SocialPsych Midterm1

Bystander Intervention and the Science of Social Psychology

We being by considering what influences people to help others in emergency situations.

What Social Psychology Answers

Diffusion of Responsbility

• Maybe someone knows how to help

• Ambiguities that makes one hesitate

Pluralistic ignorance

• Looking for others on how to interpret a situation

• Mutual non-verbal communication

The Seizure Experiment

Method: laboratory experiment

Procedure

Operational Definition for helping: all you had to do is go to the room and open the door

IV: genders (both participant and seizure), size of group, emt

DV: response time

Radio Theft Experiment

Method: field research, experimental design

Operational definition for helping: get up, run, stop the robber, and demand an explanation

IV: “can you watch my things” and “do you have a match”

29% did not notice the theft

Of those who did notice

• No commitment: 20% responded

• Commitment: 95% responded

Conclusion: commitment prevents diffusion of responsibility

Smoke-Filled Room Experiment

Method: laboratory experiment

IV: being alone, a part of a three-person group (in one experiment there is a confederate and in the another, there is not)

Results:

• If alone, 75% report (median 2 minutes)

• If 3 subjects, 38% (median 5 minutes)

• If 2 confederates, 10% report

Pluralistic ignorance: if you do not know what to do, look around for the reactions of others. People’s behaviors can shape your perception to how to understand a situation and whether you act or not.

Situation vs. Dispostions: Good Samaritan Experiment

IV: in a hurry, not in a hurry, brief discussion of the meaning of the parable of the good samaritan, or career in the minstery

Results: the biggest determinant of helping is rush

Model of Bystander Intervention

1. Notice the event

2. Interpret as an emergency (fights pluralistic ignornance)

3. Assume responsibility (fights diffusion of responsibility)

4. Know how to assist

5. Implement help (and consider danger to self, legal concerns, embarrassment, etc)

Who is John Darley

Prominent American social psychologist and long-time Princeton University professor, co-developed the theory of bystander intervention and the diffusion of responsibility with Bibb Latane following the 1964 Murder of Kitty Genovese.

1st Explanation for Human Social Behavior

An Instinct-Based View for Human Behavior

Herbert Spencer argued that properties of the mind that produce social behavior are inherited through a process of evolution.

An Introduction to Social Psychology proposes that for humans, most behavior is instinctively determined, just as it is for spiders that spin webs and beavers that build damns

• This conception of instinctual human behavior sharply contrasts with psychoanalysis and behaviorism

2nd Explanation for Human Social Behavior

Psychoanalytic Theory: The Hidden Desires That Guide Behavior

Darwin proposed the concept of “struggle for existence.”

• Sigmund Freud was inspired and claimed that human behavior is directly primarily driven by aggressive and sexuil desires

Aggressive behavior is critical for warding off predators and effectively competing for scarce resources; sexual behavior is critical for reproducing and perpetuating genes

• However, unbridled aggression and sexuality undermine social cooperation.

According to Freud, a substantial proportion of human mental activity is unconscious

• The true intent of our behavior is generally hidden from us

3rd Explanation for Human Social Behavior

Behaviorism: Behavior is Shaped by Experience

Behaviorists argued that feeling and unconscious processes are unobservable fictions invented to explain behavior and that the instincts studied by McDougall are most likely learned, rather than innate, responses.

• Behaviorists propose that most human behavior is learned in response to the demands of the environment.

Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology

In 1922, John Dewey published this seminal work that set the agenda for a mature social psychology.

• He felt strongly that human behavior is determined by both instinct (nature) and experience (nurture) and that the key is to identify how to interact

• He also insisted that by reorganizing, both unconscious and conscious processes are important determinants of human activity, and humans could gain greater influence over what happens to them in the future

Social Psychology (Book)

Floyd Allport attempts to integrate the study of consciousness, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology

• Allport was interested in how humans can apply what we learn about ourselves to promote constructive individual and social change

• Inspired a burst of empirical research

In the 1950’s and ‘60s, Social Psychology shifted

from broad conceptions of human social behavior to relatively specific, topic-based theories about particular phenomena.

