- Attraction: e.g., what causes it? Similarity, propinquity (psychological exposure/proximity), arousal, cultural norms, hormones (incl. testosterone), beauty, etc.
- Rejection: what causes it and what are its effects? e.g,. numbness, confusion, shame, increased pain tolerance, more likely to eat junk food, etc.
- Social Exchange Theory and Investment Models of Relationships: which view relationships as economic-like transactions and which make sense from an evolutionary and cognitive point of view
- Beauty: Symmetry, "what-is-beautiful-is-good", variations across culture, time, and gender; Evolutionary explanations (Women: health, fertility, youth; Men: stability, resources, status)
- Types of love: Passionate (short-term, physiological arousing, intense, dominant) and Compassionate (longer-lasting, caring, understanding, etc.), Exchange vs. Communal, Sternberg's Triangular Model (Passionate, Intimate, Commitment), Schacter's two factor emotion model (arousal + cognitive interpretation towards an appropriate love object), Hatfield & Walster's (1981) 3-factor theory of romantic love (which basically adds culture to Schacter's model).
- Attachment styles: Based on Freudian and learning theory, as well animal experiments and human research, psychologists have suggested that adult attachment styles derive to a significant degree from infant and early childhood attachment styles which can range between being overly clingy (Anxious/Ambivalent) to balanced (Secure), to being overly distant and uncomfortable with people getting too close (Avoidant).
- Maintaining relationships: Idealised picture of one another and the relationship (even though relationships tend not to improve over time) as well as devaluing alternatives (e.g., happily married men rate potential alternative partners as less attractive); secret is avoiding downward spiral e.g., tit-for-tat negative reciprocation, social allergies (small annoying habits become more irritating over time), and relationship-destabilising attributions (i.e., making global, stable, internal attributions for each other's failings and specific, unstable, external attributions for each other's successes). People will tend to stay in relationships in part because of "sunk investment" and the costs and risks involved in switching to an alternative.
- Ending relationships: Various models describe a period of waiting to see if things will improve and brooding, then accelerated deteriorating through neglect and/or active seeking of alternatives, direct confrontation (voice behaviour), exit behaviour, and then a moratorium period including "grave-dressing" during which the relationship is buried and grieved, so that the partners can get closure and move on.
Showing posts with label lecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lecture. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Lecture 7: Relationships (Brief Overview)
In Lecture 7: Relationships we explored topics such as:
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Lecture 4: Reactions to "Ghosts of Rwanda"
Although I've seen Ghosts of Rwanda four or five times now, viewing it yesterday during Lecture 4 Aggression didn't seem to get any easier or any more comfortable. And it doesn't seem to get any easier to write about.
So, my hat's off to those who have already started blogging their reactions.
I suspect we experience our own mini-psychological trauma when exposed to this kind of story and footage about human brutality on a mass social scale. I go through a kind of mini-depression for a few days after engaging in details of what happened. But I also believe that by going into some of the most difficult topics in psychology, we can emerge with a richer understanding and stronger capability for achieving more desirable outcomes.
However, I don't think we should move too lightly over our emotional reactions. They need processing - this might be a private or shared process. And then gradually as we emerge, we can explore how the events can be understood at least from a social psychological perspective.
There is more background information on the film's website (Ghosts of Rwanda), including the full transcript (thanks kelg85). There is also a lot of documentation from various sources and perspectives about the Rwandan genocide the broader societal conflict and issues (e.g.,The Rwandan Conflict: Origin, Development, Exit Strategies). Not much of this material is from social psychological perspective per se, and little seems to be by Rwandans themselves (perhaps an indication of the cultural shock and decimation). Nevertheless, books such as the following are recommended if you want to delve further:
So, my hat's off to those who have already started blogging their reactions.
I suspect we experience our own mini-psychological trauma when exposed to this kind of story and footage about human brutality on a mass social scale. I go through a kind of mini-depression for a few days after engaging in details of what happened. But I also believe that by going into some of the most difficult topics in psychology, we can emerge with a richer understanding and stronger capability for achieving more desirable outcomes.
However, I don't think we should move too lightly over our emotional reactions. They need processing - this might be a private or shared process. And then gradually as we emerge, we can explore how the events can be understood at least from a social psychological perspective.
There is more background information on the film's website (Ghosts of Rwanda), including the full transcript (thanks kelg85). There is also a lot of documentation from various sources and perspectives about the Rwandan genocide the broader societal conflict and issues (e.g.,The Rwandan Conflict: Origin, Development, Exit Strategies). Not much of this material is from social psychological perspective per se, and little seems to be by Rwandans themselves (perhaps an indication of the cultural shock and decimation). Nevertheless, books such as the following are recommended if you want to delve further:
- Dallaire, R., & Power, S. (2004). Shake hands with the devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda. Carrol & Graf.
