Psychology 105: Readings

Chapter 8: Thinking, Reasoning, and Language

• Thinking - any mental activity or processing of information

  • Includes learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding

    • All are fundamental aspects of cognition

Cognitive Economy:

→ The idea that our cognitive processes are designed to minimize mental effort and maximize efficiency in processing information

• We are all cognitive misers → invests a little mental energy as possible unless it’s necessary to do more

• Cognitive economy can get us in trouble, especially when it leads us merely to simplify, but oversimplify

• Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the information we need for decision making to a manageable minimum

  • Referred to as “fast and frugal” thinking

    • Argued that it serves us well most of the time

    • In most cases, the heuristics we use are more valid than exhaustive

• Heuristics

  • Mental shortcuts used to increase our thinking efficiency

  • May have enhanced our survival

  • Can backfire, but we’ve developed them for a reason

• Thin slicing

  • The ability to extract useful information form small bits of behavior

Heuristics and Biases:

• Cognitive biases

  • Systematic error in thinking

• Representativeness heuristic

  • Involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype → how prevalent the event has been in past experiences

    • Matching our stereotype of a certain group of people to an individual

  • Challenge → poor at considering base rate information

    • How common a behavior or characteristic is in general

• Availability heuristic

  • Involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds

    • How “available” it is in our memories

    • Often works well

    • Culprit of worrying a lot about things that aren’t all that dangerous and don’t worry enough about things that are dangerous

      • The news media provides far more coverage on dramatic accidents and homicides than they do strokes, digestive cancer, or diabetes

• Hindsight bias

  • Our tendency to overestimate how accurately we could have predicted something happening once we know the outcome

    • “I knew it all along” effect

Top-Down Processing:

• Filling in the gaps of missing information using our experience and background knowledge

• Chunking

  • Memory aid that relies on our ability to organize information into larger units, expanding the span and detail of our memories

• Bottom-up processing

  • Our brain processes only the information it receives, and constructs meaning from it slowly and surely by building up understanding through experience

Concepts and Schemas:

• Common source of top-down processing that helps up to think and reason

• Concepts

  • Our knowledge and ideas about objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties

  • Allows us to have all our general knowledge at our disposal

• Schemas

  • Concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other

  • Help us mentally organize events that share core features

Language Influencing Our Thoughts:

• Linguistic determinism

  • Extreme view on the role of language in thought suggesting that we cannot experience thought without language

  • Provides an extreme version of top-down processing in which no ideas can be generated without linguistic knowledge

Reasons to doubt:

1. Children can perform many complex cognitive tasks long before they can talk about them

2. Neuroimaging studies show that although language areas often become activated when people engage in certain cognitive tasks, those brain regions aren’t especially active during those tasks

• Linguistic relativity

  • View that characteristics of language shape our thought processes

    • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Decision Making:

• Decision making

  • The process of selecting among a set of alternatives

  • System 1 thinking

    • Rapid and intuitive

  • System 2 thinking

    • Slow and analytical

• Framing

  • The way a question is formulated that can influence the decisions people make

• Neuroeconomics

  • How the brain works while making financial decisions

  • Can help us understand why decision making goes wrong some of the time and in some people

Problem Solving:

• Problem solving

  • Generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal

Approaches:

1. Algorithms → following a step by step learned procedures

   • For problems that depend on the same basic steps for arriving at a solution every time the solution is required

   • Ensure we address all steps when we solve a problem

   • Inflexible

2. Sub-problems → break down a problem into smaller problems that are easier to solve

3. Reasoning from related examples

4. Drawing analogies between two distinct topics

Obstacles:

Salience of Surface Similarities:

• Salience

  • How attention-grabbing something is

    • Focusing on the surface-level (superficial) properties of a problem

Chapter 9: Intelligence and IQ Testing

What is Intelligence?:

• Intelligence is whatever intelligence tests measure

  • Edward Boring

Intelligence as Sensory Capacity:

• Francis Galton hypothesis

  • Intelligence is the byproduct of sensory capacity

  • Most knowledge first comes through the senses, especially vision and hearing

    • Assumed people with superior sensory capacities (better eyesight) should acquire more knowledge than other people

→ later research showed that different measures of sensory capacities (ability to distinguish similar sounds from one another or similar colours) are only weakly correlated

Intelligence as Abstract Thinking:

• Intelligence test

  • Diagnostic tool designed to measure overall thinking ability

    • Naming objects

    • Generating the meaning of words

    • Drawing pictures from memory

    • Completing incomplete sentences

    • Determining similarities between two objects

    • Constructing a sentence from three words

• Higher mental processes

  • Reasoning

  • Understanding

  • Judgment

• Abstract thinking

  • Capacity to understand hypothetical concepts

    • Rather than concepts in the here and now

→ the general agreed upon definition of intelligence

• Reason abstractly

• Learn to adapt to novel environment circumstances

• Acquire knowledge

• Benefit from experience

Intelligence as General vs Specific Abilities:

• General intelligence (g)

  • Hypothetical factor that accounts for overall differences in intellect among people

    • Speculated what produces individual differences in g had something to do with “mental energy”

      → g corresponds to the strength of our mental engines

  • Implies that some people are just plain smarter than others

    • People find this view distasteful → smacks of elitism

  • Very controversial

• Specific abilities (s)

  • Particular ability level in a narrow domain

  • How well we perform on a given mental task depends not only on our general smarts (g), but also on our particular skills in narrow domains (s)

    • Solving shape puzzles → spatial tests = specific talents

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence:

• Fluid intelligence

  • The capacity to learn new ways of solving problems

    • Rely on fluid intelligence that first time we try to solve a puzzle we’ve never seen before

    • Abilities are more likely to decline with age

• Crystallized intelligence

  • Accumulated knowledge of the world acquired over time

    • Rely on crystallized intelligence to answer questions such as “what is the capital of Italy?”

    • Could possibly increase with age, including into old age

      • Suggests fluid intelligence may better capture the power of the “mental engine”

      • Moderately and positively associated with the personality trait openness to experience

Multiple Intelligences:

• Multiple intelligences

  • Idea that people vary in ability levels across different domains of intellectual intelligence

    • According to this, the concept of g is wrong/incomplete

      • We need multiple intelligences to explain the story of people like Chris Langan → extremely successful in some intellectual domains, yet unsuccessful in others

    • Recognizes that even people with equal levels of g can have different intellectual strengths and weaknesses

Frames of Mind:

• Howard Gardner → multiple intelligences theory

  • There are numerous frames of mind or different ways of thinking about the world

    • Each frame of mind is a different and fully independent intelligence in its own right

  • Argues that different intelligences should be especially pronounced in people with exceptional talents

    • Autistic savants provide more support for the existence of multiple intelligences

Triarchic Model:

• Model of intelligence proposed by Robert Sternberg posisting types of intelligence: analytical, practical, and creative

  1. Analytical

     • The ability to reason logically

     • Book smarts

     • The kind of intelligence we need to do well on traditional intelligence tests and school exams

       • Possessed by Chris Langan

     • Closely related to g

  2. Practical intelligence

     • Ability to solve real-world problems, especially those involving other people

     • Street smarts → “size up” people we’ve just met

     • Social intelligence/capacity to understand others

  3. Creative intelligence

     • Ability to come up with novel and effective answers to questions

     • Intelligence we need to find new and effective solutions to problems

       • Composing an emotionally moving poem or exquisite piece of music

Intelligence and Brain Structure and Function:

• Studies demonstrate that brain volume, as measured by MRI scans correlates positively (between 0.3-0.4) with measured intelligence

• We don’t know whether bigger brain = intelligence reflects a direct casual association

• Tetris study showed subjects with higher levels of intelligence exhibited less brain activity in many areas of the brain

Intelligence and Reaction Time:

• People with higher reaction time have higher intelligence → however these concepts are not identical

Intelligence and Memory:

• Scores on working memory tasks are moderately correlated (about 0.5) with scores on intelligence tests

  • This type of memory is closely associated to short-term memory

The Location of Intelligence:

• Intelligence is more localized to certain areas of the cortex than others

  • Prefrontal cortex → key role in planning, impulse control, and short-term memory

    • Does not tell the whole story when it comes to intelligence

  • Parietal lobe → intimately involved in spatial abilities also appears to be associated with intelligence

How We Calculate IQ:

• Stanford-Binet IQ

  • Intelligence test based on the measure developed by Binet and Simon, adapted by Lewis Terman and Stanford University

  • Consists of a wide variety of tasks such as tests of vocabulary, memory for pictures, naming familiar objects, repeating sentences, and following commands

    • Originally developed for children, but since extended to adults

• Terman established a set of norms → baseline scores in the general population from which we can compare each individual’s score

  • We can asks whether a given person’s score on intelligence test items is above or below those similar-aged people, and by how much

• Intelligence quotient

  • Systematic means of quantifying differences among people in their intelligence (IQ)

    • Formula:

      → mental age / chronological age x 100 = IQ

      • Contains a critical flaw → Once we hit 16, our performance on IQ test items doesn’t increase by much

• Deviation IQ

  • Expression of a person’s IQ relative to their same-aged peers

  • All modern intelligence researchers rely on this statistic

• Mental age

  • Age corresponding to the average individual’s performance on an intelligence test

The Eugenics Movement:

• IQ testing movement quickly spiralled out of control

  • Test examined newly immigrated immigrants who barely spoke the language

  • Goddard and others adapted childhood tests for use in testing adults without fully understanding how the IQ scored applied to adults

• Eugenics

  • Movement in the early 20th century to improve a population’s genetic stock by encouraging those with good genes to reproduce, discouraging those with bad genes from reproducing, or both

  • Became associated with two disturbing practices

    1. US congress and House of Commons passed law designed to restrict immigration from other countries supposedly marked by low intelligence

