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180 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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prejudice
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-- A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members
- Prejudice is an attitude (- An attitude is a distinct combination of feelings, inclinations to act, and beliefs. It can easily be remembered as the ABCs of attitudes - affect (feelings), behavior tendencies (inclination ot act), and cognition (beliefs).) - A prejudcied person may dislike those different from self and behave in a discriminatory manner, believing them to be ignorant and dangerous. - The negative evaluations that mark prejudice often are supported by negative beliefs, called stereotypes |
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stereotype
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-- A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information
- To stereotype is to generalize - Such generalizations can be more or less true (and are not always negative). - Stereotypes may be positive or negative, accurate or inaccurate. - An accurate stereotype may even be desirable. - We call it "sensitivity to diversity" or "cultural awareness in a multicultural world." - The problem with stereotypes arises when they are overgeneralized or just plain wrong. - Individuals within the stereotyped group vary more than expected |
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discrimination
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- Prejudice is a negative attitude; discrimination is a negative behavior.
-- Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members. - Discriminatory behavior often has its source in prejudicial attitudes - Prejudiced attitudes need not breed hostile acts, nor does all oppression spring from prejudice. - Racism and sexism are institutional practices that discriminate, even when there is no prejudicial intent. -- Racism - (1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given race, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given race. -- Sexism - (1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given sex, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given sex. |
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prejudice: subtle and overt
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- Prejudice provides one of the best examples of our dual attitude system - we can have different explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward the same target
- Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice. - Prejudiced and stereotypic evaluations can occur outside people's awareness. - Some of these studies briefly flash words or faces that "prime" (automatically activate) stereotypes for some racial, gender, or age group. Without their awareness, the participants' actvated stereotypes may then bias their behavior |
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racial prejudice
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- In the contect of the world, every race is a minority.
- To a molecular biologist, skin color is a trivial human characteristic, one controlled by a minuscule genetic difference. - Moreover, nature doesn't cluster races in neatly defined categories. - Most folks see prejudice - in other people, not themselves |
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racial prejudice
is racial prejudice disappearing? |
- Prejudicial attitudes can change very quickly
- People of different races also now share many of the same attitudes and aspirations - In the US, Whites tend to compare the present with the oppressive past and to perceive sweift and radical progress. Blacks tend to compare the present with their ideal world, which has not yet been realized, and to perceive somewhat less progress. |
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racial prejudice
subtle forms of prejudice |
- Prejudice in dubtle forms is even more widespread.
- Some experiments have assessed people's behavior toward Blacks and Whites. - Prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behavior surface when they can hide behind the screen of some other motive. (- ex: exaggerating ethnic differences, feeling less admiration and affection for immigrant minorities, rejecting them for supposedly nonracial reasons.) - Some researchers call such subtle prejudice "modern racism" or "cultural racism." - Modern prejudice often appears subtly, in our preferences for what is familiar, similar, and comfortable. - Some researchers have found a subtle ("modern") sexism that parallels subtle ("modern") racism. - Both forms appear in denials of discrimination and in antagonism toward efforts to promote equality (ex: as in agreeing with a statement such as "women are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights.") - We can also detect bias in behavior (ex: in negotiating deals, Blacks get a worse deal. in applying for jobs, Blacks get less interviews.) - Modern prejudice even appears as a race sensitivity that leads to exaggerated reactions to isolated minority persons - both overpraising their accomplishments and overcriticizing their mistakes. - Ex: The evaluators, perhaps wanting to avoid the appearance of bias, patronized the Black essayists with lower standards. Such "inflated praise and insufficient criticism" may hinder minority student achievement. |
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racial prejudice
automatic prejudice |
- 9/10 White people took londer to identify pleasant words as "good" when associated with Black rather than White faces. The participants consciously expressed little or no prejudice; their bias was unconscious and unintedned.
- The participants (both Black and Whites) more often mistakenly shot harmless targets who were Black. - When primed with a Black rather a White face, people think guns: they more quickly recognized a gun and they more often mistook a took (ex wrench) for a gun. -Exposing people to weapons makes them pay more attention to faces of African-Americans. - It also appears that different brain regions are involved in automatic and consciously controlled stereotyping. - This suggests that automatic prejudices involve primitive regions of hte brain associated with fear, such as the amygdala, whereas controlled processing is more closely associated with the frontal cortex, which enables conscious thinking. - Even social scientists who study prejudice seem vulernable to it. |
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gender prejudice
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- Gender norms - people's ideas about how women and men ought to behave.
- Gender stereotypes - people's beliefs about how women and men do behave. - Norms are prescriptive, stereotypes are descriptive. |
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gender prejudice
gender stereotypes |
- Strong gender stereotypes exist, and, as often happens, members of the stereotypes group accept the stereotypes
- Men and women agree than you can judge the book by its sexual cover. - Gender stereotypes were much stronger than racial stereotypes. - Remember that stereotypes are generalizations about a group of people and may be true, false, or overgeneralizaed from a kernel of truth. - The average man and woman do differ somewhat in social connectedness, empathy, social power, aggressiveness, and sexual initiative (though not in intelligence). - Sometimes stereotypes exaggerate differences, but sometimes people's stereotypes are a reasonable approximation of actual gender differences. - Such stereotypes have persisted across time and culture. - The persistence and omnipresence of gender stereotypes leads some evolutionary psychologists to believe they reflect innate, stable reality. - Stereotypes (beliefs) are not prejudices (attitudes). Stereotypes may support prejudice. Yet one might believe, without prejudice, that men and women are different but equal. |
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gender prejudice
sexism: benevolent and hostile |
- Attitudes toward women have changed as rapidly as racial attitudes.
- People don't respond to women with gut-level negative emotionas as they do to certain other groups. Most people like women more than men. They perceive women as more understanding, kind, and helpful. - A favorable stereotype (women-are-wonderful effect) results in a favorable attitudes. - But gender attitudes are often ambivalent. - They frequently mix a benevolent sexism ("women have a superior moral sensibility") with hostile sexism ("once a man commits, she puts him on a tight leash"). - Stereotypes about men also come in contrasting pairs - Ambivalent sexism toward men with benevolent attitudes of men as powerful and hostile attitudes that characterized men as immoral. - People who endorse benevolent sexism toward women also tend to endorse benevolent sexism toward men. - These complementary ambivalent sexist views of men and women may serve to justify the status quo in gender relations. |
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gender prejudice
gender discrimination |
- Researchers gave women essays to read and asked them to judge the value of each. Sometimes the article was attributed to a male author or a female author.
- In general, the articles received lower ratings when attributed to a female. Women discriminated against women. - Studied gender bias in evaluation of men's and women's work. The most common result was that there was no difference. On most comparisons, judgments of someone's work were unaffected by whether the work was attributed to a female or a male. - Experiments have not demonstrated any overall tendency to devalue women's work. - But subtle bias lives. - It seems that even at birth, parents are already describing their boy in terms of status and their girls in terms of relationships. - Around the world, gender discrimination is more apparent. 2/3 of uneducated children are girls. People tend to prefer having baby boys. |
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racial and gender prejudice
conclusion |
- Overt prejudice against people of color and against women is far less common today.
- The same is true of prejudice against homosexual people. - Nevertheless, techniques that are sensitive to subtle prejudice still detect widespread bias. |
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social inequalities: unequal status and prejudice
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- Unequal status breeds prejudice.
- Historians debate the forces that create unequal status. But once those inequalities exist, prejudice helps justify the economic and social superiority of those who have wealth and power. - Historical examples abound - Stereotypes of Blacke and women help rationalize the interior status of each. - Higher status people could be patronizing. - We see other groups as competent or as likable, but usually not as both. We respect the competence of those high status and like those who agreeably accept a lower status. - Some people notice and justify status difference. - Those high in social dominance orientation tend to view people in terms of hierarchies. They like their own social groups to be high status - they like to be on top of the hierarchy. Being in a dominant high-status position also tend to promote this orientation. -- Social dominance orientation - A motivation to have one's group dominate the other social groups. - This desire to be on the top leads people high in social dominance to embrace prejudice and to support political positions that justify prejudice. - People high in social dominance orientation often support polices that maintain hierarchies (ex: tax cuts for the well-off) and often oppose policies that undermind hierarchy (ex: affirmative action). - People high in social dominance also prefer professions that increase their status and maintain hierarchies (ex: politics, business). They avoid jobs that undermind hierarchies (ex: social work). - Status may breed prejudice, but some people seek it out and try to maintain this status more than others. |
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socialization
the authoritarian personality |
- In those who were strongly prejudiced, prejudice appeared to be not specific to one group but an entire way of thinking about those who are "different."
- These people shared certain tendencies: an intolerance for weakness, a punitive attitude, and a submissive respect for their group's authorities. -- Ethnocentric - believing in the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups. -- Authoritarian personality - A personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status. - Inquiry into authoritarian people's early lives reveal that, as children, they often faced harsh discipline. - The insecurity of authoritarian children seemed to predispose them toward an excessive concern with power and status and an inflexible right-wrong way of thinking tht made ambiguity diggicult to tolerate. Such people therefore tend to be submissive to those with power over them and aggressive or punitive toward those beneath them. - Authoritarian tendencies, sometimes reflected in ethnic tensions, surge during threatening times of economic recession and social upheaval. - There are individuals whose fears and hostilities surface as prejudice. Their feelings of moral superiority may go hand in hand with brutality toward perceived inferiors. - Different forms of prejudice do tend to coexist in the same individuals. - Right-wing authoritarians tend to be equal opportunity bigots. - Particularly striking are people high in social dominance orientation and authoritarian personality. These people are among the most prejudiced in our society. What is perhaps most surprising and more troubling is that they seem to display the worst wualities of each type of personality, striving for status often in manipulative ways while being dogmatic and ethnocentric. These people are relatively rare and are predisposed to be leaders of hate groups. - Authoritarianism appears more related to concern with security and control, whereas social dominance orientation appears more related to one's group status. |
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socialization
religion and prejudice |
- Those who benefit from social inequalities while avowing that "all are created equal" need to justify keeping things the way they are.
- In almost every country, leaders invoke religion to sanctify the present order. They use religion to support injustice. - What then is the relationship between religion and prejudice? If we define religiousness as church membership or willingness to agree at least superficially with traditional beliefs, then the more religious people are the more racially prejudiced. But if we assess depth of religious commitment in any of several other ways, the nthe very devout are less prejudiced |
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socialization
conformity |
- Once established, prejudice is maintained largely by inertia.
- If prejudice is socially accepted, many people will follow the path of least resistance and conform to the fashion - They will act not so much out of a need to hate as out of a need to be liked and accepted. - Those who conformed most to other social norms wer also most prejudiced: those who were less conforming mirrored less of the surrounding prejudice. - Conformity also maintains gender prejudice. - "If we have come to think that the nursey and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a women, we have done so because children have never seen one anywhere else." Children who have seen women elsewhere (children of employed women) have less stereotyped views of men and women. - If prejudice is not deeply ingrained in personality, then as fashion change and new norms evolve, prejudice can diminish. |
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institutional supports
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- Social institutions (schools, governments, the media) may bolster prejudice through overt policies such as segregation, or by pasively reinforcing the status quo.
- Schools are one of the institutions most prone to reinforce dominant cultural attitudes. - Institutional supports for prejudice are often unintended and unnoticed. - Of pictures of people in magazines and newspapers, about 2/3 of the average male photo, but less than half of the average female photo, was devoted to the face. - The visual prominence five to the faces of men and the bodies of women both reflects and perpetuates gender bias. - People whose faces are prominent in photos seem more intelligent and ambitious. |
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frustration and aggression: the scapegoat theory
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- Pain and frustration (the blocking of a goal) often evoke hostility. When the cause of our frustration is intimidating or unkonwn, we often redirect our hostility.
- Displaced aggression - Ethnic peace is easier to maintain during prosperous times. - Targets for this dislpaced aggression vary - Passions provoke prejudice. - Competition is an important source of frustration that can duel prejudice. When two groups compete for jobs, housing, or social prestige, one's group's goal fulfillment can become the other group's frustration. Thus, the realistic group conflict theory suggests that prejudice arises when groups compete for scarce resources. -- Realistic group conflict theory - The theory that prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources. - When interests clash, prejudice may be the result |
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social identity theory: feeling superior to others
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- We also define ourselves by our groups
- Self-concept - our sense of who we are - contains not just a personal identity (our sense of our personal attributes and attitudes) but also a social identity. -- Social identity - The "we" aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to "who am I?" that comes from our group membership. - Social identity theory: - We categorize - We find it useful to put people, ourselves included, into categories. It is a shorthand way of saying some other things about the person. - We identify - We associated ourselves with certain groups (our ingroups), and gain self-esteem by doing so. - We compare - We contrast our groups with other groups (outgroups), with a favorable bias toward our own groups. -- Ingroup - "Us" - a group of people who share a sense of belonging, a feeling of common identity -- Outgroup - "Them" - a group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their ingroup. - We evaluate ourselves partly by our group memberships. Have a sense of "we-ness" strengthens our self-concepts. It feels good. We seek not only respect for ourselves but also pride in our groups. Moreover, seeing our groups as superior helps us feel even better. - Lacking a positive personal identity, people often seek self-esteem by identifying with a group. |
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social identity theory: feeling superior to others
ingroup bias |
- The definition of who you are - your gender, race, religion, marital status, academic major - implies a definition of who you are not. The circle that inclues "us" (the ingroup) excludes "them" (the outgroup).
- The mere experience of being formed into groups may promote ingroup bias. -- Ingroup bias - the tendency to favor one's own group. - Ingroup bias is one more example of the human quest for a positive self-concept. We are so group conscious that, given any excuse to think of ourselves as a group, we will do so - and will then exhibit ingroup bias. - The self-serving bias rides again, enabling people to achieve a more positive social identity: "we" are better than "they," even when "we" and "they" are defined randomly. - We are also more prone to ingroup bias when our group is small and lower in status relative to the outgroup. When we're part of a small group surrounded by a larger group, we are more conscious of our group membership; when our ingroup is the majority, we think less about it. - Because of our social identifications, we conform to our group norms. - And the more important our social identity and the more strongly attached we feel to a group, the more we react prejudicially to threats from another group. - When our group has been successful, we can also make ourselves feel better by identifying more strongly with it. - Basking in the reflected glory of a successful ingroup is strongest among those who have just experienced an ego blow. - We can also bask in the reflected flory of a friend's achievement - except when the friend outperforms us on something pertinent to our identity. - We've established that ingroup bias is the favoring of one's own group. Next, we might ask whether such favoritism reflects (1) liking for the ingroup, (2) dislike for the outgroup, or both. - Experiments support both (1) and (2). Outgroup stereotypes prosper when people feel their ingroup identity keenly, such as when they are with other ingroup members. - When anticipating bias against our group, we more strongly disparage the outgroup. - Yet ingroup bias results at least as much from perceiving that one's own group is good as from a sense that other groups are bad. - Even when there is no "them" (ex: survivors on a deserted island), one can come to love "us." - So it seems that positive feelings for our own groups do need not be mirrored equally strong negative feelings for outgroups. |
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social identity theory: feeling superior to others
need for status, self-regard, and belonging |
- Status is relative: to perceive ourselves as having status, we need people below us.
- Thus, one psychological benefit of prejudice, or of any status system, is a feeling of superiority. - Perhaps people whose status is secure have less need to feel superior. - With death on their minds, people exhibit terror management. They shield themselves from the threat of their own death by derogating those who further arouse their anxiety by challenging their worldviews. When people are already feeling vulnerable about their mortality, prejudice helps bolster a threatened belief system. Thinking about death can also, however, lead people to pursue communal feelings such as togetherness and altruism -- Terror management - According to "terror management theory, people's self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and prejudice) when confronted with reminders of their mortality. - Experiments confirm the connection between self-image and prejudice: affirm people and they will evaluate an outgroup more positively; threaten their self-esteem and they will restore it by denigrating an outgroup. - The nature of an outgroup threat influences perceptions of the outgroup. For example, when the safety of one's ingroup is threatened, people will be vigilant for signs of outgroup anger. - Despised outgroups can also serve to strengthen the ingroup. - The perception of a common enemy unites a group. - When the need to belong is met, people become more accepting of outgroups. |
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motivation to avoid prejudice
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- Motivations not only lead people to be prejudiced but also lead people to avoid prejudice.