- Gourevitch, P. (1999). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. Picador.
- Straus, S. (2006). The order of genocide: Race, power, and war in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- For more suggestions, see
- Rwandan 1994 Genocide (UCSpace)
- Bibliography of the Rwandan Genocide (Wikipedia)
- Gacaca Courts (based on principles of restorative justice)
- Ingando Solidarity Camps
- Evaluation of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC)
- Outward Bound Rwanda
- Looking for more suggestions!
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Lecture 3: Social Thinking (Reflections)
In Lecture 3: Social Thinking, we examined an array of cognitive mechanisms we use for interpreting and acting on our social environments.
I suggested that these cognitive mechanisms provided the underlying architecture for the occurrence of more observable social phenomenon, including extreme events such as genocide, which can be seen as "perfect storms" of social psychological variables coming together within particularly cultural contexts.
In this lecture, we consider the role of our cognitive mechanisms in the formation and changing of attitudes, and their application in social influence and persuasion.
Key Concepts
Humans are cognitive misers in that we use our conscious mind relatively little, with most of the processing being done by the automatic mind (also see duplex mind). The automatic mind uses a variety of adaptive, cognitive shortcuts to reduce cognitive load. These schemas, scripts, stereotypes, heuristics, and so on, all serve to efficiently process complex environmental and social information, and help to provide a sense of control and predictability over our social environment.
For observed events and behaviours which are common (i.e., fit norms, schemata and scripts), our automatic mind does most of the processing. For unusual events and behaviours humans tend to want to find explanation (attribution).
There appears to be a natural tendency to connect observed behaviour with an actor's disposition. This is called correspondent inference. When we infer an actor's disposition from a behaviour and its consequences and play down possible situational explanations we demonstrate what is know as the correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error (FAE).
We are more likely to make a FAE when dealing with others than with ourselves. We give more credence to situational explanations for our own behaviour than we do when interpreting the behaviour of others. This is the actor-observer effect.
We further demonstrate self-serving bias by tending to attribute our successes to dispositional causes and our failures to external causes; whereas we tend to do the opposite when explaining other people's behaviour.
The ultimate attribution error occurs when we use these biases in the context of groups, e.g., we tend to make self-serving attributions about our in-groups (the groups to which we belong and identify with) and out-groups.
Heuristics, schemata, scripts, stereotypes, etc. can be usefully thought of as algorithmic "nets" or "filters" which we use to catch certain kinds of information and which help us to navigate typically encountered social environments. The occurrence of unusual events is more likely to flag conscious awareness which (if cognitive capacity is available) and can then trigger consciousness thinking and consideration. However, we tend to prefer and attend more to information which is consistent with our expectations, making it difficult to change existing, largely automatic cognitive processing of our social environment.
Whilst the extent to which these cognitive biases occur is somewhat innate, it also varies across cultures. For example, the FAE is fair more prevalent in the US than in India.
Attitudes
Attitudes were the first major area of study in cognitively focused social psychology.
Attitudes are valenced dispositions we experience towards people, objects, ideas, and events. Attitudes are the basic experience of like (attraction) or dislike (revulsion) which we experience in varying strengths to just about everything.
Attitudes tend to become polarized (become more exaggerated) over time.
Attitudes can manifest in thinking (cognition), feeling (emotion), and behaviour.
Attitudes are acquired via:
Attitude research has been criticised for the lack of relationship to actual behaviour. Attitudes are most likely to predict behaviour:
Influence and Persuasion
Influence refers to ways in which an individual's attitudes and behaviour is altered by their perceptions of the social environment.
Normative influence occurs when your behaviour conforms with the majority, i.e., you do what everyone else does (e.g., Asch's Conformity Experiment). Going along with the majority, however, doesn't mean that your private attitude is consistent with the majority. It just means that your external behaviour fits with normative behaviour.
Informational influence occurs particularly in situations which are ambiguous or you are under cognitive load or you lack expertise. In such situations not only is your behaviour likely to conform with the majority, you are also likely to believe that other people are correct.
Influence techniques consist of various ways in which people can be manipulated into changing attitudes/behaviours, e.g., foot-in-the-door (start with a small request, then build up).
Minority influence occurs when even a single individual is a dissident (i.e., goes against the norm). Particularly when a minority is consistent in its alternative message, it can have a disproportionate influence on swaying the majority.
Persuasion is the intentional use of psychological influence techniques in order to get a person or group to adopt a desired behaviour (e.g., purchase a produce) or change an attitude (e.g., become pro-abortion).
