LECTURE NOTES - Lesson 8

Social Cognition

Moral Reasoning

• Morality refers to our abilities in discerning right from wrong, or good behaviour from bad behavior

• Moral reasoning is the logical process people carry out to make judgements about what is right and wrong

• Lawrence Kohlberg (1979), an American psychologist, developed a model of moral reasoning based on his research using a series of hypothetical stories requiring ethical decision-making, such as Heinz’s Dilemma that you viewed during the poll

• He proposed that moral reasoning passes through three levels of development:

Moral Disengagement

• We have all done things we knew were wrong at some point in our lives

• Perhaps you have parked your car illegally, or you availed yourself of a free wireless connection by accessing the account of your next-door neighbour

  • To explain situations where people do not abide by their own moral standards, Albert Bandura (1999) proposed a process of moral disengagement

• Moral disengagement involves a variety of psychological mechanisms we use to convince ourselves that ethical standards do not apply to us in a particular context

  • In moral disengagement, we disable the mechanism of self-condemnation and are able to avoid the negative psychological consequences often felt when they violate their own moral code

• 1. The first three mechanisms serve to minimize the reprehensible nature of the immoral behaviour by reconstruing it more favourably so that it appears less grievous:

  • Euphemistic labeling:

    • Applying a morally neutral or sanitizing language to make to one’s unethical behavior sound less harmful

      • “e.g., I’m just borrowing it.”

  • Moral justification:

    • Recasting one’s unethical behavior to make it appear that it was necessary to reach an important goal or avoid a more harmful consequence

      • e.g., “It was for the greater good.”

  • Advantageous comparison: 

    • A person construes their immoral behavior as less offensive by judging it against another’s more egregious act

      • E.g., “At least we’re not doing what those other people are doing!”

• 2. Disengagement mechanisms also work to minimize the perpetrator’s own responsibility for the unethical conduct

  • Displacement of responsibility:

    • Attributing accountability for one’s own objectionable behavior to people in positions of authority and control

      • e.g., “I was just carrying out orders.”

  • Diffusion of responsibility:

    • Spreading responsibility for immoral behavior across a group of people who are collectively involved to make one feel less responsible for the group’s behavior

      • e.g., “Everybody was doing it.”

• 3. Disengagement mechanisms also operate to diminish the harmful impact of the perpetrator’s behavior

  • Minimization: 

    • Reducing, ignoring or misconstruing the negative consequences of the perpetrator’s acts

      • e.g., “I barely touched him!”

• 4. The last group of disengagement mechanisms are aimed at devaluing or blaming the victim for the behavior

  • Dehumanization:

    • Adopting the view of the victim as lacking human qualities to weaken empathy, and therefore undeserving of humane treatment

      • “e.g., She and every person from her community is a parasite on the welfare system.”

  • Attribution of blame:

    • Arguing that the victim enticed the perpetrator into engaging in harmful behavior

      • e.g., “He had it coming.”

Criminal Thinking

• Criminal thinking refers to “cognitive processes and content that facilitate the initiation and continuation of offending behaviour”

• There are two main theories dedicated to understanding how criminal think and how these thinking patterns guide offending behavior

Yochelson and Samenow’s (1976) Criminal Personality:

• Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow conducted hundreds of interviews with male clinical forensic offenders

• Based on this research, they identified 52 common thinking errors and behavioural patterns that accompanied criminal behavior

• While the research was criticized for being based on an unusual group of offenders, having unclear descriptions of thinking errors, and failing to include a control group for comparison, this work is was foundational for later work on criminal thinking in the field

Criminal Thinking Styles

• Glenn Walters and Thomas White (1989) extended the above work by studying federal offenders

• They condensed these cognitive errors into 8 criminal thinking styles:

  • Modification

  • Cut off

  • Entitlement

  • Power orientation

  • Sentimentality

  • Super-optimism

  • Cognitive indolence

  • Discontinuity

• The key premise in this theory is that the choices and early life experiences of individuals who take part in a criminal lifestyle create a belief system that encourages and justifies persistent criminal activity

• The adoption of these thinking styles perpetuates serious and chronic offending by people rooted in a criminal lifestyle

  • Notably, Walters demonstrated through empirical research that the presence of these criminal thinking styles relates to reoffending among both men and women

Hostile Thoughts and Affect

• The following two theories are distinguished from what we have talked about so far because of their recognition that affect and cognition interact with one another in ways to produce violent behavior

Excitation Transfer Theory

• Zillman et al s excitation transfer theory is founded on the notion that emotional arousal carries over from one situation to another to increase the odds of aggression 

• In this theory, it is assumed that physiological arousal dissipates slowly, which may lead people to mistakenly attribute the residual arousal from a prior event to their current environment

