Chapter 2 - Social Beliefs Flashcards

Social Beliefs

• Beliefs vs. Reality
• Beliefs about Human Nature
  • Social trust vs. cynicism
  • Entity vs. incremental view
• Beliefs about the Social World
  • Authoritarianism
  • Social dominance orientation
  • System justification
• Political Beliefs
  • Liberalism vs. conservatism
  • Nationalism vs. patriotism
• Beliefs and Behavior, Behavior and Beliefs
• Cognitive Biases

Social Beliefs

• Beliefs about other people, groups, and their relationships are mainly ideologies:
  • Socially shared belief systems describing the world.
  • Explaining how it should be.
  • How to achieve the desired state.
• Remain in service of social motives (affiliation, control and knowledge, self-esteem and self-integrity, etc.).
• Not always reflecting true properties of the social world (reality), due to being fueled by motivations, emotions, needs, and culture.

Are We Good or Bad?

• The Big Question: Are we by nature good or evil? Cooperative or competing? Moral and prosocial vs. egoistic and self-centered?
• Two main strands of theory and research:
  • Social Trust: Trusting others, regardless of whether we know them or not, assuming they are moral, honest, helpful, trustable, willing to cooperate, and share.
  • Social Cynicism: Negative beliefs about people and social institutions as self-serving, egoistic, lazy, violating social and ethical rules, hence emotional detachment and social distance are better than any involvement (Leung & Bond, 2002).

Social Trust

• Building block of social capital = network of formal + informal relationships between people, based on mutual obligations and reciprocity (Putnam, 2007).
• Social trust promotes cooperation outside of ingroup (kin) = goals achieved more easily + no need to constantly monitor others (assumed to be good).
• Positive consequences: satisfaction with democracy, high voter turnout, acting for the community, volunteering, more friends, less homicide, higher work efficacy, higher entrepreneurship and cooperation, better well-being and health, social belonging, etc.
• Reasons for low social trust: us vs. them thinking, materialism, experiences of poverty, the experience of communism as a political system, and to some extent collectivism (surprising, but remember the in-/outgroup division!).

Social Cynicism

• Another aspect inherited from communist times, higher scores in post-communist countries.
• Correlates negatively with social trust.
• Associated with lower voter turnout, more alcohol consumption, rivalry, competition, the quicker pace of life, lower satisfaction with life and work, perceiving work via financial aspects, less positive emotions, more negative ones, lower well-being (Bond & Leung, 2004).
• Similar construct: belief in life as a zero-sum game = competition, antagonism, if one wins, the other must lose (more typical for those who feel like “losers“ = “they took it from me,“ with lower education and socioeconomic status, often elderly).

Entity vs. Incremental Theories

• Beliefs about the malleability of personality, skills, abilities (Dweck, 1999, 1993)
  • Entity theorists: human dispositions as fixed and stable, the behavior should be attributed to those (fixed mindset).
  • Incremental theorists: most of our characteristics are changeable, current goals, mental states, needs, emotions, etc. in a specific situation. If the situation changes, so can we (growth mindset).
• About 40% of people naturally opt for each of those approaches, while those may be primed and learned.
• Consequences: self-regulation (entity theorists fare worse after failures, incremental theorists usually do better, believing they can improve; failure as a challenge), perceptions of others (entity theorists more likely to use the FAE or stereotypes).

Power of Positive Thinking (Myers, 2012)

• Self-efficacy beliefs = ”I have the ability to learn new things” (Bandura, 1986; Bandura et al., 1999) and self-worth, self-esteem (as a judgment of global self-worth – ”I am a person who has worth and value”).
• Belief as doing = optimistic belief in our own competence and effectiveness brings benefits (via more initiative, persistency), such as less anxiety or depression, healthier life, more work / life / academic success.
• Necessary aspect: the feeling of control over your outcomes:
  • Locus of control: internal vs. external (Rotter, 1973).
  • Learned helplessness vs. self-determination (Seligman, 1975, 1991).
• Dark side of self-esteem: narcissism = very high SE + no empathy, not caring about others (Campbell et al., 2002) – high vs. secure self-esteem (based on who one is and on relationships with others, not on external sources, looks, grades, money).

Authoritarianism

• Since the 1930s, to explain fascism, being far-right, ultranationalist, dictatorial, militarist views, suppressive of all opposition, believing in the natural social hierarchy (Adorno et al., 1950; later Altemeyer, 1981, 1996).
• Authoritarian personality (especially right-wing authoritarianism) = extreme obedience and unquestioning submission to the respected authority figure, strict adherence to conventional values (moral superiority of the ingroup over any out-groups), hostility to those who deviate from those (authoritarian aggression).
• Currently understood more as a group-level phenomenon rather than just a personality feature:
  • Collective security needs, especially when under threat + believing the world is dangerous + highly group-identified + conformism + some personality features, individual differences (e.g., need for closure, security, predictability).

