January 25, 2012: Definitions and Perspectives in Social Psychology

• Reading Material for Week 1
• Definitions and Social Psychology
  1. The Need for Definition
     1. Definition
        
        “Social psychology is that branch of the social sciences which attempts to explain how society influences the cognition, motivation, development, and behavior of individuals and, in turn, is influenced by them.” -D.P. Cartwright (1979)
        
        Society affects the people, and people affect society.
     2. Substantive Knowledge in Social Psychology
        
        “The substantive content of the knowledge attained in any field of science is ultimately determined by the intrinsic nature of the phenomena under investigation, since empirical research is essentially a process of discovery with an internal logic of its own [realism]. But it is equally true that the knowledge attained is the product of a social system and, as such is basically influenced by the properties of that system and by its cultura, social, and political environment [social constructionism].” -D.P. Cartwright (1979)
  2. The Three/Many Faces of Social Psychology
     1. Psychological social psychology (experimental with stimulus and response network) (fcus on cognition, attitudes, perception)
     2. Symbolic interactionism
     3. Social structure and personality (macrosocial structure: processes, organizations, occupations, religious affiliations)
     4. Language and disclosure (how we talk and produce textual content)
     5. Gender
     6. Life course (patterned traversing in aging, history affecting later life experiences)
     7. More?
  3. Methodological Considerations: How should we do social psychology?
     1. Group processes: experiments
     2. Symbolic interactionism: ethnography, observation
     3. Social structure and personality: survey research
     4. Language and disclosure: conversation analysis
     5. Gender: experiments, ethnography, surveys, conversation analysis
     6. Life course: life histories (interview or documentation) in the context of social change
  4. Theoretical Considerations
     • “Social psychology … attempts to explain how society influences the cognition, motivation, development, and behavior of individuals an, in turn, is influenced by them.”
     • Substance of social psychology: cognitions or behavior? What approach? Which face? Does social psychology need theoretical integration?
     • Crisis: forefronting methods rather than substance. Develop a definition to solve the crisis and unify on one definition. You can have disagreements, but it does not disunify the field.
  5. The Bottom Line: Is There a Crisis?

January 27, 2012: Social Constructionism and Social Psychology

• Burr, Vivien. “What is Social Constructionism?” (Routledge, 2003).
• What is social constructionism?
  • Not: “… social constructionism is a term that is used almost exclusively by psychologists” (Burr, p.2).
  • It is more often used by sociologists.
• Features of social constructionism
  1. A critical stance toward taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world (3)
     • Realism: Systematic observations of the world reflect its natural features
     • S.C.: The world and its features are achieved or accomplished. World is put together and is an outcome of what people do.
     • Example: Gender. We see the world dichotomously due to biology, but sociologists now see gender as self-produced and achieved.
     • “How the categories evolved over time.”
  2. Historical and cultural specificity (3-4)
     • Realism: Social psychological processes are universal and invariant
     • S.C.: Social psychological processes are historically and culturally variable
     • Example: Boundaries. We create boundaries between groups of people, such as in-group and out-group. Internal example: Answering the phone. The first thing we do is identify the caller to decide how social we will be with them.
     • Example: Space and time. Division of neighborhoods; transition from preparatory activity to primary activity.
     • Example: Self and other. See Richard Nisbett’s “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.” Westerners are focused on individualism while Asians are focused on harmony and integration.
     • “How do particular events shape the way I look at things?”
  3. Knowledge is sustained by social processes (4-5)
     • Realism: Knowledge acquired systematically mirrors the essence of natural phenomena – “essentialism”
     • S.C.: Through daily social interaction, people assemble knowledge – “anti-essentialism.” We assemble/construct what we know. Perception of essence in objects is the result of our own assembly.
     • Example: Attention deficit disorder, autism. Are we better able to identify symptoms, or are we manufacturing the disorders? See Peter Conrad’s “Identifying Hyperactive Children: The Medicalization of Deviant Behavior” (2006).
  4. Knowledge and social action go together (4-5)
     • Realism: Knowledge is static, and when acquired it is inert and usable but not changeable until new knowledge develops. Language is a primary way in which we express our knowledge.
     • S.C.: Knowledge is dynamic and is involved in the very ways that we define and act on social problems. Language is a form of action – it “does” things as we use it.
     • We are socialized into thinking about things in categories. The nature of how we describe categories define how we resolve problems.
     • Example: at one point, we blamed the alcoholic for his/her problems, but now we see them more as victims and offer them treatment.
• How is social constructionism different from traditional psychology?
  • Anti-essentialism: there are no essences inside things or people that make them what they are; they are defined by perceptions
  • Questioning realism: social constructionism denies that our knowledge is a direct perception of reality; there can be no such thing as an objective fact
  • Historical and cultural specificity of knowledge: theories and explanations are time- and culture-bound and cannot be taken as once-and-for-all descriptions of human nature
  • Language as a pre-condition for thought: concepts and categories are acquired by each person as they develop the use of language; the way a person thinks, the very categories and concepts that provide a framework of meaning for them, are provided by the language that they use
  • Language as a form of social action: when people talk to each other, the world gets constructed; our use of language can therefore be thought of as a form of action
  • A focus on interaction and social practices: look for explanations of social phenomena in the social practices engaged in by people, and their interactions with each other
  • A focus on processes: social constructionists explain things in terms of the dynamics of spcial interactions, and emphasize processes more than structures
• Where did social constructionism come from?
  • The Enlightenment, modernism, and postmodernism: search for truth and understand the true nature of reality through the application of reason and rationality → search for truth by finding rules/structures underlying the surface features of the world → questioning and rejection of fundamental assumptions
  • Sociological influences: symbolic interactionism – as people, we construct our own and each other’s identities through our everyday encounters with each other in social interaction
  • The turn to language and the ‘crisis’ in social psychology: all knowledge is historically and culturally specific; social psychology originally emerged as a way to manipulate people
  • What is the crisis?

January 29, 2012: Reading Material for Week 2

• Joel Charon, Why vs. How
  • Phenomena can be experienced with our senses; noumena cannot
  • Humans can be passive (driven by forces outside of their control) and active (making their own decisions)
  • Social science is a perspective, so it is not complete and it does not reveal the whole truth about a human being
  • Society is made up of social patterns (class, culture, institutions)
  • Sociology views humans as actors
  • Distinction between description and explanation
  • “Not “why do people do something,” but “how do we do it and how did it occur in the first place?”
  • “How” questions can lead to answers for “why” questions

January 30, 2012 & February 01, 2012: A History of the Experimental Subject

• The way we approach and organize a field determines how we understand its puzzles and contributions
  1. Great figures approach (e.g., Schellenberg, Masters of Social Psychology, 1978)
  2. Great theories and findings approach (e.g., Shaw and Constanzo, Theories of Social Psychology, 1982; Sapsford et al., Theory and Social Psychology, 1998)
  3. Social constructionist approach (e.g., Burr reading; Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 1990; Naming the Mind, 1997)
• The social contexts of investigative practice
  • Experimental situation → Research community → Sociopolitical environment
  • In and for the concentric circles we can ask:
    1. What is the “experimental situation”? What role do subjects have and what are their relationships?
    2. How do prevailing standards (rules for research) originate and develop? (Danziger, 1990)
    3. How do actors interpret prevailing standards of scientific knowledge? (Porter, 1995)
  • The experiment takes place in the context of the community, which is influenced by political focuses (ex. stem cell research, bioterrorism).
• Origins of Social Psychology
  • Central findings of Danziger (1990):
    • A synthetic investigative practice emerged in experimental psychology in the 19th-20th century
    • Psychologists could have studied concrete individuals and specific attributes, or abstract relationships that are universal across individuals
    • Synthetic: synthesis of multiple influences
  1. Wilhelm Wundt (and students): systematic experimental introspection
     • Was interested in how external influences would affect internal experiences
     • The reflex arc concept
       • Temporal span between stimulus and response: the time it takes for someone to see a light, then hit a lever
       • A more complex version of stimulus → response is stimulus → idea → response
       • Stimulus = independent variable, idea = cognition, response = dependent variable (behavioral outputs)
       • The reflex arc model is the basis for much of social psychology, in terms of causal relations between independent and dependent variables in human behavior
     • “The Influence of the Color of Surfaces on Our Estimation of Thei Magnitude.” by J.O. Quantz. The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Oct., 1895), pp. 26-41.
       • When the moon is low, we have things to compare it with, such as buildings, but when it is high in the sky, we have no comparison.
       • Interest was in concrete individual and not aggregate
       • Subjects (“observers”) were the experimenters themselves
       • There were only a few people participating in the experiment
       • Disk in center was white and stationary, while the disk on the side was movable and in color.
       • When the disk was reddish in color, it was overestimated in size; when it was blueish in color, it was underestimated.
     • There was a collaboration and democratic relationship among experimenters and subjects. The lab and the people’s roles were different than what we have now.
  2. The Clinical Experiment
     • Experimentally induced hypnosis
     • Brouillet, The School of Jean-Martin Charcot
       • Freud and Charcot were collaborators
       • Women were hypnotized because they had hysterical reactions to social situations.
       • The women were surrounded by medical professionals so the power relationship was extreme.
     • Eakins, The Agnew Clinic
       • The medical experimenters are operating on a female for a male audience
     • Stanley Milgram and “shock” (obedience to authority
       • Experimenters wore white coats, derived from medical professionals, giving them authority
  3. Francis Galton – testing “mental faculties”
     • Multiplication of subjects (do experiments on masses of individuals)
     • Emphasis on performance (rather than passive recipients)
     • Statistical analysis
     • The lab: abstracting from individuals
       • Compare individuals against each other or against a norm for performance
       • Abstracting: how do demographics affect performance (rather than individuality)
• Origins of Experimental Social Psychology
  • Three forms of knowledge from early laboratories
    1. Elementary processes in the generalized human minds of individuals (Wundt)
    2. Pathological clinical states; physician-patient relationship as model for experimentation; experimenter no longer the subject
    3. Individual performance comp-arisons with the aggregate (Galton)
  • A synthetic investigative practice in psychology also emerged in social psychology:
    • Aggregate data, experiments, surveys, statistical relationships
    • Synthetic: synthesis of the three influences

