Human Relationships concepts

Experiment

• Procedure is standardized (replicable)

• Can establish cause and effect relationships

• Data can be statistically analyzed to determine the role of chance in the results

• A control condition is used

• Demand characteristics can occur

True experiment

Participants are randomly allocated to conditions (decreases likelihood that individual characteristics impact results)

Laboratory experiment

• Highly controlled to prevent extraneous variables

• Low ecological validity

Field experiment

• Done in a natural setting

• Cannot prevent extraneous variables and are difficult to replicate

Quasi experiment

• Participants are grouped by a trait or behavior

• Doesn’t show direct causation but implies a causal relationship (less control over pre-existing variables)

Correlational study

• Tests the correlation between variables (not cause and effect)

• Variables are only observed (not manipulated)

• Limited control (high likelihood of extraneous variables)

• High external validity (conclusions can be generalized to other populations)

Case study

• And in-depth study of an individual (or group of people) with a particular condition

• Allow researchers to study phenomena that cannot be produced ethically in a lab

• The use of triangulation increases validity

• Holistic approach

• Cannot be replicated (low reliability)

• Difficult to generalize to other people

• Cannot establish cause and effect relationships

Questionnaire

• They produce rich, qualitative data about someone's opinions and/or attitudes

• Cannot establish cause and effect

• Easy to administer and generate a lot of data

• Cannot be analysed statistically and are open to researcher bias

• Social desirability effect can happen

Protection from undue stress/harm

• Undue stress is a higher level of stress than experienced on a daily basis

• Participants should not be humiliated

• Participants should not be forced to reveal private information

• Nothing should be done to participants that will permanently damage their mental or physical health

Informed consent

• Participants must be told the nature of the study before it begins (what the research is about and what potential problems might arise)

• Participants must be informed of their rights, including the right to withdraw from the study (psychologists should not pressure or coerce participants who no longer want to be in the study and their data must be withdrawn)

• Parents must give consent for children

• Parents or guardians generally give consent for those with mental or physical disabilities if they cannot understand the implications of being in an experiment

• Informed consent is difficult when the nature of the study involves complex terminology (specifically in the biological approach)

Deception

• If a psychologist tells you what an experiment is about, you might change your behavior (demand characteristics)

• Deception includes misinformation and not revealing the entire aim of the study

• Slight deception is allowed in some cases when it doesn’t cause stress to the participants, but its necessity must be justified and approved by an ethics board

Debriefing

• At the end of the experiment, participants must be told the real aims and purpose of the experiment, and any use of deception should be justified to the participants

• Participants should leave the experiment in the same physical and psychological condition they arrived in

• All data must be guaranteed to be anonymized (the identities of the participants must not be revealed when the data is published or with any use of the data after)

Prosocial behavior/altruism

Prosocial behavior: behavior that benefits another person or has positive social consequences (behavior that is intended to help or benefit another person, a group of persons, or even society as a whole)

Altruism: when one helps another person for no reward, and perhaps even at some cost to oneself (an unselfish interest in helping another person)

Prosocial behavior (biological)

Kin selection theory: the degree of altruism depends on the genetic similarity of individuals in a group (the closer the genetic relationship, the higher the likelihood of altruistic behavior)

Dawkins’s Selfish Gene theory: there is an innate drive for the survival and propagation of one’s genes (it is not the individual or species competing for survival, it is the genes globally → inclusive fitness), altruistic behavior ensures that genes are passed down 

• Evolutionary explanations are nearly impossible to test under controlled conditions

• Genes cannot identify other people with similar genes, so this could be done by looking at physical proximity (people physically closest to you are likely to be related to you)

• Most research is based on anecdotal data (open to memory distortion and demand characteristics)

• Spontaneous helping behavior can be seen in other primates
  

Evaluation:

• Biological explanations are reductionist and ignore socialization, culture, and individual experiences

• Genetic and cultural variables cannot be isolated under controlled conditions

• Biological theories do not explain individual differences

• It is difficult to generalize animal behavior to explain human prosocial behavior

• Evolutionary theory depends on genes, and no genes contributing to prosocial behavior have been identified