    2. Many provinces passed laws requiring the sterilization of low-IQ individuals

       → some surgeons performed sterilizations that tricked their patients into believing they were undergoing emergency appendectomies

Testing IQ Today:

• Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

  • Most widely used intelligence test for adults today, consisting of 15 subtests to assess different types of mental abilities

    • Arithmetic

    • Spatial ability

    • Reasoning about proverbs

    • General knowledge

  • Yields several major scores

    a) overall IQ score

    b) verbal comprehension

    c) perceptual reasoning

    d) working memory

    e) processing speed

Commonly Used Childhood IQ Tests:

1. Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)

2. Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI)

→ both measures are versions of the WAIS adapted for older children and adolescents

Culture-Fair IQ Tests:

• Culture-fair IQ tests

  • Abstract reasoning measure that doesn’t depend on language and is often believed to be less influenced by cultural factors than other IQ tests

• Raven’s progressive matrices

  • Requires examinees to pick out the final geometric pattern in a sequence

  • Used as a non-verbal measure of intelligence

Reliability of IQ Scores:

• IQ scores aren’t fixed

  • They occasionally shift within the same person by as much as 10 points or more over a matter of months

• Test-retest reliability

  • The extent to which scores on a measure administered several times are roughly identical

Stability of IQ in Adulthood:

• IQ scores usually remains reasonably stable in adulthood

  • Retest scores tend to correlate about 0.95 over a several week interval (extremely high correlation)

Stability of IQ in Infancy and Childhood:

• Prior to age 2-3, IQ tests aren’t stable over time

• Some measures of infant intelligence are slightly more promising when it comes to predicting IQ later

  • Habituation

    • The tendency to stop responding to repeated presentations of the same stimulus

    • Infants who habituate to a visual stimulus more quickly turn out to have higher IQs in later childhood and adolescences

Validity of IQ Scores:

• Important indicator of a test’s validity is its ability to relate to outcomes measured at about the same time the test is administered

  • Also called “concurrent” validity

• Another important indicator is a test’s capacity to forecast future outcome (predictive validity)

• IQ predicts a variety of important real-world behaviours outside the classroom and workspace

  • Associated with health-related outcomes → sickness and car accidents

From Intellectual Disability to Genius:

• Bell curve

  • Distribution of scores in which the bulk of the scores fall toward the middle, with progressively fewer scores towards the “tails” or extremes

• Intellectual disability

  • Condition characterized by an onset to adulthood, an IQ below about 70, and an inability to engage in adequate daily functioning

    • Qualifies individuals for additional government services

    • The more severe the disability, the less likely it is to run in families

Criteria:

1. Onset prior to adulthood

2. IQ below approximately 70

3. Inadequate adaptive functioning

Genius and Exceptional Intelligence:

• If you score in the top 2 percent of the IQ range, you qualify for membership in an organization called Mensa

  • These people usually become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and college/university professors

• Common claim that that almost all child prodigies burn out in adulthood

Family Studies:

• Intellectually brilliant individuals had many first-degree relatives who were also brilliant, but fewer second degree relatives and still fewer third degree relatives who were brilliant

  • Confirms studies that IQ runs in families

Twin Studies:

• Identical twin’s IQs correlate

  • Genetic influence

Adoption Studies:

• Examines the extent to which children adopted into new homes resemble their adoptive vs biological parents

• Allow us to separate environmental from genetic differences

• Established a clear contribution of the environment to IQ

• The IQs of adopted children tend to be similar to the IQs of their biological parents, offering evidence of genetic influence

Chapter 10: Human Development

• Developmental psychology - study of how behaviour and mental processes change over the lifespan

Challenges:

1. Post hoc fallacy - false assumption that because one event occurred before another event, it must have cause that event

   • things that occur first don’t necessarily cause things that come later

     • nearly 100% of serial killers drink milk as children, milk drinking creates serial killers

   • tempting when the earlier behaviour seems logically related to the later one

     • we learned that children who are shy are more likely to become engineers as adults → we could easily imagine plausible arguments for how shyness lead to interests in engineering

2. Bidirectional influences

   • children’s experiences influence their development, but their development also influences their experiences

     • parents influence their children’s behaviour, which in turn feeds back to influence their parents

   • children change their environment by acting in different ways that create changes in behaviours of their parents, siblings, friends, and teachers

     • as children grow older, they play an increasingly active role in altering and selecting their environment

   • unidirectional explanations - those that attempt to explain development in terms of a one-headed arrow

     • parents fight with each other → their children react negatively

     • children witness violence at school → they become more aggressive

3. Cohort effects - effect observed in a sample of participants that result from individuals in the sample growing up at the same time

   • due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period

   • cross-sectional design - research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time

     • don’t control for cohort effects

Ex. baby boomers grew up in a very different technological age than members of the millennial generation

• longitudinal design - research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time

  • allows to examine true developmental effects → changes over time within individuals as a consequence of growing older

Ex. observed impaired well-being with long-term use of Facebook, but improved child and adolescent self-esteem with more maternal mental wellness, economic stability, and overall parental involvement

• without longitudinal designs, we can be tricked into concluding that event A comes before result B even when it doesn’t

Ex. much of the popular psychology literature warns us that divorce leads to externalizing behaviors (behaviours such as breaking rules, defying authority figures, and committing crimes) in children → longitudinal study tracked a sample of boys over several decades revealed otherwise

• ideal for studying change over time

  • but can be costly and time consuming

  • can result in attrition → participants dropping out of the study before it is completed

    • selective attrition → when the drop out of participants is not random, but drawn disproportionately from a particular definable group

  • when not feasible → remember to interpret the results of cross-sectional studies with healthy skepticism, bearing in mind that cohort effects may account for any observed changes in different ages

The Influence of Early Experience:

Two myths concerning development:

1. infant determinism

   • widespread assumption that extremely early experiences (especially in the first three years of life) are almost always more influential than later experiences in shaping us as adults

     • Ex → there’s no evidence separating an infant from its mother during the first few hours after birth can produce lasting negative consequences for emotional adjustment

2. childhood fragility

   • children are delicate little creatures who are easily damaged

     • research shows most children are remarkably resilient/capable of withstanding stress and that most children emerge from potentially traumatic situations

Clarifying the Nature vs Nurture Debate

• genetic predispositions can drive us to select and create particular environments, leading to the mistaken appearance of a pure effect of nature

  • Betty Hart and Todd Risley → six-month longitudinal study that showed that parents who speak a lot to their children produce children with larger vocabularies than parents who don’t

    • vocabulary is partly influenced by genetic factors → parents could merely be passing on their genetic predisposition for better vocabulaires to their children

  • more recent studies have found that much of the influence on children’s vocabulary is environmental, or at least can be altered by a change in environment

Gene-Environment Interaction:

• nature and nurture can sometimes interact over the course of development → the effect of one depends on the contribution of the other

  • the children with both the low MAO gene and a history of maltreatment were at heightened risk for antisocial behaviors (stealing, assault, rape)

• gene environmental interaction → situation in which the effect of genes depend on the environment in which they are expressed

  • the effects of the genes depend on the environment, and vice versa

Nature via Nurture:

• tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions

  • nurture affords children opportunity to express their genetic tendencies

Ex. as they grow older, highly fearful children select safer environments, it may appear that growing up in safe environments helps to create fearfulness, when the environment is actually a consequence of children’s genetic predisposition

Gene Expression:

• activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development

  • one of the most significant discoveries to hit psychology over the past several decades

• reminds us that nurture affects nature

Ex. children with genes that predispose them to anxiety may never become anxious unless a highly stressful events (death of a parent early in development) triggers these genes to become active

Conception and Prenatal Development - From Zygote to Baby:

• prenatal - prior to birth

  • period of development

  • human body acquires its basic form and structure

→ the most dramatic changes in prenatal development occur in the earliest stages of pregnancy

• zygote - fertilized egg

  Stages:

  1. germinal - zygote begins to divide and double, forming a blastocyst (ball of identical cells early in pregnancy that haven’t yet begun to take on any specific functions in a body part) → keeps growing as cells continue to divide for the first week and a half after fertilization

  2. embryotic - different cells start to assume different functions, blastocyst becomes an embryo (second to eighth week of prenatal development, during which limbs, facial features, and major organs of the body take form)

     • spontaneous miscarriages often occur when the embryo doesn’t form properly

  3. fetal - the point where the embryo becomes a fetus (period of prenatal development from ninth week until birth after all major organs are established and physical maturation is the primary change

     • more about fleshing out what’s a;ready there than establishing new structures

Brain Development:

• human brain begins to develop a mere 18 days after fertilization

  • the size continues to grow and develop into adolescence and even early adulthood

• proliferation - neurons begin developing at an astronomical rate

  • 250 000 brain cells per minute during peak times

Obstacles to Normal Fetal Development:

Fetal development can be disrupted in three ways:

1. exposure to hazardous environmental influences

2. biological influences resulting from genetic disorders or errors in cell duplication during cell division

3. premature birth

Teratogens - Hazards to Fetal Health:

• teratogens - environmental factor that can exert a negative impact on prenatal development

  • anxiety and depression are potential teratogens because they alter the fetus’s chemical and physiological environment

  • can influence how specific parts of the brain develop → others exert general impacts on brain development

Ex. exposure to alcohol can result in fetal alcohol syndrome (high levels of prenatal alcohol exposure, causing learning disabilities, delays in physical growth, facial malformations, and behavioural disorders

Genetic Disorders:

• a second adverse influence on prenatal development

• random errors in cell division

Prematurity:

• premature infants are those born fewer than 36 weeks gestation

• viability point - the point in pregnancy at which infants can typically survive on their own (around 25 weeks)

Survival Instincts:

• infant are born with a large set of autonomic behaviours (reflexes) that are triggered by specific types of stimulation and fulfill important survival needs

Ex. sucking reflex - autonomic response to oral stimulation → baby will start sucking on anything that is put in its mouth

