Psychology 312 Social Psychology Lecture Notes PDF

Psychology 312 Social Psychology Professor Adams Lecture #8 GENDER, GENES, AND CULTURE Culture: the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. Culture influences us in a variety o...

Psychology 312 Social Psychology Professor Adams Lecture #8 GENDER, GENES, AND CULTURE Culture: the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. Culture influences us in a variety of ways. One of the most important is through norms. Norms: shared expectations or rules about how to behave in social settings. One of the most basic ways norms influence us is through expectations about personal space. For example, to step into a crowded elevator and face the back would be a norm violation. Similarly, we know it’s inappropriate to enter a bus with only one passenger and sit as close as we can to this person we don’t know. Norms also vary across cultures. In Arab countries, when two people communicate, it is expected that they will stand close enough to each other so that they may share their breath. There are also different norms for women and men. It is unacceptable for men to wear makeup and unacceptable for women to spit. It’s important to make a distinction between the terms “sex” and “gender” Sex refers to a biological category that is defined by genetic composition and reproductive anatomy and function. All mammals are either male or female. The social marker of sex is gender. Gender refers to the characteristics by which people define female and male; it’s also what a culture makes of the raw material of biological sex. All known cultures recognize biological differentiation and use it as a basis for social distinction. Crandall (1988) One norm in our culture is that women should be thin. Crandall did a study of the norms surrounding binge eating in sororities. He reasoned that sororities are very meaningful groups in some college women’s lives and that a woman’s sorority has a great deal of social influence over her. Crandall reasoned that women in sororities would be interested in body shape and appearance and that, consequently, eating and dieting would be important to sorority members. Norms would then arise for eating behavior, and deviations from these norms would be cause for social rejection. In Crandall’s study, women filled out questionnaires which measured their eating habits, and they identified their closest friends in the sorority (a measure of popularity)/ The main finding was that there was a norm for binge eating: women who binged at the mean level of the group were the most popular; those who binged too much or too little were less popular. Thus, norms can exert a very strong influence on the members of a group. By the way, bany researchers have speculated that the same norms would be present in fraternities regarding drinking behavior. There are also norms about language and the case of the generic “he.” For a long time, the norm has been to use the term “he” or “man” to refer to both men and women. Many psychologists have questioned the extent to which the term “he” is really generic. Henley (1989) found that persons who read short stories using the generic “he” truly believed that the person in the story was a man, not a woman. In another study, students were given a list of textbook chapter titles and asked to pick pictures that went with the titles. Some students were given titles like “People in Industrial Society.” Students given the generic “he” were more likely to pick pictures of males that students given the unbiased description. The second question in this line of research is whether use of the generic “he” really causes any harm. Hamilton & Henley (1982) read science fiction stories out loud to participants. Some participants heard a story that used only masculine forms while others heard the story using unbiased language. Female participants answered more questions about the story correctly when they had heard the unbiased version of the story. Similarly, Crawford & English (1984) found that women’s recall of essays was poorer when the essays were written using the generic “he” than when they were written using unbiased language. "Studies such as these have lead the America Psychological Association to forbid sexist language in their publications.) In both medicine and psychology, men have historically been viewed as the norm. For example, in a study of anatomy textbooks, Giacomini et al. (1986) fount the 64 percent of the drawings had overtly masculine characteristics, whereas only 11 percent of the textbooks had overtly feminine characteristics. In psychology, Freud implicitly saw men as the norm when he declared that women have “penis envy” because they are “missing a penis.” Roles are a set of norms that define how people in a given social situation ought to behave. Gender roles are a set of norms about how you should behave based on your gender. For example, part of an Iranian woman’s gender role involves covering her face. In the US, gender roles are typically divided around housework: women tend to do the cooking and cleaning while men fix the cars and do the yardwork. Taylor, Keith, & Tucker (1993) found that older African Americans were especially likely to endorse sharing of the housework and sharing the provider role. Gender roles are often reflected in and perpetuated by the media. Levy (1990) examined Oscar winning roles by the gender and occupation of the character. Female characters tended to be unemployed, actresses, or prostitutes, whereas male characters tended to be soldiers, sheriff, and criminals. Signorielli et al. (1994) studied 119 different MTV commercials for the presence of gender roles. They found the commercials with men usually dealt with having fun whereas commercials with women usually concerned appearance. In addition, 75 percent of the women in the commercials were rated as having “beautiful bodies” while 75 percent of the men were described as having only “average bodies.” Hence, there is a higher standard of beauty for women. Martin & Kennedy (1993) studied the effects of