READING NOTES - Chapter 8

Social Cognition

Introduction

• Cognitive psychology:

  • The study of the mental processes involved in human perception, thought, memory, and decision-making

• Nonsocial cognition:

  • The study of how we understand the physical world and other matters unrelated to people and their social interactions

• Social cognition:

  • The study of how we understand ourselves and other peopl

Moral Reasoning

• Morality:

  • The ability to distinguish between right and wrong

• Moral reasoning:

  • The analytical process used to arrive at decisions about what if right and wrong

• Based on this research, Kohlberg (1976) developed his theory of moral development

• The resulting model identifies three major levels of moral reasoning, each with two stages 

  • The first stage is the preconventional level:

    • The lowest of Lawrence Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, whereby right and wrong are determined by the anticipated rewards or punishments

  • The second stage is the conventional level:

    • The middle of Lawrence Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, whereby right and wrong are determined by the expectations of other significant people, such as family members, close friends, or society at large

  • The third stage and highest level is the postconventional:

    • The highest of Lawrence Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, whereby right and wrong are determined by an individual’s own principles of equality, justice, and respect for human rights

• As a stage-based theory, Kohlberg’s model makes several assumptions

  • First, it presupposes that individual moral reasoning operates only one stage at a time

  • Second, changes in moral development always occur in an upwards direction

    • Once you achieve a higher stage, you never regress to a lower oen

  • Third, each stage is a prerequisite for the next one and therefore movement through the stages always follows the same sequence and no stage is ever skipped

Moral Development and Offending

• Investigations of delinquent youths typically find that they are dominated by preconventional moral reasoning, whereas nondelinquent groups exhibit a much higher proportion of conventional moral reasoning

• While Kohlberg’s of moral development was not originally expounded as a theory of crime, it has subsequently been elaborated on and used to explain offending behavior

  • This sensitivity to their immediate surroundings mean that they are likely to offend when the chances of being caught are slim or the expected payoffs are high

• High moral reasoners are better equipped to withstand opportunities to commit crime because they determine what is right and wrong based on their internal sense of social obligation and moral principles

• Moral development theory also highlights a major pitfall of criminal justice system policies that promote incarceration

  • Because institutions are dominated by low moral reasoners, prison offers few opportunities for moral growth through exposure to higher levels of moral reasoning

Moral Disengagement

• At one time or another most of us have done something we knew was wrong

  • Perhaps you stayed silent when a cashier undercharged you for an item or gave you too much change

  • Maybe you accidentally damaged someone’s parked vehicle but did not leave a note for the owner or you ran a red light despite knowing you could stop safely

• Bandura (1999) speculated that people can turn off this self-regulatory mechanism through moral disengagement

  • Refers to a variety of processes that people employ a variety of psychological mechanisms to avoid the negative feelings they might otherwise experience as a result of violating their moral standards

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement

Minimize the Reprehensible Nature of the Behavior

• Euphemistic labelling:

  • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby people apply a positive description to their immoral behavior to make it sound less offensive

• They refer to civilians who are wounded or killed during military operations as collateral damage and waterboarding has been called an enhanced coercive interrogation technique

• Moral justification:

  • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby people rationalize their immoral behavior on the grounds that it was necessary to achieve an important goal or avoid a more serious, harmful consequence

• Advantageous comparisons:

  • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby people construe their immoral behavior as less offensive by judging it against another’s more egregious acts

Minimize Responsibility for the Behavior

• Another group of disengagement mechanisms operate by diminishing the perpetrator’s perceived responsibility for the objectionable conduct

  • This is achieved by displacing or diffusing responsibility 

    • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby people avoid responsibility for their immoral acts by attributing them to people in positions of control and authority

    • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby people minimize their responsibility for immoral acts on the grounds that they are merely one among many involved

Minimize the Consequence of the Behavior

• Disengagement mechanisms also minimize the harmful effects of the offender’s behavior

• Research shows that, the more removed perpetrators are from their victims and the consequences, the easier it is for them to ignore or minimize the harm they cause

