Salient Multiculturalism Enhances Minority Group Members' Feelings of Power

By Jacquie Vorauer

Members of ethnic minority groups face many challenges in their everyday lives, including subtle and blatant discrimination, and, more broadly, threats to their social identity. Efforts to mitigate such problems and promote intergroup equality frequently involve telling people how they should try to behave toward minority group members. For example, messages encountered in educational and work settings, on the internet or television, or on the sides of buses or coffee cups may recommend that individuals “Celebrate Diversity!”, “Stamp Out Racism!”, or “Be Color-Blind!” and thereby promote multiculturalism, anti-racism, or color-blindness respectively.

What do we know about whether such initiatives work—and what it means for them to “work”? Most research in this area has focused on whether such messages trigger more positive intergroup attitudes and behavior. Yet it turns out that these kinds of outcomes tend to be more important to dominant group members (e.g., those with a White/European ethnic background), who place a high value on smooth and pleasant intergroup exchanges and on being liked by minority group members (Bergsieker, Shelton, & Richeson, 2010): Ethnic minority group members are relatively more focused on enhancing their power and control (Saguy, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2008).

In a series of studies, Matthew Quesnel and I examined how different messages about intergroup relations influence feelings of power in minority group members. Creating feelings of power in minority group members may be more important to social change than positive intergroup evaluations (Dixon, Levine, Reicher, & Durrheim, 2012) and are known to have a range of important consequences for behavior and goal pursuit (Galinsky, Rucker, & Magee, 2015).

Our main hypothesis was that rendering multicultural ideology salient would empower minority group members by highlighting the unique and valuable contributions that they make. Multiculturalism focuses on the idea that ethnic group differences should be appreciated and celebrated and emphasizes that each group makes important contributions to society. We expected that minority group members exposed to multiculturalism would experience a heightened sense that they are needed by others and that they make contributions to their community that others cannot, which would enhance their personal feelings of power.

Consistent with this, in an initial study we found that ethnic minority group members who endorse multiculturalism tend to feel more powerful. After finding this relationship, we tried to see if we could influence feelings of power by experimentally manipulating their focus on multicultural ideology.

In the first of our experiments, we found that black individuals who read a passage about multiculturalism felt greater relative power in an interaction with a White confederate. In a second experiment, we found that ethnic minority group members sitting across from a multiculturalism poster (as compared to no poster) showed more implicit associations between themselves and power—meaning they were more likely to quickly relate “power” words with words about themselves. A final experiment examined the underlying mechanism in more detail, finding that salient multiculturalism can increase minority group members' sense of power in part because it heightens their perception that they make essential contributions to society.

Our results further indicated that when feelings of power were heightened because of increased attention to multiculturalism, minority group individuals had higher expectations of control when thinking about a potential upcoming intergroup interaction. They also tended to think in more goal-directed ways, such as asking for more in negotiations and reporting an “approach orientation.” Anti-racism and color-blindness messages did not have similar empowering implications for ethnic minorities, and none of these ideologies had empowering implications for dominant group members.

Overall, our results indicate that multiculturalism might potentially have an equalizing effect on dominant versus minority group members’ feelings of power. Notably, although feeling powerful is not the same as having power in an objective sense, individuals' subjective sense of power in and of itself plays a critical role in guiding their behavior (e.g., Skinner, 1996) and feeling powerful has effects similar to being in an objectively powerful position (e.g., Galinsky et al., 2015; Magee et al., 2007). Taken together, these studies suggest that prompting individuals to reflect on multicultural ideological principles might put ethnic minority group members in a position to have a stronger voice and exert greater social influence in intergroup interaction situations.


Jacquie Vorauer is a social psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba in Canada. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo.

Psychology of Parenthood Tip Sheet

May and June seem to revolve around family in the United States, with Mother’s Day on May 14th and Father’s Day on June 18th. The end of the school year and star of summer months can also signal families spending more time together.  Discover what social and personality psychology can show us about the close relationship dynamics of parents and parenthood in this month’s SPSP tip sheet.

Experts

Personality change and parenthood

Wiebke Bleidorn
Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
http://pclab.ucdavis.edu/

Professor Bleidorn examines the conditions, mechanisms, and consequences of personality change. Her current research involves questions about the cultural and social conditions under which people change, the genetic and environmental mechanisms that account for change, and the consequences of these changes for psychological functioning and important life outcomes.