Learning to Get Up - Coordinating Movement:

• motor behaviour - bodily motion that occurs as a result of self-initiated force that moves the bones and muscles

  • major milestone = sitting up, crawling, standing unsupported, and walking

    • ages vary at which infants meet these milestones

Factors Influencing Motor Development:

• the findings that some infants crawl or walk much earlier than others suggest the these skills don’t necessarily build on each other in a casual fashion

1. physical maturation

   • motor patterns are innately programmed and become activated at specific time points

   • depend on the physical maturation of the body → allowing children to acquire the necessary strength and coordination

   • weight → heavier babies tend to achieve milestones more gradually than light babies because they need to build up their muscles more before they can support their weight

2. cultural/parenting practices

   • variability exist across cultures in the timing of development milestones

Ex. infants in Peru and China are tightly swaddled in blankets that provide warmth and a sense of security by prevent free movement of the limbs

Physical Maturation in Adolescence:

• adolescence - the transition between childhood and adulthood commonly associated with the teenage years

  • a time of profound physical change (hormonal)

• puberty - the achievement of sexual maturation resulting in potential to reproduce

• primary sex characteristics - a physical feature such as the reproductive organs and genitals that distinguish the sexes

• secondary sex characteristics - sex differentiating characteristics that doesn’t relate directly to reproduction, such as breast enlargement in females and deepening voices in males

• menarche - start of mensuration

• spermarche - first ejaculation by males

• the timing of puberty in both sexes is genetically influenced → identical twins tend to begin menstruating within a month of each other, whereas fraternal twins average about a year’s different in onset

Physical Development in Adults:

• most of us reach our physical peak in our early 20s → strength, coordination, speed of cognitive processing, and physical flexibility also attain their highest levels in early adulthood

Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood:

• effects of age on physical appearance and functioning are inescapable facts of life

  • decline in muscle tone and increase in body fat

  • basic sensory processes such as vision and hearing tend decline to → sense of smell too

• fertility in females decline sharply during their 30s and 40s → has become challenging for many females in contemporary society who opt to delay childbearing until they achieve career success

  • fertility treatments have been on the rise as a result

• menopause - the termination of mensuration, marking the end of a female’s reproductive potential

  • triggered by a reduction of estrogen → could result in ‘hot flashes’ marked by becoming incredibly hot, sweaty, and dry-mouthed

• men can still reproduce well into old age, however, there’s still a gradual decline in sperm production and testosterone levels with age

Changes in Agility and Physical Coordination with Age:

• complex tasks show greater effects of age than simpler ones

• older adults become less flexible in learning new motor skills (driving a new car)

• strength training and increased physical activity may minimize some of these declines and increase lifespan

Theories of Cognitive Development:

1. stage-like → sudden spurts in knowledge followed by period of stability

   continuous → gradual, incremental

2. domain general → cross-cutting changes in children’s cognitive skills that affect most or all areas of cognitive function

   domain specific → children’s cognitive skills develop independently and at different rates across different domains (reasoning, language, counting)

3. personal experience

   social interaction

   biological maturation

Piaget - How Children Construct Their World:

• was the first to present a comprehensive account of cognitive development

• attempted to identify the stages that children pass through on their way to adult-like thinking

• his theory led to the formation of cognitive development as a distinct discipline, and for decades most research in this field focused on sustaining

• stage theorist - believed that children’s development is marked by radical reorganizations of thinking at specific transition points (stages)

  • domain general - slicing across all areas of cognitive capacity → a child capable of a certain level of abstract reasoning in mathematics can also achieve this level in a spatial problem-solving task

• proposed that cognitive change is marked by equilibration → maintaining a balance between our experience of the world and our thoughts about it

• children are motivated to match their thinking about the world with their observations → when the child experiences something new, they check whether that experience fits with their schema

Assimilation and Accommodation:

• assimilation - piagetian process of absorbing new experience into current knowledge structures

  • might assimilate knowledge into their schema by picturing a flat disk (like a coin)

  • children use assimilation to acquire new knowledge within a stage

  • children’s cognitive skills and worldviews remain unchanged, so they reinterpret new experiences to fit into what they already know

  • eventually, the child can no longer reconcile what they believe with what they experience

• accomodation - piagetian process of altering a belief to make it more compatible with experience

  • drives change by forcing children to take on a new way of looking at the world

  • this is why parents are likely to hear their young child overuse a particular category of label (furry four-legged creature is a cat)

  • over time with refinements, children recognize and use novel categories of dogs and cars.

Piaget’s Stages of Development:

1. sensorimotor (birth - 2 years)

   • no thought beyond immediate physical experiences

   • acquire knowledge through perceiving information from the world and observing the physical consequence

   • lack objective permanence → the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view

2. preoperational (2 - 7 years)

   • able to think beyond the here and now, but egocentric and unable to perform mental transformations

   • can use symbols such as language, drawings, and objects as representations of ideas

   • children are hampered by egocentrism → inability to see the world from others’ perspectives

   • cannot pass conservation tasks

3. concrete operations (7 - 11 years)

   • able to perform mental transformations but only on concrete physical objects

   • can now pass conservation task

   • can perform organizational tasks that require mental operations on physical objects (sorting coins, setting up battle scene)

4. formal operations (11 - adulthood)

   • able to perform hypothetical and abstract reasoning

   • can understand logic and concepts

Pros:

• helped us understand how children’s thinking evolves into more adult-like thinking

Cons:

• inaccurate

  • development is more continuous than stage-like

  • developmental change is less general

  • horizontal decalage → cases in which a child is more advanced in one cognitive domain than another

    • renders Piaget’s claim that development proceeds in domain-general stages difficult to falsify

  • culturally biased → elicited more sophisticated responses from children in westernized societies with formal educated than form those in non-westernized society

Vygotsky - Social and Cultural Influences on Learning:

• interested in how social and cultural factors influence learning

• noted scaffolding → parents provide initial assistance in children’s learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent

  • children learn to perform tasks independently but require guidance when getting started

• children can acquire skills and master tasks at different rates

• impacted guided learning and peer collaboration

Psychomythology- the Mozart Effect, Baby Einstein, and Creating “Superbabies”:

• Mozart Effect - supposed enhancement after listening to classical music

  • findings were based entirely on college students

  • many couldn’t find effects at all → any that did were trivial in magnitude

  • one study suggested the effect may be due to the greater emotional arousal produced by listening to Mozart relative to either other composers or silence

  • another found that listening to Mozart was no better for improving spatial ability that listening to a passage from a scary story

→ most findings suggest that a more parsimonious explanations for the Mozart effect is short-term arousal

→ finding being overhyped to capitalize on parents’ desires to boost their baby’s intellect

• Superbabies - parents bombarding their newborn infants with foreign languages and advanced math

  • alleged intelligence-improving products (Baby Einstein) toys and videos → $100 million a year industry

    • no evidence that these products work → research suggests that babies learn less from videos than from playing actively for the same period of time

Physical Reasoning:

• children must learn to reason about their physical worlds in order to understand them

Concepts and Categories:

• categorization is crucial because it frees us from having to explore every object to find out what it is and what it does

• Renee Baillargeon → showed that by 5 months and possibly younger, infants display an understanding of object permanence if given a task that doesn’t require physically coordinated search for the object

• naive physics - infants possess a basic understanding of some other aspects of how physical object behave

  • they know that objects that are unsupported should fall

  • knowledge becomes more refined with experience

  • as we age, we become less reliant on intuitions and more reliant on evidence of how things actually work

Why is Science Difficult?:

1. the language of science is mathematics

2. it isn’t intuitive

   • it doesn’t come naturally to the human species

• Michael McCloskey

  • showed that many adults hold “commonsensical” but inaccurate ideas about physics

• infants categorize

  • series of bird pictures, infants eventually get bored with them and look away, but show fresh interest when shown a picture of a dinosaur

    • implies they’ve categorized birds as all of the same kind and therefore are no longer new

  • eventually, children learn how objects are thematically related to each other, such as a dog and a bone

    • also learn more about aspects of categories that explain how members of categories connect → fruits both taste sweet and grow on trees

Self-Concept and The Concepts of “Other” - Who We Are and Who We Aren’t:

• by 3 years old, infants posses some sense of self as distinct from others

• 18 months → children can recognize their images in a mirror

• 2 years → can recognize pictures of themselves and refer to themselves by name

→ these accomplishments are tied to development in a specific brain region - junction of the left temporal and parietal lobes

• imitation implies that children can translate someone else’s actions into their own and grasp a correspondence between self and others

• theory of mind - children’s ability to understand that others’ perspectives can differ from theirs

  • ability to reason about what other people know or believe

  • examines thinking about thinking

  • test of theory of mind → false belief task

    • tests children’s ability to understand that someone else believes something they know to be wrong → children storing special treats in one spot, but a third party moves the treat to another place

→ children don’t typically succeed until the age of 4 or 5

Numbers and Mathematics:

• counting and mathematics don’t inevitably develop

  • children must understand the size of entities aren’t relevant to quantity

Chapter 12: Stress and Coping

• stress - the tension, discomfort, or physical symptoms that arise when a stressor strains our ability to cope effectively

• stressor - a stimulus in our environment that provokes stress

  • focus on identifying different types of stressful events

    • job loss, combat

  • pinpointed categories of events that most of us find dangerous and unpredictable

    • first year university students show a greater response to negative life events such as the breakup of a relationship than older men and women

    • women who are highly anxious or experience life events during pregnancy are more likely to deliver their babies early compared to women who experience more typical worries

• traumatic event - extreme stressors that causes long-term psychological or health consequences

  • some call the psychological and physical response to stressor “strain”

• groups at high risk for stressful events → young/unmarried people, immigrants, minorities, and people of low socioeconomic status

