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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY ISSUES AND DEBATES (CULTURE AND GENDER (Obedience would…
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY ISSUES AND DEBATES
ETHICS
Ethical guidelines have changed - little experimental research has been conducted similar to the 50s and 60s and no direct replication of these studies have been conducted without significant modification
Obedience research involves the risk of causing psychological harm and the removal of a participants right to withdraw as participants are gradually ordered to comply with requests to harm another
Prejudice research creates the potential for psychological harm because groups are pitted against one another to encourage conflict
PRACTICAL ISSUES
Demand characteristics because participants are unlikely to display natural behaviour if they know the aim of the research; deception is used to prevent these occurring and effort is used to disguise research aims
Milgram deceived participants by recruiting them for a memory and learning experiment, used a confederate actor, faked electrocution and used a sample shock
Prejudice has practical issues because people mask their prejudices in today’s social and cultural climate, resulting in attempts to measure prejudice being affected by social desirability bias
Validity and reliability assessments ensure that questionnaires tap into prejudice; test-testers methods ensure prejudice being measured is consistent overtime, split half techniques assess the validity and construct validity is validating using other measures like peer reports
COMPARISONS
Social identity theory and realistic conflict theory both describe the role of groups in the formation of prejudice using in group favouritism and out group bias but realistic conflict theory described how competition for resources is a necessary condition
Social impact theory focused on social conditions that encourage social influence, but agency theory takes account of the evolutionary bias of obedience, socialising factor and psychodynamic forces that are at play to reduce the moral strain one experienced and displace the responsibility onto another
Original attempts to explain social attitudes and behaviours have tended to focus on dispositional causes which reflect attitude the time that Germans during the holocaust were different from the rest of the world but the emphasis then shifted to more social explanations
CULTURE AND GENDER
Obedience would be predicted to be greater in females because gender stereotypes have predicted that women are more compliant but experimental evidence from milgram has found this to not be the case
Theories of obedience such as agency theory and social impact theory explain obedience as largely a product of social circumstances and forces which are not mediated by gender
Milgram’s obedience experiments have been conducted in many different cultures, most citing over an 80% level of obedience
The distinction between collectivist and individualistic cultures may be useful in understanding whether social influence is affected by culture; collectivists work together cooperatively and interdependently so you could predict higher levels of obedience and prejudice
However cross cultural obedience research is not methodologically comparable which may account for differences in obedience rates found and predicted research has mixed findings
REDUCTIONISM
Social impact theory is reductionist because it ignores the interrelation between individual and social factors
Dispositional and personality explanations of prejudice and obedience are reductionist because they focus only on the character of the individual and disregard the social situations
PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
Studies such as Milgram and Sherif have variables which are controlled and carefully manipulated to ensure cause and effect relationships under lab or more naturalistic conditions
Social psychology however is criticised for studying human social behaviour in a vacuum that can’t be generalised to the real world
Group dynamics rarely exist in a social vacuum, they are affected by social, historic and cultural events which continually change
NATURE - NURTURE
Personality explanations of prejudice focuses on the type of character that is more or less likely to be prejudice and therefore account for nature
Inter group dynamic theories focus on the situational conditions that cause conflict which reflect nurture
However, most personality accounts of prejudice do not ignore nurture as the explain that such traits arise from the way that we are brought up
CHANGE OVER TIME
Social psychological knowledge is largely influenced by social changes in attitudes and historical events
Recent developments in social psychology have attempted to investigate the underlying motivation and mental constructs associated with social influence research
ISSUES OF SOCIAL CONTROL
Understanding what makes us obedient can be used to help educate and prevent blind destructive obedience in the future and help us understand historical events such as mass genocide
However it can also be used to manipulate obedience, if we can understand what conditions create the highest levels of obedience then this knowledge can be used to ensure soldiers obey higher ranking officers, or employees obey their employers
USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOCIETY
The main application of prejudice research in society has been used to reduce prejudice; in the classroom to racial bias in multi-ethnic schools
Using our knowledge of stereotypes we can educate people to be more mindful of the similarities that exist between different groups rather than focusing on the differences - langer et al. (1985) found an improvement in how children perceived disability when encouraged to be mindful
In a meta analysis of over 515 inter group contact studies, pettigrew and tropp (2006) found that contact does reduce prejudice
SOCIALLY SENSITIVE RESEARCH
Any research into prejudice and discrimination has the potential to be socially sensitive for the participants involved in the research themselves or the groups in which they represent