Parenthood, Couple’s Relationships, & Children’s Development

Galena Rhoades

Research Associate Professor and Associate Clinical Professor, University of Denver
Phone: 303-871-4280
https://portfolio.du.edu/grhoades

Dr. Rhoades research is on romantic relationship development and functioning, and the related implications for children and adults. Her research projects and collaborations include studies of cohabitation, mechanisms of change in couple interventions, infidelity, spouses' perceptions of one another, relationship processes and psychopathology, as well as adolescent adjustment.

From the Journals

Stability and Change in Self-Esteem During the Transition to Parenthood Wiebke Bleidorn, Asuman Buyukcan-Tetik, Ted Schwaba, Manon A. van Scheppingen, Jaap J. A. Denissen, Catrin Finkenauer. Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 7, 6: pp. 560-569. , First Published April 29, 2016.

Bleidorn and colleagues show changes in self-esteem affect mothers more than fathers after the birth of the first child. These changes are most notable in the year after the child is born, and result in lasting declines among mothers’ self-esteem.

The Costs of Suppressing Negative Emotions and Amplifying Positive Emotions During Parental Caregiving Bonnie M. Le, Emily A. Impett Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 42, 3: pp. 323-336. , First Published February 10, 2016.

How do parents feel when they regulate their emotional expressions in ways that do not match their genuine feelings? Research suggests that parents’ attempts to suppress negative and amplify positive emotions during childcare can detract from their well-being and high-quality parent–child bonds.

Understanding When Parental Praise Leads to Optimal Child Outcomes: Role of Perceived Praise Accuracy Hae In Lee, Young-Hoon Kim, Pelin Kesebir, Da Eun Han. Social Psychological and Personality Science, First Published December 22, 2016.

Parents and teachers praise children, but too much or too little praise can have negative effects. In this study, researchers show the importance of basing praise of children on actual performance and the need to pay careful attention to how praise is perceived by the child.

Parents Reap What They Sow: Child-Centrism and Parental Well-Being Claire E. Ashton-James, Kostadin Kushlev, Elizabeth W. Dunn Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 4, 6: pp. 635-642. , First Published March 14, 2013.

Ashton-James and colleagues show that link between child-centrism and well-being stands in contrast to recent arguments about the pitfalls of overinvestment in children. Their results dovetail with a growing body of evidence that personal well-being is associated with investing in others rather than oneself.

In Case You Missed It

How Asian American 'Tiger Mothers' Motivate Their Children

Researchers at Stanford University delved deeper into Amy Chua’s ‘tiger mother’ approach, and their research sheds light on key fundamental differences in parenting methods between Asian Americans and European Americans. - May 2014

A Father's Love is One of the Greatest Influences on Personality Development

A father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child's development as does a mother's love. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood. -  June 2012.

The Skills that Make Us a Good Partner Make Us a Good Parent 

Being a good partner may make you a better parent. The same set of skills that we tap to be caring toward our partners is what we use to nurture our children, researchers found. However, the researchers found that how you care toward your partner does not relate to how your partner behaves as a parent. – December 2012


News Media may contact [email protected] for copies of studies mentioned in this tip sheet.

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With over 7500 members, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is the largest organization of social psychologists and personality psychologists. SPSP's mission is to produce and disseminate knowledge about personality and social psychology, facilitate the careers of students and professionals, and recognize and promote achievements in personality and social psychology.

Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class

Alice, Marie and Frédérique have been in first grade for 2 months now. Today, their teacher tells them they are going to learn about a new letter and the girls are already impatient. The teacher writes the letter 's' on the board and turns to ask the children: "what sound does this letter make?'' Immediately a small hand goes up. It is Alice’s. Three other hands quickly follow it. Marie and Frédérique, who do not know this new letter, look at the rest of the class as hands go up. They hope they are not the only ones who do not know the sound of this new letter. The teacher asks Alice, who already knows the sounds of all the letters of the alphabet.

Alice gives the correct answer and the teacher smiles and congratulates her: "Well done!"

Meanwhile, Marie and Frédérique are wondering how Alice always knows the right answer. Why don’t they know the right answer? "Alice must just be more intelligent," Marie thinks to herself. "I’m no good at reading," Frédérique may worry.

