answer a few questions about household products?
Large request: Could our staff come into your home
and classify all the products in your cupboards?
What is the door in the face method?
What if you start with a large request, expecting it not to be accepted, in order to make a more reasonable request?
What is low-balling?
Comply – i.e. agree to buy on the basis of a particular deal, terms of the deal then revised – now costs more
What did Milgrim show?
People felt removed from blame when another was telling them what to do.
When did social psychology go through a “crisis”
in the 70s, due to method, theory and individualism.
Individualism - Becoming too personal, personality traits to explain social structures.
Method - experimental issues, we see man as machine, are we reducing humans and devaluing humans? How far can lab findings be extrapolated?
Theory - predefine action possibilities, only allowing certain actions in experiments. A closed questionare in experimental form.
Are there universal laws, ie time or space.
What is the cognitive approach to categories?
Categories help think about thinks quickly and easily.
What is the discursive approach to categories?
Doesn’t proceed thought, no need to reference cognitive mental entities, categories don’t come before we decide how to act.
Instead categories emerge through interaction.
Instead of looking at attitudes x or y, look at what occasions do we see them, how are they constructed, what is their function?
What did Billing say was a key problem with categorisation?
Leads to stereotyping and prejudice inevitably.
Can also question both the categories and the prototypes.
We use categories to argue a point, and changing categories can alter your argument.
What does Poole mean by “unspeak”
Repacking your argument, ie not pro abortion - pro choice.
The category carries assumptions.
‘Community’ as category
Potter and Reicher
Everybody’s construction of a social event differs, and can look at social categories in use.
Looking at how categories are used in context is how we understand what categories mean.
What is the contact hypothesis?
Allport
If you meet and learn about people from other groups, your relations will improve. However certain conditions must be met.
To be maximally effective, contact and acquaintance
programs should lead to a sense of equality in social status, should occur in ordinary purposeful pursuits, avoid artificiality, and if possible enjoy the sanction of the community in which they occur.
What did Stephan and Stephan conclude about reducing prejudice?
What are their types of interventions?
Resolve doesn’t come naturally, practical schemes are needed.
Different types of interventions: Promoting multiculturalism through education Diversity training in groups Organised intergroup dialogues Co-operative learning groups
Describe promoting multiculturalism through education.
Understanding the perspective of a minority group, trying to teach people moral education through a classroom.
Evidence shows it does work, having in group favouritism isn’t the same as putting down out groups.
Describe diversity retraining.
from the US military, common in the business workplace.
Mixed evidence, measuring issues. No long term follow up, only measure after a 2 day course. Is it really enough to change a firm attitude?
Describe organised intergroup disalogues.
Groups have history, often negative. Force them to talk through the issues, you can decrease hostility and increase understanding.
Successful for college students over a year.
Arab/Jewish youth in Israel, mixed.
Describe the co-operative learning groups.
Exchange program, you’re not trying to improve attitudes, you just are exposed to other people and depend on each other.
Describe extended contact, Wright et al.
What were his experiment?
Having an ingroup member who is friends with an outgroup member reduces prejudice.
Study:
Measure friendship type.
Higher intergroup relationships reduced prejudice.
What is the colour blind perspective on intergroup harmony? What is the multicultural group?
Experiment?
Multiculturalism emphasises group differences instead of reducing them, opposing categorisation leads to prejudice.
Colour blindness is when you see everyone as the same, reducing the differences.
Read a political essay.
A description either stating a need for understanding difference, or a need for common humanity, or control.
Measured stereotyping through a questionare.
Multiculturalism priming had a stereotyped view of groups, but also a positive view.
What individual differences can alter which schema is used?
Attributional complexity – people vary in the complexity and number of their explanations of other people
Uncertainty orientation – people vary in their interest in gaining information versus remaining uninformed but certain
Need for cognition – people differ in how much they like to think deeply about things
Cognitive complexity – people differ in the complexity of their cognitive processes and representations
What are the processes of schema change?
Bookkeeping – a slow process of gradual change in response to new evidence.
Conversion – disconfirming information gradually accrues until something like a critical mass has been attained, at which point there is a sudden and massive change.
Subtyping - schemas change their configuration, in response to disconfirming instances, by the formation of subcategories.
What does salience mean?
Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.
Considered more influential in a group.
They are salient due to vividness.
What are the 3 components of prejudice traditionally?
cognitive – beliefs about the attitude object
affective – strong feelings (usually negative) about the
attitude object and the qualities it is believed to possess
conative – intentions to behave in certain ways towards the attitude object (the conative component is an intention to act in certain ways, not the action itself).
