PSYC 121 info from test 1
Theory
A systematic way of organizing and explaining observations which include a set of propositions, or statements about the relationships among various phenomena
And or
A set of statements designed to explain a set of phenomena; more encompassing than a[n] hypothesis.
Hypothesis – a statement that can be tested
Hypothesis's...
Can be exploratory
Are typically more focused than theories
What separates psychology from other non-sciences is that we use the scientific method to test hypotheses to see if they are supported, or not supported, by appropriate information (or data)
Broken windows theory
If someone walks past a building with one smashed window people are more likely to smash other windows. Makes people care less about the building.
Psychopathy is a behavior of lack of interest in others.
How do we know that the results for one group are different enough that we can be confident they dot just look different?
Statistics
As psychological scientists, we are happy to say that a result is sufficiently unlikely that it's probably not due to chance – if there's less than a 5% likelihood that it is due to chance
Correlations
A correlation is a number that represents the size and direction of the relationship between two things.
Correlation = r
Types of variables
The type of statistic
The "degrees of freedom" (an indication of sample size)
The value of the test statistic
The probability of getting this result
Cannot prove hypothesis but can support it 0.001 does not equal 0 there is still a possibility it's up to chance.
William james – father of psycology
Set up first laboratory inteneted for teaching psycology
Michael Wilhelm – also considered father of psycology
Also established psycological laboratory – frist research laboratory – more impoirtnat
B.F Skinner
Important in history of psychology because he is strongly associated with the school of psychological behaviourism – because we can't reach into people's heads and objectively view their thoughts, we can't objectively understand the content of peoples thoughts. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the content of the way people think. Instead we should treat the humans mind as a black box and focus solely on the inputs, the things that happen in the environment and the outputs, the things we do in response to those changes in the environment.
This was a tremendously influential movement
Skinner box
Training a rat to behave in a particular way in response to reinforcement
Might set it up so when light goes green and the rat presses a lever it gets something to eat
One of the most important tools in early behaviorism
Phits
Fictional forensic psycologist
Psycologist who works In legal contexts uses the science of psycology to track down people who have comitted horrendous crimes.
Stanley Milgram
One of the most divisive characters in the history of social psycology
Associated with one of the most potenitally immoral psyscholgical studies of all time
Social psychology is the application of social psychological knowledge, theory, research and methods to understanding the social world. It's about understanding how the social world acts, and the way we think, feel and behave, but also how we influence the social context in which we fit through the way we think feel and behave.
Eric Albert
Important in contempory clinical psycology
One of the contributions he made was the delvelopement of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Therapy that can be used with people who experience a wide range of different typs of psycological distress ie depressed, anxious.
Focuses on helping people identify the links between their cognition (thinking) and behaviour
The things we do are related to the thoughts we have
While this sounds like common sense, the reality is that many people who are experiencing mental distress, – they find it very had to see that
John A.
Clinical psychologist
Abraham Maslow
Championed humanism – wanted to locate the person at the center of psychology
Started carrier working with chimpanzees as a research assistant – observations he saw there are what inspired him to develop a theory about the things that motivate human beings
Hirachy of needs is a pyramid where we have things at the bottom which are immediate needs for our survival, at the top is lofty aspirations like being the best person we can be.
Maslow argued that its really difficult to be the best person you can be when you are worrying about not having the necessities
Dr Phil
Clinical psychologist
Sigmund Freud
Not a psychologist – psychology ≠ psychiatry
Important is history of psychology for proposing a number of really important ideas that psychological scientists have gone onto test and use in practice
Specialized in neurology
Psychologist work with people to reduce and resole their mental stress primarily through talk therapies whereas psychiatrists adopt a medical model of mental distress – ie if someone has a cold then we tend to identify the problem as a medical one since something has gone into the body and caused a problem
Many things associated with mental distress are rooted deep in our unconscious
Psychology is relatively young however the ideas that are considered important date back to has long as there's been people
Trepanation – drilling holes into people's skulls as a for of therapy
This early definition of psychology has taken a number of times throughout time, along the way, we have seen nativism versus empiricism.
Nativism is the idea that we are born with every faculty that we ultimately exhibit. We have been able to do the things that we end up doing throughout our lives. This is empiricism. It has a number of different meanings, but in the context of the history of psychology, it means that everything we can do, we have to learn to do.
ISM is the idea that the totality of human experience is made up of a whole bunch of smaller elements and vote, and the students went on to try and develop ways that we could take apart human experience to identify those individual characteristics. He developed an approach called introspection, which involves training people to try and break down the sensory experiences. The things I see, hear, smell, touch into the individual elements color, shape, sheer intensity.
Functionalism, on the other hand, was James's idea that our rights or our minds have specialized faculties, specialized organs that had particular functions.
James argued that there are functions, there are things in the brain that have specific functions, and these two arguments have played off against each other throughout the history of and subsequently.
what are the things that already be apparent when it comes from this idea of nativism versus empiricism is the argument about nature versus naurture.
Psyche means body or mind or soul.
Phrenology is the identification of a person's personality based on the characteristics of the shapes of the skull Phrenologists would take their calipers are measured the size and shape of people's heads and make judgments about their personality characteristics on the basis of that.
Now, there's a problem with chronology in that if your only sample of skulls that you are measuring comes from criminals, there's an absence of what we call the control group. You might identify, for example, particular characteristics that seem to be fairly common across all of the criminals. But how do you know that they are different from people who are known criminals?
Nurture
Locke argued that we are born as a tabula rasa that's Latin for a blank slate. So when we are born, we are a book that is white waiting to be written upon everything we learn Locke says, I learned to do. We have to learn from scratch. We are born with nothing innate.
There is an important developmental phase during our early lives where we're not exposed to sufficient stimulation or things like language, It becomes increasingly hard to develop those things. We are a product of the formative experiences that we have.
Jeremy Bentham
He proposed the idea of the Panopto. He argued that we are born evil. We are born with a burning desire to get all the goodies for ourselves. And as a result, he said, if we don't believe social and institutional structure, social structures that will prevent us from doing that, then we will behave in ways that are criminal.
Sheldon made the argument for what he called Soma Times the idea that our personalities reflect the shapes of our bodies and dwarfs, he said.
Francis Galton
He argued that the extent to which the way that we always inherit from our parents and our environment. That must be because they themselves have parents who had these characteristics better people, he suggested, had better parents. People who have more positive person and social outcomes do so because they've inherited them from their parents.
Eugenics - is the practice of trying to eliminate undesirable psychological, physiological or other characteristics from population by wiping out people who have those characteristics to prevent them from passing onto their kids.