February 03 & 06, 2012: Social Psychology Methods

• “How to be a wise consumer of psychological research” (American Psychological Association) (Review)
  • Survey research (random sampling)
  • Experimental research (random assignment)
• Three Faces of Social Psychology (J.S. House, 1997)
  1. Psychological Social Psychology
  2. Symbolic Interactionism
  3. Social Structure and Personality
• Three Methods of Social Psychology
  1. Psychological Social Psychology: Experiments
  2. Symbolic Interactionism: Ethnography
  3. Social Structure and Personality: Survey Research
• A Chapter on “Research Methods in Social Psychology”
  • What is methodology?
  • “A set of systematic procedures that guide the collection and analysis of data” (Delamater & Myers, p. 27)
    1. Develop research design
    2. Go into laboratory or field to collect data
    3. Code and analyze the data to test hypothesis
  • Apparent stages of research (objectives of research) (reflex arc): description, correlation, causality, test existing theories (via hypotheses)
  • Other approach (practice-based): description can be understood as analysis – “the separation of an intellectual or substantial whole into its constituent parts”
    • To be discussed later; not on first exam
• Research Methodology Types
  • Surveys (most common application: attitudes measurement)
    • What is reliability?
      • Consistent results among trials of the same experiment.
    • What is validity (internal vs. external)?
      • Does the instrument measure what we actually want to measure?
      • External: findings apply to the broader population.
      • Internal: findings are free from external influences (inside laboratory).
    • What are strengths and weaknesses of this method?
      • Strengths: cost-effective, can give a good image of the population.
      • Weaknesses: self-reports can be inaccurate, especially when related to sensitive behavior.
  • Field Studies / Naturalistic Observation
    • Record information in natural settings as it happens
    • Conversation analysis and ethnomethodology
      • Finding a phenomenon, working with collections, using and showing detailed transcripts
      • Bottom-up
      • Finding a phenomenon: keep watching, listening, and recording until something interesting pops up
    • Ethnography
      • Interview: Difference between qualitative and quantitative interview
      • Participant observation
    • Strengths and weaknesses
      • Allows experimenters to record data in real time
  • Experiments
    • Researcher must manipuate a variable, then randomly assign subjects to particular conditions
    • Laboratory & field
    • Strengths: high internal validity due to experimenter’s exertion of control
    • Weaknesses: limited in the range of phenomena that can be studied, have problems with external validity (what happens in the lab cannot always be generalized to the real world)
  • Diverse populations and ethical issues
• The Predominance of Survey Research in Sociology and Sociological Social Psychology
  • American Sociological Review, October 2011
    • All but one topics are based on survey research; surveys are popular
  • Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2011 & June 2011
    • Official publication of the American Sociological Association
    • Contains survey research as well as field research
• Earl Babbie’s “Truth, Objectivity, and Agreement” (1986)
  • Emphasizes agreement among research subjects
  • Something is true if people agree on it (simplified statement)
  • Agreement is more important when applied to procedures and logic of inquiry (social psychological methodology)
• R.T. LaPiere’s “Attitudes vs. Actions”
  • Prejudice is a belief, while discrimination is an action
  • LaPiere compared the difference between how restaurants and hotels claimed they would treat Chinese people, and how they actually treat Chinese people
  • Most restaurants and hotels said they would not serve Chinese people, but when LaPiere actually brought a Chinese couple to these locations, they were served
  • This study shows that what people claim they will do and what they actually do are not always consistent
  • What people say they will do is simply a verbal reaction to a hypothetical situation
  • Surveys and questionnaires are good at identifying factual information (like age or height), but not as good as identifying opinions about or actions corresponding with a hypothetical situation (like if Chinese people will be served)

February 08, 2012: The Social Construction of Social Psychological Knowledge

• The perspective of social science (Joel Charon)
  • Social science:
    • makes assumptions
    • has a conceptual framework
    • sensitizes and desensitizes the investigator
    • is only partial and not complete
  • Only recently has social science been investigated as a perspective (p. 41)
• Social construction of scientific knowledge (science and technology studies)
  • “The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with “the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity.” – Joseph Ben-David, Teresa Sullivan, Annual Review of Sociology (1975)
  • “The sociology of social scientific knowledge (SSSK) is like the above but deals with social instead of natural science.” – D.W. Maynard & N.C. Schaeffer, Social Studies of Science (2000)
  • Garfinkel, Lynch, Livingston, “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Potically Discovered Pulsar.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1981.
• Social construction of social psychological knowledge
  1. The survey interview – ubiquity, abstraction, and standardization
     1. Ubiquity of the survey interview
        • Academic research
        • Marketing
        • Government
        • Polling
     2. The survey as abstract, general knowledge
        • “Dangerous Liaisons? Daring and Drinking Diffusion in Adolescent Peer Networks” by Derek A. Kreagera and Dana L. Haynieb. Abstract: “The onset and escalation of alcohol consumption and romantic relationships are hallmarks of adolescence. Yet only recently have these domains jointly been the focus of sociological inquiry. We extend this literature [to show] … that adolescent romantic partners are likely to be network bridges, or liaisons, connecting dateres to new peer contexts that, in turn, promote changes in individual drinking behaviors and allow these behaviors to spread across peer networks. … The liaison hypothesis: friends-of-partners’ drinking have net associations with adolescent drinking patterns. The coefficient for friends-of-partners’ drinking is larger than for one’s own. … Our findings suggest that romantic relationships are important mechanisms for understanding the diffusion of emergent problem behaviors in adolescent peer networks.”
        • If your romantic friend’s friends drink a lot, you will be influenced more by them than by your romantic partner
        • Speculation: it provides an insight to opposite-gender culture to which one might not necessarily be exposed
     3. Standardization in the survey interview
        • Surveys seek to calculate and measure objects’ past and intended future behaviors, their attitudes, beliefs and values, and their membership in social categories
        • The key part of the measurement process in the survey interview is standardization
          1. Read questions as written
          2. Probe inadequate answers nondirectively (ex. read the question again exactly as written)
          3. Record answers without discretion
          4. Be interpersonally nonjudgmental regarding the substance of answers
     4. The paradox of abstract knowledge: standardization and “mechanical objectivity”
        • “It depends on concrete, detailed, particular, practical, and locally organized ‘commonsense knowledge’ in communities of practice.” – Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers. Princeton University Press, 1995.
        • Standardization is very concrete, and the way in which it is executed is different among survey centers
  2. Variation in standardized administration across survey centers
     1. Orientation to professional demeanor: being warm and friendly vs. serious and neutral
     2. Probing (non-directively): how much discussion of it, what it is, and how often it can be done
     3. Supervision and monitoring: how often
     4. Pacing: the pace at which interviewers read questions
     5. The use of feedback: value neutral but variation in frequency, content, and purpose
  3. Standardization vs. rapport: laughter in the survey interview and data quality
     1. Reciprocation: accepting a laughter invitation
     2. Non-reciprocation: declining a laughter invitation
     3. Pseudo-reciprocation: smile voice
• Social construction of social psychological knowledge through the survey interview
  1. The survey interview ubiquitously used, generates abstracts knowledge through standardized administration or “mechanical objectivity.” But:
  2. Practices of standardization vary across survey centers: does this affect the quality of data?
  3. Standardization vs. rapport: does laughter affect the quality of data?

February 10 & 13, 2012: Social Cognition, Person Perception, and Gestalt Theory

• Gestalt Perception
  • Definition: “… a unitary whole of varying degrees of detail, which, by virtue of its intrinsic articulation and structure, possesses coherence and consolidation and thus detaches itself as a closed unit from the surrounding field.” –Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, p. 114. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964)
  • A gestalt object is something that is perceived as larger than the sum of its parts
  • Examples: goblet/faces, duck/rabbit, face/”liar”, horizontal lines parallel but distorted by cubes, Necker cube, Necker cube in color
• Gestalt Theory and the Reflex Arc
  • is consistent with concepts of “information processing”
  • mental operations occur in sequential stages
  • reflex arc: stimulus → perception → response
• Gestalt Principles
  • Similarity, repetition
    • Things that have similar features (ex. size, shape, color), we see them grouped together
    • When there is repetition, we see them as being in a group
  • Proximity, contiguity: when objects are in close proximity, we group them together
  • Continuity: objects arranged in a straight line or smooth curve are seen as one unit
  • Closure
    • We see complete figures even though components of the figure are missing
    • Our minds form patterns even with incomplete information
  • Figure-Ground/Symmetry
    • Seeing the goblet is the foregrounded object; seeing the faces is backgrounded
    • We tend to divide things into symmetrical halves
• Reflex Arc Gestalt Theory: Two Features
  • Constancy Hypothesis: The lines that form the border stay the same but are sensed in a different way. The things that change are in the mind.
  • Distinction between appearance and reality: the reality is in the lines; the appearance is in the perception
  • Example of exception: “A bird in the the bush”
    • Contradicts features: our perception eliminates one of the words
    • We’re supposed to see all of the stimulus elements, and add to it, but we don’t do that here
• Reflex Arc Gestalts and Social Psychology
  • Kurt Lewin and Field Theory: Social behavior is due to perceptions rather than objective stimuli in the environment
  • Fritz Heider and Person Perception
    • “Ascertaining or cognizing other persons’ important dispositional and psychological properties, such as their actions, motives, affects, beliefs, and behavior.” –Heider, 1958:58
    • Psychologists agree that snap judgments (voice, outerwear, handshake, posture) form a holistic impression that is larger than the sum of its parts. However, first impressions can be biased.
    • F. Heider & Marianne Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior.” American Journal of Psychology, 57:243-359, 1944.
      1. Little triangle and circle belong together
      2. Little triangle and circle were in antagonism to big triangle
      3. Little triangle fighting big triangle was the central event
      4. Big triangle and little triangle were men fighting over circle who was a female (50% of respondents)
      5. Big triangle was provoked to aggression by little triangle and circle was teasing him
      6. What kind of a person is the big triangle? Aggressive, belligerent, looking for a fight, dominating, powerful
      7. What kind of person is the little triangle? Heroic, brave, sly, tricky
      8. What kind of person is the circle? Weak, timid, helpless, dependent
    • Mediation: This is the process intervening between distal stimulus configurations and proximal perception – the role of “meanings”
    • The movement of objects becomes embedded in reality
    • Distal stimulus → mediation → proximal (immediate) experience in perception
    • Mediation = meaning, source of cognition
    • Meanings: antagonism and strength of big triangle
  • Person perception: theoretical and empirical lines traceable to Lewin/Heider
    1. Correspondent inference theory (E.E. Jones & Davis, 1956). Fundamental attribution error: we attribute errors of others to them; when we do it, we attribute it to the circumstances/environment.
    2. Theory of emotional lability (Schacter & Singer, 1972). Labile = changeable.
    3. Self-perception theory (Bem, 1967, 1972)
    4. Attribution theory (Harold Kelley, 1967, 1972). Co-variation principle: as observers, we see events or behaviors many times, and infer their causes by what co-varies with them. Dimensions of co-variation (contribute to mediation): distinctiveness, consistency, consensus.
    5. The attraction paradigm (Byrne, 1971)
• The reflex arc model in contemporary social psychology: stimulus → mediation → gestalt response
  1. Kelley (1950)
     • Professor → warm/cold → favorable/unfavorable
     • Prior information conditions how people perceive others
     • Warm and cold are central qualities that affect how we perceive an entire person
     • Polite and blunt are perhipheral qualities that do not have as strong of an effect as central qualities
     • Students in an economics class were introduced to a substitute instructor; they received a description beforehand, and the descriptions were all identical except for half the students receiving the word “warm” in the description and the other half receiving “cold”
     • Throughout trails, those receiving the “warm” description rated the instructor more favorably than those receiving the “cold” description
     • Students would identify particular characteristics and use the warmth/coldness to justify those characteristics in positive/negative ways
  2. Flora (2004) and various authors
     • Person’s features → gender and other variables → males associated with science and females associated with language arts
  3. Berscheid and Walster (1974)
     • Person → attractive/unattractive → desirable/undesirable
  4. Sadalla and Burroughs (1981)
     • Person → type of food → personality
     • Describe traits of people based off of their food preferences
  5. Kenrick and Gutierres (1980, 1999)
     • Person → context of attractiveness → attractiveness
     • Women of average attractiveness are seen as more attractive when compared to less attractive people, and vice versa
  6. Baron (1997)
     • Request for help → fragrance or no fragrance → helped or did not help
     • People were more likely to give change for a dollar near pleasantly smelling stores
  7. Lambert et al. (2003)
     • Questions regarding hooking up → self/other → pluralistic ignorance
     • Both men and women thought same gender was less comfortable and opposite was more comfortable
• Carlin Flora’s “The Once-Over: Can You Trust First Impressions?”
  • First impressions from watching 20- to 32-second clips of a person are usually as accurate as spending 20 minutes with the person as a trained interviewer
  • Usually, three seconds are enough to make a judgment about a new acquaintance
  • However, most people cannot tell when someone is faking an emotion; in order to determine this, one must know of specific facial or bodily cues
  • We are taught how to judge others
  • Having a baby face (round face, large eyes, small nose and chin) or an attractive face is often associated with trustworthiness, but on average, is false
  • A good way to improve forming accurate snap judgments is to go out and meet lots of people
• Mark Snyder’s “When Blief Creates Reality: The Self-Fulfilling Impact of First Impressions on Social Interaction (Self-Fulfilling Prophecies)
  • Attractive people are commonly associated with positive characteristics
  • This may be the case because of reciprocation – when attractive people are treated with friendliness because others expect them to be friendly, the attractive prople reciprocate the friendliness rather than being friendly because they are characteristically friendly
  • An experiment was conducted where people were talking over the phone, and they were shown a random photo of someone attractive of unattractive that claimed to be the person on the opposite line
  • Males treated “attractive” females better than “unattractive” females, and they received a more positive response from “attractive” females, even though not all the “attractive” females were actually attractive
• L.C. Egan et al.’s “The origins of cognitive dissonance: Evidence from children and monkeys” (2007)
  • Both children and monkeys showed a decreased preference for something they voted against in the past
  • This shows that both children and monkeys will change their attitudes based off of their actions
  • The preference for the declined object was significant enough that both children and monkeys preferred a novel object over the previously preferred object