Prosocial behavior (cognitive)

Theory of mind: the ability to understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, and perspectives that may differ from one's own

Empathy: understanding and sharing the emotions of others

Empathy Altruism model (Toi and Batson)

• People experience either personal distress (anxiety/fear) or empathetic concern (sympathy/compassion) when they see someone suffering

• Personal distress leads to egoistic helping (you consider the cost and benefits of helping) and empathetic concern leads to altruistic helping (relieving the person’s suffering is your main priority)

• Animal research shows that empathy may play a role in helping behavior (Bartal, Decety, & Mason)

• Brain imaging technology has shown that areas of the brain linked to empathy may be active during prosocial behavior (Masten et al)

Negative State Relief model (Cialdini): prosocial behavior is motivated by the desire to reduce one’s discomfort caused by the negative situation of someone else

• Egoistic motives lead us to help rather than empathy

• Explains behavior but does not predict it

Evaluation:

Strengths:

• Supported by biological evidence (human and animal research)

• Explains individual differences

• Understanding the role of empathy can be used to design interventions promoting prosocial behavior

Limitations:

• Limited predictive validity

• Research that attempts to establish cause and effect is generally hypothetical (low ecological validity)

• Difficult to operationalize empathy, particularly in artificial situations

• Reductionist (situational factors like social norms and the presence of bystanders can also play a role in prosocial behavior)

Prosocial behavior (sociocultural)*

Social Identity Theory:

• Argues that people don’t only have a personal self, they also have many social selves that correspond to group membership

• Salience: when you become highly aware of a group membership, more salient identities are more likely to influence behavior

• Four key mechanisms:

  • Social categorization: classifying people into groups based on similar characteristics, creates in-groups and out-groups (even when people are randomly assigned to a group), enables in-group favoritism

  • Social identification: taking on the norms and characteristics of a group

  • Social comparison: maintaining self-esteem by considering the benefits of belonging to the in-group instead of the out-group, and justifying your membership in the group

  • Positive distinctiveness: being more positive towards anything your in-group represents

• Only describes behavior, doesn’t predict it

• Reductionist when used in isolation (doesn’t address how the environment interacts with the self)

• Can be applied to conformity, juries, emergency situations, sexuality, and football hooliganism

• People feel stronger responsibility towards their in-group (in-group favoritism)

  • When people in your in-group need help, you assume they really need support

  • When a member of your out-group needs help, you may feel that they deserved the bad situation or that you are not responsible for helping them

• Helping behavior can also be a means of seeking approval from the in-group to develop a sense of belonging

Social norms: unspoken rules that govern how people interact with each other

• Vary between cultures

• Learned and reinforced through socialization

• Social norms can both increase and decrease likelihood of prosocial behavior

• Social norms can make people hesitant to intervene in situations that aren’t “their business”

• Family structures/dynamics can influence prosocial behavior (prosocial behavior can be learned in an environment that models it)

• Cultural norms can influence prosocial behavior

  • Simpatico hypothesis: people in communities where social obligations take priority over individual achievements tend to be less economically productive but show more willingness to assist others

 

Evaluation:

• Prosocial behavior is a complex interaction of environmental and social factors that cannot be isolated to determine which play the most significant role

• Cross-cultural research is difficult because of researcher bias

• Prone to ecological fallacy (generalizing across cultures and assuming that people within the same cultural group will behave similarly)

• Accounts for differences in the level of prosocial behavior between groups

• Studies in controlled conditions have low ecological validity and studies in the field have low internal validity; however, results are similar under both conditions

Bystanderism

Bystanderism: not helping someone in need of help

Diffusion of responsibility: assuming that somebody else can, should, and probably will offer assistance to someone in distress

Informational social influence (looking to others in a group to determine how to react) can lead to pluralistic ignorance (seeing that others are not reacting in an emergency situation, so not reacting yourself)

Evaluation apprehension: the fear of social criticism for helping in a situation where helping was unnecessary