Robert Rosenthal
Is a social psychologist or developmental psychologist
responsible for coined the terms of descriptors the Pygmalion, the government effects, the start, the Pygmalion. The outcomes that children and other things organisms, people, adults exhibit are sometimes a product of the way that they're treated. If you treat it as if you are important, as if you can learn to do other things, if you a small valuable, then you're more likely to ultimately achieve outcomes that reflect that. The Gollum effect is the reverse.
Albert Bandura
Badger is the most cited, psychologist in the history of psychology.
Study for which he is most important is a study about the importance of how observing violence impacts on behavior.
We have a lot of common wisdom that reflects these intuitive ideas that the way that we behave is the product of nature or the product of nurture.
Norman Triplett Hypothesis: that individuals performance is facilitated by others
Social facilitation – the positive effect of observers on an individual performance
This experiment illustrates
an experiment that simulates real life situation
Concealment of ultimate aim of the experiment
Impact of mere presence of others
Social facilitation become one of the major topics of social psychology for three decades
Conformity (of major influence)
They will say the same thing as the people before them
Why do people conform?
Motivation:
People may conform for one, other, or both of
Wanting to be right
Wanting to make a good impression
Leading to...
Informational Influence.
E.g., Di Vesta (1959) - conformity increased if there were more neutral trials at the start (more evidence that confederates were competent).
Normative Influence.
E.g., Increasing interdependence of participants by promising a reward to most accurate groups a conformity doubled.
Different types of conformity:
Informational Influence
Conversion
Normative Influence
Compliance
Compliance - Conformity primarily because of concern about how they will be perceived, while privately disagreeing.
Conversion - Conformity primarily because of belief that others are right then they have changed their own private opinion.
Public vs Private context
What affects conformity?
Competing contexts:
Private
Public
Normative influence is more important in producing conformity because responses given publicly are more likely to show conformity than responses given privately.
Group membership
If people feel they belong with others a behavior of those others becomes a norm that is internalized and relevant for behavior as a group member.
Conformity ↓ when the source of influence identified as an outgroup member (someone from a group to which the participant did not belong).
Consistency within the group
If confederates are unanimous then conformity is higher.
If single confederate acts as a supporter (give correct answer) conformity dropped to 5.5%
Conformity declined even if the dissenting confederate was obviously wrong (but disagreed with the majority).
Effect of group consistency only applies in unambiguous situations.
Conformity increases as groups size increases (to a maximum) - Asch (1951) ran variations with majorities of between 1 and 16.
"Social psychology is the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others." (Gordon Allport, 1954)
Adolf Eichmann
Final solution
Only defense was I was following orders
When we conform it feels like what we need to do. Obedience is when you're being told to do something.
One explanation was that of the 'Authoritarian Personality provided by Adomo, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950).
The authoritarian personality was theorised as originating in childhood in response to excessively harsh and disciplinarian parenting intended to produce emotional dependence and obedience in the child.
The child develops ambiguity (love and hate) towards parents
Frear and guilt mean the child cannot act on his anger towards the parents
The anger is displaced onto weaker others, while parents/power they represent are idealized
Underestimates situational and cultural factors in blind obedience – a situation that Milgram's work addressed
The teacher was required to administer a shock for each incorrect answer, with shocks increasing in severity
Learner behavior
75-105 start responding
120 banging on the desk/complaining
300 want to get out
345 unconscious
Experimental group study
62.5% continued to administer shocks at the highest level
368 volts was the average shock level administered
Why did they obey?
The abided because they were visually distressed
Factors affecting obedience
Milgrim (1974) reports a series of 18 experiments manipulating various situational factors to investigate factors influencing obedience
Immediacy/proximity (physical and emotional) of all the victim
Proximity of the victim was manipulated under four conditions
Victim pounds of thick wall separating Teacher and learner
Victim heard crying through thick wall
Subject ad victim in same room
Subject required to hold victims hand to shock plate
When experiment was conducted in a less prestigious setting maximum obedience decreased
There are a variety of different subsets or sub areas of psychology that deal with issues relating to culture.
Cultural psycology – studies the way which people are affected by their culture
We look specifically within cultural groups to see how their culture relates to their psychology
Cross-cultural psychology tries to distinguish universal psychological processes from those that are specific to particular cultures.
Emic vs Etic
Emic approaches to research and make approaches are those that focus primarily primarily within a cultural context
Etic approaches look at psychological questions, ideally informed by cross-cultural perspectives. So not assuming that the viewpoint of any one culture is going to be relevant in answering a particular question.
Cultures refers to the shared rules that govern behavior, a filter through which we see and understand our current reality. Cultures are things that a set of unwritten rules, things that we may not even be able to articulate that guide the way that we see the world, but also govern behaviour that we see as appropriate or inappropriate in our particular cultural context. - Primarily learned
indigenous psychology promotes psychologies Is that not imposed, that are influenced by the cultural context in which people live, that are developed from within a culture and that results in locally relevant psychological knowledge.
Universal biasses
We see something happen in the world we attribute a cause to it
Correspondence Bias (Tendency to attribute other’s behaviour to internal dispositions rather than situational constraints)
Self-Serving Bias (Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal, stable ‘causes’, and negative outcomes to external, unstable factors)
Criticism of milligrams procedure class answers
Didn’t administer any electroshocks
Ethics – psychological trauma – think they really badly injure someone
Weren't given complete right to withdraw
Everyone was male in original experiment - impacts generalization
Age – brain development isn't complete until 20
Seniority - cultural norms in childhood whether or not to obey
Behavior of researcher
Ethics - Mislead about what the study is
Criticism of milligrams procedure – teachers answers
Situation involved conflicting cures
Teacher overhead experiment telling learner that there would be no lasting damage versus the lack of response from learner after 345 volts
Ethics?
Did the end justify the means (was the result important enough?)
Were the subjects free to terminate the experiment?
Did the subjects consent freely to participate?
With the assistance of a psychiatrist Milgram interviewed the participants years later:
83.7% were glad, or very glad, to have participated
1.3% were sorry or very sorry to have participated
I doubt I'd ever get permission to replicate Milgram's research now but, hopefully, we don't need to because we're all nicer people now...
Standford prison experiment
This study was intended to evaluate the causes of problems in Navy prisons
Like Milgram's study, 24 participants were recruited from respondents to a newspaper advert, and were paid US$15 a day to participate in a two-week simulation of a prison.
Participants were allocated roles of guard and prisoner based on the toss of a coin. Zimbardo took the role of superintendent.
The study was ended early, six days into the fourteen planned... ...after Christine Malach (a graduate student) convinced Zimbardo that the study was dangerous.
More than 50 people had acted as observers by the time Malach raised her concerns.