What is the glass ceiling theory?
An invisible barrier that prevents women, and minorities, from attaining top leadership positions.
In ambiguous situations male were granted credit when women were not.
related - females success attributed to luck not skill.
What is face-ism?
Media depiction that gives greater prominence to the head and less prominence to the body for men, but vice versa for women.
What is tokenism?
Practice of publicly making small concessions to a minority group in order to deflect accusations of prejudice and discrimination
What is reverse discrimination?
The practice of publicly being prejudiced in favour of a minority groupin order to deflect accusations of prejudice and discrimination against that group.
How can we be influenced by different factors?
Who:
Experts are more persuasive than non-experts.
Popular and attractive communicators are more effective than unpopular or unattractive ones.
People who speak rapidly are more persuasive than
people who speak slowly. Rapid speech gives an
impression of ‘I know what I’m talking about.
What:
We are more easily persuaded if we think the message
is not deliberately intended to manipulate us.
A message in a powerless linguistic style (frequent
hedges, tag questions, hesitations) is less persuasive than one in a powerful linguistic style. A powerless style gives a negative impression of both the argu-
ments and the speaker.
Messages that arouse fear can be very effective. For
example, to stop people smoking we might show
them pictures of cancerous lungs.
To whom:
People with low self-esteem are persuaded more easily
than people with high self-esteem.
People are sometimes more susceptible to persuasion
when they are distracted than when paying full attention, at least when the message is simple
People in the ‘impressionable years’ are more susceptible to persuasion than those who are older.
What is the third person effect?
People think that they are less influenced than others by advertisements.
What is ingratiation?
What is the ingratatiators dilemna?
Strategic attempt to get someone to like you in order to obtain compliance with a request.
the more obvious it is that an ingratiator will profit by impressing the target person, the less likely it is that the tactic will succeed.
What is the reciprocity principle?
The law of ‘doing unto others as they do to you’. It can refer to an attempt to gain compliance by first doing someone a favour, or to mutual aggression or mutual attraction.
If we do others a favour, they feel obliged to reciprocate. Regan (1971) showed that greater compliance was obtained from people who had previously received a favour than from those who had received none. Similarly, guilt arousal produces more compliance. People who are induced to feel guilty are more likely to comply with a later request: for example, to make a phone call to save native trees, to agree to donate blood, or at a university to participate in an experiment.
What can increase complianceness?
Mindlessness - having any reason at all regardless of how justified increases compliance as opposed to no reason.
What is a post decisional conflict?
The dissonance associated with behaving in a counter-attitudinal way. Dissonance can be reduced by bringing the attitude into line with the behaviour.
Describe reference and membership groups.
For example, if I am a student but I despise all the attributes of being a student, and if I would much rather be a lecturer because I value lecturer norms so much more, then ‘student’ is my membership group and is also a negative reference group, while ‘lecturer’ is a positive reference group but not my membership group. I will comply with student norms but conform to lecturer norms
What is the dual process dependency model?
General model of social influence in which two separate processes operate – dependency on others for social approval and for information about reality.
What is an agentic state?
A frame of mind thought by Milgram to characterise unquestioning obedience, in which people as agents transfer personal responsibility to the person giving orders.
What is locution?
Words placed in sequence.
What is illocution?
Words placed in sequence and the context in which this is done.
‘It’s hot in this room’ may be a statement, or a criticism of the institution for not providing cooled rooms, or a request to turn on the air conditioner, or a plea to move to another room.
What is linguistic relativity?
View that language determines thought and therefore people who speak different languages see the world in very different ways.
Describe aggressive cues and the weapons effect.
the mere presence of weapons makes hostility and using it more likely.
What are the types of intergroup threat that can be felt?
realistic threat – a sense of threat to the very existence of one’s group, well-being, polit-ical power and so forth;
symbolic threat – a threat posed by the outgroup to one’s values, be liefs, morals and norms;
intergroup anxiety – a threat to self (e.g. embarrassment, fear of rejecti on) which is experienced during intergroup interactions; and
negative stereotypes – fear of intergroup anxiety (not actually experienced intergroup anxiety but imagined or anticipated) based on negat ive stereotypes of an outgroup.
What is mediation?
Process of intergroup conflict resolution where a neutral third party intervenes in the negotiation process to facilitate a settlement.
ie referee
What is arbitration?
Process of intergroup conflict resolution in which a neutral third party is invited to impose a mutually binding settlement.
last resort
What is conciliation?
Process whereby groups make cooperative gestures to one another in the hope of avoiding an escalation of conflict.
