PBS3 Social Psychology

Learning from experience model

the older children have to fight the battles to stay out late, get more pocket money etc.

Autism spectrum disorder and Theory of Mind

Other atypical groups, such as individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, seem to develop atypical theory of mind despite having relatively typical family social influences. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which is characterized by social difficulties, restricted and repetitive behaviour and language deficits. The relationship between autism spectrum disorder and retarded development of theory of mind was first proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen in 1985 (Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith, 1985). While there is variation in these children their average performance is far below that of neurotypical groups, and equal to deaf children of non-signing parents (Peterson and Slaughter, 2016) (who have not been exposed to typical social influences) despite the fact that children with Autism are not innately exposed to different social influences. Recent studies (Shaked, Gamliel and Yirmiya, 2006) have compared siblings of children with autism to siblings of children without autism and children with autism themselves. They found that siblings of children with autism appeared to be "resilient" to the factors affecting theory of mind in autistic children, implying that the social factors required for proper development of theory of mind are in fact present in these households, autistic children are just resilient to their beneficial effects. Here the lack of research into the impact of peer relationships on development of theory of mind becomes particularly detrimental, as we can't determine whether negative relationships with peers would affect the social factors which influence the development of theory of mind. One possible explanation for this resilience to the positive influence of social factors is suggested by a common characteristic of autistic children: that they often have difficulty engaging in pretend play. Leslie (1991) argued that theory of mind and pretend play deficits in autistic children may both be caused by deficits in attributing mental states to others. He believed that theory of mind is involved in pretend play regardless of whether or not the people involved are real. Thus, Leslie claimed that the deficits in both theory of mind and pretend play could be explained by difficulties in attributing mental states to others. An alternative argument is that pretend play evokes higher level cognition in children (Lillard, 1993) which helps them to develop socially relevant executive function. As executive function has been shown to be correlated with performance on theory of mind tasks (Devine and Hughes, 2014), it could be argued instead that deficits in pretend play are either: caused by deficits in the same theory of mind-related executive functions which are strengthened by play, or that they can lead to deficits in theory of mind (as the child is unable to engage in this higher-level social cognition). Autistic children also struggle with joint-attention, which has also been shown to benefit the development of theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1991). It has also been found that children with less severe autism perform better on theory of mind tasks than children with more severe autism, implying that the retardation of development of theory of mind may be directly related to factors associated with autism. One alternative explanation of theory of mind deficits in autistic children explains these deficiencies in terms of autistic individuals' status as a neurological minority. The argument is that delayed learning of theory of mind may instead be explained by the difficulty involved in modelling the very different typical mind against their own. The delayed learning of theory of mind may also be explained by deficits in executive function and language ability. Peterson and Slaughter (2016) found that the link of theory of mind was "significantly mediated by language ability, and that autistic children performed worse on tests of complexity of language". Similarly, Ozonoff, Pennington and Rogers (1991), found that difficulties in theory of mind performance in autistic children were significantly related to differences in executive functioning. An examination of theory of mind deficits in autistic children thus mediates the earlier claims of the dominance of social factors in causing individual differences in theory of mind development. Despite the presence of normal social factors, children with autism seem to be resilient to their effects due to a combination of executive functioning and language difficulties, or potentially the difficulties of mapping an alien mind onto their own

Panagopoulos & van der Linden, 2016

Panagopoulos & van der Linden, 2016 applied this to voting and found that placing eyes on posters for a campaign to vote activated the norm of doing one's civic duty and increased voter turnout significantly.

Schmidt and Sommerville (2011) and Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012)

Schmidt and Sommerville (2011) and Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012) both use children slightly too old to provide evidence for the Fairness/cheating foundation (as they could have learned these moral values by the age of 15+ months - at least, it is hard to say what they will and won't have learned by this stage.

Rudman Ashmore and gary 2001:

people who interacted with out-group members showed reduced implicit attitudes Lived experience. They believe that one route to implicit attitude change may be affective (emotional) rather than cognitive

Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith, 1985

The relationship between autism spectrum disorder and retarded development of theory of mind was first proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen in 1985

Social influences on theory of mind

Theory of mind, being an aspect of social cognition, could logically be expected to be influenced in its development by differing social factors. Many of these social influences revolve around differences in the family environment which children experience throughout much of their early development. Despite deficits in some areas of cognition caused by reduced parental attention in children with siblings, children with siblings have been found to develop theory of mind more quickly than other children (Perner, Ruffman and Leekam, 1994). Despite the fact that some studies into the area have drawn dubious conclusions regarding the direction of causality between good sibling relationships and good theory of mind (Perner, Ruffman and Leekam, 1994), there is now fairly compelling evidence that children with siblings have more opportunities to think about how others are feeling, and thus are more able to learn theory of mind (Peterson, 2000). Siblings can also be good partners for pretend play, which has been shown to assist in development of social cognition (Lillard, 1993), and sibling conflict can lead to parent-led discussion of differing points of view. More recent studies have suggested that exact number and order of siblings is less important than other factors involved in family experience, such as socioeconomic status and mother's level of education (Cutting and Dunn, 1999). These factors may not directly affect theory of mind however, as socioeconomic status and level of mother's education have both been shown to affect language development (Hoff, 2003), and level of language can explain deficits in theory of mind tasks. Thus, these findings could be explained by poor experimental control. Level of mental state talk (discussion revolving around the mental states of others), has also been found to positively affect theory of mind development in children, presumably due to increased awareness of the perspectives of others. Hughes, White, Ensor and Devine (2016) found that exposure to mental-state talk at age 2 predicted the children's theory of mind performance at age 6 and 10, implying either that this early exposure can have long-lasting effects or that those children who were exposed to lots of mental-state talk at a young age were continuing to be exposed to mental-state talk as they aged. While the effects of these social influences in typical groups seem to be fairly constant, levels of exposure are not. Hughes and Devine (2018) conducted a cross-cultural analysis of Hong-Kong and the UK looking into purported deficits in theory of mind development in Asian countries. They used a 2 generation design which investigated the parents of the children as well, and found that performance on false belief tasks was strongly related to levels of mind-mindedness (description of their children using attributions of mental states) in both countries, implying that the differences in theory of mind development could be explained by differences in levels of mind-mindedness in Chinese parents. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be much research into the impact of children's peers on theory of mind development, which would be particularly important for children without siblings. The presence of certain social factors seem to have a significant impact on the individual differences between typical children, next we shall find out whether the absence of these same social factors predicts atypical development.

Interactionism in the workplace:

There has been lots of interest in how personality characteristics can affect success at work (a situation). There are many models which try to explain the process of picking the correct workplace: Lewin's field theory (interactionism), Murray's needs-press model, and Parson's matching model. Parson's argued that in order to pick the correct vocation, one should understand one's own personality, strengths and weaknesses, should know what your potential career requires, and should be honest with oneself about whether the two match up. He claimed that failure to follow these steps led to inefficient, unenthusiastic work and low pay. This theory requires that occupations be conceptualized and categorized so that people can more easily identify fields which might be for them. Holland has been very influential in this field. He breaks jobs down into 6 categories: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional, and recognises the interplay between these different areas. There has been much work put into investigating which personality types suit which vocations. Extraversion appears to be associated with employment in Enterprising and Social occupations, Openness is associated with employment in artistic and investigative occupations, and Conscientiousness has been associated with working in conventional occupations, to name a few. In order to conduct these studies, they have to measure success in the workplace. Operationalizing this can be tricky, they rarely rely on people's self-ratings, instead asking co-workers or a combination of salary and self-ratings. There is lots of evidence that fit between the person and the job is associated with job success and happiness, and monetary success (this could be good evidence for a chosen situation being good for happiness). Bill Swann: Self-verification theory: This theory claims that people will have a tendency to seek information about the self which is consistent with their own self-views, whether that information is positive or negative. Not only do we seek information which verifies our self-views, but also people. (Tie-in with identity) Our perception of self is partly constructed by our idea of how others perceive us. We both navigate our social world by relying on our perception of ourselves, and form our perception of selves by navigating our social world. People are motivated to have stable, coherent self-concepts (tie-in to attitudes and cognitive dissonance). Information which is contrary to our self-concept threatens the stability of said self-concept, and makes us uncomfortable - making us dislike interacting with people whose perceptions of ourselves are different from our own. This is a rather controversial theory, in part because the implication is that people with negative self-views may actually seek out others who verify this negative self-view. People don't tend to have problems with the opposite side of this theory - that people who see themselves positively seek out others who see themselves positively. Swann has had to conduct loads of research to evaluate this theory. The evidence seems to support this theory. People do indeed seek out relationship partners who verify their self-beliefs. The typical paradigm is that people complete self-assessments about how they view themselves. They then complete these measures and are told that someone has provided an assessment of their personality. Sometimes you are given 2 assessments by 2 different assessors. One assessment is very favourable and the other is not. The people are then given the opportunity to decide which of the 2 assessors they'd like to interact with (i.e. they are told that they will have to work on a project with someone for several days vs have to chat to them for a few minutes).

Schmidt et al, 2011

3 year olds even seem to understand the difference between conventional and moral norms, chastising in-group and out-group members equally for breaking moral norms but only chastising in-group members for breaking conventional norms (i.e. norms which have been agreed upon by the in-group) (Schmidt et al, 2011) Haidt might argue that this evidence supports his hypothesis that morality (defined as the 5 moral foundations) is innate, as the children are performing seemingly moral acts at an age where not much learning has occurred, but Tomasello's theory of interdependence (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013) posits a different explanation. This hypothesis claims that selection pressures for early hunter gatherers to work together to bring down prey led to improved social cognition, which in turn led to two distinct evolutionary steps. The authors claim that we evolved the ability to collaborate with others first in evolution because collaboration ensured that hunting partners would be fitter and more likely to want to help you hunt. Next, we began to construct and follow social norms and institutions of culture, of which morality was just one example. The authors further claim that these 2 steps occur not only phylogenetically throughout the evolution of humans, but also ontogenetically throughout the development of children. With this theory in mind we can re-interpret all of the above evidence: collaborative acts with peers are to become a more attractive collaboration partner, spontaneous assistance of adults is because children depend on them, and children responding to norms before the age of 3 could be explained by children following the adult's individual imperative rather than a moral norm. Interestingly this age of 3 seems to be about the age at which Tomasello believes these children develop the ability to understand moral norms. Prior to this point it is difficult to prove that they are not simply following an adults demands, but past the age of 3 children begin to enforce norms on their peers, implying that they understand them (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). Additionally, the use of normative phrases such as "You can't do that" which was mentioned in Vaish et al (2011b) only begins at age 3, and children aged 2 seemed to use more desire-centric phrases instead. Tomasello also found that young children, unlike chimps, actively sought to participate jointly in joint activities. When children and chimps were given a free choice over whether to obtain food alone or with a partner, chimps chose to work alone while children chose to work with a partner (Rekers et al, 2011), and children will try and re-engage disinterested partners rather than continuing to try by themselves (Warneken & Tomasello 2007). Thus, Tomasello would explain cooperation early in childhood as being indicative of the first stage of interdependence, collaboration, rather than of innately following a moral norm. According to his theories of interdependence and cultural intelligence, our ability to be moral is learned thanks to increased social cognitive skills which allow us to share intentionality and follow socially constructed norms, rather than morality being an innate human behaviour.

Caspi and Moffitt (1993)

A further challenge to this claim is posed by Caspi and Moffitt (1993), who claim that our behaviour is most reflective of our personality during novel situations of which we have no prior knowledge. They claim that this is because "each individual, in an effort to regain control over the changing situation, attempts to assimilate the new events into existing cognitive and action structures", thereby revealing these cognitive and behavioural structures in doing so. They make the distinction between weak situations, which allow a number of possible behavioural responses, and strong situations, which allow only one. This distinction becomes unimportant if an individual is in their chosen situation, but vitally important if an individual is in a novel situation such as they describe. They describe a number of experimental studies which support their theory, which involve novel situations with no available information on how to behave. While these experiments do provide evidence for such an effect as they describe, such as monozygotic twins behaving more alike in situations with no information than with some, their ecological validity may be low, as very few real-world situations exist in which no societal information is available. To illustrate this point, their investigation into life-course transitions (which provide real-world tests of this phenomena and thus have high ecological validity) claims that the cause of behavioural problems in unusually young girls experiencing menarche was lack of information/preparation, totally ignoring hormone fluctuations and social isolation as confounding factors. They argued that early menarche behaviour problems in children who had already showed behavioural issues were magnified, missing the fact that the same factors which caused their earlier behavioural problems likely would have made them more vulnerable to the later behavioural issues caused by the onset of early menarche. Finally, they argue that Feldman and Newcomb's (1969) findings that personality traits of youth who enter college are "apt to be reinforced and extended" are explained by a novel experience with little available information, but they could just as easily be explained by the fact that these individuals have chosen the university which they will attend to suit their personality, and thus can be more authentic. Elder and Caspi (1988) examined the accentuation hypothesis among men who suffered severe economic setbacks. Men who were irritable, tense, and moody before hard times displayed an accentuation of these characteristics; these men became increasingly unstable under economic deprivation. In contrast, men who were calm and stable in the period preceding intense economic pressure moderated any inclination toward erratic behavior when they lost jobs and income. The same point is highlighted in studies of community disasters. In a longitudinal study tracing the responses of entrepreneurs whose businesses suffered extensive damage following a natural disaster, C. R. Anderson (1977) showed that individuals' coping styles were accentuated in their efforts to recover from the unexpected financial and psychological loss. o Coping behaviours as part of personality might be accentuated in situations which force you to cope.

Methods for testing innateness (of morality):

Catherine's supervision has some good stuff for this. Lee leaves out neuroscience data, Catherine does not. We can look at cooperation games, cross-cultural studies, infants and children, genetics and comparative psychology. We have left off Neuroscience and neuroimaging, because of Keil's argument that sometimes behavioural data can give you much better evidence than neuroscience data, and it can in this case. There doesn't appear to be much that you can learn about this question from the brain because of its plasticity - if you find an area of the brain which responds to morality, it could well have developed in response to environmental stimuli. Such as the visual word form area which seems to be specialised for reading, which we didn't evolve to do. Famous cooperation games: Ultimatum Game: One player is given an amount of money and asked to divide it between themselves and another person. But that other person can reject your offer and then you both get nothing. If you take 9 and give them 1, the other person should still take the 1, as they still gain a pound, but they find that people reject low offers. It is important to note that punishing people for being unfair might be adaptive, as a short term cost can lead to a longer term gain. Dictator Game: You give 10 pounds to one person and they decide how to split it, and the other person gets no say in it. Lots of people will not just keep the money for themselves, most people will split it to at least some degree. Public goods game: everyone is given the same amount of money. Any money which is put into the pot is multiplied by 2 and then divided equally among everyone in the game, not just those who contributed. Thus if everyone cooperates everyone benefits, but if one person defects they will benefit the most and everyone else suffers the cost. Researchers have found that not only will people pay to punish on the last turn of the game when they know they will not have to interact again (implying that it's not adaptive), they will even punish when they are a third party and totally removed from the game. Could this simply be the proximate mechanism of the adaptive behaviour showing itself? Seeing selfish behaviour creates negative arousal which we negate by punishing them, not that we calculate that they may then cooperate in the future... Re-read those studies Cross-cultural: We want to test whether these findings are universal cross-culturally. Coutrot et al (2018) found that women being worse at spatial reasoning, something which was previously thought to be an inherent feature, may be related to how much freedom they have in a society (could it not also be related to how much gender division there is, given that playing with boy's toys has been shown to increase spatial cognition, and that those cultures with more gender division may also have less freedom for women?) Heinrich et al 2006: looked across 15 diverse societies and found that costly punishment was found to some degree in all of them, but that the point at which they would punish was different. They also found that propensity to punish in a costly way was correlated with altruistic behaviour across populations. They found that some cultures such as the Susurunga would reject almost anything but a 50/50 offer, and some cultures such as the Hadza would even reject being given all of the money! It is obviously important to note that we don't know why this is, it could be because of a cultural practice of rejecting a first offer, or because they don't want others to judge them as selfish, or related to the concept of asking to owe someone money etc. They then also looked at third-party punishment AKA altruistic punishment. This involved a 3rd party who was totally unrelated to the ultimatum game being paid, but given the opportunity to use that money to punish defectors in the game. They found that in many of these cultures third-party punishment did occur, although at lower levels, except in the Gusii. Awad et al (2018): They looked into how different cultures around the world would answer the trolley dilemma, with the aim of using it to help program self-driving cars. They looked at 40 million participants across 233 countries! They found that they were able to group the countries by their preferences for decisions. They found that Eastern cultures had a slight preference for decisions which would protect them from the law, while Western cultures had a slight preference for decisions which would protect the old and vulnerable. Study of infants: Hamlin and Wynn (2011): showed infants videos of shapes trying to get up a hill, and another shape inhibiting them. They then gave the infants the chance to handle the shapes. Infants seemed to prefer the shapes which had been prosocial, trying to help the shape up the hill, rather than the one which had tried to inhibit the shape. This provided evidence for both Tomasello's and Haidt's theories, but it is important to note that Salvadori et al (2015) conducted 2 replication attempts which failed to replicate their results. Gerachi and Surian (2011): they showed children 2 teddy bears distributing resources to other animals, one who distributed fairly and one unfairly. They found that at 10 months their was no difference in approach behaviour, but by 16 months infants seemed to prefer the fair distributor. Some have argued that the 10 month olds simply weren't old enough to demonstrate their preference through behaviour. Bear in mind that the sample sizes are fairly small here, only 16 10month olds and 20 16month olds, although this is likely due to the difficulty of working with infants. Working with children can be easier, although slightly less informative about innateness. Study of Children Rochat et al 2009: They conducted a study across 7 cultures and 2 age groups, looking at children aged 3 and 5 across Brazil (3 times), America, China, Peru and Fiji. They found that in a task involving giving out rewards to other children, 3 year olds were significantly more likely to hoard all of the rewards for themselves than 5 year olds. There are 2 possible explanations for these findings, the first is that the children have developed a sense of fairness during this time, the second is that their theory of mind has developed, so whereas before they knew about fairness but didn't see the others as entities which you should be fair to, at a later age they realized that these other children had thoughts and feelings and that it would be better to act fairly towards them. Interestingly those Brazilian children who acted most fairly were those who were unschooled and surviving by living collectively on the streets. Carson and Banuazizi (2008): conducted a study of 151 Filipino and American children aged between 10 and 12. They told them a story of a camper who was clearing up toys after a play session with the help of 2 children, Susan and Rob. Susan works really hard and collects 10 toys, while Rob only collects 5. As they are walking back Rob mentions that he didn't get all of the art supplies which he needed for the camp art class, Susan says that she has everything she needs. The camp counsellor has 10 pencils to give out as a reward, and the child participants are asked how the counsellor should distribute the rewards. Roughly 1/3rd of the children in each claim that the rewards should be distributed equally. The children in the US are much more likely to distribute the pencils by merit, giving Susan more because she performed better at picking up the toys. Children in the Filipins are much more likely to distribute based on need, giving more of the pencils to Rob. Here we can start to see that Morality and fairness ideas can be expressed differently in different cultures. It could well be that the Filipins are a more collectivist culture, while the US is more individualist. Evidence from genetics: Alford, Funk and Hibbing (2005): found that identical twins were more similar in their morality attitudes across a wide range of topics. Bear in mind that one confound is that Identical twins are often raised more similarly than fraternal twins - so environment may be more similar as well as just genetics. Lewis and Bates (2010): concur with Haidt and Tomasello's beliefs that cooperation and in-group favouritism must be evolved Comparative psychology: Brosnan and De Waal (2003): Monkeys reject unequal pay - cucumber vs grape. It's very easy to anthropomorphise our own sense of inequality onto the monkeys, Tomasello might argue that the monkeys might care less about inequality, they might just be expecting a grape so they are surprised.

Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001)

Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) were able to reduce prejudice against blacks by first showing participants pictures of admired blacks and disliked whites. They used the IAT - participants were tested at exposure and 24 hours later. so the effects persist at least for a little while.

Children's social worlds:

Economic hardship associated with psychological problems in children Poor academic performance, emotional problems, conduct problems, ADHD (e.g. Boe et al., 2012, Russell et al., 2016) o Direct effects e.g. less access to resources at home, poorer quality of schooling, poorer housing quality o Indirect effects e.g. parental conflict, parental emotional wellbeing, poorer quality of parenting practices including ineffective discipline

Cognitive dissonance - Festinger et al 1956

Festinger claims that attitudes or beliefs can be consonant (agreeing), dissonant, or unrelated. When two beliefs are dissonant an aversive motivational state is created which motivates us either to behavioural/attitudinal change, or to finding some way to make the two bits of conflicting information agree. Festinger first showed this with Marian Keech, a cult leader who believed that the world would be destroyed in a massive flood on the 20th of December in 1954. When nothing happened by midnight on the 21st (lol parallels to DnD) they decided that their worship must have been so fervent that the beings from Planet Clarion had decided to spare all of earth! Festinger's induced compliance paradigm. Festinger got people to lie to somebody else. He got them into a study, got them to do a really boring task. When they were about to leave, they would then ask the person to help them introduce the next person coming in to the task which they had just done. He offered them either 1$ or 20$, if they told the next person coming in that the task which they had just done was very interesting. This was obviously counter to their own experience. They found that those who were given 20$, still characterised the task as extremely boring. Those who were paid 1$ characterised the task as more interesting than those in the control condition who hadn't been asked to introduce the study to anyone. Those who were paid 20$ thought that they had described it as good because of the money. If they were paid 1$ they thought that they mustn't have been bought for 1$, so they think of the study as being less boring because they have to justify that if they described it as interesting for so little, they must have found it interesting. The degree of public exposure makes a difference to this effect. One study in Florida had people write counter-attitudinal essays about Castro. There was then an attitudinal questionnaire to find out what people really thought about Castro. They were then told that either the only person who was going to read it was the investigator, or no-one would read it, or their friends would read it, or it would be placed in the campus newspaper with their name on it. If there was a great deal of public exposure then you were more willing to change your views to fit your public status on the attitude. This effect is mediated by degree of public exposure, constraints from multiple attitudes, and individual differences Kiteyama et al 2015: reconceptualizes cognitive dissonance as largely affective. Tucket and Nikolic 2017: decision making at high levels. They did fascinating work on decision making by the monetary policy committee - these are the people who set interest rates. There are supposed to be massively powerful models of the economy which tell them what to do. In reality there seems to be an affective component (feeling) which drives decision making. This is more evidence of the importance of emotional states on decision making. Look up Heider's balance theory and Osgood and Tannebaum's congruity theory In unbalanced states you get tension in your relationship, either between persons, beliefs or attitudes. Also read Kiteyama et al.

Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013

Individual differences don't have to be biologically-determined, they can also come about during the early years of development, and can be just as protective against risk despite being less "magical" in their origins than biological traits. Personal characteristics such as belief systems related to resilience (Lee et al, 2010, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), humour, assertiveness, agency (Malindi and Theron, 2010, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), strong work ethic (Morales, 2010, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), social skills (Boyd & Waanders, 2013, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013) and religiosity (McKnight & Loper, 2002, In Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), have all been found to be protective against risk across cultures as diverse as Hong-Kong, South Africa, and the United States. The family unit should provide supportive and healthy interaction within the family unit and encourage it without, and be flexible and variable enough to provide tailored support to the child (Peterson and Bush, 2012, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). Parental responsiveness and behavioural control appear to be effective protection factors against problem behaviour across cultures (Li, Martin, Armstrong, & Walker, 2011, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013)(Bond, Toumbourou, Thomas, Catalano, & Patton, 2005, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), and has been found to foster academic achievement in cultures from the USA (Steinberg, 2001, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013) to China (Leung and He, 2010, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). Similarly, firm and consistent behavioural control, known as parental monitoring, has been found to be a very effective protective factor in reducing the impact of risk on behaviours such as aggression and substance abuse across a diverse range of cultures (Vazsonyi, Hibbert & Blake Snider, 2003, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013)(Bares, Delva, Grogan-Kaylor & Andrade, 2011, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). The effects of parental monitoring are likely explained by 2 main factors: the first is an increased knowledge of children leading to parenting approaches which are better tailored to the individual child, an effect found universally across cultures. In contrast, the second effect is that parental monitoring has been suggested to convey care and concern to the children at risk, but this effect is only found in collectivistic cultures such as Mexico (Bush, Supple, & Lash, 2004, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). Noltemeyer and Bush (2013) point out that children around the world experience risks which are diverse in their type and scale, where one may face poverty another may face armed conflict, or maltreatment, or starvation. These risks can be socially induced, such as family discord and war, or they can be naturally present in the environment. Such natural risks could range from illnesses including malaria to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Although these kinds of life-altering events can be devastating at any time in life, studies have found that children in early development are at the greatest risk (Keiley, Howe, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 2001, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013).

Joiner and Katz (1999)

Joiner and Katz (1999) found that depressive symptoms could be passed on by mere exposure

Courtin, 2000

Language learning is correlated with development of theory of mind.

Graham, Haidt and Nosek, 2009

Moral Foundations Dictionary which would enable such cross-cultural ethnographic studies as Curry did.

Leslie (1991)

One possible explanation for this resilience to the positive influence of social factors is suggested by a common characteristic of autistic children: that they often have difficulty engaging in pretend play. Leslie (1991) argued that theory of mind and pretend play deficits in autistic children may both be caused by deficits in attributing mental states to others. He believed that theory of mind is involved in pretend play regardless of whether or not the people involved are real. Thus, Leslie claimed that the deficits in both theory of mind and pretend play could be explained by difficulties in attributing mental states to others. An alternative argument is that pretend play evokes higher level cognition in children (Lillard, 1993) which helps them to develop socially relevant executive function. As executive function has been shown to be correlated with performance on theory of mind tasks (Devine and Hughes, 2014), it could be argued instead that deficits in pretend play are either: caused by deficits in the same theory of mind-related executive functions which are strengthened by play, or that they can lead to deficits in theory of mind (as the child is unable to engage in this higher-level social cognition)

Formation and change of social norms:

Social norms are formed through the process of socialization (i.e. interacting with the people around you). Bronfenbrenner's Ecological system's theory uses 4 layers of relations to describe how an infant's (or adult's) social world is constructed. The Microsystem is the infant or adult themselves The Mesosystem involves those close to you: Family, Siblings, School, Peers, Work The Exosystem is the next level out, with extended family, parents' work environment, neighbourhood and mass media Finally there is the Macrosystem, the Laws, history, culture social conditions and economic system within which you live. Experiments such as those by Tomasello and Vaish (2013) have found that children will spontaneously help adults in a number of situations (opening cupboard doors when their hands are full or picking something up for them), and one popular explanation for this is that the children have an innate understanding of the norms of a given situation, in this case helping. The difficulty is that these children are quite old so we can't exclude the possibility of learning through socialization as an explanation for this behaviour. One way of getting around this is to look at chimps and see if they behave the same, as it is likely that if they follow these norms we do too. Chimps do seem to spontaneously help when the cost to themselves is not too high, such as pulling a lever to open a door so that another chimp can get food. However, there are many confounding factors here - Tomasello himself believes that while these chimps are helping, they are collaborating rather than following helping norms. It is also possible that chimps have evolved this ability since splitting with us, or that they have learned from observing humans, as they are captive chimps. Sander concludes that: People do seem to have an innate understanding of certain norms which are useful and adaptive to follow. He quotes this: "These findings challenge the idea that human cooperation is due to socialization practices in the form of parental instruction or the internalization of prosocial norms and values alone" (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). Read it. Nook et al, 2016: they found that activating a norm of generosity significantly increased the average donation. They had a generous norm and a stingy norm, but they found that when participants were asked to write a paragraph about someone else, those in the generosity norm were more likely to write something nice about the other person! Equally they found that participants in the empathetic norm condition were more empathetic towards the victim, but were also more likely to donate to someone afterwards, even if they were unrelated to the person in the video. Check this, it seems to be the reverse of the graph. This could also partly be explained by Empathy Altruism - they felt bad and wanted to get rid of that feeling by being empathetic. People's perception of norms is not very accurate to reality. Baer and Carney (1993) found that students consistently overestimated the quantity and frequency of beer drinking among their peers, while consistently reporting that they drunk less than their peers. Not only were they wrong about the actual behaviour, they were also incorrect about the actual norms. Prentice and Miller (1993) found that students tended to disapprove of binge drinking, but think that others were more accepting of the behaviour than they were. This gives us one avenue for changing norms, we can change people's perception of the norms to be more accurate. Haines and Spear 1996: They conducted a 5-year study of binge drinking behaviour at a major US university at which traditional educational drinking interventions had already failed. They had a sample size of 23,000 students. They ran a campaign of highlighting the actual norm of binge drinking, and managed to achieve an 18.5% drop in the number of students binge drinking - from 69.7% to 51.2%, and a corresponding 8.8% decrease in actual levels of self-reported binge drinking (from 43% to 34.2%). One alternative explanation for this is that social acceptability bias meant that less people were willing to admit to binge drinking on a questionnaire. This technique is great when the actual norm is different in the "correct" direction, but what if you are trying to shift the norm away from what it currently is? You can highlight or leverage an existing norm, but you can also try and invent a new norm. For example, there are still big divides between scientific opinion and public opinion on everything from climate change to vaccination or evolution! One way to improve this is to highlight the existing scientific norm. It was also found that having a new norm be introduced by a neutral outgroup reduced conflict in norms between liberals and conservatives. Nolan 2011: The cognitive ripple of social information. Essentially once consensus is reach in group A (for example, scientists), there will be an anchoring and adjusting effect by Group B (the public) where you don't move too far from the original anchoring point. - read Hovland and Sherif (1980) point out that norms which fit inside you "latitude of acceptance" will be more easily assimilated into your worldview. We want to achieve internalization of these public norms into private attitudes if we want to change behaviour

Fairness:

Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom (2017): Fairness as equality vs proportionality. Should everyone get the same or should people get what they deserve? There is a lot of talk about inequality being a problem, but when you really look at it people care more about people getting outputs proportional to their inputs.They asked people to estimate the levels of inequality in the US. They were also asked their ideal distribution. They found that people still wanted some level of inequality, that the people at the top should have more money Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness. •Maybe re-read this study Baumard, N., Mascaro, O., & Chevallier, C. (2012). Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods. Children almost unanimously give the 3rd cookie to the child who works harder. They problem with Starmans' study is that they don't take into account cross-cultural differences. The earlier study by Carson and Banuazzizi (2008) showed that Filipino children do not distribute rewards according to merit. Schafer, Haun and Tomasello (2015): Fair is not fair everywhere Children from 3 different societies are given a task where they must collect magnetic blocks out of a tube with a magnet on the end of a stick. One of the children is given some blocks which are not magnetic (the game is rigged). The experimenter then counts at sweets proportional to the number of blocks collected, and allows the children to allocate who should get what sweets. Children from a meritocratic society (Germany) gave the sweets according to merit in the task, while children from the gerontocratic pastoralist society (livestock herders from Africa who are run by the elderly - the Samburu tribe) did not take merit into account at all. Children from an egalitarian (based on all people being equal and deserving equal opportunities - the Hai Lom tribe) hunter-gatherer society distribute sweets mostly equally, only slightly taking merit into account. Each sample only had a little over 20 participants, due to the difficulties of working with children. They argued that this shows that approaches to fairness are not universal but are instead culturally learned. They argued also that the reason which we see this difference is that the German kids have grown up in a Market based society where most people you meet you will never see again, so if you give things to them and never see them again, you may be giving them a selective advantage. In the groups where you see the same people all the time, you should help them because they will help you later (reciprocal altruism) One criticism of the study is that they don't differentiate effort and capability. The child who did worse may still have tried just as hard. We might care about proportionality based on effort, if someone tries really hard but does well, we may be more likely to help them Comparative studies: Engelmann, Clift, Herrmann, and Tomasello (2017): they attempted to replicate De Waal's findings that monkeys reject unequal pay, and see if the same effect was found when the pay was offered by a robot. Not only did the monkeys not care when it was offered by a robot, they also didn't care in the original condition. They argued that even if this was a result of the experimental methodology, if this is an evolved fairness response it should be more robust! Riedl, Jensen, Call and Tomasello (2012): he did a repeat of the ultimatum game with chimpanzees, and found that third party chimpanzees never punished. Tomasello et al, 2007: he compared human infants to chimpanzees and orangutans, and found that while they were equivalent at performing cognitive tasks, human infants' social cognition was significantly higher. Tomasello believes that the ability to cooperate and collaborate was a human adaptation. Tomasello argues that human infants have an innate ability to share intentionality. The ability to engage in shared attention/mutual gaze from a young age is some evidence for this. Woodward's (1998) habituation experiment showed that infants were more surprised by changed intentionality (going for the different object but in the same place) than by changed location (going for the same object in a different place). Tomasello's argument is that this shared intentionality provides the socio-cognitive capacity which allows us to share the intentions of others, and in doing so learn the norms of others. Children then begin to enforce those norms around the age of 3. Cornelius 2007: Children want to learn the norms when entering novel situations Tomasello et al 2008: The Dax study, children will enforce non-moral norms - like trying to break the rules of an imaginary game (as seen in Wyman, Rackoczy and Tomasello, 2009). Schmidt and Tomasello (2012 - check it's this one) found that young children will enforce moral norms across groups, but will limit conventional norms to their own groups. This implies an understanding of the difference between universal moral rules and conventional group norms. Tomasello applies this concept of shared intentions and shared norms to cultures, pointing out that money has no real value except that which we agree it has. He believes that dogs can give evidence that shared intentionality can be selected for by evolution, as we have artificially bred them for this ability. He argues that dogs are less intelligent than primates when it comes to physical reasoning task, but they are better at social tasks. He argues that we have been breeding this into dogs for years. If a dog knows the name for everything in a room apart from one thing, and you tell it to fetch a thing which it has never heard of before, it will go and fetch the thing that it doesn't know the name of. This is an ability that children don't get until 4! Tomasello and Haidt's ideas contrast somewhat. Tomaseelo argues that our social cognitive skills and shared intentionality allow us to quickly learn morality as operationalized by social norms. Haidt argues for specific evolutionary pressures which created an innate first draft which society can then revise.

Authenticity

The above assertions assume that people will conform in every situation, but even in Asch's (1951) original study 24% of participants didn't conform once. These people would be described by philosophers as displaying Authenticity, a concept defined by "Being in touch with one's inner self, knowing one's self, having a sense of one's own identity and then living in accord with one's sense of one's self" (Kierkegaard, 1985) Sheldon et al (1997) attempted to correlate personality and authenticity, which they defined as "behaviour that is phenomenally experienced as being authored by the self or internally caused". They point out that self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) assumes that not all situations are conducive to authentic behaviour, which we can extrapolate to mean that if authenticity is desired, then one's chosen situation should lend itself to authenticity. Their results indicated that individuals had a general level of authenticity which they manifested across different situations, but that said level could fluctuate depending on the exact situation. This suggests that those individuals who never conformed in Asch's study were high in authenticity. This study used robust statistical practices, using a 0.01 significance level and conducting their regressions thrice. They also found that high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness coupled with low levels of neuroticism were associated with high authenticity Their results indicated that individuals had a general level of authenticity which they manifested across different situations, but that said level could fluctuate depending on the exact situation. This suggests that those individuals who never conformed in Asch's study were high in authenticity. This study used robust statistical practices, using a 0.01 significance level and conducting their regressions thrice. They also found that high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness coupled with low levels of neuroticism were associated with high authenticity, although it is important to note that these same results could be explained by their participants (who were students) exhibiting these traits, and thus feeling more authentic when in situations which elicited them. A crucial finding of this study was that they found differing levels of authenticity in different situations, despite many of the situations being chosen by the participants. This speaks to the societal expectation of inauthenticity in most situations. Whether it's in one's choice of job, relationship or neighbourhood certain societal expectations still exist which will often stop them from behaving exactly as their personalities would dictate. They found that relative to the child and romantic partner roles, participants felt significantly less authentic in the student and employee roles and more authentic in the friend role. They also found that there was a correlation of 0.71 between levels of authenticity experienced in all roles, implying that each individual may have a general level of authenticity. holidays provide the solution... Here it would seem that holidays provide the solution. These are situations more purely chosen based on desire rather than necessity, where cost is thrown out of the window (to an extent) and social responsibility is reduced due to the lack of people who know you to hold you accountable. Brown (2013) claims that "tourism offers an albeit temporary life that is simpler, freer, more spontaneous, more authentic". Wang (1999) described holidays as a "counterdose to the loss of true self" experienced in everyday life made available by moving to a liminal place where societal constraints are lifted. For some these transient periods of authenticity are so enticing that they decide to stay in the place that allows "an authentic existence that allows a simple, pure and original way of living" permanently (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009 in Brown, 2013). Brown (2013) goes further, claiming that tourism can have transformative effects even upon one's return. She describes tourism as a reprieve from everydayness which facilitates silence and allows time for reflection on the past and the future. She compares these traits to psychotherapy in their ability to enable a person to achieve self-realization, going so far as to describe tourism as a metaphorical therapist. Brown (2009), Lyons and Wearing, 2008 and many others have found that students on their gap year and backpackers experience significant changes to their behaviour upon their return, which may be wrought by their time to reflect on the need for authenticity. Alternatively, these changes could be brought about by changes to the personality or the need to conform to the stereotype of a gap year student, but evidence for Brown's claim is that the "search for self" is a common aim of backpackers (Cohen, 1979). Brown is quick to point out that not all tourism experiences are like this, but that they can under the correct circumstances serve as a catalyst for existential authenticity. In conclusion, it would appear that individuals do strive to chose a situation which fits their personality, and that once in that situation they are able to be more authentic and thus become happier. It is also true that people will adapt their personality to their situation, and in doing so their behaviour can become authentic despite not matching their typical personality. Having said that it is difficult to claim that people's behaviour is ever a genuine reflection of their personality, as studies of authenticity found that even in chosen situations authenticity was not 100%. Authenticity may be at its highest when on holiday, as this appears to be the closest one can reasonably get to a fully chosen situation. It would seem reasonable to assume that the converse of this quote could be found with family, which are not chosen but with whom one can often be more oneself, however there appears to be a dearth of research in this area.