viewing ads on female adolescents. They found that viewing pictures of attractive models made females rate a comparison standard (average woman) more harshly. In contrast, the comparison standard was judged the highest (most attractive) when the participants had not yet viewed any attractive models. Norms also have a large impact on our lives in the area of sexuality. There is a norm that it is the male’s responsibility to initiate sex. Evolutionary psychologists have tried to explain this phenomenon by arguing that it’s in men’s best interest to reproduce widely, and it’s in women’s best interest to be choosy. However, there are problems with this explanation. First the female egg isn’t as rare as evolutionary psychologists would have us believe. A woman releases 400-500 eggs in her lifetime, and clearly not all eggs are fertilized. Therefore, women have just as many eggs to “waste” as men have sperm to waste. Second, the likelihood of passing on one’s genes isn’t necessarily greatest when men reproduce widely. The offspring are most likely to survive when the father sticks around to feed and raise the child. Furthermore, there are societal constraints which discourage women from initiating sex. Buss (1984) looked at mating preferences in 37 different cultures. He concluded that men are morel likely to want physically attractive mates while women were more likely to seek wealth and social status in a mate. What is less clear is that there were more differences found between cultures as a whole than between men and women. In other words, men and women from the same culture were more similar in their mate preferences than men to other men and women to other women from different cultures. In addition, to say that these differences between men and women are due to genetics is premature, there is no evidence that beautiful women are more fertile than unattractive women. There are plenty of unattractive people who have children. Similarly, women may not necessarily look for wealth and status so that their children will be protected. Women tend to have less social status than men to begin with, and they may try to gain these things through marriage. File drawer problem: the tendency of studies reporting gender similarity to not get published and instead to get tucked away in researchers’ file drawers. Studies finding gender differences receive much more attention than studies finding no gender differences. Also, if a gender difference does exist, it’s very difficult to determine its exact cause (biology? The environment? Both?). Lecture #9 GENDER DIFFERENCES Gender differences (or, gender similarities) 1. Morality 2. Aggression 3. Spatial Ability 4. Math Ability 5. Verbal Ability Nature v. Nurture When trying to determine the cause of gender differences, many researchers come down on the side of either nature or nurture. You may remember from intro psych that nature refers to how biology influences us, whereas nurture refers to how the environment influences us. Another way of thinking of this is in terms of the title for Chapter 6: gender genes, and culture. Nature refers to genes, and nurture refers to culture. Morality In your text, Myers states that one of the dimensions over which females and males differ is independence vs. connectedness. The argument is that men’s independence and women’s connectedness affect the way they solve moral dilemmas. Specifically, Carol Gilligan has argued that women base moral decisions on principles of compassion and care whereas men base moral decisions on abstract principles of justice. The basic idea is that because females are more connected with others, they are more likely than men to consider another persons’ feelings when making a moral choice. Because males are more separated from others, they are more likely to invoke principle of justice when making a moral choice. Despite the popularity of Gilligan’s theory, it hasn’t received empirical support. In a study by Faye Crosby (1991) students were given examples of statements girls and boys had made when they were solving a moral dilemma. The students were not able to distinguish which comments were made by girls and which were made by boys. Crosby concluded that males and females use both case-based and justice-based reasoning. Furthermore, Cochran & Peplau (1989) refuted the argument that females are more connected than males: they found no differences between girls and boys in their desire to be attached to their parents. Aggression We know that boys are generally more aggressive than girls, and this is true of children and adults in many cultures. In the US, men are arrested for violent crimes eight times more often than women. The fact that women don’t seem to be as violent a men is undoubtedly why the Carla Fay Tucker execution created such a stir: she’s a rarity. In a 1977 review of the aggression literature, Frodi found that in self-reports men indicate more aggressive behavior than women do, men and women have an equal approval of violence, and women feel more frequent guilt about aggression than men do. The fact that women feel more guilty about aggression may serve as an inhibition/ These gender differences disappear when the aggression is perceived as justified and when the victim is anonymous. Remember that gender differences in aggression typically pertain to physical aggression Gender differences in verbal aggression aren’t as clear-cut. Explanations: 1. biological: prenatal exposure to androgens (male sex hormone) may predispose a person to be aggressive. 