February 15 & 17, 2012: Gestalts and Social Influence

1. How group participation influences thought patterns: cognitive dissonance and groupthink (Leon Festinger)
   • If a person is induced [by group experience] to do or say something that is contrary to his or her private opinion, the tendency is to change the opinion to correspond with what the person has said.
   • The larger the pressure to elicit the overt behavior, the weaker is the tendency [because dissonance is reduced].
   • As the amount of reward increases, cognitive dissonance decreases ($1 vs. $20)
   • Cognitive dissonance is when someone acts in a manner that is different than his/her beliefs
   • Those receiving $20 changed their opinions less than those receiving $1 because they had better justification to act inconsistently – they were being paid more
   • An alien Sanada told Mrs. Keech that the world would be flooded and that Keech’s group would be saved. This didn’t happen, but most people stayed in the group and altered their opinions to justify their actions.
   • Groupthink is a social psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints.
   • Groupthink occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” (Irving Janis, 1972, p.9)
   • Antecedent factors
     • Group cohesiveness: esprit de corps (e.g., people who made decision to launch Challenger had worked together for many years)
     • Leader preference: top managers promote decisions (e.g., pro-launch) in the face of opposition
     • Insulation from experts: (e.g., top decision makers separated from engineers)
   • Eight symptoms of groupthink (resulting in defective decision-making)
     • Illusion of invulnerability (overconfidence)
     • Collective rationalization (engineering data “inconclusive”)
     • Belief inherent morality (ignoring counter viewpoints)
     • Stereotyped views of others (denigrating, badgering opposition)
     • Direct pressure on dissenters
     • Self-censorship
     • Illusion of unanimity (silence)
     • Mindguarding (withholding information)
   • Needed revisions
     • Leadership as a moderator between group characteristics and groupthink decisions, e.g., Bay of Pigs vs. Cuban missile crisis where Kennedy changed his behavior (Moorhead et al.)
     • Experimental studies are differently “operationalized” and are inconclusive
     • The normalization of deviance: culture (Diane Vaughn)
     • Time pressure: decisions have to be made quickly
     • Research involves narrative description, no “controls”
2. Conformity: Solomon Asch
   • Asch’s gestalt approach: how subjects change judgments of stimuli to match a group majority
   • 75% conformed at least once, 5% conformed every time, and 37% was average
3. Compliance
   • Stanley Milgram: The Shock Experiments
     • Contexts of action: salience of victim, physical relations, larger institutional context, group forces
   • Phillip Zimbardo: The Prison Experiments
     • The prisoners started acting like real prisoners (by rioting), and the guards started acting like real guards (by psychologically tormenting prisoners)
     • We need to understand the power of social situations
     • Extensions
       • Situational forces as compelling domination – the situation won and humanity lost
       • Authority relationships as an explanation of the Holocaust, not an action fueled by anger
       • Stressful contexts as generating abuses of power
     • Critiques
       • Dramatizzation: there is a dramatic aspect
       • Validity: external validity is how well something can be applied to the real world; it can be low in these experiments because the situations were artificial
       • Design: no prior identification of hypotheses, take a post hoc justification and build on it; they thought the experiment would not be approved if it was dangerous

• Social influence as reflex arc gestalt theory: distal stimulus → mediation → gestalt (proximal behavior)
  1. Dissonant experiences → dissonance reduction in cognitive systems → change in preferences or attitudes
  2. Length of lines → group experience → reports of line length
  3. Instructions → perceptual salience of victim, physlca distance, etc. → shock administration
• What is the relationship between mediation and the result, and how did the result come to be?

February 18, 2012: What is Attraction? (Discussion Section Readings)

• P. Shulman’s “Great Expectations” (2004)
  • Marriage is turning into an instrument for self-fulfillment
  • People who get divorces do not have significantly greater numbers of arguments than those who do not get divorces
  • People are always looking for a soulmate, but it is disputable whether such a person exists
  • Two people might get married because of their curiosity in each other’s differences, but this might not end up well if they are severely incompatible; for example, one partner who deems respect as important marrying someone who does not show respect will most likely not end up well
• E. Hatfield et al.’s “Playing Hard to Get: Understanding an elusive phenomenon” (1973)
  • Folklore has always said that a woman should always play hard-to-get rather than easy-to-get
  • Preliminary interviews of men has shown that this can be true because women who play hard-to-get are able to make choices as to which men they date, which implies that they are popular and worth having
  • Researchers attempted to prove this through action by doing five experiments, all of which failed
  • A more open-ended experiment showed that men prefer selectively hard-to-get women – those who are easy-to-get for the subject, but hard-to-get for everyone else
  • Women who were uniformly hard-to-get, uniformly easy-to-get, or did not provide any information were not significantly different in popularity
  • Women who are selectively hard-to-get are preferred because men see them as possessing all the benefits of uniformly hard-to-get women while not having the liabilities of easy-to-get women

February 20, 2012 (Week 5 Readings)

• J.M. Darley & C.D. Batson’s “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior” (1973)
  • Subjects were told to give a speech about helping others; one group was told specifically what to say about Good Samaritans, while others were told to express their own opinions
  • Subjects were also told that they either had enough time or were late and in a hurry
  • On the way to the speech location, it was set up such that they would encounter a man in need of help
  • The context of the speech did not have a significant influence on whether or not subjects would help the man in need
  • If they were in a hurry, subjects were significantly less likely to help the man in need than if they were not in a hurry

February 20 & 22, 2012: Obedience (Milgram)

• In-Class Video
  • Protests were standardized by recording
  • The amount of time the button was pressed was recorded, as well as observations by the researcher
  • At 300 volts, the learner stopped responding
  • Before debriefing, the teacher was interviewed and given a questionnaire
  • One particular individual continued even after the learner asked to be let out because the researcher claimed responsibility
  • Different conditions include pounding on the wall, protests audible, being in the same room, and forcing the hand on a shoc, plate; the immediate presence of the learner decreased obedience
  • Different conditions include the experimenter leaving the room, using the phone, and giving instructions via recording; the distance from experimenter decreased obedience
  • Other trials included being included with other participants – actors as teachers
• Notes from the end of the Milgram Film: Different versions of the experiment
  • Salience of victim: victim placed in another room, victim heard through walls, victim placed in same room, teacher required to place the victim’s hand on an electrically charged plate
  • Relationship of experimenter to teacher: experimenter sat close to teacher, experimenter gave orders to teacher via telephone, experimenter gave orders to teacher via tape recording
  • Institutional setting: experiment done at Yale, experiment done at a run-down office building in Bridgeport
  • Group context and presence of other teachers (played by actors): the group of actors all went against continuation of the experiment, group of actors all agreed to continue the experiment, participant was instructed to give orders to an actor to push the button
• S. Milgram’s “Behavioral Study of Obedience” (1963)
  • 26 people went all the way to 450 volts, while 14 people stopped beforehand; nobody stopped before 300 volts
  • The subject may perceive both the learner and himself as voluntarily entering the study, and thus obliged to follow along
  • Because the learner was selected fairly (50/50 draw), the subject may see him as unable to complain about his position
  • The manner in which this experiment is conducted cannot necessarily be applied to the real world
  • The subject was told that the shocks may be painful but will not cause long-term damage
  • Up to 300 volts, the learner continues to provide answers, but afterwards, he does not; this may be seen as a sign of no longer wanting to “play along”
• Respecifying Obedience to Authority: Directive Sequences in Milgram’s Experiment
  • Milgram segment from “The Bad Show”
    • “The Bad Show”: NPR program that discusses the dark side of human nature. How readily will people do bad things?
    • Social psychologyst Stanley Milgram’s famous 1962 experiment, “Obedience to Authority.” Contrary to expectations, 65% of almost 1,000 ordinary Americans fully obeyed orders to shock a stranger with 450 volts of electricity.
    • The hosts interview Alex Haslam, Psychology professor at U of Exeter in Britain. He’s an expert on Milgram’s experiment.
  • What is the meaning of Milgram’s experiment?
    • Haslam argues that Milgram’s experiment is not really about obeying authority.
    • Rather, it’s about the lengths people are willing to go for a cause they believe in: in this case, science.
    • The program highlights the “prods” Milgram’s experimenter used to goad reluctant participants into continuing the experiment.
  • Milgram’s Four Prods
    1. Please continue, or Please go on.
    2. The experiment requires that you continue.
    3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
    4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
  • The context of social interaction
    • Haslam is right that when the experimenter used prod 4, virtually all participants called it quits and disobeyed.
    • But he doesn’t mention an important feature of the social context: the experimenter was only to use prod 4 after the first three prods had been used.
    • So resistance to prod 4 is due not only to its linguistic content, but also to its sequential placement in a developing battle of wills between experimenter and participant.
  • “Respecifying” obedience to authority
    • My research is about this sequential placement.
    • How is “obedience” or “disobedience” produced in the experiment, in the details of language and social interaction?
    • How do disobedient participants sustain their resistance to the experimenter’s prods, and successfully stop the experiment?
  • Sequential placement
    • “Sequencing”: the ordering of social actions, their before and after
    • Sociologists (and psychologists and linguists) use conversation analysis (CA) to study such detailed patterns in social interaction.
    • Doug Maynard is a sociologist who specializes in CA.
  • What does the experimenter do?
    • The experimenter seeks to goad participants into continuing.
    • When participants resist, he uses silence and abstract justifications informed by the scripted prods.
  • What does the participant do?
    • What both parties to the interaction (experimenter and participant) do is shaped by what the other does.
    • They collaboratively produce the outcomes of “obedience” and “disobedience.”
    • So how do disobedient participants successfully resist the prods?
  • A preliminary finding
    • The many obedient subjects who mobilize forceful resistance may nevertheless simultaneously display willingness to be guided by further directives.
    • This may occur via obedient subjects’ use of repair initiation to request cliarification about the directive, in effect “backing down” from their earlier shows of unwillingness to continue the experiment.
    • In contrast, disobedient subjects may resist more effectively by the tendency to put themselves in the learner’s shoes, referring to the learner’s desires, a practice that can result in explicit and sustained refusals to continue.
  • Summary
    • Studying social context is crucial if we are to learn what Milgram’s famous experiment really says about the dark side of human nature.
    • An important aspect of this social context is the language and social interaction captured on Milgram’s audio recordings.
    • “Obedience to authority” can thus be usefully respecified as a phenomenon of social interaction in its details.