Definitions of Morality

The study of morality has perplexed philosophers for centuries and anthropologists for decades. In recent years an interdisciplinary endeavour encompassing researchers from anthropology, biology, neuroscience, economics and psychology has allowed scientists to begin answering some questions about morality, including but not limited to: whether it is universal, what its function is and whether it is innate. In order to discern whether morality is innate we must first define morality and innateness. This is a controversial issue, largely due to the centuries of philosophical debate surrounding both morality and innateness. A common perspective in the scientific study of morality is a functional one, and most researchers in the field seem to agree that the function of morality is to promote cooperation (Haidt and Kesebir 2010; Rai and Fiske 2011; Tomasello and Vaish 2013; Greene 2015; Curry 2016; Sterelny and Fraser 2016). Tomasello and Vaish (2013)'s evolutionary functional perspective defines morality in terms of moral actions and interactions. They argue that the main function of "morality" is to increase cooperation in social interactions, in order to allow humans to thrive in a group context. Thus, they view morality as a functional evolutionary framework of social norms aimed at regulating selfish anti-social behaviour in humans. A somewhat different definition is argued by Haidt in his 2012 bestseller "The Righteous Mind", which reconceptualizes morality in terms of 5 "moral foundations" which he equates to tastes. He argues that these foundations represent the template upon which we all map our own moral understanding. Haidt and Tomasello's definitions concur that the function of morality is to bind groups together and thus that morality includes selfless altruistic behaviours, but Haidt extends the definition to include "living in a sanctified and noble way". Haidt's moral foundations are a purely descriptive attempt to understand morality as norms and moral actions, but one can also conceptualize morality from a philosophical standpoint. In this context morality represents a universal standard to which all actions should be compared (although the exact definition of moral changes from one philosopher to the next). Thus, for philosophers, morality represents a concept rather than a behaviour. It is necessary to consider whether each of the 3 definitions of morality could be considered innate, as each has considerably different implications. Up until the mid-20th century a trait had to be hardwired, universal and unchangeable by experience to be considered innate, but this requirement has shifted in recent years thanks to advancements in scientific understanding of the brain. One definition of "innate" comes from the philosophical school of Innatism. This holds that the mind is born already containing certain ideas and knowledge, which experience must then unlock. This idea that the brain could innately hold knowledge was not initially grounded in biology but has recently received some evidence from the Blue Brain project (Perin, Berger, Markram, 2011). Similarly, Haidt defines innateness as a trait which is built-in but malleable, in his words: "organized in advance of experience". This definition is subtly different from that of Innatism, as Innatism holds that experience unlocks innate knowledge, while Haidt believes that experience can "revise" the "first-draft" provided by genetics and in doing so subtly change this innate behaviour or knowledge, we shall judge Haidt's claims of innate morality by his definition of innateness. This essay will investigate several perspectives which provide evidence that morality was evolved, but which argue divergently on whether this means that morality is innate. It will also analyse Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as one of the principal proponents of innate morality, and question whether adequate evidence has been provided for his claims. The "cooperative approach to morality" is an umbrella term used to describe the vast array of researchers claiming that morality and moral behaviour evolved in order to encourage cooperation so that we could live and thrive in large groups. Curry (2019) recently used non-zero-sum game theory in an attempt to provide a scientifically rigorous theoretical foundation for this school of thought. They attempted to link accepted examples of cooperation with their corresponding types of morality, and then conducted a cross-cultural ethnographic study to see whether these "moral" behaviours were truly seen as morally good across cultures. They found that across 60 cultures, 961 out of 962 observations of cooperative behaviour were given a positive moral valence, and the only outlier was explained by one type of morality (respect for bravery) outweighing another (respect for property). They also found that these moral cooperative behaviours were observed in most societies, with each society exhibiting on average 4.4 examples of moral cooperation. These 60 cultures were specifically chosen to be as diverse as possible, and the fact that the moral valence of these cooperative actions was almost universally positive suggests that cooperation and group cohesion behaviours are tied to morality. While this implies that at least some aspects of cooperative morality are universal, it this does not prove that they are innate. In order to answer this question, it is important to investigate the ontogeny of cooperative behaviour, on both an intra and interspecies level. Tomasello and Vaish (2013) developed the theory of interdependence, which attempts to give an account of how cooperative behaviour and morality could have evolved, and how it could develop in children. There is good evidence that cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous. Natural selection for genes that employ such cooperative strategies has driven several major transitions in the evolution of life on Earth, including the formation of cells, chromosomes and multicellular organisms (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995). This same selection process has been especially influential in the evolution of primates. Primates are uniquely social animals, which have been living in large social groups for more than 50 million years (Shultz, Opie, and Atkinson 2011). Humans are uniquely social even amongst primates, as we and our ancestors have been living in hunter-gatherer groups for over 2 million years (Tooby and DeVore 1987). Tomasello uses the comparative method to show that great apes have highly complex social lives in which they keep track of hierarchies, friendships, and the goals of others, and that they will even cooperate, when there is not too great a cost. However, they are noticeably more reticent when there is significant effort required, and selfish when they can be when it comes to dolling out rewards. Tomasello believes that this is where the adaptation of humans lies, as he has found that human, chimp and orangutan infants have similar cognitive abilities, but that human infants have vastly superior social cognition, implying that the ability to be social in groups is an important part of our evolution (Tomasello et al, 2007). There is also a plethora of evidence of children act morally from a young age. While they can often be selfish, they will also frequently put the interests of others ahead of their own interests in order to do such things as collaborate, sympathize with and help, and share resources with others, and will negatively judge others for not doing the same (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). Young children spontaneously help adults, and seem to be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated to do so (Warneken & Tomasello 2008). Not only this, the motivation is simply the need to see a person helped, not to gain some kind of reciprocal reward (Hepach et al, 2012b). Children as young as 3 seem to build up knowledge of moral norms and judge situations which violate them as "broken, dirty or bad" (Kagan, 1981), and will use normative language such as "You can't do that" rather than "I don't want you to do that" when chastising others for breaking said moral norms (Vaish et al. 2011b). 3 year olds even seem to understand the difference between conventional and moral norms, chastising in-group and out-group members equally for breaking moral norms but only chastising in-group members for breaking conventional norms (i.e. norms which have been agreed upon by the in-group) (Schmidt et al, 2011). Thus, there is evidence that children at a very young age will act morally, understand norms, enforce norms themselves and will listen when adults enforce norms, and that this ability seems to be uniquely developed in human infants. This provides good evidence that cooperation has evolved and been selected for, with morality as one powerful aspect of cooperation, but whether this means that morality is innate is a matter of contention. Haidt might argue that this evidence supports his hypothesis that morality (defined as the 5 moral foundations) is innate, as the children are performing seemingly moral acts at an age where not much learning has occurred, but Tomasello's theory of interdependence (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013) posits a different explanation. This hypothesis claims that selection pressures for early hunter gatherers to work together to bring down prey led to improved social cognition, which in turn led to two distinct evolutionary steps. The authors claim that we evolved the ability to collaborate with others first in evolution because collaboration ensured that hunting partners would be fitter and more likely to want to help you hunt. Next, we began to construct and follow social norms and institutions of culture, of which morality was just one example. The authors further claim that these 2 steps occur not only phylogenetically throughout the evolution of humans, but also ontogenetically throughout the development of children. With this theory in mind we can re-interpret all of the above evidence: collaborative acts with peers are to become a more attractive collaboration partner, spontaneous assistance of adults is because children depend on them, and children responding to norms before the age of 3 could be explained by children following the adult's individual imperative rather than a moral norm. Interestingly this age of 3 seems to be about the age at which Tomasello believes these children develop the ability to understand moral norms. Prior to this point it is difficult to prove that they are not simply following an adults demands, but past the age of 3 children begin to enforce norms on their peers, implying that they understand them (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). Additionally, the use of normative phrases such as "You can't do that" which was mentioned in Vaish et al (2011b) only begins at age 3, and children aged 2 seemed to use more desire-centric phrases instead. Tomasello also found that young children, unlike chimps, actively sought to participate jointly in joint activities. When children and chimps were given a free choice over whether to obtain food alone or with a partner, chimps chose to work alone while children chose to work with a partner (Rekers et al, 2011), and children will try and re-engage disinterested partners rather than continuing to try by themselves (Warneken & Tomasello 2007). Thus, Tomasello would explain cooperation early in childhood as being indicative of the first stage of interdependence, collaboration, rather than of innately following a moral norm. According to his theories of interdependence and cultural intelligence, our ability to be moral is learned thanks to increased social cognitive skills which allow us to share intentionality and follow socially constructed norms, rather than morality being an innate human behaviour. Haidt argues instead that we innately have 5 moral tastes which offer the foundations upon and within which we build our own morality. His evidence for this claim seems to be largely theoretical, following an ad hoc process involving the creation of evolutionary just-so stories (rather than following any kind of theoretical guidelines in the style of Curry (2019)). Haidt claims that his 5 foundations (Fairness, Harm, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity) are organized in advance of experience, meaning that while they guide the outcome of an individual's morality, they do not control it. Thus, if we are to prove that the moral foundations are innate, we must find evidence of their presence in children (before experience has affected them too much), or we should find that they are able to adequately summarise the morality of adults in all cultures of the world. No such cross-cultural studies currently exist, so we must turn to looking at infants. In his guidelines for creating another moral foundation, Haidt requires that an aspiring foundation be innate, and offers examples of studies which prove his foundations to be so. These studies fall into two categories: studies of non-human primates, and studies of children. Studies of non-human primates shall be ignored as evidence, as the assumption that a trait in a related species must be ancestral is incorrect, and ignores the millions of years of evolution that have occurred between even our closest surviving evolutionary relatives and us. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) seems to show good evidence of infants as young as 5-6 months old preferring actors which don't violate the harm/care foundation, but Tomasello uses this same study to support his theory (the toddlers prefer good collaborators). Schmidt and Sommerville (2011) and Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012) both use children slightly too old to provide evidence for the Fairness/cheating foundation (as they could have learned these moral values by the age of 15+ months. Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke (2007) provides a degree of evidence for Loyalty/betrayal in infants, although it is confounded by the fact that infants prefer to listen to speakers of their native language (Moon, Cooper and Fifer, 1993). And Authority/subversion and Purity have yet to be shown in children. Without these studies, Haidt's foundations are currently no more than evolutionary just-so stories. Although they have spawned much research into individual foundations (Graham (2010), Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, (2005), Cannon, Schnall, and White (2011) etc.), no one study has yet checked whether these 5 foundations can fully summarise human morality, or whether every culture truly conforms to them. Without evidence of the innateness of these foundations, this theory is nothing more than a descriptive framework within which to understand one's morality. It makes no predictive claims, and as such loses much of its usefulness. Kuger, Jost and Noorbaloochi (2014) level a different criticism at Haidt, claiming that his definition of morality is not actually moral. They define morality as a philosophical truth rather than a form of social norms, and argue that 3 of Haidt's five foundations can lead to amoral or even immoral behaviour. The authors argue that many of the allegedly ''moral'' characteristics ascribed to conservatives by Haidt possess a striking resemblance to and are correlated with authoritarianism (a personality type characterized by conventionalism, submission, and aggression) which is associated with ingroup favouritism, sexism, homophobia, and punishment of social deviants (McAdams et al, 2008, Van Leeuwen and Park, 2009). They argue that these behaviours are immoral and as such, even if Haidt's moral foundations were true, humans would not be innately moral in the philosophical sense. In conclusion, Haidt's claim that moral foundations are innate is problematic due to the exceptionally difficulty of run studies on children young enough that they could not have learned moral behaviour. Equally he has not run cross-cultural studies to show that his foundations can adequately describe all available moralities, as Curry (2019) attempted to do, despite having created a Moral Foundations Dictionary which would enable such cross-cultural ethnographic studies (Graham, Haidt and Nosek, 2009). Until such studies have been conducted it is difficult to prove or disprove Haidt's theory that moral foundations are innate, but we can conclude that according to Tomasello and Curry's theory of morality as cooperation as well as the philosophical definition of morality as some objective standard by which to judge actions, morality is not innate to humans.

The Theory of Interdependence

Tomasello and Vaish (2013) developed the theory of interdependence, which attempts to give an account of how cooperative behaviour and morality could have evolved, and how it could develop in children. There is good evidence that cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous. Natural selection for genes that employ such cooperative strategies has driven several major transitions in the evolution of life on Earth, including the formation of cells, chromosomes and multicellular organisms (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995). This same selection process has been especially influential in the evolution of primates. Primates are uniquely social animals, which have been living in large social groups for more than 50 million years (Shultz, Opie, and Atkinson 2011). Humans are uniquely social even amongst primates, as we and our ancestors have been living in hunter-gatherer groups for over 2 million years (Tooby and DeVore 1987). Tomasello uses the comparative method to show that great apes have highly complex social lives in which they keep track of hierarchies, friendships, and the goals of others, and that they will even cooperate, when there is not too great a cost. However, they are noticeably more reticent when there is significant effort required, and selfish when they can be when it comes to dolling out rewards. Tomasello believes that this is where the adaptation of humans lies, as he has found that human, chimp and orangutan infants have similar cognitive abilities, but that human infants have vastly superior social cognition, implying that the ability to be social in groups is an important part of our evolution (Tomasello et al, 2007). There is also a plethora of evidence of children act morally from a young age. While they can often be selfish, they will also frequently put the interests of others ahead of their own interests in order to do such things as collaborate, sympathize with and help, and share resources with others, and will negatively judge others for not doing the same (Tomasello and Vaish, 2013). Young children spontaneously help adults, and seem to be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated to do so (Warneken & Tomasello 2008). Not only this, the motivation is simply the need to see a person helped, not to gain some kind of reciprocal reward (Hepach et al, 2012b). Children as young as 3 seem to build up knowledge of moral norms and judge situations which violate them as "broken, dirty or bad" (Kagan, 1981), and will use normative language such as "You can't do that" rather than "I don't want you to do that" when chastising others for breaking said moral norms (Vaish et al. 2011b). 3 year olds even seem to understand the difference between conventional and moral norms, chastising in-group and out-group members equally for breaking moral norms but only chastising in-group members for breaking conventional norms (i.e. norms which have been agreed upon by the in-group) (Schmidt et al, 2011). Thus, there is evidence that children at a very young age will act morally, understand norms, enforce norms themselves and will listen when adults enforce norms, and that this ability seems to be uniquely developed in human infants. This provides good evidence that cooperation has evolved and been selected for, with morality as one powerful aspect of cooperation, but whether this means that morality is innate is a matter of contention.

Resource dilution model:

by the time that you get to the last child parents have lost the energy to tell the younger children off.

What's special about siblings in childhood?

o It's an involuntary relationship (which can be positive) because you can tell them your true feelings because you won't lose the relationship - this can lead to an emotional no-holds-barred policy which can mean that oftentimes our siblings are the ones who really know us. o You spend a lot of time together. o Siblings can serve as attachment figures. o The relationship is diagonal.

• Siblings as support:

o Milevsky 2005: Their psychological well-being as young adults is tied to the quality of their relationships with their sibling, and is associated with higher self-esteem and life satisfaction. Harmonious relationships with siblings are linked to higher self-esteem and self-worth, and sibling support compensated for low parental and peer support. Although Sherman et al 2006: They didn't find a compensatory effect

Donor conception families:

• o You can have donor insemination or egg donation. Donor insemination has been around for over a century, while egg donation was invented in 1984 The child will lack a genetic link with one of the parents o People are concerned that the child may not fully accept the parent who didn't contribute genetic material as their parent. Family therapy literature has stated that just the existence of secrets creates boundaries between family members as children can sense when they are not being told something o European Study of Assisted Reproduction Families 1998: Golombok carried out the first studies into Donor insemination families. Participants were children born in mid-80s The study Focused on quality of parent-child relationships and child adjustment Families assessed when children aged 6, 12 and 18 It was conducted in the UK, Spain, Italy & the Netherlands 111 DI families compared with 116 IVF families,115 adoptive and 120 naturally conceived families Standardised interviews, questionnaires and psychological assessments with mothers, fathers, children and teachers were all used Findings age 6: • DI and IVF parents showed greater warmth, emotional involvement and interaction with their child than did natural conception parents • No differences for any of the measures of children's socio-emotional development • Not one set of 111 parents had told child about DI, but most had told someone else Findings at age 12: • Good parent-child relationships characterised by affection and appropriate control • No evidence of emotional or behavioural problems in assisted reproduction children • Less than 10% of parents had told children about donor conception Findings at 18 (was only followed up in the UK) • More positive relationships between DI and IVF mothers and children • DI children functioning well but no better than naturally conceived children • Still less than 10% of parents had told children about donor conception The reasons for non-disclosure: • Main reason for secrecy is fear that child would be upset and would no longer love non-genetic parent • Lack of knowledge about what and when to tell - how do you even go about it, and when do you tell them? • They also had no information about the donor so they had nothing to tell the child if they asked about their genetic parent, as they had all used anonymous donation o UK Longitudinal Study of Assisted Reproduction Families: This included egg donation families as well They had 50 donor insemination families, 51 egg donation families, and 80 natural conception families They tested them at 1,2,3,7,10 and 14 years old They used a standardised interview, an observational and questionnaire measure of psychological well-being of the parents, the quality of the parent-child relationship and the psychological development of the child. They obtained data from the mothers, the fathers, the children and the teachers Findings at age 1: • Greater psychological well being and adaptation to parenthood by donor-conception than natural conception parents • Greater emotional involvement with child - perhaps not surprising as they had to want the child more to get it Findings at age 2: • Donor-conception mothers showed more positive parentchild relationships than natural conception mothers e.g. greater pleasure and competence and less anger, guilt and disappointment (Parent Development Interview) • Children did not differ in socio-emotional (BITSEA) or cognitive development (Bayley Scales) Age 3: • Greater warmth and interaction with child by donor conception than natural conception parents Disclosure: • At age 1, 56% of egg donation and 46% of DI parents planned to disclose genetic/gestational origins to child • By age 7, only 39% of egg donation parents and 29% of DI parents had done so. • Some parents who said they had told their children had only partially disclosed... • The parents have clearly changed their attitude at some point, despite initially intending to tell them Findings at age 7: • Mothers in non-disclosing donor conception families showed higher levels of emotional distress than mothers in disclosing families • Interviews and observational measures revealed less positive mother-child interaction in non-disclosing than disclosing families • Children continue to function well however • Either disclosure is good for family functioning, or the families that disclose and don't could be characterised by some other shared variable which is causing the angst Findings at age 14: • Clinicians were worried about this age because age 14 is associated with lots of issues with identity. • Donor conception families functioning well • Less positive mother-adolescent relationships in egg donation than donor insemination families - as rated by mothers and adolescents - they still had very good relationships, just not quite as good. • Earlier disclosure of donor conception associated with more positive mother-child relationships - as rated by mothers and adolescents Must have been weird for the children and parents to see their relationship being judged as they grew up - it was probably anonymous. Were the natural conception families checked to ensure that they had chosen to have a child? o Identification of donors: Children born since 2005 are legally entitled to obtain the identity of their donor at age 18 What will happen when donor-conceived offspring begin to search for their donor in 2023? This is already happening in the US however, thanks to the Donor Sibling Registry, a website run by a woman whose child had been born through a donor. This is possible since donors in the US also have a unique ID number Since yesterday, the website had more than 60,000 members and more than 16,000 matches made Research has found that: • Many donor-offspring search for their donor and donor siblings • It is better to be told about donor conception when young o Those told when older more likely to feel upset, angry, shocked and confused. o (Jadva et al 2011) • Interestingly children seem to be more interested in forming a relationship with donor siblings than with donor o (Persaud et al 2016) o This is allowing an entirely new phenomena as family relationships based on genetic connections between children who were not previously aware of each other's existence are being formed across multiple family units

The Transition to siblinghood:

• o Has been likened to dethronement o The motivation to have a first or second child is quite different. The first child you have because you want to have a child, the second you have because you want them to have a sibling. o Parents' expectations of firstborn's behaviour were more negative than the reality (Gullicks & Crase, 1993). There appears to be a decline in parent-first born relationship when the second sibling is born, because for example that may be the first time that you've seen your child acting violently towards anything (if they start slapping the baby for instance)

Lesbian Mother families:

• o In the 60s and 70s Lesbian mothers tended to be women who had a baby with a man and then realized they were gay and left the husband to raise the child on their own. They often lost custody in a time when very few men ever won custody. Judges had the following reasons for believing that Lesbian mother families would be worse: Lesbian women would be less nurturing; children would develop psychological problems as a result Children would be teased and rejected by peers and would develop psychological problems as a result Children would show atypical gender development • Boys would be less masculine in identity and behaviour, and girls less feminine, than boys and girls from heterosexual homes • Children would grow up to be lesbian or gay themselves This obviously already shows their homophobia o Golombok, Spencer & Rutter, 1983: Children of lesbian mothers did not differ from children of heterosexual mothers in either psychological problems or problems with peers Boys no less masculine, and girls no less feminine, than boys and girls in heterosexual families Tasker & Golombok, 1995 AND 1997: • They then followed up with the children again in adulthood as judges believed that there might be a sleeper effect and the children might change as they age • They found no difference in the children's quality of relationship with their parents, no difference in psychological wellbeing in adulthood, and most identified as heterosexual during adulthood. • However they did find that they were more likely to have been teased about their sexuality during adolescence o Planned Lesbian Mother Families: Studies of lesbian mother families with children conceived by donor insemination • No difference in psychological adjustment of children • No difference in gender development of children • Co-mothers are more involved with children than are fathers - they had a greater investment in the parental role o Golombok, Perry, Burston et al., 2003; Wainwright, Russell, Patterson 2004: Golombok: Even with general population samples, children are functioning well. This helps to combat the claims that many of Golombok's samples rely on self-selection, as they took their sample from a general study of parents and children: "Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children" (14,000 mothers and their children). They took 39 lesbian mother families and 60 single mothers from those 14,000 families and found them to be equally well adjusted o Stigmatization: Children in lesbian and gay families still exposed to prejudice and discrimination Bullying and rejection less prevalent but low level stigmatisation still exists, e.g. use of the word "gay" as a pejorative term, which they found upsetting Children have to explain their families to people, and schools can be quite inflexible when it comes to recognising diversity in families. o Studies asking children of gay parents their opinions have found these guidelines for schools: Don't assume everyone has a mum and dad Talk about lesbian and gay families at school so that children don't always have to explain Use teaching materials with different family types Respond to homophobic bullying

The function of norms

. Social norms direct, regulate and control human social behaviour, they can allow us to maintain order in a society without the need for force, they help reduce the cost of individual learning of social behaviour, and most importantly they can help facilitate large scale cooperation in societyNorms are not always beneficial however, and they can just as easily undermine cooperative behaviour as promote it. Norms can lead to racism or antisemitism, and a norm of not-helping is one of the posited causes of the bystander effect (Darley and Latane, 1968).

activation of the norm

Activation of the norm has also been used to increase co-operation in voter turnout and charitable giving. Burnham and Hare (2007) found that confronting participants with an image of a robot with human eyes increased first-round contributions in a public goods game by 29%, and theorized that this was because the conditional cooperation norm was activated by the eyes implying the watchful gaze of another who might punish you for defecting. Panagopoulos & van der Linden, 2016 applied this to voting and found that placing eyes on posters for a campaign to vote activated the norm of doing one's civic duty and increased voter turnout significantly. Interestingly, activation of a norm in one context appears to generalise to other contexts. Nook et al. (2016) found that participants which had a high-empathy norm activated were more empathetic towards the victim (increased cooperation in the context of the norm) and were also more willing to donate money to an unrelated victim later (increased cooperation in a different context). There is ample evidence for the usefulness of highlighting the norms of a valued in group when trying to increase cooperation. Gerber, Green and Larimer (2008) found that highlighting the voting norm of your neighbourhood increased voter turnout by 8%, which was far more effective than appealing to civic duty or stating that their attendance was being recorded. More direct evidence comes from the behavioural insights team (2012) which found that highlighting the norm nationally increased debt payments by 72.5%, within your postcode increased payments by 79%, and in your town increased payments by 83%. This provides evidence that the more local and thus relevant the norm is, the more effect it has. Another example of a valued in-group is the government. It has been found that the increase in organ donation after death in opt-out countries came mostly from people assuming that the change in legislation was representative of a change in will of the people (Burger and Shelton, 2011).

Bornstein & Cote, 2005

Another impact of culture on the language environment is found in the famed dichotomy between collectivistic and individualistic cultures. In collectivist cultures such as Italy and Argentina children produced significantly more words for relatives than children of equivalent age in individualistic cultures like America . This difference is likely due to the increased prevalence of such relations in both the conversation and life of the children in collectivist cultures.

(Baron-Cohen, 1991)

Autistic children also struggle with joint-attention, which has also been shown to benefit the development of theory of mind.

Bourgeouis & Bowern (2001)

Bourgeouis & Bowern (2001) found that positive attitudes towards homosexual people spread through contact with them

Burnham and Hare (2007)

Burnham and Hare (2007) found that confronting participants with an image of a robot with human eyes increased first-round contributions in a public goods game by 29%, and theorized that this was because the conditional cooperation norm was activated by the eyes implying the watchful gaze of another who might punish you for defecting.

