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Final
Introduction to Psychology
Exam 3 Study Guide
Note: All the material below is from the lectures.
Social Cognition:
1. Bridge between social and cognitive- between the way we process information in general, and
how we do this in the particular case of other people’s minds

Explain what is meant by our ability to engage in “mind-reading”
a. Making inferences about your beliefs, thoughts, desire, goals and so on.
EX: Are you angry or happy? Hot or Cold? Nice or mean?
1. Can’t look at/ touch beliefs but know that they are there and what they
are.
2. Basically, gaining access to the mental state of the others.
The Centrality of Social Cognition:
o
Our perceptual and Conceptual systems are cahoots to anthropomorphize our
surroundings, to see animate agents, to see minds, and faces everywhere
o
Minds are ready to infer things, which gives us clues on who we are interacting with.
b. Know each of the following examples, and know how they provide evidence of the
centrality of social cognition
1) Perceiving faces everywhere
1. Something about the pattern of movement makes us all prone to
thinking about it in a way that isn’t at all appropriate for this particular
situation. So like an optical illusion, there is something about this
display that leads you to attribute real social content to it, social
content that we know isn’t really there.
2. Thus, we are prepared to see social things everywhere.
EX:
a. Movie poster with face like setting; in a closer inspection
reveals it’s all branches.
b. Items that have similar facial like features: mobs, etc
c. Jack-o-Lantern
3.
1
Final
c. Point-light walkers
1) A set of a dozen lights moving in a coordinated fashion -something about their
pattern of movement makes us inexorably think of a person walking despite it
being all dots.
d. The data on social-brain evolution
o
How is social information realized in the human brain?
 We have larger cortical volume than other species even if our overall brains
aren’t much bigger. (Brain size /= cortical volume)
 Robin Dunbar looked at these ratios and how they relate to the size of the group
that species live in.
Social Brain evolution:
 Strong relationship between having larger group sizes that you live in you
will tend to have larger cortical volumes.
o As if there were new cognitive demands for dealing with larger
groups that are met by increased cortical volume – that our big
brains are in a sense for big groups.
o

Larger cortical volume allows to manage social relationships
(Humans: more than 150 relationship)
 The number of x-mas cards adults will send out, number of
real friends among your Facebook friends, number of
people you might invite to your wedding (approximation of
our actual social network size)
 The most complicated thing we encounter is mind of
another person
 As number of intelligent humans to deal with
increase, the amount of processing power it will
take to navigate them successfully also increase. As
we have to remember relationship and their
personality etc.
Dunbar’s experiment:
o Revealed that even thought there were more than 1000 Facebook
or IG friends; people only interacted with about 150.
e. The pain of social exclusion
1) Social Exclusion: act as a form of physical(neurological) pain
EX: Frisbee – excluding to pass it to one person.
1. Anterior Cingulate Cortex-central to experience physical pain
EX 2: Cloth and Wire Mother
2. ATTACHMENT THEORY
a. Humans have fundamental need for attachment/ want somebody
to comfort them.
2
Final
b. Monkey would go to cloth mother as social instinct despite the fact
that it was wired mother that fed the monkey.
Failures of social cognition:
a. Shape chasing (Heider & Simmel video with the triangles and circle; typical response
vs. response of individuals with autism)
Typical Response:

Triangle example: where the bigger triangle was in control, or trying
to take control of the smaller triangle and the circle, the rectangular
shaped place was similar to like a room with a closed door that um,
if you went in there you were safe until that triangle came in. The
small triangle and the circle were trying to escape from the large
triangle and when they did, the large triangle became very furious
and destroyed things.
Autistic Individuals

They would say a rectangle, two triangles, and a small circle. The
triangle and the circle went inside the rectangle, and then the other
triangle went in, and then the triangle and the circle went out and
took off, left one triangle there. And then the two (pause) parts of
the rectangle made like a [sic] upside-down V, and that was it.’’
o no actual use of mental state terms, no wanting or trying,
etc.
o missing: the use of mental state language. So ASD is often
thought of as a very specific detriment to reasoning about
mental states.
b. Failures of social cognition in individuals with autism
a. Autism as a person with a major failure of Theory of Mind even when other
kinds of cognition may be unimpaired.
i. Description of autistic child, from the 40s
ii. Theory of Mind: An Assessment of an individual human’s degree of
capacity for empathy and understanding of others
b. Disregard for the distinction between people and objects, an inability of
disinclination to take the intentional stance when interacting with others.
EX:

False Photograph test
 What do you think, will autistics do well on this test or fail. When
they are asked to identify what will be in the photo after Apple falls.
3
Final
o
o
If anything, autistics do better, suggesting the problem is
really specific to thinking about what other people KNOW,
not general to just changes in state…
So again, evidence for a very specific problem in Autistics
EX:

o
False Belief test: Where will Sally look for the ball?
o
It’s as if young children can’t over-rule their own knowledge—they know where it is,
so they can’t imagine that other people don’t know. This is called a failure to
understand false belief, or more broadly, a failure to have a theory of mind.
What is meant by social cognition as “mind-melding”
a. Getting others to experience what I experience
b. Getting myself to experience what others experience
How it is handled?
1) The role of language
EX: Pragmatics or syntax of language to signal a meaning or etc.
1. Language is deeply social as its about other people all of the time: Gossip.
2) The role of emotion
1. We have other signals that we often use to communicate emotions
a. Look at faces and get a strong signal for what each person is
thinking or feeling. So emotional displays allow these people to get
what’s in their mind into the mind of others around them.
3) The role in teaching
1. If going to learn from one/teach one then need to understand that you
have mental states that I can influence them
a. So, capable of understanding things I am capable of understanding
2. Require mental state understanding to learn or teach.
EX: Monkeys and primates find themselves in this situation, where they
Don’t have those understandings, so teaching is waste of time.
4
Final
a. Don’t understand others have mental states, and they don’t try to
influence those mental states, to get the other person to have
certain mental states, like particular piece of knowledge.

Identify/explain each of the following and how each relates to “mind-melding”
a. Emotion-sharing (e.g., pain)
1) Our desire to share in the mental sates of other is so insistent that you may feel
some distress watching someone in pain.
1. Injection on lip, we are drawn to that mental state.
2) Parts of the brain that are active when you are in pain are active when you see
somebody else in pain
3) Amygdala: Brain region that is involved with fear, and if presented with a fearful
stimulus such as spider, amygdala will activate crazy.
1. EX: Show a face of somebody who’s in fear then amygdala activates, which
shows that we share emotions.
b. The Chameleon effects
1) People spontaneously mimic the behavior of others
2) Mimicry facilitates smooth interactions and increases liking between people
3) People with high empathy scores spontaneously mimic more than low empathy
folks.
c. The Fundamental Attribution Error
EX: If something bad happens to somebody else (Fail on test) will be more likely to
attribute it to their trait.
1. If someone falls off the bike  would think that person is clumsy
However, If it happened to me
2. Unlikely to infer that bad trait (not infer that I’m the stupid sort of person,
rather in this case I’m going to think of all the situational factors that led to
this grade- lack of sleep, too much work, going out partying the night
before)
a. Willing to make more broad exceptions for ourselves that we don’t
make with other people
Key idea
•
•
•
We make sense of each other’s’ behavior in terms of their psychological states
Social cognition seems to be a central human function that may have driven the expansion of
the human brain
Humans have a drive to bring their psychological experience “in register” with that of others
and strive to change others’ mental states
5
Final
•
When others’ mental states cannot be changed, we often shift our own experience to be in
line with that of others
Groups

Conformity
 Definition:
o A social influence wherein, a person changes their opinions, beliefs or behaviors
in order to fit in with the group. (Dark-side example)
o Response to the pressure to be a part of a group –how important our social
relationships really are (we feel physical pain when excluded)
 Why do they conform?
 Conform to avoid social rejection
 As it is painful to be excluded.

