Episode 20: Conflict Resolution: A Classic Psychological Study
Conflict Resolution: what do gangs, asteroids, a giant octopus and little boys at a summer camp in Robber’s Cave State Park in 1954 have in common? Find out this week as we take a look at a wonderful study in psychology which taught us a great deal about intergroup conflict and resolution. This week on The Psych Files.
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Resources for this Episode
- The article on conflict resolution: Sherif, M., O.J. Harvey, B.J. White, W.R. hood, and C W. Cherif (1961) Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. Norman: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange.
- The article by Tajfel on Social Identity Theory: Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. In S. Worchel and L. W. Austin (eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chigago: Nelson-Hall
- Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 23, 96-102.
- Tajfel, H., Billig, M.G., Bundy, R.P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1, 149-178.
- Social Psychology, 2nd Ed
. Roger Brown’s great book: Social Psychology in which the study on conflict resolution is discussed.
- Babe
One of the best, warm hearted movies every made.
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Episode 16: Personal Space Invasion: What Happens When Someone Invades Your Personal Space?
Do feel slightly uncomfortable in the bathroom? How does the presence of others in the bathroom affect you? What about places other than the bathroom? How close is too close? A psychological study was done in 1976 in which psychology researchers hid in men’s bathrooms to observe…well, you’ll find out. Learn more about personal space in this episode of The Psych Files.
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The article discussed in this episode:
Middlemist, R. D., Knowles, E. S. & Matter, C.F. (1976). Personal Space Invasions in the Lavatory: Suggestive Evidence for Arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33 (5), 541-546.
Watch this episode from NPR video on personal space in Second Life: “Avatar gender and personal space invasion anxiety level in desktop collaborative virtual environments.”
Helpful Links:
Shy Bladder website
Paruresis website
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The Matching Hypothesis Strikes Again
What happens when people “marry outside their looks” (that is, when you marry someone who is obviously much more attractive than you are)? There’s an interesting and humorous article on page 86 of the May 7, 2007 issue of Time magazine that discusses just this. The title is “The Last Taboo”. Or, as the author puts it, “Marrying a few degrees up or down the hotness scale.” Recall that part of episode 4 (”On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting”) is about what psychologists often refer to as the matching hypothesis - the observation that we all seem to have a sense of how attractive we are and how attractive other people are and we tend to marry people who we deem to be at about our same “level”.
Here are a couple other examples of seeming mismatches:
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They’re now divorced but Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett
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Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
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Dennis Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth Jane (Harper) Kucinich
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Episode 10: Cognitive Dissonance Strikes Again! What your search on Amazon says about you
Here’s a unique example of cognitive dissonance theory: the information you pay attention to (and ignore) as you search around on Amazon.com How? Listen to The Psych Files podcast to find out. Cognitive dissonance strikes again!
Click here to listen to episode 10 on how your search behavior reflects cognitive dissonance.
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Episode 8: Cognitive Dissonance Theory: Why Contradictions Bother Us So Much
Every since Leon Festinger gave us the term cognitive dissonance, we’ve been asking questions about contradictions in human behavior. For example, can you be pro choice and against the death penalty, or vice versa? That’s the question we examine this week along with other quandries such as Gingrichs’ affair and Al Gore’s house. This week on The Psych Files.
Listen to Episode 8 on cognitive dissonance.
Quote of the week
Here on page 407 of The Story of Psychology is a quote from a report called When Prophecy Fails, published in 1956:
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief and that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before
Videos of the week
Her’s the MSNBC report on the details of Al Gore’s home energy consumption which appears to be a case of dissonance with his stance on global warming.
In another case of dissonance, listen to Newt GinGrich explain why his affair during his prosecution of Clinton is, from his point of view, not relevant.
And in my last example of potential cognitive dissonance, listen to an interview of Dick Cheney by Wolf Blitzer. The conflict here is that Cheney’s administration does not support same sex marriage or bringing up children in a same-sex family, yet his daughter is pregnant and going to up the child in a same-sex partnership. Cheney says to Blitzer that the question is essentially “none of his business”, but you decide: clearly there is a contradiction here and that’s why we’re drawn to this situation. Like the other contradictions that we’ve talked about, it begs for resolution.