Kagan 1981

Children as young as 3 seem to build up knowledge of moral norms and judge situations which violate them as "broken, dirty or bad" (Kagan, 1981), and will use normative language such as "You can't do that" rather than "I don't want you to do that" when chastising others for breaking said moral norms (Vaish et al. 2011b)

Cicchetti and Rogosch, 2009

Cicchetti has conducted a number of studies into the resilience of maltreated children, and has repeatedly found that genetic variation can lead to the development of a variety of biological protective factors. Examples of these genetically encoded adaptive traits include differences in secretion of adrenal hormones from the pituitary gland as well as the organization of the emotion-processing areas of the brain

Lederberg and Mobley, 1990

Deaf children of non-signing parents have the same level of attachment quality as normal children

Dijksterhuis (2004)

Dijksterhuis (2004) demonstrated that pairing of self-related words with positive adjectives in a conditioned stimulus task increased self-esteem

Meristo et al, 2007

Even more powerful evidence for this claim is the fact that placing these children in Bilingual schools where they are exposed to both sign language and lip-reading has been shown to improve their theory of mind skills (Meristo et al, 2007). The implication is that these children have become better at theory of mind due to the introduction of these standard social influences, but an alternative explanation is that they are performing better thanks to the improvement in executive functioning which has been found in children that become bilingual (Kovacs, 2009).

o Golombok, Perry, Burston et al., 2003

Even with general population samples, children are functioning well. This helps to combat the claims that many of Golombok's samples rely on self-selection, as they took their sample from a general study of parents and children: "Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children" (14,000 mothers and their children). They took 39 lesbian mother families and 60 single mothers from those 14,000 families and found them to be equally well adjusted

Fehr and Fischbacker (2004)

Fehr and Fischbacker (2004) set out to prove that this was the case. They compiled a number of public goods studies and found that participants appeared to be using a norm of "conditional cooperation". This involved cooperating when others co-operated, and defecting when others defected. They found evidence for this claim in third-party punishment studies, in which a neutral third party is allowed to pay a price to punish the two participants taking part in the public goods game. They found that these third parties frequently punished defectors despite the cost to self and total lack of benefit, but that they didn't punish either when both defected. This finding provides a proximate explanation for the famous tit-for-tat model, which found that a pattern of initial cooperation followed by punishment of defectors was the most stable evolutionary strategy (save for tit-for-tat with a memory of 1) (Wedekind and Milinski, 1996). The predictability of social norms makes them a good strategy in social dilemmas, which could explain participants' reliance upon them. So now that we know that things like climate change and public health are social dilemmas, and social norms can affect how people act in social dilemmas, how do we increase the effectiveness of social norms?

Ozonoff and Miller (1995)

Finally, it's important to note that not all of the negative impacts of these atypical groups can be accredited to poor theory of mind, as Ozonoff and Miller (1995) found that, while autistic children could be trained to improve their theory of mind, their social behaviour and popularity remained unchanged

Ozonoff, Pennington and Rogers (1991)

Found that difficulties in theory of mind performance in autistic children were significantly related to differences in executive functioning

Haidt, Rosenberg and Hom (2003)

Found that similarity of moral values was important when selecting friends and Guillaume, Brodbeck, & Riketta (2012) found the same for teammates in the workplace

Hughes and Leekam (2004)

Found that there was a weak positive association between theory of mind and popularity as well as prosocial behaviour. This implies that those atypical groups which struggle with theory of mind will be less popular and less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour. This finding is especially dangerous when you consider that social rejection has been proven to negatively affect development in children, and can even put the child at risk of developing depressive symptoms (Chung et al, 2007).

Fowler and Christakis (2008)

Fowler and Christakis (2008) found that happiness spread through a community through nothing but contact with other happy people

Gawronski and Bodenhausen's (2006)

Gawronski and Bodenhausen's (2006) associative and propositional evaluation (APE) model reconceptualizes implicit and explicit attitudes in terms of their underlying processes, associative processes for implicit attitudes and propositional processes for explicit attitudes. Associative evaluations are automatic affective reactions which don't require assignment of truth values, while propositional processes are evaluative judgements of competing propositions which do require the assignment of truth values. Their theory claims that these associative evaluations are elicited regardless of one's explicit attitudes, but that they are then supressed in non-prejudiced individuals (these ideas are congruent with the findings of Devine, 1989). They claim that cognitive elaboration leads to more propositions being considered when evaluating an associative evaluation's validity, which will reduce the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes (assuming that the two are incongruent).

Nyborg et al. (2016)

Given that these real-world social dilemmas require the spread of new norms or the increased activation of current ones, it is beneficial to understand the process of norms spreading through a social network. Nyborg et al. (2016) posit the existence of a tipping point in society, the point at which enough members of a society are seen to conform to a norm and that norm then spreads through the population in a "virtuous cycle". They claim that easily observable behaviours such as smoking or driving an electric car will reach the tipping point faster, which seems to agree with Kallgren et al's claim that norms will be more powerful when they are salient. They also point out that human behaviour is mediated by expectations of the behaviour of others, and thus that spreading norms can become self-fulfilling as expectation of further future change leads people to conform to the norm themselves, which inspires others to take up the behaviour, ad infinitum. There has been evidence for this finding in a real-world social dilemma in Norway, where smokers drastically reduced their smoking in anticipation of the 1988 antismoking laws despite little formal enforcement of the bill when it came into law. Thus, expectation of change could be used to cause people to conform to norms which have not yet spread through society and become salient, such as by using the phrase "more and more people are conforming to this norm" (Sparman and Walton, 2017)

Moral Foundations Theory

Haidt argues instead that we innately have 5 moral tastes which offer the foundations upon and within which we build our own morality. His evidence for this claim seems to be largely theoretical, following an ad hoc process involving the creation of evolutionary just-so stories (rather than following any kind of theoretical guidelines in the style of Curry (2019)). Haidt claims that his 5 foundations (Fairness, Harm, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity) are organized in advance of experience, meaning that while they guide the outcome of an individual's morality, they do not control it. Thus, if we are to prove that the moral foundations are innate, we must find evidence of their presence in children (before experience has affected them too much), or we should find that they are able to adequately summarise the morality of adults in all cultures of the world. No such cross-cultural studies currently exist, so we must turn to looking at infants. In his guidelines for creating another moral foundation, Haidt requires that an aspiring foundation be innate, and offers examples of studies which prove his foundations to be so. These studies fall into two categories: studies of non-human primates, and studies of children. Studies of non-human primates shall be ignored as evidence, as the assumption that a trait in a related species must be ancestral is incorrect, and ignores the millions of years of evolution that have occurred between even our closest surviving evolutionary relatives and us. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) seems to show good evidence of infants as young as 5-6 months old preferring actors which don't violate the harm/care foundation, but Tomasello uses this same study to support his theory (the toddlers prefer good collaborators). Schmidt and Sommerville (2011) and Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012) both use children slightly too old to provide evidence for the Fairness/cheating foundation (as they could have learned these moral values by the age of 15+ months. Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke (2007) provides a degree of evidence for Loyalty/betrayal in infants, although it is confounded by the fact that infants prefer to listen to speakers of their native language (Moon, Cooper and Fifer, 1993). And Authority/subversion and Purity have yet to be shown in children. Without these studies, Haidt's foundations are currently no more than evolutionary just-so stories. Although they have spawned much research into individual foundations (Graham (2010), Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, (2005), Cannon, Schnall, and White (2011) etc.), no one study has yet checked whether these 5 foundations can fully summarise human morality, or whether every culture truly conforms to them. Without evidence of the innateness of these foundations, this theory is nothing more than a descriptive framework within which to understand one's morality. It makes no predictive claims, and as such loses much of its usefulness.

Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007)

Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) seems to show good evidence of infants as young as 5-6 months old preferring actors which don't violate the harm/care foundation, but Tomasello uses this same study to support his theory (the toddlers prefer good collaborators). Additionally it has failed to replicate twice

Moral Foundations theory:

Haidt likens moral foundations to tastes, and claims that they're innate. We are all born with the same range of taste receptors, but people grow up with different taste palates. Our upbringing, culture and individual differences can shape the range of moral foundations which are important to us. These 5 foundations are: Harm/Care Fairness/Cheating Loyalty/Betrayal Authority Sanctity Evidence for Moral Foundations Theory would have to be across many cultures, and would have to be easily explained by evolutionary theory. In order to prove his claim that these 5 foundations are innate, it should also be found in very young children. Fairness: As we have previously seen, fairness has been found across many cultures, and in monkeys. However, it is important to note that chimpanzees seem less bothered with fairness when it is not them which is being slighted. They will take more food when possible and if they are able to take food before their partner can, they will not help their partner reach their goal. Purity: Tybur et al 2016 and Terrizzi, Shook and McDaniel (2013) have both found evidence for moral disgust across multiple cultures (read these studies). And Purity can be explained by the Behavioural Immune System argument, that feelings of moral disgust at actions like sex before marriage may protect us from STDs in the same way that feelings of disgust at rotten food protects us from non-sexual diseases. Haidt has these evolutionary explanations for all of his dimensions. Harm grew out of the extended dependency of infants. Fairness was critical to reciprocal altruism and cooperation Loyalty allowed binding to a group Authority helped with accepting a Leviathan - a dominant male in the group Purity is part of the behavioural immune system Haidt argues that these foundations are about what we intuitively bring to our moral understanding, not what our morals ought to be. These aren't necessarily things which we reason out as being important to us, but our moral intuitions which we bring to the world. Haidt (2001): asked people morally repugnant questions and systematically removed their logical reasons for being against it. All that was left was their moral intuitions, they simply "didn't like" the idea of incest or having sex with a dead turkey (for example). Danovitch and Keil (2008): Young Humeans: They found that even children have an innate understanding of the importance of emotion and intuition in making moral judgements. They believed that a robot would be better at making logical judgements, but that a human was required for moral ones Graham, Haidt and Nosek (2009): Haidt points out that conservatives in America draw on all 5 moral foundations in building their morality, while liberals mostly draw on harm and fairness. This supposedly gives the republicans more foundations from which to draw which gives them an advantage against the democrats. Hidden tribes in US politics: This breaks down the 2 party divide into more detailed groups, each still follows the left-right axis, with those on the left focussing more on only fairness and harm, and those on the right caring equally about most of the foundations. Haidt argues that there are lessons to be learned for politics from his theories. The first of these is that Democrats should try to appeal to more diverse foundations when trying to appeal to centrist voters or trying to convert republican voters. They found that making an argument that it was unfair for trump to dodge the draft had little effect on conservatives (no effect on moderates and a small effect on liberals - who were already unlikely to vote for him). However, when they reframed the argument in terms of Loyalty (That trump had been disloyal to his nation) they found a significant reduction in participants' willingness to vote for Trump. This shows the importance of understanding the mindset and moral foundations of both sides of the political spectrum. Koleva et al (2012): found that moral foundations were the main thing underpinning the "cultural war" in America (the aggressive debate between the right and left, showing the relevance of moral foundations to political decision making. De Witt, Walker and O'Neill (in prep): Took a more individual approach to this problem. They took Remain voters and rated them on a scale of loyalty and fairness. They then showed them arguments for Brexit (relating to immigration, sovereignty and economy) which were framed from the loyalty or fairness perspective. They found that loyalty framed arguments were most effective with people high in loyalty and vice versa. Lewis and Bates (2010): Argued that it is likely that in-group favouritism has been coded for by evolution Challenges to MFT: If Moral foundations are innate and evolved, where are the genes for it? This is obviously harsh to expect, as we know of barely any genes for intelligence, it's very hard to find a gene "for" something. It is very rare for a single gene to code for complex traits, one example of such a thing happening was the FOXP2 gene for language/grammar. It doesn't do a fantastic job of differentiating libertarians. Haidt attempted to fix this by adding a 6th potential dimension, Liberty/Oppression. De-Witt argues that this may not be evolved, and may simply be a result of the cultural psyche of America being affected by Ayn Rand. The Liberty/Oppression dimension doesn't work so well outside of the US. Curry 2019: conducted a cross-cultural ethnographic analysis aimed at finding whether each culture would agree that his concepts of morality (based off morality for cooperation) were moral, and found that all but 1 did, and that was only because one moral priority superseded another. He thus argues that previously existing tools can explain the morality of those on the left and right, and that MFT is unnecessary. Jost: John Jost believes that it is immoral to argue that conservative morality is just as valid as liberal morality. He points out that it has been associated with greater levels of racism, hate-crime etc., and that it is possible for there to be a morally wrong morality. He is a liberal psychologist, Haidt is a centrist. The big 5 personality dimensions and G (general intelligence) were both created as a result of intensive analysis. The Big 5 came from linguistic analysis and G came from Spearman noticing a correlation between lots of different intelligence tests. In contrast, Moral foundations theory was more particular and subjective. It came about as a result of Haidt wanting 5 moral foundations for the 5 senses, and finding moral values which he saw universally and trying to make just-so evolutionary stories to explain them. Van Leeuwen and Park (2009): Argue that a belief in a dangerous world may mediate the Authority, Loyalty and Sanctity dimensions (the more conservative dimensions). Van de Vyer et al (2016): they tested 2031 participants (split into 2 groups) both 6 weeks before and 1 month after the London bombings. They found that after the bombings there was less emphasis on the fairness foundation, more emphasis on the in-group foundations (authority and loyalty), and more prejudice towards Muslims and Immigrants. It's possible that everyone cares about harm, but differs in their beliefs about the world as a dangerous place. So conservatives think that keeping out immigrants keeps them safe, while liberals don't think of immigrants as dangerous. Apparently, personality can explain some aspects of political decision making, but not as much as MFT (Find studies of personality and politics) De-Wit, Gjersoe and Rentfrow et al: They looked at attitudes to immigration in the UK, and found that MFT was correlated much more strongly than the Big 5. Look up Lewis and De-Wit also

holidays allow authenticity

Here it would seem that holidays provide the solution. These are situations more purely chosen based on desire rather than necessity, where cost is thrown out of the window (to an extent) and social responsibility is reduced due to the lack of people who know you to hold you accountable. Brown (2013) claims that "tourism offers an albeit temporary life that is simpler, freer, more spontaneous, more authentic". Wang (1999) described holidays as a "counterdose to the loss of true self" experienced in everyday life made available by moving to a liminal place where societal constraints are lifted. For some these transient periods of authenticity are so enticing that they decide to stay in the place that allows "an authentic existence that allows a simple, pure and original way of living" permanently (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009 in Brown, 2013). Brown (2013) goes further, claiming that tourism can have transformative effects even upon one's return. She describes tourism as a reprieve from everydayness which facilitates silence and allows time for reflection on the past and the future. She compares these traits to psychotherapy in their ability to enable a person to achieve self-realization, going so far as to describe tourism as a metaphorical therapist. Brown (2009), Lyons and Wearing, 2008 and many others have found that students on their gap year and backpackers experience significant changes to their behaviour upon their return, which may be wrought by their time to reflect on the need for authenticity. Alternatively, these changes could be brought about by changes to the personality or the need to conform to the stereotype of a gap year student, but evidence for Brown's claim is that the "search for self" is a common aim of backpackers (Cohen, 1979). Brown is quick to point out that not all tourism experiences are like this, but that they can under the correct circumstances serve as a catalyst for existential authenticity.

BIT 2012

In 2012 the Behavioural insights team found that highlighting a social norm of voting increased voting behaviour by 5%. Highlighting the social norm in your postcode increased it by 11.5%, and highlighting it in your town increased it by 15.5%!

Atypical groups - theory of mind

In this essay I will be investigating two atypical groups, one which experiences an atypical social environment, and one which develops atypically despite having a largely typical social environment. This essay will discuss the impact of social influences on theory of mind in neurotypical groups, the effect of atypical social influences on theory of mind development and atypical development despite normal social influences, before finally considering the consequences of delayed development of theory of mind.

Norms and climate change

Increasing public cooperation in stopping climate change provides a good case study for the power of all of these processes combined. There are significant differences between what the public believes and what the scientific consensus is. Van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Feinberg, & Maibach, (2015) found that making the norm among scientists (97% believe that climate change is real) salient lead to greater science acceptance and support for public action. Van der Linden (2014b) also found hearing relevant social referents such as family and friends talk about the risk of climate change amplified risk perception and intention to act. Schultz et al (2007) also found that highlighting energy consumption norms of a relevant ingroup (neighbours) caused people to adjust their own energy usage when those norms were promoted. This study does highlight one limitation of some of this work, which is that much of it may not lead to norm internalization without long term application. Because Schultz et al (2007) attempted to persuade people to change their energy consumption through the peripheral rather than the central route (Petty and Cacioppo ,1981), the participants did not internalize the norm and so the effect reduced over time once the study was completed. Thus it is important either to attempt to change these norms over an extended period of time or to utilize information to take a more central method of persuasion if we are to increase cooperation in the long term. Van der Linden (2015) found that combining an induced norm and provision of information led to the greatest decrease in bottled water consumption in the short term and intention to consume bottled water in the long term.

Chen and Lee 2008

Individuals high in extraversion and openness are more likely to take the peripheral route to attitude change than individuals high in agreeableness and conscientiousness.

(Woolfe, Want and Siegal (2002)

It is important to note that deaf children of deaf parents receive just as much communication as hearing children, and that these children do just as well as hearing controls in tests of theory of mind. They also found that found that even when factors such as syntax ability, mental age and executive functioning were taken into consideration, deaf children of non-signing parents still performed considerably worse than hearing children and deaf children of deaf parents. This gives powerful evidence for the assertion that social factors, rather than executive functioning or language ability, are what is changing in these children, and that these social factors may be the key cause of individual differences in typical groups

Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008

It was found that people tend to live in communities with similar lifestyles, personalities (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001) and political/religious ideologies (Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008). Rentfrow et al also found that people were actively choosing to migrate to these areas for ideological rather than financial or otherwise domestic reasons

Jokela (2009)

Jokela (2009) found that the five factors of personality were able to predict the probability of migration within and between US states, with high openness and low agreeableness increasing inter-state migration, and high extraversion increasing intra-state migration.

Jokela, Bleidorn, Lamb, Gosling & Rentfrow (2015)

Jokela, Bleidorn, Lamb, Gosling & Rentfrow (2015) found that not only did personality predict probability of migrating, but also preference in destination. They found that agreeable people sought areas which were more agreeable and which had factors which were beneficial to raising a family, and that open people sought areas which were more open and conducive to a more cosmopolitan way of life

Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke (2007)

Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke (2007) provides a degree of evidence for Loyalty/betrayal in infants, although it is confounded by the fact that infants prefer to listen to speakers of their native language (Moon, Cooper and Fifer, 1993)

Devine 1989

Knowledge and activation of a stereotype is similarly high in high and low prejudice subjects, however low prejudice subjects inhibit these stereotypes. o I.e. the mere presence of a stereotype can lead to knowledge of a stereotype and thus implicit associations between people who fit the stereotype and those stereotypes (similar to the representativeness heuristic). o Nonprejudiced responses are, according to the dissociation model, a function of intentional, controlled processes and require a conscious decision to behave in a nonprejudiced fashion. o Ronis, Yates, and Kirscht (in press) argued that elimination of a bad habit requires essentially the same steps as the formation of a habit. The individual must (a) initially decide to stop the old behavior, (b) remember the resolution, and (c) try repeatedly and decide repeatedly to eliminate the habit before the habit can be eliminated. In addition, the individual must develop a new cognitive (attitudinal and belief) structure that is consistent with the newly determined pattern of responses. o They build a dual factor theory - your personally designed framework has to race the implicit framework. The more you use your own one the more it will be strengthened (greased tracks) and the more likely it is to win out in controlling your behaviour o In summary, at minimum, the attitude and belief change process requires intention, attention, and time. During the change process an individual must not only inhibit automatically activated information but also intentionally replace such activation with nonprejudiced ideas and responses o This implies that it is a long and strenuous process.

Jost

Kuger, Jost and Noorbaloochi (2014) level a different criticism at Haidt, claiming that his definition of morality is not actually moral. They define morality as a philosophical truth rather than a form of social norms, and argue that 3 of Haidt's five foundations can lead to amoral or even immoral behaviour. The authors argue that many of the allegedly ''moral'' characteristics ascribed to conservatives by Haidt possess a striking resemblance to and are correlated with authoritarianism (a personality type characterized by conventionalism, submission, and aggression) which is associated with ingroup favouritism, sexism, homophobia, and punishment of social deviants (McAdams et al, 2008, Van Leeuwen and Park, 2009). They argue that these behaviours are immoral and as such, even if Haidt's moral foundations were true, humans would not be innately moral in the philosophical sense.

(Motyl, Iyer, Oishi, Trawalter, & Nosek, 2014)

Matt Motyl (Motyl, Iyer, Oishi, Trawalter, & Nosek, 2014) has found that people will also migrate to areas with similar ideologies to their own. It was found that people tend to live in communities with similar lifestyles, personalities (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001) and political/religious ideologies (Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008).

Yale attitude change studies

Much of the highly influential early research into persuasion came from the "Yale attitude change approach" led by Carl Hovland, which conceptualized persuasion as "who said what to whom" [Hovland, Janis and Kelley, 1953]. This approach hypothesized that factors related to source, nature of communication and nature of the audience affected the persuasiveness of communication. Their principle findings were that credible sources and attractive people, convincing arguments which did not appear to be targeted at the audience, and audiences which were undistracted aged between 18-25 or were less intelligent were all beneficial to persuasion. They also hypothesized that those who did not enjoy thinking, did not have enough knowledge of the situation or had low confidence were more likely to rely on experts or trustworthy sources in order to conserve their cognitive resources.

Benefits of authenticity

Multiple studies have found significant benefits of authenticity, with Goldman and Kernis (2001), Sheldon and Kasser (1995) and Wood et al (2008) all finding links between increased authenticity and improved mental health. Thus we can (to a limited extent) test whether people are more authentic in their chosen situation by seeing whether people are happier once they have migrated. Hogan and Holland (2003) found that not only are people happier when they fit their job, they tend to do better as well. Equally, Bleidorn, Schönbrodt, Gebauer, Rentfrow, Potter, and Gosling. (2016) have found that people were happier when their personalities fit their city.

Nook et al 2016

Nook et al. (2016) found that participants which had a high-empathy norm activated were more empathetic towards the victim (increased cooperation in the context of the norm) and were also more willing to donate money to an unrelated victim later (increased cooperation in a different context). One possible explanation for this is empathy altruism.

Autistic people as atypical

One alternative explanation of theory of mind deficits in autistic children explains these deficiencies in terms of autistic individuals' status as a neurological minority. The argument is that delayed learning of theory of mind may instead be explained by the difficulty involved in modelling the very different typical mind against their own.