Depersonalisation (switch to group-level self-categorization) seeing themselves as the groups they belong to - guard, prisoner
Deindividuation (loss of self-awareness in groups)
Adorno et al (1950) argued that some people are prejudiced at the personality level, displaying a constellation of characteristics including:
Conventionalism - world shouldn’t change
Authoritarian submission – you should do what your told
Authoritarian aggression – if you don’t do what your told its okay that you get beat up
Anti-intraception
Superstition and stereotypy
Power and "toughness"
Destructiveness and cynicism
Projectivity
Sex
People who are more authorities are most likely to follow through
The authoritarian personality
We find that even people who are liberal still find themselves with high f scale despite different political leanings
The Right-Wing Authoritarian
Authoritarian Submission
People should do as they're told by legitimate authorities
Authoritarian Aggression
If people don't do as they're told, they should be punished
Conventionalism
Have a preference for tradition in social relationships
Punitive socialism > Social conformity > Dangerous world belief > Authoritarianism
If parents negatively reinforced and punish kids too often, the child develops a controlling personality, and consequently a dangerous world belief
The authoritarian perspective
People do get what they deserve in life
Some people are treated very unfairly
If you weren't an authoritarian you would agree with the top statement. The authoritarian are often contradictory
Behavior = the person + the situation
Obedience is the power of the situation
The people that are most likely to be obedient are the authoritarian
These people will do things because they are told to
Leon Festinger
"Social influence processes and some kinds of competitive behavior are both manifestations of the same socio-psychological process...[namely,] the drive for self evaluation and the necessity for such evaluation being based on comparison with other persons."
What is cognitive dissonance
...the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.
Dissonance increases with:
The importance of the subject.
Strength of the conflict between dissonant thoughts.
Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.
Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves but our behaviour is inconsistent with that belief. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts.
Tension may be released by...
Changing behaviour.
Justifying behaviour by changing the conflicting cognition.
Justifying behaviour by adding new cognitions.
Dissonance is most powerful when it is about our self-image.
Ethics and integrity
Ethics is important is all areas of research – especially people or things that can feel pain
Ethics is partially important is social psychology
Little albert
Process of reinforcement – we are required for doing things people are wanting us to do punished for things people don’t want us to do
White rat and loud noise
After a while baby starts crying just because of presence of rat – no longer need the noise that goes along with it
If behaviours is not reinforced over time will became distinguished
Ethics – mortality – difference between right and wrong
Ethics are the institutionalisation of mortality –rules we establish to decide what's right and wrong.
Bioethical principals
Respect for autonomy
When people participate should be on their own autonomy – they decide if they want to participate or not
Beneficence
When you do something you should be doing it for good
Non-maleficence
When you do something it shouldn’t be for evil
Justice
Should be trying to do things that maintain a just world rather than things that cause evil, pain, inequalities etc
Code of ethics – need to be followed in New Zealand
Kaupapa Māori
Whanaungatanga
People should get to know each other
Manangatanga
We should be generous hosts of people for who we engage with for research or therapy
Aroha
We should do it with a sense of love for our participants
Mahaki
Mana
We should do the best that we can and not diminish them
Titiro, whakaronga
Stop and listen to research participants - people are the best at knowing about their own lives
Kia tupato
He kanohi kitea
Social facilitation, social loafing and Prosociality
"Social facilitation is 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"
People are more obedient and confirmative in bigger groups – if we keep making the group #bigger what happens to performance.
Depends if were looking at output of total group or the Individual's
Efficiently of different size groups if animals/people performing agricultural tasks.
Eg. Young men (alone or in groups of 2,3,or 8 pulling rope)
Result - Force exerted per person decreased as function of group size – the Ringelmann effect
Possible explanations:
Stronger if had chance to strategize, induvial only had to strategize with themself
Every group has a leader – 45 seconds isn't long enough for this to happen
Awkward when in group with people you don’t know
Co-ordination relation reasons – not having strategy's, hands banging together – coordination loss – challenges to do with performing individual activities as a group
Control condition: individual pulling alone
Real groups: groups of subjects actually pulling together
Pseudo-groups: individuals subject at front pulling with group of confederates (instructed to pretend to pull)
Can't be coordination loss with pseudo lost because only one people is pulling – must be motivation
Two possibilities – pseudo group is only motivation loss, difference between pseudo group and real groups is coordination loss.
...same pattern of results, and coined "social loafing:
"a reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task (in which one's outputs are pooled with those of other group members) compared to when working either alone or coactively" (Williams, Karau & Bourgeois, 1993, p.131)
Social loafing is a 'robust and pervasive phenomenon" (Vaughan & Hogg, 1995, p. 150) across:
Different situations
Cultures
Real world example:
Attack to 30 minutes
Struggled and escaped several times
When police arrived next day 38 people allegedly admitted that they heard the struggle but did not help or call police
Bystander affect – the finding that a lone bystander is more likely to give them aid than any one of several bystanders.
Eg. Male subjects completed questionnaires in a waiting room alone, or with a fried, or confederate. Subjects hear a women in an adjacent room having difficulty with a filing cabinet. Crash!
Results:
Subjects alone -70% helped
Pairs of subjects -40% helped
Subject plus passive confederate - 7% helped
(In a further refinement they found that pairs of friends helped 70% of the time)
The hypothesis: that in emergency people will look to others before deciding with to do.
results:
alone - 75% took positive action with two strangers
38% took positive action with confederates
10% took positive action
Conclusion:
...the presence of others inhibits people's response in an emergency - the more people, the slower the response.
Why do people demonstrate bystander affect
Factors contributing to this "bystander effect"
Latané and others have identified a number of processes that may inhibit the giving of assistance in these types of situations:
Diffusion of Responsibility - Similar to social loafing - the presence of others provides an opportunity to transfer the responsibility to act onto someone else. The more someone-else's there are, the greater the diffusion.
Audience inhibition - The presence of others makes people self-conscious of an intended action (sometimes referred to as fear of social blunders)
Social Influence - Other onlookers serve as models for action, and Pluralistic Ignorance-Unworried others dissuade/discourage individual intervention even if they're worried.
Strangers vs friends - if other onlookers are strangers then helping is inhibited (communication is slower)
However inhibition is decreased even among strangers if it is known that there will be future opportunities to interact (and possibly explain their motives).
Burnout and CPTSD
Factor analysis – how things fit together in people's heads
Emotional exhaustion
Ongoing state of physical/emotional depletion from excessive demands and continuous stress
Feeling emotionally exhausted and over-extended by work
Distances oneself from work
Depersonalization
Often referred to as engaging in dehumanization; treating others like objects, or without regard for feelings
A negative shift in response to others; -ve or inappropriate attitudes to clients, loss if idealism, irritability
Is an attempt to distance oneself from clients/others
Reduced personal accomplishment
A negative response towards oneself and one's accomplishments (also described as low mood, low morale, withdrawal, reduced productivity/ capability, inability to cope)
Is a function of exhaustion, cynicism, or both
Consequences of burnout
Physical health: hypercholesterolemia, type two diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalisation due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems, severe headaches mortality before 45 years.
