UofC PSYC 447 Ch1

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Chapter 1

Social Psychologists and Thinking


about People

Various Images of the Human Social


Individual that have Informed and
Guided Research
Understanding People
Not just social situations

Underlying research are broad assumptions


about what types of creatures people are
Well cover several implicit images of human
kind
Several of these images lean heavily to either
cognition (cold) or motivation (hot)
Think of these as heuristics
Begin with hot models

The Consistency Seeker


People are motivated to seek consistency
Dominant view of the late 50s and 60s and has
remained influential
Emphasizes motivated cognition, or motivations about
cognitions
Consistency is something cognitive, but early emphasis
was in peoples motivated strivings to attain and sustain
it
E.g. cognitive dissonance

People go about their business until some


inconsistency is encountered, which is disturbing and
sets off efforts to restore consistency
Motivations and emotions are associated with

The Consistency Seeker


Early pure forms saw people as interested in
consistency much of the time and constantly alert
for inconsistencies
In later forms it emerged that people are not all that
consistent; people have lots of thoughts, memories,
and behaviours, and it would be laborious to always
test for inconsistencies
People do not really worry much about inconsistency
unless it becomes an issue
E.g., When they find themselves doing something that is
strikingly inconsistent, with what they have said, thought,
or done before
The situation must emphasize the inconsistency to set off
the motivation to reduce inconsistency

The Self-Esteem
Maximizer

People seek to protect and possibly increase their selfesteem


At first, was related to dissonance theory: dissonance
motivation as centred around maintaining a favourable
view of the self, b/c being inconsistent made you look
bad
However, soon went beyond attitude dynamics and
dissonance reduction
Motivation to maintain self-esteem was seen as driving
task performance and responses to failure, interpersonal
strategies, defensive cognitive styles, stress, emotion,
risk taking

Seeks above all to avoid losing self-esteem


Anything that depicts the self in a bad light is and could

The Self-Esteem
Maximizer
The urge to enhance
your favourable view of self is not
apparent in all versions
More controversial than the urge to lose self-esteem
Reflects the influence of the consistency seeker image: to
raise your self-esteem, is to change your view of yourself
and thus is a form of inconsistency
E.g., Self-verification theory

Alive and well in social psych today


Few dispute that people are sensitive to criticism, enjoy
thinking well of themselves, and will adjust their
behaviour and mental processes to sustain a favourable
image of self

Research on on relationships has added another


dimension
People also want to to believe that their close
relationships are good

The Terror Manager


Terror Management Theory
Humans are unique among living things in knowing they
will eventually die
Behaviour understood as a motivated response to the
fear of death
Fear of death is the master motive that underlies most
human strivings
The avoidance of reminders of human morality is the
central, overriding fact of human life
By building self-esteem people can presumably obliterate
thoughts and fears of death
Self-esteem is an artificial defense mechanism that helps
people forget about death
Culture is created to shield people from the awareness of
death
People who are reminded of death increase their
support for their culture

The Information Seeker


Turn now to the colder (i.e., cognitive) images of
humankind
Emphasize thinking and processing information as the
paramount human activity instead of motivation

Assumes that it is important and helpful for people to


understand their worlds, and so they constantly go
about trying to collect info
Beneficial to predict events in physical surroundings and
social surroundings
Includes learning and making inferences about other
people as well as about social situations and social
structures

Also interested in gaining info about themselves


To navigate through life effectively, it is helpful and
useful to know as much as possible about both yourself

The Information Seeker


The central assumptions was that whenever something
happens you pass a test, get rejected
by a romantic partner, meet someone new you
respond by trying to determine what it means and
what its implications are
Attribution theory took this approach

At its essence is curiosity, but people are more curious


about some things and not others, hence the simplest
version that people seek any and all info is not upheld
by most as the correct model
The motivated info seeker combines the basic
cognitive, curious avid learning with the understanding
that most individuals have preferences for what to
learn
We prefer to hear favourable rather than unfavourable

The Information Processor


The simple view of humans as Info Seekers gave way
to the
realization that info was not simply
taken in but was subjected to extensive processing
A result of the cognitive revolution the info seeker was
updated

Recognizes that considerable inner mental work


occurred when info is first encountered; the process
involves selective attention, extensive and fallible
interpretation processes, partial encoding into memory
and at best modestly reliable retrieval from memory,
assimilation of new info to existing knowledge, mental
shortcuts
Became a useful heuristic more than something most
social psychologists regard as an adequate image of
the human individual

The Foolish Mistake Maker


A variation of the Info Processor, redefining it as
someone
who processes info badly
(false conclusions and errors)
Showing that people do foolish, self-destructive, or
irrational things, possibly for surprising, intuitively
disturbing reasons, was sought
Hence one important theme throughout the history of
social psych has been to characterize the thoughts and
actions of ordinary persons as stupid, biased, and
counterproductive
The cognitive miser one aspect of the foolish mistake
maker
B/c people do not like to exert mental effort, they do as
little as possible

The Nondifferent Individual, or the Situational


Responder
The battle b/w personality and and social psychologists
lead to the downplay of individual differences
The view that people are pretty much all the same
The underlying theory is that behaviour is primarily a
response to situations
How people think, feel, and act is a direct result of
situational pressures and influences, and there is not a
great deal inside people, other than mechanisms to help
them respond to their immediate situation

Today, most psychologists recognize that both


personality traits and situational
factors contribute
important
insights to predicting and understanding
human behaviour

The Impression Manager


Related to the Nondifferent Individual is the idea that
people
try to present themselves to others in
ways that make good
impressions
Not much personal depth (values and commitments), but
simply have the inner processes that enable them to
adapt to the situation