The successfulness of an attempt at persuasion can be seen as relying on:
I suggested that these cognitive mechanisms provided the underlying architecture for the occurrence of more observable social phenomenon, including extreme events such as genocide, which can be seen as "perfect storms" of social psychological variables coming together within particularly cultural contexts.
In this lecture, we consider the role of our cognitive mechanisms in the formation and changing of attitudes, and their application in social influence and persuasion.
Key Concepts
- Social Cognition
- Cognitive Miser (and the duplex mind)
- Knowledge structures
- Schemata
- Scripts
- Stereotypes
- Priming
- Framing
- Attributions
- Internal vs. external
- Correspondence Bias (or Fundamental Attribution Error)
- Actor-observer bias
- Self-serving bias
- Heuristics
- Social Perception
- Attitudes
- Mere-exposure effect
- Cognitive dissonance
- Influence and persuasion
- Compliance and conformity
- Normative
- Informational
- Minority
Humans are cognitive misers in that we use our conscious mind relatively little, with most of the processing being done by the automatic mind (also see duplex mind). The automatic mind uses a variety of adaptive, cognitive shortcuts to reduce cognitive load. These schemas, scripts, stereotypes, heuristics, and so on, all serve to efficiently process complex environmental and social information, and help to provide a sense of control and predictability over our social environment.
For observed events and behaviours which are common (i.e., fit norms, schemata and scripts), our automatic mind does most of the processing. For unusual events and behaviours humans tend to want to find explanation (attribution).
There appears to be a natural tendency to connect observed behaviour with an actor's disposition. This is called correspondent inference. When we infer an actor's disposition from a behaviour and its consequences and play down possible situational explanations we demonstrate what is know as the correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error (FAE).
We are more likely to make a FAE when dealing with others than with ourselves. We give more credence to situational explanations for our own behaviour than we do when interpreting the behaviour of others. This is the actor-observer effect.
We further demonstrate self-serving bias by tending to attribute our successes to dispositional causes and our failures to external causes; whereas we tend to do the opposite when explaining other people's behaviour.
The ultimate attribution error occurs when we use these biases in the context of groups, e.g., we tend to make self-serving attributions about our in-groups (the groups to which we belong and identify with) and out-groups.
Heuristics, schemata, scripts, stereotypes, etc. can be usefully thought of as algorithmic "nets" or "filters" which we use to catch certain kinds of information and which help us to navigate typically encountered social environments. The occurrence of unusual events is more likely to flag conscious awareness which (if cognitive capacity is available) and can then trigger consciousness thinking and consideration. However, we tend to prefer and attend more to information which is consistent with our expectations, making it difficult to change existing, largely automatic cognitive processing of our social environment.
Whilst the extent to which these cognitive biases occur is somewhat innate, it also varies across cultures. For example, the FAE is fair more prevalent in the US than in India.
Attitudes
Attitudes were the first major area of study in cognitively focused social psychology.
Attitudes are valenced dispositions we experience towards people, objects, ideas, and events. Attitudes are the basic experience of like (attraction) or dislike (revulsion) which we experience in varying strengths to just about everything.
Attitudes tend to become polarized (become more exaggerated) over time.
Attitudes can manifest in thinking (cognition), feeling (emotion), and behaviour.
Attitudes are acquired via:
- Mere-exposure effect
- Classical conditioning
- Operant conditioning
- Social learning
Attitude research has been criticised for the lack of relationship to actual behaviour. Attitudes are most likely to predict behaviour:
- when the attitude is specifically related to a specific behaviour
- over time and situations (as opposed to behaviour in a specific situation at a specific time)
- when the behaviour is freely chosen
- Changing attitude
- Changing behaviour
- Using defence mechanisms to deal with the dissonance (i.e., push awareness of the dissonance out of the conscious mind)
Influence and Persuasion
Influence refers to ways in which an individual's attitudes and behaviour is altered by their perceptions of the social environment.
Normative influence occurs when your behaviour conforms with the majority, i.e., you do what everyone else does (e.g., Asch's Conformity Experiment). Going along with the majority, however, doesn't mean that your private attitude is consistent with the majority. It just means that your external behaviour fits with normative behaviour.
Informational influence occurs particularly in situations which are ambiguous or you are under cognitive load or you lack expertise. In such situations not only is your behaviour likely to conform with the majority, you are also likely to believe that other people are correct.
Influence techniques consist of various ways in which people can be manipulated into changing attitudes/behaviours, e.g., foot-in-the-door (start with a small request, then build up).
Minority influence occurs when even a single individual is a dissident (i.e., goes against the norm). Particularly when a minority is consistent in its alternative message, it can have a disproportionate influence on swaying the majority.
