Howdy!
Righto folks, as promised onto the next chapter. TMA03 is signed, sealed and (hopefully) delivered so it's no rest for the wicked and onto the next chapter, continuing on from chapter 6 and further dealing with the issue of perception, particularly social cognition-how we perceive ourselves, others and issues arising in the context of the social word, how we judge people around us and how we predict their behavoiur and mediate our own.
Social psychology focus on these issues. Early soc. psychs. concentrated their attentions on people's attitudes (cognitions) towards what was going on around them in their social context and how these attitudes shaped their behaviours. Fritz Heider contributed to this field by examining people's behaviour in terms of cause and effect, seeing people as 'naive psychologists', negating their behaviours based on the cause and effect of previous behaviours and the behaviours of others. See the box on pg 60 for full details of the Heider and Simmel (1944) study. This study showed how people related shapes to human behaviour, showing how people attributed behaviours based on their own experiences and attitudes.
Social Schemas.
A 'mental structure' containing information on a particular object or category. The book used the example of skinheads, but try as I might I cannot find in my head anywhere a schema about skinheads so I will use the example of models (as in Kate Moss). If we see a girl walking down the street who's 6 foot 4 inches tall, as thin as Vlada Roslyakova and with a permanent look of disinterest etched on her bony face, I would assume that she was a model. I don't actually know anything about her, but the schema in my mind which contains 'top-down' information about models would combine with the information coming in from my senses to make this assumption. This concept of schemas goes back to Bartlett (1932). Schemas contain information from various social categories, such as type of person or social activity. You only need a little bit of information to come in via the senses that may be included in a schema, as this little bit of info will be related to the schema on the whole, which is how we come to make assumptions. Using schemas (schematic processing) is an efficient way of processing info. Different types of scema include person schema (obvious), role schema (about social roles/groups) and event schema/script (social situations). Schemas contain knowledge that is broadly generalise and people tend to 'share' schemas, or have the same kind of typical information in their schemas (ir my husband and I both have a schema for going to the cinema, and they both include vast amounts of popcorn and maltesers).
Strengths:
- Filters info, saving time and valuble processing resources (see Kahneman, chapter 6)
- Simplifys things for us so we don't have to deal explicitly with the vast amounts of info coming in.
- can make the world more predictable.
Weaknesses:
- Me might have the wrong info.
- Our own biases might distort our perception of something (see Darley and Gross (1983) on page 66 for study) as we may just see what we expect to see according to our schema instead of what's really there.
- Thinking categorically in this way might exagerate the difference within and between categories.
- Creates stereotypes. For example, the afore mentioned model might be a neuclear physicist but I might assume that she's as dull as ditch water with a brain to match. However, that would be me being a bitch/jealous/all of the above. This overgeneralization is an 'inevitable consequence' of the theory od schemas.
Taking this theory further one could conclude that we have no choice in how we percieve the world (see cognitive miser model, pg 68). However, people do not always rely on this 'first impression' reaction created by schemas all the time-some go further, especially when motivated to do so. Ruscher et al. (2000) carried out a study outined on page 68 to examine this further and found that motivational relevance (how usefull someone was to someone else) played a part in how they were percieved by that person. This evidence questions the previous theory somewhat. Frisk and Taylor (see page 70) termed people as motivated tacticians, able to pick and choose their cognitive strategies to best fulfill their needs and goals. They also consider the issue of automation, these cognitive processes sush as using a schema to 'judge' someone without any conscious control and developed two levels-preconscious automaticity (no control) and goal-dependant automaticity (more control). Billig (1987) thought that 'social thinking' is more that just negotiating schemas, and involves internally debating different points of view (I think, I totally just made that last bit up but it sounds about right!).
Attribution theories.
Concerned with how we attribute (or assign) causes to people's behaviour, deciding how they behave in a certain way (and no, we're not talking about deciding that little Tom Thumb fell under a train because he was all fired up on alcopops and crunchy nut cornflakes).
Soc. psychs. are interested in why we attribute the cause that we do-why we assume that derek was late because he's lazy (the less vulture-minded agongst us may assume that his bus was late. Not me though). There are two categories of causes:
Internal/dispositional: Cause coming from 'within the person', ie laziness.
External/situational: Cause arising from outside the person, ie the bus was late.
These can be know as the locus (location, either internal or external) of causality.