- Try as we might to suppress unwanted thoughts, they sometimes refuse to go away. - People low and high in prejudice sometimes have similar automatic prejudicial responses. The result: unwanted (dissonant) thoughts and feelings often persist. Breaking the prejudice habit is not easy. - In real life, encountering a minority person may trigger a knee-jerk stereotype. - Researchers who study stereotyping contend, however, that prejudicial reactions are not inevitable. The motivation to avoid prejudice can lead people to modify their thoughts and actions. - Aware of the gap between how they should feel and how they do feel, self-conscious people will feel guilt and try to inhibit their prejudicial response. - Even automatic prejudices subside when people's motivation to avoid prejudice is internal (because prejudice is wrong) rather than external (because they don't want others to think badly of them). |
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cognitive sources of prejudice
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- Stereotyped beliefs and prejudiced attitudes exist not only because of social conditioning and because they enable people to displace hostilities, but also as by-products of normal thinking processes.
- Many stereotypes spring less from malice of the heart than the machinery of the mind. - Stereotypes can be by-products of how we simplify our complex worlds. |
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categorization: classifying people into groups
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- One way we simplify our environment is to categorize - to organize the world by clutering objects into groups.
- If persons in a group share some similarities, knowing their group memberships can provide useful information with minimal effort. - Stereotypes sometimes offer "a beneficial ratio of information fained to effort expended." - Stereotypes represent cognitive efficiency |
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categorization: classifying people into groups
spontaneous categorization |
- We find it easy and efficient to rely on stereotypes when we are pressed for time, preoccupied, tired, emotionally aroused, too young to appreciate diversity.
- Experiments expose our spontaneous categorization of people by race. - We label people of widely varying ancestry as simply "black" or "white" as if such categories were black and white. - By itself, such categorization is not prejudice, but it does provide a foundation for prejudice. - In fact, it's necessary for prejudice. Social identity theory implies that those who feel their social identity keenly will concern themselves with correctly categorizing people as us or them. - Prejudice requires racial categorization. - Once we assign people to groups, we are likely to exaggerate the similarities within the groups and the differences between them. - Mere division into groups can create an outgroup homogeneity effect - a sense that they are all alike and different form us and our group. -- Outgroup homogeneity effect - Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup members. Thus, they are alike, we are diverse. - Whether a decision is made by majority rule or by a designated group executive, people tend to presume that it relflects the entire group's attitudes. - The greater our familiarity with a social group, the more we see its diversity - The less our familiarity, the more we stereotype. - Also, the smaller and less powerful the group, the less we attend to them and the more we stereotype. - They - the members of any racial group other than your own - even look alike. - People of other races do in face seem to look more alike than do people of one's own race. - Own-race bias - they more accurated recognize the White faces than the Black, and the often falsely recognie Black faces never before seen. -- Own-race bias - the tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race. - Own-age bias - People more accurately recognize people similar to their own age. - It's not that we cannot perceive differences among faces of another group. Rather, when looking at a face from another racial group, we often attend, first, to the group rather than to individual features. - When viewing someone of our own group, we are less race conscious and more attentive to individual details. |
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distinctive people
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- A minority individual in a group of majority people seems more prominent and influential and to have exaggerated good and bad qualities.
- When someone in a group is made conscpicuous, we tend to see that person as causing whatever happens. - The minority individual will seem to have greater-than-average influence on the group. - People also define you by your most distinctive traits and behaviors? - People also take not of those who violate expectations. - The extra attention we pay to distinctive people creates an illusion that they differ from others more than they really do. |
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distinctive people
distinctiveness feeds self-consciousness |
- Sometimes we misperceive others as reacting to our distinctiveness.
- Self-conscious about being different, the "disfigured" women misinterpreted mannerisms and comments they would otherwise not have noticed. - Self-conscious interactiong between a majority and a minority person can therefore feel tense even when both are well intentioned. - Majority group members often have beliefs ("meta-stereotypes") about how minorities stereotype them. |
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distinctive people
stigma consciousness |
- People vary in stigma consciousness - in how likely they are to expect that others will stereotype them.
-- Stigma consciousness - A person's expectation of being victimized by prejudice or discrimination. - Seeing oneself as a victim of pervasive prejudice has its ups and downs. - The downside is that those who perceive themselves as frequent victims live with the stress of stereotype threats and preesumed antagonism, and therefore experience lower well-being. - The upside is that perceptions of prejudice buffer individual self-esteem. - Moreover, perceived prejudice and discrimination enhance our feelings of social identity and perpare us to join in collective social action. |
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vivid cases
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- Our minds use distinctive cases as a shortcut to judging groups.
- Given limited experience with a particular social group, we recall examples of it and generalize from those. - Moreover, encountering an example of a negative stereotype can prime the stereotype, leading us to minimize contact with the group. - Such generalizing from a single case can cause problems. - Vivid instances, though more available in memory, are seldom representative of the larger group. - Those in a numerical minority, being more distinctive, also may be numerically overestimated by the majority. (ex: population percentages) - The less we know about a group, the more we are influenced by a few vivid cases. |
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distinctive events
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- Stereotypes assume a correlation between group membership and individuals' presumed characterics.
- Even under the best of conditions, our attentiveness to unusual occurances can create illusory correlations. - Because we are sensitive to distinctive events, the co-occurence of two such events is especially noticeable - more noticeable than each of the times the unusual events do not occur together. - The students therefore overestimated the frequency with which the minority group B acted undesirably, and they judged group B more harshly. - Although researchers debate why it happens, they agree that illusory correlation occurs and provides yet another source for the formation of racial stereotypes. - The mass media reflect and feed this phenomenon. - We often have preexisting biases. - Our preexisting stereotypes can lead us to see correlations that aren't there. - Their stereotyping led them to perceive correlations that weren't there, thus helping to perpeutate the stereotypes |
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attribution: is it a just world?
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- In explaining others' action, we frequently commit the fundamental attribution error.
- The error occurs partly because our attention focuses on the persons, not on the situation. - A person's race or sex is vivid and gets attention; the situational forces working upon that person are usually less visible. - The more people assume that human traits are fixed dispositions, the stronger are their stereotypes. |
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attribution: is it a just world?
group-serving bias |
- We grant members of our own group the benefit of the doubt.
- When explaining acts by members of other groups, we more often assume the worst. - Positive behavior by outgroup members is more often dismissed. It may be seen as a "special case", as awing to luck or some special advantage, as demanded by the situation, or as attributable to extra effort. - Disadvantaged groups and groups that stress modesty exhibit less of this group-serving bias. - The group-serving bias can subtly color our language. - Positive behaviors by another ingroup member are often described as general dispositions. - When performed by an outgroup member, the same behavior is often described as a specific, isolated act. - With negative behavior, the specificity reverses. - This group-serving bias is the linguistic intergroup bias. -- Group-serving bias - Explaining away outgroup members' positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while exusing such behavior by one's own group.) - Blaming the victim can justify the blamer's own superior status. - Blaming occurs as people attribute an outgroup's failures to its members' flawed dispositions. - Such group-serving bias illustrates the motivations that underlie prejudice, as well as the cognition. Motivation and cognition, emotion and thinking, are inseparable. |
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attribution: is it a just world?
the just-world phenomenon |
- Merely observing another innocent person being victimized is enough to make the victim seem less worthy.
- Such disparaging of hapless victims result from the human need to believe that "I am just a person living in a just world, a world where people get what they deserve." - From this it is but a short leap to assuming that those who flourish must be good and those who suffer must deserve their fate. -- Just-world phenomenon - The tendency to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get. - The just-world phenomenon colors our impressions of rape victims. - So although just-world beliefs can promote the desire for justice to be restored, they are more commonly associated with the claim that the world is already just. - This line of research suggests that people are indifferent to social injustice not because they have no concern for justice but because they see no injustice. - Linking good fortune with virtue and misfortune with moral failure enables the fortunate to feel pride and to avoid responsibility for the unfortunate. - People loathe a loser even when the loser's misfortune quite obviously stems substantially from bad luck. - Ignoring the fact that reasonable decisions can be bring bad results, they judge losers as less competent. - The just-world assumption discounts the uncontrollable factors that can derail one's best efforts. |
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self-perpetuating stereotypes
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- Prejudice is preconceived judgment. Judgment is inevitable: none of us is a dispassionate bookkeeper of social happenings, tallying evidence for and against our biases.
- Our prejudgments guide our attention and our memories. For example, once we judge an item as belonging to a catefory such as a particular race or sex, our memory for it later shifts toward the features we associate with that category. - Prejudgments also guide our interpretations. Whenever a member of a group behaves as expected, we duly note the fact; our prior belief is confirmed. When a member of a group behaves inconsistently with out expectation, we may interpret or explain away the behavior as due to special circumstance. - The contrast to a stereotype can also make someone seem execptional. - Stereotypes therefore influence how we construe someone's behavior. - Misinterpretations are likely when someone expects an unpleasant encounter with out. - Despite their partner's actual friendliness, the negative bias induced these students to see hostilities lurking beneath his forced smiles. They never would have seen it if they hadn't believed it. - We do notice information that is strikingly inconsistent with a stereotype, but even that information has less impact than might be expected. - When we focus on an atypical example, we can slavage the stereotype by splitting off a new category. -- Subtyping - Accomodating individuals who deviate from one's stereotype by thinking of them as exceptions to the rule. -- Subgrouping - Accomodating individuals who deviate from one's stereotype by forming a new stereotype about this subset of the group. - Subtypes are exceptions to the group; subgroups are acknowledged as a part of the overall group. |
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discrimination's impact: the self-fulfilling prophecy
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- Attitudes may coincide with the social hierarchy not only as a rationalization for it but also because discrimination affects its victims.
- When the oppression ends, its effects linger, like a societal hangver. - Categorized 15 possible effects of victimization. Believed these ractions were reducible to two basic types - those that involve blaming oneself (withdrawal, self-hate, aggression against one's own group) and those that involve blaming external causes (fighting back, suspiciousness, increased group pride). - Does discrimination indeed affect its victims? We must be careful to not overstate this point. - Social beliefs can be self-confirming. - When interviewing Blacks, interviewers sat farther away, stammered, and ended the interview quickly. Therefore, Blacks performed more poorly, which reinforced people's beliefs that they aren't good in interviews. - As with other self-fulfilling prophecies, prejudice affects its targets. |
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stereotype threat
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- Placed in a situation where others expect you to perform poorly, your anxiety may cause you to confirm the belief.
-Stereotype threat - a self-confirming apprehension that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. -- Stereotype apprehension - A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies prophecies that hammer one's reputation into one's self-concept, stereotype threat situations have immediate effects. - The media can provoke stereotype threat. - When people are reminded of a negative stereotype about themselves, it can adversely affect performance. - But how does stereotype threat undermine performance? - Once route is cognitive. Stereotype threat is distracting: the effort it takes to dismiss its allegations increases mental demands and decreases working memory. - Another effect is motivational: worrying about mistakes under stereotype threat can impair a person's performance, and the physiological arousal that accompaies stereotype threat can impair performance on difficult tests. - If stereotype threats can disrupt performance, could positive stereotypes enhance it? This possibility is confirmed. - Negative stereotypes disrupt performance, and positive stereotypes, it seems, facilitate it. |
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do stereotypes bias judgments of individuals?
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- Yes, stereotypes bias judgments, but here is good new: people often evaluate individuals more positively than the groups they compose.
- Once someone knows a person, stereotypes may have minimal, if any, impact on judgments about that person. - Given (1) general (base-rate) information about a group and (2) trivial but vivid information about a particular group member, the vivid information usually overwhelms the effect of the general information. This is especially so when the person doesn't fit our image of the typical group member. - People often believe such stereotypes, yet ignore them when given personalized, anecdotal information. - We know that gender stereotypes (1) are strong yet (2) have little effect on people's judgments of work attributed to a mon or a woman. - People may have strong gender stereotypes, yet ignore them when judging a particular individual. |
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do stereotypes bias judgments of individuals?
strong stereotypes matter |
- Strong and seemingly relevant stereotypes do color our judgments of individuals;
- Thus, even when a strong gender stereotype is known to be irrelevant, it has an irresistable force. |
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do stereotypes bias judgments of individuals?
stereotypes bias interpretations and memories |
- Stereotypes also color how we interpret events.
- Individuals will often later recognize false descriptions of an event that fit their stereotype-influenced interpretations. - Sometimes we make judgments, or begin interacting with someone, with little to go on but our stereotype. In such cases, stereotypes can strongly bias our interpretations and memories of people. - Such bias can also operate more subtly. - So we see that when stereotypes are strong and the information about someone is ambiguous, stereotypes can subtly bias our judgments of individuals. - Finally, we evaluate people more extremely when their behavior violates our stereotypes. |
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what is aggression?
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- Social psychologists distinguish such self-assured, energetic, go-getting behavior from behavior that hurts, harms or destroys. The former is assertiveness, the latter aggression.
- We will define aggression as physical or verbal behavior inteded to cause harm. - This definition excludes unintended harm. It also excludes actions that may involve pain as an unavoidable side effect of helping someone. - Aggression includes kicks and slaps, threats and insults, even gossip or snide "digs," and decisions about how much to hurt someone (in experiments) - It also includes destroying property, lying, and other behavior whose goal is to hurt. - Two distince types of aggression: - Animals exhibit social aggression, characterized by displays of rage; and silent aggression, as when a predator stalks its prey. Social and silent aggression involve separate brain regions. - In humans these two types are called hostile and instrumental aggression. - Hostile aggression springs from anger; its goal is to injure. -- Hostile aggression - Aggression driven by anger and performed as an end in itself. (Also called affective aggression.) - Instrumental aggression aims to injure too, but only as a means to some other end. -- Instrumental aggression - aggression that is a means to some other end. - Most terrorism is instrumental aggression. It is a strategic tool used during conflict. - Most wars are instrumental aggression. - Hostile aggression is hot, instrumental aggression is cool - Most murders, however, are hostile aggression. Such murders are impulsice, emotional outbursts, which helps explain why enforcing the death pentalty has not decreased murder. - Some murders and many other acts of retribution and sexual coercion, however, are instrumental. |
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theories of aggression
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(1) There is a biologically rooted aggressive drive; (2) aggression is a natural response to frustration; and (3) aggressive behavior is learned.
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theories of aggression - biological
instinct theory and evolutionary psychology |
- Freud speculates that human aggression springs from a self-destructive impuls. It redirects toward others the energy of a primitive death urge (the death instinct).
- Lorenz, an animal behavior expert, saw aggression as adaptive rather than self-destructive. - The two agreed that aggressive energy is instinctual (unlearned and universal). -- Instinctive behavior - An innate, unlearned behavior pattern exhibited by all members of a species. - The social scientists had tried to explain social behavior by naming it. The idea that aggression is an instinct collapsed as the list of supposed human instincts grew to include nearly every conceivable human behavior. - Instinct theory also fails to account for the variations in aggressiveness from person to person and culture to culture. - Although aggression is biologically influenced, the human propensity to aggress does not qualify as instinctive behavior. - Our distant ancestors nevertheless sometimes found aggression adaptive. - Aggressive behavior was a strategy for gaining resources, defending against attack, intimating or eliminating male rivals for females, and deterring mates from sexual infidelity. - The adaptive value of aggression helps explain the relatively high levels of male-male aggression across human history. 0 Men have inherited from their successful ancestors psychological mechanisms that improve their odds of contributing their genes to future generations. |
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theories of aggression - biological
neural influences |
- Because aggression is a complex behavior, no one spot in the brain controls it.
- But researchers have found nerual system in both animals and humans that facilitate aggression. When the scientists activate these brain areas, hositility increases; when they deactivate them, hostility decreases. - They found that the prefrontal cortex, which acts like an emergency brake on deeper brain areas involved in aggression behavior, was 14% less active that normal in murderers (excluding those who had been abused by their parents) and 15% smaller in the antisocial men. - As other studies of murders show, abnormal brains can contribute to abnormally aggressive behavior. |
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theories of aggression - biological
genetic influences |
- Heredity influences the neural system's sensitivity to aggressive cues.
