Comm 150 Midterm

Garfinkel

**Rules (social norms) govern social contract**

* ex. cutting lines in the bathroom

Asch

**We can be peer pressured into lying if context calls for it**

* ex. abra lied on stage saying he was cured

Milgram

**We’ll disregard our morals if context (or authority) calls for it**

* obedience study discovered ordinary people are capable of evil

Sherif

**We’ll change our beliefs if pressured, even if they’re accurate**

* jurors will change their beliefs just to match the rest of the group

Rosenthal & Jacobsen

**Traits are social**

* ex. teachers give kids special attention if they believe they’re gifted, in turn making them smarter (self-fulfilling prophecy)

Loftus

**Memory is social**

* convinced participants that they experienced a memory (trauma) that never happened
* family mentioned it to the subject, and after enough ensuring, they believed it too

Sapir/Whorf

**Language shapes our worldview**

* Ability to send particular messages is constrained by language
* Unless you have a word for something, it doesn’t exist
* Contextual limits:
* ex. can’t swear in front of a child
* euphemism is a rebranded word that is more socially acceptable

Hochschild

**Social context comes with emotion rules**

* ex. bride at a wedding is **expected** to **experience** joy
* The context **demands** that she **displays** this emotions, even if she woke up on the wrong side of the bed

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* Believes that the second you clock in for work, you lose freedom
* autonomy now belongs to employer (take out trash)
* speech becomes company rhetoric
* **emotions are bought** by the workplace (can’t look sad if you’re a hostess/won’t get tipped)

Chandra Russo

**Ritual protest as a form of solidarity witness**

* Migrant Trail Walk & Witness Against Torture


* Silent protest protocol
* Mobilizes emotions
* Works through recognizable traditions and symbols to introduce alternative logics (holding a cross or casket)
* Serves as an emotional and protective guise
* Silence is hard to counter-protest; it controls the mood of the message

Karl Marx

**Employers and employees have a power imbalanced relationship**

* He believes that **the want to work is innate** (ex. Hobbies are unpaid work), however capitalism has twisted us to no longer want to work a job

Kellerman

**All communication is strategic**

* Communication process
* all communication is goal directed and constraint-responsive
* constraint = social appropriateness, efficiency
* all communication **is adjusted** for these goals and constraints
* belonging, esteem, inclusion, etc

Heise

**Affect control theory**

* people act in a way that confirms the fundamental sentiments about self and others that are evoked by definitions of situations
* these impressions can change rapidly due to the social interaction
* *transient feelings*: feelings that manifest at any moment (measurable)
* influenced by perceiving events

Homophily: Inbreeding vs. Baseline

* **Inbreeding**: we gravitate towards people similar to us, and thus that becomes our surroundings
* **Baseline**: the amount of similarity we have between any given population

Homophily: Values vs. Status

* **Values**: Attitudes and beliefs
* **Status**: Ascribed or acquired
* ascribed: race, sex, ethnicity
* acquired: religion, job, education

**Why are younger children more likely to show greater intellectual development?**

* younger children may have less of a reputation (of being a bad student, etc) and thus be more capable of intellectual growth
* teachers view younger children as more malleable

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* correlated sampling "errors"- children in younger grades at this just happen to come from better families and circumstances than the older
* gradessampling "errors" in the teachers (the teachers of younger children are just better than teachers of the older children)

**homophily principle**

similarity breeds connection (contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people)

**causes of homophily**

geography, family, organizations, choice, influence

**when does homophily become more important to tie activation?**

during times of crisis

**what did** ***asch*** **find?**

group size influenced whether subjects conformed. The bigger the majority group (\# of confederates), the more people conformed, but only up to a certain point.

***Asch*** **Informational Conformity vs. Normative Conformity**

* **Informational**: the group must be right because they all agree
* **Normative**: the participant believed their own assessment but went with the group so as to not stand out

**when do we process information?**

when something changes, or is weird or unusual

**how does** ***mass media*** **affect what information we receive and think is important?**

the media wants to grab your attention because that's what they sell to advertisers (how they make $). the more unusual something is the more the audience will pay attention. so the mass media is more likely to present a warped view of the news

**who are the unique people that we interact with who are different from us?**

family, because it's forced

**what is the biggest force that constrains us?**

culture

**why is culture for a human like water for a fish?**

From the second you're born every part of your life is impacted by culture, which is why it's hard to see it

* Fish need water the same way humans need culture

***garfinkel*****- how do you actually teach people about culture?**

the only way is to metaphorically take you out of it, show there's a rule/norm by breaking it

**what happens when people break norms?**

you get an emotional response, you get weirded out and scared

**breaching experiment**

break through norms/protocol

**how many people conformed in** ***asch's*** **study**

* 3/4
* 76%

**how is communication goal directed and constraint responsive?**

People adjust their communicative behavior in response to situational, relational, and personal factors that constrain how appropriate and how efficient they are expected to be at particular times (i.e. saying vows fast at a shotgun wedding)

