Cognitive Psychology and Social Control

Intro statement:

Social control is trying to change the behaviour of another individual. Research into how memory functions can be used as a form of social control

Point 1:

AO1: Understanding how to maximise the encoding of information in others is beneficial in the education sector when teachers are delivering the curriculum to students

AO3: Baddeley used word list to find out that the long-term memory and codes semantically. This can be used as a positive form of social control in informing people of the best ways to learn, for example teachers trying to help you revise would link new information to prior knowledge to encode it into the LTM.

Point 2:

AO1: Understanding the capacity, duration and encoding can also be used with social control and other sectors of society such as the criminal justice system. Also, the knowledge that memory is reconstructed can be influenced by leading questions causing to negative social control.

AO3: Police officers may lead the witness of a crime to remember events differently from what they witnessed, for example if they were to ask the age of the man they saw at the scene of the crime this will lead to the witness believing that they saw a man, even if the real perpetrator was a woman.

Point 3:

AO1: However, case studies show that everyone’s memory is unique. This means results found from Clive Wearing and HM’s brain damage regarding procedural long-term memory may not apply to everyone, so memory knowledge perhaps cannot be used for social control.

AO3: In HM’s case study, he had surgery on his hippocampus leaving his short term and long-term memory impaired. However, he could still sign his name. This means people could take advantage of his memory impairment as he was not able to fully give informed consent. But this social control may not extend to all people as his brain damage is specific to him.

Concluding Statement:

Overall, our knowledge of cognitive psychology can be used in positive forms of social control as it helps in the legal and education field