Dark side: you may conform to bad behavior just because that is the norm of the group.
There might be intergroup conflict or intergroup competition. Diffusion of responsibility
may occur as well

Light side: allows you to be a part of a group and when you feel like you are a part of a
group it may boost your self-esteem. Distribution of knowledge and norms.
Three kinds of ‘conformity’
(1) Conformity: Going along with the crowd (this is what we traditionally term ‘conformity’)
Example
a. Asch’s line Paradigm (be able to describe the study, identify key lessons, and be
able to apply it to real world scenarios)
i. Asked which line was same length as the other lines in the options, then
when other people said the wrong answer, the subject also conformed to
the answer despite knowing that the answer was wrong.
1. Most of these participants, afterwards when debriefed that they
realized something was wrong, that they thought A was the right
answer—but they are apparently unwilling to say so in front of the
group the vast majority of the time
2. 70% of the participants conformed to the wrong answer
6
Final
ii. Two types of conformity
1. Some people conformed because they thought the group was correct
2. Others knew they were wrong but conformed so that they didn’t have
to go against the group.
Avoiding Conformity
i.
Works for small and big groups alike but can be counteracted by just a single
ally. So, even in big group of 10 people, if you have one ally- one person who
says what you think is the right answer- you can avoid conformity and go with
your true answer.
ii.
When the subject wrote it down: where other people cannot see their
answers.
(2) Obedience to authority
a. Milgram’s shock experiments (understand basic setup, be able to describe study,
identify key lessons about obedience from study, and be able to apply to real world
scenarios)
i. 61-66% of participants administered the strongest shock ’fatal’ shock just
because of the presence of an authority figure.
ii. The experiment required to continue to shock the subject. Many protests and
ask for confirmation- and they carry on and continue shocking despite their
misgivings.
iii. Why do they conform: Afraid of authority figure/ belief on authority
iv. What reduces compliance?
i.
ii.
iii.
There are some things however that may influence this type of conformity:
contradictory commands, who is the authority figure (ordinary man or
expert), where is the experiment taking place (institution like Yale or an
ordinary place), is the authority physically present, physically touching the
‘fake test subject’
a. When done in a modest office park instead of yale, compliance
decreased, which suggest that prestige of yale and yale professor was
part of the effect.
b. If you have to press someone’s arm down onto a shock plate,
compliance drops…
c. And when another teacher was there who refused, compliance
dropped to about 10%...
Physical contact reduce compliance
Fellow ‘dissenter’ also reduce compliance
Key Idea
7
Final
-
Obedience to authority is powerful force: if obedience is already high even when
there are no consequences of disobedience, it stands to reason that in other
circumstances conformity would be even higher.
-
Trappings of authority matter
(3) Conformity to expected roles
a. The Stanford prison experiment(understand basic setup, be able to describe study,
identify key lessons about obedience from study, and be able to apply to real
worldscenarios)
i. Participants were randomly assigned to either be a prisoner or a guard.
Conditions were made too real to completely look and feel like a prison.
ii. Prisoners started becoming rebellious and guards started taking their roles
more seriously as well – they became much stricter. Over time, this
became even worse.
iii. ROLE OF LEADERSHIP
1. Critical for understanding how brutality occurs
Brown-eyes/ Blue eyes experiment
Classroom of kids: group them by eye colors.
◦
◦
Day 1: Teacher said blue eyed students are better than brown eyed students. This came
with advantages for blue eyed students and disadvantages with brown eyed students
◦
Blue eyes get more recess time
◦
Make fun of brown eyes
Day 2: Brown eyed students are better than blue eyed students. This came with
advantages for brown eyed students and disadvantages with blue eyed students
◦
Reverse role
◦
Creating a conflict: using eyes to ridicule them
◦
Students performed better on days they were in the higher “better” group and worse when
they were in the “worse” group.
◦
Students in the ”better” group started bullying students from the worse groups. A lot of
conflicts was caused between these two groups.
8
Final

What are norms? Norms of reciprocity? Norms of fairness?
Norms



Unspoken (but understood) rules of expectations that are governed
socially - in a culture or society.
Norms work to make a behavior acceptable or unacceptable.
Almost everything you do is governed by norms.
EX: When you visit a new country, behaviors that are “norms” (normal
and acceptable) to you might be unacceptable in this new culture.
Decision making of Norms that guide human behaviors (Persuasion Technique)
1. Reciprocity: Obligation to give when you receive
a. Free samples, then expect to comeback for more / Tips or charity
b. Giving back tips when mints are given in a restaurant.
2. Scarcity:People want more of what they can have less of
a. Limited time offers/ Special editions
3. Authority: People tend to follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts
a. EX: 8 in 10 dermatologists agree that ABC facewash works
b. Dentists from Harvard say that XYZ toothpaste is 99% effective
4. Consistency: People like to be consistent with the things they have previously said or done
a. Make the customers sign up to the weekly newsletter/ keeping subscribing to the
same newsletter.
b. Trump supporters, keep following trump to be consistent with their prior views
5. Liking:You are most likely to be persuaded by similar people who are cooperative and give
you compliments – so people you like!
a. Salesperson tries to build rapport by finding the customer’s interests- any
commonalities/
6. Consensus: especially when uncertain, people look to the actions and behaviors of others to
determine their own
a. Looking at the reviews before buying something/ see the consensus
Norm of Fairness
Origin of Fairness: with all other things being equal, we will offer more or less even splits, and
we will turn down offers if they get too unfair
EX:

Two Monkeys with cucumber and grape
9
Final

By doing the same task one gets a grape and other gets a cucumber, monkey
with the cucumber sense unfairness
Cultures (Norms of Fairness):
-
Ultimatum Game: making more or less equal distributions of shared sources.
o Subject A has to split $100 with Subject B and subject B can accept or
decline. If reject, then no money for both.
o


Now one might notice here that if offers of 80/20 are rejected 50%
of the time, there is probably an optimal strategy, say giving 40 and
keeping 60, that the other person will accept—so being perfecly fair
isn’t always the optimal strategy, but it is a common one. You can
imagine what you’d offer in this situation, remembering that if the
other person rejects, you get nothing, so there is some substantial
risk to being greedy.