Psychological health
Insomnia, depressive symptoms, use of psychotropic and antidepressant medicine, hospitalisation for mental disorders and psychological ill-health symptoms
Professional fallout
Job dissatisfaction, absenteeism and presenteeism, new disability pension
Onces stress goes off other part of nervous system pushes down that result
What causes burnout
Workload
Plan
Prioritises
Delegate
Say no
Let go of perfectionism
Perceived lack of control
Identify why your feeling this way
Communicate how your feeling
Reward
Something you get in return for doing something else ie money
Appreciation
I do this job because it makes a difference
Test
Ask for promotion or feedback,
Use what you have
Community
Communicate
connect
Fairness
Speak up
Ask for credit
Compare situations where people are treated fairly to where you are
Values mismatch
How important is it
Seek congruence
What is trauma
When an individual is exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence
What is personality
"...That pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations." (Phares, 1988)
"Consistent behaviour patterns and intrapersonal processes originating within the individual." (Burger, 1997)
...The enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person's unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns." (From the APA Dictionary of Psychology)
Consistency and persevering over time
Peoples consistent ways of moving through time
Who are you
Shakespeare's play
Idea Julius Caesar is presenting in segment is that he can judge something about people from the way they look. wants to be surrounded by fat men with sleek foreheads because he thinks that he doesn’t have to fear anything from the lazy or cowardly. Doesn't like people who have thin and hungry look because he assumes that they are people who are motivated by greed.
Physiognomy
Dispositions follow bodily characteristics... physical appearance (face) is a window on the psyche.
Greek astrologers
Used the stars as potential ways of looking at how people behave. The influences on people's behavior and how we might expect them to behave in given situations.
Babylonians
Engaged in sacrifice, usually of animals through the trials, to try to work out what was going to happen in the future and what people are going to do.
Hypocrites
Lots of different coloured liquids that happened to go through people's bodies that he thought might be what he called the pillars of temperament.
He identified a matrix of hot and cold fluids that might also be wet or dry.
These in some way drive who we are. Fluid that was dominant in your body influenced personality type
Blood = sanguine
Black bile = melancholic
Yellow bile = choleric
Phlegm = phlegmatic
Christian Thomasius
Identify peoples personalities based on the information we could collect about them.
Idea that we could identify traits that people have and score people on those traits.
Immanuel Kant
Did work based off Hippocrates and Galens findings
There are basic personality types – took those labels and tried to identify a set of characteristics which might be thought to characterize those different personality types.
Wundt
Took basic labels Kant proposed and organized them into catergories above.
Two primary dimensions – strong and weak, unchangeable temperaments, unchangeable temperments
Lavater
A basic resource in a gentleman's home, to be consulted with hiring staff, making friends and establishing business relations.
Identify peoples personality characteristics based on their faces – relates to physiognomy
Sanguine = cheerful (or red)
Melancholic = unhappy
Choleric = bad tempered
Phlegmatic = calm
Francis Galton
Went through dictionary to build comprehensive list of prospective personality characteristics... discovered correlation analysis along the way
Organisms that do well in part because they’ve adapted to their environment.
If a bird is in an environment where food is not easily accessible unless you've got a long beak, initially the birds which have the longest beaks, will be the ones who get food. The ones that don't have long beaks will die and after a while the long beaked birds will have children which will have long beaks.
Words that people use to describe other people could be used to describe personality – reflect language we have.
Discovered correlation analysis
Different personality characteristics seem to vary.
Sigmund Frued
Frued's topographic model
The way we think can be broken down into three basic levels
The conscious
The things we have access to in the here and now
The preconscious
We can bring to mind with time and effort
Unconscious
Inaccessible to us
Freud's structural model
Iceberg in which the conscious and the pre conscious sit around about where the waterline is and the unconscious is underneath them
Id
hot, sweaty, bubbling urges that are inaccessible to us at any moment but drive up a lot of our behavior.
Superego
The preachy moralizing part of our personality that comes from an internalization of what we think of society says is important
Ego
Bit of our consciousness that mediates between these two. Tries to find middle path where we can try do some of the things that our hot sweaty urges are pushing us towards that our superego are trying to keep suppressed.
Carl Jung
Collective unconscious, primordial images > archetypes, extroversion
One of the things that becomes apparent looking across time, culture and history is that there are things that may reside in our unconscious mind that are innate.
Things that have been written onto our unconscious.
many symbols that transcend cultural boundaries and cultural time points that must reflect something that was burned into our collective unconscious.
He also argued for what he called the importance of primordial images or archetypes of people or different types of personalities.
One of the basic distinctions that he characterized in this term was between people who are extrovert and introvert.
Two types of attitudes
There is a whole class of men who at... a given situation at first draw back a little if with an invoiced 'no,' and only after that are able to react
And there is another class who, in the same situation, come forward with an immediate reaction, apparently confident that their behavior is obviously right.
Later added four basic functions
Irrational (sensation, intuition) - reflecting perception
Rational (thinking, feeling) - reflecting reason and judgment
Relates to Myers Brigg
Gordon Allport
"Psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious."
Identified 4000 adjectives in the English language alone that describe personality.
Challenge - to combine in some usable 'structure' - hence the quest for 'types' that could then be described using traits.
The nomothetic approach - identification, measurement and description of common traits across individuals.
What are the things that I have in common, with other people
The ideographic approach - identification of the unique combinations of traits that account for an individual's personality.
Might share traits with other people but aren't the same as those other people
Raymond Cartel
Factor analysis
Factor analysis is a suite of statistical tools that allow you to look at which things go together, which things don't go together.
Personality as trait dimensions
The dominant approach to personality sees a combination of all thoughts, views, ideas graphically. There are an unlimited set of personality traits that we all vary on. In combination they make up the unique indivual that we are.
First need to identify a trait that can be represented as different points on a continuum – people differ in different levels of this trait
Measure enough people, and we typically find a normal distribution – some people are at the extremes but most are in the middle.
Big five (OCEAN Model)
openness, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, Neuroticism
DeYoung
Extraversion... linked to approach tendencies/reward: nucleus acumens, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex
Neuroticism... sensitive to threat/punishment: amygdala, anterior/mid-cingulate gyrus, PFC
Agreeableness... prosociality vs callousness, aggression: superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex
Conscientiousness... impulse control: dorsal/ventral lateral PFC
Openness... abstraction and flexibility: dorsolateral PFC, front pole of anterior PFC, anterior parietal cortex.