In the 1970’s and ‘80s, cognitive revolution took place

• shift toward understanding the mental processes that underlie behavior

• The social cognition perspective was formed to understand how people perceive, remember, and interpret events and individuals in their social world, including themselves

  • This focus remains strong to the present-day and has expanded to include newer techniques to measure the neural underpinnings of thought and emotion.

Four perspectives have combined with the social cognitive perspective

1. The Evolutionary Perspective is an effort to view humans as a species of animal and their social behavior as a consequence of the same physical laws and evolutionary processes as all other forms of life.

• Suggests that a proper understanding of human activity requires recognizing uniquely human adaptations in addition to those we share with other creatures.

2. The Cultural Perspective emphasizes the central role of culture in just about everything people think and do. Humans are cultural animals: only humans create their symbolic conception of reality. This creation of culture. Culture gives meaning to life, and is taken to be a true representation of reality by those who share the same cultural background, despite the fact that it is often clear, even to the casual observer, that people from different cultures can have different beliefs about the nature of reality.

2. The Existential Perspective examines basic questions about existence and human nature regarding matters such as meaning, identity, the body, and free will.

• Social psychologists are increasingly using an existential perspective to examine human behavior. They are devoted to understanding the basic nature of the self, authenticity, and the core human motives: the needs for meaning, social connections, and the ways in which people cope with the possibilities of trauma and loss, as well as the inevitability of death.

4. The Social Neuroscience Perspective is gaining momentum as technological advances are being made to better understand when people engage in social thoughts and behavior.

• Social neuroscience utilizes assessments of activity in the brain to examine the neural processes that underlie social judgment and behavior, enhancing knowledge of the roles of various cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes in social phenomena.

The Roots of Social Psychology 1

• Herbert Spencer extended Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to argue that the social behavior of humans is also the product of evolutionary processes.

• Freud claimed that human behavior is driven by aggressive and sexual drives that are largely hidden from our conscious experience. 

• Behaviorists argued that only overt behavior can be directly observed and measured. They discounted the study of such things as feelings, wishes, and unconscious processes.

• The stage for modern social psychology was set by the integrative efforts of John Dewey, Floyd Allport, and Gardner and Lois Murphy

1st Assumption of Social Psychology

Behavior Is a Joint Product of the Person and the Situtation

Kurt Lewin is considered the father of modern social psychology.

• Proposes any given behavior is determined by the combined influences of individual features of the person and specific aspects of the situation.

In Stanley Milgram’s famous studies of obedience, participants in these studies were remarkably compliant when ordered by an authoritative experimenter to administer what appeared to be potentially lethal electrical shocks to an innocent victim.

The genes that we inherit from our biological parents, combined with the experiences we have had over the course of our lives, lead us to develop dispositions: consistent preferences, ways of thinking, and behavioral tendencies that influence us across varying situations and over time. 

2nd Assumption of Social Psychology

A second assumption of social psychology is that virtually all thoughts, feelings, and actions are social in nature. From birth on, we learn the language, ways, and values of our culture.

• Throughout life, we routinely encounter and interact with other people. Even when we’re completely alone, people occupy our thoughts. As a result, our view of reality is shaped by our connections to others.

3rd Assumption of Social Psychology

Behavior is Strongly Influenced by Our Social Cognition

Social cognition shapes behavior.

Social psychologist Fritz Heider emphasizes how people’s own understanding of the causes and consequences of other people’s actions plays an important role in determining their behavior.

The way each individual understands other people, whether the understanding is accurate or not, has a powerful influence on that individual’s social behavior. And different understandings can lead to vastly different judgments and behaviors.

