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issues and debates - SOCIAL - Coggle Diagram
issues and debates - SOCIAL
nature/nurture
Milgram aimed to prove that obedience is situational (nurture), not dispositional (nature)
prejudice explained by either dispositional (nature) factors or situational (nurture) factors - personality theories are dispositional, while intergroup dynamic theories such as RCT and SIT are situational - however personality theories often take into account the impact of nurture as well as nature (eg Authoritarian personality is dispositional but due to harsh parenting - nurture)
social control
social impact theory - used to decide number of students in classroom, number of colleagues in a work environment, etc - social engineering
obedience research could be used to manipulate people - eg obeying people in uniforms
use of psychological knowledge in society
social impact theory - used to decide number of students in classroom, number of colleagues in work environment, etc
methods to reduce prejudice eg in classrooms using jigsaw technique, especially to reduce racial bias in multi-ethnic schools
using knowledge of stereotypes can lead to educating people to be mindful of the similarities that exist between different groups instead of focusing on the differences
understanding that intergroup hostility is facilitated by lack of equal status contact (groups need to mix frequently in non-competitive situations to reduce conflict)
psychology as a science
social psychology was originally concerned with understanding collective thinking and action, until 1924 when they started to become more scientific and focus on experimentation
gender
only 1 of Milgram's experiments involved women - androcentric, not generalisable to females
only found that women had higher anxiety levels, but same obedience
Burger found that men and women had similar obedience levels, but women tended to have higher empathy
Blass - meta-analysis, found that 9 out of 10 obedience studies showed no significant difference between genders
individual differences
using dispositional factors (eg personality) to explain prejudice is limited, as it cannot explain why whole cultures and societies are prejudiced (eg in Nazi Germany, against the Jews) - need to study social factors
social identity theory ignores individual differences between in-group members (presence or lack of discrimination could be due to personality)
development
gender socialisation could mean that men are raised to be strong and aggressive, while women are raised to be quiet and compliant - predicts that females might be more obedient
Adorno - the authoritarian personality is developed due to harsh parenting and conditional love while growing up - can account for obedience and prejudice
reductionism
Sherif believed that dispositional explanations for prejudice were reductionist, and that it cannot be explained by one strand of thought, but by a range of interconnecting social processes
Social Impact Theory reduces obedience to an equation, ignoring social conditions and individual interactions
comparisons between ways of explaining behaviour
realistic conflict theory VS social identity theory - both describe role of groups in formation of prejudice, using in-group favouritism and out-group bias - RCT states competition for resources is a necessary condition, SIT doesn't
change in psychological knowledge over time
pre 1920s- race theories 'legitimised' inequalities between Black and White people
1920s & 1930s- post WW1
1950s- US civil rights movement
-> questioned legitimacy of racial inequality
1960s & 1970s- shift in social psychology to use social and cultural explanations to explain behaviour
1970s- began to question whether groups and social conditions could be the whole explanation for prejudice
ethics
1950s & 1960s - many experiments into prejudice and obedience that would now be considered unethical - cannot be replicated now - cost/benefit analysis
obedience studies - can cause psychological harm, right to withdraw not explicitly stated, forced to hurt others
prejudice studies - potential psychological harm - groups encouraged to have conflict
practical issues
demand characteristics - participants unlikely to display natural behaviour if aware of aims - used deception to avoid
eg Milgram ('memory and learning' experiment, fake role assignment, confederates
social desirability bias - people tend to mask prejudice to avoid judgement
validity & reliability - test-retest method (reliable over time); other measures eg peer reports (construct validity is validated); correlations between different measures of prejudice (require complicated analysis, but result in highly valid/reliable measures)
culture
possible that collectivist cultures tend to be more obedient than individualistic cultures due to their cooperative nature, however it is hard to tell whether research supporting this is due to actual differences in obedience or just methodological differences
social sensitivity
research into prejudice/discrimination has the potential to be social sensitive - for participants - + historically prejudice research increased racial discrimination due to biased conclusions about White supremacy