Lillard, 1993

One possible explanation for this resilience to the positive influence of social factors is suggested by a common characteristic of autistic children: that they often have difficulty engaging in pretend play. Leslie (1991) argued that theory of mind and pretend play deficits in autistic children may both be caused by deficits in attributing mental states to others. He believed that theory of mind is involved in pretend play regardless of whether or not the people involved are real. Thus, Leslie claimed that the deficits in both theory of mind and pretend play could be explained by difficulties in attributing mental states to others. An alternative argument is that pretend play evokes higher level cognition in children (Lillard, 1993) which helps them to develop socially relevant executive function. As executive function has been shown to be correlated with performance on theory of mind tasks (Devine and Hughes, 2014), it could be argued instead that deficits in pretend play are either: caused by deficits in the same theory of mind-related executive functions which are strengthened by play, or that they can lead to deficits in theory of mind (as the child is unable to engage in this higher-level social cognition)

Wainwright, Russell, Patterson 2004

Participants drawn from a national sample and matched on demographic characteristics. Looked at adolescents Same level of psychosocial adjustment and romantic relationships and sexual behaviour were the same.

Self-verification theory

People were also found to be driven to migrate through incongruity between their own ideologies and those of the people around them, with this effect being demonstrated both observationally and experimentally. Swann (1983) points out that people seek out not only a physical but also a social environment which fits their self-image. His self-verification theory claims (with significant empirical support: Swann, Stein-Seroussi, Giesler, 1992; Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987; etc.) that people seek out people who will confirm their self-views, whether those are positive or negative, due to the desire to have a coherent self-concept.

Shaked, Gamliel and Yirmiya, 2006

Recent studies (Shaked, Gamliel and Yirmiya, 2006) have compared siblings of children with autism to siblings of children without autism and children with autism themselves. They found that siblings of children with autism appeared to be "resilient" to the factors affecting theory of mind in autistic children, implying that the social factors required for proper development of theory of mind are in fact present in these households, autistic children are just resilient to their beneficial effects.

Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, and Griskevicius (2007)

Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, and Griskevicius (2007) found that telling students that a majority of their peers "only drink 4 units" at a party led to increased alcohol consumption in those who normally drank less, they named this the boomerang effect. They found similar results in energy consumption. They found that those using less energy than the norm increased their consumption up to the norm, but that this effect could be countered by adding a smiley face to those doing well in order to indicate that their behaviour was desired. When the smiley face was added, highlighting the norm reduced household energy consumption by 1-3% across millions of households, which constitutes a substantial increase in co-operation to combat climate change.

Sheldon et al (1997)

Sheldon et al (1997) attempted to correlate personality and authenticity, which they defined as "behaviour that is phenomenally experienced as being authored by the self or internally caused". They point out that self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) assumes that not all situations are conducive to authentic behaviour, which we can extrapolate to mean that if authenticity is desired, then one's chosen situation should lend itself to authenticity. Their results indicated that individuals had a general level of authenticity which they manifested across different situations, but that said level could fluctuate depending on the exact situation. This suggests that those individuals who never conformed in Asch's study were high in authenticity. This study used robust statistical practices, using a 0.01 significance level and conducting their regressions thrice. They also found that high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness coupled with low levels of neuroticism were associated with high authenticity Their results indicated that individuals had a general level of authenticity which they manifested across different situations, but that said level could fluctuate depending on the exact situation. This suggests that those individuals who never conformed in Asch's study were high in authenticity. This study used robust statistical practices, using a 0.01 significance level and conducting their regressions thrice. They also found that high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness coupled with low levels of neuroticism were associated with high authenticity, although it is important to note that these same results could be explained by their participants (who were students) exhibiting these traits, and thus feeling more authentic when in situations which elicited them. A crucial finding of this study was that they found differing levels of authenticity in different situations, despite many of the situations being chosen by the participants. This speaks to the societal expectation of inauthenticity in most situations. Whether it's in one's choice of job, relationship or neighbourhood certain societal expectations still exist which will often stop them from behaving exactly as their personalities would dictate. They found that relative to the child and romantic partner roles, participants felt significantly less authentic in the student and employee roles and more authentic in the friend role. They also found that there was a correlation of 0.71 between levels of authenticity experienced in all roles, implying that each individual may have a general level of authenticity.

Consequences of poor Theory of Mind

So far we have seen the causes of poor theory of mind development, but we have yet to see the consequences. Development of theory of mind is not only affected by social relationships, but also affects them in turn. Hughes and Leekam (2004) found that there was a weak positive association between theory of mind and popularity as well as prosocial behaviour. This implies that those atypical groups which struggle with theory of mind will be less popular and less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour. This finding is especially dangerous when you consider that social rejection has been proven to negatively affect development in children, and can even put the child at risk of developing depressive symptoms (Chung et al, 2007). These consequences do vary dependent on the context however, as studies have found that poor theory of mind can actually protect children against the affects of having an unloving mother, but that it can boost self-concept with a loving mother (Cahill, Deater-Deckard, Pike & Hughes, 2007). Finally, it's important to note that not all of the negative impacts of these atypical groups can be accredited to poor theory of mind, as Ozonoff and Miller (1995) found that, while autistic children could be trained to improve their theory of mind, their social behaviour and popularity remained unchanged

Social traps and collective action problems

Social traps are a somewhat different form of social dilemma, in which individuals or groups pursue immediate rewards that later prove to have negative or even lethal consequences. These social dilemmas best fit to real-world dilemmas such as climate change and public health, as they relate to a failure to change one's ways despite the negative consequences. Driving petrol cars or not recycling provides immediate reward, but both have the long-term negative consequence of causing climate change. Nyborg et al (2016) define global problems such as climate change or voting in terms of a sort of reverse public goods game called a "collective action problem", in which a group benefits from a certain action, but no individual has sufficient incentive to act alone. One example of such a dilemma would be the purchase of electric cars: If everyone buys electric cars, there will be more charging ports, but there is little incentive to buy an electric car due to the scarcity of charging ports.

Curry 2019

The "cooperative approach to morality" is an umbrella term used to describe the vast array of researchers claiming that morality and moral behaviour evolved in order to encourage cooperation so that we could live and thrive in large groups. Curry (2019) recently used non-zero-sum game theory in an attempt to provide a scientifically rigorous theoretical foundation for this school of thought. They attempted to link accepted examples of cooperation with their corresponding types of morality, and then conducted a cross-cultural ethnographic study to see whether these "moral" behaviours were truly seen as morally good across cultures. They found that across 60 cultures, 961 out of 962 observations of cooperative behaviour were given a positive moral valence, and the only outlier was explained by one type of morality (respect for bravery) outweighing another (respect for property). They also found that these moral cooperative behaviours were observed in most societies, with each society exhibiting on average 4.4 examples of moral cooperation. These 60 cultures were specifically chosen to be as diverse as possible, and the fact that the moral valence of these cooperative actions was almost universally positive suggests that cooperation and group cohesion behaviours are tied to morality. While this implies that at least some aspects of cooperative morality are universal, it this does not prove that they are innate. In order to answer this question, it is important to investigate the ontogeny of cooperative behaviour, on both an intra and interspecies level.

(Fehr and Fischbacker, 2004).

The level of cooperation among non-related individuals found in humans sets us apart from almost all other species, and whether through legal enforcement or tacit agreement this cooperation seems to be enabled by the presence and enforcement of social norms

Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983

The relevance of the Elaboration-Likelihood-Model (ELM) to commercial interest in changing attitudes is emphasized by the fact that its founders have applied it directly to marketing (Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983). This study attempted to determine when consumers would actively process product-relevant information and when they would be more cursory in their analysis of adverts. They found that level of involvement was strongly correlated with level of elaboration. They defined involvement as personal relevance, which they manipulated by telling participants either that the product they were reviewing the advert for would soon be available in their area and that they would receive one at the end of the trial, or that that the product would be available far away and that they would be rewarded with an unrelated product. They theorized that this relationship was caused by increasing relevance of the information increasing motivation and thus making participants more likely to take the central route. There is extensive evidence for this relationship, with central cues such as quality of arguments found to be more important in conditions of high involvement (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Petty, Cacioppo, and Heesacker 1981) and peripheral cues such as expertise or attractiveness of a message source having a greater impact in conditions of low involvement (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Petty, Cacioppo, and Heesacker 1981). One interesting study (Petty and Cacioppo, 1980) showed that normally peripheral cues such as attractiveness of source can become central cues when they are seen as relevant, such as when advertising hair or beauty products. One additional finding of Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann was that low involvement lead to less correlation between attitude and purchase intentions, which they claimed provided evidence that the central route lead to longer lasting attitudinal change and was a better predictor of behaviour. While this finding initially seems valid, the fact that they simulated involvement by varying product availability in the participants' area may have led those in the low involvement condition to believe it unlikely that they would have the opportunity to purchase the item, possibly affecting their purchasing intention and making this a dubious claim. The value for brands of generating involvement in their target audience is still clear however, given Petty et al.'s other findings that higher involvement led to greater memory of the brand. Failing that, it seemed that the presence of a famous endorser increased brand-memory under low involvement conditions.

Kitty Genovese (1964) and Latane and Darley (1968):

The murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 gripped New York and all of America, and led to a massive surge of research into the phenomena known as the bystander effect... She was returning home early in the morning after working at a restaurant. She was attacked by a man called Winston Mosely. She screamed for her life as he was attacking her. Her screams were so loud that it scared Mosely - he was afraid that he would get caught as lights were coming on. Mosely left, and then returned later when she couldn't get into her flat. ¾ of hour after the attack began, Kitty was dead. 38 people reported hearing her screams (later estimates suggested ~12 people), but nobody offered any assistance or even bothered to call the police. Many people at the time talked about urban decay - people living in cities not having any sense of community. People wanted to know how we could explain such a horrific act, and Darley and Latane, who were New Yorkers themselves, developed the theory of Bystanderism to answer this desire. They argued that it wasn't that people didn't care about the victim, but that in each-others' presence, they were influenced not to take action. One of the first factors which they posited which might influence Bystanderism was diffusion of responsibility. This argued that the more people who were available to help someone in need, the less each individual person felt responsibility to act, as said responsibility was diffused among everyone involved. There is some evidence for this being involved in the murder of Kitty Genovese, as a number of people who were interviewed said that they did assume that someone else was going to call the police or help. Latane and Darley (1968) conducted a number of studies to prove their Bystander effect. They wanted to know whether people were more likely to help when they were alone vs when they were in the presence of others. They sent male students to a room to complete a survey, they were either alone, with 2 other real participants, or with 2 confederates. After a few minutes, the room began to fill with smoke. They found that people who were alone intervened fastest, people in groups of 3 were almost half as likely to have raised the alarm by 6 minutes, and those with confederates were even less likely. Could this also be explained by conformity? Darley and Latane did loads of experiments like this - such as students falling and dropping their books, and always found that people were more likely to help them if no-one else was around Find these studies These studies also support the idea that situations determine the way that we behave. However, personality psychologists have argued that most helping behaviour is planned, and that people are only rarely in situations in which spontaneous helping is required. People help friends and family more than strangers, and so personality and type of social relationship will be stronger predictors of planned helping than spontaneous helping. As such, they argue that these experiments represent exceptional deviations from the norm, not how people's personality normally makes them act.

Changing implicit attitudes

There are 2 main methods which have been used to change implicit attitudes, changing associative structure, or changing pattern of activation. Attempts to change associative structure focus on forming new associations through stimulus-pairing. Dijksterhuis (2004) demonstrated that pairing of self-related words with positive adjectives in a conditioned stimulus task increased self-esteem, Blair et al 2001 found that priming with counter-stereotypical mental imagery reduced implicit biases, and Hollands and Marteau (2011) found that pairing of unhealthy food images with aversive images reduced unhealthy eating. Another way to change implicit attitudes is through differential pattern activation (changing the context within which the associations are made). Pattern activation presupposes that the attitude object is already represented in a multifaceted manner and that the presence of particular context cues activates different associative patterns reflecting different subsets of this representation. Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) were able to reduce prejudice against blacks by first showing participants pictures of admired blacks and disliked whites. Rudman and Lee (2002) also found that exposure to violent rap music led white participants to show more negative associative evaluations of Black people. One limitation of these techniques is that it's unclear whether these changes in implicit attitudes persist long term, and as such Gawronski and Bodenhausen suggest a process of repeated exposure to these techniques such that the new implicit associations become more prevalent than the old ones in an individual's experience.

The theory of planned behaviour Ajzen (1991, 2006):

The theory of planned behaviour is a model for how social norms, attitudes and perceived control combine together to create intention to act, and how that intention to act relates to actual behaviour. The theory involves 4 stages, beliefs, what those beliefs influence, intention to act, action. Normative beliefs translate into subjective norms, i.e. people's perception of norms. Behavioural beliefs translate into attitude towards a behaviour Control beliefs lead into perceived behavioural control. These 3 factors then combine together to create intention to act. For example: You might have an attitude that people should help those in need, which is made relevant when you see a homeless man fall over on the tube. However you know that social norms dictate that you should ignore other people on the tube, but your perceived behavioural control is high - you think that you will be able to help. In this case norms are outweighed by high perceived behavioural control and attitudinal predisposition to help, creating an intention to act. However your ACTUAL behavioural control is lower than you thought and you can't bring yourself to act, so your behaviour is to do nothing. Actual behavioural control has some input into perceived behavioural control, but not complete input. Early theories mostly focussed on the impact of attitude on intention to act, but we have started gradually reintroducing the social world in which attitudes sit. Areas in more detail: Normative beliefs and subjective norms: normative beliefs are the behavioural expectations of key referent groups - for example, people watching will disapprove of what you are about to do. These give rise to subjective norms, but your motivation to comply with these norms could be very variable, you may not care what the referent group thinks (this fits in with Sander's definition that norms must be from socially relevant groups). Knowledge of these norms can actually be a better predictor of behaviour than attitudes. You pay attention to your group membership every time you act. You can predict someone's behaviour better by looking at where they place themselves in the group and what the norms of the group are than by assessing them individually. This idea then moved into a territory which was then picked up by social representations theory (this might well be very important to know about) Social representations theory: This theory has its origins in Durkheim's individual vs collective representations. Moscovici focusses on shared representations which allow us to make important social information obvious and accessible by other members of the group. This can be in the form of texts, messages etc. Anchoring is key here (likely that your own ideas don't stray far from that of the group). Apparently the downside of the theory is that it doesn't explain why some norms are more important than others. Read social representations theory Behavioural beliefs: These are your beliefs that the planned behaviour will have the desired outcome, based on subjective probability. Attitude towards the behaviour: people have a belief about what behaviours are best for certain challenges. They might have a positive or negative evaluation/attitude towards the behaviour involved. The strength of our belief in this behaviour may be strengthened or weakened if it doesn't work. The fact that your odd beliefs don't always work out, doesn't mean that you won't believe in them. For example, people often believe things which don't match even their own experience, if praying for rain doesn't work, you might justify it as: "Maybe I'm not praying hard enough" - you may have low perceived behavioural control. Intention: Intention is a readiness to act in a specific way. This is the point where the 3 influences interact, and while it is essential for actually performing the action, it can be affected by many other factors. This intention does not have to be conscious. The intention is prior to action, but may only be revealed through action. Perceived control beliefs: this is your perception of your ability to do something, if we don't think we have control, our attitudes may well not be expressed. This doesn't have to be related to poor self-esteem, it could also be related to your environment. For example: If lots of people in your environment disagree with you, you might not try to persuade them to your side, because you don't think that they are likely to be argued around to your views. Actual behavioural control: experiencing successful performance (especially in the face of adversity) can increase our sense of self-control and will increase the strength of the attitude-behaviour relationship. Behavioural control ties in to the idea of self-efficacy (Bandura 1997). This has its origins in social learning theory. Self-efficacy beliefs are routed in self-reflection and can be learned vicariously. They are people's judgements of their capability to organise and execute courses of action. This has the effect that people's levels of motivation and actions are based more on what they believe to be true than what is objectively true. Bandura broke down self-efficacy into 4 major processes: Cognitive: high self-efficacy have focussed attention and non-defeatist attributions. Motivational: difficult tasks are seen as challenges rather than threats for people with high self-efficacy and they recover well from set-backs. Affective: people with high self-efficacy have an enhanced sense of well-being and lower anxiety Selection: people with high self-efficacy set realistic challenges rather than futile goals for themselves Non-defeatist attributions are very important. These come in when things go wrong. It's about how you handle what happened, and what you attribute to your failures. If you blame yourself you might give up, if you think you didn't have enough practice etc. you're more likely to continue. A defeatist attribution is: personal and irredeemable. If you are not defeatist you will see it as something which you can do something about. Experience of overcoming defeat can be very valuable in building up a sense of self-efficacy. People low in self-efficacy rarely choose to do anything. Bandura believes that the most important thing for self-efficacy is authentic mastery (experience not of simply thinking of doing things, but actually doing them). They best way to build it is through success against adversity. If you never fail you will be more vulnerable to failure once you experience it. Vicarious learning is also important. Role models are importance for self-efficacy, they could prove that something you want to do is possible (i.e. women in engineering). Role models can also be damaging however. If you observe your role models putting lots of effort in and failing, you may decide to give up. It can actually be easier for a role-model to undermine your sense of self-efficacy than improve it. Mentors which encourage persistence and give feedback will increase self-efficacy.

Cahill, Deater-Deckard, Pike & Hughes, 2007

These consequences do vary dependent on the context however, as studies have found that poor theory of mind can actually protect children against the affects of having an unloving mother, but that it can boost self-concept with a loving mother

McCue, Bacon and Lykken, 1993

These psychologists point out that while random assignment allows experimenters to reduce experimenter bias in assortment of participants, it denies individuals the ability to choose their environment and minimizes individual differences. This cycle of personality begetting personality is powerful, as studies have found that monozygotic twins actually become more behaviourally-alike with age, as they begin to seek out situations which confirm their personality and thus exhibit those traits more (McCue, Bacon and Lykken, 1993).

(Sparman and Walton, 2017)

They experimented with introducing a norm of not eating meat. They found that with no norm, roughly 20% of people avoided meat. When they introduced a static norm (simply saying how many people are vegetarian now) they number of people avoiding meat actually went down, as it highlighted that they were in the minority. However, when they used a dynamic norm - that "more and more people are becoming vegetarian", they found that around 33% of people avoided meat! They labelled this effect "Pre-conformity"

Social dilemmas:

These are situations, both in cooperation games and in real life, in which an individual receives a higher pay-off for defecting than for cooperating, but in which the group does better if everyone cooperates. Examples of real life social dilemmas include: Climate change Voting Public health Charitable giving Prejudice and racism Genocide Crime Social inequality Social norms can be used to facilitate cooperation through building trust during social dilemmas. Read Van Der Linden 2018: the future of behavioural insights. He talks about how must successful nudges are social nudges. Goldstein et al (2006): tags were put on towel racks asking people to reuse towels for a number of reasons. They found that only 16% of people reused towels if the argument was about the hotel saving energy. Asking people to help save the environment got 31% to reuse towels. Saying that almost 75% of guests reuse towels increased the reuse rate to 44% and saying that 75% of guests who stayed in this room reused towels increased towel reuse to 49%. This is because the norm is more local and thus relevant. Schultz et al (2007): They conducted a study trying to get people to reduce their energy usage. They found that including a norm/social nudge in an home energy report telling people whether they used more or less power/gas than their neighbours reduced the energy usage of those above the norm, but also increased the gas use of those below it, as they thought that they should be using more! They coined this the Boomerang effect. They had a massive sample size of millions of households. They managed to remove the boomerang effect by putting a smiley face on the bills of people who were below the norm, and a frowny face on people who were above it. There was a change in energy usage of about 1-3%, which doesn't sound like much but across millions of households ends up having a massive effect. Gerber, Green and Larimer (2008): They sent people letters imploring them to vote and either appealed to their civic duty, used the Hawthorne effect, appealed to the self, or told them that their neighbours were voting. This had the greatest impact on voting behaviour, they increased voter turnout by 8% (sample size of 180,000 people) Burnham and Hare (2007): they found that putting a robot with human eyes on screen increased cooperation (operationalized as first-round contributions in a public goods game) by 29%. Panagopoulos and van der Linden (2016) then applied this to voting behaviour by putting pictures of human eyes on posters telling people to vote. They also found a small increase in voter turnout. Blanchard et al 1991: They argued that normative appropriateness of prejudice was strongly correlated (r = 0.96) with reported level of prejudice. Although these numbers could simply be reflecting social acceptability bias in responding, or simply in behaving. Promoting public health: Burger and Shelton 2011: they found that placing a sign about exercise increased people taking the stairs by 1%, but placing a sign about social norms increased people taking the stairs by 6%. These effects were robust for at least 1 week after the signs were taken away. This would also benefit the environment, as taking the lift uses energy. Another example of this is opt-out vs opt-in for organ donation after death. Initially people thought that increased rates of organ donation were caused by people not being bothered to change their status, but it turns out that the government changing its status signals a change in social norm and makes people change their attitudes. Martin and Randal (2011): Charitable giving They manipulated the donation boxes in museums. The boxes started either empty, filled with 50 cents, filled with 5 dollars, or filled with 50 dollars. They found that the boxes with money in them received significantly more donations. They found that the effect was much less for bills, because very few people put bills in these boxes. People were quite willing when it came to coins however. Limitations of norms are that they must be focal and salient to affect behaviour. In many situations, norms don't predict behaviour because norms are not focal or salient. This was found by Van der Linden (2011). Public goods games as social dilemmas: Things like the prisoners dilemma are good examples. The best strategy in these scenarios was found by Axelrod in 1980. It is known as Tit-For-Tat, it starts off cooperating and then simply does whatever the opponent does back to it. It has recently been found that "Tit-for-tat with a memory of 1" is better, this simply allows one defect before it starts punishing.