4th Assumption of Social Psychology

The Best Way to Understand Social Behavior Is to Use the Scientific Method

Kurt Lewin tells us that science gives us the best way to understand the causes and consequences of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of social life.

Emphasis on the scientific method.

• Uses experiments as a way of developing, testing, and refining theories to understand the determinants of social behavior.

• The field developed as a way of refining intuitive thinking, to help us get closer to the truth by providing more accurate conceptions of the way the world really is.

• Provides the basis for how social psychologists accumulate knowledge regarding the determinants of human thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Heider’s Attribution Theory

People are intuitive scientists.

• Ordinary people have a strong desire to understand what causes other people’s actions.

Casual Attributions

are shaped by cultural knowledge, a vast store of information accumulated within a culture that explains how the world works and why things happen as they do.

Nisbett and Wilson argue

that human capacity for introspection—looking inward and observing our own thought process—is quite limited.

Cognitive Misers

People are cognitive misers, avoiding expending effort and cognitive resources when thinking and prefer to seize on quick and easy answers to the questions they ask.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to seek out information and view events and other people in ways that fit how we want and expect them to be.

Positive Affect

A good mood helps to avoid the guilt that would arise if they turned their backs on someone in need.

Feelings of awe inspire us to think beyond ourselves and see ourselves as small players in a much grander, more expansive drama.

Priming Prosocial Roles

Social roles and relationships come with certain norms that tell us how to behave.

Terror management theory

suggests that our awareness of our mortality should promote prosocial behavior.

Scrooge effect

studied by Jonas and colleagues, showing that making people think about death increases donations to valued charities.

Mortality’s effect on social behavior

likely to increase social behavior when the charitable action helps to connect the person’s identity to entities that transcend one’s death, and when prosocial cultural values have also been primed.

Priming Religious Values

Basic prosocial norms for positive reciprocity can be found in all of the major world religions.

It’s true that people who report high levels of religiosity also report being more altruistic, but in laboratory settings designed to measure the likelihood of helping, religiosity is unrelated to the actual likelihood of prosocial actions.

The mere idea of religion can still prime more positive acts.

• In one study, participants who first unscrambled sentences that primed them with concepts such as “divine” and “sacred” were more generous to a stranger than were those primed with neutral concepts.

• Interesting that priming people with other ways that society promotes justice (“courts” and “contracts”) had the same effect.

Bystander Effect (Step 1)

Step 1: Notice the situation

Bystander Effect (Step 2)

Interpret the situation as an emergency

Pluralistic ignorance: the inaction of all the members of the group can itself contribute to a collective ignorance of anything being amiss.

Bystander Effect (Step 3)

Take responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility: for a victim to receive help, someone needs to decide that it will be his or her responsibility to act.

If you ever need help and there are multiple witnesses, you can solve the problem of diffusion of responsibility by picking out—talking or pointing to—a specific individual and asking that person to help.

Bystander Effect (Step 4)

Decide how to help

Having prior training helps people overcome this freeze reflex.

Bystander Effect (Step 5)

Decide whether to give help.

When people witness a violent attack, they might be afraid to intervene for fear of getting hurt themselves.

“Good Samaritan” laws protect people from liability for any harm they cause when they act in good faith to save another person.

Urban Overload Hypothesis

Milgram speculated that living in a dense urban area exposes people to greater stimulation or noise pollution. Living in a city apartment, you get used to the sounds of sirens, crying babies, car alarms, late-night partiers, and impatient drivers honking their horns. To deal with the din that comes with population density, people might learn to cope by shutting out these sounds

Altruistic Personality

Whether measured as behaviors (giving someone directions, donating blood) or tendencies (to take another person’s perspective, to experience empathy, these differences can be pretty stable across one’s life.

Traits and Prosocial Concerns

People who score high on a measure of trait agreeableness or humility are thought to be motivated by prosocial concerns.