Minimize the Worth of the Victim and Blame the Victim

• The remaining disengagement processes loosen any connection the offender feels toward the victim by characterizing him or her as different or deserving of mistreatment

  • This is known as Dehumanization

• Psychologically, it is easier to hurt something inhuman rather than human

• Attribution of blame:

  • A moral disengagement mechanism whereby the victims are blamed for provoking the perpetrators and leaving them with no alternative but to respond as they did

Individual Development and Operation of Moral Disengagement 

• Most people endorse similar moral standards

• Where they tend to vary is in how badly they feel about violating their moral standards and their reliance on disengagement processes

• Given the enormity of the violence attempted by Abdulmutallab, it is not surprising to see numerous disengagement processes

Criminal Thinking

• Criminal thinking:

  • Cognitive processes and content that facilitate the initiation and continuation of offending behavior

Yochelson and Samenow’s Criminal Personality

• During this time, they conducted countless interviews with 240 offenders - most of whom were male - found not guilty by reason of insanity

  • Based on these interviews, Yochelson and Samenow concluded that offenders think differently than other people

• Yochelson and Samenow’s work represented an important step forward because it highlighted cognition’s role in criminal behavior; however, their research has not escaped criticism

Criminal Thinking Styles

• Combining Yochelson and Samenow’s research with their own clinical experience at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, Glenn Walters and Thomas White (1989) distilled eight cognitive errors that they believed were associated with criminality 

  • The central tenet of Walter’s (1990) theory is that the choices and early life experiences of people who engage in lifestyle criminality produce a belief system that consists of the eight criminal thinking styles

• To facilitate criminal lifestyle theory research, Walters (1995) created the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS), a self-report instrument that measures all eight styles

• Alternatively, criminal behavior is generally seen as less socially acceptable for women than for men; therefore, the women who engage in this lifestyle and end up incarcerated may have more severe procriminal thinking patterns

Hostile Thoughts and Affect

• This discussion so far has focused on the role of cognition in offending behavior, largely to the exclusion of affect or emotion

• Yet it would be naïve to think that cognition and affect do not influence one another

Excitation Transfer Theory

• Dolf Zillman’s excitation transfer theory is based on the idea that emotional arousal can carry over from one situation to another

• The theory assumes that the physiological arousal of people who are excited dissipates gradually 

• In a carefully controlled investigation of this effect, Zillmanm and colleagues (1972) showed that participants who were angered and then physiologically aroused by riding an exercise bike administered significantly more intense electric shocks to an antagonist than did participants who were not angered or physiologically aroused by exercise 

Bertowitz’s Cognitive Neoassociation Model

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

• Originally articulated by John Dollard and colleagues at Yale University in 1939, the hypothesis consists of two basic propositions:

  • Every aggressive act is produced by a frustration and every frustration produces aggression

    • In the context of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, the state produced when a person is blocked from attaining an expected goal

• The Dollard group noted that frustration does not always result in overt acts of physical violence but can lead to verbal threats or no visible signs of aggression

The Role of Negative Affect

• Berkowitz (1989) recognized that a body of research demonstrates that people are more likely to exhibit aggression when faced with a host of unpleasant experiences - such as personal insults, pain, foul odours - that do not constitute frustrations according to the theory

• Aversive events:

  • Incidents that produce pain, frustration, and unpleasant feelings

• Negative affect:

  • A feeling of discomfort or unpleasantness

The Role of Cognition

• The cognitive neoassociation model incorporates two distinct phases, each governed by different processes

• The initial phase is dominated by associative processes that occur in a largely automatic fashion and with little cognitive processing

  • The theory assumes that this response involves networks of associated feelings, thoughts, physiological responses, and expressive motor reactions such as facial expressions and other body language

  • Spreading activation:

    • A process that occurs when activation of one part of an interconnected neural network leads to the activation of the other parts 

  • The fight associative network includes links to the motor actions or behaviours relating to violence as well as the inclination to attack and injure