Persuasion is the intentional use of psychological influence techniques in order to get a person or group to adopt a desired behaviour (e.g., purchase a produce) or change an attitude (e.g., become pro-abortion).
The successfulness of an attempt at persuasion can be seen as relying on:
- From Whom (credibility, likability)
- Message Content (reason, emotion)
- Audience
- Alpha strategies (increasing the strong, compelling, credible argument)
- Omega strategies (reducing/removing barriers/resistance)
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Lecture 2: Social Thinking (Brief overview)
In Lecture 2 we focused on: a) Culture and Nature (Ch2); and b) The Self (Ch3).
The key purpose in discussing Culture and Nature was to appreciate and explore Baumeister and Bushman's (2008) argument, based on socio-biology, that the human being has evolved a brain which is particularly receptive to learning culture. Becoming a member of a culture and groups within a culture brings many survival advantages. This culture consists of all the abstract ideas and knowledge created historically and kept alive in a culture. If a new born child is to be allowed to access the resources of this culture, then it must undergo considerable mentoring and training in order to be accepted as a member and given access to rewards.
The key purpose in discussing The Self was to examine and explore the major ways psychologists operationalise feelings, attitudes, and thoughts which people have about themselves. Some of the most commmonly discussed self-constructs are self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-efficacy. The lecture also considered Baumeister's criticism that Western cultures have become overly obsessed with enhancement of the self, as oppposed to focusing on learning skills which arguably then leads to increased self-esteem. The "cult of the self" also appears to have had detrimental effects of our social systems, a theme we pick up on in the final tutorial on Social Disengagement.
The key purpose in discussing Culture and Nature was to appreciate and explore Baumeister and Bushman's (2008) argument, based on socio-biology, that the human being has evolved a brain which is particularly receptive to learning culture. Becoming a member of a culture and groups within a culture brings many survival advantages. This culture consists of all the abstract ideas and knowledge created historically and kept alive in a culture. If a new born child is to be allowed to access the resources of this culture, then it must undergo considerable mentoring and training in order to be accepted as a member and given access to rewards.
The key purpose in discussing The Self was to examine and explore the major ways psychologists operationalise feelings, attitudes, and thoughts which people have about themselves. Some of the most commmonly discussed self-constructs are self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-efficacy. The lecture also considered Baumeister's criticism that Western cultures have become overly obsessed with enhancement of the self, as oppposed to focusing on learning skills which arguably then leads to increased self-esteem. The "cult of the self" also appears to have had detrimental effects of our social systems, a theme we pick up on in the final tutorial on Social Disengagement.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Lecture 1: Evolution, change & challenge (Reflections)
In the first lecture I tried to paint something of the picture ("Zoom") of where we've come from as a species from a cosmological perspective, and highlighted some of the social change trends which are impacting and likely to impact on humanity and social systems into the future.
There is of course much more about this story which could be discussed...
e.g., I heard about an interactive drama/play recently (Of All The People of the World) which is based around 6.6 billion grains of rice - each grain representing a person. The actors move the rice around from table to table , sometimes in wheelbarrows, and the audience can mingle and go from table to table. The piles of rice on each table represent people in a certain category (e.g., a pile of rice on one table might represent all the people living with HIV+). This was a dramatic technique to try to communicate and explore the volume and distribution of people into different groups.
I also came across and enjoyed this slick presentation "Shift Happens" which picks up on and extends similar themes related to social evolution and change.
The presentation lacks referencing, so perhaps some of the claims should be taken with a grain of salt?
(BTW: This is an example of embedded multimedia - in this case, a slide presentation. slideshare has many shared presentations. You can also embed video sharing sites such as youtube)
What are your favourite "World Facts/Trends" and how do they bear on the topic and nature of social psychology?
There is of course much more about this story which could be discussed...
e.g., I heard about an interactive drama/play recently (Of All The People of the World) which is based around 6.6 billion grains of rice - each grain representing a person. The actors move the rice around from table to table , sometimes in wheelbarrows, and the audience can mingle and go from table to table. The piles of rice on each table represent people in a certain category (e.g., a pile of rice on one table might represent all the people living with HIV+). This was a dramatic technique to try to communicate and explore the volume and distribution of people into different groups.
I also came across and enjoyed this slick presentation "Shift Happens" which picks up on and extends similar themes related to social evolution and change.
The presentation lacks referencing, so perhaps some of the claims should be taken with a grain of salt?
(BTW: This is an example of embedded multimedia - in this case, a slide presentation. slideshare has many shared presentations. You can also embed video sharing sites such as youtube)
What are your favourite "World Facts/Trends" and how do they bear on the topic and nature of social psychology?
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