This article claims that it always isn't so bad to be an introvert. The article is related to the learning outcome of conformity - groupthink.
Introverts run the world - quietly
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This is an interesting study that shows that people in leadership positions think that they are taller than they actually are.
Powerful people think they are taller than they really are, new study finds This is a good website where you can find information about new social science research:
http://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/social.php For instance, articles from yesterday show new research on the relationship between sleep deprivation and Alzheimer's disease, that memory is improved if we hold items in our hand (I suppose it is because we then are using more senses or because memory can be coded in relation to proprioception of our body), that caffeine consumption decreases risk for depression in women, that our clothes give clues of our race because of stereotyping (white men dressed as cleaners were taken for black and black people dressed as businessmen were taken for white. Last year there was a french TV documentary that featured a spoof TV show where people where told to administer what they thought were lethal electric shocks to contestants. The spoof TV show was a variation of the original Milgram experiment. Although the participants were unaware that the shocks weren´t lethal, 82 percent of the participants agreed to give a lethal shock to the other contestant. They were cheered on by the TV audience that also were unaware that everything was a spoof. Here is a link to the an article on the TV show:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8571929.stm The terror management theory is a theory that states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of death. In order to deal with and forget our mortality we create culture, on which our social identity and self esteem are built (compare with social identity theory). It is believed that we, once we become aware of our mortality are more likely to enforce religion, and our social/cultural identity. This could be an explanation why disasters and terror attacks often lead to collectivism and patriotism. It happened during the 9/11 in the United States and it also seems likely to be the case for the recent terror attack in Norway. When we are reminded of death we are more likely to appreciate life, our loved ones and the institutions on which our identity is built.
Research on terror management theory In the 1960s Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to investigate the connectedness of people in American society. His findings demonstrated that humans are rather well connected with each other. In his experiment he sent out letters to individuals without an adress (except that the person was located in Boston) to self selected participants, asking them to pass the letter along to someone who might know the person. On average, the letter reached its' destination after changing hands with 6 people.
The study will now be replicated by the use of facebook. It will be interesting to see whether social networking technology has made us more connected to each other, or if 6 degrees of separation model (on average it takes 6 people to connect from one to another) is still valid. http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-yahoo-test-six-degrees-theory-134204 One can be prejudiced even if one is a scholar in psychology, it seems:
Blogger's ugly conclusions anger some in the black community Last year I read several books by the journalist Malcolm Gladwell. Here is a short review of the books.
The Tipping point: This is probably the book by Gladwell that I like the most. Gladwell puts forward an interesting hypothesis that social behaviour spreads in the same way as biological viruses. According to him, a novel social behaviour usually originates in a small group, then spreads to other groups, often when the group grows to more than 150 people. When a group reaches 150 person limit, it tends to split into other groups, who will bring the social behaviour to other groups. This can lead to almost exponential growth of a social behaviour. Gladwell identifies three principles for social behaviour to spread: First, the social behaviour needs to be contagious or memorable; secondly, the social behaviour is being spread by just a few people: Salesmen (people who promote the behaviour), Mavens (Experts, knowledgeable people who come up with the ideas) and Connectors (people who have many social relations allowing the behaviour to spread quickly). Thirdly, the social context has a need for the behavior. Blink: In this book, Gladwell investigates the concept of intuition or snap judgment; the ability to make good decisions or judgments without thinking. Gladwell's main point of the book is that so called "thin slicing" is the explanation of snap judgments. Thin slicing is the ability to extract a pattern from a limited amount of information. Gladwell's idea is that too much information often can confuse us instead of making us wiser (this idea is related to what another author, Taleb, is putting forward in his book The Black Swan) One must be aware of, however, that even though thin slicing can be effective because it saves time during decision making, it can also lead to stereotyping. Outliers. The story of success: In this book, Gladwell discusses the strong influence of social and