→ Ronal Kessler and colleagues studied approx 6000 men and women and found that (60%-90%) had experienced at least one potentially traumatic event (sexual/physical assault or car accident)

• victims of natural disasters sometimes suffer from collective trauma that damages the bonds among them

  • Hurricane Katrina separated family members for long periods of time and spawned chaos in the streets of New Orleans

Stress as a Transaction:

• stress is a subjective experience

• people’s varied reactions to the same event suggest that we can view stress as a transaction between people and their environments

  • examine how people interpret and cope with stressful events

→ Richard Lazarus - contended that a critical factor influencing whether we experience an event as stressful in our appraisal

• primary appraisal - initial decision regarding whether an event is harmful

• secondary appraisal - perceptions regarding our ability to cope with an event that follows primary appraisal

• when we believe we can’t cope, we’re more likely to experience a full-blown stress reaction than when we believe we can

• problem-focused thinking - coping strategy by which we problem solve and tackle life’s challenges head on

  • Ex. when we earn a disappointing grade, we may analyze why we fell short and devise a workable plan to improve our performance on the next exam

• emotion-focused coping - coping strategy that features a positive outlook on feelings or situations accompanied by behaviours that reduce painful emotions

  • Ex. after the breakup of a relationship, we may remind ourselves that we were unhappy months before it occured and re-enter the dating arena

Stress as a Response:

• asses people’s psychological and physical reactions to stressful circumstances

• typically, scientists expose subjects to stress-producing stimuli in the lab (otherwise they study people who’ve encountered real-life stressors

  • they measure a host of outcome variables

    • stress-related feelings → depression, hopelessness, and hostility

    • psychological responses such as increases in heart rate and the release of stress hormones

      • corticosteroid - stress hormone that activates the body and prepares us to respond to stressful circumstances

Major Life Events:

• social readjustment rating scale (SRRS) - questionnaire based on 43 life events ranked in terms of their stressfulness as rated by participants

  → David Holmes

  • scored by adding numbers to the right of each item experienced over the preceding year

  • involve life transition → suggests that the scale may be measuring how we adapt to changing circumstances (which tax ability to cope effectively)

  • studies using the SRRS indicate that the number of stressful events people report over the pervious year or so is associated with a variety of physical disorders and psychological disorders (depression)

  • does not consider other crucial factors

    • people’s interpretation of events

    • coping behaviors and resources

    • difficulty recalling events accurately

    • “chronic” ongoing stressors

    • subtle forms of discrimination/differential treatment

    • the fact that some stressful life events (divorce or troubles at work) can be consequences rather than causes of people’s psychological problems

  Hassles:

• minor annoyances or nuisance that strains our ability to cope

• Hassles Scale - measure how stressful events (ranging from small annoyances to major daily pressures) affect our adjustment

• the frequency and perceived severity of hassles are better predictors of physical health, depression, and anxiety than major life events

• it’s possible that major stressful events are the real culprits

  • the set us off when we already feel hassled or create hassles with which we need to cope

Mechanics of Stress:

→ Hans Selye - studied effects of prolonged stress on the body

• recognize a connection between the stress response of animals, including stomach ulcers and increases in the size of the adrenal gland, which produces stress hormones, and that of physically ill patients, who showed a consistent pattern of stress-related responses

• argued we’re equipped with a sensitive physiology that responds to stressful circumstances by kicking us into high gear

• general adaptation syndrome (GAS) - stress response pattern proposed by Hans Selye that consists of three stages → alarm, resistance, and exhaustion

  1. alarm reaction - involves excitation of the autonomic nervous system, the discharge of the stress hormone adrenalin, and physical symptoms of anxiety

     • Joseph LeDoux identified the seat of anxiety within the limbic system → dubbed the emotional brain

       • includes the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus

         → Ex. turbulence on a plane — images of plane crashes seen on tv pop up uncontrollably into a person’s mind → the swift emotional reaction to the turbulence is tripped largely by the amygdala (where vital emotional memories are stored and create gut feelings of a possible crash

     • fight or flight response - physical or psychological reaction that mobilizes people and animals to either defend themselves or escape a threatening situation

       → Walter Cannon (1915)

       • is a set of physiological reactions that mobilize us to either confront or leave a threatening situation

       • hypothalamus and pituitary gland orchestrate the adrenal gland’s release of another stress hormone (cortisol) which floods people with energy, while the hippocampus retrieves terrifying images from news stories of planes going down in flames.

  2. resistance - adapting to the stressor and finds ways to cope with it

     • the instant the hippocampus detected danger form the first apparent jolt of rough air, it opened a gateway to portions of the cerebral cortex

       • Joseph LeDoux called the “thinking brain”

  3. exhaustion - if our personal resources are limited and we lack good coping measures, our resistance may ultimately breakdown, causing our levels of activation to bottom out

     • results can range from damage to an organ system to depression and anxiety to a breakdown in the immune system

• correctly recognizes that stress could sometimes be advantageous

  • eustress - based on the greek word “good” to distinguish from distress (bad stress)

    • events that are challenging, yet not overwhelming, such as competing in an athletic event or giving a speech, can create “positive stress” and provide opportunities for personal growth

  • short-term stress that lasts minutes to hours can also trigger a healthy immune system response to help us fend off physical ailments

Fight or Flight vs Tend or Befriend:

• tend and befriend - reaction that mobilizes people to nurture (tend) or seek social support (befriend) under stress

  • common pattern of reacting to stress among females, although some males display too

  • females generally rely on their social contracts and nurturing abilities (tending) to those around them and to themselves → more than males do

    • when stressed out, female typically befriend/turn to others for support

• compared to males, females generally have more to lose (especially when they’re pregnant, nursing, or caring for children) if they’re injured or killed when fighting or fleeing

• oxytocin (love and bonding hormone) further counters stress and promotes the tend and befriend response

  • researches found that females with high levels of oxytocin during pregnancy and in the first month after birth of child are more likely to touch their children affectionately, sing special songs to them, and bathe them in special ways.

  • lab studies also suggest that oxytocin promotes trust consistent with a tend and befriend response

    • Ex. participants interacted with a conversational partner who dismissed, ignored, and interrupted them. Even when they experienced distress following the social rejection, they reported greater trust in their partner when they received oxytocin before their interaction compared with a placebo

Long-Lasting Stress Reactions:

• post traumatic stress disorder - a condition that sometimes follows extremely stressful life events

  • symptoms include vivid memories, feelings, and images of traumatic experiences (commonly known as flashbacks), efforts to avoid reminders of the trauma, feeling detached or estranged from others, increased arousal (evidenced by difficulty sleeping and startling easily)

Psychomythology - are almost all people traumatized by highly aversive events:

• people who cope well in the aftermath of a serious stressor tend to display relatively high levels of functioning before the event

  • resilience is the most common response to traumatic events

    • the rule rather than the exception even among children, who are commonly regarded as fragile and vulnerable to stress

Social Support:

• social support - relationships with people and groups that can provide us with emotional comfort and personal and financial resources

  • encompasses interpersonal relations with people, groups, and the larger community

• positive influence of social support isn’t limited to health outcomes

  • supportive and caring relationships can help us cope with short-term crises and life transitions

  • Ex. a happy marriage is protective against depression, even when people encounter major stressors, but the breakup of close relationships through separation, divorce, discrimination, or bereavement ranks among the most stressful event we can experience

  • social support (and its health benefits) is also enhanced through spirituality

Gaining Control:

• we can relieve stress by acquiring control of situations

Five Types of Control:

1. Behavioural - the ability to step up and do something to reduce the impact of a stressful situation or prevent its recurrence

   • problem-focused coping → generally more effective in relieving stress than avoidance-oriented coping (avoiding action to solve our problems or giving up hope)

   • research shows that more highschool and college students use problem-focused coping techniques, the less likely they are to develop drinking problems

2. Cognitive - the ability to cognitively restructure or think differently about negative emotions that arise in response to stress-provoking events

   • includes emotion-focused coping → strategy that comes in handy when adjusting to uncertain situations or aversive events we can’t control or change

3. Decision - the ability to choose among alternative courses of action

   • we can consult with trusted friends about which classes to take and which professor to avoid, and make decisions about which autobody shop will be best qualified to fix that dent in our car

4. Informational - the ability to acquire information about a stressful event

   • knowing the types of questions are on standardized tests can help us prepare for them

   • proactive coping - anticipation of problems and stressful situations that promotes effective coping

     • people who engage in this tend to perceive stressful circumstances as opportunities for growth

5. Emotional - the ability to suppress and express emotions

   • Ex. writing in a diary can facilitate emotional control and has a host of long-lasting benefits

Is Catharsis a Good Thing?:

• when it involves problem solving and constructive efforts to make troubling situations “right”, it can be beneficial

• when catharsis reinforces a sense of helplessness, as when we voice our rage about something we can’t or won’t change, it can actually be harmful

  • the is worrisome because a slew of popular psychotherapies rely on catharsis, encouraging clients to “get it out of your system”, “get things off your chest”, or “let is all hang out” → yell, punch pillows, throw balls against walls when they become upset

    • research shows that these activities rarely reduce our long-term stress, although they may make us feel slightly better for a few moments

    • in other cases, they actually seem to heighten our anger or anxiety in the long term, perhaps because emotional upset often generates a vicious cycle → we can become distressed about the fact that we’re distressed

Does Crisis Debriefing Help?:

• crisis debriefing/critical incident stress debriefing - designed to ward of PTSD among people exposed to trauma

  • crisis debriefing is a single-session procedure within one or two days of a traumatic event

  • it proceeds according to standardized steps, including strongly encouraging group members to discuss and process their negative emotions, listing the post traumatic symptoms that group members are likely to experience, and discouraging group members from discontinuing participation once the session has started

  • recent studies indicate that crisis debriefing isn’t effective for trauma reactions

    • nor is there much evidence that merely talking about our problems when we’re upset is helpful

