Week 12 Psychological Society 2024 PDF

The Psychological Society 1) Crowds, Mass Society, and the Social Self 2) The Individual and the Social 3) Self-Esteem and Prejudice 4) Self-Esteem and Human Potential 5) Positive Psychology and Self-Control Psychologization: the spread of psychological discourse, practice, and expertise beyond...

The Psychological Society 1) Crowds, Mass Society, and the Social Self 2) The Individual and the Social 3) Self-Esteem and Prejudice 4) Self-Esteem and Human Potential 5) Positive Psychology and Self-Control Psychologization: the spread of psychological discourse, practice, and expertise beyond the discipline’s alleged borders. The transformation of social, economic, spiritual, and political problems into psychological ones. The psychological society: “the emphasis on “the self” as an individual psychological subjectivity, conferring identity, and locus of agency. Psychological society contrasts with other kinds, such as religious or communist societies, in which the psychological character of the self is not the prime source of identity and purpose. In a psychological society, people, of course including psychologists, acquire a psychological subjectivity, a way of representing themselves to themselves and to others, as having a psychological identity. There is, therefore, a sense in which each person in psychological society becomes her or his own psychologist.” - Sirotkina & Smith, 2010 William James (1890) - The material Self: our body, clothing, property, money, family - The social Self: “the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.” - The spiritual Self: “a man's inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions” “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not.” - William James, 1890 “With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus, Self-esteem = Success / Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.” - William James, 1890 Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) French intellectual influential to the development of Fascism Psychology of Peoples (1894) - National or cultural differences in terms of unconscious ideas and predispositions The Crowd (1894) - The crowd as “hysterical mob” - The group intellectually inferior to the individual - Social contagion - Suggestibility Handbook of Social Psychology Analyses of recurring patterns in social phenomena (1935) - Language / Erwin A. Esper - Magic and cognate phenomena: an hypothesis / Raymond Royce - Material culture / Clark Wissler Social phenomena in selected populations Analyses of some correlates of social phenomena - Population behavior of bacteria / R.E. Buchannan - The physical environment / Victor E. Shelford - Social origins and processes among plants / Frederick - Age in human society / Walter R. Miles E. Clements - Human populations / Warren S. Thompson - Sex in social psychology / Catherine Cox Miles Social phenomena in infrahuman societies - Attitudes / Gordon W. Allport - Insect societies / O.E. Plath - Social maladjustments: adaptive regression / F.L. Wells - Bird societies / Herbert Friedmann Experimental constructions of social phenomena - The behavior of mammalian herds and packs / - Relatively simple animal aggregations / W.C. Allee Friedrich Alverdes - Social behavior of birds / Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe Historical sequences of human social phenomena - Social behavior in infrahuman primates / Robert M. & Ada W. Yerkes - Social history of the Negro / Melville J. Herskovits - Influence of social situations upon the behavior of children / Lois - Social history of the Red Man / Clark Wissler - Social history of the White Man / W.D. Wallis Barclay Murphy - Social history of the Yellow Man / Edwin Deeks Harvey - Experimental studies of the influence of social situations on the behavior of individual human adults / J.F. Dashiell Floyd Allport (1890-1978) - First American dissertation on social psychology (1919) - Social facilitation: compared individuals acting alone versus as members of groups on simple timed task - “the social” as behavior in groups Floyd Allport’s Social Psychology (1924) was the first successful American textbook for the subdiscipline - Methodological individualism: All social psychology should focus exclusively on objectively observable responses made by individuals in objectively specified situations - Group fallacy: against notion that aggregates of people constituted a superorganism or “group mind” “While Floyd Allport’s denial and denigration of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion, and behavior were grounded in his moral as much as his methodological individualism, it is also worth noting that his conceptualization was grounded in a very particular Anglo-Saxon tradition of moral individualism. In this tradition, individuality is conceived as “self-contained,” as constituted independently of, and indeed in opposition to, the “prescribed” modes of thought and practices of social communities.” - Jonathan Greenwood, 2000 Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967) - American psychologist, long-time professor at Harvard - Early trait theorist - Personality (1937) - Nomothetic: generalize, lawful - Idiographic: specify, the individual Character - “the personality evaluated according to prevailing standards of conduct” (Allport, 1921) - moral and evaluative connotations Personality - a more objective and value neutral alternative. - traits and their measurement The Nature of Prejudice (1954) - Intergroup relations: ingroups, out- groups, and the attitudes they hold - Prejudice exists on a spectrum from hate speech to extermination - The contact hypothesis Hans Eysenck (1916-1997) - Leader of clinical psychology in Britain - PEN model: Psychoticism, Extroversion, Neuroticism (PEN) - Race, Intelligence, and Education (1971) - In 2019, 26 of his articles on personality traits rather than smoking as the cause of cancer "considered unsafe" and retracted by his employer King’s College London Raymond B. Cattell (1905-1998) - British-born American psychologist - Psychometrics: cryallized and fluid intelligence - 16 factor model of personal derived through factor analysis - Beyondism: Cattell’s quasi-religious eugenic philosophy and racial science Solomon Asch (1907-1996) - Situational factors lead to heinous acts - Universal tendencies rather than particular types of people - Dangers of conformity in 1950s America 1950s and 1960s as golden age of situational social psychology - Festinger’s cognitive dissonance experiments - Milgram’s obedience to authority - Bandura’s Bobo doll study of aggression - Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison “Experiment” Walter Mischel (1930-2018) - Stanford University psychologist - Personality and Assessment (1968) - Person-Situation debate: controversy over whether a person’s behavior in a given situation is more strongly determined by his or her pre-existing personality traits or dispositions or by the demands of the particular circumstances. The Big Five - A consensus personality theory starting in the early 1990s - developed from factor-analytic trait studies and longitudinal studies funded by National Institutes of Health - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN) “Research on the relations between personality traits and job performance is now of absolutely crucial importance for the optimal deployment of human resources. First of all, recent findings demonstrate quite clearly that some personality measures can provide substantial incremental validities over cognitive measures [e.g. intelligence] for the prediction of a variety of job- related criteria. In addition, unlike most cognitive measures, personality scales tend to have little if any differential impact on protected groups, and thus they are less prone to raise discriminatory concerns.” - Lewis Goldberg, “The Structure of Phenotypic Personality Traits,” 1993 Self-concept “is almost always self-evaluation or self-esteem, as if our thoughts about ourselves are concerned almost entirely with how good we are.” - McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976 A 2002 survey of PsycINFO found over 20,000 articles used “self-esteem” as a keyword (Judge, Bono, Thoresen, 2002) Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) - Self-Help (1859): an advice book aimed at working men - Preached gospel of thrift, good character, and perseverance - Self-reliance: "Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates" Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) - Jewish émigré from Nazi Germany - B = f (P, E) - T groups: small groups learn about each other through feedback, problem-solving, and role- playing - Social Action Research: community-based design to address social problems “In recent years we have started to realize that so-called minority problems are in fact majority problems, that the Negro problem is the problem of the white, that the Jewish problem is the problem of the non-Jew, and so on. It is also true of course that intergroup relations cannot be solved without altering certain aspects of conduct and sentiment of the minority group. One of the most severe obstacles in the way of improvement seems to be the notorious lack of confidence and self-esteem of most minority groups. Minority groups tend to accept the implicit judgment of those who have status even where the judgment is directed against themselves.” - Lewin, 1946 “It should be clear to the social scientist that it is hopeless to cope with this problem by providing sufficient self- esteem for members of minority groups as individuals. The discrimination which these individuals experience is not directed against them as individuals but as group members and only by raising their self-esteem as group members to the normal level can a remedy be produced.” - Lewin, 1946 Kenneth Clark (1914-2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) - PhDs from Columbia University in 1940 and 1943 respectively - Her dissertation used differently colored dolls as a projective test of racialized