Week 9

Question 1

How selfish are we?

Answer 1

• A widespread assumption in Western

thought is that humans are fundamentally selfish

• Freud: actions are motivated by the

‘pleasure principle’ - we do things that

maximise personal pleasure

• Machiavelli: humans are “fickle,

hypocritical, and greedy of gain”

• Are we hardwired to prioritise our own

interests even to the point of hurting

others?

Question 2

Discuss the Dictator Game

Answer 2

• A paradigm for investigating trust and

generosity

• Player 1 (the allocator) is given some

money, e.g., $10

• Player 1 decides how much to give to

Player 2 (the recipient)

• Player 2 receives the offered amount and Player 1 receives the rest
  Most people give almost half

Question 3

What encourages people to give?

Answer 3

• Social closeness to or distance from the recipient (e.g., when both anonymous, allocators tend to give less; Hoffman et al., 1996)
• Trust and prosociality (e.g., people who are more socially oriented and care about others more tend to give more; Bekkers, 2007)
• Demographic factors (e.g., women and older allocators tend to be more generous; Engel, 2010)
• NOT being an economics student lol (Tisserand et al., 2015)

Question 4

Discuss giving feeling good

Answer 4

Spending money on others makes us happier than spending money on ourselves
- Spending more of our income on others increases happiness acutely and over time (Dunn et al., 2008)
- Prosocial spending creates a positive feedback loop: helping others feels good so we do it more (Aknin et al., 2011)
- A ‘psychological universal’: generalises across cultures (Aknin et al., 2013) and starts as early as 1 year old (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006)
- Not just about spending money: general acts of kindness (even random ones) improve our own well-being (Curry et al., 2018)

Question 5

Discuss social loafing

Answer 5

• We have reasons for helping other

individuals; what about in groups?

• Social loafing: the tendency to exert

less effort when working on a group

task in which individual contributions

cannot be monitored (Karau & Williams,

1993)

• An explanation for why groups are

sometimes less productive than the

combined performance of their members working as individuals

• Ringelmann (1913) investigated social

performance in an individual or cooperative rope-pulling task

• When pulling alone, people exerted more force (they tried harder!) compared to when they pulled in pairs or groups
• The larger the group, the smaller the

amount of force exerted

• “Each man [sic], trusting in his neighbour to furnish the desired effort, contented himself by merely following the movement of the crank, and sometimes even let himself be carried along by it”

Question 6

Why do we loaf?

Answer 6

• Deindividuation: people feel they can ‘hide in the crowd’ and avoid the negative consequences of slacking off
• Equity: people have preconceived ideas that people don’t work hard in groups, so reduce their own effort
• Reward: people feel their personal
  effort won’t be recognised even if they
  try hard

Question 7

Discuss Social facilitation

Answer 7

• We don’t always slack off in groups -

in fact, the mere presence of others can give us a boost

Two types of social facilitation:

• Co-action effects: we perform better at tasks when we do them with other people
• Audience effects: we perform better at

tasks when we are watched by other people

Question 8

What are co-action effects?

Answer 8

• Performance boost when accompanied by others engaged in the same activity
• Triplett (1898) noticed that cyclists performed better when racing against each other than the clock
• Did another experiment in which children wound fishing line alone or in pairs. Children worked faster when with a partner doing the same task

Question 9

Discuss audience effects

Answer 9

• Performance boost when in the presence of passive spectators
• People perform better on fine-motor tasks (Travis, 1925) and simple maths tasks (Dashiell, 1935) when an audience is present vs. absent
• Thought to be in part because other people heighten physiological arousal and evaluation apprehension, both of which serve to enhance performance

Question 10

Discuss social loafing and faciliation

Answer 10

Karau & Williams (1993)
More likely on tasks people don’t care about or in groups that people don’t like
- More likely when motivation is low
- More likely when personal effort can’t be identified

Bond & Titus (1983)

• More likely on simple/easy tasks than complex tasks
• More likely when personal effort can be identified
• More likely when motivation is high

Question 11

Discuss altruism

Answer 11

• Prosocial behaviour that benefits others without regard to consequences for oneself
• Batson and Shaw (1991) propose several motives for altruism
• Social reward: being esteemed or value by others (e.g., praise, recognition)
• Personal distress: reduce our own distress about others’ suffering
• Empathic concern: identifying with someone in need and intending to help

Question 12

Discuss competitive altruism

Answer 12

• If people are motivated by social reward , they may try to outdo one another in altruistic acts
• The person who gives away the most seal meat among the Inuit of Alaska enjoy the highest status (Hardy & van Vugt, 2006)
• In lab studies, people will give greater social status to group members who act altruistically (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005)