- Our temperaments - how intense and reactive we are - are partly brought with us into the world, influenced by out sympathetic nervous system's reactivity. - A person's temperament, observed in infancy, usually endures. - Long-term studies following several hundred children reveal that a reecipe for aggressive behavior combines a gene that alters neurotransmitter balance with childhood maltreatment. - Neither bad genes nor a bad environment alone predispose later aggressiveness and antisocial behavior; rather, genes predispose some children to be more sensitives and responsive to maltreatment. - Nature and nurture interact. |
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theories of aggression - biological
biochemical influences |
- Blood chemistry also influences neural sensitivity to aggrression stimulation
ALCOHOL - Alcohol unleashes aggression when people are provoked. - Alcohol enhances aggressiveness by reducing people's self-awareness and by reducing their ability to consider consequences, and by people's mentally associating alcohol with aggression. - Alcohol deindiviuates, and it disinhibits. TESTOSTERONE - But human aggressivenes does correlate with the male sex hormone, testosterone. - Men with low testosterone are somewhat less likely to react aggressively when provoked. - Testosterone is roughly like battery power. Only if the battery levels are very low will things noticeably slow down. LOW SEROTONIN - Another culprit often found at the scene of violence is a low level of the neurotransmitter serotonin, for which the impulse-controlling frontal lobes have many receptors. BIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR INTERACT - It is important to remember that the traffic between testosterone, serotonin, and behavior flows both ways. - Testosterone, for example, may facilitate dominance and aggressiveness, but dominanting and defeating behavior also boosts testosterone levels. -Neural, genetic, and biochemical influences predispose some people to react aggressively to conflict and provocation. - It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature or that war is caused by instinct or any single motivation. |
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theories of aggression - biological
frustration |
-- Frustration-aggression theory - The theory that frustration triggers a readiness to aggress.
- Frustration is anything that blocks our attaining of a goal. -- Frustration - the blocking of goal-directed behavior. - Frustration grows when our motivation to achieve a goal is very strong, when we expect gratification, and when the blocking is complete. - The aggressive energy need not explode directly against its source. We learn to inhibit firect retaliation, especially when others might disapprove or punish; instead, we displace our hositilities to safer targets. -- Displacement - The redirection of aggrestion to a target other than the source of the frustration. Generally, the new targe is a safe or more socially acceptable target. - Displaced aggression is most likely when the target shares some similarity to the instigator and does some minor irritating act that unleashes the displaced aggression.. - When a person is harboring anger from a prior provocation, even a trivial offense - one that would normall produce no response - may elicit an explosive overreaction. |
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theories of aggression - biological
frustration frustration-aggression theory revised |
- Lab tests of the frustration-aggression theory have produced mixed results: Sometimes frustration increased aggressiveness, sometimes not.
- Berkowitz theorized that frustration produces anger, en emotional readiness to aggress. - Anger arises when someone who frustrates us could have chosen to act otherwise. - A frustrated person is especially likely to lash out when aggressive cues pull the cork, releasing bottled-up anger. - Cues associated with aggression amplify aggression - Frustration may be unrelated to deprivation. - Collective humiliation and antagonism feed terrorism far more than does absolute deprivation. - Economic advancement may even increase frustration and escalate violence. - When people in rapidly modernizing nations become urbanized and literacy in improved, they become more aware of material possibilities. Since affluence usually diffuses slowly, however, the increasing gap between people's aspirationgs and their avhievements intensifies frustration. - Frustration arises from the gap between expectations and attainments. |
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theories of aggression - biological
frustration relative deprivation |
- Frustration is often comounded when we compare ourselves with others.
- Relative deprivation explains why happiness tends to be lower and crim rates higher in communities and nations with large income inequality. -- Relative deprivation - The perception that one is less well off than others with whom one compares oneself. - One possible source of such frustration today is the affluence depicted in television programs and commercials. In cultures where televeision is a universal appliance, it helps turn absolutely deprivation (lacking what others have) into relative deprivations (feeling deprived). |
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theories of aggression - biological
learned The rewards of aggression |
- People can learn the rewards of aggression. A child whose aggressive acts successfully intimidate other children will likely become increasingly aggressive.
- Aggression is instrumental in achieving certain rewards. - The same is true of terrorist acts, which enable powerless people to gerner widepsread attention. - Terrorism's purpose is, with the help of media amplification, to terrorize. - Deprived of what Marget Thatcher called "the oxygen of publicity," terrorism would surely diminish. |
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theories of aggression - biological
frustration observational learning |
- Bandura proposed a social learning theory of aggression. He believes that we learn aggression not only by experiencing its payoffs but also by observing others. As with most other social behaviors, we acquire aggression by watching other act and noting the consequences.
-- Social learning theory - The theory that we learn social behavior by obesrcing and imitating and by being rewarded and punished. - Seldom did children who were not exposed to the aggressive adult model display any aggressive play or talk. Although frustrated, they nevertheless played calmly. - Those who had observed the aggressive adult were many times more likely to pick up the mallet and lash out at the doll. Watching the adult's aggressive behavior lowered their inhibitions. Moreoever, the children often reproduced the model's specific acts and said her words. - Observing aggressive behavior had both lowered their inhibitions and taught them ways to aggress. THE FAMILY - Physically aggressive children tend to have had physically punitice parents, who disciplined them by modeling agression with screaming, slapping, and beating. - Although most abused children do not become criminals or abusive parents, 30% do later abuse their own children. - Violence often begets violence. - Family influence also appears in higher violence rates in cultures and in families with absentee fathers. THE CULTURE - The social environment outside the home also provides models. - In communities where macho images are admired, aggression is readily transmitted to new generations. - The broader culture also matters. - A man from a nondemocratic cultures that is economically underdevelped, that has great economic inequality, that prepares men to be warriers, and has engaged in war is predisposed to aggressive behavior. - People learn aggressive response both by experience and by observing aggressive models. - Aggressive acts are motivated by a variety of aversive experiences - frustration, pain insults. Such experienes arouse us emotionally. - Aggression is most likely when we are aroused and it seems safe and rewarding to aggress. |
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influences on aggression
pain |
- As soon as the rats felt pain, they attacked each other, before the experimenter could switch off the shock. The greater the shock (and pain), the more violent the attack.
- The animals were not choosy about their targets. They would attack animals of their own species and also those of a different species, or stuffed dolls, or even tennis balls. - The researchers also varied the source of pain. They found that not just shocks induced attack; intense heat and "psychological pain" (frustration) brought the same reaction as shocks. - Pain heightens aggressiveness in humans also. - Aversive stimulation rather than frustration is the basic trigger of hostile aggression. - But any aversive event, whether a dashed expectation, a personal insult, or physical pain, can incite an emotional outburst. |
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influences on aggression
pain heat |
- Temporary climate variations can, however, affect behavior.
- Offensive odors, cigarette smoke, and air pollution have all been linked with aggressive behavior. - Compared with students who answered questions in a room with normal temperature, those who did so in an uncomfortably hot room reported feeling more tired and aggressive and expressed more hostility toward a stranger. Follow-up experiments revealed that heat also triggered retaliative actions - Although the conclusion appears plausible, these correlations between temperature and aggression don't prove it. |
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influences on aggression
pain attacks |
- Being attacked or insulted by another is especially conducive to aggression.
- Intentional attacks breed retaliatory attacks. |
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influences on aggression
arousal |
- We can experience an aroused bodily state in different ways.
- A given state of bodily arousal feeds one emotion or another, depend on how the person interprets and labels the arousal. - Yet being physically stirred up does intensify just about any emotion. - Arousal feeds emotion - A frustrating, hot, or insulting situation heightens arousal. When it does, the arousal, combined with hostile thoughts and feelings, may form a recipe for aggressive behavior. |
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influences on aggression
aggression cues |
- Violence is more likely when aggressive cues release pent-up anger.
- The sight of a weapon is such a cue. - Children who had just played with toy guns became more willing to knock down another child's blocks. - Guns prime hostile thoughts and punitive judgments. - What's within sight is within mind. This is especially so when a weapon is perceived as an instrument of violence rather than a recreational item. - Guns not only serve as aggression cure but also put psychological distance between aggressor and victime. - Remoteness from the victim facilitates cruelty (Milgram) |
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influences on aggression
pornography and sexual violence |
- The increased rates of criminal violence, including sexual coersion, coincided with the increased availability of violent and sexual material in the media that started during the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
- Social psychologists report that viewing such fictional scenes of a man overpowering and arousing a women can distort one's perceptions of how women actually respond to sexual coercion and increase men's aggression against women. - Rape myth - that some women would welcome sexual assault |
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influences on aggression
pornography and sexual violence distorted perceptions of sexual reality |
- Those who saw the films with mild sexual violence were more accepting of violence against women.
- Exposure to pornography increases acceptance of the rape myth. - Note that the sexual message (that many women enjoy being taken) was subtle and unlikely to elicit counterarguing. |
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influences on aggression
pornography and sexual violence aggression against women |
CORRELATIONAL STUDIES
- Evidence also suggests that pornography contributes to men's actual aggress toward women - As pornography became more widely available during the 1960s and 1970s, the rate of reported rapes sharply increased - except in countries and areas where pornography was controlled. EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES - Results: exposure to violent pornography increases punitive behavior toward women. - Women are most at risk when encountering men who exhibit the promiscuous behavior and hostile attitudes pornography cultivates. |
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influences on aggression
pornography and sexual violence media awareness education |
- By sensitizing people to the portrayal of women that predominates in pornography and to issues of sexual harassment and violence, it should be possible to debunk the myth that women enjoy being coerced.
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influences on aggression
television |
- 6 in 10 TV programs contained violence.
- During fistfights, people who went down usually shook it off and came back stronger - unlike most real fightfight that last one punch (often resulting in a broken jaw or hand). - In 73% of violent scenes, the aggressors went unpunished. In 58%, the victim was not shown experiencing pain. - In children's programs, only 5% of violence was shown to have any long-term consequences; two-thirds depicted violence as funny. - A variation on the catharisis idea maintain that watching violent drama enables people to release their pent-up hostilities -- Catharsis - Emotional release. The catharsis view of aggression is that aggressive drive is reduced when one "relseases" aggressive energy, either vy acting aggressively or by fantasizing aggression. |
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influences on aggression
television television's effects on behavior |
CORRELATING TV VIEWING AND BEHAVIOR
- The more violent the content of the child's TV viewing, the more aggressive the child. - And it extends to devious "indirect aggression." British girls who most often view programs that model gossiping, backbiting, and social exclusion also more often display such behavior. - The heavy viewers were indeed more violent because of their TV exposure. - Violence viewing among 875 8-year-olds correlated with aggressiveness even after statistically pulling out several obvious possibly third factors. - Aggressio followed viewing, not the reverse. - Where television goes, increased violence follows. Even murder rates increase when and where television comes. TV VIEWING EXPERIMENTS - Studies confired that viewing violence amplifies aggression. - The aggression provoked in these experiments is not assault and battery; it's more on the scale of a shove in the lunch line, a cruel comment, a threatening gesture. - The irrefutable conclusion is that viewing violence increases violence. This is especially so among people with aggressive tendencies and when an attractive person commits justified, realistic violence that goes unpunished and that shows no pain or harm. - Exposure to media violence causes significant increases in aggression. The research base is large, the methods diverse, and the overall findings consistent. - Our in depth review reveals unequivocal evidence that exposure to media violence can increase the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. WHY DOES TV VIEWING AFFECT BEHAVIOR? - Researchers have explored why viewing violence has this effect. Consider 3 possibilities. - One is that it is not the violent content that causes social violence but the arousal it produces. - Other research shows that viewing violence disinhibits. - Viewing violence primes the viewer for aggressive behavior by activating violence-related thoughts. - Media portrayals also evoke imitation. - TV modeling of prosocial behavior should be socially beneficial. -- Prosocial behavior - Positive, constructive, helpful social behavior; the opposite of antisocial behavior. |
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influences on aggression
television television's effects on thinking |
DESENSITIZATION
- They measured the physiological arousal of 121 Utah boys who watched a brutal boxing match. Compared with oys who watched little television, the responses of those who watched habitually were more of a shrug than a concern. - Similar desensitization - a sort of psychic numbness - occurs among young men who view slasher films. - Such viewing breeds a more blase reaction when later viewing a brawl or observing two children fighting. - Such viewing patterns help explain why, despite the portrayals of extreme violences (or because of it), Gallup youth surveys show that the percentage of 13 to 17 year olds feeling there was too much movie violence has declined. - As television and movies have become more sexually explicit, teen concern about media sex depictions has similarly declined. SOCIAL SCRIPTS - When we find ourselves in new situations, uncertain how to act, we rely on social scripts. -- Social scripts - Culturally provided mental instructions for how to act in various situations. - Challenged, they may "act like a man" by intimindating for eliminating the threat. - Youths may acquire sexual scripts they later enact in real-life relationships. ALTERED PERCEPTIONS - Heavy views (4+ hours) are more likely than light viewers (2-) to exaggerate the frequency of violence in the world around them and to fear being personally assaulted. - For those who watch much television, the world the becomes a scary place. COGNITIVE PRIMING - Watching violent videos primes networks of aggressive-related ideas. - Perhaps television's biggest effect relates not to its quality but to its quantity. - Compared with more active recreation, TV watching sucks people's energy and dampens their moods. Moreover, TV annually replaces in people's lives a thousand or more hours of other activities. |
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influences on aggression
video games |
THE GAMES KIDS PLAY
- In one survey of 4th graders, 59% of girls and 73% of boys reported their favorite video games as being violent ones. - Games rated Mature are supposedly intended for sale only to those 17 and older, but often are marketed to those younger. EFFECTS OF THE GAMES KIDS PLAY - Violent game playing might have a more toxic effect than watching violent television because while game playing, players: - identify with, and play the role of, a violent character - actively rehearse violence, not just passively watch it - engage in the whole sequence of enacting violence - selecting victims, acquiring weapons and aummunition, stalking the victim, aiming the weapon, pulling the trigger - are engaged with continual violence and theats of attack - repeat violent behaviors over and over - are rewarded for effective aggression - For such reasons, military organizations often prepare soldiers to fire in combat by engaging them with attack-simulation games. - Playing video games: - increases arousal - increases aggressive thinking - increases aggressive feelings - increases aggressive behaviors - decreases prosocial behaviors - Practicing violence breeds violence rather than releases violence. |
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influences on aggression
group influences |
- If frustrations, insults, and aggressive models heighten the aggressive tendencies of isolated people, then such factors are likely to prompt the same reaction in groups.
- As a riot begins, aggresive acts often spread rapidly after the triger example of one antagonistic person. - Groups can amplify aggressive reactions partly by diffusing responsibility. - Diffusion of responsibility increases not only with distance but also with numbers. - The greater the number of people in a lynch mob, the more vicious the murder and mutilation. - Groups magnify aggressive tendencies, much as they polarize other tendencies. - Mobbing is a group activity. - As group identity develops, conformity pressures and deindividuation increase. Self-identity diminishes as members give themselves over to the group, often feeling satisfying oneness with the others. The frequent result is social contagion - group-fed arousal, disinhibition, and polarization. - Genocide is not the plural of homicide. Massacres are social phenomena fed by moral imperatives - a collective mentality (including images, rhetoric, and ideology) that mobilizes a group or a culture for extraordinary actions. - People gave much stronger shocks when in groups than when alone. - When circumstances provoke an individual's aggression reaction, the addition of group interaction will often amplify it. - Increased aggression is predicted by: - male actors - aggressive or type A personalities - alcohol use - violence viewing - anonymity - provocation - the presence of weapons - group interaction |
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how can aggression be reduced?
catharsis? |
- Such statements asum the "hydraulic model" which implies accumulated aggressive energy, like dammed-up water, needs a release.