February 29, 2012 & March 02, 2012: Symbolic Interactionism

• The Self
  1. The qualities that constitute one’s subjective being
  2. The “I” is the subjected knower, and the “me” is object that is known (William James)
  3. The “looking glass self” (Cooley): one cannot have a sense of an “I” without a sense of a “you”
     • The way we perceive ourselves is affected by how we think others perceive us
     • People are preoccupied with what others think of them
     • Children will act in certain ways to certain people to induce certain responses, and repeat actions that produce desirable effects
  4. The “I” and the “me” (G.H. Mead): play, the game, the generalized other
     • The body is physical, while the self is more internal and based on consciousness
     • An individual experiences oneself indirectly through the viewpoints of others
     • Internal conversation occurs when we respond to ourselves how we expect others to respond
     • “Me” is the response and consideration of others; “I” is the response to the community
  5. The digital self (S. Zhao): inward, narrative, retractable (can get rid of identitites), multiple (not distinguishing, as Mead’s already have multiples); you have control because you don’t have face-to-face contact, so there’s less that is “given off”
• George Herbert Mead
  • Lived 1863-1931
  • Studied at Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt
  • Taught at University of Michigan
  • Moved to University of Chicago in 1892
  • Was close to John Dewey
  • Worked with Jane Addams
  • Did not publish his own books; Mind, Self, and Society and others were posthumous publication of lectures
• The Self as Social Process in Symbolic Interactionism
  • Mead: “What determines how much self gets into communication is the social experience itself”
  • The complete self involves the unity and structure of the social process
  • The conversation of gestures: self as process
  • Internalization; what is subjective reality?
  • What we’re going to say and do is determined by what we say and do; we change it based off others’ responses
• The language of variable analysis
  • The reflex arc model and gestalt perception: stimulus → idea (mediation) → motor response
  • Independent variables → experimental variables → dependent variables
  • Instructor → warm/cold → (un)favorable
  • “Mediation” (and “meanings”) intervene between distal stimulus configurations and proximal perceptions
• William James: The Baby and the Candle
  • This baby is entirely abstracted from society and everything around us where we actually live
• Dewey’s Critique of the Reflex Arc: The Organic Circuit
  • Perception is not passive, but active
  • Action precedes discrimination of stimuli
  • When engaged in action without interruption, it is not possible to discriminate stimuli and responses
  • Example: bike riders don’t necessarily consider traffic lights as stimuli because they are so used to stopping at red and going at green, but a pedestrian running out in front of them is considered a stimulus
• Social Construction as Dynamic
  • Mead on consciousness: consciousness is an emergent part of social action that arises to solve problems
  • Mead on “meaning”: meaning is something that is already there; implicit in the social act
  • Mead on the “self”: the focus is on the practice – what the organisms do
  • Rather than “internalization”: practical intersubjectivity (mutual understanding) (Hans Joas)
• J. O’Brien’s “Wrestling the Angel of Contradiction: Queer Christian Identities” (2004)
  • Relivious people at gay pride parades would get booed because they would be representing an agent that goes against homosexuality
  • These people live this contradictory lifestyle because it defines hwo they are – it itself is a purpose
  • Religious homosexuals usually either denounce and flee, accept shame, or find an alternative
  • Most homosexuals believe the struggle with this contradiction makes them better Christians
  • Homosexuals believe they are integrating homosexuality into Christianity and make them reconsider Christian messages, themes, and traditions
• Rosenfeld’s “Identity Careers of Older Gay Men and Lesbians”
  • Identity career: a sense of who/what someone has become
  • Homosexuality used to be considered a mental abnormality
  • A lot of homosexuals didn’t think much of themselves, and thought they were completely normal
  • Distancing: removing/lessening the connection/association between themselves and the word “homosexual”; done by living a heterosexual lifestyle
  • Embracing a new identity: meeting with other homosexuals, relating to / forming associations with the word “homosexual,” reassessing desires
  • Coming out to family members: some avoid coming out to avoid tension, some don’t tell but everyone knows anyway; some family members feel insulted or outraged
  • Old gay people are not restricted by traditional family troubles and feel free and autonomous

March 05, 2012: Practice-Based Gestalt Theory

• Reflex Arc Gestalt Theory: Three Features
  1. Constancy hypothesis: across gestalt perceptions, the stimmulus stays the same
  2. Distinction between appearance and reality: what is real is the lines; for a perception to exist, one must propose it, and others must acknowledge it
  3. Additive relations: stimuli + mediation (idea) = gestalt
• Practice-Based Gestalt Theory
  1. Rather than constancy, “internal relationships” – parts of gestalt support one another, and “have structures, organizational forms, properties, characters and features of their own” (Gurwitsch)
  2. Appearance/reality distinction collapses
  3. Interrelations and dynamic process, rather than static, additive relations: on actual behavior, talk, and social interaction, and the practices therein
• H. Mehan & H. Wood’s “Five Features of Reality” (1975) [PFICR]
  1. Reality is a reflexive activity: something is dependent on its context
     • Westerners challenge the validity of an orcale, but Azande know it exists and begin with that assumption
     • Azande treat incorrect oracle responses as the result of an error, sabotage, or practical joke, and do not challenge the principle of the oracle
     • Similar to how we don’t challenge the principles of math or chemistry if we don’t get an expected result
     • Object constancy assumption: things remain constant over time across perspectives
     • Language not only delivers information, but it also creates an environment where that information can appear
  2. Reality is a coherent body of knowledge
     • Although freaks may seem primitive and inconsierate, they still have sophisticated and organized systems for things they see as important
     • Example: freaks don’t use common medical/chemical terms for drugs, but they still organize them into their own accepted and internally universal form of classification/categorization – this system is not questioned and is seen as fact
     • It is integrated into their lifestyles, without them actually knowing
  3. Reality is an interactional activity
     • Example: through interaction, nurses come up with unofficial labels for patients; patients are then viewed through this label and their actions are interpreted through this label
     • Even though the patients’ actual behavior stayed constant, it was perceived differently due to the nurses’ interaction
  4. Reality is fragile: the taken-for-granted world can be disrupted easily; we have moments when the way I thought the world was is no longer true
     • When unspoken, accepted, assumed rules are broken, the normal social process falls apart and those who are victimized become confused/bewildered
  5. Reality is permeable: given a breach in the world, reality can be reassembled; reality is vulnerable
     • With time, someone can move from one reality to another, such as from one of civilization to one of barbarianism
     • This is done by breaching the former reality and fully entering a new one
  • We will sacrifice, through hospitalization and incarceration, individuals who object the idea of intersubjectivity of reality
  • Conversation analysis notations don’t gloss over details, and are basic enough to be understandable
• Doug Maynard’s “Cognition on the Ground”
  • When people perceive a gestalt, they can explain it to others, who will either see it and agree, or won’t see it if it is not explained well and stay silent
  • The challenge is to take the perception out of one’s mind and explain it to others so it can be intersubjective
  • When people are receiving a survey interview, they use the interviewer as a resource to help them answer questions
  • Although they know the answer internally, they produce it externally through interacting with the interviewer

March 07 & 09, 2012: Reflex Arc and Practice-Based Gestalt Theories

• Gestalt Psychology: Ernst Mach, C.von Ehrensfels (1890)
  • Reflex Arc Tradition
    • Vittorio Benussi: rivals with Koffka and Kohler, conflict about tradition
    • Kurt Lewin: field theory; operated within gestalt tradition
    • Fritz Heider
    • Social cognition
    • Attribution theory, cognitive dissonance, social influence
  • Practice-Based Tradition
    • Max Wertheimer: quickly-moving objects create an illusion of motion
    • Koffka, Kohler
    • Gurwitsch
    • Dewey, Mead, symbolic interactionism
    • Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis
• Garfinkel: Ethnomethodology
  • “The study of member’s methods” for constituting trust, adhering to expectations, engaging in common sense
  • “A conception of and experiments with ‘trust’ …”
  • Trust = commonsense, known-in-common, taken-for-granted basis for everyday life
    • Expectations, presuppositions, presumptions
  • What happens when “trust” is breached
    • Produce affect/emotions, make people angry
    • Congruency of relevance: we assume that others will understand what we are talking about. Example: “what’s a flat tire?”
    • Interchangeability of standpoints: if we switch spots, I will see what you see and you see what I see. Example: treat customer as clerk
    • When these disruptions occur, we try to normalize as much as possible, primarily by treating it as a joke. Ex: tic-tac-toe on the line
    • Leaving the field: withdrawing from the setting, leaving the room
    • When people identify someone as strange, they discount what they say and begin thinking there’s something wrong with them
    • We will sacrifice the individual to preserve the normality of society
• H. Garfinkel’s “A Conception of and Experience with ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Concerted Stable Actions” [UIR – Utterances, Interchangeability, Relationship]
  • Congruency of Relevances
    • For common things, we use short utterances, with the assumption that the other person will understand
    • When people’s short utterances are not understood, they get irritated
    • This can be avoided by simplifying and literalizing the basic components of the implication-laiden utterance
  • Interchangeability of Standpoints
    • To breach, ignore the idea that someone can be different from who you perceive them to be
  • Knowledge of Relationship
    • Breached by children pretending they’re boarding students in their own home
    • People responded by being confused, scolding the child, treating it as a joke, or ignoring the child
  • Breaching the grasp of “what anyone knows” to be correct grounds of action of a real social world (?)
• Aron Gurwitsch’s “The Field of Consciousness”
  • Each part of the gestalt serves a functional and specific purpose contributing towards the whole gestalt
  • The same item can contribute something different depending on the gestalt; ex: same musical note in different songs, the lines outlining the goblet or the faces

March 12, 2012: The Conversation Analysis Perspective – Six Substantive Issues

• Clayman and Gill’s “Conversation Analysis” (2012)
  • Conversation analysis looks at the conduct and interaction within all different kinds of talk
  • Analysts work with naturally-occurring conversations to keep findings as real and applicable as possible
  • For some, transcription may seem excessive, such as when the role of laughter in speech is explicitly transcribed; however, this extra detail is valuable
  • Receipt tokens of acknowledgement (“ok,” “mhm”) have different effects based on how/when they are used
  • Conversation analysis aims to account for all cases, rather than leaving exceptions
  • Example: instead of “answerer talks first in a phone call,” it is “the answerer responds to a prompt, which is either the phone ringing, or the caller saying ‘hello’ first”

1. Talk as an orderly domain
   • On the surface, talk looks disorganized because of overlapping and conflicting ways of speaking
   • It’s orderly in its own right
2. Internal vs. external constraint
   • Talk is its own domain
   • Class, gender, and ethnicity is an external constraint
   • Interaction order is an internal constraint
   • Example: on Black Friday, the internal constraint is “first come, first served.” It’s completely independent from what you bring (other attributes, like age) (external)
3. The “minutiae” and “particulars” of conversational interaction
   • People have a preference for being recognized rather than self-identification, so they stretch words to provide a larger voice sample
   • People do things to conform to what is implicitly expected of them
   • The “how are you” sequence: people as the question and respond “fine” or “good” to continue the conversation
   • Each part of the conversation requires the othe rparticipant to show understanding in order to continue
4. Utterances as actions
   • Action → response → action → response
   • Utterances prompt a response and action
   • Utterances are a mode of action
   • Criticizing, insulting, complaining, responding, giving advice, scolding, describing, ordering, reporting, announcing, speculating, telling a story, being ironic, requesting, asking, offering, apologizing, approving, welcoming, objecting, joking, greeting
   • Utterances are context-sensitive. Example: “oh my God!” can be shock or excitement
   • Example: calling 911 to report vandalism is a prompt for someone to come out and help, and the dispatcher already knows
   • It is possible for someone to misinterpret an utterance; this is more apparent with subsequent, follow-up conversation
5. Levels of analysis
   1. Activity frameworks (courses of action – getting acquainted, talking about peresonal problems, delivering news)
   2. Sequences of actions: questions → answers, invitations/requests → acceptance/rejection, announcing → marking/assessing, telling a story → doing recipiency (being an audience)
   3. Turn components
6. Analyzing data
   • Begin with a noticing
     • Notice something interesting, such as the subtle implications of the phrase “how are you”
     • Example: “you know what” prepares the listener for listening
     • “It’s interesting that many people start phone conversations the same way”
     • Purely unmotivated noticings are ideal
   • Begin with a vernacular action
     • Active act, such as an invitation
     • “Your line’s been busy” = my side telling (I tell my experience to prompt a response; an indirect way of being snoopy)
     • If tacit doesn’t work, go to a more overt method: “Who were you talking to?”