In fact, because helping others can satisfy a basic need to feel connected to others, helping for these intrinsic reasons seems to have the most emotional benefits for both the giver and the receiver of help.

Once people begin volunteering, experiences of social validation and personal satisfaction lead them to keep at it.

Any time people feel that what they give is a part of themselves, they are committed to keep giving.

Role of Political Values

Conservatives are more motivated to maintain traditional values and norms.

Liberals, on the other hand, are more motivated by egalitarian values and don’t like to see a price tag put to anyone’s pain and suffering.

Moral Foundations Theory

People take into account five guiding principles when they prioritize whom and when to help or how to be virtuous

1. preventing harm to others

2. ensuring fair treatment to all

3. being loyal to one’s group

4. respecting authority

5. and maintaining purity in one’s actions.

Conservatives and Liberals

Conservatives prioritize respecting authority, maintaining purity, and protecting the ingroup.

Liberals will tend to reach out primarily to those who seem to be suffering unnecessarily or as a result of unfair disadvantage, whereas conservatives will be more likely to help individuals and groups they see as conforming to traditional morals.

Women and Men

Women often score higher than men on measures of agreeableness and empathy.

Women score higher in communion than do men. These differences are found across many cultures.

Women think about themselves as being more helpful and prosocial compared with how men think of themselves.

In 62% of the studies that Eagly and Crowley analyzed, men were more likely to help than were women.

• Men are more likely to help in situations that call for chivalrous behavior or taking action despite possible danger.

It turns out that women report being more attracted to men who behave prosocially.

Women, on the other hand, are more likely to volunteer their time for others or go out of their way to mail a letter that has been left behind. In other words, both men and women are prosocially oriented in some ways, but gender roles suggest who should help in which kinds of situations.

Evolved biological differences in hormonal responses might lead women more than men to reach out to others and offer a helping hand.

Perspectives layer on top of these initial differences, the role of socialization and cultural influences in magnifying gendered behavior.

“tend-and-befriend”

Shelly Taylor and her colleagues have argued that in addition to the typical fight-or-flight response to acutely stressful situations, women might also exhibit a “tend-and-befriend” response to stressors.

Primatologist Robert Sapolsky observing a troop of baboons in East Africa.

Whose behavior changed entirely when the most dominant males in their hierarchy suddenly died of tuberculosis.

When new adolescent males joined the troop, they apparently had learned to adopt this kinder, gentler lifestyle. Even among baboons, changes in social dynamics can narrow the gap between the sexes in prosocial tendencies.

Evolution

the idea that species change over time and are descended from common ancestors, goes back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander

Theory of Natural Selection

explains the process through which evolution occurs

2 Key Ingredients in the recipe for evolution by Natural Selection

1. The processes of reproduction cause variability, which has two primary sources: mutation and sexuil reproduction

2. Competition

Adapation

Attributes that improve their prospects for survival and reproduction, as well as the survival of their offspring, are more successful in passing along their genes.

Over time, individuals with the most successful adaptations outnumber and eventually replace less-well-adapted versions of the creature.

Who coined the term “survival of the fittest”

Naturalistic Fallacy

we assume (incorrectly) that the way things are is necesarily how they out to be

Doman-specific adaptations

attributes that evolved to meet a particular challenge but that are not particularly useful when dealing with other types of challenges

Doman-general adaptations

attributes that are useful for dealing with various challenges across different areas of life

Stephen Mithen

According to him, the flexibility of these domain-general adaptations is what most clearly distinguishes humans from other primate species

Henry David Thorea

The American writer who famously wrote of his solitary time at Walden Pond, hung out with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and took his dirty laundry to his mother!

Fusiform face area

unctions specifically to recognize human faces

• Faces are unique and convey important information, making it possible not only to recognize individuals and recall information about them

• Interpret what they might be thinking and feeling.

When social rejection or exclusion occurs

it triggers a strong negative reaction in the brain. In fact, social exclusion activates an area of the brain responsible for generating feelings of physical pain.