Personality over the lifespan
Doesn’t really change
Theory
A systematic way of organizing and explaining observations which include a set of propositions, or statements about the relationships among various phenomena
And or
A set of statements designed to explain a set of phenomena; more encompassing than a[n] hypothesis.
Hypothesis – a statement that can be tested
Hypothesis's...
Can be exploratory
Are typically more focused than theories
What separates psychology from other non-sciences is that we use the scientific method to test hypotheses to see if they are supported, or not supported, by appropriate information (or data)
Broken windows theory
If someone walks past a building with one smashed window people are more likely to smash other windows. Makes people care less about the building.
Psychopathy is a behavior of lack of interest in others.
How do we know that the results for one group are different enough that we can be confident they dot just look different?
Statistics
As psychological scientists, we are happy to say that a result is sufficiently unlikely that it's probably not due to chance – if there's less than a 5% likelihood that it is due to chance
Correlations
A correlation is a number that represents the size and direction of the relationship between two things.
Correlation = r
Types of variables
The type of statistic
The "degrees of freedom" (an indication of sample size)
The value of the test statistic
The probability of getting this result
Cannot prove hypothesis but can support it 0.001 does not equal 0 there is still a possibility it's up to chance.
William james – father of psycology
Set up first laboratory inteneted for teaching psycology
Michael Wilhelm – also considered father of psycology
Also established psycological laboratory – frist research laboratory – more impoirtnat
B.F Skinner
Important in history of psychology because he is strongly associated with the school of psychological behaviourism – because we can't reach into people's heads and objectively view their thoughts, we can't objectively understand the content of peoples thoughts. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the content of the way people think. Instead we should treat the humans mind as a black box and focus solely on the inputs, the things that happen in the environment and the outputs, the things we do in response to those changes in the environment.
This was a tremendously influential movement
Skinner box
Training a rat to behave in a particular way in response to reinforcement
Might set it up so when light goes green and the rat presses a lever it gets something to eat
One of the most important tools in early behaviorism
Phits
Fictional forensic psycologist
Psycologist who works In legal contexts uses the science of psycology to track down people who have comitted horrendous crimes.
Stanley Milgram
One of the most divisive characters in the history of social psycology
Associated with one of the most potenitally immoral psyscholgical studies of all time
Social psychology is the application of social psychological knowledge, theory, research and methods to understanding the social world. It's about understanding how the social world acts, and the way we think, feel and behave, but also how we influence the social context in which we fit through the way we think feel and behave.
Eric Albert
Important in contempory clinical psycology
One of the contributions he made was the delvelopement of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Therapy that can be used with people who experience a wide range of different typs of psycological distress ie depressed, anxious.
Focuses on helping people identify the links between their cognition (thinking) and behaviour
The things we do are related to the thoughts we have
While this sounds like common sense, the reality is that many people who are experiencing mental distress, – they find it very had to see that
John A.
Clinical psychologist
Abraham Maslow
Championed humanism – wanted to locate the person at the center of psychology
Started carrier working with chimpanzees as a research assistant – observations he saw there are what inspired him to develop a theory about the things that motivate human beings
Hirachy of needs is a pyramid where we have things at the bottom which are immediate needs for our survival, at the top is lofty aspirations like being the best person we can be.
Maslow argued that its really difficult to be the best person you can be when you are worrying about not having the necessities
Dr Phil
Clinical psychologist
Sigmund Freud
Not a psychologist – psychology ≠ psychiatry
Important is history of psychology for proposing a number of really important ideas that psychological scientists have gone onto test and use in practice
Specialized in neurology
Psychologist work with people to reduce and resole their mental stress primarily through talk therapies whereas psychiatrists adopt a medical model of mental distress – ie if someone has a cold then we tend to identify the problem as a medical one since something has gone into the body and caused a problem
Many things associated with mental distress are rooted deep in our unconscious
Psychology is relatively young however the ideas that are considered important date back to has long as there's been people
Trepanation – drilling holes into people's skulls as a for of therapy
This early definition of psychology has taken a number of times throughout time, along the way, we have seen nativism versus empiricism.
Nativism is the idea that we are born with every faculty that we ultimately exhibit. We have been able to do the things that we end up doing throughout our lives. This is empiricism. It has a number of different meanings, but in the context of the history of psychology, it means that everything we can do, we have to learn to do.
ISM is the idea that the totality of human experience is made up of a whole bunch of smaller elements and vote, and the students went on to try and develop ways that we could take apart human experience to identify those individual characteristics. He developed an approach called introspection, which involves training people to try and break down the sensory experiences. The things I see, hear, smell, touch into the individual elements color, shape, sheer intensity.
Functionalism, on the other hand, was James's idea that our rights or our minds have specialized faculties, specialized organs that had particular functions.
James argued that there are functions, there are things in the brain that have specific functions, and these two arguments have played off against each other throughout the history of and subsequently.
what are the things that already be apparent when it comes from this idea of nativism versus empiricism is the argument about nature versus naurture.
Psyche means body or mind or soul.
Phrenology is the identification of a person's personality based on the characteristics of the shapes of the skull Phrenologists would take their calipers are measured the size and shape of people's heads and make judgments about their personality characteristics on the basis of that.
Now, there's a problem with chronology in that if your only sample of skulls that you are measuring comes from criminals, there's an absence of what we call the control group. You might identify, for example, particular characteristics that seem to be fairly common across all of the criminals. But how do you know that they are different from people who are known criminals?
Nurture
Locke argued that we are born as a tabula rasa that's Latin for a blank slate. So when we are born, we are a book that is white waiting to be written upon everything we learn Locke says, I learned to do. We have to learn from scratch. We are born with nothing innate.
There is an important developmental phase during our early lives where we're not exposed to sufficient stimulation or things like language, It becomes increasingly hard to develop those things. We are a product of the formative experiences that we have.
Jeremy Bentham
He proposed the idea of the Panopto. He argued that we are born evil. We are born with a burning desire to get all the goodies for ourselves. And as a result, he said, if we don't believe social and institutional structure, social structures that will prevent us from doing that, then we will behave in ways that are criminal.
Sheldon made the argument for what he called Soma Times the idea that our personalities reflect the shapes of our bodies and dwarfs, he said.
Francis Galton
He argued that the extent to which the way that we always inherit from our parents and our environment. That must be because they themselves have parents who had these characteristics better people, he suggested, had better parents. People who have more positive person and social outcomes do so because they've inherited them from their parents.
Eugenics - is the practice of trying to eliminate undesirable psychological, physiological or other characteristics from population by wiping out people who have those characteristics to prevent them from passing onto their kids.