Berkowitz’s (1989) Cognitive NeoAssociation Model

• Affect is also central to the Cognitive NeoAssociation model

• This theory assumes that aversive events, such as an incident involving frustration where a person is blocked from attaining the expected goal, create unpleasant feelings

• This negative affect automatically activates two different networks of associated thoughts, feelings, physiological responses, and motor reactions 

  • The first network centres on the fight tendency to attack the aversive source through the activation of the fight or flight response network

  • The second network is activated moments after the first and involves more thorough cognitive processing where people tend to “catch themselves”

• A criticism of these models is that while they explain reactive violence, they offer little explanation of instrumental acts of violence

Social Interactions

• Research shows that social interactions and the presence of other people can exert a powerful influence on what we think and how we act

• Situational factors are “features, events, or social interactions that characterize a person’s surrounding circumstances”

• Much research has been conducted on deindividuation and obedience as situational factors that explain violent behavior

Deindividuation

• Being submerged in large crowds can produce deindividuation, a psychological state characterized by a decreased sense of personal identity, self-awareness, and self-evaluation

• The larger the group the greater the level of deindividuation. Anonymity also strengthens deindividuation

• Characteristics that make individuals less identifiable, such as hiding their face or wearing similar clothing as others in the group, help to enhance anonymity

• The conventional view of deindividuation suggests that it promotes only social transgressions

  • Yet, a more recent theory advances that deindividuation process may simply influence people to adopt the behavioural norm of the crowd, which could be either prosocial or antisocial 

Obedience

• As noted in the video and your text, the military staff involved in the torture at Abu Graib claimed they were simply following orders

• American psychologist, Stanley Milgram was deeply interested in understanding the role of obedience, that is, complying with the commands of a person in authority, in explaining the disturbing violence of the Holocaust during World War II

  • He conducted a controversial study that showed that the presence of an authority figure can profoundly influence people's behavior

  • He further observed an inverse relationship between victim proximity and obedience

  • Participants were least obedient when the victim was physically closest to them and most obedient when the victim was farthest away

• In contrast, proximity to the source of authority increased obedience

Social Information Processing Theories

• Social information processing (SIP) theories draw an analogy between the human mind and a computer that reads data inputs and generates a behavioural output

  • This theory assumes that people read and base their behaviour on social cues, which refers to the “words, gestures, and actions of other people that provide clues about their feelings, thoughts, and motives” and SIP theory proposes that aggressive behaviour is explained by deficiencies in one or more of the following 4 stages of cognitive processing:

    • 1. Encoding social cues – Perceiving and organizing incoming social cues

      • Those who engage in aggressive behaviour are more likely than others to be hypervigilant towards aggressive social cues in the environment.

    • 2. Interpreting social cues – integrating the available encoded social cues and situational information to create a mental picture or appreciation of the situation

      • Attribution is the “process of making causal judgments about people's behaviour and events” 

      • Aggressive people are more likely to exhibit an information processing error called hostile attribution bias, which is the tendency to misinterpret the neutral actions of others as aggressive

    • 3. Searching for behavioural responses – once a situation has been interpreted, people access their memory for appropriate behavioral responses

      • Aggressive people tend to rely on less effective or maladaptive scripts, “an organized unit of knowledge or mental template that lays out the expected sequence of behaviour for a particular social situation as well as a likely outcome of that behaviour” 

      • As we have seen, Priming is when recent exposure to stimuli may make certain scripts more accessible for future retrieval

      • Recently viewing weapons or other violent cues can prime aggressive scripts

    • 4. Evaluating and selecting response – a script will be activated when it is selected as the best choice among all scripts that were retrieved

      • There are three main considerations in evaluating scripts:

        • Response evaluation - is based on how closely a script coincides with one's values and moral beliefs

        • Outcome expectations - are based on a cost-benefit analysis of the potential positive and negative outcomes of enacting a script

        • Self-efficacy - is based on the chances that a script can be successfully performed in the present situation

• Aggressive scripts may be selected when an individual views violent behaviour acceptable, believes a violent response will be rewarded, and is more confident in their ability to enact an aggressive script than a prosocial one

The General Aggression Model (GAM)

• The general model of aggression synthesizes many of the theories and studies discussed in this lesson into a holistic model that explains individual instances of aggressive behavior

• According to the model, distal factors relating to a person's biology and environment enhance or diminish the influence of proximate factors

• Proximate factors include the characteristics of person or the immediate situation

  • Together, these proximate factors directly impact the person's arousal, affect, and cognition, which are constantly appraised

• Immediate appraisal refers to “a largely automatic, subconscious process in which arousal, affect, and cognition are constantly evaluated to make inferences about a situation

  • Immediate appraisals may lead to impulsive behavioural responses or a reappraisal” 

• Reappraisal includes the process of re-evaluating arousal, affect, and cognition to make inferences about a situation when the initial or immediate appraisal was unsatisfactory and time and cognitive resources permit further evaluation