Social Dominance Orientation

• SDO as a general tendency to prefer inequality among social groups, including a desire for one’s ingroup’s dominance and superiority over others (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Pratto et al., 1994).
• SDO higher in majorities and powerholders (e.g., men but women may also score relatively high → system justification?) and those engaged or employed in occupations maintaining existing social hierarchies.
• Similarities to authoritarianism in prejudice and discrimination against the outgroup (evil Them) and ingroup favoritism.
• Correlates with achievement orientation, hedonism, rivalry tendencies, perception of power as value, and other ideologies supporting group-based hierarchies (e.g., racism, but also speciecism).
• Based on lay social Darwinism = social world as a jungle, continuous struggle to be better off than others.

System Justification

• A paradox: Social world as a shared creation of our minds, which is full of inequalities (related to gender, race, income, etc.) but many (most?) people do not rebel against those – why?
• System justification perspective brings an answer: we justify even quite unequal systems in which we live, justify the status quo to reduce uncertainty and threat, feel better, happier, and more satisfied (even, or especially, when we are the minority) = selling equality and justice for predictability and ”control”.
• System justification tendencies grow with the growth of injustice (possibly due to compensation needs).
• Example: the just-world theory (Lerner, 1980) = people want to believe they live in a world where good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people (e.g., blaming the victim, to distance oneself = be safe via ”I am good, not like them, so nothing bad is gonna happen to me” kind of thinking).

Political Beliefs and Orientations

• Ideology as shared by some group collection of beliefs about the social world: descriptive (how it is) and prescriptive (how it should be).
• Most popular division into left and right-wing beliefs
  • Left: proponents of change and equality /…/ liberalism, protest, progressiveness, solidarity, socialism, communism
  • Right: proponents of status quo maintenance and stability /…/ conservatism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism
• Origins of the left-right terminology: The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the National Assembly deciding on how much power the king should have. Louis XVI’s absolute veto proponents sat on the right, and the opponents—anti-royalists—sat on the left of the NA’s president.

Liberalism vs. Conservatism Sources (John Jost)

• Socialization: beliefs of parents and broader social circle, including formal education, university (Sears & Levy, 2008).
• Personal / individual factors: to some extent genetically based (studies on identical and fraternal twins = the first have more similar political beliefs) and linked to our personality (Big Five: openness to experience = liberal beliefs, conscientiousness = conservative beliefs).
• Current situation: threat or uncertainty may promote a swing to the right = more authoritarian and conservative views (Jost et al., 2003; Pyszczynski et al., 2021), which are strongly motivated by security or cognitive closure needs (black and white, simplified views, while liberalism accepts more uncertainty and ambiguity).
• Women as more progressive than men (Langsæther & Knutsen, 2024; British Social Attitudes, 2023).

Nationalism vs. Patriotism (Szacki, 2011, Kosterman & Feshbach, 1989)

• Nationalism: ideology assuming that national bonds are the most important for the individual and society; individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state must surpass other individual or group interests; nation should be uniform as it is constantly under external threat; associated construct: authoritarianism and xenophobia (prejudice against strangers).
• Patriotism: not an ideology, but rather a social identity; national pride, feeling of love, devotion, sense of attachment to a homeland, but also feeling other citizens are potential allies = no anti-immigration or protectionism feelings.
• Weekly correlated, as both entail positive evaluations of one’s own nation (Takeuchi et al., 2016), but each correlates with different phenomena, e.g., nationalism + belief in own nation’s superiority, especially moral one, patriotism + feeling of the competence of own nation (Skarżyńska & Poppe, 1997).

Beliefs Doing (Myers, 2021)

• Attitudes (strong, specific, activated) may influence our behavior.
• Acting can change our beliefs: behavior as influencing attitudes:
  • Saying (doing) becomes believing (Higgins & McCann, 1984).
  • Role playing in the Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971).
  • Foot-in-the door phenomenon = initial voluntary compliance and then consistency, commitment; 17 vs 76% rate of agreement to the big (second) request (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).
  • Harming leads to more negative attitudes. Paradoxical effect: we hurt those we dislike, but we also dislike those we hurt // extreme case: dehumanization (Weller, 2002).
• Possible mechanisms: an open contradiction of actions vs. well-defined attitudes → cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), when unsure of own attitudes → self-perception theory (Bem, 1972).

Cognitive Biases (Myers, 2021)

• Preconceptions guiding how we perceive and interpret information (schemas, priming, motivated cognition, confirmation bias): True intuition may exist, but it is based on expertise and knowledge (Pearson, 2013; Salas et al., 2009).
• Being affected by memorable events rather than by facts (availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic, quicker emotional responses than cognitive ones).
• Misperceiving correlation and control (seeing random events as related) and feeling overconfident (incompetence feeds overconfidence → the Dunning-Kruger effect).
  • Illusory correlations: if you believe there is a relationship, you may spot one, even if it is random (Ward & Jenkins, 1965).
  • Illusion of control: chance events seen as subject to our influence.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies, e.g., behavioral confirmation.
• (Re)constructing memories (even our past attitudes and behaviors).
• Remember about those weaknesses of our cognitive system!