- The ceoncept of catharsis is usually credited to Aristotle - If led to believe that catharsis effectively vents emotions, people will react more aggressively to an insult as a way to improve their mood. - Viewing or participating in violence fails to produce catharsis. - Doing nothing at all more effectively reduced aggression than did blowing off steam by hitting the bag. - Aggression has led to heightened aggression. - Expressing hostility bred more hostility. - Cruel acts beget cruel acts. - Little aggressive acts can breed their own justification. People derogate their victims, rationalizig further aggression. - Retaliation may, in the short run, reduce tension and even provide pleasure. But in the long run it fuels more negative feelings. - Silent sulking is hardly more effect, because it allows us to continue reciting our grievances as we conduct conversations in our head. - We can be assertive without being aggressive. |
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how can aggression be reduced?
a social learning approach |
- To foster a gentler world, we could model and reward sensitivity and cooperation from an early age, perhaps by training parents how to discipline without violence.
- If observing aggressive models lowers inhibitions and elicits imitation, then we might also reduce brutal, dehumanizing portrayals in films and on television - steps comparable to those already taken to reduce racist and sexist portrayals. - Aggressive stimuli also trigger aggression. This suggests reducing the availability of weapons such as handguns. |
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need to belong
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- To connect with others in enduring, close relationships
-- A motivation to bond with others in relationships that provide ongoing, positive interactions |
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ostracism
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- Acts of excluding or ignoring
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what leads to friendship and attraction
proximity |
-- Proximity - Geographical nearness. Proximity (more precisely, "functional distance") powerfully predicts liking.
- Proximity can also breed hostility. - But much more often, proximity kindles liking. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
proximity interaction |
- Even more significant than geographic distance is function distance - how often people's paths cross.
- Interaction enables people to explore their similarities, to sense one another's liking, and to perceive themselves s a social unit. - The chance nature of such contacts help explain a surprising finding. - Only half of identical twins recall really liking their twin's selection, and only 5% said "I could have fallen for my twin's fiance." - With repeated exposure to and interaction with someone, our infatuation may fix on almost anyone who has roughly similar characteristics and who reciprocates our affection - Why does proximity breed liking? - One factor is availability |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
proximity anticipation of interaction |
- Not only does proximity enable people to discover commonalities and exchange rewards, but also merely anticipating interaction boosts liking.
- Anticipatory liking - expecting that someone will be pleasant and compatible - increases the chance of forming a rewarding relationship. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
proximity mere exposure |
- Familiarity does not breed contempt. Rather, it fosters fondness.
- Mere exposure to all sorts of novel stimuli boosts people's ratings of them. -- Mere-exposure effect - The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them. - The mere-exposure effect violates the commonsense prediction of boredom - decreased interest. - Unless the repetitions are incessant, familiarity usually doesn't breed contempt, it increases liking. - When they showed people a woman's face, their cheeck (smiling) muscles typically became more active with repeated viewings. - Mere exposure breeds pleasant feelings. - Exposure without awareness leads to liking. In fact, mere exposure has an even stronger effect when people receive stimuli without awareness. - You can probably recall immediately and intuitively liking or disliking something or someone without consciously knowing whyy. - Emotions are often more instantenous than thinking. Emotions are semi-independing of thinking ("affect may precede cognition") - Emotion and cognition are enabled by distinct brain regions. - Amygdala - an emotion-related brain structure - Hippocampus - a memory-related brain structure - The mere-exposure effect has enormous adaptive significance. It is a hardwired phenomenon that predisposes our attractions and attachments. - The mere-exposure effect colors our evaluations of others: We like familiar people, and people we like (for example, smiling vs unsmiling strangers) seem more familiar. - The phenomenon's negative side is our wariness of the unfamiliar - which may explain the automatic, unconscious prejudice people often feed when confronting those how are different. Fearful or prejudicial feelings are not always expressions of stereotyped beliefs; sometimes the beliefs arise later as justifications for intuitive feelings. - We even like ourselves better when we are the way we're used to seeing ourselves. - When asked which picture they liked better of themselves, most perferred the mirror image - the image they were used to seeing in the mirror. - Advertisers and politicians exploit this phenomenon. Repetition alone can increase sales and votes. Politicians have replaced reasoned argument with brief ads that hammer home a candidate's name and sound-bite message |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness |
- Appearance does matter.
- Good looks are a great asset. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness attractiveness and ating |
- A young person's physical attractiveness is a moderately good predictor of how frequently he/she dates.
- Men do put somewhat more value on opposite-sex physical attractiness. But women also respond to a man's looks. - In a test, arranged people into couples and had them spend time together. Later, they evaluated their dates. Only one thing mattered: how physically attractive the person was. - Looks even influences voting. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness the matching phenomenon |
- They pair off with people who are about as attractive as they are.
- People tend to select as friends, and especially to marry, those who are a "good match" not only to their level of intelligence but also to their level of attractiveness. -- Matching phenomenon - The tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a good match in attractiveness and other traits. - People often approach someone whose attractiveness roughly matches or not too greatly exceeds their own. - They seek out someone who seems desirable, but are mindful of the limits of their own desirability. - In happy couples who are not equally attractive, the less attractive person often has compensating qualities. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness the physical-attractiveness stereotype |
- People of both sexes avoided sitting next to the accomplice when she appeared facially disfigured.
- Much as adults are biased toward attractive adults, young children are biased toward attractive children. - Adults show a similar bias when judging children. - The sad truth is that most of us assume what we might call a Bart Simpson effect - that homely children are less able and socially competent than their beautiful peers. - We assume that beautiful people possess certain desirable traits. - Physical-attractiveness stereotype - what is people is good. -- Physicaly attractiness stereotype - The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirably traits as well: What is beautiful is good. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness the physical-attractiveness stereotype first impressions |
- To say that attractiveness is important, other things being equal, is not to say that physical appearance always outranks other qualities. Some people more than others judge people by their looks.
- Moreover, attractiveness probably most affects first impressions. But first impressions are important. - Attractiveness and grooming affect first impressions at job interviews. - The speed with which first impressions form, and their influence on thinking, helps explain why pretty prospers. Even a .013 second exposure is enough to enable people to guess a face's attractiveness. - An attractive face predisposes people to categorized good words faster. - Pretty is perceived promptly and primes positive processing. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness the physical-attractiveness stereotype is the beautiful is good stereotype accurate? |
- Attractive children and young adults are somewhat more relaxed, outgoing, and socially polished.
- Physically attractive individuals also tend to be more popular, more outgoing, and more gender typed - more traditionall masculine and feminine. - Self-fulfilling prophecies - attractive people are valued and favored, so many develop more social self-confidence. - What's crucial to your social skill is not how you look but how people treat you and how you feel about yourself. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness who is attractive |
- Attractiveness is whatever the people of any given place and time find attractive. This, of course, varies.
- Despite such variations, there remains strong agreement both within and across cultures about who is and who is not attractive. - To be really attractive is, ironically, to be perfectly average. - Asking people to rate faces, the composite average picture of all the faces was rated higher than the actual faces themselves. - Attractice faces are also perceived as more alike than unattractive faces. - Computer-averaged faces also tend to be perfectly symmetrical - another characteristic of strikingly attractive (and repoductively sucessful) people. - If you could merge either half of your face with its mirror image - thus forming a perfectly symmetrical new face - you would boost your looks. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness who is attractive evolution and attraction |
- Psychologists working form the evolutionary perpective explain the human preference for attractive partners in terms of reproductive strategy.
- They assume that beauty signals biologically important imformation: health, youth, and fertility. - They also assume evolution predisposes women to favore male traits that signify an ability to provide and protect resources. - Explains why physically attractive females tend to marry high-status males, and why men compete with such determination to display status by achieving fame and fortune. - Men require a modicum of physical attractiveness, women require status and resources, and both welcom kindness and intelligence. - Men everywhere have felt most attracted to women whose waists are 30% narrower than their hips - a shape assicated with peak sexual fertility - Women also prefer a male waist-to-hip ratio suggesting health and vigor, and during ovulation they show heightened preference for men with masculinized features. - Today's women prefer men with high incomes even more. - We are driven by primal attractions |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness who is attractive social comparison |
- Although our mating psychology has biological wisdom, attraction is not all hardwired. What's attractive to you also depends on your comparison standards.
- Shown ap icture of an average young women, those who had just been watching a movie with beautiful women rated her less attractive than those who hadn't. - To men who have recently been gazing at centerfolds, average women or even their wives tend to seem less attractive. - But the lingering effect of expoure to perfect 10s or of unrealistic sexual depictions, is to make one's own partner seem less appealing - more like a 6 than an 8. - Slef-perceptions - after viewing a superattractive person of the same gender, people rate themselves as being less attractive than after viewing a homely person - this is especially true for women. - Men's self-rated desirability is also deflated by exposure to more dominant, successful men. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
physical attractiveness who is attractive the attractiveness of those we love |
- A 17yo girl's facial attractiveness is a surprisingly weak predictor of her attractiveness at ages 30 and 50. Sometimes an average-looking adolescent, especially one with a warm, attractive personality, becomes quite an attractive middle-aged adult.
- Not only do we perceive attractive people as likable, we also perceive likable people as attractive. - Those portrayed as warm, helpful, and considerate also looked more attractive. - Discovering someone's similarities to us also makes the person seem more attractive. - Love sees loveliness: the more in love a woman is with a man, the more physically attractive she finds him. - And the more in love people are, the less attractive they find all others of the opposite sex. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
similarity versus complementarity do birds of a feather flock together? |
- Bird that flock together are of a feather.
- Friends, engaged couples, and spouses are far more likely than randomly paired people to share common attitudes, beliefs, and values. - Furthermore, the greater the similarity between husband and wife, the happier they are and the less like they are to divorce. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
similarity versus complementarity do birds of a feather flock together? likeness begets liking |
- The more similar someone's attitudes are to your own, the more likably you will find the person.
- When others think as we do, we not only appreciate their attitudes but also make positive inferences about their character. - Reality matters, but perception matters more. - People like not only those who think as they do but also those who act as they do. Subtle mimicry fosters fondness. - The desire for similar mates far outweighed the desire for beautiful mates. - Studies of newlyweds reveal that similar attitudes and values help bring couples together and predict their satisfaction. - Similarity breeds content |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
similarity versus complementarity do birds of a feather flock together? dissimilarity beeds dislike |
- We have a bias - the false consensus bias - toward assuming that others share our attitudes. When we discover that someone has dissimilar attitudes, we may dislike the person.
- If those dissimilar attitudes pertain to our strong moral convictions, we dislike and distance ourselves from them all the more - Dissimilar attitudes depress liking more than similar attitudes enhance liking. - Within their own groups, where they expect similarity, people find it especially hard to like someone with dissimilar views. - Attitude alignment helps promote and sustain close relationships, a phenomenon that can lead partners to overestimate their attitude similarities. - Whether people perceive those of another race as similar or dissimilar influences their racial attitudes. - Whenever on group of people regards another as "other" the potential for conflict is high. - In fact, except for intimate relationships such as dating, the perception of like minds seems more important for attraction than like skins. - Cultural racism persists because cultural differences are a fact of life. Each culture has much to learn from the other. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
similarity versus complementarity do opposites attract? |
- Similarity still precails.
- Still we resist - are we not attracted to people whose need and personalities complement our own? - The logic seems compelling, and most of us can think of couples who view their differences as complementary. - Give the idea's persuasiveness, the inability of researchers to confirm it is astoninshing. -- Complementarity - The popularly supposed tendency, in a relationship between two people, for each to complete what is missing in the other - People seem slightly more prone to like and to marry those whos needs and personalities are similar. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
liking those who like us |
- Liking is usually mutual.
- Proximity and attractiveness influence our initial attraction to someone, and simiarity influences longer-term attraction as well. - One person's liking for another does predict the other's liking in return. - But does one person's liking cause the other to return the appreciation? Discovering that an appealing someone really likes you seems to awaken romantic feelings. - Those told that certain others like or admire them usually feel a reciprocal affection. - Negative information carries more weight because, being less usual, it grabs more attention. - Bad is stronger than good. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
liking those who like us attribution |
- As we've seen, flattery will get you somewhere, but not everywhere.
- If praise clearly violates what we know is true, we may lose respect for the flatter and wonder whether the compliment springs from ulterior motives. - Thus we often perceive criticism to be more sincere than praise. - Our reactions depend on our attributions. - Do we attribut the flattery to ingratiation or to a self-serving strategy. - If so, both the flatter and the praise lose appeal. - But if there is no apparent ulterior motive, then we warmly receive both flattery and flatterer. - Ingratiation - The use of stratgeies, such as flattery, by which people seek to gain another's favor. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
liking those who like us self-esteem and attraction |
- She gave some women either very favorable or very unfavorable analyses of their personalties, affirming some and wounding others.
- Then a man asked them for a date. Which women do you suppose most liked the man? It was those whose self-esteem had been temporarilty shattered and who were presumably hungry for social approval. - This helps explain why people sometimes fall passionately in love on the rebound, after an ego-bruising rejection. - However, low-self-esteem individuals tend to underestimate how much their partner appreciates them. They also have less generous views of their partner and therefore feel less happy with the relationship. - If you feel down about yourself, you will likely feel pessimistic about your relationship. Feel good about yourself and you're more likely to feel confident of your dating partner of spouse's regard. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
liking those who like us gaining another esteem |
- Approval that comes after disapproval is powerfully rewarding.
- The target person was especially well liked when the individual experienced a gain in the other's esteem, especially when the gain occured gradually and reversed the earlier criticism. - Perhaps Sophia's nice words have more credibility coming after her not-so-nice words. Or perhaps after being withheld, they are especially gratifying. - Constant approval can lose value. - An open, honest relationship - one where people enjoy one another's esteem and acceptance yet are honest - is more likely to offer continuing rewards than one dulled by the suppression of unpleasant emotions, one in which people try only to lavish praise. - In most social interactions, we self-censor our negative feelings. - Thus, some people receive no corrective feedback. - A true friend is one who can let us in on bad news. - Someone who really loves us will be honest with us but will also tend to us through rose-colored glasses. - They found that the happiest were those who idealized ach other, who even saw their partners more positively than their partners saw themselves. - Honesty has its place in a good relationship, but so does a presumption of the other's basic goodness. |
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what leads to friendship and attraction
relationship rewards |
- Attrction involves the one who is attracted as well as the attractor.
- We are attracted to those we find it satisfying and gratifying to be with. Attraction is in the eye and the brain of the beholder. - Reward theory of attraction - those who reward us, or whome we associate rewards, we like. If a relationship gives us more rewards than costs, we will like it and will wish it to continue. -- Reward theory of attraction - The theory that we like those whose behavior is rewarding to us or whom we associate with rewarding events. - Mutual attraction flourishes when each meets the other's unmet needs. - We not only like people who are rewarding to be with but also like those we associate with good feelings. - Conditioning creates positive feelings toward good things and people linked with rewarding events. - The phenomenon of liking and disliking by association. People rated other people better when they were in a nice room versus a shabby room. - This simple theory of attraction - we like those who reward us and those we associated with rewards - helps us understand why people everywhere feel attracted to those who are warm, trustworthy, and responsive. - The reward theory also helps explain some of the influences on attraction. - Proximity is rewarding - It costs less time and effort to receive friendship's benefits with someone who lives or works close by. - We like attractive people because we perceive that they offer other desirable traits and because we benefit by associating with them. - If others have similar opinions, we feel rewarded because we presume that they like us in return. Moreover, those who share our views help validate them. We especially like people if we have successfully converted them to our way of thinking. - We like to be liked and love to be loved. Thus, liking is usually mutual. We like those who like us. |
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what is love
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- Love is more complex than liking, and thus more difficult to measure, more perplexing to study.
- Most attraction researchers have studied what is most easily studied - responses during brief encounters between strangers. - The influences on our initial liking of another - proximity, attractiveness, similarity, being liked, and other rewarding traits - also influence our long-term, close relationships. - First impressions are important. Nevertheless, long-term loving is not merely an intensification of initial liking. |
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what is love
passionate love |
- How do we measure love?