But the real power of this demonstration is in player 2. even in the
80/20 case, player 2 gets $2 or nothing. What would you rather
have, $2 or nothing? There is no purely rational explanation for
rejecting the offer of $2 in order to get nothing! But player 2 rejects
because they’re pissed off, and they’re pissed off because the
person offered them only 20% of a shared resource, which violates
a norm of fairness. So player 2 will punish themselves to punish
Player 1, who violated the norm of fairness. We will pay costs to
punish people who violate norms!
Average offers change by cultures: cultures determine how we act
fairness.
Diffusion of Responsibility
o Kitty Genovese case
o The “Bystander Effect” (be able to describe it, identify key lessons about the
bystander effect, and be able to apply to real world scenarios)
(Bystander Effect)
-
In an emergency situation, like hood of help decreases when passive bystanders
are present.
-
Subjectively dividing the personal responsibility to help a stranger by the number
of bystander present – Everyone assumes someone else will help
EX:
10
Final
o
o
-
A woman was stabbed while 40 people saw it, they ignored.
Follow-up research in laboratory settings has shown that this effect is
general—that we have every reason to think that most of us in this room
would have done the very same thing. In a classic paradigm, you’re taking
part in a quiz game where you’re in a small cubicle along with several other
individuals with whom you can talk over an intercom. At one point during
the game one of the others—in fact a confederate faking—has a seizure,
calls out for help, for an ambulance, etc. And just like in the Kitty Genovese
case, when participants are one of many, say 6 others, very few leave their
cubicle to help, call an ambulance, or alert the experimenter. If on the other
hand it is just you and this one other person, the majority do indeed offer
some form of help—suggesting that the notion that other people will take
care of it is very powerful indeed.
Overcoming Diffusion of Responsibility
o Pick out an individual (one specific individual) and ask them directly for help.
o As the size of the group increases people are less likely to help because the
personal responsibility that they feel towards this situation decreases. Vice
versa, an individual is more likely to help when they are alone (or there are
very few bystanders) since personal responsibility increases
The Fundamental Attribution Error
We tend to assume that actions come from personality, from the kind
of person we are. So only bad person would commit bad acts, but all of the
norms, conformity (group behavior) suggest that these are wrong. Even good
people will do that bad things if the situation is set in the right way.
Prejudice

Intergroup conflict
o Conflicts that occur among members of different groups because of group
affiliations
11
Final
o The minimal group paradigm (what it is and what it shows)
 Minimal group paradigm is a social psychology research methodology
that proposes that the minimal condition for group biases (like favoritism
towards your own group and prejudice towards other groups) is simply
being a member of a group.
EX: US vs THEM
o
o
Given two arts, want to see how people treat somebody who has a different
art preference than you.
Question: How much do you like those who share your art preferences? If
you had to choose, which kinds of art fans would you give money to?
 People give more money to others who share the same art
preferences. This is intergroup discrimination (ingroup bias)
 Researchers created teams by flipping a coin (Random). These are
known as “minimal groups”
What does this show?
 Shows that this does not relate to art preferences rather it is
random.
 NATURE VS NURTURE
 Do we learn to be prejudiced or is there something about
how we think about groups that takes us down this road?
o We have bias automatically according to the
experiment back in 70s-without having to learn it
EX 2:
o Participant’s come into lab in groups
o Asked to estimate the number of dots on a page
o Randomly assigned to groups: “Over estimator” and “Under
estimators”
o Ask participants to rate each group and allocate study payment to
fellow ingroup members or outgroup members
 Over estimators viewed Under estimators as less likeable, kind,
and effective than Over estimators. Under estimators viewed
Over estimators as less likeable, kind, and effective than Under
estimators. Over estimators distributed much less money to
Under estimators. Under estimators distributed much less
money to over estimators.
o The Robbers Cave experiment (what it is and what it shows)

MuzaferSherif’s argument: Intergroup Conflicts (conflicts between groups) occur
when two groups are in competition for limited resources.
12
Final

Validated Theory by Robber Cave experiment

o

Two groups of 12 year boys, strangers to each other when through stages
 Stages
 Bond Stage
o Bond as two individual groups through the pursuit of common
goals that required co-operative discussion, planning, and
execution.
o During the first phase, the groups did not know of the other
group’s existence. The boys developed an attachment to their
groups throughout the first week. Created own cultures and
group norms.
 Competition Stage
o 4-6 days: friction between groups through competitions such as
baseball, tug war, football, etc
o Winners would receive reward and none for the losers.
 Reducing Friction Period
o Working together to solve a problem/ common goal
o By working together with other group: they felt positive
towards other groups
Failed Experiment:
 When children/people build friendship prior to the experiment of conflict, they
fail to participate in the conflict.
Social stereotypes
o What are stereotypes
 perceiving members of a given category as possessing various common
attributes
 An efficient way of organizing and storing info about people in
long-term memory
 Also, a source of bias and generalization
 Accuracy is a separate (and extremely controversial) issue
 Examples - women are delicate and sensitive and men are strong; Chinese
people are good at math; someone wearing a Trump hat is racist

Even when people are not aware of their presence, stereotypes will serve as an:
o Energy saving tactic
o Stereotypes of warmth and competence
13
Final
o Sexism and stereotypes about women, and how these stereotypes reflect on
gender disparities (e.g., in leadership positions)
 Work


Reference Letter – Wording can reinforce gender stereotypes. Women: caring,
nice, cooperative. Men – brilliant, trailblazer, etc.
Implicit bias
o What is implicit bias (implicit bias as beyond conscious control)
 Attitudes or Stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and
decisions unconsciously.
 Signal detection: we always need to monitor the environment for risky
things (hunter gatherers needed to monitor for snakes and stuff, we need to
monitor for guns and stuff)

o Types of implicit bias (implicit racial, sex, and age bias)
o What is the difference between explicit and implicit prejudice
 People in these studies are not explicitly being racist - whatever is causing
this bias is also what’s going on in other cases of discrimination (black
14
Final
people not getting hired, etc.) - it is the result of an implicit bias outside of
people’s conscious awareness


How is implicit bias measured/studied?
o The Implicit Association Test (what it is and what it shows)

Show White face or bad word and Black face or good word VS white face or
good word and black face and bad word
 People are faster when they match black with bad word.
IAT: uses reaction times as an indirect measure or an implicit measure to test people's
associations between positive and negative emotions
● Used not only for race, but for other groups such as nationality, politics, gender,
etc.
● Weak correlation with self-report measures
● Might only be relevant in current context (i.e., being showed well liked black
public figures before performing task)
Why do you think the IAT is a better predictor of implicit behavior and not explicit behavior?
o If we have more time can cause Social desirability bias – we want to be socially desirable
aka we want people to see us in a positive light, so our explicit behaviors often differ
from our implicit behaviors such as the implicit biases revealed in the IAT. IAT eliminates
the time.
o
o
Implicit bias is not about bigotry. Implicit bias is grounded in basic human tendency to
divide the social world into groups.
Tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of
“us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team.”
How can we overcome Implicit Bias?