Question 13

Discuss Batson and colleagues (1983)

Answer 13

• told a participant that they would interact with another participant (actually a confederate) who would be subjected to 10 electric shocks
• Easy-to-escape condition: participant could leave after seeing 2 shocks
• Hard-to-escape condition: participants had to stay through all 10 shocks
• Participants’ main emotional response was assessed: personal distress vs. empathic concern for the other person
• Given the opportunity to trade places with the confederate and take the shocks

Question 14

Discuss being a bystander

Answer 14

• The news story that launched a thousand studies
• In March 1964, The New York Times reported 37 people watched uselessly from their apartments while Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in an alley
• The number was later upgraded to 38
• The reports shocked the American public and social psychology researchers, who began to study the phenomenon that came to be known as the ‘bystander effect’

Question 15

Discuss bystander intervention

Answer 15

• Assistance given by a witness to someone in need
• We might hope that people respond unquestioningly, but in reality people can be reluctant to intervene during seeming emergencies
• Bad people or a function of the situation?

Question 16

Discuss The Smoke Under the Door Experiment

Answer 16

• Latané & Darley (1968) had male undergraduates take part in a study on “problems at an urban university”
• In a waiting room participants faced an ambiguous but potentially dangerous situation in which smoke began to puff into the room
• One group of participants did the study alone
• Another group did the study with two confederates trained not to respond overtly to the smoke
• A third group did the study with two other real participants
  ### Why did bystanders not intervene?
• Each bystander picks up cues about what is happening and how to react to it from other people
• Diffusion of responsibility: the presence of other people reduces each person’s sense of responsibility (“surely someone else will act…”)
• Pluralistic ignorance: each bystander may be uncertain about the legitimacy of the “emergency” we see (lack of) reaction from others and decide it mustn’t be dangerous
• Evaluation apprehension: people fear making mistakes and being seen as foolish, which makes them reluctant to intervene in critical situations
• Explanations for the bystander effect suggest that it will be stronger in groups than alone
• In a review of the literature, Latané and Nida (1981) concluded that people were more likely to help and be helped when a critical incident was witnessed by one person alone than when witnessed by a group

Question 17

Do people really not help?

Answer 17

Bystander effects are often discussed as something that is an inevitable outcome in response to group-
based emergency situations
But the picture is not as bleak as conventionally assumed
Sometimes people are more likely to help when in groups than alone

*Fischer et al. (2011) propose a ‘reverse bystander effect’ (more bystanders = greater likelihood of helping) when emergencies
are less ambiguous and and it is clear what bystanders should do
*CCTV footage of real violent incidents in public spaces suggests that bystander intervention is the norm in these cases rather
than the exception (Levine et al., 2020)
When people feel able to do something, they’re more likely to help
*Pantin and Carver (1982) had people watch a short video of what to do in medical emergencies (or not) and several weeks
later exposed them to someone ostensibly having a choking fit
*Participants who watched the video responded more quickly in the emergency than those who didn’t, regardless of group size

Question 18

Factors that increase likelihood of helping

Answer 18

• Fischer and colleagues (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of bystander effects
• The bystander effect was reduced (i.e., people helped more) when:
• The situation was more dangerous
• The perpetrator was present
• The victim was a close other
• Other bystanders were real (rather than instructed confederates)

Question 19

What is Prejudice?

Answer 19

• Actual meaning: pre-judgement
• Gordon Allport literally wrote the book on prejudice “Aversive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he [sic] belongs to a group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to that group.” (p22)

Question 20

Discuss nature of prejudice

Answer 20

• Often prototypically thought of as racism, but reflected in many other areas:
• Sexism
• Homophobia
• Transphobia
• Prejudice based on religion, SES, age,
• disability, political orientation, etc.
• Prejudice: An attitude or affective response (positive or negative) toward a group and its members
• Discrimination: favourable or unfavourable treatment of individuals based on their group membership
• Prejudice is an attitude; discrimination is a behaviour
• A prejudiced person might not act on their prejudice (someone can be prejudiced against a group but not discriminate against the group)

Question 21

Discuss attitude of prejudice

Answer 21

Prejudice encompasses all three
components of an attitude (the
ABCs):
* Affective: how much someone likes or
dislikes someone based on their group;
strong feelings about a group
* Cognitive: thoughts that reinforce a
person’s feelings - knowledge and
beliefs about a group (often held as
stereotypes)
* Behavioural: intentions to turn thoughts
and feelings into an action - to behave in
certain ways toward a group