March 14, 2012: Social Psychology, Socialization, and Autism (Part 1)

• Early infant development: “ultra” sociality
  • Protoconversations: parent and infant interact one-on-one, face-to-face, that shares emotions. There is a turn-taking system – the baby follows the mother, and she responds to the baby
  • Mimicry: baby copies mom’s behavior
• Early development: grasping and pointing
  • 6 months: grasping, manipulating objects; interact with environment; intensify interaction with others
  • 9 month “revolution”: pointing (types of pointing listed below)
    • Requesting
    • Indicating something for you, helping gesture (ex: looking for something)
    • Sharing (ex: having a shared visual experience)
    • Pointing assumes others are rational and intentional (theory of mind)
• Early development: autism
  • Difficulties in taking the point of view of others and jointly attending to aspect of the social world
  • Cannot do pretend play
• Autism: increased number of cases (includes spectrum disorders)
  • Upsurge in autism diagnosis
  • 15,000 (1992) → 330,000 (2009)
  • In Wisconsin: 30 (1992) → 7000 (2009) (350 times as many)
• Autism in the press
  • Autism: the hidden epidemic?
    • “The number of U.S. children diagnosed with autism has skyrocketed in the past decade, causing widespread concern and confusion. As families struggle to cope with the disorder, MSNBC and NBC News look at the issues surrounding autism, the theories behind the dramatic increase and the latest on treatments.” —November 2005
• Autism in the News
  • Autism Now Series on PBS
    • Nick shows a particular type of shyness
    • Tend not to make eye contact, difficulty connecting, difficulty with language, abruptly absent
    • Physical symptoms: digestive system failures, mitochondria cannot produce sufficient energy, causes seizures and sensitivity to light and sound
    • Alison suspects a vaccine caused autism because Nick was diagnosed at the same time his whole system shut down
    • Children with autism have difficulty controlling emotions and expressing pain in words
    • Nick’s symptons have improved because Alison has saught out other doctors to treat more specific problems that were seen as symptoms
    • Autism affects the family, such as his siblings who think it’s unfair; Nick’s family’s lives revolve around autism, and it requires cooperation from all family members
    • A disruption in schedule makes Nick upset
    • We have widened the definition of autism – we conceptualize the symptoms differently now
    • Children with disabilities are entitled to free and appropriate education
    • Autism programs aim to integrate technology, like iPads
    • Children with autism have to be patiently taught things that may seem as easy as breathing for other children
    • People specially trained in autism should be teaching these children, not people trained in general education
• Why the upsurge in cases? (Sociological/epidemiological questions)
  • Not bad parenting
    • Refrigerator mother is the cause of autism? Debunked.
  • Not vaccines
  • Abnormal serotonin or other neurotransmitters?
  • Neurological defects in the pre-frontal cortex? Where do the neurological differences come from?
  • Genetics?
  • Factors in the environment?
  • Increased awareness, recognition, and diagnosis
  • Increased average parental age (older parents = higher chance of autistic children), substitution, accretion, etc.
• What are the impairments or deficits? (Clinical/psychological questions)
  • Social interaction (difficulty with taking other’s view, lacking empathy, indifference)
  • Social communication (literalness and trouble with idioms; tone of voice; pedantic)
  • Difficulty with imagination and generalization; may appear obsessively interested in limited areas; may work in sensory ways (tactile orientation)

March 16, 2012: Social Psychology, Socialization, and Autism (Part 2)

• Social Psychological Questions: What is autistic intelligence? What does it contribute? What happens in the interaction?
  • “What do you do when you cut your finger?” “Then I don’t have one.”
  • This is a literal viewpoint and is considered a deficit of relevant intelligence
  • “This is a picture of a cow. Can you make this picture of a cow?” Tony responds by playing with the pieces by banging the pieces together
• Directive-Response Sequences
  • Directives: utterances designed to get a recipient to do something
    • Offers, requests, orders, prohibitions, etc.
    • Not only talk but also prosody and embodiment
  • Responses: compliance, non-compliance, resistance, negotiation, bargaining, accounting, recycling
    • Talk, prosody, embodiment
• Successful and Unsuccessful Directives
  • “Put that one here”
    • Directive: “put that one here.”
    • Response: “no, don’t help me!”
  • “No, don’t help me!”
    • Directive: “no, don’t help me!”
    • Response: “you wanna try it yourself?”
    • Directive: (softly) “turn this one around.”
    • Response: Tony turns the piece
    • When Laura is interruptive, Tony doesn’t like it. When Tony leads, he does like it and complies with Laura.
    • Strategy: getting into the other person’s world; start with where they are
  • Criticisms
    • Tony doesn’t have an image in his mind of what he has to make; if he did, he might have done better
    • Autistic people are tactile-oriented and use touch as their primary sense
    • Tony is not interpreting the verbal input, but is instead taking it on a piece-by-piece basis
    • Instead of interpreting it as practice-based, they interpret it as reflex arc and as individual pieces
• Changing gears: different kinds of intelligence
  • Commonsense: gestalt, global, abstract
  • Autistic: stimulus-bound, local, concrete
  • Commonsense = the answer you would expect; ex: cut your finger → put on a bandage
  • Autistic has a local (focus on detail, literal interpretation) approach rather than seeing the bigger/global picture/goal
  • Concrete is like using specific images to recall things
• Intentional Blindness
  • The inability to perceive features in a visual scene if they are not being attended to
  • We don’t see the details (like umbrella/gorilla) because we are attentive of the gestalt (basketball passes)
  • Example: magic trick with six cards, one card is removed and your card is missing – at the end, all the cards are different
  • Example: counting passes awareness test, most people overlook the moonwalking bear
  • Example: asking for directions, most people don’t realize that the person asking for directions has been switched
• Autistic Intelligence: Attentional Blindness
  • It represents an attention to detail and blindness to schemas or general pictures (gestalts)
  • Three-dimensional touch sensory detail (?)
• What does autistic intelligence and orientation to detail get you? How about a job with McDonald’s?
  • They are more focused with micro and details
  • “McDonald’s hired Temple Grandin to help them implement an animal welfare audit at their fifty meatpacking plants, because she can see the details in an animal’s environment in the same way the animal does.”
  • Temple Grandin is “a designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants.”
  • Example: Grandin notices that cows have eyes on the sides of their heads, so she designs machinery so they will be less stressed from their perspective
  • Tiny details that scare farm animals
    1. Sparkling reflections on puddles
    2. Reflections on smooth metal
    3. Jiggling chains
    4. Metal clanging or banging
    5. High-pitched noise
    6. Air hissing
    7. Air drafts that blow towards the face
    8. Clothing hung on fence – similar to humans being frightened by unsourced shadows
    9. Changes in flooring and texture
    10. Sudden changes in color of equipment
• Temple Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures” (2006)
  • Grandin translates words into images to better understand them
  • Grandin is able to visualize her ideas to see how they would work in real life, and find problems before production
  • Nouns are easiest for autistics to learn because they can be associated with a picture; prepositions are harder and are remembered by an image of one thing in relation to another
  • Grandin used doors as symbolic representations of transitioning through different stages of her life
  • Some autistics have difficulty determining where their body starts and ends relative to other objects they’re touching
  • Other types of autistics (like visual thinkers) are music/math thinkers (patterns) and verbal logic thinkers (word details)
  • Education systems should focus on capitalizing on strengths rather than attempting to improve weaknesses
  • As Grandin got older and gained more experience, she expanded her image / visual information bank and became more normal
• What is Intelligence?
  • Imagine exploring a dark cave with a flashlight
  • If it has a variable focus, you can shine it intensely on some part of the cave, or broadly on the whole cave (neurotypical)
  • If it has a fixed and narrow focus, it will show minute details in great specificity, but at the cost of awareness of the context (autistic)
• Questions about autism
  • Sociological and demographic: Why the upsurge in cases?
  • Clinical and psychological: What are the impairments (deficits)?
  • Social psychological: What forms of intelligence does autism represent? What happens in the interaction?

Week 8 Readings: Socialization (Focus on Autism)

• K. Davis’ “Final Note on a Case of Extreme Isolation” (1947)
  • Anna was a girl who lived in isolation for 6 years due to family/adoption problems and an abusive and inhumane grandfather
  • After being rescued, she was at an infant’s mental ability with a 6-year-old’s physical body; she gradually improved
  • Her full mental capacity was most likely not achieved, but she was discovered at a young-enough age that her brain still had some plasticity
  • In comparison, Isabelle faced strikingly similar circumstances, but was able to recover quickly and almost fully
  • This could be explained by Anna inheriting a mental deficiency or Isabelle receiving better professional attention
  • Isabelle’s cas shows one can be isolated for 6 years and still acquire (full) cultural competency
• E. Langer’s “Mindfulness and Mindlessness” (1990)
  • Being in a conscious, purposeful, decision-making state helped hursing home residents live longer
  • Entrapment by category: failing to realize an object has uses outside of its label
    • Example: a door can also be wood
    • Mindful: creating new categories: mindless: sticking too rigidly to old categories
  • Automatic behavior: performing habitual tasks without taking into consideration contextual cues that change the need/relevance of habitual tasks
    • Many actions we see as intelligent can be performed automatically (ex: reading, writing)
    • Example: “because” produces a mindless response, even if the reason itself is silly
  • Acting from a single perspective: following something too closely
    • We act with such driven intent that we cannot see alternatives
    • Example: 4 pinches of salt instead of 1 is not a big deal; Ace bandages are not the only thing that can help sprains