To avoid these painful experiences, we try hard to fit in.

The brain when it comes to the social world.

The parallel activity in the medial frontoparietal network suggests that the resting brain is preparing to think about others or consolidating information about others.

Socialization

the lifelong process of learning from others what are desirable and undesirable styles of living. This learning occurs in our relationships with our parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and many others over the course of our lives.

Humans being intelligent beings

Humans have the greatest intelligence in terms of their capacities for imagination, and, consequently, altering their environment to better suit their visions

William James

pointed out that an action that initially required conscious control can become habitual, such that conscious thought is no longer needed to perform it. 

Automatization

unconscious automatic processes

Controlled processes

while responses to more novel, complex, and challenging situations involve more conscious

Brain’s evolutionarily older regions, including the limbic system

system of thought and decision making that relies on emotions, intuitions, and images processed—automatic processes

More recently evolved frontal lobes of the cerebrum

is a rational system that is logical, analytic, and primarily linguistic. It takes over when people have sufficient time, motivation, and attention to think carefully about their situation and themselves—controlled proccesses

The process of natural selection resulted

in systems that energize, direct, and regulate behaviors that help people survive and prosper.

Motivation

refers broadly to generating and expending energy toward achieving or avoiding some outcome.

Needs

 are what is necessary for the individual not just to survive but also to prosper

Self-determination theory

argues that, in order to flourish, people need

1. competence (being able to do things successfully)

2. relatedness (having close connections with other people)

3. and autonomy (being in control of one’s life).

Goals

on the other hand, are what people strive for to meet their needs.

Hedonism

 the motivation to approach pleasure and avoid pain.

Security and growth

avoiding the bad and approaching the good

Avoidance and Approach motivation

Avoidance motivation involves more right-hemisphere activity, whereas approach motivation tends to involve primarily left-hemisphere activity

Otto Rank

 studied how security and growth motives develop and interact over the course of the life span to influence a person’s thinking and behavior.

• Children avoid negative emotions by establishing and sustaining a secure relationship with their loving and protective parents.

• Rank noted that there is a complex interplay between security and growth tendencies, such that they can at times pull a person in opposite directions.

Rank’s analysis suggests two broad tendencies that have been highly supported by social psychological research over the past 60 years.

1. To sustain security-providing feelings of acceptance and self-worth, people are inclined to follow the crowd, obey authority, and accept the values held by their culture.

2. Striving for growth, people exhibit a need for uniqueness, want to express their personal views and preferences, and assert their personal freedoms when they are threatened.

Hierarchy of Goals

a structured framework—often visualized as a pyramid—that organizes objectives from broad, long-term, high-level, "why" purposes down to specific, short-term, low-level, actionable tasks.

Robin Vallacher and Dan Wegner’s action identification theory

suggests that the challenges people face in the moment also affect how they are likely to describe their actions.

A key component of the motivational system is emotion

• Darwin (1872) asserted that emotions signal important changes in bodily states and environmental circumstances.

• Both the experience and, perhaps even more frequently, the anticipation of emotions play critical roles in motivating behavior.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio

proposed a three-part division of emotions—background emotions, primary emotions, and secondary emotions—all of which can occur at varying levels of consciousness, from complete unconsciousness to dim awareness to profound domination of our conscious experience.

Background Emotions

Background emotions make up an individual’s general affective tone at a given moment.

Primary Emotions

Research suggests that there are six primary emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.

Primary emotions involve rather general and diffuse activation of specific bodily systems, including specific brain regions, the autonomic nervous system, and facial muscles.

Secondary Emotions

 For example, joy, ecstasy, and delight are variations of happiness; gloom, misery, and wistfulness are variations of sadness; panic, anxiety, and terror are variations of fear.

The value of social emotions

Social emotions regulate social behavior by drawing the person’s attention to socially inappropriate behavior, reinforcing appropriate social behavior, and helping to repair disrupted social relationships.