- Social scientists have counted various ways. - Sternberg views love as a triangle consisting of three component - passion, intimacy, and commitment. - Lee and others identify three primary love styles: - Eros - self-disclosing passion - Ludus - uncommitted game playing - Storage - friendship - These combine to form secondary love styles. - Some elements are common to all loving relationships: mutual understanding, giving and receiving support, enjoying te loved one's company. - Some elements are disctinctive. - If we experience passionate love, we express it physically, we expect the relationship to be exclusive, and we are intensely fascinated with our partner. - You can see it in our eyes. The strong-love couples gave themselves away by gazing long into each other's eyes. When talking, they also nod their heads, smile naturally, and lean forward. - Passionate love is emotional eciting and intense. Has been defined as a state of intense longing for union with another. -- Passionate love - A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate lovers are absorbed in each other, feel ecstatic at attaining their partner's love, and are disconsolate on losing it. - Passionate love involves a roller coaster. - Passionate love is what you feel when you no only love someone but also are in love with him or her. |
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what is love
passionate love theory of passionate love |
- Imagine yourself with pounding heart and tembling hand: are you experiencing fear, anxiety, joy?
- Physiologically, one emotion is quite similar to another. You may therefore experience the arousal as joy if you are in a euphoric situation, anger if your environment is hostile, and passionate love if the situation is romantic. - In this view, passioante love is the psychological experience of being biologically aroused by someone we find attractive. - Two-factor theory of emotion - arousal x its label = emotion. - Proponents of the two-factor theory argue that when the revved-up men responded to a woman, they easily misattributed some of their own arousal to her. - According to this theory, being aroused by any source should intensify passionate feelings - providing the mind is free to attribute some of the arousal to romantic stimulus. - Scary movies, roller coaster rides, and physical exercise have the same effect, especially to those we find attractive. - Those who do exciting things together report the best relationships. - Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder. - Passionate love is a biological as well as a psychological phenomenon. - Passionate love engages dopamine-rich brain areas associated with reward. |
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what is love
passionate love variations in love: culture and gender |
- There is always a temptation to assume that most others share our feelings and ideas.
- But in some cultures, notably those practicing arranged marriages, love tends to follow rather than to precede marriage. - It is actually men who tend to fall more readily in love. - Men also seem to fall out of love more slowly and are less likely than women to break up a premarital romance. - Once in love, however, women are typically as emotionally involved as their partners, or more so. - Women are also somewhat more likely than men to focus on the intimacy of the frienship and on their concern for their partner. - Men are more likely than women to think about the playful and physical aspects of the relationship |
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what is love
companionate love |
- Although passionate love burns hot, it inevitably simmers down. The londer a relationship endures, the fewer its emotional ups and downs. The high of romance may be sustained for a few months, even a couple of years. But no high lasts forever.
- The novelty, the intense absorption in the other, the thrill of the romance, the giddy floating on a cloud feeling fades. - About four years after marriage, the divorce rate peaks in cultures worldwide. - If a close relationship is to endure, it will settle to a steadier but still warm afterglow - companionate love. -- Companionate love - The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined. - Companionate love is lower key; it's a deep affectionate attachment. It activates different parts of the brain. - The flow and ebb of romantic love follows the pattern of addictions to coffee, alcohol, and other drugs. At first, a drug gives a big kick, perhaps a high. With repetition, opponent emotions gain strength and tolerance develops. An amount that once was highly stimulating no longer gives a thrill. Stopping the substance, however, does not return you to where you started. Rather, it triggers withdrawal symptomes - malaise, depression, the blahs. The same often happens in love. The passionately high if fated to become lukewarm. - The cooling of intense romantic love often triggers a period of disillusion, espeically among those who reard that romantic love as essantial for a marriage and for its continuation. - Some suspect the sharp rise in divorce rate in the past 2 decades is linked, at least in part, to the growing importance of intense positive emotional experiences (romantic love) in people's lives, experiences that may be particularly difficult to sustain over time. - The decline in intense mutual fascination may be natural and adaptive for species survival. The result of passionate love frequently is children, whose survival is aided by the parents' waning obsession with each other. - For those married more than 20 years, some of the lost romantic feeling is often renewed as the family nest empties and the parents are once again free to focus their attention on each other. |
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what enables close relationships?
attachment |
- Love is a biological imperative. We are, in our roots, social creatures, destine to bond with others.
- Our need to belong is adaptive. Cooperation promoted our species' survival. - Our infant dependency strengthens our human bonds. By keeping infants close to their caregivers, strong social attachment serves as a powerful survival impulse. - Deprived of familiar attachments, somtimes under conditions of extreme neglect, children may become withdrawn, frightened, and silent. - Some elements are common to all loving attacments: mutual understanding, giving and receiving support, valuing and enjoying being with the loved one. - Passionate love is, however, spiced with some added features: physical affection, an expectation of exclusiveness, and an intense fascination with the loved one. - Passionate love is not just for lovers. The intense love of parent and infant for each other qualifies as a form of passionate love, even to the point of engaging brain areas akin to those enabling passionate love. |
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what enables close relationships?
attachment attachment styles |
- About 7 in 10 infants and nearly that many adults exhibit secure attachment.
-- Secure attachment - Attachments rooted in trust and marked by intimacy. - This trusting attachment style forms a working model of intimacy - a blueprint for one's adult intimate relationships, in which underlying trust sustains relationships through times of conflict. - Secure adults find it easy to get close to others and don't fret about getting too dependent or being abandoned. - As lovers, they enjoy sexuality within the context of a secure, committed relationship. And their relationships tend to be satisfying and enduring. - Others proposed an influential attachment model that classified people's attachment styles according to their images of self (positive or negative) and of others (positive or negative). Secure people have a positive image of both self and others. - People with the preoccupied attachment style (aka ancious ambivalent) have positive expectations of others but a sense of their own unworthiness. -- Preoccupied attachment - attachments marked by a sense of one own's unworthiness and anxiety, ambivalence, and possessiveness. - As adults, anxious-ambivalent individuals are less trusting, and therefore more possessive and jealous. - People with a negative view of others exhibit either the dismissing or the fearful attachment style; the two styles share the characteristic of avoidance. -- Dismissive attachment - an avoidant relationship marked by distrust of others. -- Fearful attachment - an avoidant relationship style marked by fear of rejection. - As adults, avoidant people tend to be less invested in relationships and more likely to leave them. They also are more likely to engage in one-night stands of sex without love. - Some researchers attribute these varying attachment styles to parental responsiveess - Early attachment experiences form the basis of internal working models or characteristic ways of thinking about relationships. - Youths who have experienced nurturant and involved parenting tend later to have warm and supportive relationships with their romantic partners. - Others researchers believe attachment styles may refelect inherited temperament. - Either way, early attachment styles do seem to lay a foundation for future relationships |
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what enables close relationships?
equity |
- If each partner pursues his or her personal desires willy-nilly, the relationship will die. Therefore, our society teaches us to exchange rewards by an equity principle of attracition - what you and your partner get out of a relationship should be proportional to what you each put into it.
- If two people receive equal outcomes, they should contribute equally; otherwise one or the other will feel it is unfair. If both feeltheir outcomes correspond to the assets and efforts each contributes, then both perceive equity. -- Equity - a condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it. Note: Equity outcomes needn't always be equal outcomes. - Strangers and casual acquaintances maintain equity by exchanging benefits. - Those in an enduring relationship do no feel bound to trade similar benefits. They feel freer to maintain equity by exchanging a variety of benefits and eventually to stop keeping track of who owes whom. |
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what enables close relationships?
equity long-term equity |
- Those involved in an equitable, long-term relationship are unconcerned with short-term equity.
- People even take pains to avoid calculating any exchange benefits. - When we help a good friend, we do not want instant repayment. True friends tune into one another's needs even when reciprocation is impossible. - Similarly, happily married people tend not to keep score of how much they are giving and getting. - Not being calculating is mark of friendship. Tit-for-tat exchanges boosted people's liking when the relationship was relatively formal but diminished liking when the two sought friendship. - Only when the other's positive behavior is voluntary can we attribute it to love. - People usually bring equal assets to romantic relationships. Often they are matched for attractiveness, status and so forth. If they are mismatched in one area, such as attractiveness, they tend to be mismatched in some other area, such as status. But in total assets, they are an equitable match. - Especially in relationships that last, equity is the rule. |
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what enables close relationships?
equity perceived equity and satisfaction |
- Those in an equitable relationship are more content.
- Those who perceive their relationship as inequitable feel discomfort - the one who has the better deal may feel guilty and the one who sense a raw deal may feel strong irritation. (Given the self-serving bias, the person who is overbenefited is less sensitive to inequity. - Inequity took its toll - those who perceived inequity also felt more distressed and depressed. - During the honeymoon and empty-nest stages, spouses are more likely to perceive equity and to feel satisfaction with their marriages. - When both parents freely give and receive, and make decisions together, the odds of sustained, satisfying love are good. - Perceived inequity triggers marital distress. But they also report that the traffic between inequity and distress runs both ways - marital distress exacerbates the perception of unfairness |
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what enables close relationships?
self-disclosure |
- Deep, comanionate relationships are intimate. They enable us to be known as we truly are and to feel accepted. We discover this delicious experience in a good marriage or a close friendship - a relationship where trust displaces anxiety and where we are free to open ourselves without fear of losing the other's affection.
- Such relationships are characterized by what is called self-disclosure. As a relationship grow, self-disclosing partners reveal more and more of themselves to each other; their knowledg of each other penetrates to deeper and deeper levels. -- Self-disclosure - revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others. - Most of us enjoy this intimacy. - Not only do we like those we disclose, we also disclose to those whom we like. And after disclosing to them, we like them more. - Lacking opportunities for intimacy, we experience the pain of loneliness. - The disclosure reciprocity effect - diclosure begets disclosure. We reveal more to those who have been open with us. -- Disclosure reciprocity - The tendency for one person's intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of conversational partner. - But intimacy is seldom instant. (If it is, the person may seem indiscreet and unstable). - Appropriate intimacy progresses like a dance: I reveal a little, you reveal a little, but not too much. You then reveal more, and I reciprocate. - For those in love, deepening intimacy is exciting. - Some people - mostly women - arae especially skilled openers - they easily elicit intimate disclosures from others, even from those who normally don't reveal very much of themselves. - Such people tend to be good listeners. During conversation they maintain attentive facial expressions and appear to be comfortably enjoying themselves. - They may also express interest by uttering supportive phtases while their conversational partner is speaking. - They are growth-promoting listeners - people who are genuine in revealing their own feelings, who are accepting of others' feelings, and who are empathetic, sensitive, reflective listeners. - Dropping our masks, letting ourselves be known as we are, nurtures love. - It is gratifying to open up to another and then to receive the trust another implies by being open with us. - A true friendship is a special relationship that helps us cope with our other relationships. - At its best, marriage is such a friendships, sealed by commitment. - Intimate self-disclosure is one also of compaionate love's delights. - Those who most deeply and accurately knew each other were most likely to enjoy enduring love. - Among believers, shared prayer from the heart is a hubling, intimate, soulful exposure. - Women are often more willing to disclose their fears and weaknesses than are men. - Men today, particularly men with egalitarian gender-role attitudes, seem increasingly willing to reveal intimate feelings and to enjoy the satisfactions that accompany a relationship of mutual trust and self-disclosure. - The essence of love - two selves connecting, disclosing, and identifying with each other; two selves, each retaining their individuality, yet sharing activities, delighting in similaritiess, and mutually supporting. - Those who experienced the escalating self-disclosure ended the hour feeling remarkably close to their conversation partner. |
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how do relationships ends?
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- Comparing their unsatisfying relationship with the support and affection they imagine are available elsewhere, people are divorcing more often
- Roughly half of US marriages and 40% of Canadian marriages end in divorce. - Enduring relationships are rooted in enduring love and satisfaction, but also in inattention to posible alternative partners, fear of the termination cost, and a sense of moral obligation. - Thanks partly to women's increasing employment, divorce rates rose. |
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how do relationships ends?
divorce |
- Divorce rates have varied widely by country.
- Individualistic countries have more divorce than do communal cultures. - Individualists marry for as long as we both shall love, collectivists more often for life. - Individualists expect more passion and personal fulfillment in a marriage, which puts greater pressure on the relationship. - Those who enter relationships with a long-term orientation and an intention to persis do experience healthier, less turbulent, and more durable partnerships. - Those whose commitment to a union outlasts the desires that gave birth to it will endure times of conflict and unhappiness. - Narcissists - those more focused on their own desires and image - enter relationships with less commitment and less likelihood of long-term relational success. - People usually stay married if they: - married after age 20 - both grew up in a stable, two-parent home - dated for a long while before marriage - are well and similarly educated - enjoy a stable income from a good job - live in a small town or on a farm - did not cohabit or become pregnant before marriage - are religiously committed - are of similar age, faith, and education - None of those predictors, by itself, is essential to a stable marriage. Moreover, they are correlates of enduring marriages, not necessarily causes. - But if none of those things is true for someone, marital breakdown is an almost a sure bet. If all are true, they are very liekly to stay together until death. |
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how do relationships ends?
the detachment process |
- Severing bonds produces a predictable sequence of agitated preoccupation with the lost partner, followed by deep sadness and, eventually, the beginnings of emotional detachment and a return to normal living.
- Even newly separated couples who have long ago ceased feeling affection are often surprised at their desire to be near the former partner. - Deep and long-standing attachments seldom break quickly; detaching is a process, not an event. - Among dating couple, the closer and longer the relationship and the fewer the available alternatives, the more painful the breakup. - People recall more pain over spurning someone's love than over having been spurned. - Their distress arises from guilt over hurting someone, from upset over the heatbroken lover's persistance, or from uncertainty over how to respond. - Among married couples, breakup has additional costs. - When relationships suffer, those without better alternatives or who feel invested in a relationship (through time, energy, mutual friends, possessions, and children) will seek alternatives to exiting the relationship. - Three ways of coping with a failing relationship: - Some people exhibit loyalty - by waiting for conditions to improve. - Others (especially men) exhibit neglect; they ignore the partner and allow the relationship to deteriorate. - Still others will voice their concerns and take active steps to improve the relationship by discussing problems, seeking advice, and attempting to change. - It's not distress and arguments that predict divorce. - Rather, it's coldness, disillusionment, and hopelessness that predict a dim marital future. This is especially so when inhibited men are coupled with critical women. - Successful couples have learned to restrain the poisonous put-downs and gut-level reactions , to fight fiarly, and to depersonalize conflict. - By enacting and expressing love, the passion of initial romance can evolve into enduring love. |
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altruism
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- Altruism is selfishness in reverse.
- An altruistic person is concerned and helpful even when no benefits are offered or expected in return. -- Altruism - A motive to increase another's welfare without conscious regard for one's self-interests |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms |
- Helping behavior benefits the giver as well as the receiver.
- One explanation assumes that human interactions are guided by a social economics. - We exchange not only material goods and money but also social goods - love, services, information, status. - Social exchange theory does not contend that we consciously monitor costs and rewards, only that such considerations predict our behavior. -- Social exchange theory - The theory that human interactions are transactions that aim to maximize one's rewards and minimize one's costs. - According to social exchange theory, such subtle calculations precede decisions to help or not. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms rewards |
- Rewards that motive helping may be external or internal.
- When businesses donate money to help improve their corporate images or when someone offers another a ride hoping to receive appreciation or friendship, the reward is external. We give to get. - Rewards may also be internal. Helping also increases our sense of self-worth. Makes you feel good about yourself and gives you a feeling of self-satisfaction. - The positive effect of helping on feelings of self-worth are one explanation for why so many people feel good after doing good. - Youth engaged in service projects develop social skills and positive social values. Volunteering also benefits morale and even the health of adults. Those who do go tend to do well. - The cost-benefit analysis can seem demeaning. - We credit people for their good deeds only when we can't explain them. - We attribute their behavior to their inner dispositions only when we lack external explanations. - When external causes are obvious, we credit the cause, not the person. - There is a weakness in reward theory. It easily degenerates into explaining-by-naming and can cause a circular explanation. - Egoism - the idea that self-interest motivates all behavior - has fallen into dispute. -- Egoism - A motive (supposedly underlying all behavior) to increase one's own welfare. The opposite of altruism, which aims to increase another's welfare. - To escape the circularity, we must define the rewards and costs independently of the helping behavior. - If social approval motivates helping, then in experiments we should find that when approval follows helping, helping increases. And it does. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms internal rewards |
- We also need to consider internal factors, such as the helper's emotional state or personal traits.