self-image - In 1946, she opens the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem in response to the city's lack of social and psychological services for minority children “It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status.... These results seem most significant from the point of view of what is involved in the development of a positive, constructive program for more wholesome education of Negro children in the realities of race in the American culture. They would seem to point strongly to the need for a definite mental hygiene and educational program that would relieve children of the tremendous burden of feelings of inadequacy and inferiority which seem to become integrated into the very structure of the personality as it is developing.” - Clark & Clark, 1950 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) - anti-segregation case before the Supreme Court 1) Southern black children possessed damaged psyches 2) the damage derived from segregating school itself rather than broader social forces 3) this damage compromised the black students' ability to learn - The Social Scientists’ Statement prominently featured the Clark’s doll studies Dark Ghetto (1965) - “a tangle of pathology” - The poor black man is “compelled to base his self-esteem… on a kind of behavior that tend[s] to support a stereotyped picture of the Negro male – sexual impulsiveness, irresponsibility, verbal bombast, posturing, and compensatory achievement in entertainment and athletics.” - associated with the Moynihan Report (1965): African-American social and economic problems blamed on “broken” matriarchal family structures Abraham H. Maslow (1908–1970) - American psychologist heavily influenced by neo-Freudians - Leader of the humanistic psychology and human potential movements - Human potential movement: part of 1960s counterculture focused on untapped capacities of consciousness Hierarchy of Needs (1943) Theory of motivation Physiological Needs: The most elemental needs (e.g. food and shelter) whose lack of satisfaction is physically catastrophic for the individual and which dominate every other concern if unmet. Safety Needs: The need to be protected from threats by predators, criminals, extremes of climate and temperature, or other hazardous environmental circumstances Love Needs: The motives to obtain affection, friendship, and a sense of belonging within a social group Esteem Needs: the needs for self-respect and personal achievement that become salient once physiological, safety, and belonging and love needs have been adequately met. Self-Actualization: The tendency of psychologically healthy people to fulfill their potential - Influenced by anthropologists - In 1938, Maslow spent 6 weeks as part of an anthropological project on the Siksika Reserve in Alberta - Indigenous culture influenced his concept of self-actualization. - However, Maslow individualized it - Maslow’s never visualized his hierarchy as a pyramid or a tipi - He acknowledged that individuals might move among the various needs - The pyramid image came from the popularization of his theory in management textbooks in the 1950s and 1960s - Carl Rogers, 1968 Morris Rosenberg (1922-1992) - American sociologist who spent majority of his career at the Laboratory on Socio- environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health - Global self-esteem - Society and the Adolescent Self- Image (1965) John Vasconcellos (1932-2014) - California state assemblyman - Deep immersion in the human potential movement - In 1986, he secured funding for the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility Toward a State of Esteem (1990) - Numerous social ills: drug and alcohol abuse; crime and violence; poverty and welfare dependency; academic failure; teenage pregnancy. - Building self-esteem as a "social vaccine" that "empowers us to live responsibly" by inoculating individuals from the psychic pain caused by sexism, racism, poverty, and homophobia Gloria Steinem (1934-) - Journalist and leader of the American women’s movement in the 1970s “This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.” - Steinem, 1971 1992  # of Articles Mentioning "Self-Esteem" in New York Times 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55  Critique 1: Unearned Self-Worth Letter to the editor, New York Times, July 9, 1965  Critique 2: Myth of Empowerment  Critique 3: Damage Narratives Positive psychology: “the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” - Formally launched by Martin Seligman when serving as APA president in 1998 - Downplays links to earlier precedents like the human potential movement John Templeton Foundation - Private foundation based on fortune of a Christian financier - “utilization of scientific methods in understanding the work and purpose of the creator, research on studying or stimulating progress in religion, and research on the benefits of religion.” - Major patron of positive psychology (e.g. Seligman’s Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania) - Seen as alternative to biomedical funding “The proposed cognitive social learning person variables deal first with the individual’s competencies to construct (generate) diverse behaviors under appropriate conditions. Next, one must consider the individual's encoding and categorization of events. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of the behaviors a person performs in particular situations requires attention to his expectancies about outcomes, the subjective values of such outcomes, and his self-regulatory systems and plans.” “The essence of self-regulatory systems is the subject's adoption of contingency rules that guide his behavior in the absence of, and sometimes in spite of, immediate external situational pressures.” - Mischel, 1973 Jennifer Metcalfe & Walter Mischel, “we have deliberately eschewed most references to the abundant findings from brain research that tempt speculations about differences in the brain structures within which the hot and cool systems may have their primary locations, if and when they prove to be more than metaphors." "But while we are sensitive to the need to avoid premature connections to the neural level, we nevertheless chose to structure our metaphor as a neural network not only because we believe it provides a useful interdisciplinary heuristic at this time but also because it has at least a hope of ultimately connecting to a cognitive neuroscience level of analysis in which metaphors could evolve into more tangible forms.“ - Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999 Steven Pinker (2011): “the very idea of self-control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side.” Positive psychology brought back concepts like “character” and “virtue,” supposedly expelled from scientific psychology in the 1920s due to their moral and religious connotations “You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”” - “Obama’s Way,” Vanity Fair, 2012 - Self-esteem became a technology for the marginalized to articulate the damage caused by unmarked privilege - The mood economy: the post- industrial working-class use narratives of overcoming psychological trauma as the marker of adulthood as older milestones (steady employment, home ownership) no longer tenable in an age of economic insecurity “If errors were committed, perhaps psychologists should reduce their own self-esteem a bit and humbly resolve that next time they will wait for a more thorough and solid empirical basis before making policy recommendations to the American public.” - Baumeister et. al., 2003 However, new social psychology of automaticity (social priming, power poses) and self-control (ego depletion, grit, delay of gratification) at the heart of recent replication failures in psychology. Why has self-esteem been one of the most studied concepts by psychologists? What kinds of problems was promoting self-esteem meant to solve? Why did psychologists switch from promoting self-esteem to self-control? To what extent have forms of methodological individuals shaped how psychologists’ approach social problems? Final Exam Date: Sunday 15 Dec 2024 Time: 19:00-22:00 Location: Accolades Building West, Room 109 Format: 50 multiple choice questions (non-cumulative since term test) 2 essay questions (out of choice of 4) The history of psychology is more than an accounting of key dates and influential figures The history is not so much about objectively representing the past as actively and partially reconstructing it in meaningful ways Our living present constantly shapes how we understand the past Whose stories do we tell? - Writing critical histories of dominant field versus counter-storytelling to disrupt it - Balancing history of psychology as theory, practice, context - The relevance of the recent past versus the forgotten possibilities of a deeper one  Major Questions 1) How did Psychology emerge as a distinct discipline? 2) What social, political, and intellectual factors shaped its development? 3) What is the relationship between the context of a scientific concept and its content? 4) What tools and techniques have psychologists used to better understand mental processes? 5) How has the scope and practices of Psychology changed over time? 6) Who got to be counted as a psychologist in different historical periods? “From this perspective, psychology is significant less for what it is than for what it does. Psychology… has altered the way in which it is possible to think about people, the laws and values that govern the actions and conduct of others, and indeed of ourselves. What is more, it has endowed some ways of thinking about people with extra credibility on account of their apparent grounding in positive knowledge. In making the human subject thinkable according to diverse logics and formulae, and in establishing the possibility of evaluating ways of thinking about people by scientific means, psychology also makes human beings amenable to having certain things done to them by others. It also makes it possible for them to do new things to themselves.” - Nikolas Rose, 1996