This brief example illustrates a key aspect of school settings: the omnipresence of social comparison between students. Studies in social psychology have demonstrated that being exposed to the success of others can be threatening for one’s self-image. Seeing or imagining someone else succeeding better than oneself triggers negative thoughts and consumes scarce attentional resources. However, the probability of ending up in the same situation as Marie and Frédérique, namely, experiencing upward social comparisons, is not randomly distributed in the classroom but partly determined by social class. Indeed, in addition to economic resources, belonging to a social class entails the possession of cultural dispositions (e.g., language use, ways of being and knowledge), which are more or less in tune with school standards. These inequalities in cultural capital constitute (dis)advantages on the school market as they provide a greater or lesser familiarity with academic tasks which are carried out with or less ease or difficulty. But these (dis)advantages do not tell the whole story: Because classrooms are conceived to be a level playing field, having higher cultural capital also means being perceived as being smarter. The paper “Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class: How Classroom Settings Reproduce Social Inequality by Staging Unfair Comparison” examines how forced social comparisons in the classroom can contribute to social reproduction in education.

Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined the hypothesis that school settings may widen the achievement gap related to social class by staging unfair social comparisons among students. These disruptive comparisons result from the fact that classrooms settings showcase achievement gaps between students in a way that does not acknowledge the unequal familiarity with arbitrary academic standards, forcing students to interpret these (dis)advantages as a sign of differences in intellectual ability, a construal which may interfere with disadvantaged students cognitive functioning.

In a first study, we demonstrated that classroom situations that highlight differences in performance by having students raise their hands to signal completion during a difficult reading test undermine the working-class students’ achievement, whose lower familiarity with the academic language is well established. Two other studies were carried out to specify the processes involved in the observed results, namely an invisible cultural disadvantage which is construed as a sign of intellectual limitation.

Because social class is confounded with multiple factors and processes, we manipulated levels of familiarity with a new arbitrary standard (i.e., cultural capital) as a proxy of social class. We thus created a new arbitrary written code (a series of symbols corresponding to a set of letters) and operationalized two levels of familiarity with a completely new arbitrary code, without the students' awareness. We then examined how being exposed to the success of other students (i.e., social comparison) might disrupt the performance of the least familiar students. A second study showed that the performance of the experimentally disadvantaged students placed in an environment where students who succeed were instructed to raise their hands is significantly lower than that of disadvantaged students not placed in a situation of comparison. However, A third study showed that letting the cat out of the box, that is making students aware of the (dis)advantage conferred to some of them, prevents the less familiar students from a threatening interpretation of their underachievement as a lack of ability and restores their performance.

In sum, our findings provide evidence that the reproduction of inequality in education is not just the product of prior cultural differences among students: classroom situations can amplify the social-class achievement gap by staging disruptive social comparisons that harm the achievement of students who are less familiar with standards valued in education. Because Marie and Frédérique perceive the classroom as a just and equitable place, they are left with few other options but to interpret the fact that they lag behind due to the fact that they are less intelligent, a construal that gradually turns them away from learning.


Sébastien Goudeau is a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology at the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage (CNRS/University of Poitiers). His research focused on understanding how academic context impacts academic performance and contributes to the reproduction of inequality. You can find him on Twitter @Seb_Goudeau

Highlights of SPSP Funded Small Conference on Architectural Psychology

By Sanaz Talaifar and Sam Gosling

Does your research area deserve more attention? Do you want to bring together scholars, policymakers, and/or practitioners to exchange ideas about a specific research topic or problem? If so, the SPSP Small Conference Grant could be a great opportunity for you.

For us, the Small Conference Grant served as a catalyst to explore a topic that had long faded from the psychological mainstream. There was a brief moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when psychologists and architects became interested in the reciprocal relationships between their two fields. This field, then dubbed “architectural psychology,” has since become integrated—and, some would say, lost—in the broader field of environmental psychology. Given our own curiosity in architectural psychology, we became interested its past fortunes and wondered what we might do to contribute to its re-emergence.

We suspected that others might also have an interest in the topic, but there was no way to know for certain. The SPSP grant opportunity gave us a chance to find out. So, on December 4-5, 2016 we hosted a conference on the Psychology of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. We were amazed by the response to our call for presentations: we received submissions on diverse range of topics, from a wide array of academic disciplines, and from twelve countries including Singapore, Serbia, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, India, and others.

The conference yielded several unanticipated benefits. First, it spurred dialogue between our university’s departments of psychology and architecture. Second, it provided the opportunity to connect with other relevant academic and professional societies such as the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture and the Austin Foundation for Architecture. Finally, these linkages led to co-sponsorships from UT’s Department of Psychology and Department of Architecture, as well as the Austin Foundation for Architecture which allowed us to provide a broader set of events in our program and host a broader selection of speakers.