**despite communicative choices being intentional (i.e. not involuntary or uncontrollable)...**

they don't need to be consciously made and often aren't consciously made

**tacitly**

outside conscious awareness

**how is mindless behavior automated?**

it's familiar/ overlearned

**what is tacit/ implicit learning**

unconscious processing, an automatic and naturally occurring cognitive activity. knowledge is acquired implicitly, held tacitly, and used unconsciously

**how is language an example of tacit learning?**

Instructions to search consciously for a language's rule have been found to inhibit the learning of the language

**what is an example of how implicit/tacit knowledge is used?**

when persons implicitly learned, based on one friendly or unfriendly gesture in one interaction, that kind (or unkind) experimenters wear glasses, they implicitly used this knowledge to assess another's friendliness in a subsequent interaction

**how does social pressure relate to the** ***asch*** **experiments?**

when one confederate said the correct answer the number of non-confederates who said the wrong answer went down to 0

**Hannah** ***Arendt***

wrote a book called the Banality of Evil where she wrote that the idea that only bad people do bad things is false, any person can do evil things

***Milgram's*** **experiment**

designed an experiment where people were "given" electric shocks if they gave a wrong answer to a test. The experimenters were forcing the teachers to continue giving electric shocks even after hearing agonizing screams from the learner in the other room. (teaches us about morals)

**what was** ***milgram's*** **experiment testing**

obedience to authority and negative reinforcement

**what did** ***milgrams*** **experiment find**

americans will torture a stranger for no reason, 2/3 of teachers were ready to administer the highest voltage

**what does professor abra think about** ***milgram's*** **experiment?**

the fact that Milgram was saying "the experiment demands that you continue" shows that people don't want to stop the context, they aren't following the authority figure they're following the social context

***Sherif***

studied conformity through how well people perceived things that are hard to see (auto kinetic effect) (teaches us about beliefs)

**auto kinetic effect**

When people are seated in a darkened room and a stationary point of light is directed at the opposite wall, the light appears to move about in arbitrary directions.

**what did** ***sherif's*** **experiment find**

people were converging with what others were saying, the variation was getting smaller even though the factual answer was the light wasn't moving at all. Shows more powerful conformity and stronger effect because you're actually changing your opinion and then stating it, whereas in Asch you know what you believe to be true you just are afraid of stating it

***Cargile***\*\*, Giles, Ryan, Bradac- **language attitudes**\*\*

Language (variation) influences perception

(Ex: american’s may thinks someone with a british accent is "refined")

**How does the** ***speaker*** **impact the language attitudes process?**

A speaker's linguistic performance is determined by a number of perceived situational cues, including their perceptions of the hearer's physical and communicative attributes

* i.e. speaking loudly to a deaf person, slowly to a person you think is dumb

**What is often the most important in determining** ***hearer's*** **language attitudes**

What a speaker is perceived to be and how they are perceived to sound and communicate

* i.e. perceieved ethnicity or reigonality of speaker, age of speaker

**ex. of different language behaviors leading to different language attitudes**

One official with a protection goal may see a criminal's non-standard accent and believe that they're a member of a particular social group whose members are cruel, remorseless, and undeserving of assistance. Another official with the rehabilitation goal may hear, at the same time, a criminal's slow speech rate and poor lexical diversity, allowing attributions to be made about the criminal's impoverished educational upbringing. The two officials' goals then lead to appropriate perceptions of the criminal based on the 'appropriate' language attitudes that they summoned in this situation.

**why are language attitudes cognitive? what is an example?**

language can trigger beliefs about the speaker and their group membership ex: language → group membership → speaker personality; British accent → British upper class → fancy, competent

**why are attitudes affective? and what is an example?**

they involve feelings toward an attitude object, ex: a passion for Irish poetry

**why are attitudes behavioral? and what is an example?**

they encourage certain actions, ex: if you believe members of a particular group to be cruel and their presence makes you feel hostile, you are predisposed to behave in a distant manner

**example of interpersonal history affecting language attitudes**

a man may think people who speak in a southern US accent are dumb but when his good friend who he thinks is intelligent speaks with such an accent he wouldn't act on this stereotype. Instead he'd make use of individuated information already provided by their interpersonal history

**example of social situation affecting language attitudes?**

attitudes towards a speaker's slow rate of speech would be different in the context of a nuclear physics lecture than during introductions at a cocktail party

***Rosenthal and Jacobson*** **experiment (Pygmalion in the Classroom)**

The purpose was to figure out what would ensue if teachers would react differently towards certain students if told that a select number of students were expected to learn more information and more quickly than the pupils in their class; studied self fulfilling prophecy

**what did rosenthal and jacobson find?**

Teachers produce low or high performing students, The teachers were more likely to interact with the students who had "high IQ" which led to those students doing better
Teachers communicated differently to students who weren't stars, they didn't help them get to the right answer because they believed them to be dumb

***Loftus***

interested in memory and how it works, had people's parents recount stories to them that never happened and those people then told the story to the researcher because they thought it actually happened

