The individual and the group Flashcards
What are the three subtopics under the individual and the group?
Social Cognitive Theory, Social Identity Theory and Stereotypes
What studies support the Social Identity Theory?
De Dreu, Nass Fog and Moon, Cialdini, Sherif, Tajfel and Turner and Tajfel
What studies support the social cognitive theory?
Bandura Ross and Ross/ Bandura
What studies support the formation of stereotypes?
Hamilton and Gilford and Tajfel and Turner
Outline SIT
- explains intergroup conflict as to account for the disagreements that may emerge between groups
- The social identity is very important to how we feel about yourselves
- we categorise people into social groups ( social categorisation) determining in group and outgroup and then compare the statuses of our own group to others ( social comparison)
- sometimes effort needs to be put in to ensure positive distinctiveness ( when we want out social group to come out on top) like when it is difficult to determine the difference between the in group and out group and the in group members need to work hard to set their group up as the better one
- possible for in group members to compete even if there is not a reason to ( Tajfel)
- we want our self esteem to be associated with the group we are in
- when we cannot make out group come out on top agression occurs
Cialdini
Cialdini conducted several different studies relating to students’ willingness to identify with their university depending on whether their (American) football team had won or lost a match.
Significantly more students were observed wearing university-branded clothing the Monday after a victory in a weekend game than after a loss. This suggested that students wanted to be associated with success rather than with failure.
Significantly more students who had been told that they’d done poorly in a phone ‘quiz’ about their university described a football team’s victory as ‘we’ than did students who’d been told they’d done well in the quiz. This suggested that associating with success is a way of boosting self-esteem.
Significantly more students used ‘we’ when describing a win than they had done when previously they’d had to describe a loss. This suggested that being connected to a losing team is experienced in the same way as a personal failure and that a self-esteem boost is then desirable.
Overall, students tended to demonstrate their affiliation to a winning team more than to a losing team in a behaviour termed ‘BIRGing’ (basking in reflected glory). This serves to boost self-esteem.
Tajfel
Tajfel had his participants - 14/15yo schoolboys - pick a favourite picture, which then acted as the basis for group allocation. The boys then, on their own, had the chance to allocate points to other members of their group, and also the other group in which the points would be later on converted into money. The boys tended to try to give as much as they could to members of their own group, although there was an element of fairness in their allocations. However, there were times when the boys would give a smaller number of points to one of their own if that meant that even less would be allocated to a member of the other group. This shows that we tend to value relative success (‘beating’ others) more than we do absolute success (doing the best we can regardless of others). Group membership is one factor that affects our behaviour, making us tend towards ‘winning’ behaviours more than ‘achieving’ behaviours. It takes very little to make people start acting with a social identity (as a member of a group).
De Dreu
De Dreu conducted studies looking at the role of oxytocin in explaining in-group and out-group behaviours. He used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures people’s unconscious biases towards different groups. He had his Dutch participants completing an IAT where they had photos of native Dutch men and immigrant Morrocan men, plus a collection of positive and negative words. The IAT measured how strongly participants associated positive and negative words to the two different groups of people. To investigate the role of oxytocin in this task, De Dreu had half the participants receive a nasal dose of an oxytocin spray, while the other half received the same spray but without oxytocin in it (placebo condition).
De Dreu’s results showed that participants who’d received oxytocin associated Dutch men with positive words significantly more strongly than they did Moroccan men. There was also a tendency, under the influence of oxytocin, for participants to associate negative words with the Moroccan men.
De Dreu concluded that oxytocin can lead to intergroup biases in terms of behaviour because it motivates in-group favouritism. Such behaviour can plausibly be presented as giving a survival advantage to a group, and so gives support for the idea that in-group favouritism is an evolved behaviour, mediated by the biological factor of oxytocin instead of a sociological factor
Nass Fog and Moon ( might leave out)
Ppts were told either that they were working as part of the ‘blue team’, interacting with a ‘blue computer’ or that they were going to be working as a ‘blue individual’, interacting with a ‘green computer’. This established two conditions: ‘identity’ and ‘non-identity’. Ppts were also told that their performance was either going to be evaluated with the computer (interdependence condition) or separately from the computer (independence condition).