      → a review of 61 studies revealed no overall benefits for emotional disclosure on a variety of measures of physical and psychological health

Hardiness - Challenge, Commitment, and Control:

• hardiness - set of attitudes marked by a sense of control over events, commitment to life and work, and courage and motivation to confront stressful circumstances

  • Salvatore Maddi initiated a study of the qualities of stress-resistant people → they found that resilient people possess a set of attitudes (hardiness)

  • Hardy people view change as a challenge rather than a threat, are committed to their life and work, and believe that they can control events

Optimism:

• optimistic people have a rosy outlook and don’t dwell on the dark side of life

• there are some distinct advantages to being optimistic

  • more productive, focused, persistent, and better at handling frustration than pessimists

• also associated with a lower mortality rate and lower risk of depression following a heart attack, lower distress in infertile females trying to have a child, better surgical outcomes, and fewer physical complaints

Spirituality:

• spirituality - search for the sacred, which may or may not extend to belief in God

  • religious beliefs play vital roles in many of our lives

    • recent polls show that 87 percent of Americans and somewhat lower percent of Canadians believe in God

      → explanation of these findings is that religious involvement activates a healing energy that scientists can’t measure

  • the correlation between religiosity and physical health isn’t easy to interpret

    • some authors have measured religiosity by counting how often people attend church or other religious services and found that such attendance is associated with better physical health

Reasons why spirituality and religious involvements may be a boon to many people:

1. many religions foster self-control and prohibit risky health behaviours

   • alcohol, drugs, and unsafe sexual practices

2. religious engagement (attendance at services) often boost social support and increases satisfaction

3. a sense of meaning and purpose, control over life, positive emotions, and positive appraisals of stressful situations associated with prayer and religious activities may enhance coping

Flexible coping:

• the ability to adjust coping strategies as the situation demands is critical to contending with many stressful situations

• George Bonanno

  • studied who’d just started college in NYC when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and predicted that students who had difficulties with managing their emotions would find the transition to college life particularly difficult.

    • participants completed a checklist of psychological symptoms at the start of the study and two years later → those who were better at flexibly controlling their emotions by suppressing or expressing then on demand on a laboratory task reported less distress at the two-year follow-up

• expending a great deal of effort to suppress and avoid emotions can distract us from problem solving and lead to an unintended consequence

  • the emotions may return in full or with greater force

  • the attempt to suppress negative emotions and thoughts associated with aversive events tends to backfire and increase the very negative experiences we’re struggling so hard to avoid

  • accepting circumstances and feeling we can’t change and finding positive ways of thinking about our problems can be a potent means of contending with stressful situations

Rumination:

• some ways of reacting to stressful situations are clearly counterproductive

• ruminating - focusing on how bad we feel and endlessly analyzing the causes and consequences of our problems

  • study found that both heart rate and blood pressure were higher among participants still ruminating 10 minutes after the termination of a stressor

  • rumination was measured based on levels of reflection, regret, and brooding, but also through relationship preoccupation

    • results showed that each of regret, brooding, and relationship preoccupation were related to negative adjustments, but reflection was related to positive adjustment

  • Nolen-Hoeksema

    • contended that women have much higher rates and more frequent bouts of depression than men because they tend to ruminate more than men

    • researchers have reported consistent sex differences in rumination, although on average, these differences are small

      • contrarily, when men are stressed out, they are more likely to focus on pleasurable or distracting activities such as work, watching football games, or drinking copious amounts of alcohol

      • they also adopt a more direct approach to solving their problems than women do

The Immune System:

• immune system - our body’s defence system against invading bacteria, viruses, and other potentially illness-producing organisms and substances

  • first shield → antigens

    • skin

      • blocks the entry of many disease-producing organisms (pathogens)

    • when we cough or sneeze, our lungs expel harmful bacteria and viruses

    • saliva, urine, tears, perspiration, and stomach acid also rid our body of pathogens

  • some viruses/bacteria penetrate these defences

    • phagocytes and lymphocytes

      • two types of specialized white blood cells manufactured in the marrow of our bones

        1. at the scene of the infection

           → phagocytes engulf the invader

           → macrophages wander through the body as scavengers, destroying the remaining antigens and dead tissue

           → T cells and B cells (lymphocytes) move through the body as they are called and attach to proteins on the surface of virus and cancer infected cells, popping then like balloons

           → B cells produce proteins called antibodies, which stick to the surface of invaders, slow their progress, and attract other proteins that destroy foreign organisms

  • acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) - a life-threatening, incurable, yet treatable condition in which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks and damages the immune system

    • when the immune system is overactive, it can launch an attack on various organs of the body, causing autoimmune diseases like arthritis (the immune system causes swelling and pain at the joints), and multiple sclerosis (the immune system attacks the protective myelin sheath surrounding neurons)

Psychoneuroimmunology:

• psychoneuroimmunology - study of the relationship between the immune system and central nervous system

  • we must be careful not to fall prey to exaggerated claims

    • physical diseases aren’t the result of negative thinking, nor can positive thinking reverse serious illnesses like cancer — despite assertions by immensely popular alternative medical practitioners like Andrew Weil

Stress and Colds:

• most people believe they are more likely to get a cold when they’re really stressed out (they’re right)

  • researchers discovered that significant stressors, such as unemployment and interpersonal difficulties lasting at least a month, were the best predictors of who developed a cold

    • perhaps because long-term stressors are especially likely to promote an inflammatory response know to increase the risk of colds and other diseases

Stress and Immune Function:

• all the following stressors can lead to disruptions in the immune system:

  1. taking an important test

  2. death of a spouse

  3. unemployment

  4. marital conflict

  5. living near a damaged nuclear reactor

  6. natural disasters

• positive emotions and social support can fortify our immune systems

Stress-Related Illnesses:

• certain illnesses or disorders were once called psychometric because psychologists believed that deep-seated conflicts and emotional reactions were the culprits

  • Franz Alexander argued that stomach ulcers are linked to infantile cravings to be fed and feeling of dependency

• peptic ulcer - inflamed area in the gastrointestinal tract that can cause pain, nausea, and loss of appetite

  • result of certain illnesses and disorders according to Franz Alexander

  • most people believe that ulcers are produced by stress

  • caused by helicobacter pylori

    • an unusual bacterium that thrives in stomach acid

• psychophysiological - illnesses such as asthma and ulcers in which emotions and stress contribute to, maintain, or aggravate the physical condition

• biopsychosocial perspective - the view that an illness or medical condition is the product of the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors

  • most psychologists have adopted this view

• numerous physical illnesses depend on the complex interplay of genes, lifestyle, immunity, social support, everyday stressors, and self-perceptions

Mysteries of Psychological Science:

• coronary heart disease - damage to the heart from the complete or partial blockage of the arteries that provide oxygen to the heart

  • accounts for 1 in every 2.5 death/1 millions deaths a year

  • develops when deposits of cholesterol collect in the walls of arteries, narrowing and blocking the coronary arteries, creating a condition called atherosclerosis

    • associated with an inflammatory response in the artery walls, and if the condition worsens, it can lead to chest pain and deterioration and death of heart tissue → heart attack

  • role of stress

    • prominent in CHD risk factors

    • stressful life events predict recurrences of heart attacks, high blood pressure, and enlargement of the heart

  • role of personality

    • longstanding behaviour patterns contribute to risk for CHD

    • type A personality - personality type that describes people who are competitive, drive, hostile, and ambitious

      → these people are at higher risk for heart attacks

  • anger and hostility

    • hostility is the most predicative of heart disease

    • hostility is associated with well-documented risk factors for CHD

      → alcohol consumption

      → smoking

      → weight gain

Towards a Healthy Lifestyle:

• healthy behaviours to follow

  • quit smoking

    • smoking ranks as the leading cause of preventable disease and death in Canada and the USA

    • under half of adult smokers are make a serious attempt to quit smoking over the course of a year

    • stop-smoking approaches typically educate people about the health consequences of smoking and teach smokers to manage stress

      → help to pinpoint and avoid high-risk situations associated with past smoking (parties and bars)

  • limit excessive drinking

    • repeated bouts of heavy drinking, especially heavy episodic drinking, are associated with increases in many different types of cancer, serious and sometimes fatal liver problems, pregnancy complications, and brain shrinkage/other neurological problems

      → drinking five or more drinks on one occasion for males and four or more drink for females

  • control weight

    • people who are obese are at heightened risk of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, arthritis, some types of cancer, respiratory problems, and diabetes

    • exercise is one of the best means of shedding belly fat and losing weight over the long haul

    • overweight individuals suffer from a variety of social and emotional problems

      → obese children are subject to teasing

      → adults often experience discrimination in the social arena and workplace

• exercise

  • jogging, swimming, bicycling, and other aerobic exercises promote the use of oxygen in the body

    • can lower blood pressure and risk for CHD

    • improve lung function

    • relieve symptoms of arthritis

    • decrease diabetes risk

    • cut risk of breast and colon cancer

    • can improve cardiovascular recovery from stress and relieve depression and anxiety

  • personal inertia - to try something new

    • many self-destructive habits relieve stress and don’t create an imminent health threat, so it’s easy to “let things be”

  • misestimating risk - underestimate certain risks to our health and overestimate others

Complementary and Alternative Medicine:

• alternative medicine - health care practices and products used in place of conventional medicine

  • medicine for which there’s solid evidence of safety and effectiveness

• complementary medicine - health care practices and products used together with conventional medicine

→ together, both forms of medicine are known as CAM (complementary and alternative medicine)

Biologically Based Theories:

• vitamins, herbs, and food supplements

  • herbal and natural preparations that some once viewed as promising have generally been found to be no more effective than a placebo

  • negative findings have challenged still-popular beliefs

    • St. John’s wart can alleviate the symptoms of moderate to severe depression

    • shark cartilage can cure some cancers

    • glucosamine and chondroitin (found naturally in the body but extracted from animal tissue) relieve mild arthritis pain