cultural context on success. For instance, he demonstrates how Canadian ice hockey players usually are born the first few months of a calendar year. The reason for this is because the earlier a person is born in the year, the more mature he will be during the NHL draft and thus have an advantage over the less mature (that are born later in the year). Gladwell also shows how many succesful people such as Oppenheimer and Bill Gates were successful because their opportunities. In addition, he argues that the many plane crashes of Korean air in the 1990s were due to Korean culture which emphasizes acceptance of authority and indirect communication. The pilot made the error because the co-pilot did not dare to question his authority alternatively could not communicate that the pilot was making an error with enough clarity. What the dog saw: This book is a compilation of articles that Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker. It covers a lot of interesting topics, such as several fairly unknown geniuses, the influence of social factors on phenomena such as intelligence and the menstruation cycle, late bloomers (people who had little talent initially but developed ability through hard work and time), and a criticism of criminal profiling. Malcolm Gladwell has also given an interesting tedtalk: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce In this talk, he discusses psychophysics, which is the psychological discipline that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the psychological perceptions and sensations of the physical stimuli. This research has applications in areas such as food science. When food manufacturers want to create taste sensations that are most appealing to consumers, they can use psychophysics research. Gladwell's point of the speech, however, is that there is no ideal taste of a product, because taste preference is very individual and is not distributed in a bell curve. This is the reason why there are so many varieties of products, because people prefer different types of food and tastes. Gladwell's tedtalk is a good illustration of the qualitative approach to behavior. Qualitative researchers, believe, unlike quantitative researchers, that there is no "average" behavior for a particular situation but a variety of behaviors. Thus, a qualitative approach to psychological research is to describe rather than generalize. In the speech, Gladwell also makes the point that experimental research is superior to qualitative research when it comes to taste preference, because people do not always consciously know what they desire. Here are some sources that may be useful when you are revising, primarily for altruism.
The first source is an RSA animate of a talk by Jeremy Rifkin. Jeremy Rifkin talks about how humans are biologically "soft wired" for empathy and that we can extend our empathy to others by extending our social identities to include the entire human race as well as other creatures. Rifkin claims that anti-social behavior, such as violence are secondary to our nature and are affected by sociocultural factors. His talk partly relates to biological factors for emotion - when other people are communicating their feelings, our mirror neurons create the same feelings in us. Therefore, when you are in need of help it is essential that you communicate your emotions to others as well as you can. The social identity theory (SIT) or kin selection theory may be arguments that can be used against his claim. As you all know, according to these theories, we have a tendency to "help and stick to our own kind" or our in-groups. One may ask if it our brains are capable of including all creatures on earth in our in-group in thought as well as in action. According to SIT our self identity is defined by this exclusion and inclusion of others. In his talk Jeremy Rifkin relates to research on mirror neurons. I think I showed you the first part of a documentary on mirror neurons a long time ago. Mirror neurons can be used as an example of how our biology influences our behavior as well as a biological factor influencing emotion. It is also a biological support of social learning theory. Speaking about social learning, I want to inform you that for dogs, barking and peeing with one leg lifted seems to be learned by imitation. As you might know, we taught our chihuahua Teddy not to bark and not to pee with his leg lifted (because I live in a condo and don´t want to disturb neighbors or have my walls spoiled) However, now when Teddy has seen other dogs lift their legs while peeing and heard them bark he is showing slight tendencies for these behaviors. Please do not use this last anecdote in any of your essays!!! If you are using Dan Batson´s empathy-altruism hypothesis as an empathy you may consider this article that is written by him: Empathic concern and empathy in humans It mentions a recent study by Batson where female participants read a story about Kayla who was being rehabilitated after a broken leg. Kayla was either a student, a child or a dog depending on the experimental condition. Interestingly enough, participants reported more empathic concern for the dog or the child than the student, implicating that empathic concern is more than just identification (because in that case participants who were students, should have identified more with Kayla the student) Another study than the Carol study that you all know of supporting Batson´s hypothesis is a study from 1983 where participants