March 19 & 21, 2012: Deviance and Vocabularies of Motive

• Background
  • “All behavior is motivated. Getting out of bed when the alarm clock rings, brushing the teeth, shaving, selecting the day’s necktie, ordering rolls and coffee or ham and eggs from the menu card, picking up the paper to read the news—these everyday activities are all causally determined … a definite motivation is invariably present.” —P.T. Young, 1936
  • No human behavior is beyond the reach of this causal determination
  • Early 20th century: consolidation of “desires,” “wants,” “interests,” and “energy” in a single term and abstract category that referred to aspects of personal direction under external influence and manipulation
  • Between WWI and WWII:
    1. Prominence of Freudian psychoanalysis
    2. Applied psychology (vocational guidance, marketing, work motivation – all these fields were interested in using motivation)
    3. Schools and education
• Need Psychology
  • H.A. Murray (1938): we have needs for acquisition, superiority, autonomy, achievement
  • Abraham Maslow (1954): psychological, safety, love and affection, esteem, and self-actualization
  • Problems: anecdotal and circular
  • Not very influential anymore due to problems
• Psychology and Motivation
  • “Cultural apologetics” – in each era, psychologists used concepts that were intrinsic to the era (energy, drive, needs, etc.) – and elevated those concepts to the status of universal human forces within the person
  • The psychology of human needs perpetuated the more general, and historically more deeply rooted, belief that the reasons for human conduct were to be looked for, not in particular social situations, but in hypothetical forces that inhabited individuals (Danziger, 123)
  • When an autistic child shows opposition, we must consider the possibility of the child not being able to do something, rather than concluding that it is choosing not to do it
• Contemporary Theories
  • Cognitive dissonance (Festinger): people have motivation to remove dissonance
  • Self-perception theory (Bem): how do we need to perceive ourselves?
  • Frustration-aggression (Dollard; aversive emotional arousal (Berkowitz): if we get frustrated, this leads to aggressive behavior
  • Social learning (Bandura): if an adult modeled aggressive behavior, observant children copied the behavior
• The Sociological Response: Social Structure and Personality
  • Sociological social psychologists are beginning to take more seriously the task of explicating the relationship between structural positions and individual personality and behavior by understanding through quantitative research:
    1. How social structure comes to influence personality
    2. How personality and social structure combine to determine socially consequential behaviors
    3. How the “fit” between individual needs or abilities and structural demands affects individual and social functioning
• A Different Sociological Response: Motivation as External
  • “The postulate underlying modern study of language is the simple one that we must approach linguistic behavior, not by referring it to private states in individuals, but by observing its social function of coordinating diverse actions.” —C. Wright Mills, “Situated Action and the Vocabulary of Motives.” American Sociological Review (1940)
• Vocabularies of Motive
  • “Motivation is ‘the controlling speech form’ which is incipiently [at the beginning of] or overtly present in some act or series of acts. Motives are words that stand for the anticipated situational consequences of a given act.” —C. Wright Mills (1940)
• Vocabularies of Motive: Drug Addiction
  • People can be addicts only if certain kinds of verbalizations are present
  • The thinking is that addiction occurs because you get drawn in to the high the substance provides
  • The feeling of pleasure is irrevocably connected to relieving the distress of withdrawal
  • If someone says that you are in withdrawal from morphine, you have acquired the vocabulary through language that produces the addiction, because you say that you need it – “I have to have it”
  • Addiction is not about pleasure, it’s about feeling normal again
• Vocabularies of Motive: Learning to Get High
  • You can’t separate the experience from the social context
  • Vocabularies: “You feel good? That’s the drug.” “You’re throwing up, but that’s part of getting high.”
• H. Becker’s “Becoming a Marijuana User” (1953)
  • A first-time user usually does not get high off marijuana because they aren’t using it right; the right way is learned through group interaction
  • Even when someone gets high, they might not even know it until someone with more experience tells them they are high and tells them to which sensations to pay attention
  • One must continue use and redefine sensations as emjoyable; they must learn to regulate use by interacting with more experienced users
  • There are many ways people can react to something new, but for the reaction to become stable, social interaction is necessary
• Vocabularies of Motive: Crime and Embezzlement
  • The attorney cashed in a client’s settlement check to pay off bills
  • He told himself he would only do it once, but he repeated it because he “had to do it,” and he “had no alternative”
  • These vocabularies release criminal behavior
  • Conditions:
    1. Individual is in a position of financial responsibility and trust
    2. (S)he has an “unshareable” problem – you can’t share it with anyone and you can’t tell anyone about it
    3. And also a set of verbalizations or vocabularies – justify the criminal behavior
• Vocabularies of Motive: Techniques of Neutralization
  • For most juvenile delinquents, law-breaking behavior is usually momentary
  1. Denial of responsibility – couldn’t help it
  2. Denial of injury – can’t hurt anybody
  3. Denial of victim – they deserved it
  4. Condemnation of condemners
  5. Appeal to higher authority – loyalty to the group/gang
• Summary
  1. Motivation is socially organized and external to the individual – group phenomenon
  2. Vocabularies release action / deviant behavior
  3. They are learned from participation in groups
  4. Vocabularies anticipate the consequences of law (and other violations)
• Goffman’s “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto”
  • A long time ago, ghettos were seen as places abandoned by law enforcement; after the beginning of the war on crime, many people living in ghettos have to make avoiding arrest an everyday task
  • Police constantly monitored the neivhborhood through video surveillance and helicopters, and pulled people to search them, check for warrants, and make arrests
  • Most people have warrants for their arrest due to minor infractions
  • People avoid going to the hospital because it might get them arrested or break their parole if police question why they are there
  • Rerporting crimes and using police can be risky because it might uncover the location of a family member on parole
  • Those with warrants don’t use police protection, which may make them targets as crime victims, and more prone to using violence as defense
  • Family or friends may take advantage of one’s warranted status to get what they want or get revenge
  • Some people use warrants as excuses for not doing things, even if the real reason is irrelevant to the warrant
  • The criminal justice system affects ghettos not only by the arrests made, but also by how it changes people’s lifestyles avoiding law enforcement
• Brown’s “School Violence and the Culture of Honor”
  • Culture of honor is linked to engaging in violent behavior to defend the honor
  • Students in culture-of-honor states are more likely to bring a gun to school and more likely to initiate school shootings
• Schachter & Singer’s “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State”
  • Experiments have shown that changes in physiology are not distinctly different among very different emotions; this supports the fact that the cognition is what helps us determine what emotion we’re feeling
  • When our body is aroused, we look around to see what is causing that arousal, and assign an emotion based off of its source (ex: fear, joy)
  • Epinephrine informed: received injection and told of side effects, side effects attributable; epinephrine misinformed: received injection and told of wrong side effects, side effects non-attributable; epinephrine ignorant: received injection and told there would be no side effects, side effects non-attributable; placebo: saline injection, side effects non-attributable
  • A stooge was introduced and proceeded to act like a child (euphoria) or raged (anger) in front of the subject
  • Subjects were more susceptible to the stooge’s mood if they had no explanation of bodily states (non-attributable categories)
  • Subjects engage in behagior only to the extent of the intensity of the emotion they’re feeling

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March 28 & 30, 2012: Intergroup Relations and Conflict: Race, Ethnicity, and Language Use

• Intergroup Relations and Conflict
  • Definition: Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identifications, we have an instance of intergroup behavior.
  • Muzafer Sherif’s “Robber’s Cave” experiment: recruit 11-12 year-old boys and separate them; form group identities (name, leader, structure); competitive games; collaborative / joint/common-goal tasks to diminish animosity
  • Common goal overcomes divisions
• Readings on Group Conflict: What do they suggest about race and ethnicity in the U.S.?
  • W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
    • PhD History, 1895, first African American to get a doctorate at Harvard
    • Nead of NAACP in 1910; founded The Crisis
    • Books: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folks (1903), Black Reconstruction (1935)
  • W.E.B. DuBois’ “Double Consciousness and the Veil” (1903)
    • Blacks feel separated from the rest of the world as if they were separated by a veil
    • Blacks don’t have a self-consciousness, but instead see themselves through the eyes of others
    • It’s not possible for one to feel American and Negro at the same time
  • Tori DeAngelis’ “Unmasking ‘Racial Micro Aggressions'” (2009)
    • Racial microaggressions are messages sent to racial minorities by white people who are being racist without intending to do so
    • Whites who strongly believe in equality and do not want to be associated with racism still show subtle signs of racism – this is aversive racism
    • Microassaults: conscious/intentional actions
    • Microinsults: communications that subtly demean a person’s race
    • Microinvalidations: communications that subtly and indirectly exclude something of a racial minority
    • Microinsults and microinvalidations are so subtle that a racial minority might feel offended but (s)he is unsure why
    • Members of racial minorities state that they feel this subtle racism, and find themselves adjusting their thoughts and behaviors negatively due to it
    • Members of racial minorities feel as if they are representing their entire race, and want to make a good impressions
    • Critics say microaggressions are not a big deal, and it is characterizing racial minorities as victims rather than people who have opportunities to overcome racism and take a positive approach
  • Robert B. Moore’s “Racism in the English Language” (1976)
    • If whites are racist, then it should be apparent in their language
    • There are terms that are blatantly racist, but blacks also dislike “colored”
    • The color black or darkness is usually paired with negativity, while white, lightnes, or brightness is paired with positivity
    • The word “slave” dehumanizes blacks
    • Some political terms actually criminalize the flourishing agents if they are reworded from the opposite perspective; they are blaming the victim
    • Using these terms localizes and shrinks our perspective
    • History books use loaded words to make white Europeans look heroic and Native Indians look villainous
    • Words with negative connotations are used to describe blacks and their associations
    • Using a positive adjective to describe one member of a group implies the rest of the group is not that adjective
    • Media connects speaking English to prosperity; foreigners who cannot speak English are portrayed as less capable people
    • We must recognize the racist nature of language and adjust our usage
  • bell hooks (nee Gloria Watkins) (1952-)
    • MA, University of Wisconsin (1976)
    • PhD, UC Santa Cruz (1976) (?)
    • Books: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; Feminist theory from margin to center; Talking back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
  • bell hooks’ “Talking Back” (1989)
    • Talking back is speaking to authority as if they were an equal
    • Women were not allowed to talk, and those who obeyed were subnmitting to male dominance
    • hooks chose not to conform, and expressed her thoughts and emotions in wroting
    • At first, works written by black women were criticized; these works are now receiving more attention and are more prevalent
    • She got her name from a word that meant a sharp-tongued woman who spoke her mind and talked back
  • N.J. Shook & R.H. Fazio’s “Interracial Roommate Relationships: An Experimental Field Test of the Contact Hypothesis” (2008)
    • White college freshmen were randomly assigned to have White roommates or Black roommates
    • The individuals who were assigned with Black roommates showed less satisfaction, less involvement, and less comfort than those assigned with White roommates
    • When tested at the end of the semester, the individuals who had Black roommates showed a decrease in automatically activated racial attitudes, while those who had White roommates did not show a significant difference
    • This shows that, although having a Black roommate might be less satisfying, they produce long-term benefits
• Ethnicity and Language Use: Case Study
  • Black English Vernacular (BEV), African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), African-American English (AAE), Standard English
  • Two Views of School Performance
    1. Cultural Deprivation: 1960s idea about poor performance of African-American children in the schools; why black kids were underperforming relative to others – they didn’t have sufficient prior cultural experiences
    2. History, lived experience, language use in context
  • The Story of Leon and Clarence
    • William Labov’s Language in the Inner City (1972)
    • Look at how black children were being tested in the school clinic
    • Black child would have long pauses between responses, which made people conclude he was linguistically deficient
    • When the examiner was black and the child brought a black friend, he talked more
    • Lesson: there is an environmental/situational factor affecting black children’s performance
  • AAE as a distinct linguistic system
    • Examples
      • She been married → She has been married and is not now
      • I been know your name → I knew your name but forgot it
      • It ain’t nobody I can trust → I can trust no one
      • It ain’t nobody I can’t trust → I can trust everyone
      • Wasn’t no girls could go with us → None of the girls could go with us
      • Wasn’t no girls couldn’t go with us → All of the girls could go with us
      • Ain’t none these dudes can beat me → None of these guys can beat me
      • Ain’t none of these dudes can’t beat me → All these guys can beat me
    • At first, it was seen as an unsophisticated/wrong way (deficient form of English), but it was actually a different system
    • Each ethnicity does not have a strict correlation – they just have a higher chance due to contextual exposure
  • AAE as involving skilled productions, as in disputing/insulting
    • There go Willie mother right there (referring to passerby) → Your mother is a lizard → Your mother smell like a roach → Your mother home is Benedict Arnold
    • These insults are proprietary to blacks
    • Those socialized in white culture cannot fully understand the insult routine
    • Miller Lite commercial: the commercial says the timing of the joke was wrong, but it’s actually because he just didn’t understand the insult routine
  • Blacks vs. Whites and Insulting
    • Your momma drink pee → “Your daddy eats do-do” vs. “She does not”: non-AAE speakers do not understand that this is an insult
    • Snappy reports: Move over → I can’t, your mom is already there
    • You lose by running out of insults or coming up with a counter
    • Three features of ritual insults
      1. Reliance upon formulaic patterns
      2. Use of rhyme within these patterns
      3. Change of speech rhythms
  • Issues
    1. What happens when language styles clash?
    2. Variation is an interesting topic, but what underlies the variation?
• Universals in Language Use
  • Three-part lists
    • Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend o’mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
    • Personal basis, family basis, and national basis – it doesn’t make sense, but it has a linguistic tone to it
    • I hope the place is stacked; I hope the audience is live; I hope when I step out this door that they are ready and anxious, you know, to hear us do what we gotta do