Petty and Capiocco 1981

This early work by Hovland et al spawned a bevy of research into persuasion which influenced and was later synthesized by Petty and Cacioppo (1981) in their elaboration likelihood model. They argued that all persuasion research was unified by the use of one of two distinct routes to attitude change, which they termed the central and peripheral routes. The central route led to long-term attitude change, which was predictive of behaviour through careful and thoughtful consideration of the information presented. The peripheral route relied on heuristic cues present in the stimulus which were generally unrelated to the logical quality of the stimulus, and led to shorter-term attitude changes which were less predictive of behaviour. They theorized that whether people used the central or peripheral route was controlled by their level of "elaboration", which was determined by an individual's motivation and ability to evaluate the argument being presented. Factors such as personal interest (Janis and Fesbach, 1953), and need for cognition (Steinhart and Wyer, 2009) affect motivation, while factors such as distraction, cognitive busyness and relevant knowledge affect ability to process. The greater the motivation and ability to process information, the higher the elaboration, and thus the likelihood of taking the central route. An individual low in motivation or ability takes the peripheral route, and is more likely to rely on heuristics such as attractiveness and credibility of the source (in line with Hovland's findings) and cues from context and their own mood. There will be less of a correlation between their attitudes and thoughts (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). One moderating factor of the relationship between thoughts generated in response to an argument and attitudes is an individual's confidence in those thoughts (Petty, Brinol and Tormala 2002). If people are unconfident in their positive thoughts regarding an argument they might not develop a more positive attitude, conversely lack of confidence in ones' negative thoughts regarding an argument increases the likelihood of accepting the argument anyway based on peripheral cues. Thus, appealing to the central route may be more effective in confident than non-confident individuals. The relevance of the Elaboration-Likelihood-Model (ELM) to commercial interest in changing attitudes is emphasized by the fact that its founders have applied it directly to marketing (Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983). This study attempted to determine when consumers would actively process product-relevant information and when they would be more cursory in their analysis of adverts. They found that level of involvement was strongly correlated with level of elaboration. They defined involvement as personal relevance, which they manipulated by telling participants either that the product they were reviewing the advert for would soon be available in their area and that they would receive one at the end of the trial, or that that the product would be available far away and that they would be rewarded with an unrelated product. They theorized that this relationship was caused by increasing relevance of the information increasing motivation and thus making participants more likely to take the central route. There is extensive evidence for this relationship, with central cues such as quality of arguments found to be more important in conditions of high involvement (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Petty, Cacioppo, and Heesacker 1981) and peripheral cues such as expertise or attractiveness of a message source having a greater impact in conditions of low involvement (Petty and Cacioppo 1979; Petty, Cacioppo, and Heesacker 1981). One interesting study (Petty and Cacioppo, 1980) showed that normally peripheral cues such as attractiveness of source can become central cues when they are seen as relevant, such as when advertising hair or beauty products. One additional finding of Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann was that low involvement lead to less correlation between attitude and purchase intentions, which they claimed provided evidence that the central route lead to longer lasting attitudinal change and was a better predictor of behaviour. While this finding initially seems valid, the fact that they simulated involvement by varying product availability in the participants' area may have led those in the low involvement condition to believe it unlikely that they would have the opportunity to purchase the item, possibly affecting their purchasing intention and making this a dubious claim. The value for brands of generating involvement in their target audience is still clear however, given Petty et al.'s other findings that higher involvement led to greater memory of the brand. Failing that, it seemed that the presence of a famous endorser increased brand-memory under low involvement conditions.

Modern families

This is an umbrella term which includes families which were unknown or hidden until the 70s and/or only recently became legal. Examples include: Lesbian mother families Gay father families Single mothers by choice Families created by assisted reproductive technologies -IVF, egg donation, donor insemination, embryo donation and surrogacy Children can now have 5 parents: Sperm donor, Egg donor, Surrogate mother, Two social parents Things like IVF used to be very controversial, when Louise Brown was born (the first IVF baby) the doctors who helped it happen had to go into hiding! There are now more than 8 million IVF babies worldwide Gay marriage is now legal in 27 countries

Difficulties in changing attitudes - individual differences

Those wanting to change others' attitudes face a number of hurdles, not least of which is the vast interpersonal differences in their target audiences. This essay has already shown that differences such as age, intelligence, need for cognition, confidence, familiarity with the relevant subject, cognitive busyness, personal relevance, and interest can all have significant impacts on the ways in which an argument is interpreted. Personality factors can also have an impact, with individuals high in agreeableness and conscientiousness more likely to take the central route than those high in openness and extraversion (Chen and Lee, 2008). Orientation towards affective or cognitive arguments mediates the effectiveness of "I think" vs "I feel" language in arguments (Mayer and Tormala, 2010). This is but a small sample of an exhaustive list of individual differences which would seem to make the job of advertisers and political influencers nearly impossible, and yet some general processes can be identified and utilized to change people's attitudes. One important fact that many of these studies miss is that attitudes only become important when making decisions, and no one knows this better than advertisers. As such much of the commercial research into attitude change focuses on behavioural changes as evidence of attitudinal changes. While short term attitude changes can cause someone to make a one-time purchase, political activists and brands are more likely to want long-term attitudinal change which can be achieved largely through the central route. Angst and Agarwal (2009) found that increasing involvement lead to increased attitude change regarding information privacy in healthcare, and Flynn et al (2013) found that cognitive arguments were most effective at reducing smoking in at-risk teens. Having said that, there are circumstances in which taking the peripheral route can be beneficial. Te'eni-Harari et al (2009) found that children had reduced experience with many topics and thus reduced familiarity with them, and so were more likely to take the peripheral route. Additionally, audiences in areas of high distraction such as during their commute are unlikely to take the central route. In these circumstances peripheral strategies such as attractive expert sources and positive cues in the argument can be most important. Reijmersdal (2009) found that brand-placement in media increased brand-memory but worsened brand-attitude when it was obvious, as people didn't like feeling as though they are being influenced. This matches Hovland's findings that arguments were most effective when they didn't seem to be targeted at the audience. In this scenario they found that implicit product placement worked best, increasing brand-recall while avoiding the defensive reaction.

Norms and real world social dilemmas

Thus, norms which either promote or undermine cooperation can be important guides when in socially ambiguous situations, such as in social dilemmas. A social dilemma is a situation in which an individual profits from selfishness unless everyone chooses the selfish alternative, in which case the whole group loses. These social dilemmas underlie many of the most pressing global-political issues, from climate change to public health and welfare. Thus, when formal institutions such as laws and treaties fail, governments should turn to social norms to motivate people to act on these important issues

What is innateness?

Up until the mid-20th century a trait had to be hardwired, universal and unchangeable by experience to be considered innate, but this requirement has shifted in recent years thanks to advancements in scientific understanding of the brain. One definition of "innate" comes from the philosophical school of Innatism. This holds that the mind is born already containing certain ideas and knowledge, which experience must then unlock. This idea that the brain could innately hold knowledge was not initially grounded in biology but has recently received some evidence from the Blue Brain project (Perin, Berger, Markram, 2011). Similarly, Haidt defines innateness as a trait which is built-in but malleable, in his words: "organized in advance of experience". This definition is subtly different from that of Innatism, as Innatism holds that experience unlocks innate knowledge, while Haidt believes that experience can "revise" the "first-draft" provided by genetics and in doing so subtly change this innate behaviour or knowledge, we shall judge Haidt's claims of innate morality by his definition of innateness

Rogers 1975

While commercial companies are most likely to attempt to change opinions of their product through persuasion, those who wish to change attitudes towards an idea or a concept have an additional available route in fear appeals. Protection motivation theory (Rogers, 1975) describes a fear appeal as "a communication which describes negative consequences if someone doesn't follow your recommended course of action". They found that altering number of references to danger, the level of personalization and the absence of presence of films all affected the level of fear present. Rogers claims that the most important aspects of a fear response are: the magnitude of noxiousness of depicted event, likelihood of event occurring if advice isn't followed, and likelihood that advice can avoid the event. These techniques have been used to great effects in stopping smoking (Rogers and Deckner, 1975), conserving energy (Hass, Bagley and Rogers, 1975), abstaining from alcohol (Stainback and Rogers, 1983) and helping endangered animal species (Shelton and Rogers, 1981).

Norm internalization

While it is not necessary for people to have internalized a norm for it to affect behaviour in a short-term social dilemma presented in the lab, internalization does become more of an issue when striving for the long-term change which is necessary to combat real-world social dilemmas such as climate change. Van der Linden (2015) found that the introduction of a norm of reduced energy consumption dramatically reduced energy consumption of Princeton students during the 24 days in which the study ran, but that energy consumption rapidly returned to normal with the end of the study. This implies that the students had not internalized the norm, as once the norm was no longer active and salient, they stopped conforming to it. Voigtlander and Voth (2014) found that internalization is more effective when it can tap into pre-existing beliefs (Voigtlander and Voth 2014) but obviously this cannot always be the case when trying to affect change. Broockman and Kalla (2016) found that direct experience and central route persuasion seemed to lead to increased internalization, and Van der Linden (Gintis, 2003) found that internalization increased with time.

Warneken & Tomasello 2008 + Hepach et al, 2012b

Young children spontaneously help adults, and seem to be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated to do so (Warneken & Tomasello 2008). Not only this, the motivation is simply the need to see a person helped, not to gain some kind of reciprocal reward (Hepach et al, 2012b)

Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo (1971):

Zimbardo has received an incredible amount of attention for the 1 "study" which he conducted throughout his entire career. This study aimed to assess dispositional versus situational explanations of brutality in prisons, but had no underlying theory going in. The study involved a simulation of a prison in which participants were randomly assigned to be either a guard or a prisoner. They wanted to know how the prison environment would affect the participants' behaviour (situation), and whether personality would mediate this effect. Guards were given uniforms and glasses to reduce individuality, and local police were brought in to publicly arrest the "prisoners" in order to increase the validity of the study. The participants were taken to a simulated prison in the Stanford Psychology department basement. The experiment was originally supposed to last for 2 weeks (14 days), but only lasted a few before it was shut down by an outside researcher. Things began to escalate after about a day. Some of the guards became much more physically and verbally aggressive, and some of the inmates began to rebel. One of the prisoners went on a hunger strike, one was put into solitary confinement (a closet) At one point parents were invited to have visiting hours with their children, and they were very concerned about their sons. There was a sense as though they could not leave the simulated prison. Zimbardo also got involved, he played the role of a prison warden, he began to belittle them and question their masculinity if they were distressed. This is one of the most compromising decisions made by any researcher ever. He claims that he too was swept away by the power of the situation (hence showing the incredible power of the situation over behaviour), but this is a dubious claim given that it was a situation which he created! The study only ended when an outside researcher came to check in on the experiment and saw the extent to which it had deteriorated... The "study" was so ethically and methodologically flawed that their analyses were never published in a journal, only in a book. Despite this fact, this study is one of the most famous pieces of research both within and outside psychology. Due to this fact, this study has also contributed to the situation side of the person-situation debate. They claimed that the only small contribution made by personality in this (presumably) drastic shift in behaviour caused by the situation, was the fact that those prisoners who were high in authoritarianism were more likely to stay in the prison until the end (as 5 participants had left early). However there have since been a number of critiques both of the experiment in general and of this conclusion. Nick Cassalov and striker (find other studies, this one does not show up) conducted a repeat of this study with the BBC in better ethical guidelines and found nothing so extreme as what Zimbardo found. They and others with similar findings believed that there may have been a significant selection bias in the original study. The advert which Zimbardo put in the paper included asking for participants to participate in a study of "prison life", which one could argue would stop many from applying to experience such a situation for 2 weeks. It wouldn't be too crazy to claim that people who are willing to sign up to spend 1-2 weeks of their time in prison might be different to people who aren't. Indeed, another repeat of the experiment run in 2007 by Carnahan and McFarland used 2 separate conditions, one in which the phrase "prison life" was used in the advert, and one in which it was omitted. They found that compared to volunteers in the control study (in which the phrase prison life was not used) prison volunteers in the second study scored significantly higher on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism (a subclinical variation of psychopathology), narcissism and social dominance, and lower on measures of empathy and altruism! This seems to show that rather than personality having little role in the outcome of the Prison Experiment, it may in fact have had a key influence! It is also always worth mentioning that the Zimbardo study had a tiny sample size - too small to conduct reliable and robust statistical analyses

Gerber, Green and Larimer (2008)

found that highlighting the voting norm of your neighbourhood increased voter turnout by 8%, which was far more effective than appealing to civic duty or stating that their attendance was being recorded

Hollands and Marteau (2011)

found that pairing of unhealthy food images with aversive images reduced unhealthy eating - although they didnt see whether the change had persisted long term

Blair et al 2001

found that priming with counter-stereotypical mental imagery reduced implicit biases, and

Kallgren, Reno and Cialdini (2000)

found that social norms were most powerful when they were intense (powerfully held), crystallized (held by most), focal to the behaviour in question, salient, expressed by a valued in-group and internalized

Siblings:

o About 80% of people in the western world have a sibling o Sibling relationship is the most enduring - to the extent that sibling bereavement is as good a predictor as the death of a partner. Potentially because you've known them almost all your life, you're related (gives you a sense of mortality) and you're not related to it. o Birth order differences do exist, but they seem to be very minor in terms of comparison to inter-family comparisons. By and large the quality of sibling relationships clusters per family - with factors such as maternal warmth having a significant impact. o Psychoanalytic theory claims that at a young age, siblings can often have a death wish to each other - they feel that the sibling stole all the attention from them etc. o The sibling relationship is the only close relationship (other than parents) that is involuntary, and even your parents have chosen to become a parent - neither sibling chose to be born or related. They are someone who is in close proximity to you for most of your development who you didn't chose to have there. o Siblings only share 50% of their genes ON AVERAGE - you may find differences in relatedness from sibling pair to sibling pair. o Relatedness between siblings increases with age - as you start to be able to choose your own environment as you age, so you might both select similar niches. o Siblings have a vertical relationship with their parents (because one is a caregiver and one is a dependent), with their peers they have a horizontal relationship because they're at a similar level, and with their siblings they have a diagonal relationship because one tends to have a more developed role, but not by much - so the older will occasionally try to care for the other.

Good point if they ask to combine modern family and nuclear family in an answer:

o Bowlby's original attachment study thought that mothers were integral, which would make single fathers and gay parents far worse than nuclear families or even lesbian or single mother families. However it has been found that they are actively better!

• Conflict:

o Conflict appears to be quite frequent - young siblings engage in conflict approximately 3.5 times an hour. This can be a good thing, as it gives them a practice ground for conflict resolution and makes them better at understanding others' thoughts and beliefs. o Negatives: This can be a training ground for aggression, and also it has been found that some parents ignore children when they're being good, but tell them off when they're fighting. This teaches the children that fighting is a way to get their parents' attention.

Relationship change over time

o Dunn et al (1994) Child relationships seem to be fairly stable across time: Older child's positive and negative behaviour to younger sibling correlated from age 5 to age 12 Younger sibling's behaviour showed consistency from 3 to 6 years, and from 6 to 10 years but not over the whole 7-year period o Kramer & Kowal (2005) Observed sibling interaction when younger child 1 month old Follow ups until younger child 13 years old Initial sibling relationship quality predicted relationship quality in adolescence Sibling relationship quality also predicted by older sibling's interaction with a peer BEFORE the younger child was born o U-shaped curve? Decrease in maternal reports of sib negativity over 2 years when younger child aged 5 to 7 years (Jenkins et al., 2005) Older sibling dyads reported more positive relationships than younger dyads in sample of 5- to 12-year-olds (Stoneman & Brody, 1993) Sibling relationships become more egalitarian and less intense as they get older and the age difference becomes relatively less impactful o What underlies change? It's often developmental change in the younger sibling that drives evolutionary change in the relationship. The younger sibling becomes increasingly a more active and assertive partner in the relationship Life events like going off to school and university can also have effects o Adolescence: In adolescence children become more independent, take risks, peers become more important than parents etc. What does this mean for sibling relationships? Branje et al 2004: • Looked at 285 Dutch families with 2 adolescents • It was a longitudinal study conducted in 3 waves • There was no change in the support which the older sibling felt they received over time • They found that the younger sibling's perceived support increased from age 11-12. • When younger children go to secondary school they see more support from their older sibling - by 17 and 13 the siblings rate each other as equally supportive and the relationship has become quite egalitarian Feinberg et al 2003: • Study of 15 year olds and their younger siblings o Sibling relationships predict friend relationships: Yeh and Lempers 2004: • 3-wave longitudinal study • Positive sibling relationships during the first wave predicted friendship quality during the second wave which in turn predicted reduced loneliness, depression and substance abuse at the third wave. There appeared to be a directional relationship between sibling relationship quality and friendship quality Direction of causality? Surely could just be that they're a friendly person o Young adulthood and beyond: Arnett 2004: • From 18-25 and onwards people begin a period of self-exploration in which they learn to take responsibility for themselves, make independent decisions and establish financial independence • People spend less time with their siblings, but there is still important evidence for siblings as a source of support. • Young adults' relationships with siblings less tied to the quality of their relationship with parents (Sharf et al., 2005) Late adulthood: • While sibling relationships may become more distant during adulthood they may improve in later life • Pinquart (2003): Adults who have never-married may be particularly close to siblings

European Study of Assisted Reproduction Families

o European Study of Assisted Reproduction Families 1998: Golombok carried out the first studies into Donor insemination families. Participants were children born in mid-80s The study Focused on quality of parent-child relationships and child adjustment Families assessed when children aged 6, 12 and 18 It was conducted in the UK, Spain, Italy & the Netherlands 111 DI families compared with 116 IVF families,115 adoptive and 120 naturally conceived families Standardised interviews, questionnaires and psychological assessments with mothers, fathers, children and teachers were all used Findings age 6: • DI and IVF parents showed greater warmth, emotional involvement and interaction with their child than did natural conception parents • No differences for any of the measures of children's socio-emotional development • Not one set of 111 parents had told child about DI, but most had told someone else Findings at age 12: • Good parent-child relationships characterised by affection and appropriate control • No evidence of emotional or behavioural problems in assisted reproduction children • Less than 10% of parents had told children about donor conception Findings at 18 (was only followed up in the UK) • More positive relationships between DI and IVF mothers and children • DI children functioning well but no better than naturally conceived children • Still less than 10% of parents had told children about donor conception The reasons for non-disclosure: • Main reason for secrecy is fear that child would be upset and would no longer love non-genetic parent • Lack of knowledge about what and when to tell - how do you even go about it, and when do you tell them? • They also had no information about the donor so they had nothing to tell the child if they asked about their genetic parent, as they had all used anonymous donation

• Pretend play and mental state talk:

o Frequent pretend play is linked to better understanding of others' thoughts and beliefs (theory of mind). o References to mental states (cognitions, emotions, desires) occur preferentially within pretend play o Mental state talk with siblings may be particularly important because of references to others' mental states

• Similarities in siblings' behaviour:

o Many studies have shown concordance between siblings in different behaviours E.g., antisocial behaviour, substance use, risky sexual behaviour o Why might siblings show similarities in behaviour? Genetic similarity Similar environment (i.e., similar parenting) Social learning Older siblings shape norms around risky behaviours Older siblings expose younger siblings to settings where behaviour occurs - the older siblings can create the environments which affect their younger siblings o Fagan and Najman 2005: Have shown that sibling influences are independent of parent influences! o Mchale et al 2009: Sibling influences on risky behaviour are stronger when the siblings are the same sex and/or have a close relationship o East 1998: The relationship is also stronger when they share friends

• Stacey and Biblarz 2001:

o Reinforces the above point: "the consequences of such research are by no means "academic," but bear on marriage and family policies that encode Western culture's most profoundly held convictions about gen- der, sexuality, and parenthood" o "We agree, however, that ideological pressures constrain intellectual development in this field" o Paul Cameron - very antigay - disbarred for bad research practices, still gets quoted in court cases which restrict the rights of gay people - smacks of anti-vax Wardle (another bad researcher) extrapolates from single-mothers to lesbian mothers, but this is inappropriate given the confounding factors of economic stress etc. present in single mothers o Heterosexism leads pro-gay researchers to take a defensive approach comparing gay parents to the "gold standard" of heteronormative families, and implies that differences are the same as deficits. Researchers are thus afraid to make any theories about potential differences in development. o They believe it is difficult to conceive of a credible theory of sexual development that would not expect the adult children of lesbigay parents to display a somewhat higher incidence of homoerotic desire, behavior, and identity than children of heterosexual parent. o Rethink- ing the "no differences" doctrine, some scholars urge social scientists to look for po- tentially beneficial effects children might derive from such distinctive aspects of lesbigay parenting as the more egalitarian relationships these parents appear to practice (Patterson 1995; also see Dunne 2000) o Problems in the field: Fears about coming out and lack of questions on questionnaires make it impossible to work out how many gay people there are - there may be closeted gay parents with closeted gay children! With gay parents who started in heterosexual marriages things like divorce will always be a confound Fourth, because researchers lack reliable data on the number and location of lesbigay parents with children in the general population, there are no studies of child development based on random, representative samples of such families. Most studies rely on small-scale, snowball and convenience samples drawn primarily from personal and community networks or agencies. Most re- search to date has been conducted on white lesbian mothers who are comparatively educated, mature, and reside in relatively progressive urban centres, most often in California or the Northeastern states. Ethnographic studies suggest that "lesbian," "gay," and "bisexual" identity among socially sub- ordinate and nonurban populations is generally less visible or less affirmed than it is among more privileged white, educated, and urban populations (Boykin 1996) o They conducted a meta-analysis of 21 studies which claimed to find no differences in terms of sexuality, but re-examined the findings and found that on some dimensions-particularly those related to gender and sexuality-the sexual orienta- tions of these parents matter somewhat more for their children than the researchers claimed. One of the studies is by Golombok They found that daughters of lesbian parents aspire to less gender-types jobs (doubly-so!), are more gender-diverse in their play patterns and less gender-strict in their dress - these are good things! Sons are similar but less-so. Tasker and Golombok 1997: A significantly greater proportion of young adult children raised by lesbian mothers than those raised by heterosexual mothers in the Tasker and Golombok sample reported hav- ing had a homoerotic relationship (6 of the 25 young adults raised by lesbian mothers- 24 percent-compared with 0 of the 20 raised by heterosexual mothers) The young adults reared by lesbian mothers were also significantly more likely to report having thought they might experience homoerotic attraction or relationships. The difference in their openness to this possibility is striking: 64 percent (14 of 22) of the young adults raised by lesbian mothers report having con- sidered same-sex relationships (in the past, now, or in the future), compared with only 17 percent (3 of 18) of those raised by heterosexual mothers • If these young adults raised by lesbian mothers were more open to a broad range of sexual possibilities, they were not statistically more likely to self-identify as bi- sexual, lesbian, or gay. To be coded as such, the respondent not only had to currently self-identify as bisexual/lesbian/gay, but also to express a commitment to that iden- tity in the future. Tasker and Golombok (1997) employ a measure of sexual identity with no "in-between" categories for those whose identity may not yet be fully fixed or embraced - this ignores the "Questioning" aspect of LGBTQ+ o Don't forget small sample size o All of the studies measure sexual orientations as a dichotomy rather than as a continuum Potential causes: These lesbian mothers are less concerned that their children act in gender stereotypes ways

• Siblings as attachment figures:

o Researchers conducted a repeat of the strange situation task in which a 4 year old child's sibling was in the room: In the absence of the mother 50% of the children comforted their younger sibling and 50% ignored them, with some even covering their ears! When a stranger was in the room they found that most siblings monitored their younger sibling, and most younger siblings approached their older sibling. So, when there was a potential threat most of the children would take on the defensive role and display attachment behaviours despite individual differences in the relationship.