Rational Deliberation
o The resume study
 What it tested


What it showed



To see how much prejudice is happening based on name.
White receives 50% more callbacks
Quality didn’t help Black resumes
 Implications (about racial discrimination)
How to overcome bias and reduce discrimination (important to know and be able to apply to
current, real-world bias scenarios, and how to reduce bias)
15
Final
o Explain the contact hypothesis and key features of quality contact
o Factors that protect against bias
 Motivation to act egalitarian
 Sharing a common identity or common goals
REDUCING DISCRIMINATION

Motivation to act egalitarian
o Having internal motivations to act in non-prejudiced ways has a bigger effect
than having external motivations
 Fairness
 Slow down with motivation
 Brain Regions report study of race
 Amygdala: linked to automatic race based evaluations
 FFA: involved in the rapid identification of other race individuals
 ACC: Detect conflict between implicit race attitudes and conscious
intentions to be non-biased.
 DLPFC: may regulate negative racial bias (evaluation) when conflicts
are detected
 Fusiform gyrus: Identification of race from faces
Act egalitarian: ‘I attempt to act in non-prejudiced ways towards Black people because it
is personally important to me.’ (internal)
‘I attempt to appear non-prejudiced towards Black people in order to avoid disapproval
from others.’ (external)

Sharing a common identity
o Effectiveness is shown through minimal group paradigms
o Robber Cave Experiment: phase 3
 Common goals
 They changed behavior after sharing a common goal/solving the same
problem
 Friendship: common link
o Overcoming bias
 When becoming a part of your team
 Racial bias decreases as seen in the MRI
 Part of the brain that distinguish the group activate everybody
on the team: no longer responded to race
 Amygdala triggered to everybody in the in group with no racial
bias
 Sharing identity
 Reduces Bias (implicit bias)
- Common identity: there was a study where white participants were significantly
more likely to help black interviewers when they wore a hat of the same university
16
Final
as that worn by the interviewee because the hat led the white participant to
categorize the interviewer as a ingroup member

o
minimal group paradigm says that the minimal condition for group biases is
simply being a member of group. For instance, if I split the class in half and
now there is 2 diff groups, that alone can cause biases. So you will have a
bias in favor of your group.
o
So instead we just have us all in one group and we all share a common
identity of being a part of recitation 21/17, and that’s something that helps
reduce discrimination.
Positive contact with outgroup members
o EX: Protesting together for the BLM movement
o
Positive contact: contact hypothesis – when you have positive intergroup
contact, you improve intergroup relations and reduce bias. Contact must be of
good quality

o
The Contact Hypothesis
 EX: Assigning roommates with different race.
 Quality contact has these features:
o Personal interaction
o Equal status between groups
o Cooperation between groups
Changing Systems
o EX: Police re-education programs
police systems: hospitals can reduce perceived discrimination by changing the
protocol doctors follow when interacting w/patients
o
Overcoming Bias
EX
 Orchestra: hiding people’s gender, allowed fairness in selection.
 Process is more powerful than training people in removing bias
Moral Psychology



Kant and the Categorical Imperative (universal moral law/golden rule)
Piaget’s perspective on the development of morality
Kohlberg
o Heinz dilemma
17
Final







3 levels of moral development (pre-conventional; conventional; post-conventional; 6 stages)
of moral development (be able to describe each level)
Social Domain Theory
o Define
o Moral and conventional rules
o Comparison to Piaget and Kohlberg
What is morality for?
Hume’s perspective (contrast to Kant)
What is included in the “first draft” of moral cognition from the moral foundations
perspective
Trolley dilemmas (what they are and what they show)
Social Transmission of Morality
o Relationship between emotions and moral judgment
o Moral Contagion Hypothesis
Moral Psychology
·
Kant and the Categorical Imperative (universal moral law/golden rule)
Univseral Moral Law:
- “Act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law of
all rational beings”
→ The reason that Kant had such a huge influence is probably his belief that
through human reasoning processes, we could discover eternal truths about
the world. What that means for morality is that humans should be capable of
reasoning through moral questions in order to discover the universal moral
laws that exist.
In fact, by the end of all the thinking that Kant did about morality, he
believed most if not all morality could be reduced to a single law, and he
called that law the categorical imperative.
 “Act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the
universal law (of all rational beings)”
·
Piaget’s perspective on the development of morality
 Universal, invariant sequence
 Focused on observables (outcomes) more than underlying properties (intentions)
o Ex) A child knocks over one glass while trying to steal a cookie
 A child knocks over five glasses while trying to help her mom
o Who deserves more blame?
 Younger children emphasize outcome (second child is worse and
should get in more trouble)
 Older children emphasize intention (First child is worse)
 Piaget’s evidence (How morality change over time)
o (1) Egocentric: I can play however I want.
18
Final
o
o
·
(2) Heteronomous: There is one right way to play, it has been the same
forever.
(3) Autonomous: There is an agreed upon way to play, but we could
change it through consensus
Kohlberg


Created moral dilemmas and examined how people actually reasoned about
morality.
How do children actually reason? To test this question, he asked children to
respond to what is called the Heinz dilemma.
o Heinz dilemma
 A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was
one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of
radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered.
The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging 10
times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium
and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s
husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money,
but he could only get together about 1,000, which is half of what it
cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to
sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, “No, I
discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So,
Heinz gets desperate and considers breaking into theman’s store
to steal the drug for his wife.

·
3 levels of moral development (pre-conventional; conventional; post-conventional; 6 stages)
of moral development (be able to describe each level)
 Pre-conventional level: Values based on external events
o Stage 1 (ages 5-7): acting to avoid punishment
 Rules are mandatory
 Emphasis on avoiding physical harm
 Children weigh their own rights over others
Stage 2 (ages 8-10): acting to further one’s own interest
 Instrumental
 Strict concerns for equality
 Some understanding that some rules are arbitrary- but not
consistent
 Saying that the husband should not steal the drug b/c it’s breaking the
law
Conventional level: Assessing personal consequences
o Stage 3 (ages 10-12): Decisions based on the approval of others
 Fairness requires more than strict equality
 More concerns about reciprocity
 Concern about living up to expectations (eg., you have to do
something so your mom will be happy with you)
o

19
Final
o


Stage 4 (ages 12-14): Judgment based on the relative rules and laws of
society
 Conventions are viewed as completely arbitrary social expectations
 Moral decisions are based on fairness and concerns about harm
(not by concern for rules or expectations)
 Morality is codified in laws (objective)
Saying that the husband should steal the drug and accept to go prison
Post-Conventional level: shared standard rights, duties, and principles
o
Stage 5 (ages 17-20):social contract rules & laws of social good
 Morality is relative to systems of laws
 NO system may lay claim to moral superiority
 All concerns about equality, harm, and fairness are same as before
o
Stage 6 (age 21 on): Guided by moral principle of justice
 What is moral are values and rights that exist prior to social
attachment and contracts
 Morality is the values that any rational being would want to see
reflected in a moral society
 Pre-conventional stage of moral development
Saying that the husband should steal the drug and not go to prison as
it is unfair.