Hosting a conference is an especially effective and rewarding way to create connections—between ideas, disciplines, and people. We encourage you to apply for the SPSP Small Conference Grant. It provides enough support to craft a unique small meeting, catering to topics, audiences, locations, and formats that may not met by the main annual SPSP conference. The application process is straightforward and SPSP was helpful and responsive throughout the entire process. We are grateful for their support.

For more information about our conference, visit www.PsychologyofArchitecture.org.


Sanaz Talaifar is a PhD student in social-personality psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the relationship between our identities and our moral values and how our social identities manifest themselves in the built environment. She can be reached at [email protected].

Sam Gosling is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests focus on the connections between people and the physical spaces in which they live, new methods of data collection, and personality in non-human animals.

From the Indian Province of Kerala to the Middle East Conflict: When the Ingroup is Viewed as Eternal

In the Indian province of Kerala, an awe-inspiring temple towers over the city Thiruvananthapuram. For thousands of years, local maharajas, foreign dynasties, as well as the poor devotees of the region, have donated immense amounts of gold, jewels, and other riches to be safeguarded in the hidden vaults of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, dedicated to the deity Vishnu. Over the centuries, a treasure of unimaginable proportions has been accumulated and following a court order in 2011 (Uthradam Thirunal Marthanda Varma, 2011), the ancient doors to the vault were opened in order to audit the treasure. As the audit proceeded, it quickly became apparent that the value of the treasure exceeded even the wildest speculations with some estimations being over $1 trillion dollars (Dobson, 2015), roughly half of the value of India’s GDP (World Bank, 2017).

It is hard to escape the glaring contrast between such staggering wealth and the poverty and deprivation that continues to plague hundreds of millions in the Indian subcontinent (Department of Rural Development, 2015). Indeed, after the worth of the treasure became known, voices were soon raised in protest, pointing out that the temple’s riches could be used to lift millions from poverty or even wipe out a sizeable part of India's overall fiscal deficit (Pomfret, 2011). Opponents of such proposals emphasize the cultural, religious, and historical value associated with the temple and its treasures and see the monetization of the riches as sacrosanct treachery against the religious and cultural heritage it represents as well as to the generations of poor devotees who have donated their feeble belongings to the temple's vaults (Mannathukkaren, 2011). While each side in this debate presumably cares deeply about the fate of their fellow compatriots and the cultural and national group to which they belong, the case of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple provides a striking illustration that the ingroup sometimes has several sets of interests and that the immediate interests of the current generation of group members do not always coincide with the interest of the group when perceived in a wider time perspective.

In an article published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Kahn, Klar & Roccas), Along with my coauthors, Yechiel Klar and Sonia Roccas, I develop a framework for understanding how the ingroup is perceived on a temporal dimension and suggest that people differ in the degree to which they perceive the ingroup as Trans-Generational (including all past, present and future generations of group members) or Intra-Generational (focusing mainly on the current generation). When the ingroup is perceived as Trans-Generational, the perspective of the current generation of ingroup members change. The birds-eye perspective afforded by such a perception of the group diminishes the relative importance of the welfare of the current generation of group members at the expense of historical, cultural, and symbolic values associated with the group.

In four studies, conducted among Israeli Jews, Palestinians, Americans, and Swedes, we show that the perception of the group as Trans-Generational is associated with an increased willingness to accept the continued suffering and hardships experienced by current group members for the sake of the eternal group. This tendency comes to the fore in violent intergroup conflicts, in particular conflicts that are embedded in a charged historical context in which the suffering of past generations and the imagined glory of a promised future serve to justify current suffering among one’s fellow co-nationals. Third-party observers of such conflicts are at times puzzled at the seeming unwillingness of the warring parties to make the necessary concessions in order to reach a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Doing so would seem to be in the best interest of both parties, who are often suffering great hardships and sacrifices as a result of the ongoing conflict. After all, social psychological gospel tells us that people generally want their ingroup to benefit (e.g., Brewer, 1979; Tajfel, 1981).