- The benefits of helping include internal self-rewards. - Altruism researchers Krebs found that Hardvard men whose physiological responses and self-reports reealed the most arousal in response to another's distress also gave the person the most help. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms internal rewards guilt |
- Distress is not that only negative emotion we act to reduce.
- Throughout recorded history, guilt has been a painful emotion, so painful that we will act in ways that avoid guilt feelings. - Cultures have institutionalized ways to relieve guilt - animal and human sacrifices, offerings of grain and money, penitent behavior, confession, denial. - People will do whatever that can be done to expunge the guilt, relieve their bad feelings, and restore their self-image. - On average, those who had not been induced to lie bolunteered only two minutes of time. Those who had lied were apparently eage to redeem their self-images; on average they offered a whopping 63 minutes. - Our eagerness to do good after doing bad reflects our need to reduce private guilt and restore a shaken self-image. - It also reflects our desire to reclaim a positive public image. We are more likely to redeem ourselves with helpful behavior when other people know about our misdeeds. - Guilt leads to much good. - By motivating people to confess, apologize, help, and avoid repeated harm, it boosts sensitivity and sustains close relationships. - Among adults, the inner rewards of altruism can offset other negative moods as well. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms internal rewards exceptions to the feed bad/do good scenario |
- We saw that one negative, anger, produces anything but compassion.
- Another exception is profound grief. People who suffer the loss of a spouse or a child, whether through death or separation, often undergo a period of intense self-preoccupation, which restrains giving to others. - Did their moods affect their helpfulness? - When immediately they were given a chance to help a graduate student with her research, 25% of those whose attention had been self-focused helped. - Of those whose attention was other-focused, 83% helped. - Only other-focused participants found helping someone especially rewarding. - The feel bad-do good effect occurs with people whose attention is on others, people for whom altruism is therefore rewarding. - If they are not self-preoccupied by depression of grief, sad people are sensitive, helpful people. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms internal rewards feel good, do good |
- Happy people are helpful people.
- A positive mood of relief can dramatically boost helping. - 62% of people whose fear had just turned to relief agreed willingly. That was nearly double the number who did when no ticket-like paper was left or when it was left on the car door (not a place for a ticket). - Individuals' willingness to relay the phone message rose during the 5 minutes affertward. Then, as the good mood wore off, helpfulness dropped. - Helping softens a bad mood and sustains a good mood. - A positive mood is, in turn, conducive to positive thoughts and positive self-esteem, which predispose us to positive behavior. - In a good mood, people are more likely to have positive thoughts and associations with being helpful. - Positive thinkers are likely to be positive actors. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms social norms |
- Often we help others because of a subtler form of self-interest - because something tells us we ought to.
- Norms, the oughts of our lives, are social expectations. The prescribe proper behavior. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms social norms reciprocity norm |
- Reciprocity norm - to those who help us, we should return help not harm
-- Reciprocity norm - An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them. - Invest in others and expect dividends. - In all such interactions, rereceive without giving in return violates the reciprocity norm. - Reciprocity within social networks helps define the social capital - the supportive connections, information flow, trust, and cooperative actions - that keep a community healthy. -- Social capital - The mutual support and cooperation enabled by a social network. - The norm opperates most effectively as people respond publicly to deed earlier done to them. - When people cannot reciprocate, they may feel theatened and demeaned by accepting aid. Thus, proud, high self-esteem people are often reluctant to seek help. Receiving unsolicited help can take one's self-esteem down a notch. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms social norms the social-responsibility norm |
- The social-responsibility norm is the belief that people should help those who need help, without regard to future exchanges.
-- Social responsibility norm - An expectation that people will those needing help. - In India, a relatively collectivist culture, people support the social-responsibility norm more strongly that the individualistic West. - Even when helpers in Western countries remain anonymous and have no expectation of any reward, they often help need people. - However, they usually apply the social-responsibility norm selectively to those whose need appears not to be due to their negligence. - The norm seems to be - give people what they deserve. - Responses are thus closely tied to attributions. If we attribute the need to an uncontrollable predicament, we help. If we attribute the need to the person's choices, fairness does not require us to help; we say it's the person's own fault. - The key is whether your attributions evoke sympathy. - Thus, the social-responsibility norm compels us to help those most in need and those most deserving. |
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why do we help?
social exchange and social norms social norms gender and receiving help |
- Women, if perceived as less competent and more dependent, receive more help than men.
- Women offered help equally to males and females, whereas men offered more help when the persons in need were females. - Of course, men's chivalry toward lone women may have been motivated by something other than altruism. - Not surprisingly, men more frequently helped attractive than unattractive women. - This gender difference is attributed to independence versus interdependence. |
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why do we help?
evolutionary psychology |
- Evolutionary psychology contends that the essence of life is gene survival.
- Our genes drive us in adaptive ways that have maximized their chance of survival. - When our ancestors died, their genes lived on, predisposing us to behave in ways that will spread them into the future. - Genes that predispose individuals to self-sacrifice in the interests of strangers' welfare would not survive in the evolutionary competition. - Genetic selfishness should, however, predispose us toward two specific types of selfless or even self-sacrificial helping - kin protection and reciprocity. |
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why do we help?
evolutionary psychology kin protection |
- Our genes predispose us to care for relatives.
- Thus, one form of self-sacrifice that would increase gene survival is devotion to one's children. - Parents will generally be more devoted to their children than their children are to them. - Other relatives share genes in proportion to their biological closeness. - Kin selection - favoritism toward those whose share our genes. -- Kin selection - The idea that evolution has selected altruism toward one's close relatives to enhance the survival of mutually shared genes. - Genetically identical twins are noticeably more mutually supportive than fraternal twins. - The point is not that we calculate genetic relatedness before helping but that nature (as well as culture) programs us to care about close relatives. - But such acts for close kin are not totally unexpected. - What we do not expect (and therefore honor) is the altruism of those who risk themselves to save a stranger. - We share common genes with many besides our relatives. Blue-eyed people share particular genes with other blue-eyed people. - Also, in evolutionary history, genes were shares more with neighbors than with foreigners. - Are we therefore biologically biased to be more helpful to those who look similar to us and those who live near us? - The order of who gets helped first: the children before the old, family members before friends, neighbors before strangers. - Helping stays close to home - Kin selection predisposes ethnic ingroup favoritism. - Kin selection is the enemy of civilization |
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why do we help?
evolutionary psychology reciprocity |
- Genetic self-interest also predicts reciprocity.
- An organism helps another because it expects help in return. - The giver expects later to be the getter, whereas failure to reciprocate gets punished. - Reciprocity works best in small, isolated groups, groups in which one will often see the people for whom one does favors. - Reciprocity among humans is stronger in rural villages than in big cities. - Compared with people in a small-town or rural environments, those in big cities are less willing to help. - Group selection - when groups are in competition, groups of mutually supportive altruists outlast groups of nonaltruists. -- social insects - To a much lesser extent, human exhibit ingroup loyalty, by sacrificing to support us, sometimes against them. - Human societies evolved ethical and religious rules to serve as brakes on the biological bias toward self-interest. - These rules admonish us to balance self-concern with concern for the group, and so contribute to the survival of the group. - Let us try to teach generosity and altruism |
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why do we help?
comparing and evaluating theories of helping |
- Each proposes two types of prosocial behavior - a tit-for-tat reciprocal exchange and a more unconditional helpfulness.
- The argument that behavior occurs because of its survival function is hard to disprove. |
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why do we help?
genuine altruism |
- Are such anonymous benefactors - along with lifesaving heoroes, blood donors, and Peace Corps volunteers - ever motivated by an ultimate goal of selfess concenr for thoers? Or is their ultimate goal solely some form of self-benefit, such as gaining a reward, avoiding punishment and guilt, or relieving distress?
- Our willingness to help is influence by both self-serving and selfess considerations. - But especially when we feel securely attached to someone, we feel empathy. -- Empathy - the vicarious experience of another's feelings, putting oneself in another's shoes. - We also feel empathy for those with whom we identify. - When we feel empathy, we focus not so much on our own distress as on the sufferer. - Genuine sympathy and compassion motivate us to help others for their own sakes. - In humans, such empathy comes naturally. - To some this suggests that humans are hardwired for empathy. Primates also display empathy, indicating that the building blocks of altruism predate humanity. - Often distress and empathy together motivate responses to a crisis - With their empathy aroused, people usually helped. Is this genuine altrusim? Doubt it. - Feeling empathy for a sufferer makes one sad, they noted. - They led people to believe that their sadness was going to be relieved by a different sort of mood-boosting experience. Under such conditions, people who felt empathy were not especially helpful. - If we feel empathy but know that something else will make us feel better, we aren't so likely to help. - No experiment rules out all possible egoistic explanations for helpfulness. - other findings suggest that genuine altruism does exist - with their empathy aroused, people will help even when they believe no one will know about their helping. - Their concern continues until someone has been helped. - If their efforts to help are unsuccessful, they feel bad even if failure is not their fault. - And people will sometimes persist in wanting to help a suffering person even when they believe their own distressed mood arises from a mood-fixing drug. - Sometimes people do focus on others' welfare, not on their own. - Genuine empathy-induced altruism is a part of human nature. - During Vietnam, 63 soldier received Medals of Honor for using their bodies to shield their buddies from exploding devices. These soldiers had no time to reflect on the shame of cowardice or the eternal rewards of self-sacrifice. Yet something drove them to act. |
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when will we help?
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- What is shocking in these cases (where people did not help) is that 100% of those involved failed to respond.
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when will we help?
number of bystanders |
- They staged ingenious emergencies and found that a single situational factor - the presence of bystanders - greatly decreased intervention.
- Lone bystanders were more likely to help. - In internet communication too, people are more likely to respond helpfully to a request if they believe they alone have received it. - Sometimes the victim was actually less likely to get help when many people were around. - As the number of bystanders increases, any given bystander is less likely to notice the incident, less likely to interpret that incident as a problem or an emergency, and less likely to assume responsibility for taking action. |
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when will we help?
number of bystanders noticing |
- Your eyes are on the back of the pedestrians in front of you.
- Your private thoughts are on the day's events. - Would you there fore be less likely to notice the injured women than if the sidwalk were virtually deserted? - Smoke poured into the room. Solitary students noticed the smoke almost immediately. Those in groups took about 20 seconds to notice the smoke. |
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when will we help?
number of bystanders interpreting |
- Once we notice an ambiguous event, we must interpret it.
- Informational influence - each person uses others' behavior as clues to reality. Such misinterpretations can contribute to a delayed response. - Illusions of transparency - a tendency to overestimate others' abilities to read our internal states. - People facing an emergency presumed their concern was more visible than it was. More than we usually suppose, our concern or alarm is opaque. Keenly aware of our emotions, we presume they leak out and that others see right through us. Often, we keep our cool quite effectively -Pluralistic ignorance - ignorance tht others are thinking and feeling what we are. - When those working alone notice the smoke, they went to report it. - Those in groups of 3 did not move. Only 1 person among 24 reported the smoke within the first 4 minutes. - By the end of the of the 6 minute experiment, the smoke was so thick, but still in only 3 of the 8 groups did even a single person leave to report the problem - The group members, by serving as nonresponsive models, infuenced one another's interpretation of the situation. -- Bystander effect - The finding that a person is less likely to provide help when there are other bystanders. - 70% of those who were alone when they overheard the accident came into the room or called out to offer help. Among pairs of strangers confronting the emergency, only 40% of the time did either person offer help. Those who did nothing apparently interpreted the situation as a non-emergency. - As the number of people known to be aware of an emergency increases, any given person becomes less likely to help. - People's interpretations also affect their reactions to street crimes. - Assumed spouse abuse, it seems, just doesn't trigger as much intervention as stranger abuse. |
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when will we help?
number of bystanders assuming responsibility |
- Somtimes an emergency is obvious.
- But many bystanders diffused the responsibility for action. - Of those led to believe there were no other listeners 85% left their room to seek help. Of those who believed four others also overheard the victim, only 31% went for help. - They believed an emergency had occured by were undecided whether to act. - We know the others had a dramatic effect. Yet the participants almost invariably denied the influence. - We often dont know what we do what we do. - Urban dwellers are seldom alone in public places, which helps account for why city people often are less helpful than country people. - Compassion fatigue and sensory overload from encountering so many people in need further restrain helping in large cities. - The bigger and more densely populated the city, the less likely people were to help. - People in economically advanced countries tended to offer less help to strangers, and those in countries marked by aimable and agreeble sympathy (Spain, Portugal) were more helpful. - Nations, too, have often been bystanders to catastrophes. |
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when will we help?
number of bystanders revisiting research ethics |
- These experiments raise again the issue of research ethics.
- The researchers were always carefull to debrief the lab participants. - 100% said the deception was justified and that they would be willing to take part in similar experiments in the future. - None reported feeling angry at the experimenter. - The overwhelming majority of participants in such experiments say that their participation was both instructive and ethically justified. - After protecting participants' welfare, social psychologists fulfill their responsibility to society by doing such research. |
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when will we help?
helping when someone else does |
- Prosocial models do promote altruism.
- Models sometimes, however, contradict in practice what the preach. - Experiments show that children learn moral judgments both from what they hear preaches and from what they see practiced. - When exposed to hypocrites, they imitate - they say what the models says and do what the model does. |
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when will we help?
time pressures |
- People in a hurry
- A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. - Those leisurely on their way to an unimportant appointment usually stopped to help. But people seldom stopped to help if they were late for a very important date. - They simply did not take time to tune in to the person in need. - Their behavior was influenced more by context than by conviction |
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when will we help?
similarity |
- Because similarity is conducive to liking and liking is conducive to helping, we are more empathetic and helpful toward those similar to us.
- This similar bias applies to both dress and beliefs. - Fewer than half the students did the favor for those dressed differently from themselves. 2/3 did so for those dressed similarly. - No face is more familiar than one's own. In me I trust. People were more helpful in an online game to people who's pictures had their own features morphed in. - Does the similarity bias extend to race? - Few people want to appear prejudiced. - Perhaps then, people favor their own race but keep that bias a secret to preserve a positive image. - If so, the same-race bias should appear only when people can attribute failure to help to non-race factors. - White women were less willing to help a black than a white woman in distress if their responsibility coulbe de diffused among the bystanders. - When norms for appropriate behavior are well defined, whites don't discriminate; when norms are amibiguous or conflicting, racial similarity may bias responses. |
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who will help?
personality traits |
- By and large, personality tests were unable to indentify the helpers.
- Although the social context clearly influenced willingnes to help, there was no definable set of altruistic personality traits. - Attitude and trait measures seldom predict a specific act, which is what most experiments on altruism measure. But they predicted average behavior across many situations more accurately. - They have found individual differences in helpfulness and shown that those differences persis over time and are noticed by one's peers. - Some people are reliably more helpful. - Second, researchers are gathering clues to the network of traits that predispose a person to helpfulness. - Those high in positive emotionality, empathy, and self-efficacy are most likely to be concerned and helpful. - Third, personality influences how particular people ract to particular situations. - Those high in self-monitoring are attuned to others' expectation and are therefore more helpful if they think helpfulness will be socially rewarded. - Others' opinions matter less to internally guided, low-self-monitoring people. - When faced with potentially dangerous situations in which strangers need help, men more often help. - But in safer situations, women are slightly more likely to help. - The gender difference interacts with the situation. - Women respond to friend's problems with greater empathy and more time spent helping. |
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who will help?
religious faith |
- Confronted with a minor emergency, instrinsically religious people are only slightly more responsive.
- It is when making intentional choices about long-term helping that religious fath better predict altruism. - Some researchers have discerned multiple motivations for why people volunteer, etc. - Some are rooted in rewards - seeking to join a group, gain approval, enhance job prospects, reduce guilt, learn skills, or boost self-esteem. - Others help to act upon their religious or humanitarian values and concern for others. - Those religiously committed have reported volunteering more hours than have the religiously uncommitted. - It was membership in religious groups that was most closely associated with other forms of civic involvement like voting, jury duty, community projects, talking with neighbors, and giving to charity. |
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how can we increase helping?
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- One way to promote altruism is to reverse those factors that inhibit it.
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how can we increase helping?
reduce ambiguity, increase responsibility |
- Prompting people to interpret an incident correctly and to assume responsibility should increase their involvement.