Question 22

Discuss types of prejudice

Answer 22

Blatant prejudice (Allport, 1958)
* Sometimes called ‘old fashioned’
prejudice
* Explicit rejection of the outgroup
* Belief in the inferiority of the outgroup
* Outward expression of negativity toward
the outgroup
But not all forms of prejudice are brazenly open

Question 23

Discuss subtle prejudice

Answer 23

(e.g., Pettigrew &
Meertens, 1995; McConahay, 1986)

• Covert forms of prejudice
• Can involve rejection of explicitly
  prejudiced beliefs while still feeling
  animosity (“I’m not racist, but…”)
• Can be reflected in unacknowledged or
  unconscious negative feelings toward
  members of certain groups (Gaertner &
  Dovidio, 1986)
• Sometimes assessed using ‘implicit’
  measures that don’t rely on asking
  people to self-report on their attitudes

Question 24

Discuss sexism case study

Answer 24

Glick and Fiske (2001) coined the term
‘ambivalent sexism’, which recognises
that prejudiced attitudes can contain
both negative and positive features
* Hostile sexism: blatant, overtly negative
evaluations of women (beliefs that women
are incompetent, unintelligent, overly
emotional, and manipulative)
* Benevolent sexism: subtle, seemingly
positive evaluations of women that
reinforce traditional gender roles (beliefs
that women should be protected, revered
as wives, mothers, child caretakers)

Question 25

Discuss economic perspective

Answer 25

Some of the most intense intergroup tensions arise between groups that compete for the same limited resource (e.g., money, jobs, land) This perspective is outlined in Realistic Group Conflict Theory * Predicts (correctly) that prejudice will increase under conditions of economic difficulty, such as recessions and high unemployment (e.g., King et al., 2010)

Question 26

Discuss robbers cave experiment

Answer 26

Sherif et al. (1961) conducted a study under the guise of a two-week summer camp with 22 boys Boys were allocated to two groups: The Eagles and The Rattlers * Stage 1: ingroup formation in which each group got to know one another, norms and leadership developed * Stage 2: group conflict in which the groups competed in activities for limited prizes * Stage 3: conflict resolution in which the groups worked together to achieve a number of superordinate (i.e., collective) goals

Question 27

Discuss motivational perspective

Answer 27

Hostility can emerge between groups even in the absence of direct competition Intergroup hostility can develop simply because another group exists The mere existence of group boundaries can be sufficient to initiate intergroup prejudice

Question 28

Discuss minimal group paradigm

Answer 28

A method of studying prejudice pioneered by Henri Tajfel (1970) Designed to reveal the minimal conditions required for ingroup favouritism and outgroup derogation to occur * E.g., preferring the art of abstract painters Kandinsky or Klee * Even arbitrary distinctions can trigger a tendency to favour one’s own ingroup over outgroups - even when it comes at the ingroup’s expense People are allocated to groups based on seemingly meaningless criteria and have no interaction with other group members Participants then assign points, redeemable for money, to pairs of their fellow participants One amount would go to an ingroup member and the other to an outgroup member

Question 29

Discuss social identity theory

Answer 29

Combines with self-categorisation theory to form ‘the social identity approach’ Our identity is comprised in large part of social groups we belong to Hence, in order to feel good about ourselves, we strive to feel good about and boost the status of our ingroups People who are more identified with the group tend to show greater ingroup favouritism (e.g., McCoy & Major, 2003)

Question 30

Discuss the cognitive miser

Answer 30

Prejudice as a byproduct of our tendency to categorise things and people People tend to favour simpler ways of thinking than more effortful ways of thinking (Fiske & Taylor, 1984) Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort - so we rely on heuristics or cognitive shortcuts

Question 31

Discuss cognitive perspective

Answer 31

This gives rise to stereotypes, which help us process information rapidly and efficiently but can be biased * Beliefs that all members of a group have the same qualities, which define the group and differentiate it from other groups (Hogg & Abrams, 1988) Main features: 1. Define people in terms of their social category membership 2. Stereotypes are shared (amount to more than one person’s opinion)

Question 32

Discuss stereotypes

Answer 32

Researchers brought a baby into a social psychology class * Half were told the baby’s name was ‘Keith’ and the other half ‘Karen’ * Participants rated the baby on stereotypically gendered personality traits White participants watched a recording in which two people had an argument and one pushed the other * Half saw a Black person push a White person; the other saw a White person push a Black person * Rated how violent the episode was