Our research suggests that while people do generally want their ingroup to benefit, they differ in their perception of what constitutes the ingroup; or more poignantly, when constitutes the ingroup. While a perception of the group as an intra-generational cohort of current group members may be associated with a willingness to make concessions on historical assets – to sell the proverbial temple treasure in order for the current ingroup members to prosper – a perception of the group as Trans-Generational may in some cases lead to a willingness to compromise on the welfare, indeed even the lives, of fellow ingroup members for the sake of the eternal group.


Dennis Kahn is a postdoctoral fellow, cohosted by the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel and Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses on social representations of history and perceptions of collective threats.

Photo "Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram" by Rainer Haessner is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

References:

Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive–motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 61–79.

Department of Rural Development (2015) Socio-economic Caste Census.

Dobson, J. (2015, Nov 13). A one trillion dollar hidden treasure chamber is discovered at India's Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/.

Kahn, D. T., Klar, Y., & Roccas, S. (in press). For the Sake of the Eternal Group: Perceiving the Group as Trans-Generational and Endurance of Ingroup Suffering, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Mannathukkaren, N. (2011, Aug, 27). The misery of plenty, The Hindu. Retrieved from http://www.thehindu.com/.

Pomfret, J. (2011, Aug, 9). India temple treasure brings riches, challenges, Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/.

Tajfel, H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Uthradam Thirunal Marthanda Varma v. Union Of India. W.P.(C) No.4256/2010. (2011). Retrieved from https://indiankanoon.org.

World Bank (2017). World databank. Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org.

Seeing Through the Fog: Forgiveness and Collective Apologies

In a series of studies social psychologists examined group forgiveness and found that individuals are astute perceivers of political process. For an apology to be sincere, the process must show that the offenders are in agreement about the apology and that the person(s) saying sorry for the group represents the whole group.

Public and political apologies have steeply increased in recent times. Yet the sincerity of those apologies and how they are received by victims varies widely. Based on new social psychological research on group apologies, the sincerity of a collective apology is judged not so much by the inner state of the person issuing the apology but rather by the inner state of the group that the apologizer represents.

For apologies between individuals the apologizer accounts for their individual wrongdoing and, to be sincere, needs to be true to their own inner feelings and beliefs. With collective apologies the apologizer accounts for the group’s wrongdoing. Sincerity here depends on the apologizer representing the group’s feelings and beliefs. Democratic process and majority endorsement within the offender group therefore influence victims’ perception of sincerity and conciliatory response.

In a series of four studies, researchers in Australia investigated how people react to apologies for wrongdoing engineered in lab settings and to Japan’s real-life apology in regards to Australian POW camps in WWII. The most effective group apologies came from democratic rather than random decision-making processes. Apologies were also more likely to be perceived as sincere and responded to with forgiveness if the wider offender group was seen to support the apology.

“The sincerity of an apology is often critical for it to be viewed positively by victims,” says lead author Michael Wenzel (Flinders University).

He notes that people are very perceptive of the decision dynamics within an offender group, and this plays into how victims respond to apologies.

“Victim group members not only consider the apology itself but also how it has come about; whether it is based on democratic decision-making processes or not, and whether it is carried by a majority of the offender group,” says Wenzel.

“Governments and political leadership intent on repairing the moral harm due to their group’s past actions, as well as repairing the relationship with the victim group, should try and build consensus within their group about the appropriateness of an apology to the victim group,” says Wenzel. “They should consult with their wider group membership and engage them in a collective decision to apologize to the victim group.” He also notes that awareness of division within the debates is important, as this can ultimately affect how the victimized group perceives the apology.

“Apologies always seem to trigger the question whether ‘they really mean it,’” summarizes Wenzel, “For collective apologies the clues lie in group-internal processes and ‘domestic politics.’ Victims seem to be attuned to those. A question is whether offender groups or their political leaders are, too.”

Researchers Michael Wenzel, Tyler G. Okimoto (The University of Queensland), Matthew J. Hornsey (The University of Queensland), Ellie Lawrence-Wood (The University of Adelaide) and Anne-Marie Coughlin (Flinders University) worked on the study, recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.


Study Michael Wenzel, Tyler G. Okimoto, Matthew J. Hornsey, Ellie Lawrence-Wood and Anne-Marie Coughlin, The Mandate of the Collective: Apology Representativeness Determines Perceived Sincerity and Forgiveness in Intergroup Contexts. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.  First published online: April 4, 2017.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), published monthly, is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. The Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. Follow us on Twitter, @SPSPnews and find us on facebook.com/SPSP.org.