• Teaching:

o Siblings have been shown to be better at teaching than peers, partly because of the age gap but also because they know them so well and because the younger sibling might see them as an attachment figure.

• Surrogacy:

o There are 2 kinds of surrogacy: Genetic - where the surrogate uses her own egg, and gestational - where the egg and sperm are implanted and the surrogate simply takes the infants to term o Concerns with surrogacy: No opportunity for pre-natal bonding Surrogate may remain in contact with family as child grows up Disapproval as parents need to explain child's arrival Children's feelings about having been relinquished by surrogate o Golombok again: Aged 1,2,3,7,10,14 Pre-school years: • Positive parent-child relationships and child adjustment • Child adjustment at age 7: o Surrogacy children functioning within normal range (no more clinical problems than standard children), however, they showed raised levels of adjustment difficulties compared to children in other family types o This is similar to internationally adopted children at age 7 which is attributed to the need to deal with identity issues at an early age • However, by age 10 this has disappeared. o Raised levels of difficulties shown by surrogacy children at age 7 had disappeared by age 10 and the same is true of internationally adopted children whose difficulties also declined by adolescence • Adolescence: o During adolescence issues relating to identity and autonomy become salient and difficulties between parents and children are more likely to arise • However, findings at age 14: o More positive mother-child relationships in surrogacy families - as rated by mothers and adolescents o Adolescents born through surrogacy showed high levels of psychological adjustment • Children aged 7 and 10 asked about their surrogate: o Two-thirds wished to see her more often, the remainder felt that contact was just right, and one child wished to see her less o Adolescents at age 14 were fine with it and fairly neutral

Gay father families:

o Unlike lesbian mother families, children raised by men o It is widely believed that mothers are more suited to parenting than are fathers (there is no evidence for this) o But whether it's true or not, children with gay fathers may be exposed to greater stigmatisation because of this belief o Study of adoptive gay father families: This was a study of Adoptive gay father families, adoptive lesbian mother families and adoptive heterosexual families They found that: • Gay father families were functioning as well as, if not better than, the lesbian mother and heterosexual parent families • Gay fathers showed lower levels of depression • Gay fathers showed more positive parenting • Children in gay and lesbian families had lower levels of problems • No differences in gender development for boys or girls o Study of gay father families through surrogacy: It could be argued that these families deviate most from the traditional family model Children have 2 fathers and 2 "mothers" - surrogate and egg donor but no mother in the family home Differ in terms of gender, sexual orientation of parents and use of assisted reproduction Study of 40 gay father and 55 lesbian mother families with children of 3-9 years (Golombok et al 2017) High levels of positive parenting and low levels of negative parenting Lower levels of internalising problems for children of gay fathers Higher levels of externalising problems for children whose parents perceived greater stigmatisation More likely to maintain contact with surrogate than an egg donor. They clearly see the gestational role as more important than the genetic role in terms of the development of their child. • Self-selection and high income in the gay fathers

Mooney-Somers, 2006:

• o Very small study so be careful, but she is quite a significant researcher who has worked with Golombok and who mentions the fact that they don't talk about second generation homosexuality because they don't want to "give ammunition to the enemy", somewhat showing evidence for Catherine's self-selecting bias criticism. o Critiques of research into whether children with gay parents grow up to be gay are this: Does it matter? If this is seen as a negative outcome this is necessarily a homophobic point of view o This article is not very scientific, but highlights a potential direction for future research. It highlights a dearth of research into second generation homosexuals, and points out that it comes with a feeling of additional connection to the gay parent, but maybe some detachment from the experience of many of their queer peers. o She mentions the fear of confirming the negative views of gay parenting. It is possible that in matters such as this, in which individual liberties are at risk, we cannot take such a neutral scientific stance for fear of any negative outcomes which we find being used as evidence to withhold individual rights. This is obviously not ideal, one potential cause could be to try to change the narrative away from all children of modern families being fine to all children of modern families having the same outcomes as other families - i.e. some will turn out fine, some won't (this could play into risk and resilience). Perhaps if this could be achieved then there would be a reduced selection bias on publications or indeed which avenues research chooses to explore (if indeed any such bias exists).

Parenting style and parenting practices:

• o Warmth, affection, discipline and control are all important, and having the right combination is integral. o Distinction between parenting styles and practices: Styles: overall emotional climate of parent-child relationship Practices: such as monitoring child's whereabouts • Same parenting practice may have different outcome according to parenting style o Parenting styles: Diane Baumrind 1967/2010: Parenting style can be chategorized based on 2 dimensions, warmth (responsiveness) and control (demandingness) • High warmth and control: Authoritative o Combines warmth and affection with firm control o Children self-controlled, emotional stability, adaptive coping • High warmth and low control: Permissive o Loving but little control o Children show low assertiveness and self-control, poor self-esteem • Low warmth and high control: Authoritarian o Control through power and expect compliance o Children are defiant, low in social competence, poor academic achievement • Low warmth and control: Neglecting o Rejecting or indifferent o Children most likely to develop emotional or behavioural problems Culture is a modulating force: • Recent research has suggested that this may not always be the best way to conceptualise these things. These outcomes aren't universal across cultures - african american families don't have negative impacts for authoritarian parents etc. • Parents who smack have negative outcomes across the board, but the impact of it is modulated by how normal smacking is in that culture • This has led to an increase in domain-specific studies, not trying for cross-cultural generalisation - just looking at specific cultures • Control for example has been broken down into: behavioural control, psychological control, and how much parents know about what's going on in their children's lives. Patterson's Coercion Theory (1976): • When parents react to children's antisocial behaviour in neutral or positive manner (e.g. give in to tantrums), child will repeat behaviour • This pattern of coercive behaviour is associated with childhood conduct disorder

Single mothers by choice:

• o Divorced and unmarried single mothers: Children show higher rates of psychological problems Problems associated with parental conflict, financial hardship and maternal depression These problems usually disappear after a while o Children of single mothers by choice do not experience these risk factors Differ from children in other single mother families, whose fathers may be absent but whose identity is known o There has only been 1 longitudinal study done: (Golombok again) Study of families with 3-9-year-olds - Positive mother-child relationships and well-adjusted children and adjustment difficulties in the children could be explained by financial hardship and maternal stress • Although this doesn't mean that these difficulties are not meaningful, they are inherent to the condition

Characteristics of parents and parents' relationship:

• o Parents don't come to parenting as blank slates, they have their own history and experiences which will affect their effectiveness as parents. o Parental conflict: Parental conflict negatively affects child adjustment (Reynolds et al., 2014) Children in houses with conflict displayed higher levels of aggression, poorer academic performance, poorer peer relationships, higher likelihood of developing depression and anxiety (Cummings & Davies, 2010) What matters is not just whether or not there is conflict, but instead how it is expressed, is there violence, shouting, how intense is it, how do they resolve arguments? Are the children directly involved, how frequent are the arguments? Children show overt physiological responses suggesting distress when shown their parents arguing vs strangers arguing from as young as 6 months Direct effects • Parental conflict is distressing for children. Research shows that exposure to arguments is upsetting (Cummings & Davies, 1994) Indirect effects • Conflict interferes with parenting and the emotional relationship between parents and children • They show less warmth, less emotionally available, less sensitive, more hostile and poor/inconsistent discipline o Parents' psychological health: Parents with psychological disorders such as depression are more likely to show emotional, behavioural and social problems, particularly depression (e.g. Netsi et al.,2018; Claessens et al., 2015; Ramchandani et al., 2005) Why? What are the mechanisms involved? • Depression interferes with parenting o Depressed mothers very lenient or very authoritarian o Less responsive, flat affect o Unresponsive behaviour reflected in their infants o Link with insecure attachment o But link between depression in parents and children may be genetically transmitted Most work is on the impact of depression in the mother, but Ramchandani has done a lot of work on the impacts of paternal depression Anxiety: • Parents who are anxious struggle more with autonomy promotion • Parent's communication to the child of threat concerning the environment is different if they are anxious themselves • Children with anxious parents at substantially increased risk of developing social anxiety (Lieb et al., 2000) • Increased risk of emotional and conduct problems • Mechanisms: o Some of the risk mediated by genetics (Gregory & Eley, 2005)

Children can contribute to their own development:

• o Resilience: some children will be less affected by adversity such as poverty, parental conflict and abuse o Temperament has different effects in different circumstances o Birth order can have an affect

Individual differences in relationship quality between siblings:

• o Sibling relationships vary enormously in quality. o Siblings may vary in terms of how much they talk with each other, how similar their senses of humour are, how often you pretend play, how balanced your relationship is, how much rivalry you have. o Rivalry doesn't have to be negative or bely hostility. o There can even be differences in how the 2 siblings view their own relationship - so the relationship status may not be mutual. o Rivalry can be friendly, but not when it's caused by differential treatment (which is unfair) by the parents - for example if they try and compare the children against each other. o Some degree of differential treatment is normal in that parenting should be tailored to the child, but it must be fair and rational o Origins of individual differences: Gender composition Age gap Maternal warmth Temperamental fit Peer relationships (if you have a close friend in a peer you may be less interested in a sibling relationship) Developmental delay and mental health problems

Middle child syndrome:

• Addler (the psychoanalyst who was first interested in sibling relationships) say being the middle child as a source of success, because you compensate for not automatically getting attention by working hard to find your own defining trait, which can cause you to succeed (unclear whether this was proven)

Personality by area:

There may be some significant differences in personality characteristics in people in different areas. Evidence for this has existed for quite a long time. There have long been maps of political vote by state or county, and also things like incidence of heart disease or depression etc. Given that we know from health psychology that physical health can be affected by mental health, and that political orientation can be affected by personality (Potential link between personality and Lee's lectures which should definitely be investigated - get some studies). So, to what extent can these trends be explained psychologically? Studying these kinds of questions empirically requires a huge amount of data, but luckily the proliferation of internet-based survey software allows us to gather information about personality across several different countries. Surveys of America have found significantly higher levels of worry and anxiety in the North east and Midwest, and very low neuroticism in southern California. Neuroticism across 5 different samples has been associated with lower well-being, higher incidence of mental illness, higher incidence of heart disease, and higher rates of cancer. It is important to note that someone who is high in neuroticism is not necessarily going to be at higher risk of dying from cancer or heart disease from this data, this is correlation not necessarily causation. Openness appears to be higher near the coasts and in the West, and has been associated with greater numbers of Bohemians (i.e. people employed in creative jobs such as art, music and painting), more votes for Obama, a larger immigrant population and a larger gay population. To what extent is this caused by immigrants and gay people being more open? Immigrants are actually often anti-immigration (need a study for this) but gay people may well be more open. This could also be caused by ideological migration, as we shall see later. Similar results are found in the UK, although there was a greater correlation between neuroticism and these traits in the UK than in the US, potentially because we have fewer confounding health factors such as fast-food restaurants etc. There may be some significant differences in personality characteristics in people in different areas. Evidence for this has existed for quite a long time. There have long been maps of political vote by state or county, and also things like incidence of heart disease or depression etc. Given that we know from health psychology that physical health can be affected by mental health, and that political orientation can be affected by personality (Potential link between personality and Lee's lectures which should definitely be investigated - get some studies). So, to what extent can these trends be explained psychologically? Studying these kinds of questions empirically requires a huge amount of data, but luckily the proliferation of internet-based survey software allows us to gather information about personality across several different countries. Surveys of America have found significantly higher levels of worry and anxiety in the North east and Midwest, and very low neuroticism in southern California. Neuroticism across 5 different samples has been associated with lower well-being, higher incidence of mental illness, higher incidence of heart disease, and higher rates of cancer. It is important to note that someone who is high in neuroticism is not necessarily going to be at higher risk of dying from cancer or heart disease from this data, this is correlation not necessarily causation. Openness appears to be higher near the coasts and in the West, and has been associated with greater numbers of Bohemians (i.e. people employed in creative jobs such as art, music and painting), more votes for Obama, a larger immigrant population and a larger gay population. To what extent is this caused by immigrants and gay people being more open? Immigrants are actually often anti-immigration (need a study for this) but gay people may well be more open. This could also be caused by ideological migration, as we shall see later. Similar results are found in the UK, although there was a greater correlation between neuroticism and these traits in the UK than in the US, potentially because we have fewer confounding health factors such as fast-food restaurants etc. Mechanisms underlying geographical variation in personality: Selective migration: Jokela et al 2008, Jokela 2009 (Boneva et al., 1998; Oishi, 2010) This is the theory that people will move to places which satisfy their needs, and which will fit their world-view. There are obviously other constraints on where people live which may confound these theories. Where they were born, budget, safety, good schools, space for money etc. Jokela has tracked where people have lived over a number of years, and found that personality traits are associated with propensity to move as well as where it is that you move to. People who are curious and creative (Open) may be more compelled to go to places where people go to universities or be drawn to large cities because there are more opportunities there for employment and other like-minded people. People's political ideology appears to be quite relevant as well. Matt Motyl is interested in ideological migration, he has shown that people are able to make fairly accurate inferences about the political leaning of a household based on pictures of the houses, and based on these cues people made decisions about whether they would fit in with these areas or not, and these decisions seemed to affect their decisions to live there. Social influence: Fowler & Christakis, 2008; Bourgeois & Bowen, 2001; Joiner & Katz, 1999 This claims that people are affected by the thoughts, feelings and actions of those around them, and is similar to informational conformity except that it's also related to ideologies etc. Essay notes will have more Ecological influence: Schaller, 2006; Schaller & Duncan, 2007; Van de Vliert, 2009, Wei et al (in press) This is the theory that the physical environment, such as the climate, can influence our cognition, emotion, and behaviour People in a warm environment might not have to wear as much clothing, so will place more emphasis on physical appearance and spend more time working out, they also might be more open. This doesn't always apply however, think of the middle-east. Equally think of things like seasonal affective depression in Norway. Wei et al (in press) found that people in warmer areas in China were more agreeable. One potential explanation for this is that warmer environments are more comfortable and so people are outside more and are more likely to be interacting with others, which encourages social behaviour.

Usage-based theory of language development

A contrasting theory of child language development is proposed by Tomasello (2006), which takes the view that the language environment is in fact quite rich enough for a child to be able to learn language. This "Usage-based" theory of language development argues that children apply learning mechanisms such as associative and inductive learning, imitation and probability to learn chunks of language based around particular items and words in their language environment rather than the abstract grammatical rules proposed in the theory of Universal Grammar. Usage-based theories would thus support the claim that the language environment plays a significant role in development of language

Hoff 2003

A study by Hoff in 2003 concluded that these differences were the result of differing properties of the maternal speech which the infants were exposed to rather than any other factors outside of the language environment. The study concluded that the mothers from higher socio-economic classes gave longer and more varied utterances, and had more time to spend in leisurely parent-child interaction, as well as being less stressed in general which coloured the tone of their interactions. From this we can extract 2 important factors of a rich language environment: Quantity and variety of words spoken, and duration and tone of time spent between the child and the primary caregiver. The author also acknowledges that other non-auditory factors such as amount of time spent reading can benefit the language environment, and thus I would argue that this too should be included as a beneficial addition to the learning environment. Interestingly culture also seems to have a significant impact on language development, not just in terms of which language is spoken (as is claimed by the theory of Universal Grammar), but also in terms of the social contexts in which it's spoken. Hoff (2003) showed that North American mothers talked to their infants from birth, even going so far as to build conversation from the babies' burps and sneezes (Snow, 1977, in Hoff, 2003), while Mayan, Walpiri, and certain African American mothers in southern America didn't even regard children as potential conversationalists and never addressed them directly. Aside from the earlier espoused benefits of direct conversation with infants, Lieven (1994, in Hoff, 2003) argued that these differences also caused distinct differences in the exact forms in which infants acquired language. He claimed that children who were directly spoken to learned individual words first and strung them together later, while children who were not learned larger chunks of words first and only separated them later. From this we can say that the language environment can also directly affect the exact form of our earliest language learning. He argued that this difference was caused by the increased difficulty of trying to parse data only from overheard conversation, which could be explained by the lack of eye-contact or social interaction to increase awareness

The Rise of Situationism:

After the Vietnam war and Mischel's (1968) study, personality was shunned as a cause of behaviour. Instead researchers focussed on manipulating the situation to see how it changed behaviour. The advantage of situation researchers was that they were able to perform experimental procedures in which they manipulated variables (i.e. the situation), while the personality researchers could only perform correlational studies. This debate raged for quite a while, with both sides making assumptions about human behaviour. Personality psychologists assumed that individuals behaved consistently over time, and that the same situations evoked different responses in different people; meanwhile situationists assumed that variability in human behaviour was due to differences between situations not individuals, that different individuals would respond in similar ways to the same situation, and that changing the situation would change people's behaviour. As we shall see, these two perspectives aren't necessarily incompatible. This can be demonstrated by looking at three exceptionally famous studies which were initially argued to support the situationist argument, but which (upon further inspection) actually show the interaction of personality AND the situation... ... These studies seem to point to the conclusion that we do tend to rely on external cues to determine out behaviour when in novel situations from which we have no previous experience to draw, but that these situations are not necessarily representative of personality's typical influence on our behaviour. Most of the classic demonstrations of "the power of situations" placed people in situations that were not like the typical situation we experience in everyday life. In everyday life, we seek out situations that reflect aspects of our personalities and avoid other situations.

The definition of Attitude:

Attitudes: Attitudes are very important to psychology, with Gordon Allport (who many describe as the father of social psychology) going so far in 1935 as to assert that "This concept has been so widely adopted that it has virtually established itself as the keystone in the edifice of American social psychology". It is also a term which people use a lot in every day life, and it is important not to get confused and bring in your preconceptions about the term when discussing it. Attitude is so important because it is one of the key social determinants of social behaviour. There are many non-social factors which affect social behaviour, such as temperament, emotion, intelligence, personality etc. however a value and an attitude towards it is essentially social. Thus, attitudes start emerging as an account of what we value both socially and publicly. Allport thought that an attitude was something sitting in your head which somehow got triggered and caused you to give a certain response. While this is overly simplistic it has influenced later definitions... Eagly and Chaiken (2007) define attitudes as "A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour". Ajzen (1991) (The theory of planned behaviour) defined attitudes as "an individual's disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object, person, institution or event, or to any other discriminable aspect of the individual's world Our key assumptions about attitudes are that: They are subjective experiences They are about something They are not a mood or personality characteristic They are essentially evaluative - they involve a judgement They are not necessarily based on knowledge, in fact they can affect what "knowledge" you take on, as they can lead you to believe whether something is true or not through things like confirmation bias. They could be acquired by proxy They can be conscious and easily articulated or implicit and hard to articulate. Not all attitudes are very meaningful in terms of understanding the social worlds in which you live. Most people have an attitude about their toothbrush, but it doesn't affect their life very much.

What else can predict behaviour?