2. environmental: parents play more roughly with their male than with their female children. Also, boys are generally allowed more activity than girls are. The true cause of aggression is probably a function of both biology and the environment: males may have a greater predisposition to act aggressively, but society is more accepting of male aggression than female aggression Spatial Ability Maccoby & Jacklin (1974): men have superior visual spatial ability. However, this difference is not supported by current research. There appear to be no gender differences in the areas of spatial visualization or spatial perception (rod and frame task). The gender difference exists only on mental rotation tasks. These tasks require a perceiver to rotate a two or three- dimensional figure so that it can be visualized from a different perspective. Such mental rotation skills are called upon in geometry classes, and studies show that boys typically outperform girls in geometry class. Explanations: 1. biological: because gender differences in visual spatial ability appear to icrease at adolescence, hormones secreted during puberty may affect the brains of males and females differently. 2. environment: many scientists argue that male superiority in this area is a function of differential experience for boys and girls. In cultures where female autonomy is valued, no gender differences in visual spatial ability have been found. In fact, training has been found to reduce or eliminate gender differences in visual spatial tasks. Math Ability Out of all the cognitive sex differences studied, math ability has received the most attention in the past decade. This is largely because claims of sex differences attracted the attention of the media. However, most research indicates that there are no sex differences in math ability. Maccoby & Jacklin (1974): boys and girls are similar in math ability until late childhood. Boys begin to receive higher test scores on tests of math ability around the age of 12. Consistent sex differences in math ability appear around the age of 15. The fact that sex differences in math ability don’t appear until adolescence indicates that biology alone is not a sufficient explanation for this difference. How large are these gender differences in math ability (SEE SAT SCORES GRAPH) This represents the distribution of SAT scores for females and males. What you see are two overlapping normal curves. The data from a large sample of females and males taking the SAT are included in these curves. Most people tend to cluster around the mean—the mean is represented by the peak in each curve. Fewer people fall at the tails of the curves. This graph demonstrates that the vast majority of males and females fall within the same range: the overlap. A few males lie above the highest scoring females, and a few females lie below the lowest scoring males. The fact is that such a distribution doesn’t predict how many individual male or female will perform in college. Thus, one can’t make sweeping generalizations that all males are better at math than all females. Claude Steele (1997) has demonstrated that stereotype threat can account for women’s poor performance on math achievement tests. Stereotype threat is the event of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs becoming self-relevant. Steele recruited male and female college sophomores who were good at math and who perceived their strong math ability as important to their sense of self. Each student was given a very difficult math test (advanced items from the GRE). Steele found that women performed worse than equally qualified men on these math items. As a comparison, Steele recruited another group of students who had strong literature skills and who perceived their ability as important to their sense of self. Again, each student was given a very difficult literature test. In this case, women performed just as well as equally qualified men. Why the difference between math and literature? Steele argues that women are aware of the stereotype that they’re not supposed to be good at math. (There is no stereotype about literature ability.) When women take a test that they believe is diagnostic of their math ability, anxiety occurs. They fear that if they don’t perform well they are confirming a society’s stereotype that women are inferior at math. This is added pressure that men don’t feel, and the added pressure lowers performance. Explanations: 1. biological: Norman Geschwind has argued that excess testosterone during prenatal development may create superior math ability in some boys. However, this is an area where the environment explanations are more compelling: 2. environmental: a) after early adolescence girls begin taking fewer math classes than boys do. As you can imagine, the amount of coursework and experience someone has with math is bound to influence his or her performance. More experience = better performance. Meece (1982) found that by junior high school, boys perceive themselves as more competent in math than girls do, despite the fact that they are receiving the same grades. Likewise in a study of male and female first year college students, DeBoers (1987) found that females had higher grades in their high school math and science courses than males did, yet females felt that they were performing more poorly than males.  b) Eccles finds that parents give math related toys to their sons more often than to their daughters. c) Eccles also finds that parents give different messages to boys and girls about their successes at math: boys are told they succeed because they’re smart; girls are told they succeed because they worked hard. Girls also report that they study longer than boys for math, but in reality, they both study equally. Girls perceive their ability as less than boys, even though their grades are similar, and parents of girls say that math is more difficult than do parents of boys. All of these factors go on to affect the typical finding that girls don’t take elective math in high school, although boys often do. Eccles was doing her work in 1980, and during that year an influential newspaper article appeared in favor of the argument that boys are genetically better at math than girls. Eccles had assessed parents’ attitudes about their child’s math ability both before and after this article appeared. She found that after the article, parents rated their sons ad even higher in math ability than before, but they lowered their ratings of their daughters. Verbal Ability Maccoby & Jacklin (1974) reported that female superiority on verbal tasks ahs been one of the more solidly