Theories in Detail- Cognitive and Social Psychology



Theories in Detail- Cognitive and Social Psychology

Social

Agency Theory- Milgram

• People obey orders from authority figures.

• Agentic State is where individuals give up their free will in order to serve the needs of society.

• Autonomous State is where individuals have free will.

• Moral Strain is the unpleasant sensation resulting from pressure to obey orders to commit an immoral act. People have less responsibility of actions as they are in the Agentic state.

• Agentic Shift is the switch between the autonomous state and the Agentic state.

• We are socialised to obey orders from an authority figure from a young ages (obey parents) from society.

Social Identity Theory- Tajfel

• Prejudice: making judgements about people based on their group membership, rather than their individual nature. Negative opinions based on stereotypes, with an uninformed attitude.

• Stereotype: these are common over simple views of what particular groups of people are like. As in you develop an idea about an individual (the minority) and apply it to the whole group.

• Discrimination: treating people differently according to their group membership, so is an action carries out as a consequence of prejudice.

• SIT is based on Turner and Tajfel’s ideas. Prejudice occurs when there are two groups are present, which results in rivalry and conflict. In groups are the groups to which we belong, out groups are the groups to which we do not belong.

• We tend to put the out groups down in order to boost our self esteem. It is important we score higher than the out groups so that out in group has status. This is in group favouritism.

• A person’s social identity depends on their social group.

There are three different stages in social identity theory.

Social Categorisation: ( classifying our selves and other people into groups which also involved the stereotyping of other groups.

Social Identification: (identifying with the group to which we belong to, so the sharing of culture, values and beliefs, the differences between in groups and out groups becomes much clearer, the social group you belong to becomes part of you.

Social Comparison: ( the process of comparing our in groups to our out groups, so to boost self esteem, you make sure you are better than the out group, by outing them down. In group favouritism occurs.

Cognitive

Levels of Processing- Craik and Lockhart 1972

• Came up with an influential approach to explaining how memory works.

• Aim was to explain why some things are better remembered than others, suggesting that how well a piece of information is processed depends on the way in which it is processed.

• Information can be processed deeply or shallowly. Craik defines depth of processing as the amount of meaning extracted from the information. Information which is deeply processed and is thought about is most likely to be remembered.

They suggested E processing information about what things look like.

Phonetic Processing: ( processing information about what something sounds like.

Semantic Processing: ( processing information about what something means.

• Semantic processing is the deepest form of information processing, which involves the most amount of cognitive work, so the semantic material is most likely to be remembered.

• Craik and Tulving (along with other researchers) were interested in what exactly produces deep processing and how it affected memory.

• They identified four factors in which made processing deeper.

Elaboration ( when information is more complex, and discussed in further detail, information is more likely to be remembered.

Distinctiveness ( if information is different and distinctive (more noticeable) information processed which is distinctive is more likely to be recalled, as it sticks out in an individual’s memory.

Effort ( if information takes more effort to understand or work out, information will be easier to recall. (An anagram) the more effort put in to resolve it, the more likely it is it will be remembered.

Personal Relevance ( if the information has a relevance to you personally you may remember it, say if you were a twin, you may remember information about twin studies than others might.

Cue Dependency- Tulving

• Cue Dependency is the most common reason for forgetting. (tip of the tongue phenomenon)

• Tulving said that forgetting takes place when we have the information in our memory, but the lack of cues are there to enable us to access it. Cues are additional pieces of information that guide us to what we are looking for.

• When you return somewhere, where you haven’t been for a while familiar sights, smells, sounds will bring back floods of memories. The distinctive sensory information serves as cues to retrieve old memories that lay dormant in the brain.

• There are two types of cues:

State Cues ( emotional and physiological state (happy/sad or high/drunk). When in the same state at learning as recall, state cues improve recall.

Context Cues ( environmental factors that trigger memory (smell, sight, place). When in same context at learning as recall, context cues aid recall.

Repression- Freud

• The idea that we forcibly forget facts that provoke anxiety or unhappiness, therefore protecting ourselves against negative emotions. Freud felt repressed memories are still active in the mind but an individual isn’t aware of them, as they are stored in the unconscious mine, but they can trigger symptoms.

• At its most dramatic, it is the blanking out of all memories, its usually acquired in childhood from a bad experience with parents.

Reconstructive Memory- Bartlett

• Concerned with what happens when information is stored and then retrieved.

• He suggests that memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past events, influenced by attitudes and responses to memories and evens when they occurred. Retrieval of a stored memory involves an active process of reconstruction.

• When recalling an event, we actively it piece together using a range of information.

• He proposed that things are reconstructed by the use of schemas.

• Schemas are units of information. We have a schema for every aspect of life and the world, which consists of the things we relate together. When reconstructing memories we use schemas and information within them. WOG participants may have used ghost and death schemas to reconstruct the story. It scanned the schema eliminating irrelevant information and selecting appropriate bits. Because of the use of schemas the story became, stereotyped.

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