watched a confederate (unknowingly to participants) receiving electric shocks. They either watched him receive shocks over two trials or ten trials. After watching the trials participants had to answer questions about their emotional state. After filling out the questionnaire, participants were informed that the confederate had had a traumatic experience with electric shock during childhood and were therefore asked to take the remaining shocks in the confederate´s place. If participants had a high distress score as measured by the questionnaire they were more likely to accept the offer, supporting the view that we are more likely to help when we can empathize (which may be made possible by our mirror neurons). In regards to the "dog versus human" study I find it amusing that participants had more empathic concern for a dog than a full grown student, which may be because we a similar bonding with our pets as with our children. A study from 2003 has shown that when people pet their dogs, oxytocin is released in the dog as well as in the human. Oxytocin, which is another example of how hormones influence our behavior, is related to bonding, trust and helping behavior and is therefore a biological factor of altruism. More on oxytocin and bonding with pets can be read on this blog page (recommended to me by Chaya): Pampered pooch syndrome In regards to dispositional factors for altruism, Nicky sent me this link a long time ago: Oliner & Oliner This is the study of heroic rescuers that we have talked about in class. It may be used as an example of dispositional factors for behavior and maybe as part of an evaluation of bystander theories (even though there may be situational factors for bystanderism, some people may be less prone for bystanderism than others) The same may be used during evaluation of altruistic theories. There may of course also be social and cultural factors influencing both altruism and bystanderism. In an early presentation of altruism I mentioned the hypothesis of strong reciprocity, that states that we are more likely to help people in a group if a social norm of reciprocity and cooperation has been established. Conversely, if an egoistic norm has been established, we should be less likely to help others. We are also likely to punish those that break the social convention of helping. This behavior has been observed in humans as well as in animals. This possible "innate sense of fairness" has recently been observed in an interesting study on babies. Situational factors can also affect altruism. In one study, scientists compared survival rates of men, women and children between the sinking of Lusitania and the sinking of Titanic. The sinking went much faster for the Lusitania than the Titanic, and consequently more men and less women and children survived the Lusitania compared to the Titanic. The explanation is that because the sinking of the Titanic went so fast, men were more likely to follow their basic instinct rather than their internalized norm of allowing children and women to board the lifeboats before them. In a similar study, Dr Aguirre analyzed the records of a deadly nightclub fire and found that those who were alone in the nightclub were more likely to survive than those that were with friends or relatives (further support for SIT and kin altruism): How the men reacted as the Titanic and Lusitania Went Under Friends of mine, by the way, claim that feminism may eventually change the norm that women are to be saved before men if the lives of a group of people is at stake (as implied by the saying "women and children first"). But this is a new discussion in itself. Mr Cordray sent me an interesting article about a month ago that may interest you. It describes some new research findings that may seem a bit weird:
Social science palooza For instance, one study shows that we are more likely to break promises for those we love. This is because we are more driven by emotion than rationality when making these promises. This may be a study to consider when analyzing why relationships change (rule violations). There are also some interesting studies on emotion. Younger people are apparently better at reading emotion than older people (a factor you may consider if you write an evaluation for essays on emotion). Also, disgust seems to affect moral decisions. In one study participants were given a bitter drink and consequently more likely to register moral disgust when presented with different scenarios. Another study has demonstrated that home teams win more than away teams because the referee favors the home team while officiating. The referee is more likely to give more fouls to the away team the larger and louder the home team is. This is a classic example of conformity, and may be something you can mention if you answer a question on the topic. Speaking about conformity, a classic movie that illustrates minority influence is 12 angry men. Besides being a great movie, you can see all sorts of conformity and compliance techniques in it. Remember that consistency is the single most important factor for minority influence (some people may call it stubbornness). |
AuthorThis is my class blog for IB Psychology. Here I will publish reflections on psychology, reviews of psychology books, recommended links, lecture notes, and information on psychology topics that are not covered by the syllabus. You are free to add comments or ask me questions. Archives
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