Social exchange theory: Human relationships are based on a rational and subjective cost-benefit analysis, and we are more likely to help when we feel that the benefits (financial reward, esteem, affection, avoidance of failure or humiliation) outweigh the costs (humiliation, pain, financial loss)

Arousal-Cost-Reward model (Piliavin): 

• Arousal is an unpleasant emotion that bystanders are motivated to reduce; however, before helping people assess possible costs and benefits associated with helping or not helping

• Assumes that prosocial behavior is motivated by emotion and cognition

• Arousal is always present in emergency situations (could be fear, disgust, or sympathy depending on the situation)

• Arousal can be increased through empathy, proximity to the emergency, and length of the emergency

• Arousal can be decreased through helping, seeking help from another source, leaving the emergency, or deciding the person does not need or deserve help

• We are not motivated to help because of altruism, but rather the desire to reduce unpleasant feelings of arousal (link to Cialdini’s Negative State Relief model)

Latane’s Law of Social Impact: helping is a result of the strength of the situation (do you have the knowledge/skill required and is your safety threatened), the immediacy of the person needing help (physical proximity and how much time is left to safe the victim → temporal), and the number of people involved (diffusion of responsibility)

Promoting prosocial behavior

• Increases in prosocial behavior observed in many studies could be due to priming and not learning

• Increases in prosocial behavior after examples of prosocial behavior can be explained by Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Personal relationships

Romantic relationship: a relationship involving strong and frequent interdependence in many domains of life

• Passionate love: complete absorption in another person that includes sexual feelings and intense emotion (a state of intense longing for union with another person; it is a mix of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiological functions)

• Companionate love: warm, trusting, tolerant affection for another whose life is deeply intertwined with one’s own

• Begins with attraction

Formation of personal relationships (biological)

• Attraction is rooted in natural selection (we are attracted to traits with the greatest advantage for potential offspring)

• Attraction is a physiological response

  • Neurotransmitters: dopamine (feel-good neurotransmitter, responsible for motivation), noradrenaline (help control emotions and stress, responsible for rush of excitement, stimulates adrenaline production), serotonin (low levels can cause obsessive thinking and mood extremes)

  • Hormones: testosterone (increases sexual desire and feelings of aggression)

  • Potentially pheromones

Over time, attraction shifts to attachment (an intimate relationship with feelings of comfort, security, and relatedness)

• Humans have an innate attachment system consisting of specific behaviors and physiological responses called attachment behaviors

• Attachment keeps people together once romantic love dissolves

• Vasopressin plays a role in long-term commitment

• Oxytocin intensifies feelings of attachment

Receiving more diverse MHC genes (Major Histocompatibility Complex) leads to a stronger immune system

• The genes are co-dominant

• Advantageous to have offspring with a stronger immune system, so beneficial to recognize the MHC genes of others

• MHC influences body odor

Formation of personal relationships (cognitive)

Similarity-Attraction model: we like and are attracted to people who are most similar to us (age, religion, social class, cultural background, personality, education, intelligence, physical attractiveness, and attitudes)

• Validates opinions and boosts self-esteem

Internal working model (Bowlby): 

• As children we form schema based on our first bonded relationship (typically with mother or another caregiver)

• The schema include: ideas about attachment figures and what to expect from them, ideas about self, and ideas about how self and others relate
  

Halo effect: the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area

• In the context of relationships: beautiful people = good people

• A result of system 1 thinking (falling in love normally isn’t rational)

Evaluation:

• Cognitive theories account for individual differences

• Many studies are high in ecological validity (actual dating sites)

• Some constructs are difficult to measure (internal working model)

• Factors influencing relationship formation cannot be isolated under natural conditions

• Reductionist when considered alongside other approaches

Formation of personal relationships (sociocultural)

Sociocultural psychologists argue there is no empirical proof that cognition comes before decision making

• Robert Zajonc argues there is likely very little cognition; we first decide we like something and then rationalize that decision

Mere exposure effect: people tend to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them; the more frequently we are exposed to something, the more we like it

• Original study was very artificial, with participants being shown pictures of faces in different frequencies and then rating how much they would like the person

There are cultural differences in what is found attractive

• Passionate love is considered a Western phenomenon

Evaluation:

• Sociocultural theories account for individual differences

• Many studies are experimental and can be replicated for reliability

• Theories are less deterministic and more holistic

• Laboratory studies are highly artificial and lack ecological validity

• Issues with construct validity of variables like attraction or liking

• Cultural research tends to stress differences rather than similarities

• Many studies are based on questionnaires and surveys → demand characteristics

• A majority of the research is etic, and asks people to rank qualities sought out in Western relationships

Role of communication in relationships

Communication involves what you say and how you say it

Bradbury & Fincham’s Attributional Theory:

• Happy couples engage in relationship-enhancing communication patterns when there is a disagreement (not blaming their partners or assuming they did things on purpose, negative behaviors are attributed to the situation)

• Unhappy couples engage in distress-maintaining communication patterns (blaming partners for negative events and not giving them credit for positive events)

• Issue of bidirectional ambiguity (negative communication → bad relationship or the other way around)

• Reductionist to say relationships fail solely because of attributional styles

• In highly dysfunctional relationships “relationship-enhancing” communication patterns can lead to excusing violent behaviors

Social penetration theory (Altman & Taylor):

• Close relationships are formed by a process of gradual self-disclosure (sharing personal things about yourself with someone that you trust)

• Self-disclosure leads to self-validation

• Disclosure is part of the cost-benefit analysis that takes place in a relationship

• There are four levels of disclosure:

  • The orientation stage: “small talk”, sharing simple information about yourself without revealing anything vulnerable, low level of risk

  • The exploratory stage: revealing more about your feelings and opinions but sticking to safe topics (politics, jobs, thoughts on the future), many friendships stay here

  • The affective stage: beginning to share private/personal information, often involves intimate physical relations

  • The stable stage: feeling like you can be honest and open with your partner, strong sense of trust, you can predict your partner’s emotional reactions

  • Mnemonic Only Elephants Are Smart

• Difficult to determine cause and effect between disclosure and relationship health (it is more likely that disclosure is the result of healthy relationships and not the cause)

• Most research has been conducted on Western women (sampling bias, and overly simplistic since men and women have different disclosure patterns)

• Reductionist when used in isolation

Why relationships change/end

• Relationships are comfortable when they are predictable, but crises occur when the predictability is disrupted (having a child, moving to a new city, breaking established “rules” that minimize the potential for conflict)

• These “rules” include respecting privacy, not sharing information that has been disclosed, being emotionally supportive, and being honest
  

Social exchange theory: relationships are maintained through a cost-benefit analysis, a relationships lasts only as long as both partners consider the benefits to outweigh the costs

• Short term lack of balance can be tolerated, but it must be restored for the relationship to survive

• Might be too simplistic and you can’t reliably measure costs and benefits
  

Equity theory: the perception of equality determines whether relationships are maintained

• Can be used to explain cheating

• Doesn’t take emotion into account (same with social exchange theory)

• Lacks cross-cultural validity (same with social exchange theory)

• Difficult to quantify costs and rewards to rigorously test theory (same with social exchange theory)
  

Fatal attraction theory (Felmlee): what attracts you to your partner in the first place may be the reason the relationship ends

• Common patterns include: fun to foolish (initially liked the sense of humor but now see it as a way to avoid problems or humiliation), strong to domineering (liked confidence but now see it as uncompromising and potentially abusive), and spontaneous to unpredictable (initially exciting but later can be seen as a lack or seriousness or potentially lead to cheating)
  

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Gottman)

• Seems like it has high predictive validity, but most of the participants are in relationships that are already failing because of long-term problems

Methodological considerations

• Most research is correlational because it is often difficult and unethical to carry out research on couples (cause and effect cannot be established)

• If experiments are done, they normally involve hypothetical scenarios (questionable predictive validity)

• Sampling bias (university students, individualistic cultures, or people who sought out therapy to save a failing marriage)

• For retrospective studies you cannot verify the accuracy of what participants say, there is the potential for memory distortion, and also the potential for the peak-end rule to influence perception of the relationship