April 9 & 11, 2012: Biological Contexts of Social Psychology

• Basic Questions about Biology and Social Psychology
  • What is the influence of biology on social interaction?
  • How has our evolutionary past shaped brains to affect individual behavior and social organization?
  • What is the relevance of genetic difference on social behavior?
  • What is the relevance of “proximate” human physiology?
  • Dichotomous thinking of nature vs. nurture / instinct vs. learning has broken down a lot
• Sociobiology and Evolutionary Social Psychology
  • What is the influence of biology on social interaction?
  • How has our evolutionary pas shaped brains to affect individual behavior and social organization?
  • Wilson on the sociobiology of ants: tendency of cooperation/collaboration is explained not by kin selection, but by group selection (altruism); ants use chemical substances to communicate
• Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology and Social Psychology
  • How evolution shapes human social psychology
  • The mind: memory, perception, language, modular structures that have evolved over time
• Evolutionary Social Psychology
  • Swiss army knife metaphor: there are separate tools, just like there are separate modules in our brain; each tool/module has its own function
  • Concern with commonalities and universals
  • In-group orientations (includes altruism)
    • We have a tendency of altruistic behavior in many species: chirping, sharing food, suicide stinging
    • Fairness and justice
    • Humans are genetically inclined to help parents and siblings more than distant others, because we share more genetic material, and by helping them, we preserve our own DNA
    • Inclusive fitness theory: it appears altruistic, but it’s actually motivated by selfishness
    • Human generosity evolved/emerged as a property of the group and not the individual
    • The costly sacrificial acts help sustain the group; helping the group then helps the individual
    • Selfishness beats …?
    • By helping the group, we help ourselves indirectly
  • “Preparedness”: organisms are predisposed to learn certain kinds of behavior over others. Ex: humans learning language (language acquisition device)
  • Individualistic orientation: individualism as an approach to understanding human behavior
  • Concern with sex differences
  • The engine that drives the evolutionary process: not natural selection (survival of the fittest), rather differential reproduction (concern to produce one’s own genes)
  • Inclusive fitness theory: we’re concerned about our own DNA, but also of relatives, and we will act in a self-sacrificial way so their DNA can also be reproduced
  • Females prefer males who will provide care and future success while they invest time in babies; males prefer attractive mates who will engage in relationships
• Example of Evolutionary Social Psychology: Birth Order
  • Frank Sulloway: across social groups, first-born children are conservative, authoritarian, and “tough-minded”
  • Freese et al: demographic variables (parent’s education, race, age, size of sibship) are the determining factors on social and political attitudes
  • First-borns tend to be more conservative than later-borns, and defend the status quo while later-borns try to oppose/question/challenge it
  • Studied almost 4,000 (7,000?) people
  • First-borns relate more with power and authority and use their size and strength as enforcement
  • First-borns are more assertive, jealous, over-represented in positions of power
  • Later-borns are more imaginative
• Criticisms of Evolutionary Social Psychology
  1. Reductionism
  2. Static views
  3. Implication that natural is good
  4. Untestable hypothesis
  5. Post hoc explanations
  • See Kendrick et al. for defenses against these criticisms – “Evolutionary Social Psychology: Adaptive Predispositions and Human Culture”

April 13, 2012: Douglas Kenrick, Josh Ackerman, and Susan Ledlow’s “Evolutionary Social Psychology: Adaptive Predispositions and Human Culture” (Extra Reading)

• General Principles of Evolutionary Models
  • Natural Selection: Morphology and Behavior by Adaptive Design
    • Different parts of different animals’ bodies morph into different things so they can use it to survive in their environment
    • Animals engage in behaviors that will maximize their chances of surviving
  • Inclusive Fitness: Why Humans Everywhere are Concerned with the Distinction between Kin and Non-Kin
    • Animals subconsciously help those with whom they share genes in order to pass those genes on
    • When questioned about life-or-death situations, humans have a tendancy to protect those who still have reproductive capabilities
  • Life History Strategies: When and How to Reproduce?
    • Animals must find a balance between staying healthy and producing lots of offspring
    • Humans have a very long life span, an extended period of offspring dependence, reproductive support by older post-reproductive individuals, and male help in caring for offspring
    • Humans maintain connections with ancestors on both genders’ sides
    • Males tend to start reproducing later because they must acquire status before attracting a mate
  • Differential Parental Investment: Sex Differences and Similarities in Reproductive Strategy
    • Females have a larger investment in mating because their contribution of an egg is much more valuable than a male’s contribution of sperm
    • In other species, if the male invests more time and effort caring for the child, they will be more selective than the female when searching for a mate
    • Because male humans have a higher investment in caring for the child, they have higher standards for females for long-term relations rather than casual, short-term sexual relationships
  • Sexual Selection: Mate Choice, Status, and Attractiveness
    • Some animals like the peacock have counterintuitive features that place them in greater danger, but improve the chances of finding a mate
    • Intrasexual selection involves defeating same-sex competitors; intersexual selection involves attracting an opposite-sex mate
    • In humans, both females and males are selective in their mate-choosing process because they both invest in raising offspring
    • Research shows females prioritize status while males prioritize attractiveness
• Mind, Language, and Culture
  • Adaptively Prepared Learning
    • Animals have a predisposition to learning some things more quickly and easily than others
    • Fear responses to some particular stimuli are innate
    • We are “prepared” to learn some things – we learn them more easily, and they’re harder to extinguish
    • Another example of preparedness is the human brain’s preparedness to learn a language
  • The Construction of Culture
    • The ability to learn human language shows our predisposition to acquiring human culture
    • There are human interactional tendancies that are universal among all cultures
    • The tendency of monogamy and polygyny/polyandry is dependent on the prevalence of males and females in a particular specie
  • Intra- and Intergroup Relationships
    • Even a very long time ago, humans banded together in groups
    • People preferred in-group people because they were usually connected genetically or have had long ancestral relationships
    • Out-group members are seen as less friendly, but were not completely ignored because they do not necessarily always pose a threat and could potentially be used for exchange relationships
• Why Don’t Social Scientists Take Fuller Advantage of Modern Evolutionary Theory?
  • Concerns about evolutionary theory: it is reductionistic, implies that evolved mechanisms are unchangeable, implies that evolved mechanisms are “natural” and therefore good or moral, its hypotheses are untestable, and its explanations are post hoc

Week 11 Readings: Biology

• Michael Levine & Hara Estroff Marano’s “Why I Hate Beauty” (2001)
  • Contrast effect: difference between two things is exaggerated depending on presentation order
  • Overexposure to extreme beauty is causing Levine to lose his ability to appreciate real everyday beauty
  • Our minds selectively remember the beautiful, so we have unrealistically high expectations from those around us
  • Male teachers exposed to young female students might subconsciously see their wives as less attractive, making them less satisfied with the marriage
  • Physical atttractiveness is correlated with health and fertility
• Dion, Berscheid, and Walster’s “What is Beautiful is Good” (1972)
  • Folklore has said that there is a correlation among physical attractiveness, desirable personality and success; this correlation may exist, but causation may not be in the direction expected
  • An experiment asked college students to decide if they thought people of varying attraactiveness possessed certain personality traits
  • Students attributed omre positive traits more frequently to more attractive people; the most attractive person won every category except parental competence

April 18 & 20, 2012: Social Psychology and Gender

• Early Social Psychology and Gender
  • Following Talcott Parsons, much early sociology and social psychology emphasized the process of sex role socialization
  • Men and women were distinctly defined categories that had fundamental and enduring differences
• More Recent Social Psychology and Gender
  • A partial list of social psychological studies in the 1980s-2000s:
    1. Gender role attitudes: no. of women in the workforce increasing
    2. Gender as stratification factor: wage gap has been reduced, but females still make less; women suffer more job stress
    3. The influence of gender on self-esteem, attributions of one’s own success or failure, etc.: women are more likely to feel insecure, successfully and financially
    4. Gender and language use, leadership style, conformity, help giving: how gender affects these aspects
• Contemporary Social Psychology and Gender
  • Ferree (1990): Housework as “gendered labor, that is, a set of culturally and hsitorically specific tasks that convey social meanings about masculinity and feminity, and therefore about power” (p. 874)
    • Even though both men adn women have occupations, women still do most of the housework (asymmetry)
    • Women usually work with other women, and achieve less prestigious positions
  • Expectations of state theory (Correll & Ridgeway, 2003): Members of groups form expectations about performance on the basis of socially significant characteristics” – master statuses such as gender and race that are readily identifiable
    • People see asymmetry and think it is that way because it should be
    • Men tend to show more leadership because of the status rather than what skills they bring
• Gender Controversy
  • Caster Semenya at the 2011 Bislett Games: Oslo, Norway
    • Possibility that Caster was biologically male
  • In recent years in high schools
    • Georgia: boy preferring wigs/make-up sent home
    • Mississippi: tuxedo picture banned from yearbook
    • Arizona: girl becomes homecoming prince
    • California: gay male becomes prom queen
    • There are 4118 gay-straight alliance clubs in high schools across the country
• Sex, Sex Category, and Gender
  • Sex: biological criteria for classifying person as female, male, intersexed (on basis of chromosomes, genetalia, hormones)
  • Which of these factors should be determinant of sex?
  • Sex category: sexual (biological criteria) plus displays of sex identification
  • There can be a disparity between sex and sex category
  • Gender: the activity of managing situated conduct such that normative claims can be made about membership in a sex category
• Money’s Theory of Gender Plasticity
  1. Genitals are naturally dimorphic and not socially constructed. As such, they are markers of dichotomous gender.
  2. Gender is necessarily dichotomous because of #1 (the morality of gender).
  3. Intersexed or ambiguous genitals can and should be corrected by surgery (they should be unequivocally assigned to a category). Gender identity is changeable until 18-24 months.
  4. Physicians and psychologists are the authority on this.
• Diamond’s Theory of Gender Innateness
  1. Brain structure sets limits on the influence of culture, learning, and environment.
  2. Gender identity is hardwired from conception.
  3. Transexuality and intersexuality: represent in utero brain anomalies
• The Incorrigble Belief in Gender Dichotomy
  • Physicians (and members of society) assume that female and male are the only natural options
  • “Good penis equals male; absence of good penis equals female” – the oracle of pediatric sexology
  • The idea of “doing gender”
  • Chromosomes are less important in determining gender than penis size
  • Gender is changeable utnil about 18 months of age
  • Doctors think gender should be assigned immediately and unchangeably
  • Mismanagement (inability to declare gender) is less likely to happen in urban hospitals
  • Rural babies have less immediate gender assignment, and sometimes don’t receive surgery and grow up with ambiguous genitalia
• What is “Doing Gender”?
  • Garfinkel’s “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part I” in Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967)
  • Goffman’s “Gender Advertisements” (1975)
    • We show an alignment towards a gender in our interactions
    • Study of advertisements; how it is patterned gender is being displayed
  • West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” in Gender and Society 1:125-151 (1987)
  • Joan Fujimura’s “Sex Genes: A Critical Sociomaterial Approach to the Politics and Molecular Genetics of Sex Determination” in Signs (2006)