    • acai berries can improve sexual performance, increase energy, and aid digestion and weight loss

    • extract from leaves of the ginkgo biloba tree slows cognitive decline in aging adults, prevents Alzheimer’s disease, and reduces heart attacks and strokes

  • dietary supplements with calcium don’t prevent much bone loss in females

  • vitamin C doesn’t markedly decrease the severity or duration of colds

Manipulative and Body-Based Methods:

• chiropractic manipulation

  • chiropractors - health professionals who manipulate the spine to treat a wide range of pain-related conditions and injuries and often provide nutritional and lifestyle counselling

    • can’t perform surgeries or prescribe medication

  • based on the idea that irregularities in the alignment o the spine (subluxations) prevent the nervous and immune systems from functioning properly

Mind-Body Medicine:

• biofeedback - feedback by a device that provides almost an immediate output of a biological function, such as heart rate or skin temperature

  • some patients can learn to use this feedback to modify physiological responses associated with stress or illness

• meditation - a variety of practices that train attention and awareness

  • concentrative meditation - the goal is to focus attention on a single thing, such as a flame of a candle, and mantra, or one’s breath

  • awareness meditation - attention flows freely and examines whatever comes to mind

positive effects of meditation:

• heightened creativity

• empathy

• alertness

• self-esteem
  

Energy Medicine:

• acupuncture

  • ancient Chinese practice of inserting thin needling into more than 2000 points in the body to alter energy forces believed to run through the body

  • can help to relieve nausea following surgical operations and treat pain-related conditions

  • still no reason to believe that any of its positive effects are due to energy changes

Placebos and CAMS:

• research on acupuncture and other CAM treatments concluded that they’ve mostly failed to demonstrate that they’re more effective than placebos or “sham” treatments

  • patients with back pain and migraine headaches benefit from sham acupuncture treatments in which researchers place needles at locations that don’t match the acupuncture points or in which needles don’t actually puncture the skin

  • can be more effective than oral drug placebo for the treatment of migraine headaches

• placebo effects are often impressive in their own right and exert a measurable impact on brain chemistry and activity

• both placebos and acupuncture stimulate the release of endorphins

• placebo power

  • Parkinson’s disease - a serious and irreversible illness

    • produces slow movements, rigid muscles, and tremors associated with decreased levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine

    • generally afflicts people over 60 but can occasionally strike people in their 20s and 30s

Whole Medical Systems - Homeopathy:

• homeopathic medicine - remedies that feature a small dose of an illness-inducing substance to activate the body’s own natural defences

  • based on the premise that consuming an extremely diluted dose of a substance known to produce an illness in a healthy person will alleviate that illness

  • when we rely too heavily on the representative heuristic, we can make errors in judgement

    • in this case, we might assume that the treatment for a disorder must resemble its cause → if a disorder it caused by too much chemical A, we should treat it by presenting the patient with as little chemical A as possible

    • homeopaths often dilute remedies to the point that not even a single molecule of the original substance remains

      • believe that the “memory” of the substances is enough to stimulate the body’s defenses is an extraordinary claim that makes utterly no sense from a scientific perspective

  • no homeopathic remedies haven’t been shown to be effective for any medical condition

5 probable reasons for the apparent effectiveness of homeopathy and other unsupported CAMs:

1. they produce a placebo effect by instilling hope

2. people assume that natural products like herbs and megavitamins improve their health because they perceive no adverse effects to counter their beliefs

3. the symptoms of many physical disorders come and go

   • so consumers may attribute symptom relief to the treatment rather than to changes in the natural course of the illness

4. when CAM treatments accompany conventional treatments, people may attribute their improvement to the CAM treatment rather than to changes in the natural course of the illness

5. the problem may be misdiagnosed in the first place, so the condition isn’t as severe as initially believed

Chapter 13: Social Psychology

• social psychology - the study of how people influence others’ behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes

  • helps us understand not only why we sometimes act helpfully and even heroically in the presence of others, but also why we occasionally show our worst sides

Humans as a Social Species:

• humans are highly social species

  • COVID pandemic showed many how unsettling it was to have to self-isolate

Gravitating Towards Each Other:

• Robin Dunbar → 150

  • 150 is the number of the approximate size of most human social groups

  • research suggests that 150 is also close to the average number of people that each of us knows reasonably well

Why We Reform:

• the need to belong theory - humans have a biologically based need for interpersonal connections

  • Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary

  • we seek out social bonds when we can and suffer negative psychological and physical consequences when we can’t

  • systematic research shows that the threat of social isolation can lead us to behave in self-destructive ways and even impair out mental functioning

How We Became This Way:

→ conformity, obedience, and many other forms of social influence became maladaptive only when they’re blind or unquestioning

• from this standpoint, irrational group behaviour are byproducts of adaptive processes that have gone terribly wrong

Social Comparison:

• one reason others affect is that they often serve as a mirror of sorts, providing us with helpful information about ourselves

  • social comparison theory - we evaluate our abilities and beliefs by comparing them with those of others → doing this helps us to understand ourselves and our social worlds better

    • Leon Festinger

• comes in two different “flavours”

  • upward social comparison - we compare ourselves with people who seem superior to us in some way

    • we may feel better because we conclude that “if they can achieve that, I bet I can too”

  • downward social comparison - we compare ourselves with others who seem inferior to us in some way

    • we often end up feeling superior to our peers who are less competent than us in an important domain of life

→ both can boost our self-concepts

Social Contagion:

• we often look to others when a situation is ambiguous to figure out what to believe

  • how to act

  • looking at the facial expressions of others, in a situation of plane turbulence, for cues how to react

• we can influence the way people feel, act, and think by our own actions

  • staring at someone

Mysteries of Psychological Science:

• why are yawns contagious

  • contagious yawning doesn’t typically emerge until about the age of 4

    • this developmental trend may reflect the emergence of empathy and theory of mind in children

  • recent research has examined the existence of contagious yawning in animals

    • chimpanzees exhibit contagious yawning more to members of their own groups than other chimpanzees → suggesting a tue to empathy

  • none of us know why yawning is contagious

    • some argue that contagious yawning promotes social bonding of individuals within groups

    • may have evolved to foster alertness within a group

• mass hysteria - outbreak of irrational behaviour that is spread by social contagion

  • such as the flu epidemic

  • many of us are prone to mass hysteria under the right circumstances

    • because we are most likely to engage in social comparison when a situation is ambiguous

  • some cases lead to collective delusions → many people simultaneously come to be convinced of bizzare things that are false

• urban legends - false stories that have been repeated so many times that people believe them to be true

  • rumours tend to grow lessa accurate with repeated retellings, often becoming over simplified to make a good story

    • Gordon Allport and Leo Postman

  • convincing because they’re surprising yet plausible

  • make good stories because they tug on emotions, especially negative ones

  • research shows that the most popular urban legends contain a heavy dose of material relevant to the emotion of disgust

    • probably because they arouse our perverse sense of curiosity

The Fundamental Attribution Error:

• attributions - process of assigning causes to behaviours

  • make them every day

  • internal (inside the person)

    • when we conclude Joe Smith robbed the bank because he’s impulsive

  • external (outside the person)

    • when we conclude the Bill Jones robbed the bank because his family was broke

• fundamental attribution error - tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional influences on other people’s behaviour

  • Lee Ross

  • dispositional influences - enduring characteristics, such as personality traits, attitudes, and intelligence

  • because of this error, we attribute too much of people’s behaviour to who they are

  • we tend to underestimate the impact of situational influences on others’ behaviour, so we also attribute too little their behavior to what’s going on around them

  • no one knows why we commit fundamental attribution error, but one likely culprit is the fact that we’re rarely aware of all of the situational factors impinging on other’s behaviour at a given or a moment

  • we are less likely to commit the fundamental attribution error if we’ve been in the same situation ourselves or been encouraged to feel empathetic toward those we’re observing

  • we tend to commit fundamental attribution error only when explaining others’ behaviour → when explaining our own behaviour, we typically invoke situational influences

The Fundamental Attribution Error - Cultural Influences:

• fundamental attribution error is associated with cultural factors

  • Japanese and Chinese people seem to be less prone to this error

    • may be because they’re more likely than those in Western cultures to view behaviours within a context → as a result, they may be more prone to seeing others’ behaviour as a complex stew of both dispositional and situational influences

    Ex. Chinese participants are considerably more likely to invoke dispositional explanations for the behaviour of a mass murder (“they must be evil people”) and more likely to invoke situational explanations (“they must have been under terrible stress in their life”)

Deindividuation:

• deindividuation - tendency to people to engage in uncharacteristic behavior when they are striped of their usual identities

  • several factors contribute

    • most prominent are a feeling of anonymity and lack of individual responsibility

  • when we are deindividuated, we become more vulnerable to social influences, including the impact of social roles

    • the advent of email, text messaging, and other largely impersonal forms of communication may contribute to deindividuation → leading to a heightened risk of “flaming” (sending insulting messages to others)

Stanford Prison Study:

→ what would happen if ordinary people played the roles of prisoner and guard?