established generalizations in the field of sex differences. This refers to women’s tendency to comprehend written and spoken material more quickly then men. How large is this difference? Hyde and Linn reviewed the literature on verbal ability and report that 99 percent of a person’s score on a verbal test is determined by factors other than the person’s sex. Just as we found with math ability, however, there is only evidence for gender differences in verbal ability in adolescence and adulthood. Language abilities are similar in girls and boys until about the age of 11. Sex differences in verbal ability increase between the ages of 14 and 18. Again, the fact that gender differences don’t occur until adolescence and the fact that they have been declining in recent years indicates that biology alone doesn’t account for these differences. Environmental explanations 1. parents vocalize more to baby girls than baby boys. 2. Daughters are evaluated more favorably: mothers rated girls as better than boys in reading, despite there being no gender difference in performance tests 3. Girls are encouraged to be verbally expressive The bottom line is that both nature and nurture matter. However, their relative importance in a number of gender differences is still being debated. Also, there are far more differences within gender than between genders. Values influence gender differences research It’s critical to remember that gender differences research is influenced by values. Our values even influence the questions we ask. You may remember from the chapter a Yankelovich poll (1994) which read, “Which would you prefer: finding a great bargain on clothes or having great sex?” The not-so-suprising results showed that men preferred great sex and more women preferred a great bargain on clothes. This poll was meant to show that men are more interested in sex than women are. Imagine if we rephrased the question: “Which would you prefer: having your team with the Superbowl or having great sex?” You may very well get a reversal for men and women. Phrasing matters. The history of research on gender differences points to how values influence research. Nineteenth century scientists were so convinced that women were intellectually inferior to men that they framed their research to get the results they anticipated. They kept moving from one part of the brain to another until they thought they found conclusive evidence of male superiority. Beware of present day researchers who claim to have found the ultimate truth about the differences between men and women. Psychology 312 Social Pshchology Professor Adams Lecture #10 CONFORMITY Douvon-Gold Onion Diagram: A few things should be noted from this diagram: 1. each level is embedded in the next 2. one level can influence other levels directly or indirectly. Ex: the president can affect society directly through social policies. Also, TV can affect us directly as individuals. On an indirect level, you may hear that you’ve received a position with an organization by hearing about it from one person. Regarding definitions, the person is self-explanatory, the interpersonal involves our interactions with a single other person (or a small group of people), things at the societal/organizational level include your job, school, etc., and our culture is the Western culture. Cultures influence individuals and societies through broad attitudes, basic values, and through norms. Remember, norms are a set of shared expectations or rules about how to behave in social settings. Conformity: a change in behavior or belief as a result of a real or imagined group pressure Compliance: acting an accord with group pressure but not truly believing in what you’re doing. Acceptance: genuinely accepting what the group has convinced you to do. (There was the question of whether Patricia Hearst was merely being compliant or whether she truly believed in what she was doing when she robbed a bank.) Sherif (1937) brought participants into a dark room and asked them to judge whether a point of light had moved over time. The light never actually moved: this is called the autokinetic effect. When in the presence of others, participants changed their guesses to fit with the guesses of the other group members. They conformed. Asch (1955) thought that Sherif’s task may have been ambiguous, and that the ambiguity may have led to the conformity. Asch gave participants an unambiguous task: he asked them to judge the length of lines. One participant was placed in a room with several confederates. After a couple trials where everyone selected the correct line, the confederates began to give the wrong answers. The real participants, though confused, followed the confederates’ lead and have the wrong answers. Thus, conformity occurred on an unambiguous task. Under what conditions do people conform? 1. Size of the group: conformity increases with up to five people present. Increasing the number beyond five people doesn’t increase conformity significantly. 2. Ambiguity; in general, the more ambiguous the task, the more conformity. This does not mean, however, that conformity only occurs on ambiguous tasks. 3. Status of the group members: higher status yields greater conformity. 4. Presence of dissenters: if one person dissents from the group, conformity decreases. 