• Demand characteristics for self-reported data

Cooperation/competition

Social group: two or more people who interact with each other and perceive themselves as a distinct social unit

Norms: implicit or explicit, guide behavior in a group

• They provide guidelines for behavior and when they are followed lead to social approval (Zimbardo)

• Often internalized and become part of values and beliefs

• Allow group members to show commitment

Intragroup behavior: how members of a group interact

Intergroup behavior: how members of one group interact with members of another group (collectively or individually) → SIT

Competitive relationships (Deutsch): poor communication (distrust/withholding of information), suspicion of others’ intentions, difficult to divide work, rejection of ideas leading to low self-esteem, seeing an increase in a another group’s power as a threat to your group, rigid thinking without compromise

Cooperative relationships (Deutsch): effective communication, common goals, division of work, similarity in values and beliefs, a sense of trust, everyone’s needs are validated

Cooperation: people working together towards commonly agreed upon goals rather than working separately in competition (a form of prosocial behavior)

• Cooperation is required for solving global issues (but is often difficult because of inequalities between groups)

• Many people naturally act in self-interest even if resources are rapidly declining

• Social norms determine whether people will cooperate; if cooperation is a norm, then cooperation is more likely if you believe a sufficient number of people will also conform and that a sufficient number of people expect you to conform → can be increased through laws/limitations (Bicchieri)

• Cooperating because you see other people cooperating when you are unsure of what to do is informational social influence

• Social norms that encourage cooperation lead to more cooperative behavior (Sattler and Kerr)

• Greed can also play a role in deciding whether or not to cooperate (Dawes et al.) → cost-benefit analysis

• Cooperation decreases in larger groups

  • As the number of people in a group increases, individual contributions become less identifiable, which leads to more free riding

  • You feel like you make less of a difference

  • Large groups can lead to deindividuation (loss of self-awareness and feeling anonymous), which removes pressure to conform to cooperation as a social norm

• Individualistic cultures show more hard work when individual contributions are noted, and less hard work when working in groups (social loafing); collectivistic cultures work better in groups than they do alone (Gabrenya, Wang & Latané)
  

Free-riding effect: when you do less work because other people are working hard

Sucker effect: feeling like you are doing more than your fair share of the group's work and consequently decreasing your level of effort

Social loafing: the tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group compared to when working alone, often assuming others will make up for their reduced contribution

Prejudice and discrmination

Stereotyping: a cognitive process where people categorize themselves and others based on group membership

Stereotype: a simplified mental representation of a person, group of people, or institution that is shared by many people

Discrimination: when a person treats someone differently based on his or her membership of a group, rather than on individual merit (a behavior)

Prejudice: an attitude (cognition + emotion); a favorable or unfavorable predisposition toward any member of a group

Prejudice (cognitive)

Hostility is a key emotional component of prejudice (Allport)

The availability heuristic (basing decisions on the most readily available information) can lead to the development of prejudice → influences schema which influences perception of groups of people

Overcoming prejudice requires decategorization, which is very difficult because of confirmation bias (the tendency to look for information that confirms stereotypes of prejudices)

• Challenging prejudice could involve exposing people who hold a stereotype to many members of that group that do not fit the stereotype (unfavorable traits only need a few examples to confirm stereotypes, but many more are needed to disconfirm them; Rothbart and John)

Theory of threatened egotism: intergroup discrimination occurs when your own perception of self is threatened

• Acting out against the out-group makes you feel better about yourself and restores self-esteem (Fein & Spencer)

Prejudice (sociocultural)

Social norms change over time, and group members change their behavior to conform to new norms

Society and culture can teach stereotypes and prejudices → these learned thought patterns may lead to physiological arousal and therefore hostile emotions against the out-group

Integrated threat theory (Stephan et al): prejudice is the result of three types of threats: stereotyping (creates expectations about out-groups, leading to prejudice), realistic threats (competition for economic resources) and symbolic threats (perceived threats to one’s culture as a result of the integration of members of the out-group with different morals, social norms, and values)

Prejudice (biological)