Ppts then completed a desert survival problem, where the task required the ranking of various items in terms of how useful they might be in the case of crashing in the desert and then they had to enter their rankings into their computer. Each computer was set up to offer a different set of rankings (designed so that it always re-ranked every ppt’s own rankings in exactly the same way), including a brief but neutral description of each item and how it might affect survival. It was made clear that the computer may not give the ‘right’ answers, and so ppts had to consider how useful the computer’s rankings might be. Ppts were given the chance to change their rankings if they wanted to. The amount by which ppts changed their rankings was treated as a measure of behavioural conformity.
Finally, ppts completed two questionnaires with Likert scales, related to their interaction with, and attitudes towards, the computer. This was to determine the degree to which ppts considered themselves to be working with their computer.
Nass, Fogg & Moon found that the more strongly ppts felt themselves to be interdependent with their computer, the higher their reported team affiliation, the more cooperative they considered themselves to be, the better they considered the information from their computer to be, and the more conformity they showed to their computers’ rankings. {NEW INFORMATION (August 2021): the identity manipulation had no effect. The colours, while easy to remember, are not an important factor.]
Overall, these results show that humans will form affiliations even with a computer, and will show similar patterns of behaviour as they do when affiliated with other people. This affects both attitudes and actions. When we feel part of a team, our attitudes to others changes. Specifically, we are more positive towards, trusting of and cooperative with ingroup members.
Bandura
To test the hypothesis that the consequences that someone else receives for a behaviour will affect whether a child will reproduce the behaviour but won’t affect whether they learn the behaviour. Children were split into three groups. Individually, all children watched a video of an adult model beating up a Bobo doll using “novel aggressive responses” and “distinctive verbalisations”. The three groups then saw different endings to the video: Model rewarded - adult was told that they were a ‘strong champion’ and were given lemonade, crisps and chocolate. Model punished - adult was told they were a big bully and were then beaten with a rolled-up newspaper and threatened with more. No consequences (video stopped after the interactions with Bobo). Children were then taken to a room containing a number of toys, including a Bobo doll and everything that the model had used to beat it up with. The children were told that they were free to play while the researcher went to get some more toys and watched through a one way mirror.This phase measured reproduction of observed behaviours. Finally, children were offered rewards for every behaviour they were able to intimidate. This phase measured the acquisition (learning) of observed behaviours.
Children who’d seen the model punished were significantly less likely to reproduce the observed behaviours spontaneously.
Acquisition of observed behaviours: with the incentives on offer, children in all conditions revealed “an equivalent amount of imitative learning”, meaning that there were no significant differences between any of the conditions.
The consequences that someone else faces because of something they have done don’t change whether or not an observer will learn what they have seen, but can affect whether they will copy what they have seen.
The study demonstrates that motivation may be necessary before imitation occurs, but that learning takes place without requiring imitation.
Outline the Social Cognitive Theory
-proposed that it is not only direct personal experience that we learn from, but also from everything that we see other people doing
-and acquired through observation or imitation based on consequences of a behaviour.
- 4 aspects of behaviour acqusition : attention, retention, motivation, reproducibility
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What is attention?
- Attention must be paid in order to observe the behaviour shown then to imitate
What is retention?
- Retention - if someone doesn’t remember what they’ve seen, then imitation is not going to happen.
- They need to be able to remember what they have seen in order to imitate
What is reproducibility?
- Reproducibility - if someone is physically or cognitively unable to attempt to imitate what they have observed (or believes that they are unable), then imitation is not going to happen.
- must be physically or cognitively able to imitate the behaviour they have observed
What is motivation?
- Motivation - if someone doesn’t want to imitate what they have seen, then they won’t.
- Their has to be a want in order to imitate the behaviour they have seen