Robert Rosenthal
Is a social psychologist or developmental psychologist
responsible for coined the terms of descriptors the Pygmalion, the government effects, the start, the Pygmalion. The outcomes that children and other things organisms, people, adults exhibit are sometimes a product of the way that they're treated. If you treat it as if you are important, as if you can learn to do other things, if you a small valuable, then you're more likely to ultimately achieve outcomes that reflect that. The Gollum effect is the reverse.
Albert Bandura
Badger is the most cited, psychologist in the history of psychology.
Study for which he is most important is a study about the importance of how observing violence impacts on behavior.
We have a lot of common wisdom that reflects these intuitive ideas that the way that we behave is the product of nature or the product of nurture.
Norman Triplett Hypothesis: that individuals performance is facilitated by others
Social facilitation – the positive effect of observers on an individual performance
This experiment illustrates
an experiment that simulates real life situation
Concealment of ultimate aim of the experiment
Impact of mere presence of others
Social facilitation become one of the major topics of social psychology for three decades
Conformity (of major influence)
They will say the same thing as the people before them
Why do people conform?
Motivation:
People may conform for one, other, or both of
Wanting to be right
Wanting to make a good impression
Leading to...
Informational Influence.
E.g., Di Vesta (1959) - conformity increased if there were more neutral trials at the start (more evidence that confederates were competent).
Normative Influence.
E.g., Increasing interdependence of participants by promising a reward to most accurate groups a conformity doubled.
Different types of conformity:
Informational Influence
Conversion
Normative Influence
Compliance
Compliance - Conformity primarily because of concern about how they will be perceived, while privately disagreeing.
Conversion - Conformity primarily because of belief that others are right then they have changed their own private opinion.
Public vs Private context
What affects conformity?
Competing contexts:
Private
Public
Normative influence is more important in producing conformity because responses given publicly are more likely to show conformity than responses given privately.
Group membership
If people feel they belong with others a behavior of those others becomes a norm that is internalized and relevant for behavior as a group member.
Conformity ↓ when the source of influence identified as an outgroup member (someone from a group to which the participant did not belong).
Consistency within the group
If confederates are unanimous then conformity is higher.
If single confederate acts as a supporter (give correct answer) conformity dropped to 5.5%
Conformity declined even if the dissenting confederate was obviously wrong (but disagreed with the majority).
Effect of group consistency only applies in unambiguous situations.
Conformity increases as groups size increases (to a maximum) - Asch (1951) ran variations with majorities of between 1 and 16.
"Social psychology is the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others." (Gordon Allport, 1954)
Adolf Eichmann
Final solution
Only defense was I was following orders
When we conform it feels like what we need to do. Obedience is when you're being told to do something.
One explanation was that of the 'Authoritarian Personality provided by Adomo, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950).
The authoritarian personality was theorised as originating in childhood in response to excessively harsh and disciplinarian parenting intended to produce emotional dependence and obedience in the child.
The child develops ambiguity (love and hate) towards parents
Frear and guilt mean the child cannot act on his anger towards the parents
The anger is displaced onto weaker others, while parents/power they represent are idealized
Underestimates situational and cultural factors in blind obedience – a situation that Milgram's work addressed
The teacher was required to administer a shock for each incorrect answer, with shocks increasing in severity
Learner behavior
75-105 start responding
120 banging on the desk/complaining
300 want to get out
345 unconscious
Experimental group study
62.5% continued to administer shocks at the highest level
368 volts was the average shock level administered
Why did they obey?
The abided because they were visually distressed
Factors affecting obedience
Milgrim (1974) reports a series of 18 experiments manipulating various situational factors to investigate factors influencing obedience
Immediacy/proximity (physical and emotional) of all the victim
Proximity of the victim was manipulated under four conditions
Victim pounds of thick wall separating Teacher and learner
Victim heard crying through thick wall
Subject ad victim in same room
Subject required to hold victims hand to shock plate
When experiment was conducted in a less prestigious setting maximum obedience decreased
There are a variety of different subsets or sub areas of psychology that deal with issues relating to culture.
Cultural psycology – studies the way which people are affected by their culture
We look specifically within cultural groups to see how their culture relates to their psychology
Cross-cultural psychology tries to distinguish universal psychological processes from those that are specific to particular cultures.
Emic vs Etic
Emic approaches to research and make approaches are those that focus primarily primarily within a cultural context
Etic approaches look at psychological questions, ideally informed by cross-cultural perspectives. So not assuming that the viewpoint of any one culture is going to be relevant in answering a particular question.
Cultures refers to the shared rules that govern behavior, a filter through which we see and understand our current reality. Cultures are things that a set of unwritten rules, things that we may not even be able to articulate that guide the way that we see the world, but also govern behaviour that we see as appropriate or inappropriate in our particular cultural context. - Primarily learned
indigenous psychology promotes psychologies Is that not imposed, that are influenced by the cultural context in which people live, that are developed from within a culture and that results in locally relevant psychological knowledge.
Universal biasses
We see something happen in the world we attribute a cause to it
Correspondence Bias (Tendency to attribute other’s behaviour to internal dispositions rather than situational constraints)
Self-Serving Bias (Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal, stable ‘causes’, and negative outcomes to external, unstable factors)
Criticism of milligrams procedure class answers
Didn’t administer any electroshocks
Ethics – psychological trauma – think they really badly injure someone
Weren't given complete right to withdraw
Everyone was male in original experiment - impacts generalization
Age – brain development isn't complete until 20
Seniority - cultural norms in childhood whether or not to obey
Behavior of researcher
Ethics - Mislead about what the study is
Criticism of milligrams procedure – teachers answers
Situation involved conflicting cures
Teacher overhead experiment telling learner that there would be no lasting damage versus the lack of response from learner after 345 volts
Ethics?
Did the end justify the means (was the result important enough?)
Were the subjects free to terminate the experiment?
Did the subjects consent freely to participate?
With the assistance of a psychiatrist Milgram interviewed the participants years later:
83.7% were glad, or very glad, to have participated
1.3% were sorry or very sorry to have participated
I doubt I'd ever get permission to replicate Milgram's research now but, hopefully, we don't need to because we're all nicer people now...
Standford prison experiment
This study was intended to evaluate the causes of problems in Navy prisons
Like Milgram's study, 24 participants were recruited from respondents to a newspaper advert, and were paid US$15 a day to participate in a two-week simulation of a prison.
Participants were allocated roles of guard and prisoner based on the toss of a coin. Zimbardo took the role of superintendent.
The study was ended early, six days into the fourteen planned... ...after Christine Malach (a graduate student) convinced Zimbardo that the study was dangerous.
More than 50 people had acted as observers by the time Malach raised her concerns.