Challenge to Kohlberg’s Theory
Social Domain Theory
o Define: The idea that all of the rules that we see as existing in the social world can be
divided into one of two domains.
o Moral and conventional rules
 First domain: moral (physical harm, emotional harm, violations of fairness)
o Moral rules are the ones that are intrinsic and universal, applying
no matter what.
 Ex) Even if you lived in a country where there was no rule
against murder, you would probably still think that murder
is wrong, because it just is.
 Second domain: conventional (foods, dress, manners)
o Rules that are created by individual cultures, and only apply when
there are explicit rules or norms dictating them
 Ex) Eating with a fork is a conventional rule -- if you were
in a culture where it wasn’t the norm to eat with forks, and
everyone just ate with their hands, you probably wouldn’t
say that it is wrong for people there to eat that way.
20
Final
Issue with Domain Theory
 Comparison to Piaget and Kohlberg
 No stages (Developmental continuity)
 both morality and convention are present from the start, convention
does not precede morality
 moral understanding is more abstract in early childhood
·
·
What is morality for?
 Morality is a way to keep tribes tight-knit, to keep society organized, and so on,
all so that a given tribe can prevail over other tribes
 our moral emotions do this even when no one is looking
Hume’s perspective (contrast to Kant)
 Instead of grounding things in pure reason, Hume grounded them in emotional
responses.
 Saying that our gut was guiding morality not reason, logic, education. It’s
how we feel: Sentimnetalism
 The idea is that when we consider an unjust act like theft, we feel a surge of
passion -- i.e. emotion -- and this leads us to not steal, or to punish the thief. Amd
this negative response to theft doesn’t necessarily come from some abstract
principle regarding the rightness or wrongness of the action, or any appeal to
universal law, but simply the fact that some actions intrinsically excite our
emotions in positive or negative ways. = called SENTIMENTALISM
 To put it more concisely, Hume famously said, “Reason is the slave of the
passions.”
 Hume: “Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is
utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not
conclusions of our reason.”
EX: Man riding an elephant:
- Sub-conscious mind: elephant
- Conscious mind: you
o Indicate you don’t have much control over moral
 Emotion driving the moral
·
What is included in the “first draft” of moral cognition from the moral foundations
perspective
 The idea is that we’re all born with 6 foundations:
 Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. (sort of a
first draft of the moral code in our minds of the things that we need
to organize a good society.)
 But, through exposure to the environment, we learn which of the
foundations are important to us. This means that cultures might vary in
terms of which foundations they value more.
21
Final
·
Trolley dilemmas (what they are and what they show)

Rails with one person vs five people.
 Pull the switch to save five for one, which you change the direction?
 Forces us to choose when there are no good choices
 Stick to the moral code that prohibit causing someone’s death vs
best outcome?
 95% : Ok to save the five over one by flicking the switch
 Utilitarian answer
 Situation 2:
 Push a person to stop the track to save five
 Utilitarian: same answer (push to save five)
 Deliberately causing one’s death is different from allowing
them to die as collateral damage
 10% say it’s ok to push
 Instincts (emotions play a role) - personal
 Shows that logic that goes in the first dilemma isn’t the main driving
factor, emotions tend to override that
Brain location of mroral faculty
Kant: Cerebral cortex: prefrontal cortex
Hume(Emotion): Limbic system
Morality in relation to evolution: Morality binds us in groups (Key binding function leads to
success, so more favorable in natural selection: which passed down)
Social Transmission of Morality
o Relationship between emotions and moral judgment (How moral idea spreads)
 Morality and emotion are fundamentally connected
o 1) Emotion covaries(follow) with moral judgement
o 2) Emotion amplifies moral judgments / increases the intensity of
them
o 3) Emotion may even be moralizing itself (moralize nonmoral)
 If you are angry, you rationalize it by saying it’s justified
because something is morally wrong.

In summary, morality and emotion are intertwined, and this fact raises the
prediction that emotion should be involved in the spread of moral ideas.
EX:
oMoral Contagion Hypothesis
22
Final

Moral emotion increases diffusion of moral information in social
networks
o Moral emotion: emotional content that is functionally tied to a
moral context
o ex) sadness about the death of a pet is NOT a moral emotion, but
anger toward an act of discrimination that violates an
injunctive norm in your community is a moral emotion

Moral contagion: Proof of concept

Tested how categorization of words work in spreading the moral
ideas: Emotions, moral, Moral + Emotions. This allowed to test the
moral contagion hypothesis in the context of naturally formed
social networks.

Moral language alone was not sufficient to affect retweet
rate in the gun control data set. However, language that had
the special combination of morality and emotion
significantly affected retweet counts.

In fact, we show that for everyone moral-emotional word
added, the predicted retweet rate increases by 15%. We
also show that these results hold when adjusting for the
effect of distinctly emotional content (which had similarly
strong effects on retweet rate), as well as covariates known
to affect retweet rate such as whether the tweet author was
verified, whether there was a url or media attached to the
tweet, and how many folders the tweet author had.
Disorders (Guest Lecture by Dr. Ian Reed)

What is considered “abnormal”?
o Definition of mental disorder:
 A persistent disturbance or dysfunction in behavior, thoughts, or emotions that
causes significant distress or impairment
 One way to think about mental disorder:
 Comparing them to normal psychological processes discussed in class
thus far
23
Final

o EX:




o Perception, memory, learning, emotion, motivation, thinking,
and social processes
Conceptualizing mental disorder
 Physiognomy (In the past)
o Suggested that mental disorder could be diagnosed from facial
feature
 Medical Model
o Abnormal psychological experiences are conceptualized as
illnesses that like physical illness, have biological and
environmental causes, defined symptoms, and possible cures.
o In Diagnosis: Clinicians attend to
 Signs: objectively indicator of a disorder
 EX: “you look like crap/blue”
 Symptoms: subjectively reported behaviors, thoughts,
and emotions
 EX: “I feel like crap”
o Disorder:
 Refers to common set of signs and symptons
o Disease
 A known pathological process affecting the body
o Diagnosis:
 A determination as to whether a disorder to disease is
present
o Knowing that disorder is present doesn’t necessarily mean that
we know the underlying disease process giving rise to the signs
and symptoms.
John Nash
 Game Theorist-schizophrenic
Steve Jobs:
 Succesful Businessman…antisocial personality disorder
Michael Jordan
 Best Basketball player-narcissitic personality disorder
Thom Yorke
 Songwriter- Bipolar Disorder
24
Final


Argue that these individuals were successful not in spite of these
abnormalities, but because of them
Often times our biggest strength are simultaneously our biggest weakness
Classifying Disorders: The DSM(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)



A classification that describes the features used to diagnose each recognized
mental disorder and indicate how the disorder can be distinguished from other,
similar problems.
DSM is Atheoretical
o For a reason
 if we have 10 different clinical psychologists, present them with
the same patients, potentially get 10 different explanations on what
that person is dealing with and how they came across that
difficulty etc.
 So that EVERYONE can use it
History
o DSM and DSM II (1968)
 Provided a common language for talking about the disorders
 Advance b/c
 EX: depression and anxiety were lumped together as
general diagnosis of neurosis reaction
o DSM-III(1980) and DSM IV (1994)
 Removed vague description in favor of
 Diagnostic criteria
o Detailed lists of symptoms
 Two clinicians diagnosing the same individual were now much
likely to come to the same diagnosis.
o DSM-5
 22 major categories containing more than 200 different mental
disorders
 Also lists conditions that may be included as formal disorders but,
for now, require additional research
 Why the switch to Arabic numerals?
 The thought is that there will be additional iterations (i.e.
5.1, 5.2, 5.3, etc.)
Causation of Disorders