The Secret to Easy Theory

By Kurt Gray

We all know Kurt Lewin’s aphorism “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Unfortunately there is a divide between knowing theory’s importance and knowing exactly how to do it.  How should one represent the structure of science—the nomological net of ideas? This post explores a new and simple way to depict theory: theory mapping.

Typically, we present theory through words in introductions and general discussions, but this is less than ideal for three reasons.  First, words can be slippery, so that it’s not always clear what the authors mean.  Second, it takes a lot of time to sift through the theory sections of papers.  Third, even after you have read a lot of theory, it is not always clear how it all fits together, as authors typically focus on their own sub-field.  Is there an easier way to represent theory?

We also all know the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and it applies to theory too. Theory mapping is a technique that visually maps out the connections between concepts, and therefore allows people you to understand the contours of a field at a glance.  It was developed to help bring the same kind of rigor to theory as to methodology.  It can be read about in full in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (and at www.theorymaps.org), but I’ll provide a sneak peek here. 

Theory mapping uses five elements to display links between ideas, which I’ll illustrate here with cars—not because they are psychologically interesting, but because they are simple to understand.  In the actual paper, I use both cars and my research in moral psychology to display theory mapping. The website also has a set of theory maps provided by eminent scholars in the field (listed below).  I have included the theory map by Jonah Berger on word of mouth at the end of the article as an example.

Table 1.  Theory maps provided on www.theorymaps.org

Topic

Map Authors

Word of Mouth

Berger

Empathy

Cameron, Scheffer, Spring & Hadjiandreou

Motivation

Etkin

Cultural Tightness

Gelfand & Jackson

Revenge

Gollwitzer & Stouten

Facial Expressions

Jack

Emotion

Lindquist

Social Power

Magee, Galinsky & Rucker

Endowment Effect

Morewedge

Stress

Muscatell

Priming

Payne

Health Behavior

Sheeran & Rothman

Ideology

Stern & Ondish

Emotion Regulation

Tamir & Vishkin

Mind Perception

Waytz & Gray

 

The Elements of Theory Maps:

1. Positive and negative associations.  The most basic elements of theory is whether concepts are correlated, whether positively or negatively.  In psychology, we often discuss whether concepts are connected (revealing convergent validity) or not connected (revealing divergent validity), and so these relationships are important to map.  Positive associations are demonstrated with a line between concepts, and negative associations are demonstrated with a line with a dash through it. With cars, we can see that the size of a car is tied to more safety in an accident, but to less fuel efficiency. 

Feature Image

2. Moderation.  In psychology, many phenomena are moderated by situational and individual differences.  For example, the enjoyability of traveling through Asia is moderated by openness to experience.  Moderators are revealed by a concept in italics enclosed within « ».  With cars, the price of a car is moderated by the amount of horsepower, with more powerful cars costing more.

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3. Fundamental elements.  Psychological phenomena are constructed through the combination of basic elements, whether cognitive or neural. For example, face recognition is constructed through basic perceptual, cognitive and social processes.  These fundamental elements are represented within an upward-pointing { symbol.  We can see that a car is constructed from a combination of a chassis, an engine and a body.

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4. Varieties or Examples. Psychological constructs vary across context and culture.  For example, cruel behaviors can involve physical violence, verbal vitriol, or social ostracism. Theory mapping displays the different varieties or examples using a dashed line connected to grey text.  With cars, there is a variety of brands, which vary by the country of production.

Feature Image

5. Numbers and notes.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even pictures cannot capture everything.  Theory maps can be supplemented with notes that are tied to number throughout the map.

Putting it all together.  Below, you can see a total theory map of cars, and below that you can see two other theory maps, one for word of mouth, and one for mind perception.  See www.theorymaps.org for the example of moral psychology and maps from other researchers.

By tying theory to a visual map, theory mapping allows people to see theory at a glance.  It provides specificity by allowing researchers to concretely specify interconnections between constructs.  It also provides synthesis by allowing researchers to evaluate the coherence of their ideas and see how they connect with other ideas.  Theory mapping is a new technique, but one that may help to improve the rigor of psychological science.  Consistent with open science, it is also open to all.  If you—or your methods class—would like to submit a theory map on the website, just contact me through the website.  Happy theorizing!