The amygdala and fear response may play a key role in social cognition

The insula (a part of the brain associated with disgust responses) is activated when looking at certain social groups → the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain activated when thinking about yourself or other people) is sometimes not activated

There is an evolutionary advantage to detecting potential threats from strangers as it protects the gene pool of a community and increases the chances that alleles within that group will keep being passed on

Evaluation of biological explanations:

• Prejudice has an emotional component, so explanations cannot be purely biological (Cunningham found frontal lobe activation after amygdala activation after being shown images for a long time → out groups trigger immediate response of amygdala, cognitive control of emotions comes from frontal lobe)

• Correlational research does not demonstrate causality → bidirectional ambiguity, and you cannot distinguish between innate and learned responses

• You cannot assume that a heightened amygdala response means racism (do not over interpret brain imaging data)

Origins of conflict

Conflict: when tensions between groups leads to aggression (what one group wants, another group sees as harmful to their interests)

Realistic Group Conflict Theory (Sherif): intergroup conflict is the result of conflicting goals or competition over limited resources

• Groups that are positively interdependent (working towards common goals) will have good relationships

• Negatively interdependent groups (competition for resources or conflicting goals) will have prejudices, discriminate, and act hostile

• The results of the Sherif study were not replicated when the boys already knew each other (Tyerman and Spencer)

Group polarization (McDoom): where the decisions and opinions of people in a group become more extreme than their actual, private beliefs

• The in-group only has positive motives, while the out-group only has negative motives

• In-group behavior is justified as the result of situational factors, and out-group behavior is attributed to character flaws or disposition

• 4 key steps linked to SIT:

1. Boundary activation: growing threat leads to increased need to distinguish between members of the in-group and out-group

2. Out-group negativity: greater threats lead to more negative feelings and behaviors towards the out-group

3. Out-group homogenization: as the threat continues, all members of the out-group are viewed as having the same negative characteristics

4. In-group solidarity: complete polarization; larger threats demand more in-group loyalty, and those who are seen as disloyal are punished or excluded

• Discussions with the in-group validate opinions and discredit outside groups

• Public discussions about the out-group lead to public commitment to the in-group’s views

• Applied to explain the development of group polarization during the Rwandan Genocide but does not explain how polarization led to violence

Conflict resolution

Intergroup contact theory (Allport): conflict can be reduced by bringing people together without considering race, religion, ethnicity, etc.

• Too simplistic, so other researchers have expanded on it

• Prejudice is strengthened if contact between groups produces competition, is unpleasant, lowers the status of one group, or leaves one group frustrated, but can be weakened if contact is cooperative and groups are seen as equal (Amir)

• Conditions that can reduce conflict: cooperation leading to positive results, cooperation done on equal status, cooperation for a common and valued goal, realistic opportunity for deep and meaningful relationships (“friendship potential”, Allport), the activity is sanctioned by an authority figure

• Superordinate goals (something that affects both groups and requires cooperation to be fixed) like in the Robber’s Cave study can diminish hostility → individual identities break down, a more inclusive group identity is created, peaceful cooperation begins → can be seen in the real world during natural disasters

• Limitations:

  • Difficult to create contact situations involving overcoming meaningful and practical obstacles

  • The results of the contact may be limited to that specific context and cannot be generalized

  • Participants may feel anxiety that interferes with the experience → people who feel anxious about intergroup contact are less likely to participate, research is made of self-selected samples who likely already want to understand other groups better

  • Often a language barrier → translators are expensive and feel artificial, so participants normally speak a common language or the language of the out-group (makes lack of equity more salient if language spoken is the language of the out-group or selects participants with a higher level of education)
    

The original blue eyes-brown eyes simulation found that brown eyed children who were initially discriminated against did not discriminate as badly against the blue eyed children when the roles were reserved → having a group experience discrimination so they don’t discriminate as badly is used in diversity training

• Another less controversial method is cooperative learning like the “jigsaw classroom” → everyone has something to contribute to the learning process and everyone is valued by working towards a common goal

Social cognitive theory can be applied to conflict reduction (Paluck) → education rather than direct contact may help people think through difficult issues and vicariously interact with other groups in a less threatening way