Cares greatly about what others think, and so in that


sense the theory has a strong motivational component,
but other motivations were relegated to background
status
Like a chameleon, changing colours to suit the situation
In other versions, the person has a simple set of basic
motivational drives and uses impression management to
attain theses goals

Does not come equipped with an extensive set of inner

The Impression Manager


As a general model of human nature, it has largely
gone out
of fashion
It is not clear if many social psychologists really
believed that people went through life trying to make
good impressions, without caring what form that
impression took
Theorists soon came to believe that there were
powerful inner forces and processes at stake
Rather than simply presenting themselves in whatever
way made a good impression, people carefully selected
their public behaviours so as to claim identities for
themselves and establish themselves in others minds
the way they themselves wanted to be seen, or at best
compromised b/w presenting themselves according to
their own inner values and what the clear preferences of
the audience were

The Naturally Selected Animal


Influenced by biological, and evolutionary thinking
Prior to this conceptualization social psychologists
explained that
human behaviour was the result of
immediate situational factors and several types of
long-term influences (socialization processes, such as
school, media, parental influences; Freudian processes,
such as unconscious motivations and the result of
childhood experiences; and reinforcement history)
They all treated the newborn as largely blank slate, and
the idea that people were born with innate behavioural
tendencies was not widely respected

Regarded human beings as simply another species of


animals, and as such consider human social behaviour
to be the result of the same evolutionary forces that
shaped human behaviour among animals

The Naturally Selected Animal


Is seen as basically similar to many other animals,
although
perhaps a bit more complicated in
the view of its intelligence,
invention of
language, and mastery of technology (but, the same
basic principles apply)
Wants to survive and reproduce
Many behaviour patterns have become divorced from
their overt connection to survival and reproduction but
remain in place b/c they contribute to survival and
reproduction in the past
E.g., Sexual desire

Purists among evolutionary psychologists insist that


reproduction is the key to natural selection
Has called attention to difference b/w men and women
The Naturally Selected Animal theory could be elaborated

The Naturally Selected Animal


However, offers more than an explanation for sexual
behaviour
It favours relatives over strangers, forms groups easily,
and is interested in dominance (rising to the top of a
group hierarchy)
Social psychologists began to realize that evolutionary
theory could offer a basis for explaining the majority of
human behaviour, although proving those explanations
are correct is often difficult

Created arguments with those interested in culture


Nurture versus nature debate or socialization versus
evolution
The argument is put in terms of the length of a leash
The assumption is that evolution shaped people to behave
in certain ways but left a certain degree of flexibility for

The Cultural Animal


An attempt to accept the fundamental fact that the
human psyche was shaped by evolution
but also to recognize the importance of culture
The core idea is that the human mind was created by
nature, but culture is humankinds biological strategy
Nature selected in favour of traits that facilitated survival
and reproduction and the humans species used culture
as its method of solving these problems
Cultures is basically a system that helps groups live
together
Culture is learned behaviour that is transmitted through
the group, and so the prominent features of human
psychology are designed to help us participate in these
group systems

The Cultural Animal


Thus, crucially, the traits that set humans apart form
other animals are based on adaptations
to make human social life, including culture, possible
E.g., groups function best if people perform roles in an
interlocking system, so humans have selves that can
take on and juggle multiple roles
Groups need people to adjust to the rules and standards of
the group, so humans are good at self-regulation
Morality is a set of rules created to overcome selfishness
and benefit the group
Groups benefit from loyalty and stable relationships, so
humans have a need to belong
Cultural groups require shared understandings, so people
have empathy and theory of mind (i.e., the mental capacity
to appreciate the inner states of others

The Cultural Animal


Rejects the leash metaphor
The leash argument assumes that nature came first,
laying the foundations for human behaviour, and culture
followed after the evolutionary process was done
Instead, culture influenced evolution this does not
require that specific cultural practices were produced by
evolution, but rather that culture became part of the
selection environment, so that traits favourable to
culture developed
E.g., following the emergence of human language in the
social environment, people who were better able to talk and
understand speech became more successful at surviving
and reproducing

In short, instead of natural evolution preceding culture,


human biology and culture coevolved
The other difference is one of emphasis
The Naturally Selected animal explanations focus on how

The Group Member


Several varieties of the image, but all have in common
the
view that the single person is seen as
a member of the group
Most prevalent theme involves some loss of individuality
within the group
Usually the consequences are seen as bad the group
member can become deindividuated, may engage in
group think, and might even participate in mob
violence
These negative effects reveal the group aspect of the
Foolish Decision Maker (assumption that people
degenerate into inferior creatures by virtue of belonging
to groups social loafing, crowding, social facilitation,
and diffusion of responsibility in bystander intervention)

Motivations differ depending on what approach is


taken
One approach considers processes within the group
(i.e., getting along and getting ahead, which require
ways to stand out)

The Group Member


One further variation might be the ethically or
culturally
relative person
Attention to cultural differences
The implicit view is that people are products of their
cultural environment
This view emphasizes differences b/w people not their
individual differences, as in personality psychology, but
their cultural differences

Most social psychologists are quite convinced that


racial, ethnic, and cultural differences have no genetic
basis
Hence evidence of such differences pose an implicit
challenge to evolutionary views of people as basically
the same

The Benighted Layperson


The everyday person who thinks or does socially
undesirable things
The implication is that social psychologists need to teach
this person how to be a better person, for the good of all
Has never been a dominant view b/c it requires
consensus that the job of science is to instil social values
to the public, and many balk at such an approach
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that social
psychologists do their work as a way of contributing to
the betterment of society by finding ways to change
people whom they regard as needing guidance from
experts (do they have the right?)
Someone who is prone to holding various prejudices,
especially towards women and minorities, is not
environmentally friendly, tending to waste energy, to fail
to recycle, to litter, is aggressive, unhelpful, does not
treat others properly, and also does things that are

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