5. Individual and cultural differences: some evidence suggests that women conform more than men, but this finding isn’t supported by current research. Western cultures tend to conform less than Eastern cultures. Psychology 312 Social Psychology Professor Adams Lecture #11 CONFORMITY (cont.) Why did Sherif (the autokinetic effect study) and Asch (the line study) get different rates of conformity? One reason rests with the compliance-acceptance distinction. Sherif’s participants showed private acceptance of the group norms. They truly believed the other group members were right about how far the light had moved. Asch’s participants, on the other hand, demonstrated public compliance. They didn’t truly believe the answers they were giving, but they wanted to go along with the group. The conformity seen in Sherif’s study is probably best explained by social comparison theory. Remember, social comparison theory states that in the absence of a physical or objective standard of correctness, we will seek other people as a means of evaluating ourselves. In other words, in the absence of physical reality, we use social reality. Physical reality: some obvious fact in the environment tells you whether your belief is correct. Ex: to test your belief that a vase is delicate, you can hit it with a hammer to see if it shatters. Social reality: you turn people around you to find out what they think. Ex: to determine the value of your vase, you take it to an appraiser. To the extent that physical reality is ambiguous, we become increasingly dependent on social reality. Also, when physical reality is ambiguous, the informational power of the group increases. We become dependent on others for what to do. *Social reality is as real in terms of its impact on behavior as is physical reality. *In Sherif’s study, subjects couldn’t ascertain the correctness of their judgements using physical reality, e.g., there is no ruler by which to judge light movement. Instead, subjects had to use social reality to determine the correctness of their judgements. *In Asch’s study, there was a clear physical reality (the lines could be accurately differentiated); in Sherif’s study there were no physical reality cues. This is why differing amounts of conformity were present. However, in both studies, subjects used social reality cues. Normative social pressure: power that arises because individuals believe that deviancy may lead to rejection or other punishment. Schacter (1951), a.k.a. the “Johnny Rocco” study Rocco was a fictitious juvenile delinquent. A group of subjects was brought into the laboratory to decide the fate of Rocco. There were three confederates in every group: Confederate 1 consistently agreed with the group Confederate 2 (the deviant) always disagreed with the group Confederate 3 began by disagreeing but later agreed What do group members do to the deviant?  1. the group rejects the deviant 2. the group stops talking to the deviant 3. the group assigns the worst, most undesirable task to the deviant. The fear of not conforming, or fitting in with the group, is a real fear. French & Raven 91959) identified 5 other types of power that groups can have over others. Higher levels of any of these powers should lead to greater conformity. 1. coercive power: the potential to deliver threats and punishments to force others to change their behavior. ex: parents exert coercive power to their children and the government exerts coercive power over us when it implements speed limits. 2. reward power: the opposite of coercive power. Reward power provides positive reinforcement for change. Ex: parents can reward their children, and social groups reward good members by appointing them to office. 3. legitimate power: the power one derives from being in a particular role or position. Ex: juries have legitimate power over the fates of the accused and professors have legitimate power over the grades of their students. *Legitimate power lasts only as long as you are in a particular role or position. For example, past presidents no longer have legitimate power. 4. Expert power: the power gained because others wee you as particularly knowledgeable. Ex: medical doctors have a lot of expert power. We follow their orders. 5. Referent power: people we admire and like have power over us. Ex: significant others have power over us; we conform to their expectations of us. Conformity vs. Contagion Contagion: seeing someone else behave in a way that you want to behave in releases you to behave in the same way. The LA riots are a prime example of contagion: looting beget more looting. There are four steps necessary for contagion to take place 1. Observer is motivated to behave in a certain way. 2. Observer knows how to perform the behavior and is not currently performing it. 3. Observer sees a model perform the behavior. 4. Observer performs the behavior. Contagion has been shown to occur when someone observes another person run a stop sign. The person witnessing this is more likely to do the same. Deindividuation: condition that occurs when our self-awareness is lost, and we focus on the group and the situation. *we forget our sense of personal responsibility. Deindividuation greatly increases the probability that contagion will occur. It explains behavior in mob situations for example. Zimbardo (1969) did a study of deindividuation. H had women administer shocks to other women (similar to the Milgram paradigm). The independent variable was the degree of identification: half the women wore nametags and half wore white robes with hoods (similar to KKK). The results show that the women wearing the hoods (deindividuated condition) administered longer shocks (twice the duration) than women who wore nametags (individuated.) Two of the most prominent studies of obedience are the Milgram study and the Zimbardo study. Milgram (1963) is famous for his shock studies at Yale. Brief synopsis: The “teacher’s” job was to administer shocks to a “learner” whenever the learner gave the wrong answer. The shock board held voltages ranging from 15 (mild) to 450 (XXX-very dangerous). How far does someone go in shocking a learner who is pleading and screaming? Initially, Milgram and others expected very few people (1 in 1000) to go all the way (450 volts). In actuality, 63% of the teachers went all the way. Zimbardo (1971) is famous for his prison study at Stanford. Brief synopsis: Participants were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. Soon the guards began to torment the prisoners, and the prisoners became despondent. The study was cut short from its intended duration of two weeks to six days because everyone (including Zimbardo himself) got caught up in the roles they were assigned to. This study demonstrates 1: the power of the situation, 2: the power of social roles, and 3: the power of deindividuation for the guards.