**how does creating memories work?**

we store memories already missing a bunch of pieces and we fill it in so it's a coherent memory- it's an editable video
Everytime you call up a memory something has decayed so you insert something that makes sense for the context
The more often you call up the memory the less accurate it is because you don't store information about the edits you made

**why do we edit memories?**

we want to make sense of what we witnessed

**what are the three dimensions of response as stated in affect control theory**

evaluation (goodness versus badness) potency (powerfulness versus powerlessness) and activity (liveliness versus torpidity)

**What did** ***Heise*** **want to do with affect control theory**

he wanted to know if he could use math to predict how people make sense of situations that don't make sense and to see if he could use emotion to predict behavior

* ex: if people see a boyfriend beating a girlfriend they may not intervene but if they see a criminal beating a girlfriend they may intervene

***Affect Control Theory*** **(ACT**)

people respond affectively (emotionally) to every social event. individuals maintain affective (emotional) meanings through their actions and interpretations of events.

**how have researchers used affect control theory to analyze institutional roles**

researchers have focused on certain social identities and then examined the kind of action people normally think that person would do

**ex. of affect control theory in medicine**

doctors should accommodate, remember, medicate, caution, reassure, console. A nurse should admire, stroke, obey, mother, and release a patient. A psychoanalyst should coddle, watch, observe, contemplate and psychoanalyze.
The doctor should charm, direct, discipline, and assist the nurse.
The nurse should treat, charm, inform, and engage with the doctor.
A patient's predicted acts toward the caregivers are to idolize, beg, avoid, hide from, appease, and forget

**what is one of the most powerful features of affect control theory?**

its ability to adjust predictions to take into account circumstances created by recent events (role creativity)

**what is an example of people using affect control theory to adjust predictions based on the circumstances?**

people expect a mother to entertain and sing to a baby but if the mother is responding to the baby interacting with her the mother will caress, kiss, welcome

**what did** ***loftus*** **have to say about sense of self**

people's sense of self is informed by their memories, but since these memories aren't accurate we have no way of knowing who we really are

***Sapir-Whorf*** **Hypothesis**

the idea that different languages create different ways of thinking

**strong version of sapir-whorf hypothesis example**

if i don't have the word for chair i don't know what it is. all i see is wood

**weak version of sapir-whorf hypothesis example**

having the word chair allows me to think about a chair differently than if i don't have the word. I still conceive of it as something people sit on but I don't have a word for it

**what is an example of context-constraining your ability to express yourself?**

you can't say bomb at an airport but you can when you're at home with friends or family

**stigmatized labels- euphemisms**

we take something that's stigmatized and make it socially palatable to talk about. it has a lifespan because euphemisms become stigmatized since it's describing the underlying thing. people think that by changing the word they've removed the underlying stigma but they haven't

**example of a euphemism**

homeless people becoming "unhoused people"

**how do cheerleaders and coaches try to impart emotional states onto the audience and players respectively?**

cheerleaders are ecstatic and perky because they want the audience to be excited and happy, the coaches are yelling and growling because they want the players to be intense and aggressive

**what is the haka and how was the france rugby team able to take control of the situation?**

a maori ritual done before rugby games that is meant to instill an emotional state in your opponent- fear and intimidation. the french team went hand in hand and stepped over the midline showing that they were coming for the other team

**how does the context of rugby change the aggression in pre game rituals?**

the culture of rugby is that everyone understands the intimidation tactics are for the field, once they leave that context they leave the beef behind

**what is an example of how emotions are social?**

you can turn them on and off fast, they're for other people (i.e. when hugging someone you don't smile while you're in the actual hug)

***Hochschild***

expert on emotion. she believed that social contexts contain emotion rules and that there are particular emotions that are acceptable or mandatory to experience and display

**what is an example of social contexts having "mandatory" emotions?**

a bride to be is supposed to display elation, joy, anticipation

**why did abra let his 6 year old watch the walking dead?**

Because children are only allowed to be happy they don't know how to regulate emotions, fear being the biggest one. This leads to issues in adulthood. Abra's kid could experience fear when there was no threat, so he could learn how to handle it

**what did hochschild discover about happiness and occupations**

there are a lot of occupations where the job is to display happiness and make other people feel happy. has nothing to do with being competent

**how did hochschild connect her ideas to capitalism**

* Marx believed that everyone who works is working with a gun to their head because they'll die without work.
* Hochschild believed you lose freedoms when you clock into work- you lose control over your body (have to clean up), your voice, and your emotions (when you work as a hostess and you're really tired you can't act that way, you have to be happy). You get excited when you get to clock out because you get your freedoms back. Essentially we rent our bodies out

**in many jobs emotions are...**

commodities (emotion is part of our purchases)

**what 3 elements impact which language attitudes become accessible and how they're used**

* goals (one officer with protection goal)
* hearer's mood
* expertise (schemas, stereotypes)

**3 processes involved with language attitudes**

* generation (of content)
* salience
* application (interpersonal history)

**outcomes of language attitudes**

* speaker evaluations (competency, attractiveness)
* listeners communication strategies
* other behaviors (cooperation)

Social Process Model of Attitudes