- In other cases, witness heard a bystander interpret the incidenent. These comments substantially boosted reporting of the crime. - Personal appeals are much more effective - if the personal appeals come from friends. - Personalized nonverbal appeals can also be effective. - Explored ways to reduce anonymity. - Bystanders who had identified themselves to one another (age, name, etc) were more liekyl to offer aid than were anonymous bystanders. - Even a trivial momentary conversation with someone dramatically increased the person's later helpfulness. - Helpfulness also increases when one expects to meet the victim and other witness against. - She was helped most quickly by those who believed they would soon be meeting the discussants face to face. - Anything that personalizes bystanders - a personal request, eye contact, introductions, anticipation of interaction - increases willingness to help. - Personal treatment makes bystanders more self-aware and therefore more attuned to their own altruistic ideals. - Deindividuated people are less responsible - Circumstances that promote self-awareness (name tages, being watched/evaluated, undistracted quiet) should also increase helping. - Self-aware people more often put their ideals into practice. |
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how can we increase helping?
guilt and concern for self-image |
- People who feel guilty will act to reduce guilt and restore their self-worth.
- 58% of the not guilt-laden individuals shortly thereafter offered help to another experimenter. Of those not reprimanded, only 33% helped. Guilt-laden people are more helpful. - People also care about their public image - Door-in-the-face technique - A strategy for gaining a concession. After someone first turns down a large requent (the door in the face), the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable request. - Another practical way to trigger concern for self-image - ask for a contribution so small that it's hard to so no without feeling like a Scrooge. - When pervious donors are approached, bigger requests do elicit bigger donations. But with door to door solicitation, there is more success with requests for small contributions, which are dificult to turn down and still allow the person to maintain an altruistic self-image. - Labeling people as helpful can also strengthen self-image |
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how can we increase helping?
socializing atruism teaching moral inclusion |
- People who differed from them within the human circle to which their moral values and rules of justice applied.
- These people were morally inclusive. - Moral exclusion - omitting certain people and animals from one's cirlce of moral concern - has the opposite effect. It justifies all sorts of harm, from discrimination to genocide. -- Moral exclusion - The perception of certain individuals or groups as outside the boundary within which one applies moral values and rules of fairness. - Moral inclusion is regarding others as within one's circle of moral concern - It also describes restrictions in the public empathy for the human costs of war. - A first step toward socializing altruism is therefore to counter the natural ingroup bias favoring kin and tribe by broadening the range of people whose well-being concenr us. - if everyone is part of our family, then everyone has a moral claim on us. The boundaries between we and they fade. - Inviting advantaged people to put themselves in others' shoes, to imagine how they feel, also helps. |
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how can we increase helping?
socializing atruism modeling altruism |
- Seeing unresponsive bystanders makes us less likely to help.
- People reared by extremely punitive parents, as were many delinquents and chronic criminals, also show much less of the empathy and principled caring that typifies altruists. - If we see or read about someone helping, we are more likely to offer assistance. - It's better not to publicize rampant tax cheating, littering, and teend drinking, and instead to emphasize - to define a norm of - people's widspread honesty, cleanliness, and abstinence. - Perhaps norms for generosity could also be cultivated. - Their familes - and often their friends and chuches - had taught them the norm of helping and caring for others. That prosocial value orientation led them to cinlude people from other groups in their circle of moral concern and to feel responsible for others' welfare. - Do TV's positive models promote helping, much as its aggressive portrayals promote aggression? Prosocial TV models have actually had even greater effects than antisocial models. |
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how can we increase helping?
socializing atruism learning by doing |
- Just as immoral behavior fuels immoral attitudes, so helping increases future helping.
- Children and adults learn by doing. - When children act helpfully, they develop helping-related values, beliefs, and skills. - Helps also satisfies their neesd for a positive self-concept. - Helpful actions therefore promote the self-perception that one is caring and helpful, which in turn promotes further helping. |
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how can we increase helping?
socializing atruism attributing helpful behavior to altruistic motives |
- Overjustification effect - when the justification for an act is more than sufficient, the person may attribute the act to the extrinsic justification rather than to an inner motive.
- Rewarding people for doing what they would do anyways therefore undermines instrinsic motivation. -- Overjustification effect - the result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing - Although rewards undermind instrinsic motivation when they function as controlling bribes, an unanticipated compliment can make people feel competent and worthy. - To predispose people more people to help in situations where most don't, it can also pay to induce a tentaive positive commitment, from which people may infer their own helpfulness. |
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how can we increase helping?
socializing atruism learning about altruism |
- Once people understand why the presence of bystanders inhibits helping, they become more likely to help in group situations.
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
the power of persuasive eyewitnesses |
- Vivid anecdotes and personal testimonies can be powerfully persuasive, often more so than compelling but abstract information
- Those who had seen where indeed believed, even when their testimony was shown to be useless. - Later experiments revealed that discrediting may reduce somewhat the number of guilty votes. But unless contradicted by another eyewitness, a vivid eyewitness account is difficult to erase from jurors' mind. - Compared with criminal cases lacking eyewitness testimony, those that have eyewitness testimony are more likely to produce convictions. - Can't jurors spot erroneous testimony? Are inccorect eyewitnesses believed less often than those who are accurate? - As it happened, both correct and incorrect eyewitnesses were believed 80% of the ime time. - Human obervers have abosolutely no ability to discern eyewitnesses who have mistakenly identified an innocent person. - The jurors believed the witnesses more when conditions were good. But even when conditions were so poor that 2/3 of the witness had actually misidentified an innocent person, 62% of the jurors still usually believed the witnesses. - Jurors are more skeptical of eyewitnesses whose memory for trivial details is poor - though these tend to be the most accurate witness. - Those who pay attention to details are less likely to attend to the culprit's face. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
when eyes deceive |
- Sotires abound of innocent people who have wasted years in prison because of the testimony of eyewitnesses who were sincerely wrong.
- To assess the accuracy of eyewitness recollections, we need to learn theri overall ratets of hits and misses. - One way for researchers to gather such information is to stage crimes comparable to those in everyday life and then solicit eyewitness report. - Eyewitnesses are often more confident than crrect. - Of course, some witnesses are more confident than others. - It's the confident witnss whom jurors find most believable. - In the convictions overturned by DNA evidence, the eyewitnesses proved persuasive because of their great but mistaken confidence in their identifications of the perpetrator. - Intuitive confidence does correlate with accuracy when there is great variation in how long witnesses view the culprit; those who view longer are both more accurate and more confidenct. - Yet some people, right or wrong, chronically express themselves more assertively. - Errors sneak into your perceptions and our memories because our minds are not videotape machines. - People are quite good at recognizing a pictured face when late shown the same picture alongisde a new face. - Subtle differents in view, expressions, and lighting are hard for human vision to deal with. - We construct our memories based partly on what we perceive at the time and partly on our expectations, beliefs, and current knowledge. - The strong emotions that accompany witnessed crimes and traumas may further corrupt eyewitness memories. - Contrary to the popular conception that most people would never forget the fact of a clearly seen individual who had physically confronted them and threatened them fro more than 30 minutes, many were unable to correctly identify their perpetrator. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
the misinformation effect |
- Tohse who had been asked the question consistent with what they had seen were 75% correct.
- Those previously asked the misleading question were only 41% correct; more often than not, they denided seeing what they had actually seen and instead "remembered" the picture they had never seen. -- Misinformation effect - Incorporating misinformation into one's memory of the event after receiving misleading information about it. - Suggestive questions - When questioning eyewitnesses, police and attorneys commonly ask questions framed by their own understanding of what happened. So it is troubling to discover how easily witnesses incorporate misleading information into their memories, especially when they believe the questioner is well informed and when suggestive questions are repeated. - False memories feel and look like real memories. They can be persusive as real memories - convincingly sincere, yet sincerely wrong. - This is true of young children, who are especially susceptible to misinformation, as well as adults - 58% of preschoolers produced false and often detailed stories about a fictitious event. - Given such vivid stories, professional psychologists were often fooled. They could not reliably separate real from fale memories - nor could the children. - Told the incident never actually happened, some protested. - Such findings raise the possibility to false accusations. - Given suggestive interview questions, most preschoolers and many older children will produce false reports. - Even among US and UK college students, imagining childhood events lead 1/4 to recall that the imagined event actually happened. - This imagination inflation happens partyl because visualizing something activates similar areas in the brain as does actually experiencing it. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
retelling |
- Retelling events commits people to their recollection, accurate or not.
- An accurate retelling helps them later resis misleading suggestions - The more we retell a story, the more we convince ourselves of a falsehood. - Researchers had witnesses rehearse their answers to questions - doing so increased the confidence of those who were rwong. - We often adjust what we say to please our listeners. Moreover, having done so, we come to believe the altered message. - When interviewed by lawyers for the defendeant, the witnesses later gave the juge testimony that was more favorable to the defenant. - Witnesses did not omit important facts from their testimony, they just changed their tone of voice and choice of words depending on whether they thought they were witnesses for the defendeant or for hte plaintiff. - So its not only suggestive quesions that can distort eyewitness recollections but also their own retellings, which may be adjusted subtly to suit their audience. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
reducing error |
- Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement
- They include ways to (1) train police interviewers and (2) administer lineups |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
reducing error train police interviewers |
- Following an open ended beginning (tell me what you recall), the detectives would occasionally interrupt with follow-up questions, including questions eliciting terse answer (how tall was he?)
- The guide instructs interviewers to begin by allowing eyewitnesses to offer their own unpromprted recollections. - The recollections will be most complete if the interviewer jogs the memory by first guiding people to reconstruct the setting. - Have them visualize the scene and what they were thinking and feeling at the time. - Even showing picture of the setting can promote accurate recall. - The interview then jogs their memory with evocative questions (was ther anything unsual about hte voice/appearance/clothing?) - This cognitive interview substantially increases details recalled, with no loss in accuracy. - The FBI now includes the procedue in its training program. - Interviewers on memory reconnaissance missions must be careful to keep their questions free of hidden assumptions. - Flooding eyewitnesses with an array of mug shots also reduces accuracy in later identifying the culprit. - Errors are especially made when the witness has to stop, think, and analytically compare the faces. - Witness who help build a face composite later have more difficulting indentifying the actual face from a lineup. Verbally describing a suspect's face also disrupts later recognition of it from a photographic lineup - Some researchers think this verbal overshadowing occure because one's memory for the face accommodates the verbal depiction; others believe that the word-based description replaces the unconscious perception or makes it inaccessible. - Accurate identifications tend to automatic and effortless. The right face just pops out. -Studies confirm that quicker idenfications are generally more accurate. - Younger eyewitnesses, and those who had viewed the culprit for more than a minute, were also more accurate than older eyewitnesses and those who had less than a minutes exposure. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
reducing error minimize false lineup identifications |
- One way to reduce misidentifications is to remind the witnesses that the person they saw may or may not be in the lineup.
- Alternatively, give eyewitnesses a blank lineup that contains no suspects and screen out those who make false identifications. Those who do not make such errors turn out to be more accurate when they later face the actual lineup. - Mistakes also subside when witnesses simply make individual yes or no judgments in response to a sequence of people. - A simultaneous lineup tempts people to pick the person who, among the lineup members, most resembles the perpetrator. - Witnesses viewing just one suspect at a time are less likely to make false indentifications. If witnesses view a group of photos or people simultaneously, they are more likely to choose whoever most resembles the culprit. -With a sequential lineup, eyewitnesses compare each person their their momry of the culprit and make an absolute decision - match or no match. - Police lineups are more like good experiements. They contain a control group. They have an experimenter who is blind to the hypothesis. Questions are scripted and neutral, so they don't subtly demand a particular response. And they prohibt confidence-inflating post-lineup comments prior to trail testimony. - Such procedures greatly reduce the natural human confirmation bias. - Lineups can also now be effectively administered by computers. - Procedures such as double-blind testing are still uncommon in criminal procedures. - An eyewtiness who consistently identified the same suspect, by face/body/voice, was nearly always an accurate eyewitness. |
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how reliable is eyewitness testimony
reducing error educate jurors |
- Jurors fail to fully appreciate most of these factors, all of which are known to influence eyewitness testimony.
- To educate jurors, experts now are asked frequently to testify about eyewitness testimony. Their aim is to offer jurors this sort of information to help them evaluate the testimony of both prosecution and defense witnesses. - When taught the conditions under which eyewitnesses accounts are trustworthy, jurors became more discerning. |
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what other factors influence juror judgments?
the defendant's characteristics |
- Jurors seldom convict a person they like or acquit a person they dislike. They main job of the trial lawyer is to make a jury like the defendant.
- This case is overstated. - The evidence usually is clear enough that jurors can set aside their biases, focus on the fact, and agree on a verdict. Facts do matter. - When jurors are asked to make social judgments - would this defendent intentionally commit this offense - facts are not all that matter. - Communicators are more presuasive if they seem credible and attractive. Jurrors cannot help forming impressions of the defendant. - It seems that some cultural bias still linger. But actual cases vary in so many ways, that it's hard to isolate the facotrs that influence jurors. |
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what other factors influence juror judgments?
the defendant's characteristics physical attractiveness |
- Beautiful people seem like good people.
- They judged the more attractive as less guilty and recommended that person for lesser punishment. - When the evidence is meager or ambigious, justice is not blind to a defendant's looks. - Baby-faced adults seemed more naive and were found guilt more often of crimes of mere negligence but less often of intentional crimes. - If convicted, unattractive people also strike people as more dangerous, especially if they are sexual offenders. - The judge sets higher bails and fines for less attractive defendents. |
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what other factors influence juror judgments?
the defendant's characteristics similarity to the jurors |
- Other factors that influence liking should also matter.
- Likeness (similarity) leads to liking. - When people pretend they are jurors, they are indeed more sympathetic to a defenent who shares their attitudes, religion, race, or gender. - Juror racial bias is usually small, but jurors do exhibit some tendency to treat racial outgroups less favorably. - Blacks are overpunished as defendants or undervalued as victims or both. - So it seems we are more sympathetic toward a defendent with whom we can indentify. If we think we wouldn't have committed that criminal act, we may assume that someone like us is also unlikely to have done it. - Ideally, jurors would leace their biases outside the courtroom and begin a trial with open minds. - When the evidence is clear and individuals focus on it (as when they reread and debate the meaning of testimony) their biases are indeed minimal. The quality of evidence matters more than the prejudices of the individual jurors. |
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what other factors influence juror judgments?
the judge's instructions |
- Nearly all states in US have rape shield status that prohibit or limit testimony about the victim's prior sexual activity. Such testimony, though irrelevant to the case at hand, tends to make jurors more sympathetic to the accused rapist's claim that the woman consented to sexual relations.
- If such reliable, illegal or prejudicial testimony is neverthless slipped in by the defense or blurted out by a witness, will jurors follow a judge's orders to ignore it? - Very possbily not. Sometimes it is hard for jurors to ignore inadmissible evidence. - A judge's order to ignore testimony can even boomerang, adding to the testimony's impact. Perhaps such statements create reactance in jurors. Or perhaps they sensitize jurors to the inadmissible testimony. -- Reactance - A motive to pretect or restore one's sense of freedom. Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action. - Judges can more easily strike inadmissable testimony from the court records than from the juror's minds. - This is especially so with emotional information. When jurors are told vivdly about a defendant's record, a judge's instructions to ignore are more likely to boomerang than when the inadmissable information is less emotional. - Even if jurors later claim to have ignored the inadmissable information, it may alter how they construe other information. - Pretrial publicity also is hard for jurors to ignore, especially in studies with real jurors and serious crimes. - In an experiment, they either did or did not hear the judge's instructions to disregard the pretrial publicity. The effect of the judicial admonition was nil. People whose opinions are biased by such publicity typically deny its effect on them, and that denial makes it hard to eliminate biased jurors. - To minimize the effects of inadmissable testimony, judges can also forewarn jurors that certain types of evidence are irrelevant. Once jurors form impressions based on such evidence, a judge's admonitions have much less effect. - A pretrial training session pays dividends. Teaching jurors legal procedures and standards of proof improves their understanding of the trial procedure and their willingness to withhold judgment until after they have heard all the trial information. - Judges could cut inadmissable testimony before the jurors hear it - by videotaping testimonies and removing the inadmissible parts. Live and videotaped testimonies have the much the same impact as do live and videotaped lineups. - Critics object that the procedure prevents jurors from observing how the defendant and others react to the witness. Proponents argue that videotaping not only enables the judge to edit out inadmissible testimony, but also speeds up the trial and allows witnesses to talk about crucial events before memories fade. |
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what other factors influence juror judgments?
additional factors |
- Does a severe potential punishment (death penalty) make jurors less willing to convict? Yes.