Watch a very interesting video about global warming and how it is causing a lot of people some cognitive dissonance. The video (about 3 min long) asks this question: can say that we want to “save the planet” and support other Earth Day type initiatives while at the same time feeling that we are entitled to drive any vehicle we want, or consume any and all goods we want?
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Episode 7: Blaming the Victim and other Attribution Biases
Are rape victims responsible for what happens to them? That is the question we examine this week. We look at blaming the victim and other attributional biases.
Listen to episode 7 on Blaming the Victim and other biases.
Here is the concept map for the biases discussed in this show.
Here is my Concept Map Quiz!
Test yourself to see if you really know the difference between these types of biases (requires latest version of Flash).
Show Notes
1: Fundamental Attribution Error
- “people do what they do because of the kind of people that they are, not because of the situation they are in”
- “people tend to underestimate external influences when explaining other people’s behavior”
2: Actor/Observer (bias) Difference
- “Whereas we are very likely to find internal causes for other people’s behavior, we tend to look …to the situation to explain our own behavior”
- Example: in a murder trial, the prosecution will call the person a murderer, defense will focus on the difficulty of the person’s life at the time or their childhood, characteristics of the person murdered. “That person drove my client to do what he/she did”
3. Self-serving Attribution (bias): while we tend to take credit for our successes (attribute success to internal causes), we blame our failures on external causes
- I earned an A, my professor gave me a C
- Why? Because it threatens our self esteem to think that failures were caused by something about ourselves
- Example: sports - when a team wins, they attribute it to talent or skill, when they lose, they attribute it to bad luck, poor playing conditions, bad calls from the umpires rather than “I didn’t train hard/study hard enough”, “Our team wasn’t as good”
- It feels bad to attribute our failures to ourselves
4. Optimism bias: “good things are more likely to happen to oneself than to others and bad things are less likely to happen to oneself”
- A kind of “defensive attribution”
- Teenage driving habits - very risky
- Runner Jim Fixx wrote a book: “The Complete Book of Running”, and died at a young age.
- Why do we tend to hold this belief? Because the world is a scary, unpredictable place and that makes us feel anxious. The only way to feel a little better is to believe that it couldn’t happen to me. “I would have acted differently”, “That wouldn’t happen to me because…”I would make different decisions”
5. Belief in a Just World: bad things happen to bad people, “or at least to people who make mistakes, poor choices, etc.” thus, bad things won’t happen to me because I wouldn’t make those mistakes.
- “the belief in a just world keeps anxiety-provoking thoughts about one’s own safety at bay” Aronson, et. al.
- when the world seems chaotic or dangerous, this is anxiety provoking. so we attempt to reassure ourselves by blaming the victim
Resources for this week’s episode
The major source for information on the different types of biases can be found in the text Social Psychology by Aronson, Wilson and Ackert.
Here’s the link to the article by Camille Paglia
I didn’t mention this source in this podcast, but here’s an interesting article about blaming the victim, just world beliefs and how this relates to September 11th.
Video of the week
Here’s the link to the video of the Bill O’Reilly show during which he appears to be blaming the victim.
Quote of the week
The quote this week came from the book “The Art of Growing Up” by Veronique Vienne and with some wonderful photographs by Jeanne Lipsey. You can find it at Amazon here.
Last but not least, savor apparently insignificant moments when nature itself seems to encourage us to release our grip: when a leaf falls form a tree, when the sun suddenly disappears behind a hill, or when a soft autumn drizzle blurs the landscape.
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Episode #4: On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting: the data on Love
Do Birds of a Feather Flock together or do Opposites Attract? That’s the question we examine this week on the first video episode of The Psych Files.
I got a little ambitious and decided to do a video podcast. One of my favorite topics (I suppose many people’s favorite topics) has to do with how romantic relationships begin and why some relationships flourish while others don’t. Well, this is a topic that psychologists have studied in great depth and some time back I had one of my classes conduct a survey on the topic. So this video podcast has 3 parts: 1) a little background on 3 theories which relate to how relationships begin, 2) a quick overview of the survey my class and I created, and 3) a look at the results using a very neat new program called InspireData (from the Inspiration concept mapping people). I really had fun putting the video podcast together and I hope you find it informative. If you’ve got a moment let me know what you think.
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