  • When it is strongly stimulated by unpleasant events, people feel a powerful urge to lash out violently and hurt someone

• The second phase, during which deeper cognitive processing occurs, begins immediately after the initial phase is underway

  • Now people start to think about and evaluate the causes of the event, the motives of the other people involved, and their emotions

Social Interactions

• Decisions to act criminally or violently do not occur in a vacuum

• As the preceding discussion highlights, what happens to and around people, such as experiencing aversive events, affect their behavior

• Situational (or contextual) factors:

  • Features, events, or social interactions that characterize a person’s surrounding circumstances

Deindividuation

• Deindividuation:

  • A psychological state characterized by a loss of individual identity, self-awareness, and self-evaluation, which is often associated with being immersed in large groups

• Evidence indicates that, the larger the group, the greater the deindividuated effect

  • The worry is that people in this state are more prone to violating social norms and offending

• A study by Diener, Fraser, Beaman, and Kelem (1976) illustrates the possible consequences of deindividuation on trick-or-treaters

  • The study was conducted in more than two dozen homes around Seattle, Washington

  • When the door was answered at the pre-selected locations, trick-or-treaters saw two bowls on a table:

    • A large one containing candy 

    • A smaller one containing coins

  • Children in the anonymous condition were not asked anything by the adult occupant who answered the door, but those in the non-anonymous condition were asked their name and where they lived

  • After directing the children to take one candy from the bowl, the adult left them alone and went to another room while a hidden observer recorded the size of the group and the children’s behavior

  • The researchers reported that children in conditions conductive to deindividuation were more likely than the other children to violate social expectations by taking multiple candies or money

    • The study results point to another factor - anonymity - that also contributes to deindividuation

• It is no coincidence that the children who did not disclose their names or addresses were more likely to violate the situation’s social expectations

• The effect of deindividuation is frequently implicated in the results of the well-known Stanford prison experiment

• Despite the absence of some basic methodological elements required for a true scientific experiment, the study is still relevant because of its realism

  • Different ideas exist about why deindividuation leads to social transgressions

• The classic view is that it reduces the anxiety and fear of being singled out and subjected to social disapproval and, as a consequence, people engage in behaviours they would otherwise inhibit

• With greater anonymity and larger crowds, an individual has less and less sense of his or her own identity; at the same time, the identity of the group grows in prominence 

Obedience

• As mentioned in the Abu Ghraib case study, many of the convicted military personnel claimed that they were simply following orders

  • Similar defences were advanced by people tried for their role in the Holocaust, a matter of deep interest to Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist with a strong Jewish identity who had grown up during World War II

• Obedience:

  • The action of complying with the directions of a higher authority 

• Milgram conducted a series of follow-up studies using the same basic design and involving close to a thousand participants

• He discovered that various situational factors, including the learner’s proximity, affected people’s obedience

  • One reason so many participants continued giving the shocks may be the task’s incremental nature

  • The intensity of the shocks increased in relatively small steps 

  • Once participants decided to apply the shock at one level, it became difficult to justify not going just a little bit further and applying the next shock

Social Information Processing Theories

• Social information processing (SIP) theories liken the human mind to a computer that generates output based on the data going in and how they are processed

• The “data” consist of the stimuli or social cues people perceive, such as the words and actions of others, which give them clues about their social situations; the “output” is the behavior generated in response to the information processed

  • The words, gestures, and actions of other people that provide clues about their feelings, thoughts, and motives

• Since the 1980s, several models based on SIP theory have been proposed to explain the occurrence of antisocial and, more particularly, aggressive behavior

Encoding Process

• Encoding:

  • The process of perceiving and organizing incoming stimuli such as social cues

• This process depends on our perceptual abilities as well as where we direct our attention and what we remember 

Interpretation Process

• Interpretation involves integrating the available encoded social cues and other information to form a mental picture or understanding of the situation

• Attribution:

  • The process of making causal judgements about people’s behavior and events

• Unfortunately, the attributions we make are prone to errors such as hostile attribution bias, which is the tendency to interpret the ambiguous actions of others as signs of aggressive intent or behavior and is one of the major information processing errors identified by Dodge’s model