• Philip Zimbardo

1. the set up

   • advertised for volunteers for a two-week “psychological study of prison life”

   • randomly assigned 24 male undergraduates to either be a prisoner or a guard

2. the study

   • basement of Stanford psychology department turned into simulated prison, complete with jail cells

     • real police officers even went to the houses and of the would-be prisoners and arrested and transported to the simulated prison

   • prisoners and guards were forced to dress in clothes befitting their assigned roles, Zimbardo, who acted as the prison superintendent, instructed guards to refer to prisoners only by numbers, not by names

3. results

   • first day passed without incident

   • later, the guards began to treat prisoners cruelly and subject them to harsh punishments

     • guards forced prisoners to perform humiliating lineups, do push-ups, sing, strip naked, and clean filthy toilets with their bare hands

   • by day two, the prisoners mounted a rebellion, which the guards quickly quashed

   • the guards then became increasingly sadistic, using fire extinguishers on the prisoners and forcing them to simulate sodomy

   • soon, many prisoners began to display signs of emotional disturbance, including depression, hopelessness, and anger

     • two prisoners were released because they appeared to be on the verge of a psychological breakdown

     • one prisoner went on hunger strike in protest

   • on day six, Zimbardo ended the study eight days early

     • although the prisoners were relieved at the news, some guards were disappointed

→ this study has been the target of considerable criticism in recent years

• this study wasn’t carefully controlled

  • it was more of a demonstration than an experiment

    • his prisoners and guards may have experienced demand characteristics to behave in accord with their assigned roles

    • they may have assumed that the investigators wanted them to play the parts of prisoners and guards and obliged

      → these demand characteristics may be been inadvertently amplified by the researchers

Crowds:

• deindividuation helps explain why crowd behaviour is so predictable

  • the actions of people in crowds depend largely on whether others are acting prosocially or antisocially

    • a myth that’s endured for centuries is that crowds are always more aggressive than individuals

    • Gustav Le Bon argued that crowds are a recipe for irrational and even destructive behaviour → people in crowds are more anonymous and therefore more likely to act on their impulse than individuals

Groupthink:

• groupthink - emphasis on group unanimity at the expense of critical thinking

  • closely related to conformity

  • groups sometimes become so intent on ensuring that everyone agrees with everyone else that they lose their capacity to evaluate issues objectively

• treatments

  • groupthink is often treatable

    • Janis noted that the best way to avoid groupthink is to encourage active dissent within an organization

      → recommended that all groups appoint a devil’s advocate (a person whose role is to voice doubts about the wisdom of group’s decisions

      → suggested having independent experts on hand to evaluate whether the group’s decisions make sense

Cults + Brain Washing:

• cults - group of individuals who exhibit intense and unquestioning devotion to a single cause

  • because they are secretive and difficult to study, we know relatively little about them

    • but evidence suggests that cults promote groupthink in four major ways

      1. having a persuasive leader who fosters loyalty

      2. disconnecting group members from the outside world

      3. discouraging questions on the group’s assumptions

      4. establishing training practices that gradually indoctrinate members

  • common misconceptions

    • cult members are usually emotionally disturbed → studies show that most cult members are psychologically normal

      → stems from the fundamental attribution error — we overestimate the role of personality traits and underestimate the role of social influences

    • all cult members are brainwashed → there’s considerable scientific controversy about the exisistance of brainwashing.

      → there are reasons to doubt whether brainwashing is a unique means of changing people’s behaviour — instead the persuasive techniques of brainwashing probably aren’t all that different from those used by effective political leaders and salespeople

  • resisting cult influence

    • inoculation effect - approach to convincing people to change their minds about something by first introducing reasons why the perspective might be correct and then debunking those reasons

      • William McGuire - demonstrated that the best way to immunize people against undesirable beliefs is to first gently introduce them to reasons why this belief seems to be correct → gives them the chance to generate their own counterarguments against these reasons

Obedience:

• obedience - adherence to instructions from those of higher authority

  • the groups influence springs not from our peers, but from our leaders (teacher, parent, boss)

• necessary, even essential ingredient in our daily lives

• can produce troubling consequences when people stop asking questions about why they’re behaving as others want them to

The Milgram Study:

• found that obedient and disobedient participants were similar on most personality variables

  • found no evidence that obedient participants were more sadistic than disobedient participants → suggesting that participants didn’t follow orders because they enjoyed doing so

• researchers identified a few predictors of obedience in the study

  • the level of moral development using his interview-based scheme was negatively correlated with compliance

  • people with high levels of a personality trait called authoritarianism are more likely to comply with the experimenters’ demand

    • people with high levels of authoritarianism see the world as a big hierarchy of power → authority figures are to be respected and not questioned

• found no consistent sex differences in obedience

• critics note that some concentration camp guards actively enjoyed torturing innocent people

  • further argued that destructive obedience on a grand scale probably requires not only authority figure bearing an official stamp of approval, but also a core group of genuinely wicked people

• prosocial behaviour - behaviour intended to help others

  • bonobo

• antisocial behaviour - aggressive acts

  • chimpanzees

→ primate researcher Frans de Waal argued that our two closest animal relatives (bonobo & chimpanzee) display the seeds of both prosocial and antisocial behaviour

Causes of Bystander Nonintervention:

→ John Darley and Bibb Latane

• the bystander effect was less a consequence of apathy than of “psychological paralysis”

• bystanders in emergencies typically want to intervene, but often find themselves frozen, seemingly helpless to help

• suspected that popular psychology was wrong — there’s actually danger rather than safety in numbers

Two Major Factors That Explain The Bystander Effect

• pluralistic ignorance - error of assuming that no one in a group perceives things as we do

  • to intervene in an emergency, we first need to recognize that the situation is really an emergency

  • relevant when we’re trying to figure out whether an ambiguous situation is really an emergency

• diffusion of responsibility - reduction in feelings of personal responsibility in the presence of others

  • the presence of others makes each person feel less responsible for the outcome

Social Loafing:

• social loafing - phenomenon whereby individuals become less productive in groups

  • people slack off in groups

  • consequence = the whole is less than the sum of its parts

• some believe it is a variant of bystander nonintervention

  • social loafing appears to be due in part to diffusion of responsibility

  • people working together in groups typically feel less responsible for the outcome of a project than they do when working alone

    • result = they don’t invest much time

Is Brainstorming in Group a Good Way to Generate Ideas?:

• less effective than individual brainstorming

  • group members may be anxious about being evaluated by others

    • leading them to hold back potentially good ideas

  • social loafing

    • when brainstorming in groups, people frequently engage in “free riding”

      • they sit back and let others do the hard work

Altruism:

• altruism - helping others for unselfish reasons

• scientists have argued that we help others for egoistic reasons (self-centered)

  • relieving our own distress

  • experiencing the joy of others we’ve helped

Helping - Situational Influences:

• people are more likely to help others when they can’t easily escape the situation

  • running away, driving away

• characteristics of the victim also matter

  • person with a cane vs an obvious drunk

• can be infectious when it collides with conformity and everyone else pitches in

  • Miracle Food Drive where over 10 000 volunteers collected street-by-street donations from residents

• enlightenment effect - learning about psychological research can change real-world behaviour for the better

  • someone who was presented with psychology information/stats and then two weeks later is more likely to help someone slumped over on a bench because they now had new knowledge about bystander intervention

• individual and gender differences

  • individual differences in personality also influence the likelihood of helping

  • participants who are less concerned about social approval and are less traditional are more likely to go against the grain and intervene in emergencies even when others are present

  • extroverted people are also more prone to help others than introverted people

  • people with life saving skills are more likely to offer assistance to others in emergencies than other people, even with they’re off duty

Aggression - Why We Hurt Others:

• aggression - behaviour intended to harm others, either verbally or physically

→ situational influences

• interpersonal provocation - strike out aggressively against those who have provoked us

• frustration - thwarted from reaching a goal

• media influence - watching media violence increases the odds of violence through observational learning

• aggressive cues - external cues associated with violence (guns and knives) can serve as discriminative stimuli for aggression, making us more likely to act violent in response to provocation

• arousal - when our autonomic nervous systems are hyped up, we may mistakenly attribute this arousal to anger

• alcohol and other drugs - certain substances can inhibit our brain’s prefrontal cortex, lowering our inhibitions toward behaving violently

• temperature - rates of violent crime in different regions of the USA mirror the average temperatures in these regions

  • because warm temperatures increase irritability, they may make people more likely to lose their tempers when provoked or frustrated

Aggression - Individual, Gender, and Cultural Differences:

• personality traits - people differ in their tendencies to behave aggressively

  • certain traits can combine to create a dangerous cocktail of aggression-proneness

• sex differences - there are higher levels of physical aggressiveness among males than females

  • girls tend to be higher than boys in relational aggression → form of indirect aggression, prevalent in girls, involving spreading rumours, gossiping, the nonverbal putdowns for the purpose of social manipulation

• cultural differences - physical aggression and violent crime are less prevalent among Asian cultures than in North American or European cultures

  • people from southern regions of the USA are more likely than those from other regions of that country to adhere to a culture of honor → social norm of defending one’s reputation in the face of perceived insults

When Attitudes Don’t Predict Behaviour:

• although attitudes forecast behaviour at between than chance levels, they’re far from powerful predictors

  • this reflects the fact that our behaviours are the outcome of many factors, only one of which is our attitudes

When Attitudes Do Predict Our Behaviour:

• attitudes that are highly accessible (come to mind easily) tend to be strongly predictive of our behaviour

→ the fact that attitudes are correlated with behaviours doesn’t mean they cause them

• other explanation are possible

  • our behaviours may sometimes cause our attitudes → starting out with a negative attitude toward people experiencing homelessness

Origins of Attitude:

• recognition heuristic - makes us more likely to believe something we’ve heard many times

  • generally serves us well because we hear many times from many different people are often true

  • can help us make snap judgements that are surprisingly accurate → when asking who will win a tennis match, many people will pick the player they’ve heard of (more often than not, it is effective)

  • can lead us to fall for stories that are too good to be true (urban legends)

    • hearing one person express an opinion 10 times can lead us to conclude falsely that this view is widely held

Attitudes and Personality:

• attitudes are associated in important ways with our personality traits

• our personalities even relate to/influence our attitudes towards religion

  • the specific religion we adopt is largely a function of our religious exposure while growing up and is mostly independent of our personalities

  • our religiosity (the depth of our religious convictions) is linked to certain personality traits

Cognitive Dissonance Theory:

• Leon Festinger

  • cognitive dissonance - unpleasant mental experience of tension resulting from two conflicting thoughts or beliefs