Cognitive appraisal theory

proposes that people’s subjective experience of emotions is determined by a two-step process involving a very fast primary appraisal that is often followed by a more careful and thoughtful secondary appraisal.

Primary appraisal

often takes place before people are consciously aware of what happened in the outside world to produce it; it signals whether something good or bad is happening.

Particularly, the thalamus responds to the environment with physiological arousal and an initial experience of emotion.

Secondary appraisal

Often leads to a refinement, a modification, or even a change in the nature of the emotion people experience. The rational processing system described earlier shapes secondary appraisals by bringing up memories, cultural influences, and thoughts of future ramifications.

This deeper interpretation engages the prefrontal lobes, a part of the brain associated with consciousness and high-level cognitive functioning such as language. Indeed, language actually helps to construct our emotional experience.

Cognition influences emotions, and emotions also affect cognition.

Bad moods lead people to view things more negatively, to recall negative memories, and to have more negative expectancies.

People in a good mood rely on their preexisting knowledge in making judgments and don’t analyze things too much.

People in negative moods think more intensely about themselves and their environment in an attempt to understand what they are experiencing.

Emotion Differentiation

Emotions are necessary for rationality and good decision-making, especially in matters pertaining to complex social judgments. Emotions provide us with important information about how a given situation affects our needs and desires. In fact, the more we are able to make fine-grained distinctions in the emotions we are experiencing, referred to as emotion differentiation.

We can better regulate toward our goals and, as a result, feel better. And the possibility that we can learn this skill bodes well for those who struggle with such differentiation.

Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial behavior: action that is intended to benefit another individual

Altruism

the desire to help another, regardless of benefit

Theories Supporting Altruism

Emotions: sympathy-feeling bad for someone else, empathy-feeling someones point of view

• Philosophy (“sympathy,” Adam Smith)

• Psychology (“empathy-altruism model” Daniel Batson)

• Neuroscience (brain activity during empathic pain)

Principles: ethical beliefs

• Philosphy (moral law, Immanuel Kant)

• Psychology (social norms of “reciprocity” and “social responsibility”)

• Evolutionary psychology (“delayed reciprocal altruism”)

Theories Denying Altruism

“Social-exchange theory” involves cost-benefit analysis

• Costs of helping and of not helping

• Benefits of helping and of not helping

Types of benefits:

• Material self-interest

• Psychological self-interest, hedonism

  • Negative-state relief, if you do not help you will feel bad, if you help you will feel good

  • Image-repair

The Great Debate: Cialdini vs. Batson

Robert Cialdini: social exchange theorist

Daniel Batson: empathy-altruism theorist

• Cialdini: negative state relief

• Batson: empathy vs. distress

  • “Empathic concern”: sympathy, compassion, tenderness

  • “Personal distress”: alarmed, troubled, upset

Eleanie experiment

IV: Eleanie expresses herself similarly to the participant and dissimilarly.

Easy situation: you are able to leave. Hard situation: you have to stay and watch the confederate receive the shocks

Emotion

• Emotions are more than just “feelings,” they are thoughts, action, expression, and self-regulation

• Emotions are based on interpretation of events: primary and secondary appraisal; reappraisal

• Emotions affect thoughts: self-perception, memory, attention, expectations, holistic, or analytical style of thinking

• Motivates action

• Communication

Cornell Bowling Study

• Kraut and Johnson

People’s faces were coded when they got a strike. Interestly, people were happy when they turned around, not when they got the strike.

Prosocial Behavior and Emotions

• Empathy and Sympathy

• Personal guilty; collective guilt

• Bad moods and negative state relief

  • Positive mood maintenance

  • Favorable view of other people

• Awe and reduced egocentrism

• Gratitude (in both altruists and recipients

Every individual has three primary psychological dimensions

1. the universe

2. the individual

3. and the cultural