• When participants were given an opportunity to act against the puzzle-wrecker, differences only emerged in the ambiguous intent condition

Response Search Process

• Central to Huesmann’s model is the idea that the behavioural responses retrieved from memory take the form of scripts

  • An organized unit of knowledge or mental template that lays out the expected sequence of behavior for a particular social situation as well as the likely outcome of that behavior

• People maintain countless scripts in their memory, which are based on their experiences and observations of others

• Priming:

  • The process that occurs when recent exposure to stimuli increases the accessibility of associated mental structures such as scripts, raising the possibility of their subsequent activation

    • In other words, recent experiences involving particular objects, media, or emotions may “ready” certain scripts so they are more accessible and likely to be retrieved in the near future

• Less socially competent people manifest a number of difficulties during the response search process

• Research indicates they they tend to retrieve fewer scripts, especially as young children, and those they do retrieve are often less effective or inappropriate for the situation

Response Evaluation Process

• The process of evaluating scripts and selecting one for enactment is theorized to encompass three main considerations

  • One is what Dodge calls response evaluation

    • One of the considerations used to evaluate whether to enact a particular script based on how closely it fits one’s values and moral beliefs

  • A second consideration concerns outcome expectations

    • One of the considerations used to evaluate whether to enact a particular script based on a cost-benefit analysis of the possible positive and negative outcomes

• Self-efficacy:

  • One of the considerations used to evaluate whether to enact a particular script based on the likelihood that it can be successfully performed

• The evaluation process ends with the selection of a script, which is immediately enacted

• Fontaine and Dudge acknowledge that people do not always engage inn a careful evaluation process before they act

• They suggest that impulsive behavior is an indication that the evaluation process has been skipped altogether

Enactment of Antisocial and Violent Behaviours

• The decision to enact antisocial or violent behavior does not appear to hinge on any particular error in SIP

• In cognitive terms, it is the scope and depth of the processing deficiencies that seem to separate people who regularly resort to antisocial and violent behavior from the rest of us

  • Nonetheless, certain patterns of deficient information processing are thought to promote specific types of aggression

• Studies find that errors in the initial stages of processing, such as hypervigilance to aggressive social cues and hostile attribution bias, correlate most strongly to reactive violence

• These types of processing errors explain the emotional responses to (mis) perceived insults and provocations that are characteristic of reactive violence

  • In contrast, people who perceive and interpret social cues accurately but possess scripts dominated by aggressive responses and believe this type of behavior will be rewarded tend to engage in instrumental violence

• While SIP theories were developed in an effort to explain isolated incidents of violence, such as the case of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch coordinator whose misplaced suspicions led to a lethal confrontation with unarmed teen Trayvon Martin

Putting it all Together: The General Aggression Model

• The GAM is intended to help us understand individual episodes of violence that, according to the model, are products of both distal and proximate factors

• Distal factors:

  • Factors that indirectly increase the risk of future violent behavior by enhancing proximate factors that encourage violence or diminishing proximate factors that disinhibit violence 

• Proximate factors:

  • Factors that relate to the characteristics of the person or situation and directly impact the risk of violence

    • Person-based proximate factors pertain to the characteristics of the individual

• The GAM proposes that person and situation factors affect arousal, affect, and cognition

• The arousal, affect, and cognitions generated by person and situation factors are constantly appraised 

• Much of this evaluation occurs automatically without our awareness, something that is dubbed immediate appraisal

  • 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

    • 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 a further evaluation

      • Once the person settles on a satisfactory explanation, he or she will act

• The GAM model can be applied to the Abdulmutallab case

• Few distal factors seem to be present because Abdulmutallab is a bright person raised in a warm, loving, and stable family 

• His training with AL-Qaeda made numerous aggressive scripts cognitively available and, by wearing the bomb for three weeks prior to boarding the plane, he was repeatedly rehearsing mentally and, to some extent physically, the violent act he was going to perform