    • if we hold an attitude or belief (cognition A) that’s inconsistent with another attitude or belief (cognition B), we can reduce the anxiety resulting from this inconsistency in three major ways

      1. change cognition A

      2. change cognition B

      3. introduce a new cognition (C) that resolves the inconsistency between A and B

Alternatives to Cognition Dissonance Theory:

• some scholars contend that it’s not dissonance itself that’s responsible for shifting our attitudes, but rather threats to our self-concepts

Festinger and Carlsmith Study:

The Setup

• mind-numbing boring tasks

• ask the participant to tell the next one that the study was interesting enjoyable

The Study:

• randomly assigned some participants to receive $1 to perform this favour and other to receive $20

• afterward, they asked participants how much they enjoyed performing the tasks

  • cognitive dissonance theory makes the prediction that participants paid $1 should say they enjoyed the task more

• participants given $20 had a good external justification

  • participants given $1 had almost no external justification

→ as a result, the only easy way to resolve their cognitive dissonance was to persuade themselves that they must have enjoyed the task after all

The Results:

• participants given less money reported enjoying the task more

  • presumably because they needed to justify their lies to themselves

  • their behaviours had changed their attitudes

→ there are at least two other explanations for cognitive dissonance

1. self-perception theory - theory that we acquire our attitudes by observing our behaviours

   • according to this model , Festinger and Carlsmith’s participants in the $1 condition looked at their behaviour and said to themselves “I told other participants that I liked the taks, and I got paid only one lousy buck to do so. So I guess I must have really liked the task”

2. impression management theory - theory that we don’t really change our attitudes, but report that we have so that our behaviours appear consistent with our attitudes

   • according to this model, participants in the $1 condition didn’t want to look like hypocrites

     • so they told the experimenter they enjoyed the task even though they didn’t

Routes to Persuasion:

• dual process models of persuasion - there are two alternative pathways to persuading others

  1. central route - leads us to evaluate the merits of persuasive arguments carefully and thought out

     • focused on informational content of arguments

       • do they hold up under close scrutiny?

     • especially likely to take this route when we’re motivated to evaluate information carefully and are able to do so

  2. peripheral route - leads us to respond to persuasive arguments on the basis of snap judgements

     • focus on surface aspects of the argument

       • how appealing or interesting are they?

     • especially likely to take this route when we’re not motivated to weigh information carefully and don’t have the ability to do so

     • the danger of persuasive messages that travel through the peripheral route is that we can be easily fooled by superficial factors

       • how physically attractive/famous/likeable the communicator is or how many times we’ve heard the message

Persuasion Techniques:

1. foot in the door - persuasive technique involving making a small request before making a bigger one

   • asking first to volunteer one hour a week

     • once they agree to that request, there is a foot in the door because from the perspective of cognitive dissonance theory, they’ll feel a need to justify their initial commitment

       • they’ll probably end up with a positive attitude toward the organization, boosting the odds that they’'ll volunteer even more of their time

2. door in the face - persuasive technique involving making an unreasonably large request before making the small request we’re hoping to have granted

   • asking for a $100 donation to charity, before asking for a smaller one, like $10

   • may work because the initial large request often induces guilt in recipients

     • but if initial request is so outrageous that it appears insincere or unreasonable, this method can backfire

   • research suggests that the foot in the door and door in the face techniques work equally as well

3. lowball - persuasive technique in which the seller of a product starts by quoting a low sales price, and the mentions all of the “add-on” costs once the customer has agreed to purchase the product

   • by the time the deal is done, the buyer may end up paying twice as much they’d initially agreed to

4. but your are free - persuasive technique in which we convince someone to perform a favour for us by telling them that they are free not to do it

   • research suggests that this technique doubles the odds of compliance to a request

     • probably because people given a free choice can convince themselves that they made the choice on their own and weren’t pressured by the person making the request

Characteristics of the Messenger:

• research demonstrates that we’re more likely to swallow a persuasive message if famous or attractive people deliver it

• messages are especially persuasive if the messenger seems similar to us

• implicit egotism effect - the finding that we’re more positively disposed toward people, places, or things that resemble us

  • appears to influences not only our attitudes, but our life choices

    • we’re more likely than chance would predict to select people whose names contain the first letters of our first or last names (in the matters of friendships and relationships)

Prejudice and Discrimination:

• prejudice - drawing negative conclusions about a person, group of people, or situation prior to evaluating the evidence

Stereotypes:

• stereotype - a belief, positive or negative, about the characteristics of members of a group that is applied generally to most members of the group

  • by lumping enormous number of people who share a single characteristic (skin, nationality, or religion) into a single category, stereotypes help us make sense of our often-confusing social worlds

  • can be seed from which prejudice grows

    • can mislead us when we paint them with too broad a brush → when we assume that all members of a group share a given characteristic

    • can mislead us when we cling to them too rigidly and are unwilling to modify them in light of disconfirming evidence

  • can lead to spread erroneous negative information about members of other groups

  • can affect our split-second interpretation of ambiguous stimuli

  • illusory correlation - indicate the perception of an erroneous association between a minority group and a given characteristic

  • can result in the ultimate attribution error - assumption that behaviours among individual members of a group are due to their internal dispositions

    • ex. women, Christians, black people

    • when we commit this error, we tend to attribute any positive behaviour of disliked groups to luck or to rare exceptions to prove that rule

    • leads us to underestimate the impact of situational factors on people’s behaviour

• research suggests that overcoming stereotypes takes hard mental work

• the key difference between prejudiced and nonprejudiced people isn’t that the former have stereotypes of minority groups and the latter don’t, because both groups harbour such stereotypes

  • instead it’s that prejudiced people don’t try hard to resist their stereotypes, but nonprejudiced people do

The Nature of Prejudice:

• adaptive conservatism - evolutionary principle that creates a predisposition toward distrusting anything or anyone unfamiliar or different

  • members of one race are more likely to show pronounced skin conductance responses to fear relevant stimuli (snake and spider) than to fear irrelevant stimuli (bird and butterfly) that have been paired repeatedly with faces of a different race

  • even if there’s a evolutionary predisposition toward fearing or mistrusting outsiders, that doesn’t mean that prejudice is inevitable

Two Major Basis Associated With Tendency to Forge Alliances With Like People:

1. in-group bias - tendency to favour individuals within our group over those from outside our group

   • ex. sporting event

     • fans cheering on their team and booing the opposing team → the home team is their “tribe”

   • may be reinforced by our tendency to “turn off'“ our compassion toward out-group members

2. out-group homogeneity - tendency to view all individuals outside our group as highly similar

   • makes it easy for us to dismiss members of other groups in one fell swoop → because we can simply tell ourselves that they all share at least one undesirable trait (greediness/laziness)

Discrimination:

• discrimination - negative behaviour toward members of out-groups

  • whereas prejudice refers to negative attitudes toward others, discrimination refers to negative behaviours toward others → we can be prejudiced against people without discriminating against them

Consequences of Discrimination:

• far fewer women than men are members of major American orchestras

  • when the judges are blind to the sex of the musician, women were 50% more likely to pass the audition

Scapegoat Hypothesis:

• scapegoat hypothesis - claim that prejudice arises from a need to blame other groups for our misfortunes

  • can also stem from competition over scarce resources

Ex. the number of Black Americans in the U.S South tose when the price of cotton went up → White Americans blamed the Black Americans for the bad prices

Just-World Hypothesis:

• just-world hypothesis - claim that our attributions and behaviours are shaped by a deep-seated assumption that the world is fair and all things happen for a reason

  • ironically, the need for a sense of fair play, especially if powerful, may foster prejudice

    • it can lead us to place blame on groups that are already in one-down positions

Ex. many people with a strong belief in a just world are likely to believe that victims of serious illnesses are responsible for their plights → blaming the victim phenomenon

Conformity:

• some prejudiced attitudes and behaviours probably stem from conformity to social norms

  • study revealed that White people with a high need for conformity were especially likely to be prejudiced against Black people

    • such conformity may stem from a need for social approval

Individual Differences in Prejudice:

• some people exhibit high levels of prejudice against a wide variety of out-groups

  • people with authoritarian personality traits are prone to high levels of prejudice against many groups

Prejudice - Behind the Scenes:

• explicit prejudice - unfounded negative belief of which we’re aware regarding the characteristics of an out-group

• implicit prejudice - unfounded negative belief of which we’re unaware regarding the characteristics of an out-group

  • asking White people to cooperate with Black people on a task → although White participants claimed to like their Black partners, sensitive measures of their facial activity implied otherwise

    • their forehead muscles involved in frowning became active

  • implicit association test (IAT) - researchers ask participant to press a key on the computer keyboard with their left hand if they see either a photograph of a Black person or a positive word

    • researchers then ask for the reverse pairing

    → the results of numerous studies demonstrate that most White participants respond more quickly to pairings in which Black faces are paired with negative words and White faces are paired with positive words

    • often doesn’t correlate significantly with explicit measures of prejudice, such as questionnaire measures of racist attitudes

    • it’s unclear whether the IAT measures positive or a zero correlation as evidence for the IAT’s validity

    • may not measure implicit prejudice for the substantial majority of people

Combating Prejudice:

• jigsaw classroom - educational approach designed to minimize prejudice by requiring all children to make independent contributions to a shared project

  • numerous studies reveal that jigsaw classrooms result in significant decreases in racial prejudice

• Robbers Cave study - researchers observed how quickly hostility developed between two groups of boys at a summer camp when placed in direct competition with each other for limited resources, demonstrating the concept of "realistic conflict theory" and highlighting how introducing superordinate goals (shared goals) could later reduce intergroup tension and promote cooperation between the groups

→ both studies underscore a lesson confirmed by many other social psychology studies

→ increased contact between racial groups is rarely sufficient to reduce prejudice