Depersonalisation (switch to group-level self-categorization) seeing themselves as the groups they belong to - guard, prisoner
Deindividuation (loss of self-awareness in groups)
Adorno et al (1950) argued that some people are prejudiced at the personality level, displaying a constellation of characteristics including:
Conventionalism - world shouldn’t change
Authoritarian submission – you should do what your told
Authoritarian aggression – if you don’t do what your told its okay that you get beat up
Anti-intraception
Superstition and stereotypy
Power and "toughness"
Destructiveness and cynicism
Projectivity
Sex
People who are more authorities are most likely to follow through
The authoritarian personality
We find that even people who are liberal still find themselves with high f scale despite different political leanings
The Right-Wing Authoritarian
Authoritarian Submission
People should do as they're told by legitimate authorities
Authoritarian Aggression
If people don't do as they're told, they should be punished
Conventionalism
Have a preference for tradition in social relationships
Punitive socialism > Social conformity > Dangerous world belief > Authoritarianism
If parents negatively reinforced and punish kids too often, the child develops a controlling personality, and consequently a dangerous world belief
The authoritarian perspective
People do get what they deserve in life
Some people are treated very unfairly
If you weren't an authoritarian you would agree with the top statement. The authoritarian are often contradictory
Behavior = the person + the situation
Obedience is the power of the situation
The people that are most likely to be obedient are the authoritarian
These people will do things because they are told to
Leon Festinger
"Social influence processes and some kinds of competitive behavior are both manifestations of the same socio-psychological process...[namely,] the drive for self evaluation and the necessity for such evaluation being based on comparison with other persons."
What is cognitive dissonance
...the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.
Dissonance increases with:
The importance of the subject.
Strength of the conflict between dissonant thoughts.
Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.
Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves but our behaviour is inconsistent with that belief. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts.
Tension may be released by...
Changing behaviour.
Justifying behaviour by changing the conflicting cognition.
Justifying behaviour by adding new cognitions.
Dissonance is most powerful when it is about our self-image.
Ethics and integrity
Ethics is important is all areas of research – especially people or things that can feel pain
Ethics is partially important is social psychology
Little albert
Process of reinforcement – we are required for doing things people are wanting us to do punished for things people don’t want us to do
White rat and loud noise
After a while baby starts crying just because of presence of rat – no longer need the noise that goes along with it
If behaviours is not reinforced over time will became distinguished
Ethics – mortality – difference between right and wrong
Ethics are the institutionalisation of mortality –rules we establish to decide what's right and wrong.
Bioethical principals
Respect for autonomy
When people participate should be on their own autonomy – they decide if they want to participate or not
Beneficence
When you do something you should be doing it for good
Non-maleficence
When you do something it shouldn’t be for evil
Justice
Should be trying to do things that maintain a just world rather than things that cause evil, pain, inequalities etc
Code of ethics – need to be followed in New Zealand
Kaupapa Māori
Whanaungatanga
People should get to know each other
Manangatanga
We should be generous hosts of people for who we engage with for research or therapy
Aroha
We should do it with a sense of love for our participants
Mahaki
Mana
We should do the best that we can and not diminish them
Titiro, whakaronga
Stop and listen to research participants - people are the best at knowing about their own lives
Kia tupato
He kanohi kitea
Social facilitation, social loafing and Prosociality
"Social facilitation is 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"
People are more obedient and confirmative in bigger groups – if we keep making the group #bigger what happens to performance.
Depends if were looking at output of total group or the Individual's
Efficiently of different size groups if animals/people performing agricultural tasks.
Eg. Young men (alone or in groups of 2,3,or 8 pulling rope)
Result - Force exerted per person decreased as function of group size – the Ringelmann effect
Possible explanations:
Stronger if had chance to strategize, induvial only had to strategize with themself
Every group has a leader – 45 seconds isn't long enough for this to happen
Awkward when in group with people you don’t know
Co-ordination relation reasons – not having strategy's, hands banging together – coordination loss – challenges to do with performing individual activities as a group
Control condition: individual pulling alone
Real groups: groups of subjects actually pulling together
Pseudo-groups: individuals subject at front pulling with group of confederates (instructed to pretend to pull)
Can't be coordination loss with pseudo lost because only one people is pulling – must be motivation
Two possibilities – pseudo group is only motivation loss, difference between pseudo group and real groups is coordination loss.
...same pattern of results, and coined "social loafing:
"a reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task (in which one's outputs are pooled with those of other group members) compared to when working either alone or coactively" (Williams, Karau & Bourgeois, 1993, p.131)
Social loafing is a 'robust and pervasive phenomenon" (Vaughan & Hogg, 1995, p. 150) across:
Different situations
Cultures
Real world example:
Attack to 30 minutes
Struggled and escaped several times
When police arrived next day 38 people allegedly admitted that they heard the struggle but did not help or call police
Bystander affect – the finding that a lone bystander is more likely to give them aid than any one of several bystanders.
Eg. Male subjects completed questionnaires in a waiting room alone, or with a fried, or confederate. Subjects hear a women in an adjacent room having difficulty with a filing cabinet. Crash!
Results:
Subjects alone -70% helped
Pairs of subjects -40% helped
Subject plus passive confederate - 7% helped
(In a further refinement they found that pairs of friends helped 70% of the time)
The hypothesis: that in emergency people will look to others before deciding with to do.
results:
alone - 75% took positive action with two strangers
38% took positive action with confederates
10% took positive action
Conclusion:
...the presence of others inhibits people's response in an emergency - the more people, the slower the response.
Why do people demonstrate bystander affect
Factors contributing to this "bystander effect"
Latané and others have identified a number of processes that may inhibit the giving of assistance in these types of situations:
Diffusion of Responsibility - Similar to social loafing - the presence of others provides an opportunity to transfer the responsibility to act onto someone else. The more someone-else's there are, the greater the diffusion.
Audience inhibition - The presence of others makes people self-conscious of an intended action (sometimes referred to as fear of social blunders)
Social Influence - Other onlookers serve as models for action, and Pluralistic Ignorance-Unworried others dissuade/discourage individual intervention even if they're worried.
Strangers vs friends - if other onlookers are strangers then helping is inhibited (communication is slower)
However inhibition is decreased even among strangers if it is known that there will be future opportunities to interact (and possibly explain their motives).
Burnout and CPTSD
Factor analysis – how things fit together in people's heads
Emotional exhaustion
Ongoing state of physical/emotional depletion from excessive demands and continuous stress
Feeling emotionally exhausted and over-extended by work
Distances oneself from work
Depersonalization
Often referred to as engaging in dehumanization; treating others like objects, or without regard for feelings
A negative shift in response to others; -ve or inappropriate attitudes to clients, loss if idealism, irritability
Is an attempt to distance oneself from clients/others
Reduced personal accomplishment
A negative response towards oneself and one's accomplishments (also described as low mood, low morale, withdrawal, reduced productivity/ capability, inability to cope)
Is a function of exhaustion, cynicism, or both
Consequences of burnout
Physical health: hypercholesterolemia, type two diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalisation due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems, severe headaches mortality before 45 years.