Biopsychosocial perspective (What is the biophysical perspective?):
o Explains mental disorders as the result of interactions among biological,
psychological, and social factors
25
Final
o Biological perspective
 Focuses on genetic and epigenetic influences, biochemical imbalances,
and abnormalities in brain structure and function
o Psychological perspective
 Focuses on adaptive learning and coping, cognitive biases, and
interpersonal problems
o Social factors
 Focuses on poor socialization, stressful life experiences, and social
inequities

Diathesis-Stress model of psychopathology/psychological disorders
o Suggests that a person may be predisposed for a psychological disorder
thatremains unexpressed until triggered by stress
 Diathesis is the predisposition
 Stress is the external trigger
o Possible for
 Someone with the predisposition to never encounter a precipitating stress
 Someone with a little genetic propensity to a disorder might suffer from it
given the right pattern of stress

For each of the following, know the basic definitions, subtypes, and examples (note: for each
of the following ‘category’ of disorders, multiples types of disorders were discussed)
o Anxiety disorders
 Definition: the class of mental disorder in which anxiety is the predominant
feature
 Often comorbid
o Comorbidity – the co-occurrence of two or more disorders in
asingle individual
 Example: Include phobic disorders, panic disorder, and generalized
anxiety disorder
o Obsessive compulsive disorder: feature but not primary feature
of anxiety disorder
 Generalized Anxiety Disorder; Panic Disorder; Phobias; OCD; PTSD
 (PHOBIC DISORDER)
o Disorders characterized by marked, persistent, and excessive
fear and avoidance of specific objects, activities, or situations
o Needs to be
 Disproportionate to actual risk
 Impair ability to carry out a normal life
26
Final
o Individuals recognize the fear is irrational, but can’t stop it
from happening
Specific Phobia
 An irrational fear of a particular object or situation that
markedly interferes with an individual’s ability to
function
 5 Categories
 Animals (e.g. dogs, cats, rats, snakes, spiders)
 Natural environments (e.g. heights, darkness,
water, storms
 Situations (e.g. bridges, elevators, tunnels,
enclosed places)
 Blood, injections, and injury
 Other phobias, including choking or vomiting
 In children, loud noises or costumed characters
Preparedness Theory
• The idea that people are instinctively predisposed
toward certain fears
• Humans and monkeys can
• Quickly be conditioned to have a fear
response for stimuli such as snakes and
spiders
• Cannot be quickly conditioned to have
fears of flowers or toy rabbits
• Passed down from ancestors
Social Phobia
 An irrational fear of being publicly humiliated or
embarrassed
Example
o Can be restricted
 Public speaking, eating in public, or
urinating in a public bathroom
o Can be generalized
 Situations that involve being observed or
interacting with unfamiliar people
o Try to avoid situations where unfamiliar people
might evaluate them
27
Final
o Experience intense anxiety and distress when
public exposure is unavoidable
(PANIC DISORDER)
-
-
A disorder characterized by the sudden occurrence of multiple
psychological and physiological symptoms that contribute to
afeeling of stark terror
o Acute symptoms of a panic attack last only a few
minutes
 EX: Include shortness of breath, heart
palpitations, sweating, dizziness,
depersonalization or derealization, and fear that
one is about to go crazy or die
o To meet criteria must
 Have recurrent unexpected attacks
 Report significant anxiety about having another
attack
Agoraphobia:
o A specific phobia regarding fear of public places
o Fear of
 Not necessarily of public places but rather
having a panic attack in a public place or around
strangers who might view them with disdain
orfail to help them
o This is typically experienced during a period of intense
stress
(Generalized Anxiety Disorder):
-
A disorder characterized by chronic excessive
worryaccompanied by three or more of the following
symptoms:
o Restlessness, fatigue, concentration
problems,irritability, muscle tension, and sleep
disturbance
-
Uncontrollable worrying produces a sense of loss of control
that can erode self-confidence
o Simple decisions can be fraught with dire consequences
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
28
Final
-
-
-
-
-
A disorder in which repetitive, intrusive thoughts (obsessions)
and ritualistic behaviors (compulsions) designed to fend off
those thoughts interfere significantly with an individual’s
functioning
o Behavior gives transient anxiety relief, so the behavior
is reinforced.
o Treatment:
 Expose the patient to the behavior but not allow
it to happen.
 This causes extinction of behavior: LEARNING
Anxiety plays a big role
o Obsessive thoughts create anxiety
o Compulsive behaviors reduce anxiety
o Creates a loop that’s difficult to exit
Obsession and compulsions
o Intense, frequent, and experienced as irrational and
excessive
Attempts to cope with obsessive thoughts by repression are of
little to no help
o Thought suppression can actually backfire, increasing
the intensity and frequency of obsessive thoughts
Most common OCD obsessions and compulsions
o Checking – 79% of OCD patients
o Ordering – 57% of OCD patients
o Moral concerns – 43% of OCD patients
o Contamination – 26% of OCD patients
Posttraumatic stress disorder
-
A disorder characterized by chronic physiological arousal,
recurrent unwanted thoughts or images of the trauma,
andavoidance of things that call the traumatic event to mind
-
Nowhere more apparent than in war
o Many soldiers returning from combat experience
symptoms of PTSD
 Flashbacks of battle
 Exaggerated anxiety and startle reactions
 Medical conditions that don’t arise from
physical damage
 EX: paralysis or chronic fatigue
Neural correlates to PTSD
-
29
Final
o Those with PTSD show
 Heightened activity in the amydgala
 Region associated with the evaluation of
threatening information and fear
conditioning
 Decreased activity in the medial prefrontal
cortex
 Region important to the extinction of
fear conditioning
 A smaller sized hippocampus
 The part of the brain most linked with
memory
o Correlational vs Causal?
Gilbertson (2002)

Study of PTSD victims and their identical twins
 Both combat veterans with PTSD and
their identical twins showed reduced
hippocampal volume
 This suggests that the veterans’ reduced
hippocampal volumes weren’t caused by
the combat exposure
o Instead, both the veterans and
their twin brothers had a smaller
hippocampus to begin with
o Likely a pre-existing condition
making them more susceptible to
PTSD when they were later
exposed to the stimulus
Depressive and Bipolar Disoder
Mood Disorder

Mental disorders that have mood disturbance as their predominant feature
o Two main forms
1. Major Depressive Disorder (unipolar depression)
 A disorder characterized by a severely depressed mood and/or
inability to experience pleasure that lasts 2 or more weeks and
is accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, lethargy, and
sleep and appetite disturbance
Dysthymia
30
Final