Jones and Davis (1965) thought that we normally assume other's behaviours to have dispositional causes as that is what a constant factor (unlike the situation) and tells us more about the person.
Harold Kelley (1967) developed the covariation model, which assumes that we consider past behaviours and situations to assess causality, using three variables:
Consistency: How the 'action' (ie being late) varies in relation to both the 'actor' and the 'situation'.
Distinctiveness: How the action varies when the sitution (ie work) varies.
Consensus: Whether the action and the situation are constant if we change the actor (ie if it's just Derek who's a lazy bones or whether no one else can be bothered to turn up on time).
If we vary the outcomes of these variables we can then determine whether the cause is internal of external-see the table on the bottom of page 73 for more details on this.
Section three then goes on to describe vignettes (a description of a person/event/etc that allows the experimentor to have more control) and their use in experimental psychology. A study by McArthur (1972) is outlined on page 74 describing an experiment that test's Kelley's earlier covariation model. The feature here also mentions the plus side of using vignettes (in soc. psych. it allows more control and allows us to study something which we possibly wouldn't be able to look at outside of the lab), as well as the downside (low ecological validity).
Biases (a 'departure from rationality) are oftened encounted when we make judgements. Fundamental attribution error occurs because people have the tendancy to attribute the causes of other people's behaviour to internal causes, with actor/observer effect occuring due to people tending to attribute their own behaviour to external causes. Storms (1973) carried out an experiment (page 76) to look at this, concluding that there was evidence to support both of these biases. Other evidence used to support these biases is perceptual salience, which suggests that, because the actor is the focus of attention, it is natural for people to attribute causes to the actor as that is what they know more about, rather than the situation which they may not know much about. (Miller (1984) on page 77 outlines some cultural differences which occur relating to this area of study).
Another bias identified is self-serving bias, where people tend to attribute successful behaviour to internal causes and failures to external causes (lets be honest, we all do this right? I know I do anyway!! If I cock up I usually blame the mister, lol!). Lau and Russell (1980) conducted a qualitative study into self-serving bias using content analysis (click link for more info). Their study looked at two football teams after a game to see how both the winning team and the losing team attributed the causes of the outcome of the game by going through newspapers and getting their opinions as written in the press and coded their answers in order to quantify the results. One problem with content analysis is interpreting the data, as people may interpret things differently, which may lead to the researcher's subjective bias, but has a higher leel of ecological validity. Read this study on page 78-79 for more info on this. The study showed that the winning team tended to attribute their win to internal factors, but both winning and losing team used internal attributes more (for this theory, we would expect the losing team to assign more external causes). The researchers suggested that it was typical for sports teams (in the media especially, I would assume) to attribute the outcomes of their games more to internal factors, hence the outcome of this study.
Cognitive bias-suggests that self-serving bias occurs due to cognitive (information processing) bias, based on what we expect to happen.
Motivational bias-suggests that self-serving bias occurs due to our own needs, such as telling ourselves we failed the exam because the questions were ambigous rather than because we didn't study enough our are 'thick', hence preserving our self esteem. Shrauger (1975) found that people with high self esteem tended to make more self-serving attributions for their behaviour.
A main evaluation point for attributional theory is that it is assumed that people look for causal explanations in the same way a scientist would, whereas in reality it's not really like that. For example, I really couldn't give a stuff why Derek was late-what he does in his own time is his own business. Also, people might rely causes for their behaviour differently depending on the context-like the book says, Derek was hardly likely to tell his boss he couldn't get up because he had a raging hangover. Attribution theories need to go further to encompass more 'real life' situations.
Ok, that's as far as I've got on this chapter so far, it's half term week so both children are here all day meaning I am low on time!! I will finish this update in the next few days!!
Ok, I'm back after a marathon study session last night, during which I managed to finish chapter 7 and the commentary (Mr Candyflee and I then went on to drink too much Pinot and watch Blades of Glory, an instant classic which, although not quite on par with Anchorman, is still up there as one of the funniest films I've seen in ages).
Section 4 goes on to take about information processing when making judgements and judgemental biases, namely availability heuristic (click link for more info), which occurs when people make a judgement based on their own knowledge or info available in their own cognitive system. The book gives the example of murder and suicide rates in the USA-most people assume that murder is more prevalent than suicide because that's what we hear more of in the media (and is therefore more perceptually salient), although in fact suicide occurs more frequently (and in no way is that depressing ). Another bias discussed in the representativeness heuristic, which occurs when people tend to categorise something according to what it's most comparable with, ignoring other information such as probability. The example in the book about Kahneman and Tversky (1973) and Dick's vignette (there are a million jokes there but I shall resist) on page 83.
