Issues and Debates

Social Influence

Social issues in psychology

  • Society: a group of people living together in a large group

    • Social psychology investigates how these people affects our behaviour

  • Social issue: problem or conflict in a society

Obedience

  • Milgram’s research of obedience helps to understand the atrocities committed against jews during WW2 by the nazis

  • It was found that german soldiers were simply obeying orders in fear or getting a punishment, they just found themselves in a situation that determined their behaviour

Conformity

  • Helps understand social issues

  • Riots occured in London in August 2011 due to the police shooting of Mark Duggan and this spread to other parts of England

  • Informational social influence helps us understand why people were unsure how to respond to the shooting and observed others instead

  • In a crowd, if people were being hostile like shooting or damaging, they would internalise the norms of the group

  • Normative social influence can explain that the members of the crowd may have felt the need to fit in and joined in with the riots

Deindividuation

  • Zimbardo et als study showed how behaviour can change when personal identity is lost

  • Helps understand the behaviour of Nazi soldiers during WW2 as they wore anonymised uniforms

  • Research has demonstrated that people become more aggressive with the loss of personal identity which can explain the soldier’s aggression

  • Larger groups are more likely to become deindividuated

Bystander effect

  • German citizens may have failed to help Jews because other Germans were not helping too

  • May have not intervened because responsibility was diffused

  • Pluralistic ignorance may have occured as Germans did not understand the level of persecution the Jews experienced

  • Germans may have thought the cost of helping was too high, as they could have been imprisoned or killed

Cultural issues in psychology

Individualistic cultures: typically Western, emphasises independence

Collectivistic cultures: typically Eastern, emphasises group membership

Obedience

  • Individualistic cultures are less likely to follow orders

  • Collectivistic cultures are more likely to obey

  • Milgram showed that obedience is more of the situation we are in rather than the culture we come from

  • Children are seen to be more obedient

Conformity

  • Individualistic cultures are more likely to not conform as indiviualism is not feared

  • Collectiviistic cultures emphasise group coherence and not being seen as different as others, will conform

  • Rob Bond and Peter Smith replication of Asch’s line test in 17 countries showed that colletivistic cultures were more liekly to conform

Bystander effect

  • Individualistic cultures may be indifferent to other’s suffering and more self-protecting behaviour

  • Collectivistic cultures are more motivated to help members that they are associated with, and do not help people belonging to their group

  • Less likely to help those who are not belonging in their group

Deindividuation

  • Less likely to occur in both cultures

  • Only dependent on the norms established in a group

Memory

Reductionism 

A belief that any human behaviour or cognitive process can be best explained by looking at the individual parts

A scientific theory of describing something using its basic parts. 

Methods

  • Multi-store model

  • Experiments

pros

cons

  • Allows people to look in detail at components that affect behaviour

  • Can be used to explain certain types of behaviours and disorders

  • Scientific

  • Open to testing

  • Oversimplifies complex behaviours

  • Does not take into consideration other factors affecting behaviour

  • Explanations may be too simple, not the whole picture

Holism 

Theory of explaining something as a whole

  • To understand the whole behaviour or the whole person

  • Takes into account the different factors affecting

  • Uses qualitative methods to try and fain understanding

  • Difficult to achieve due to monitoring of many factors

    • May be considered unscientific because results only apply to one participant

Methods

  • Reconstructive memory

  • Qualitative analysis

  • Observation

  • Interviews

  • Case studies 

pros

cons

  • Allows for a detailed all-round analysis

  • Considers more than one cause

  • Looks at everything that may impact on a behaviour

  • Doesn’t allow for detailed study in one area

  • Non-scientific

  • Over complicates behaviour which may have one simple explanation

Brain and Neuropsychology

Issues and Debates: How psychology has changed over time

The development of neuroscience

  • The scientific study of the brain and nervous system

Changes to studying the brain

In the past (pre 1900’s)

Development

  • 1700 - Edwin Smith surgical papyrus written. First written record about the nervous system.

  • 1879: Wilehlm Wundt started the first psychology laboratory in the University of Leipzig, Germany

  • Physiologists interested in anatomy of the brain and would try to understand the structure rather than the function of the organ

  • Studying the brain in the past was more possible after someone had died, when brains could only be removed during a post-mortem

    • Post mortem: examination of bodies after death, to work out how or why the person died

    • This means there was limited knowledge and investigations on how the brain itself was involved in the control of specific behaviours

  • Case studies were used as evidence to help understand the brain

  • Phineas Gage (before Damasio et al.)

    • Found out that his prefrontal cortex affected his impulse and emotional control

    • However this was just an assumption as there was no technology to actually prove this 

  • 1924: Hans Berger developed the EEG (electroencephalograph) to measure brainwave activity in a living brain

    • Worked by having electrodes placed onto the scalp to pick up the general level of activity in different parts of the brain

    • This tells which parts of the brain are working hardest when different activities are done

  • 1929: Hans Berger publishes his findings about the first human electroencephalogram ( EEG) machine

  • This was the beginning of studying the brain without dead patients

  • 1971: MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) 

  • 1950s: PET (Positron emission tomography) scans were then developed which gave more detailed pictures of the brain

    • High quality images

    • MRI: the structure of the brain

    • PET: shows parts of the brain that are active with colours

  • Advantage of brain scans: Provides opportunity to help people with brain damage (alive ones)

  • Modern methods developed today allow psychologists to use microscopes to look at individual synapses

    • Through this, theories could develop about which parts of behaviour the brain controls

    • e.g Evidence was shown that people with high levels of impulsivity have high levels of dopamine in their nervous system due to a lack of neural receptor that reduce dopamine levels (Zald et al. 2008)

  • 1968: Sperry explored the understanding of left and right hemisphere, and since then our knowledge has developed greatly since this study

  • Brain scans allow researchers to identify specific areas in the brain associated with certain tasks 

  • Damasio et al (improvement from Phineas Gage)

    • Damasio used technology to prove that Phineas Gage had actually damaged his Ventromedial Prefrontal cortex

    • This means it is no longer an assumption but there is actual proof