Cars:

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Word of Mouth (Jonah Berger):

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Mind Perception (Waytz & Gray): 

Feature Image

 

 

When Social Status is Bad for Health

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt’s assertion that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent highlights a key idea that is born out in social psychological research: that what really matters in life is how you, not others, think you are doing.  For example, previous research shows that people who see themselves as having higher status in their countries, their local communities, or their schools and workplaces have better mental and physical health. These subjective perceptions tend to matter above and beyond objective indicators of status.  But my colleagues and I were interested in whether this was always true. We thought that it might be good to subjectively perceive oneself as high status, provided that this perception was generally in line with the objective reality. In contrast, we thought that people who perceived themselves as high status, in the face of evidence to the contrary, might actually have worse health.

We tested this idea in research presented at the Social Personality Health Preconference at the 2017 SPSP Annual Meeting. In a sample of 150 children (age 9-17) with asthma, we measured their subjective social status using the MacArthur Ladder. Children imagined a ladder that represented their school and marked the rung on which they thought they fell in terms of their status there. The top rung represented those with the most status among their peers, and the bottom rung represented those with the least status. In addition, children were interviewed about their social relationships, and outside coders rated these interview responses on the extent to which children appeared to have high-quality relationships and to get along with peers at school. We looked at how these factors related to in vitro Th-2 cytokine production in response to mitogen stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells, an indicator of more severe asthma exacerbations.

As expected, among children whom outside coders rated as having high-quality relationships with peers, the higher their perceived status, the lower their cytokine production (i.e., the better their asthma). However, among children whom outside coders saw as having worse relationships with peers, the higher their perceived status, the higher their cytokine production (i.e., the worse their asthma). These results suggest that while it may often be healthy to see oneself as high status, when one’s perceptions are inconsistent with other evidence about one’s social relationships, higher subjective social status has the potential to be unhealthy.


Cynthia Levine is a postdoctoral fellow working with Edith Chen. She received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 2005 and her PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 2012. Cynthia’s research focuses on culture, inequality, health, and well-being. She is especially interested in how thinking or feeling in ways that fit with the norms of the social or cultural context can protect people's health. In addition, she hopes to understand how changing social contexts to make them more inclusive can help to reduce health disparities.

Reference:

Levine, C. S., Sinard, R., Daftary, K., & Chen, E. (2017, January). When subjective social status predicts worse health. Paper presented at the Social Personality Health Preconference of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX.

Conducting the Milgram Experiment in Poland, Psychologists Show People Still Obey

A replication of one of the most widely known obedience studies, the Stanley Milgram experiment, shows that even today, people are still willing to harm others in pursuit of obeying authority.

The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is yes. Social psychologists from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland replicated a modern version of the Milgram experiment and found results similar to studies conducted 50 years earlier.

“Our objective was to examine how high a level of obedience we would encounter among residents of Poland,” write the authors. “It should be emphasized that tests in the Milgram paradigm have never been conducted in Central Europe. The unique history of the countries in the region made the issue of obedience towards authority seem exceptionally interesting to us.”

For those unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, it tested people’s willingness to deliverer electric shocks to another person when encouraged by an experimenter. While no shocks were actually delivered in any of the experiments, the participants believed them to be real. The Milgram experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions of pressure from authority, people are willing to carry out commands even when it may harm someone else.

“Upon learning about Milgram's experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner,’ says Tomasz Grzyb, a social psychologist involved in the research. “Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.”

While ethical considerations prevented a full replication of the experiments, researchers created a similar set-up with lower “shock” levels to test the level of obedience of participants.

The researchers recruited 80 participants (40 men and 40 women), with an age range from 18 to 69, for the study.  Participants had up to 10 buttons to press, each a higher “shock” level. The results show that the level of participants’ obedience towards instructions is similarly high to that of the original Milgram studies.

They found that 90% of the people were willing to go to the highest level in the experiment. In terms of differences between peoples willingness to deliver shock to a man versus a woman, “It is worth remarking,” write the authors, “that although the number of people refusing to carry out the commands of the experimenter was three times greater when the student [the person receiving the "shock"] was a woman, the small sample size does not allow us to draw strong conclusions.”

In terms of how society has changed, Grzyb notes, “half a century after Milgram's original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to 'electrocute' a helpless individual.”