Psychological health
Insomnia, depressive symptoms, use of psychotropic and antidepressant medicine, hospitalisation for mental disorders and psychological ill-health symptoms
Professional fallout
Job dissatisfaction, absenteeism and presenteeism, new disability pension
Onces stress goes off other part of nervous system pushes down that result
What causes burnout
Workload
Plan
Prioritises
Delegate
Say no
Let go of perfectionism
Perceived lack of control
Identify why your feeling this way
Communicate how your feeling
Reward
Something you get in return for doing something else ie money
Appreciation
I do this job because it makes a difference
Test
Ask for promotion or feedback,
Use what you have
Community
Communicate
connect
Fairness
Speak up
Ask for credit
Compare situations where people are treated fairly to where you are
Values mismatch
How important is it
Seek congruence
What is trauma
When an individual is exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence
What is personality
"...That pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations." (Phares, 1988)
"Consistent behaviour patterns and intrapersonal processes originating within the individual." (Burger, 1997)
...The enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person's unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns." (From the APA Dictionary of Psychology)
Consistency and persevering over time
Peoples consistent ways of moving through time
Who are you
Shakespeare's play
Idea Julius Caesar is presenting in segment is that he can judge something about people from the way they look. wants to be surrounded by fat men with sleek foreheads because he thinks that he doesn’t have to fear anything from the lazy or cowardly. Doesn't like people who have thin and hungry look because he assumes that they are people who are motivated by greed.
Physiognomy
Dispositions follow bodily characteristics... physical appearance (face) is a window on the psyche.
Greek astrologers
Used the stars as potential ways of looking at how people behave. The influences on people's behavior and how we might expect them to behave in given situations.
Babylonians
Engaged in sacrifice, usually of animals through the trials, to try to work out what was going to happen in the future and what people are going to do.
Hypocrites
Lots of different coloured liquids that happened to go through people's bodies that he thought might be what he called the pillars of temperament.
He identified a matrix of hot and cold fluids that might also be wet or dry.
These in some way drive who we are. Fluid that was dominant in your body influenced personality type
Blood = sanguine
Black bile = melancholic
Yellow bile = choleric
Phlegm = phlegmatic
Christian Thomasius
Identify peoples personalities based on the information we could collect about them.
Idea that we could identify traits that people have and score people on those traits.
Immanuel Kant
Did work based off Hippocrates and Galens findings
There are basic personality types – took those labels and tried to identify a set of characteristics which might be thought to characterize those different personality types.
Wundt
Took basic labels Kant proposed and organized them into catergories above.
Two primary dimensions – strong and weak, unchangeable temperaments, unchangeable temperments
Lavater
A basic resource in a gentleman's home, to be consulted with hiring staff, making friends and establishing business relations.
Identify peoples personality characteristics based on their faces – relates to physiognomy
Sanguine = cheerful (or red)
Melancholic = unhappy
Choleric = bad tempered
Phlegmatic = calm
Francis Galton
Went through dictionary to build comprehensive list of prospective personality characteristics... discovered correlation analysis along the way
Organisms that do well in part because they’ve adapted to their environment.
If a bird is in an environment where food is not easily accessible unless you've got a long beak, initially the birds which have the longest beaks, will be the ones who get food. The ones that don't have long beaks will die and after a while the long beaked birds will have children which will have long beaks.
Words that people use to describe other people could be used to describe personality – reflect language we have.
Discovered correlation analysis
Different personality characteristics seem to vary.
Sigmund Frued
Frued's topographic model
The way we think can be broken down into three basic levels
The conscious
The things we have access to in the here and now
The preconscious
We can bring to mind with time and effort
Unconscious
Inaccessible to us
Freud's structural model
Iceberg in which the conscious and the pre conscious sit around about where the waterline is and the unconscious is underneath them
Id
hot, sweaty, bubbling urges that are inaccessible to us at any moment but drive up a lot of our behavior.
Superego
The preachy moralizing part of our personality that comes from an internalization of what we think of society says is important
Ego
Bit of our consciousness that mediates between these two. Tries to find middle path where we can try do some of the things that our hot sweaty urges are pushing us towards that our superego are trying to keep suppressed.
Carl Jung
Collective unconscious, primordial images > archetypes, extroversion
One of the things that becomes apparent looking across time, culture and history is that there are things that may reside in our unconscious mind that are innate.
Things that have been written onto our unconscious.
many symbols that transcend cultural boundaries and cultural time points that must reflect something that was burned into our collective unconscious.
He also argued for what he called the importance of primordial images or archetypes of people or different types of personalities.
One of the basic distinctions that he characterized in this term was between people who are extrovert and introvert.
Two types of attitudes
There is a whole class of men who at... a given situation at first draw back a little if with an invoiced 'no,' and only after that are able to react
And there is another class who, in the same situation, come forward with an immediate reaction, apparently confident that their behavior is obviously right.
Later added four basic functions
Irrational (sensation, intuition) - reflecting perception
Rational (thinking, feeling) - reflecting reason and judgment
Relates to Myers Brigg
Gordon Allport
"Psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious."
Identified 4000 adjectives in the English language alone that describe personality.
Challenge - to combine in some usable 'structure' - hence the quest for 'types' that could then be described using traits.
The nomothetic approach - identification, measurement and description of common traits across individuals.
What are the things that I have in common, with other people
The ideographic approach - identification of the unique combinations of traits that account for an individual's personality.
Might share traits with other people but aren't the same as those other people
Raymond Cartel
Factor analysis
Factor analysis is a suite of statistical tools that allow you to look at which things go together, which things don't go together.
Personality as trait dimensions
The dominant approach to personality sees a combination of all thoughts, views, ideas graphically. There are an unlimited set of personality traits that we all vary on. In combination they make up the unique indivual that we are.
First need to identify a trait that can be represented as different points on a continuum – people differ in different levels of this trait
Measure enough people, and we typically find a normal distribution – some people are at the extremes but most are in the middle.
Big five (OCEAN Model)
openness, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, Neuroticism
DeYoung
Extraversion... linked to approach tendencies/reward: nucleus acumens, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex
Neuroticism... sensitive to threat/punishment: amygdala, anterior/mid-cingulate gyrus, PFC
Agreeableness... prosociality vs callousness, aggression: superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex
Conscientiousness... impulse control: dorsal/ventral lateral PFC
Openness... abstraction and flexibility: dorsolateral PFC, front pole of anterior PFC, anterior parietal cortex.
Personality over the lifespan
Doesn’t really change