The same cognitive and bodily problems as in depression
are present, but they are less severe and last longer,
persisting for at least 2 years
Double depression
o A moderately depressed mood that persists for at least 2
years and is punctuated by periods of major depression
o When both major depressive disorder and dysthymia
co-occur together
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
o Recurrent depressive episodes in a seasonal pattern
 In most cases, the episodes begin in fall or
winter and remit in spring
 Pattern is due to reduced levels of light over the
cold seasons
 Winter-related depressions appear to be more
prevalent in higher altitudes
Kindling hypothesis
o On average, major depression lasts about 12 weeks
 At least 60% of individuals with one episode
will have another…
 At least 70% of individuals with two episodes
will have a third…
 90% of individuals with three episodes will
have a fourth
Helplessness theory (Why do we get depressed?)
– The idea that individuals who are prone to depression
automatically attribute negative experiences to causes that
are internal (i.e. their own fault), stable (i.e. unlikely to
change), and global (i.e. widespread)
Example
o A student who receives a low grade on an exam will
make the following attributions
 That they are low in intelligence (internal)
 That their low intelligence will never change
(stable)
 That this is representative of their failure in
other realms (global)
31
Final
2. Bipolar disorder
 A condition characterized by cycles of abnormal persistent
high mood (mania) and low mood (depression)
o Depressive phase
 Clinically indistinguishable from major
depression (as far as we know)
o Manic phase
 Lasts at least 1 week
 Mood can be elevated, expansive, or irritable
 Other symptoms
 Grandiosity, decreased need for sleep,
talkativeness, racing thoughts,
distractibility, and reckless behavior
o Lifetime risk of bipolar disorder is 2.5%
 Does not differ in men and women
o Typically a recurrent condition
 90% of affected people suffer from several
episodes over a lifetime
o 10% of those with bipolar disorder are rapid cycling
 Characterized by at least 4 mood episodes
(either depressive or manic) every year
 This type is more difficult to treat
 Some think that those with psychotic and mood disorders
(especially bipolar disorder) have higher creativity and
intellectual ability
o Pronounced energy, mania, grandiosity, and ambition
helps people achieve great things
Schizophrenia

A disorder characterized by

Profound disruption of basic psychological processes

A distorted perception of reality

Altered or blunted emotion

Disturbances in thought, motivation, and behavior
Must have two or more symptoms during the continuous period of at least 1 month with
signs of the disorder persisting for at least 6 months

Symptoms are described as either positive or negative
Positive:
32
Final
o Thoughts and behaviors present in schizophrenia but not seen in
thosewithout the disorder, such as delusions and hallucinations
 Hallucinations
 False perceptual experiences that have a compelling
sense of being real despite the absence of
externalstimulations
o Auditory 65% of schizophrenics reveal hearing
voices repeatedly
o hallucinations are more common than visual
hallucinations
 Delusions
 A patently false belief system, often bizarre and
grandiose, that is maintained in spite of its irrationality
o EX: an individual may believe that he or she is
Jesus Christ, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, or some
other well-known person
 People with schizophrenia have little or no insight into
their disordered perceptual and thought processes

Disorganized speech


Grossly disorganized behavior


A severe disruption of verbal communication in which
ideas shift rapidly and incoherently among unrelated
topics
Behavior that is inappropriate for the situation or
ineffective in attaining goals, often with specific motor
disturbances
Catatonic behavior

A marked decrease in all movement or an increase in
muscular rigidity and over activity
o Modern medications make this symptom less
common
Negative
-
Deficits or disruptions to normal emotions and behaviors (e.g.,
emotional and social withdrawal; apathy; poverty of speech;
and other indications of the absence or insufficiency of normal
behaviors, motivation, and emotion)
33
Final
-
These symptoms refer to something missing in schizophrenic
patients
o Rob people of emotion, flattened affect, deadpan
responses, decreased interest in others, or decreased
capacity to focus attention
Cognitive
– Deficits in cognitive abilities, specifically executive functioning,
attention, and working memory
– More difficult to notice since they are less bizarre and public than
most positive symptoms
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)



A condition beginning in early childhood in which a person shows persistent
communication deficits as well as restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors, interests,
or activities
o EX: Understands that Bob think it’s raining but not understand that Bob picks up
an umbrella.
In DSM-5, ASD now subsumes several distinct disorders from DSM-IV
o Autistic disorder
o Asperger’s disorder
o Childhood disintegrative disorder
o Pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified
Current model
o States that ASD can be understood as
 An impaired capacity for
 Empathizing – knowing the mental states of others
 A superior ability for
 Systematizing – understanding the rules that organize the structure
and function of objects
 Brain imaging studies show
 decreased activity in regions associated with understanding the
minds of others
 greater activation in regions related to basic object perception
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

A persistent pattern of severe problems with inattention and/or hyperactivity
orimpulsiveness that cause significant impairment in functioning
o Meeting criteria requires either (or both)
 Multiple symptoms of inattention
34
Final


Persistent problems with sustained attention, organization,
memory, or following instructions
o Hyperactivity-impulsiveness
 Persistent difficulties with remaining still, waiting for a turn, or
interrupting others
Affects about 10% of boys and 4% of girls
o Men are more likely for hyperactivity type
o Woman are more likely for inattentive type
o Depressive and bipolar disorders
 Depression (major depressive disorder/ unipolar depression); Dysthymia;
Double depression; Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD); and Bipolar Disorder
o Schizophrenia
35
Final
 Negative and positive symptoms—be able to identify
 Causes
o Autism Spectrum Disorders
o Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Personality
An individual’s characteristic style of thought, feeling, and action

Explain why the power of situations makes it difficult to define and study personality
o Problem in social psych: power of situation
 Conformity Experiment
 Line experiment
 Stanford Prison Exp: role
 Milgram study with powerful authorities
 Influence of religious, authority, and other pressures, the context of just
having a lot of other people around
What makes it harder to separate personality from situations?
o Need to be cautious of any attempt to define personality in total
isolation removed from situations
o Means that situation affects us almost irrespective of our
personality.
o But, some individuals often object to situations as well,
override the power of situation
 So despite the power of situation, there is effect of personality in this
situations
o The trouble with personality
 People have to think of the situation as constant in order to think about the
personality
36
Final


Personality arises within situations—there is simply no such thing as a
personality outside a situation, just like there is no such thing as a rectangle
defined only by height.
But a variant of this question is not so dumb…
EX:
o Asking one person:
o How much of this person’s behavior is due to external factors (the
situation) and how much is due to internal factors (personality)?
o Asking Multiple people
o How much of the variation in the behavior of these people is due to
variation in external factors and how much is due to variation in
internal factors?
Personality is highly heritable
o BUT the environment matters; the variation between the intelligence of
people due to genes is much lower in poor areas due to severe barriers to
people achieving their potential
EX:
-
Wealthy Area: your intelligence will almost certainly be highly
similar to your parent’s intelligence. Your parent’s intelligence
strongly predicts your intelligence. (IQ)
-
Poor Area: your intelligence is likely to be only very weakly
related to your parents’ intelligence.
o Why?
 Wealthy Area, everything is set up for you to
expand to your full abilities—your environment
will be stable, and resources will be present for
you to learn and thrive. In setting like this one,
the range of likely variation is much greater.