April 23 & 25, 2012: Social Psychology of Emotions

• Emotion is a subset of affect
  1. Evaluation: we evaluate if it is bad or good
  2. Changes in bodily sensation: various stimuli to body
  3. Displays: showing what the internal state may be
  4. Cultural meanings that we assign to what we see
• Emotion Expressions
  • Overview: 5-year-old girl falls under mental retardation, and clinicians are delivering the diagnosis
  • Pattern: citing the evidence → asserting of the condition (never the other way around)
• Symbolic Interactionist
  • Schacter & Singer, Becker
  • Dramaturgical theories – feeling rules (Hochschild)
    • When we come together in a group, we attempt to convery aspects of our character, as if we were in a drama/theater
    • Feeling rules: how we’re supposed to feel in certain situations. Ex: expressions of grief subsided and it became private over time
  • Emotion work: management of one’s emotions and the emotions of others
    • Cognition: thoughts used
    • Body: fix sensations accompanying emotion, such as breathing slowly
    • Expression: regulating the expression itself
  • The role of macro processes: emotions aren’t just about local situations; it also has to do with structures (occupational, etc.)
• Structural Theories
  • Interaction ritual chains (Collins)
    • Gathering of individuals in time and space
    • Use of greeting rituals
    • Rhythmic synchronization
  • Power and status (Kemper)
    • All human relationships have power and status embedded in them
    • Four emotions: anger, anxiety, fear, loss of confidence
    • If someone insults us, that is a power move, and we will feel these emotions
    • If someone has power but loses it, we will feel these emotions
• Psychodynamic theories
  • Freud
  • The notion of unconscious comes from Freud
  • Emotional catharsis (Scheff)
    1. The need to express emotion: it was thought that repressing emotions would cause hysteria, paralysis, seizures, etc.
    2. Abreaction: if you let the emotion loose and recall the memory, you will release the stress
    3. Aesthetic distance: as you’re re-experiencing the emotion, you must stsay away from being completely immersed in the emotion; instead, you must apoproach it in a medium, rational way
• Situated sociologies of emotion
  • Social constructionism (Harré, Coulter): turn away from physiology and psychology; we must focus on reciprocal interaction, and look at vocabularies of emotion as it’s used
  • Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
    • Display of affect and situated ascription
    • Ascription: seeing someone’s actions and assigning a label to describe their emotions
    • Affect and social order
    • When you’re waiting for news delivery, there is a suspension of the accent of reality – social order temporarily breaks down, then recreates after delivery
  • Phenomenological approaches: ethnographic autobiography, narrative

April 30, 2012: How Emotions Work

• Pissed Off in L.A. – or the emotional features of road rage
  • Discredited/disproved:
    • Something bad happened to the driver first (“bad day”)
    • Drivers are afraid
    • Frustration-aggression hypothesis
    • Race, age, gender (background)
    • A few bad drivers cause all the problems
  • The emotional provocations of asymmetrical interaction: drivers can’t really communicate because the other driver cannot hear you if you say something (contrast from walking on the street); unable to articulate
  • The metamorphosis of the angered body
    • Spatial. Immediate: foot movements or other embodied acts (brake, shift gears); Transcendent: talk on phone, listen to radio – you’re paying attention to another spatial dimension
    • Temporal. Immediate: loss of moment, have to adjust; Transcendent: want to get to your destination but you are being interrupted
    • Moral. Immediate: insult to one’s private domain, interruption to peacefulness; Transcendent: the car as projecting an identity and self
    • Isomorphism: when driving, we become our car
  • Narrative practices of anger – the driver seeking to enact drama that tells a story about the interaction
    1. Righteous indignation: when driving, we have a tendency to take things personally (“they did it to me“); get back at them on behalf of yourself and the community
    2. Invocation of prejudical stereotypes: notice details of offender and generalize characteristics on the entire offender
    3. Socioemotional logic and what pissed off people actually do: aesthetic dimensions; when we insult someone, we build a narrative by taking a ritualized revenge and perform it so it’s witnessed by others
• Pissed Off in Oklahoma (Channel 6 Story)
  • Narrative practices of anger – seeking to enact a drama that tells a story about the interaction
    1. “Did you know you ran over my dog? H was $1,000.” Yang builds the construction that he was victimized; police says he swerved away from 2 dogs and hit 1
    2. Make generalization based off race; the dog’s owner saw that the driver was Asian (Hmong)
    3. “If they do it to me, they might do it to others, so I’m going to get back at this person for the greater good.” This is a macroaggression – he taught the lesson to the group rather than just the man

Week 13 Readings: Emotions and Affect

• Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling” (1983)
  • Even before being interviewed, people are trained about how to portray themselves during the interview and what they should and should not do
  • The people who are seen as desirable during interviews are people who can best project this ideal image
  • Training as a flight attendant for Delta caused people to become separated from their families and attached to the company
  • Flight attendants are taught to relax and smile regardless of what the situation
  • The home and the airplane cabin is connected during training so flight attendants treat things on the plane as nicely as they treat things at home
  • By using empathic language, flight attendants are able to calm the complaining passenger, or at least make them conscious of the fact that they are angry
  • The flight attendants’ smiles are not representative of their emotions, but instead, those of the company
  • Some flight attendants are responding to the company forcing smiles onto them by no longer conforming and expressing their own, true emotions

May 02 & 04, 2012: The Interaction Order

• Definition
  • Social interaction that transpires in local social situations or environments in which two or more individuals are co-present, and whose elements fit together and are more closely organized with one another than with elements beyond the local situation
  • Social interaction that is not conditioned by elements beyond the local situation. Rather, participants comport themselves with their embodied behavior and talk on the spot to organize what they do to achieve the purposes they have for that situation
  • The system that regulates everyday interaction among people on a basic level
• Characteristics: social “situatedness”
  • Transcends usual sociological distinctions
  • Involves “presentation of self”
  • Breakdown in the interaction order has consequences
    • For the interaction (comes to halt or confusing interlude)
    • For larger audiences
    • For the individual’s self (personality)
  • Example: Perry’s three agencies of government
    • With other politicians and the person running/hosting the debate
    • With the audience at the debate
    • With himself
• I.O. as its own domain
  • The interaction order as “for itself”
  • The working consensus: it’s not necessarily something we want for ourselves, but we align ourselves to the situation
  • Service encounters
  • Affective neutrality
  • The physical exam and disattentions: small talk, middle distant gaze, suspended talk
  • It’s our practices that determine the rules, rather than the rules determining the practice
  • Example: Mr. Bean’s bus stop and blind man, the bus stops at the opposite side of the line
• Service encounters: standing in line
  • Main organizing principle: first come, first served
  • Rules
  • Movement practices: you can only maintain a position if you stay there and keep up with the progress of the line
  • Space holding practices: stay between two people
  • Directional practices: face forward
  • Gaze practices: do not look at other people, keep eyes focused on objects
  • Violations (see Duneier & Gardner): example, large backpack
  • Emotions and morality: waiting makes you deserving of your position and the service at the end; suppress emotions to promote neutrality
  • Special cases: bars; there’s no specific line, and people try different methods to get served as soon as possible

Week 14 Readings: Interaction Order

• Stephen E. Lankenau’s “Panhandling Repertoires and Routines for Overcoming the Nonperson Treatment” (1999)
  • People tend to ignore panhandlers (nonperson treatment), so they must come up with methods to catch their attention
  • People generalize the negative thoughts associated with homeless people to everyone with similarities
  • Nonperson treatment can be the result of intentional or non-intentional ignorance
  • Most panhandlers had health issues that were not apparent just from looking at them
  • Most pandhandlers had a job, but lost it
  • Storytellers tell stories that make people feel sympathetic
  • The panhandler must have a look that matches along with their story/situation
  • Silent storytellers don’t say anything and allow their bodily impression and props to do the communicating
  • Sign storytellers use messages written on signs to deliver messages/requests for help in a passive and unobtrusive way
  • Line storytellers have a line they say to ersuade others to help them by giving them something they need
  • Luck storytellers tell detailed narratives of their strange circumstances, emphasizing the luxury/difficult disparity between the storyteller and passerby
  • Aggressors evoke fear or guilt by using intimidation, persistence, and/or shame (make the passerby feel shameful of how little they donate)
  • Aggressive panhandling is illegal; for most panhandlers, being aggressive is not worth it, because they will get arrested and lose out on further panhandling opportunities
  • Servicer panhandlers make themselves seem like salespeople rather than panhandlers to make the interaction more comfortable
  • Servicers help people in various different small ways (like giving information, assisting with tasks, and being of utility), and the people who are helped usually give money, even though it is not specifically requested
  • Greeters make people feel happy and good about themselves, lightening their emotions and evoking kindness in return
  • People might be hesitant at first, but when they can feel that the greeter really does have good intentions, they reciprocate the kindness
  • Entertainers provide humor and enjoyment: jokers use humor to make people laugh; musicians use music in some way to receive donations for their skills or effort
  • Panhandlers face the challenges and tough situations they’re in and use strategies to support themselves
  • These strategies can be used outside of the panhandling sense as persuasion techniques
• M. Duneier’s “Talking to Women” from Sidewalk (1999)
  • Mudrick talks to women passing by all the time and compliments them, but he usually doesn’t get a response
  • He says women can’t be mean to him because of the nice things that he is saying to them
  • Conversation analysis shows that questions and compliments increase chances of getting a response and continuing a conversation, but this isn’t the case for Mudrick
  • The woman shows specific signs of not wanting to continue the conversation with Mudrick, but Mudrick insists on prolonging the conversation by asking more questions and being more rudely invasive
  • Keith has control of the woman through the interaction he has with her dog – these interactions allow him to tolerate the silences from the woman
  • The only reason the woman interacts with Keith is to correct him or disagree with him
  • When asking for money, Keith offers compliments only to women
  • Keith picks on white women to induce a sense of guilt that he is in a fearful state while they are not; on the contrary, black women might feel double the guilt because they share a race with Keith
  • These men are not only being vulgar to the women, but they are breaking conventional concepts of social bonds
  • After Keith was placed into a wheelchair, a woman stated that she would talk with him more because she felt at ease, as if Keith’s disability placed the woman in greater power
  • Overall, male panhandlers treat women as objects of interaction
• Carol Brooks Gardner’s “Passing By: Street Remarks, Address Rights, and the Urban Female”
  • A breach of civil inattention occurs when eye contact is held for too long between two people who do not know each other
  • Women may feel victimized by men breaching civil inattention and pointing out their presence through a variety of different provocative ways
  • If an individual is out-of-role, they are inviting breaches of civil inattention
  • Civil inattention may be broken when people notice someone else with striking similarities
  • Women sometimes do not feel offended by civil inattention because receiving it implies that she is being flattered
  • Some women may respond differently to men depending on what they perceive their intention to be (ex. acknowledging that she is married), as that may mitigate the offense they take
  • Men might talk about women to themselves but make it clear to the woman that she is the subject of the conversation; however, she cannot take part of the conversation
  • These conversations sometimes include taboo topics with the intention of making the woman feel uncomfortable for overhearing them
  • When a woman is exposed to situations like this, it tests her self-control
  • A woman might react to a breach of civil inattention by ignoring the remark or avoiding the location where it happened, or acting in a way that prevents the civil inattention from happening in the first place
  • If a woman retaliates, she might receive harsher retaliation in return, or be ignored and turned into a breacher herself