The book then goes on to talk about calibration, how accurate a person knows their judgements to be. If a person is calibrated properly, they will know exactly how accurate their judgements are. I did activity 7.2 and it turns out my calibration is way off, although to be fair I was doing the quiz and playing Guitar Hero at the same time. Fischhoff and Lichtenstein (1977) found that people in the West are over confident when predicting the acuracy of their own knowledge, although this may not necessarily be a bad thing-not so much an error as a survival mechanism, or a motivational tool.
Section 4.2 is about how people judge risks. Scientists and researchers use all sorts of calculations to using probability and what-not to calculate the risk of various things. But people making judgements about risks relating to everyday things do so in a completely different way. Psychologists look at people's beliefs about risks, including estmimates and possible outcomes, in order to understand why people decide to carry out an activity (ie smoking) after weighing up the risks. Many (these studies are outlined on page 88) found that peoples personal perception of risk in completely different to the educational materials etc lined up by the experts. People tend to adopt the whole 'it won't happen to me' attitude (Graham, 1987), or decide that the immediate benefits over rule the overall risk, showing that there are many other factors influencing people's decision making other that the scientific facts.
Optimistic bias occurs when people are more optimistic about risk they technically they should be. Taylor and Brown (1994) discovered that 95% of the US population had unrealistic optimism towards risks involved with various risks. Weinstein (1987) used a questionaire to fins out how people regarded their risk of getting various illnesses etc compared with other people similar to them (in age and sex etc), and found that most people thought they were less at risk then most. This may be due to lack of experience in a certain thing-if you've never encounted cancer in your life for example, you're probably going to assume that you're not going to (example of both schemas and the availability heuristic here). Motivation could also be a factor here, comparing yourself to someone more at risk then you in order to make yourself feel better, a defence mechanism to avoid anxiety. Taylor et al. (1992) found that in a sample containing gay men at risk of HIV, those with HIV were more optimistic about not getting AIDS that the men without HIV, possibly in order to make themselves feel better. However, Weinstein (1987) reported conflicting results, suggsting that the more severe a situation, the more pessimistic a person is.
More evaluation for optimistic bias includes how representative are the samples in the research of the whole population? How does this research translate cross-culturally? How can the risks involved in a hypothetically questionaire compare to risks in real life situations-perhaps people feel very differently in real life scenarios. It could also be the result of over-confidence, or an example of people trying to exert control over their lives, perhaps an example of a self-serving bias-good outcomes come from their own good behaviour and control. Perception of risk is also more optimistic when the risk is seen to have some element of human control-for example, people may be overly optimistic about not dying of a horrid illness because there are so many medicines available these days.
All of the research in the chapter thus far comes from the experimental side of things, where the research methods incorperate demand characteristics which contrain the way people can answer things. Section 5 gives a detailed description of research conducted by Joffe (1999), an interview based study on how vulnerable people from two different cultures (British and South African) were to contracting HIV/AIDS. I won't go into too much detail about the study here as it's all outlined in section 5 far better than I could manage lol. The findings showed that people generally tended to pair AIDS with the culture with which they did NOT identify with. There was a big ingroup/outgroup divide going on, and it reminded me very much of chapter one with it's social indentity theory-it seems like an age since we were all reading about that!! Anyway, participants in the study generally tended to compare the risks to the other group rather than their own, showing optimistic bias. The defence mechanism discussed earlier seems to be expanded here from the individual to the whole group. Schema theory and availablilty heuretic may also be applied here, as people's opinions may have stemmed from what they knew based on previous media coverage in their cultural circles. There is evidence also for attributional theory, with the findings here being concurrent with fundamental attribution error.
So that's chapter 7 in a nutshell. The review section and the commentary are both really good and I think really important for the TMA should you choose this chapter for TMA04, which to be honest I've got a feeling I might do. So I shall leave it there!! 'Tis valentines day today and my beloved is working lates so my plan revolves around making a sicky, sticky, saccharine-esque cake concoction in the vulgar shape of a love heart, safe in the knowledge that if he doesn't come home until really late well, all the more for me!!
Until next time!!
Candyflee xx
ps, in honour of the occasion...