- Do experienced jurors' judgments differ from those of novice jurors? Yes. - Are defendants judged more harshly when the victim is attractive or has suffered greatly? Yes. - Jurors' judgments of blame and punishment can be affect by the victim's characteristics - even when the defendent is unaware of such. |
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what influences the individual juror?
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- No juror is the average juror - each carries into the courthouse individual attitudes and personalities.
- And when they deliberate, jurors influence one another. - Two key questions are (1) how are verdicts influenced by individual jurors' dispositions and (2) how are verdicts influence by jurors' group deliberation? |
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what influences the individual juror?
juror comprehension |
- Jurors are best persuaded when attorneys present evidence in narrative fashion - a story.
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what influences the individual juror?
juror comprehension understanding instructions |
- The jurors must grasp the judge's instructions concerning the available verdict categories.
- For those instructions to be effective, jurors must first understand them. Study after study has found that many people do not understand the standard legalese of judicial instructions. - A judge may also remind jurors to avoid premature conclusions as they weigh each new item of presented evidence. However, human beings do form premature opinions and those leanings do influence how they interpret new information |
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what influences the individual juror?
juror comprehension understanding statistical information |
- Even when people (including experienced trial judges) understand naked statistical probabilities, they may be unpersuaded.
- Naked numbers must be supported by a convincing story. |
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what influences the individual juror?
juror comprehension increasing jurors' understanding |
- Understanding how jurors miscontrue judicial instructions and statistical information is a first step toward better decisions.
- A next step might be giving jurors access to transcripts rather than forcing them to rely on their memories in processing complex information. - A further step would be devising and testing clearer, more effective ways to present information. - There must be a simpler way to tell jurors not to impose the death sentence in murder cases when there are justifying circumstances. - When jurors are given instructions rewritten into simple language, they are less susceptible to the judge's biases. - Legal instructions are typically delivered in a manner likely to frustrate the most conscientious attemps at understand. The language is technical and no attempt is made either to assess jurors' mistaken preconceptions about the law or to provide any kind of useful education. |
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what influences the individual juror?
jury selection |
- Can trial lawyers use the jury selection process to stack juries in their favor?
- Consultants help lawyers pick juries and plot strategy. - In several celebrated trials, survey researchers have used scientific jury selection to help attorneys weed out those likely to be unsympathetic. - Many trial attorneys have now used scietific jury selection to indentify questions they can use to exclude those biased against their clients, and most report satisfaction with the results. - Individuals react differently to specific features of a case. - Despite the ecitment and ethical concern about scientific jury selection, experiments reveal that attitudes and personal characteristics don't always predict verdicts. There are no magic questions to be asked of prospective jurors, not even a guarantee that a particular survey will detect useful attitude-behavior or personality-behavior relationships. - The studies are unanimous in showing that evidence is a substantially more potent determination of jurors' verdicts than the individual characteristics of the jurors. - In courtrooms, jurors' public pledge of fairness and the judge's instruction to be fair strongly commit most jurors to the norm of fairness. - In experiments, it's when the evidence is ambiguous that jurors' personalities and general attitudes have an effect. - Still, variations in the situation, especially in the evidence, are what matter most. - What this implies about human behavior, on juries or off, is that we are unique individuals, our differences vastly overshadowed by our similarities. Moreover, the range of situations we are likely to encounter is far more varied than the range of human beings who will encounter them. - So, jurors' personalities and attitudes matter, but the trial situations matter more. |
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what influences the individual juror?
death-qualified jurors |
- A clos case can, however, be decided by who is selected for the jury.
- The people who do not oppose the death penalty are more prone to favor the prosecution. - Death-qualified jurors are more concerned with crime control and less concerned with due process of law. - When a court dismesses potential jurors who have moral scruples against the death penalty, it constructs a jury that is more likely to vote guilty. - Defendants in captial-punishment cases do assume the extra handicap of juries predisposed to find them guilty. Conviction-prone jurors tens also to be more authoritarian - more rigid, more punitive, closed to mitigating circumstances, and contemptuous of those of lower status. - 1986 - US Supreme Court overturned a lower-court ruling that death-qualified jurors are a biased sample. - The solution is to convene separate juries to (1) decide guilt in capital murder cases and, given a guilty verdict, to (2) hear additional evidence on factors motivating the murder and to decide between death or imprisonment. - Deeper issue: whether the death penalty itself falls under the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. - Homicide rates have not dropped when states have initiated the death penalty, and they have no risen whe nstates have abolished it. - The death penalty is applied inconsistently. And it is applied more often with poor defendents. |
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how do group influences affect juries?
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- Chances are that about 2/3 that the jurors will not initially agree on a verdict.
- After discussion, 95% emerge with a consensus. - Obviously, group influence has occured. - The law prohibits observation of actual juries. So researches simulate the jury process. - Will some mathematical combination of initial decisions predict the final group decision? Some researchers found that the scheme that predicts best varies according to the nature of the case. - But in several cases, a 2/3s majority scheme fared best - the group verdict was usually the alternative favored by at least 2/3 of the jurors at the outset - Without such a majority, a hung jury was likely. - 9/10 reached the verdict favored by the majority on the first ballot. |
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how do group influences affect juries?
minority influence |
- Seldom, yet sometimes, what was initially a minority opinion prevails.
- A typical 12-person jury is like a college class - the three quiestest people rarely talk and the three most vocal people contribute more than half the talking. - From the research of minority influence, we know that jurors in the minority will be most persuasive when they are consistent, persistent, and self-confident. - This is especially so if they can begin to trigger some defenctions from the majority |
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how do group influences affect juries?
group polarization |
- Jury deliberation shifts people's opinions in other intriguing ways as well.
- Deliberation often magnifies initial sentiments. - By contrast, group diversity often moderates judgments. - Through deliberation, their intial leaning had grown stronger. |
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how do group influences affect juries?
leniency |
- Especially when the evidence is not highly incriminating, deliberating jurors often become more lenient. This qualifies the 2/3s majority rules finding, for if even a bare majority initially favors acquittal, it usually will prevail.
- Moreover, a minority that favors acquittal stamd a better chance of prevail than one that favors conviction. - Those cases where the minority does not prevail, it usually shifts to acquittal. - The "innocent unless proved guilty" and "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" rules put the burden of proof on those who favor conviction. Perhaps this makes evidence of the defendant's innocence more persuasive. Or perhaps normative influence creates the leniency effect, as jurors who view themselves as fair-minded confront other jurors who are even more concerned with protecting a possibly innocent defendant. |
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how do group influences affect juries?
are twelve heads better than one? |
- Jurors exert normative pressure by trying to shift others' judgments by the sheer weight of their own.
- Groups recall information from a trial better than do their individual members. - Deliberation also tends to cancel out certain biases and draws jurors' attention away frm their own prejudgments and to hte evidence. - 12 > 1 |
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how do group influences affect juries?
are six heads as good as twelve |
- In civil cases and state criminal not potentially involving a dealth penalty, courts coule use 6-person juries. Moreover, the Court affirmed a state's right to allow less than unanimous verdicts.
- The Court's assumptions triggered an avalanche of criticism - Smaller juries may be less likely to reflect a community's diversity. - Resisting group pressure is far more difficult for a minority of one than for a minority of two. - Larger juries are more likely than smaller juries to contain members of minority groups, more accurately recall trial testimony, give more time to deliberation, hang more often, and appear more likely to reach a "correct" verdict. |
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how do group influences affect juries?
from lab to life: simluation and real juries |
- Some have asked their participants, who sometimes are drawn from actual juror pools, to view enactments of actual trials.
- Court debated the usefulness of jury research in its decision regarding the used of dealth-qualified jurors in capital punishment cases. Defendants have a constituional right to a fair trial and an impartial jury whose compsition is not biased toward the prosecution. The dissenting judges argued that this right is violated when jurors include only those who accept the death penalty. - No one contends that the simplified world of the jury experiment mirros the complex world of the real courtroom. Rather, the experiments help us formulate theories with which we interpret the complex world. |
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the future
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- Increasing population and increasing consumption have combined to overshoot the earth's ecological carrying capacity.
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an environmental call to action
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- Cars burn gasoline. This combustion, along with the burning of coal and oil to generate electricity and heat buildings, produces an excess of carbon dioxide, which - along with other greenhouse gases from agricultural and industrial sources - contributes to global warming.
- There is now strong evidence that global warming is occurring. The threat of climate change is clear and increasing. - With the changing climate, hurricanes and heat waves, droughts and floods are becoming are common. - Global warming is causing not only climate change itself but also environmental destruction. Trees and shrubs are invading the North American tundra, crowding out tundra species. Similarly, plants and animals are gradually migrating toward the poles and toward higher elevations, interfering with polar and alpine ecosystems. Semiarid agricultural and grazing lands, notably those in sub-Saharan Africa, are gradually turning into desert. - Ecosystems around the world are in danger because of human exploitation. As the earth's population increases, the demand increases for resources. - With desforestation come soil erosion, diminished absoprtion of greenhouse gases, greater extremes of rainfall and temperature resulting in periodic floods and droughts, and the devastation of many animal species. - Because of overfishing, stocks of wild salmon, Atlantic cod, haddock, herring, and other species have suffered major depletion - The earth cannot indefinitely support developed countries' current rate of consumption, much less the projected increase in comsumption as less-developed countries attain higher living standards. - With global warming occurring, and with most scientists saying it results primarily from human-produced greenhouse gases... |
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enabling sustainable living
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- Those more optimistic about the future see two routes to sustainable lifestyles (1) increasing technological efficiency and agricultural productivity and (2) moderating consumption and decreasing population.
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enabling sustainable living
new technologies |
- One component in a sustainable future is improved eco-technologies.
- Given the speed of innovation, the future will surely bring solutions that we aren't yet imagining. The future will bring increased material well-being for more people requiring many fewer raw material and creating much less polluting waste. |
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enabling sustainable living
reducing consumption |
- The second component of sustainable future is the control of consumption.
- The US and other developed countries must consume less. - Thanks to family planning efforts, the world's population growth rate has decelerated, especially in developed nations. Even in less-developed nations, birth rates have fallen. - Given that humans have already overshot the earth's carrying capacity, consumption must also moderate. - What can be done to moderate consumption by those who can afford to overconsume? - One way is through public policies that harness the motivating power of incentives. - Encouraging alternatives to cars. Reward carpooling and penalize driving solo. Hybrid cars are eligible for tax rebates. Allow hybrid drivers to use carpool lanes without passengers. - Tax people not on what the earn but on what they spend - which is their earnings minues their savings and their charity. The tax could be made progressive with ample exemptions for dependents and high tax rates for hte big spenders. Frank argues that a progressive consumption tax promises to moderate consumption. Such a tax would encourage savings and investment while increasing the price on nonessential luxury goods. - Public policy could also give business and industry more incentives for conserving and penalties for consuming - ex: mandatory greenhouse-gas reporting system and increased regulations for carbon storage. - The Stakeholder Alliance analyzes the true cost of private buisnesses including factors such as resources depleted, pollution generated, and workplace injuries; it advocates using those factors to make corporations accountable. - Support for such polices will require a shift in public consciousness. - Perhaps social psychology can help point the way to greater well-being by documenting materialism by informing people that economic growth does not automatically improve human morale, and by helping people understand why materialism and money fail to satisfy. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
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- There is a connection between wealth and well-being.
- Cycle of work and spend - working more to buy more. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
increased materialism |
- Materialism has surged.
- Today's American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness. - Materialism was up, spirituality was down - the need to be very well of financially rose while the need to develop a meaninful philosophy on life went down. - Among 19 listed objectives, new American collegians in most recent years have ranked becoming "very well off financially" number 1. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
wealth and well-being |
- We can observe the traffic between wealth and well-being by asking if rich nations are happier.
- There is some correlation between national wealth and well-being (measured as self-reported happiness and life satisfaction) - Once nations reached about $10,000 GNP per person, higher levels of national wealth were not predictive of increased well-being - We can ask whether within any given nation, rich people are happier. - In poor countries - where low income threatens basic needs - being relatively well-off does predict greater well-being. - In affluent countries, where most can afford life's necessities, affluence still matters - partly because people with more money pereceive more control over their lives. - But compared with poor countries, income matters. - Once a comfortable income level is reached, more and more money produces diminishing long-term returns. - The income-happiness correlation is suprisingly weak. - We can ask whether over time a culture's happiness rises with its affluence. - So, believing that it's very important to ve very well-off financially and having become better off financially, are today's americans happier? They are not. - Twice as rich and apparently no happier. - We might call this soaring wealth and shrinking spirit the American paradox. - We excel at making a living but often fail at making a life. - Our becoming much better-off over the last five decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being. - Economic growth has provided no apparent boost to human morale |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
materialism fails to satisfy |
- It is striking that economic growth in affluent countries has failed to satisfy. It is further striking that individuals who strive most for wealth tend to live with lower well-being.
- Seek extrinsic goals - wealth, beauty, popularity - and you may find anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic ills. - Those who instead strive for instrinsic goals such as intimacy, personal growth, and contribution to the community experience a higher quality of life. - People who identify themselves with expensive possessions experience fewer positive moods. - The challenge for healthy nations, then, is to foster improving standards of living without encouraging a materialism and consumerism that displaces the deep need to belong. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
materialism fails to satisfy our human capacity for adaptation |
- The adaptation level phenomenon is our tendency to judge our experience relative to the neutral level defined by our prior experience.
- We adjust our neutral levels on the basis of our experience. - We then notice and react to up or down changes from those level.ss -- Adaptation-level phenonmenon - the tendency to adapt to a given level of stimulation and thus to notice and react to changes from that level - Thus, as our achievements rise above past levels, we feel successful and satisfied. - Before long, however, we adapt. What once felt good comes to register as neutral, and what formerly was neutral now feels like deprivation. - We generally underestimate our adaptive capacity. People have difficulty predicting the intensity and during of their future positive and negative emotions, a phenomenon called impact bias. - The elation from getting what we want evaporated more quickly than we expect. - We also sometimes miswant. - The best things in life are not things. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
materialism fails to satisfy our wanting to compare |
- Much of life revolves around social comparison.
- Happiness is relative to our comparisons with others, especially with others within our own groups. - Whether we feel good or bad depends on whom we're comparing ourselves with. - Our poverty became a reality. Not because of our having less, but by our neighbors having more. - Further feeding our luxury fever is the tendency to compare upward - as we climb the ladder of success or affluence, we mostly compare ourselves with peers who are at or above our current level, not with those who have less. - The US rich-poor gap has grown. This helps explain why rising affluence has not produced increased happiness. Rising income inequality makes for more people who have rich neighbors. - The adaptation-level and social comparison phenomenon give us pause. They imply that the quest for happiness through material achievement requires continually expanding affluence. - But the good news is that adaptation to simpler lives can also happen. If we shrink our consumption by choice or by necessity, we will intially feel a pinch, but it will pass. - Thanks to our capacity to adapt and to adjust comparisons, the emotional impact of siginicant life events dissipates sooner than most people suppose. |
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the social psychology of materialism and wealth
toward sustainability and survival |
- As individuals and as a global society, we face difficult social and political issues.
- A shift to postmaterialist values will gain momentum as people, governments, and corporations take these steps. - Face the implications of population and consumption growth for pulltion, climate change, and environmental destruction - Realize that materialist values make for less happy lives. - Identify and promote the things in life that matter more than economic growth. - These insights also come from experiments that lower people's comparison standard and thereby cool luxury fever and renew contentment. - Realizing that others have it worse helps us count our blessings. - Downward social comparison facilitates contentment. - If materialism does not enhance life quality what does? - Close, supportive relationships - Faith communities - Positive thinking habits - Flow - Those things that make for the genuinely good life are enduringly sustainable. |