Doliński, Dariusz; Grzyb, Tomasz; Folwarczny, Michał; Grzybała, Patrycja; Krzyszycha, Karolina; Martynowska, Karolina; Trojanowski, Jakub. Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015? Obedience in the experimental paradigm developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 years following the original studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, online before print March 2017

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

How to Overcome Unconscious Bias

Imagine playing a game where you’re seated in front of four decks of cards. On the back of two decks are pictures of puppies; on the other two are pictures of spiders. Each deck has some cards that win points and others that lose points. In general, the puppy decks are “good” in that they win you more points than they lose while the spider decks are “bad” in that they lose you more points they win. You repeatedly select cards in hopes of winning as many points as possible. This game seems pretty easy— and it is. Most players favor the puppy decks from the start and quickly learn to continue favoring them because they produce more points.

However, if the pictures on the decks are reversed, the game becomes a little harder. People may have a tougher time initially favoring spider decks because it’s difficult to learn that something people fear like spiders brings positive outcomes and something people enjoy like puppies brings negative outcomes.

Performance on this learning task is best when one’s attitudes and motivations are aligned. For instance, when puppies earn you more points than spiders, people’s preference for puppies can lead people to select more puppies initially, and a motivation to earn as many points as possible leads people to select more and more puppies over time. But when spiders earn you more points than spiders, people have to overcome their initial aversion to spiders in order to perform well.

This potential conflict between attitudes and motivations on behavior is not reserved for puppies and spiders. There are social domains where attitudes and motivations point in competing directions. Race is a clear example. On average, white people associate black people with negativity. These anti-black attitudes can exist in both consciously controlled explicit attitudes or in less consciously controlled implicit attitudes. At the same time, many white people also value appearing and being racially unprejudiced. For instance, data from a 2015 volunteer sample found that while 80 percent of white people had an easier time pairing black than white faces with negative words, 73 percent also agreed with statements such as “I am personally motivated by my beliefs to be non-prejudiced.”

What happens to race-related behavior when our attitudes and motivations conflict with one another? My co-author Sophie Trawalter and I examined this question in a series of studies recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. We found that white participants strongly resisted displaying anti-black behavior, even if this meant sacrificing a chance for a financial reward.

Our studies adapted a tool called the Iowa Gambling Task, the learning measure described in the opening paragraph. Our version of the Iowa Gambling Task asked people to repeatedly select one face from an array of black or white faces. Participants were told that it was their job to win as many points as possible over 120 selections, and that people in the top 10 percent of points earned would win a gift card.

Across conditions, we manipulated whether black or white faces represented the good or bad decks. In one condition, selecting black faces generally led to gaining points and selecting white faces generally led to losing points. In the reverse condition, selecting black faces generally led to losing points and white faces generally led to gaining points.

Our results highlighted the impact of both attitudes and motivations on behavior. At the beginning of the task, we saw the influence of racial attitudes. Participants performed better in the condition that aligned with anti-black attitudes, earning more points when black faces were tied to losses. Participants had a much harder time initially earning points when black faces were tied to gains, and this was particularly true among those reporting higher levels of consciously preferring white to black people.

However, as the task progressed, we saw the influence of racial motivations. While people were initially better at earning points when black faces were tied to losses, performance in this condition did not improve over time. That is, participants appeared to avoid reinforcing that black faces were associated with negative outcomes like losing points. Conversely, while people had a harder time initially learning that black faces were associated with gains, they showed a great deal of improvement in this condition throughout the task.

In fact, by the end of the study, participants tasked with learning that black faces led to point gains were outperforming those tasked with learning that black faces led to point losses. Moreover, this ability to learn that black faces led to point gains was weakly but reliably related to a greater desire to avoid racial prejudice. In other words, participants highest in reporting a motivation to appear unprejudiced were best able to acquire the association between selecting black faces and positive outcomes.

One remaining issue is whether participants simply could not or chose not to reinforce anti-black associations. While our data cannot definitively answer that question, we have some reason to believe participants were “playing dumb,” and choosing to not perform well when the task paired black faces with losses. For instance, remember that when the task paired puppies with gains and spiders with losses, performance was good both initially and significantly improved over time. That is, performance suffered only when the task supported potentially unwanted racial associations.

Do these studies prove that people who are motivated to be unprejudiced need not worry about racial bias in their behavior? No. After all, even people motivated to appear unprejudiced still had a much easier time earning points initially when black faces were paired with losses. But, this work does highlight how people can work against undesired attitudes given the right motivation. Our white participants valued acting unprejudiced so much that they were willing to forego possible reward to avoid strengthening any anti-black associations. As we say in the paper, attitudes may have the first word but not the final say in behavior.


By Jordan Axt. This post was first published on Scientific American and is shared with the editor's permission.