Lecture 18 Prejudice and Discrimination

• more preferential preference for people in the ingroup, discrimination against people in the outgroup

• minimal groups paradigm experiment

  • Assign groups to arbitrary groups

  • Participants showed strong favoritism towards their assigned groups, even when the criteria for group assignment were meaningless.

  • Outcome: People show ingroup bias easily

• Allport Contact Hypothesis

  • Need:

    • Equal status

    • A shared objective/goal

    • Active collaboration

    • Needs to have clear support

  • OUTCOME: Not enough evidence because of publication bias

• Jigsaw Classrom Outcomes:

  • LACK of random assignment, major threat to validity

  • Not enough evidence that proves it’s more effective than other methods

• prejudice on the decline

Lecture 20: Two Track Mind

• System 2 - effortful thinking, analytical

• system 1 - gut feeling, automatic

• argument vs cues, what are they

• system 2 is more likely to activate if:

  • it is relevant to you

  • if it will happen to you soon/high stakes

• Need for Cognition (NFC)

  • People who score high on this like to be analytical and enjoy hard things  

    • they are also more likely to engage in System 2 thinking, relying on arguments rather than initial cues

  • opposite is true for people who score lower

• Door in the Face Effect

  • A psychological phenomenon where individuals are more likely to agree to a smaller request after first being presented with a larger, more unreasonable request.

  • Reciprocity is likely the reason: the person making the smaller request appears to be meeting halfway, making the other person feel obligated to comply.

• Cognitive Reflection Task

  • People who scored higher on CRT are better at distinguishing fake news as not accurate (regardless of what political party they associate with)

  • People who scored lower on CRT are ass at everything

Lecture 22 Aggression and Biology

• Aggression was NOT genetically programmed into our DNA

• We don’t have a violence gene

• we did inherit some violent tendencies from our ancestors, this is shown through our ancestors, related things like chimps and our parts of our brains

• However, biology acts like a loaded gun, whether we choose to act on them is largely dependent on ourselves, cultural norms, society etc.

• we have a fundamental desire to stand on business and seek revenge when someone does us dirty

• Thomas Hobbes

  • Said that without a strong central authority (government), people are just gonna be stuck in a vicious cycle of violence

• CORRECTED version of Seville Statement

  • it is scientifically CORRECT to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors

  • it is scientifically BULLSHIT to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature.

  • it is almost CERTAINLY TRUE that in the course of human evolution there has been selection for aggressive behavior

  • it is scientifically CORRECT to say that humans possess neural systems to regulate aggression

Lecture 23

• Dictator Game

• Motivations for prosocial behavior

  • egoism

  • Altruism

  • Collectivism

  • Principilism