Download Theories_in_Detail

Theories in Detail- Cognitive and Social Psychology
Social
Agency Theory- Milgram
 People obey orders from authority figures.
 Agentic State is where individuals give up their free will in order to serve the needs of society.
 Autonomous State is where individuals have free will.
 Moral Strain is the unpleasant sensation resulting from pressure to obey orders to commit an
immoral act. People have less responsibility of actions as they are in the Agentic state.
 Agentic Shift is the switch between the autonomous state and the Agentic state.
 We are socialised to obey orders from an authority figure from a young ages (obey parents) from
society.
Social Identity Theory- Tajfel
 Prejudice: making judgements about people based on their group membership, rather than their
individual nature. Negative opinions based on stereotypes, with an uninformed attitude.
 Stereotype: these are common over simple views of what particular groups of people are like. As in
you develop an idea about an individual (the minority) and apply it to the whole group.
 Discrimination: treating people differently according to their group membership, so is an action
carries out as a consequence of prejudice.
 SIT is based on Turner and Tajfel’s ideas. Prejudice occurs when there are two groups are present,
which results in rivalry and conflict. In groups are the groups to which we belong, out groups are the
groups to which we do not belong.
 We tend to put the out groups down in order to boost our self esteem. It is important we score
higher than the out groups so that out in group has status. This is in group favouritism.
 A person’s social identity depends on their social group.
There are three different stages in social identity theory.
Social Categorisation:  classifying our selves and other people into groups which also involved the
stereotyping of other groups.
Social Identification: identifying with the group to which we belong to, so the sharing of culture, values and
beliefs, the differences between in groups and out groups becomes much clearer, the social group you
belong to becomes part of you.
Social Comparison:  the process of comparing our in groups to our out groups, so to boost self esteem, you
make sure you are better than the out group, by outing them down. In group favouritism occurs.
Cognitive
Levels of Processing- Craik and Lockhart 1972
 Came up with an influential approach to explaining how memory works.
 Aim was to explain why some things are better remembered than others, suggesting that how well a
piece of information is processed depends on the way in which it is processed.
 Information can be processed deeply or shallowly. Craik defines depth of processing as the amount
of meaning extracted from the information. Information which is deeply processed and is thought
about is most likely to be remembered.
They suggested E processing information about what things look like.
Phonetic Processing:  processing information about what something sounds like.
Semantic Processing:  processing information about what something means.
 Semantic processing is the deepest form of information processing, which involves the most amount
of cognitive work, so the semantic material is most likely to be remembered.
 Craik and Tulving (along with other researchers) were interested in what exactly produces deep
processing and how it affected memory.
 They identified four factors in which made processing deeper.
Elaboration  when information is more complex, and discussed in further detail, information is more likely
to be remembered.
Distinctiveness  if information is different and distinctive (more noticeable) information processed which is
distinctive is more likely to be recalled, as it sticks out in an individual’s memory.
Effort  if information takes more effort to understand or work out, information will be easier to recall. (An
anagram) the more effort put in to resolve it, the more likely it is it will be remembered.
Personal Relevance  if the information has a relevance to you personally you may remember it, say if you
were a twin, you may remember information about twin studies than others might.
Cue Dependency- Tulving
 Cue Dependency is the most common reason for forgetting. (tip of the tongue phenomenon)
 Tulving said that forgetting takes place when we have the information in our memory, but the lack of
cues are there to enable us to access it. Cues are additional pieces of information that guide us to
what we are looking for.
 When you return somewhere, where you haven’t been for a while familiar sights, smells, sounds will
bring back floods of memories. The distinctive sensory information serves as cues to retrieve old
memories that lay dormant in the brain.
 There are two types of cues:
State Cues  emotional and physiological state (happy/sad or high/drunk). When in the same state at
learning as recall, state cues improve recall.
Context Cues  environmental factors that trigger memory (smell, sight, place). When in same context at
learning as recall, context cues aid recall.
Repression- Freud
 The idea that we forcibly forget facts that provoke anxiety or unhappiness, therefore protecting
ourselves against negative emotions. Freud felt repressed memories are still active in the mind but
an individual isn’t aware of them, as they are stored in the unconscious mine, but they can trigger
symptoms.
 At its most dramatic, it is the blanking out of all memories, its usually acquired in childhood from a
bad experience with parents.
Reconstructive Memory- Bartlett
 Concerned with what happens when information is stored and then retrieved.
 He suggests that memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past events, influenced by attitudes and
responses to memories and evens when they occurred. Retrieval of a stored memory involves an
active process of reconstruction.
 When recalling an event, we actively it piece together using a range of information.
 He proposed that things are reconstructed by the use of schemas.
 Schemas are units of information. We have a schema for every aspect of life and the world, which
consists of the things we relate together. When reconstructing memories we use schemas and
information within them. WOG participants may have used ghost and death schemas to reconstruct
the story. It scanned the schema eliminating irrelevant information and selecting appropriate bits.
Because of the use of schemas the story became, stereotyped.