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Perhaps your parents didn’t finish high
school and so test poorly on an IQ test,
but you end up excelling in school
Or perhaps your parents are well
educated and good test takers, but you
get wrapped up in gang activities and
drop out before HS
Final



Malnutrition or drug abuse or broken
families affects you or your parent and
does so in different ways
Thus, you will end up more different
than your parent in intelligence, and
indeed on most things
NOT because your genes are
fundamentally different from someone
else’s in a rich neighborhood, but just
because the environment is throwing
more curve balls your way, more
room for you to differ.
o So we once again see here that trying to think of the
individual as separate from an environment simply
doesn’t work!
o Power of Situation doesn’t mean that situations are the only source of variation in
behavior
 But the situation often accounts for more variance than we naturally infer
 The Fundamental Attribution Error: WILL BE ON THE EXAM
o When we look at somebody else, we assume that part of the
behavior is driving all their personality
 It represents an Important Piece of what we know about human
thinking. That is, we tend to underestimate the power of situations.
Measuring Personality
Two poles in study of Human Psychology:


Broadest Level: Look at human universals: things true of all regularly developing humans
Individual Level: Where each individual person is considered independently and
uniquely.
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Final
DRAW BACKS


Broadest Level:
o When I want to understand why you are doing/ what you are doing, when it is
different than what someone else did, this level is hopelessly broad. IT can’t
distinguish at all between individuals.
Individual Level:
o When it comes to your best friend, you are willing to hang out down here at
the level at which everyone is unique. But,it is much effort to consider each
person on a totally individual level, and we might think that, while it is
logically true that every individual is unique, some individuals are more alike
than others. That is, some of you have psychological things in common with
me and some don’t---in some sense we can group people based on common
elements of their personalities.
So what we want is some intermediate level of analysis at which we can characterize kinds of
people.

Three ways psychologists have tried to do this…
o Types
o Themes
o Traits
Types

Define and identify limitations of type-based approaches to defining and measuring
personality
o Measuring Personality type
Problems of measuring types
 Galen’s Humours
 Galen was a Roman Physician, built on older Greek Theories in
developing four kinds of people -four humours- each associated with a
specific element
o The idea was that we all have all four of these elements in us,
and the best-functioning people are in perfect balance between
them. But most of us have one of the areas as dominant—and
this affects our personality as well as our health.


So someone who is despondent and irritable is of the
earth or melancholic temperament;
Someone courageous, optimistic, and amourous is air—
also known as sanguine.
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Final


Someone calm and unemotional is water, or
phelgmatic,
Someone easily angered and bad tempered is fire, or
choleric.
o Many theorists of the time believe that the weather, the season
of the year, the season you were born in, and the foods you ate
influenced the balance of humours in your body and thus your
personality. This overall view actually survived with great
popularity in Europe until the 19th century.

Astrology
 The notion of zodiac signs having an influence on our personality, so
when you were born (the month and day in western zodiac, year in
Chinese zodiac)
 Body style
 These are debunked: type theories per se have largely fallen from favor. Tend
to seem arbitrary, not linked enough to your actual psychology
o Precise personality theories:
 Theories about the natural types that exist in the world of humans and what
they are each like
Personality types have been replaced by themes
Themes

Define and identify limitations of theme-based approaches to defining and measuring
personality
Other invalid measures
o Sigmund Freud: thinks personality as interaction of these three different themes
 Id (Instincts)
 Strong desires: food/sex
o The Provence of the id.
 Ego (Reality)
 Arbiter b/w id and real world
o Get what the id wants but to do so within the confines of the
real world
o Need to work within the confines of other people, available
food, social rules, and so on.
 Superego (Morality)
 Layer of control over the id: not based on realistic constraints but more
on social morals
o Norms, molarity, etc
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Final
o There might be circumstances in which we can gratify sexual
needs, but refrain because it’s immoral
o Rorschah ink blot test
 Modern astrology
Traits

The difference between type-based and dimension-based approaches to personality
o EX:
 Ice-cube/steam
 Type: Two examples of water. represent two types of water—the ice
type and the steam type, and we could imagine a third liquid type right
in the middle.
 Dimensions: Conceptualize this as a continuum, a dimension, let’s call
it molecular speed, and both of these things are just the same stuff at a
different point along that dimension.



Fundamentally different system than the types system, in which water and
steam would be conceptualized as fundamentally different kinds of thing.
On the dimensions approach, there is commonality and also difference—
commonality of stuff, the same kind of thing, but difference of position along
the continuum.
 Two different ways to characterize personality types.
 The point is not that one of these approaches is totally wrong, but
that they are competing accounts of the same thing,
 Many find that the dimensions approach is much more powerful in the
domain of personality.
Be able to identify and recognize the characteristics of each of the “Big Five” personality
traits (OCEAN): Dimensional model
o Openness :
 Describes a person’s orientation towards novelty, change and uncertainty
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Final
o Conscientiousness:
 Describes the extent to which a person is focused, organized, and persistent in
the pursuit of his or her goals
o Extraversion:
 Describes a person’s level of arousal and preference for stimulation
o Agreeableness
 Describes a person’s orientation toward and style of interacting with others
 compliance and modest…
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Final

Less agreeable: expresses opinions vs More agreeable: willing to help
others…
o Negative Emotionality (aka Neuroticism)
 Describes a person’s propensity to experience negative emotions
Personality is our position on each of these five dimensions.
Problems of Measuring Traits (Why might it be hard to get to the ‘true’ personality using this
approach?)

Reactivity (Subject Bias)
EX:

o Being asked questions about personality…how do you answer?
 How much do you worry about what your score will be?
 What if you don’t want to be an introvert, you’ve always felt like a
wallflower and wished you were more outgoing?
 Therefore, shift your answers in the direction of what you expect to be
extroverted.
Lack of Insight
o Do we then know you were accurate?
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Final
o On consciousness/ implicit bias—how do you know you even CAN have the
necessary insight to answer the questions appropriately?
 Related issue can be Narcissism.
Where does the difference come from/ Where personality (individuality) comes from
o Twin studies (evidence on how genetics could determine personality)
 Monozygotic identical twins are usually compared to dizygotic or fraternal
twins—because while DZ twins are no more genetically related than normal
brothers and sisters, they are more like MZ twins in that they shared the same
womb environment, are the same age, had more or less the same home
environment, and so on.
 Correlation between genetically identical MZ twins are much higher
than DZ twins, suggesting a genetic basis for personality.

o Birth order
 There are consistent differences based on birth order that seem to hold very
widely in many contexts.


Firstborns score higher on objectively measured intelligence and additionally
found a similar effect on self-reported intellect.

However, we found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional
stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination.
o
General Intelligence
o Definition
 G– for general intelligence. This is what we might think of as intelligence, IQ,
etc—and the idea is that G reflects your general ability to solve problems.
o How it is measured
 Traditional way of assessing intelligence:
 Reliance on general knowledge, meaning results will vary with level
of education, etc…so not ‘pure’ intelligence in one sense, since it will
depend on educational background.
 Genetics doesn't seal your destiny when it comes to IQ. About half the
variability in IQ is attributed to the environment. Access to nutrition,
education, and health care appear to play a big role.

But overall, the environmental determinants of IQ aren't as well understood as
the biology.
o The Flynn effect
 Gradual increase in avg IQ over time.
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Final



One of the very odd things about IQ testing though is that over time people
are starting to score higher and higher on the tests!
These amount to about 10 IQ points every 10-20 years!
Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to
be identified for raising intelligence.
•
Both internal (personality) and external (situational) forces produce human behavior
•
Measuring internal factors is sticky business: types, themes, or traits?
•
Trait theories are most prevalent in personality psychology, but have serious limitations
•
Personality has a very strong genetic component, but can still be shaped by environment
•
Individual differences -- including intelligence -- likely reflect natural variability in
cognitive modules
45