Behaviour is part of a complex system, in which any one construct does not necessarily have a massive part to play. We know that personality dictates behaviour (B = f(P,S)), as do attitudes, what else? Ability Motivation Needs Social pressure Roles and habits (such as gender, subordinate at work etc.) Talaska et al 2008: attitude is a moderate predictor of racial discrimination, but emotional prejudice is twice as powerful! So emotion should definitely be included in these models. Find more studies for the role of emotion in behaviour Bodily states can affect decision making - either through emotion or changing self-understanding. Arousal may affect your self-concept of performance, as being too aroused or not aroused enough can decrease performance. See self-efficacy notes

Bilingual language development

Bialystok (2008) investigated the effects of bilingual language environments on language and cognitive development. Aside from the obvious fact that the children develop 2 separate languages, they found that while it had no impact on some executive functions such as memory span, bilingual children benefitted significantly in terms of their cognitive and linguistic development. The bilingual children found literacy more accessible and found a wide range of general executive processes which involved attention and control far easier (potentially because the children had more practice at executive control due to the need to distinguish between speaking 2 different languages with overlapping vocabulary). Bialystok claims that these differences are at the centre of intelligent thought, and thus that bilingual children may on the whole be more intelligent. This conclusion has implications for the more general impact of language learning on cognitive development, namely that it seems that the two are positively correlated. Language learning has also been connected with numerical reasoning (Frank, Fedorenko, Lai, Saxe and Gibson, 2012) and the development of a theory of mind (Courtin, 2000).

Goodness of fit and happiness:

Bleidorn 2016: To live among like-minded others They looked at 543,934 US residents from 860 cities, with sample sizes ranging from 200 to 9,031. The average sample size was 632. They used the Big five inventory and a single-item self-esteem scale. They found that people were happier when they fitted their environment Jokela, Bleidorn, Lamb, Gosling and Rentfrow (2015): conducted a similar study in the UK They looked at 588,014 UK residents of which 56,019 lived in London. 63% of the participants were women, with a mean age of 33.2 and a standard deviation of 12.2. Once again they used the Big five inventory, and this time they used the Satisfaction with life survey. They once again found that people who suited their environment were happier within it. For example, those high in agreeableness were happier in areas with traits which were correlated with agreeableness, such as households with children, high fertility rates, lower average house prices, and garden space - this all seems to be related to child rearing. If this is the case, could these people have become more agreeable and family minded since becoming parents? And thus, these requirements would be caused by parenthood and not agreeableness. Meanwhile people who were higher in openness were happier in areas with greater population density, fewer Christians, a smaller proportion of white residents, higher mean house prices and more non-domestic buildings.

When do norms have the greatest influence:

Cialdini et al (1991): Tried to come up with a theory that could reliably explain when norms do and don't affect human behaviour. They found that combining descriptive and prescriptive social norms had the greatest impact. Kallgren, Reno and Cialdini (2000): Found that social norms only influence behaviour when they are focal in attention (you are paying attention to them) and salient in consciousness for the targeted behaviour (i.e. they are relevant to the behaviour and you are thinking about them). They discovered this by bringing the norm in and out of focus. The norm in this case was about littering, and they brought the norm into focus by making the environment around the car messy or clean. They placed litter on people's car (bills on their windshields). In the messy environment when the norm was out of focus people were more likely to drop the bill on the ground than in the clean environment (in which the norm was in focus). Could it also be that the relative scale of the offence seems less, as it is relatively less impactful on the environment? When they are localized and thus relevant. In 2012 the Behavioural insights team found that highlighting a social norm of voting increased voting behaviour by 5%. Highlighting the social norm in your postcode increased it by 11.5%, and highlighting it in your town increased it by 15.5%! In order to be influential, norms should be: Intense, Crystallized, focal, salient, expressed by a valued referent in-group and internalized over time.

Consensus:

Consensus describes a state of normative group agreement. It is a more fundamental normative process, and is the process which we use to create and change norms. Conradt and Roper (2005) argue that consensus decisions are fundamental to human cooperation. Consensus can also act as a heuristic to guide decision making, as people will often go with the consensus opinion. Sherif's (1935) Autokinetic effect studies were a good exemplification of spontaneous emergence of consensus. Centola and Baronchelli (2015) also found that spontaneous consensus emerged as to what the correct name for a person in a picture should be. It is possible that participants may have felt that they were supposed to agree on the correct name, which would make consensus necessary. They also investigated how different types of networks would affect the spread of norms - Read the study.

Hopkins, Taylor, D'Antoine, & Zubrick, 2012 - in Noltemeyer and Bush 2012

Culture can also impact not only the level and type of risks experienced by a child, but also whether standard protective measures will even work to defend against them. Some protective measures, such as high socioeconomic status, would intuitively seem to be reasonably constant in being protective - as they allow children to avoid the risks caused by poverty. However, a study of 5,289 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children found that resilience was predicted by 3 factors. Unsurprisingly, a supportive peer group aided resilience, but the surprising results were that low socioeconomic status and lack of knowledge of their own culture were actually beneficial to the resilience of the children! The investigators attempted to explain this by suggesting that both results were "culturally specific anomalies" which could be explained by processes of exclusion. Aboriginal children with high socioeconomic class were shunned and isolated from cultural support networks because 90% of Aboriginal people in the area lived in poverty. Equally, those children who knew more of their heritage were more sensitive to markers of oppression which lead to higher levels of depression and antisocial behaviour. The surprising results of this study highlight the incredible impact that culture can have on resilience processes in children, and further emphasizes the fact that while resilience may be common, it should by no means be implied to be homogenous in its expression or its distribution. In light of these findings, Ungar (2008) offered an alternative definition of resilience to that given by Masten (2001): "'...resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to health-sustaining resources... and a condition of the individual's family, community and culture to provide these health resources and experiences in culturally meaningful ways"

Perner, Ruffman and Leekam, 1994

Despite deficits in some areas of cognition caused by reduced parental attention in children with siblings, children with siblings have been found to develop theory of mind more quickly than other children (Perner, Ruffman and Leekam, 1994). Despite the fact that some studies into the area have drawn dubious conclusions regarding the direction of causality between good sibling relationships and good theory of mind (Perner, Ruffman and Leekam, 1994), there is now fairly compelling evidence that children with siblings have more opportunities to think about how others are feeling, and thus are more able to learn theory of mind (Peterson, 2000).

Goldwin-Meadow and Feldman (1975)

Goldwin-Meadow and Feldman (1975) found that these children developed their own gestural system for the purpose of communication, which they called Homesign. This gestural system was remarkably similar to the early stages of language acquisition in hearing children. This implies that the drive to learn language could be in some ways innate, but even these children had parents who were mouthing words to them, and who were motivating them to communicate in ways which were biased by their own language development

(Kuhl, Garcia-Sierra, Ramirez-Esparza, 2014)

IDS involves modification of speech by increasing variation in prosodic pattern which aids in language learning by increasing the clarity of grammatical phrasing and intonation associations, and has been found to be correlated with higher concurrent utterances and word production at 24 months than those infants who had not been talked to with IDS

Masten 2001

In 2001 Anne Masten (Masten, 2001) wrote an Article titled "Ordinary Magic: Resilience processes in development" which aimed to rewrite the common narrative that resilience in children was something unusual, and to provide a new direction for policy aimed at protecting children at risk. She argued that resilience was the norm rather than the exception in children, and that it relied on ordinary normative processes rather than any one single specialised trait. She chose the term "ordinary magic" for a number of key reasons, not least because in her view resilience was incredible to behold, while still being surprisingly common. One additional reason was that resilience appeared to make use of "ordinary, normative human resources", which she argued made it all the more important to protect said resources in children at risk In her article Masten also defines risk and resilience, and points out that the lack of a coherent definition of the two terms has been detrimental to the field. In that spirit I will use her definitions (as many in the field have since) to answer this essay. Thus, resilience will be defined as "good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development", and risks will be defined as "predictors of undesirable outcomes drawn from evidence that this status or condition is statistically associated with higher probability of a "bad" outcome in the future". It is also important to note that risk is required for there to be resilience, as an individual cannot be considered resilient if they have never faced a significant threat to their development, for they will not have been required to withstand any kind of risk. Unger (2008) furthers Masten's claim, suggesting that "it is this need to account for the level of risk exposure when assessing the impact of a protective process that distinguishes the study of resilience from broader understandings of general coping, positive development, and wellbeing" Is this true though? Reconceptualizing resilience would argue that you can also be resilient to a positive environment

The philosophical context:

Innate vs learned John Locke believed that "Nothing is in the intellect that has not first been in the senses", and came up with the idea of a "tabula rasa", a blank slate. He believed that everything that we know must first be learned. David Hume challenged his position, by claiming that causality always requires an inference, i.e. exactly why something happened. I.e. we must have some innate understanding of things like gravity and equal and opposite reactions. This inspired Kant's 4 A priori - Causality, Objecthood, Space and Time. He argued that we needed these 4 A priori to make sense of sensory input. Leslie and Keeble (1987): tested infants at 6 months and found that they did appear to have some kind of sense of objecthood. This is very young so it could be that this is pre-programmed, but it could also be quickly learned This theoretical background is obviously useless to psychology if there is no mechanism for such a priori knowledge to be made reality in the brain. However recently the Blue brain project found some evidence for the existence of pre-programmed knowledge in the brain (see essay)

Interactionism in Health:

Interaction between people - Swann, McClarty and Rentfrow (2007) - placed 67 pairs of husbands and wives under stress by taking the wife away and intentionally placing some of them in stressful situations, before reuniting them with the husband and seeing how they interacted. They found that characteristics of the husbands and wives interacted to influence the degree to which they were supportive of one another. Those wives whose husbands were more inhibited in consoling them had a higher heart rate (which we known is associated with health costs). The Diathesis-Stress model is a good example of interaction between a person and the situation. It has been found that resilient people are less affected by negative situations (see development studies). Caspi et al (2003) found evidence for this in genetics by tracking children who had experienced traumatic life experiences for several years to see how they responded. They identified a polymorphism in the 5-HTT gene which was related to resilience to depression. (not everyone has managed to replicate this finding). Belsky and Pluess (2009) have recently taken a fresh approach to resilience, claiming that those who are not resilient do worse in worse situations, but do better in better ones!

Bialystok (2008)

Investigated the effects of bilingual language environments on language and cognitive development. Aside from the obvious fact that the children develop 2 separate languages, they found that while it had no impact on some executive functions such as memory span, bilingual children benefitted significantly in terms of their cognitive and linguistic development. The bilingual children found literacy more accessible and found a wide range of general executive processes which involved attention and control far easier (potentially because the children had more practice at executive control due to the need to distinguish between speaking 2 different languages with overlapping vocabulary). Bialystok claims that these differences are at the centre of intelligent thought, and thus that bilingual children may on the whole be more intelligent. This conclusion has implications for the more general impact of language learning on cognitive development, namely that it seems that the two are positively correlated

Changes in attitudes and behaviours:

It can be difficult to distinguish between attitude change and behavioural change, thanks to things like public compliance vs private acceptance. When we talk about attitude change we're not referring to momentary conformity, as we will often do or say things in public which we don't privately accept. This is also relevant for its applications to public policy changes. The field has received a lot of research funding thanks to its application to marketing. People's attitudes become important when they make choices. Much of this literature set people up with a choice in the lab, but missed the fact that in the real world your attitudes really only matter when choices come into play.

The social return potential model:

Jackson (1965): We can think of norms as a distribution of potential approval to disapproval for an action rather than as a single "thing" by which people are judged. If we reconceptualize norms this way we can then model a norm by its degrees of normalness. We can then create a function of approval for a norm or behaviour. The point of maximum return is the point at which you receive the most social approval. The range of tolerable behaviour is the range of behaviour which the group finds acceptable. The norm intensity is the total area under the curve, how large the range in approval is and how much the group cares about the norm. Norm crystallization quantifies the degree of variance in approval of a norm, i.e. the degree of agreement on whether a behaviour is good or bad. Thus we can calculate normative power by combining norm intensity and norm crystallization (multiplying them together). Glynn & Huge, 2007: The structural characteristics of norms (maybe read?)

Frank, Fedorenko, Lai, Saxe and Gibson, 2012

Language learning is correlated with numerical learning.

Hughes, White, Ensor and Devine (2016)

Level of mental state talk (discussion revolving around the mental states of others), has also been found to positively affect theory of mind development in children, presumably due to increased awareness of the perspectives of others. Hughes, White, Ensor and Devine (2016) found that exposure to mental-state talk at age 2 predicted the children's theory of mind performance at age 6 and 10, implying either that this early exposure can have long-lasting effects or that those children who were exposed to lots of mental-state talk at a young age were continuing to be exposed to mental-state talk as they aged

Interactionism:

Many regard Kurt Lewin as the father of social psychology. He was interested in perception, how we make sense of the world around us. He came up with field theory: our physical reality is replicated in our head, and social factors influence how we perceive that world in our head. Lewin predated the person-situation debate, but he recognised that behaviour is about the interaction between the environment and the individual. He believed that behaviour was a function of the person and the situation, which he wrote as an equation (for some reason): b = f(p,s) which literally just means, behaviour is a function of person and situation... or to translate again: Psychological characteristics and social characteristics interact to influence behaviour As with so many areas of psychology, many researchers now consider themselves interactionists

Lieven 1994

Mayan, Walpiri, and certain African American mothers in southern America didn't even regard children as potential conversationalists and never addressed them directly. Aside from the earlier espoused benefits of direct conversation with infants, Lieven (1994, in Hoff, 2003) argued that these differences also caused distinct differences in the exact forms in which infants acquired language. He claimed that children who were directly spoken to learned individual words first and strung them together later, while children who were not learned larger chunks of words first and only separated them later. From this we can say that the language environment can also directly affect the exact form of our earliest language learning. He argued that this difference was caused by the increased difficulty of trying to parse data only from overheard conversation, which could be explained by the lack of eye-contact or social interaction to increase awareness

The Response to Mischel:

Mishcel (1968) famously argued that personality was unimportant in explaining behaviour because the correlation between behaviour and personality was only 0.3 Funder (1983) pointed out that in order to claim that personality was unimportant to behaviour, situationists should prove that the situation (or some other factor) was a better predictor of behaviour by comparing the two. Him and his colleagues computed correlation coefficients of classic social psychology experiments which were supposed to show the importance of the situation. They investigated Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), Darley and Latané (1968), and Milgram (1963) and found that the average correlation between the situation and behaviour was only 0.38! These results indicated that the average impact that the situation had on behaviour was in the same ballpark as personality, and thus that both should be considered when explaining behaviour. This also showed that behaviour is very hard to predict or explain, as it is controlled by so many factors.

Morality as shaped by evolution: Haidt

Morality, Culture and Evolution: Haidt claims that morals could have been shaped by evolution, and this has been a controversial idea. Haidt thinks that if we want to understand morality we have to understand its evolutionary roots. Many want to think that morality is a cultural thing, but cultures can evolve under selection pressures. Haidt argues that in order for our genes to do well they had to create groups in which we could cooperate and prosper. Haidt says "yes, we might have selfish genes", but these selfish genes might express themselves by creating individuals who will act in a moral way and thus get on. He argues because of this that morality is innate, which he defines as "Organized in advance of experience". Essentially this means that we have a predisposition towards his 5 dimensions of morality, but that the level of each dimension can then be changed throughout the lifetime.

(Cutting and Dunn, 1999)

More recent studies have suggested that exact number and order of siblings is less important than other factors involved in family experience, such as socioeconomic status and mother's level of education

How are norms regulated?

Norms are enforced through social sanctions, which can range from something as subtle as negative social judgement to more active sanctions such as exclusion from the group or physical aggression. One other possible reason to follow norms could be that if no one follows norms related to things like order then everyone suffers. i.e. if you had to fight your way to the front of the line every time it would not be efficient. We are also self-motivated to follow norms. Campbell-Meiklejohn et al (2010) found that people got a hit of dopamine when they found that their behaviour was in agreement with others' and experts, as much as when they were paid for their work!

Asch (1951):

Norms are exceptionally powerful. In Asch's line length measuring task participants are shown 3 lines and most chose which line was the same length as a reference lien. The answers were all very much unambiguous. They found that 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 35% conformed every time (check). This showed that people were willing to ignore evidence about reality in favour of social conformity, essentially so that they would not be excluded from the group.

Implicit attitudes:

Not all attitudes are conscious, some are implicit. Gawronksi et al 2006 argue that this is rarely the case, instead these thoughts are repressed, rather than unconscious. With things like the Harvard implicit attitudes test (IAT) could fear of appearing racist affect cognition time and thus give you racist results (similar to stereotype threat). The argument is that these slower response times for "incongruent" results can be key mechanisms which drive our behaviour, if we are able to think in one way and behave from that more easily than another (i.e. greased tracks) Green et al 2007: a study of 287 physicians from Atlanta and Boston found that when given an identical medical run-down (vignette) for a white and black patient, black patients were more likely to be diagnosed with CAD but less likely to be diagnosed with thrombolysis. They also found that the physicians showed implicit bias on the IAT. The problem with these small initial implicit nudges is that they can push you down one pathway, and you will then find evidence to support that initial pathway thanks to cognitive dissonance

Fernald, Taeschner, Dunn, Papousek, 2009

One final factor which makes up a healthy language environment relates to the exact ways in which parents speak to and interact with their children. One renowned example of this is the importance of Infant directed speech (IDS), an adaptation so important it appears to be ubiquitous

IDS

One final factor which makes up a healthy language environment relates to the exact ways in which parents speak to and interact with their children. One renowned example of this is the importance of Infant directed speech (IDS), an adaptation so important it appears to be ubiquitous (Fernald, Taeschner, Dunn, Papousek, 2009). IDS involves modification of speech by increasing variation in prosodic pattern which aids in language learning by increasing the clarity of grammatical phrasing and intonation associations, and has been found to be correlated with higher concurrent utterances and word production at 24 months than those infants who had not been talked to with IDS (Kuhl, Garcia-Sierra, Ramirez-Esparza, 2014). The way in which parents respond to infant speech is also important, and reformulating and extending infants' utterances has been shown to be an important part of the infants' language development, as it shows them the correct language patterns without discouraging them from attempting to learn. This analysis of factors which can impact a child's language development can allow us to construct a prototypical healthy and rich language environment. In this language environment, children are exposed to a large variety of words during 1 on 1 sessions with their parents and in other social scenarios, they are encouraged to read and talk, and are aided in their language learning through techniques such as infant directed speech and reformative responses.

Peterson and Slaughter, 2016

One of the most well known atypical groups for theory of mind are deaf children of non-signing parents. These children seem to develop theory of mind around half as quickly as typical groups (Peterson and Slaughter, 2016), and comparisons with deaf children of signing parents seem to imply that these deficits are due to a lack of exposure to the normal social influences. Children with Autism spectrum disorder's average performance is far below that of neurotypical groups, and equal to deaf children of non-signing parents The delayed learning of theory of mind may also be explained by deficits in executive function and language ability. Peterson and Slaughter (2016) found that the link of theory of mind was "significantly mediated by language ability, and that autistic children performed worse on tests of complexity of language

Deaf children of non-signing parents - ToM

One of the most well known atypical groups for theory of mind are deaf children of non-signing parents. These children seem to develop theory of mind around half as quickly as typical groups (Peterson and Slaughter, 2016), and comparisons with deaf children of signing parents seem to imply that these deficits are due to a lack of exposure to the normal social influences. Deaf children with non-signing families are cut off from fluent communication for much of their early development: they have less access to conversation and so less access to mental-state talk and they can't communicate with siblings so their effect may be reduced. While these children appear to have the same quality of attachment with their parents as other children (Lederberg and Mobley, 1990), hearing mothers of deaf toddlers seem to continue to communicate with them primarily through speech, despite the fact that their children aren't attending to it (Lederberg and Everhart, 1998). This implies that these children aren't being exposed to the same conversational practice of theory of mind as other typical toddlers. It is important to note that deaf children of deaf parents receive just as much communication as hearing children, and that these children do just as well as hearing controls in tests of theory of mind (Woolfe, Want and Siegal (2002). This suggests that the differences in theory of mind are due to differences in exposure to social influences, and not to the fact that the children are deaf. Woolfe, Want and Siegal (2002) found that even when factors such as syntax ability, mental age and executive functioning were taken into consideration, deaf children of non-signing parents still performed considerably worse than hearing children and deaf children of deaf parents. This gives powerful evidence for the assertion that social factors, rather than executive functioning or language ability, are what is changing in these children, and that these social factors may be the key cause of individual differences in typical groups. Even more powerful evidence for this claim is the fact that placing these children in Bilingual schools where they are exposed to both sign language and lip-reading has been shown to improve their theory of mind skills (Meristo et al, 2007). The implication is that these children have become better at theory of mind due to the introduction of these standard social influences, but an alternative explanation is that they are performing better thanks to the improvement in executive functioning which has been found in children that become bilingual (Kovacs, 2009). The study of deaf children with non-signing parents provides evidence for the importance of social influences in creating individual differences. The absence of these standard social influences leads to poorer development of theory of mind, suggesting that their presence may be what is helping the development of theory of mind in hearing children.

Methodological difficulties and methodology:

People often measure attitudes using Likert scales, which have the problem that people will often answer in middling ways rather than going to the extremes. Additionally, there are problems such as social acceptability bias etc. Additionally you have to decide what kind of response scale to use and how specific the questions should be. The more specific you are the more you can be sure that someone's answer will predict their behaviour, but if you're too specific it becomes irrelevant. Just because someone gives an attitude does not mean that it is personally relevant to them. Interestingly, the way that you write questionnaires can radically affect the responses which you receive. Leading questions can also cause people to believe things which they shouldn't - such as that HIV can be quickly cured. The characteristics of the interviewer can also affect the way you respond "a nice young lady comes up to you". The research often relies on comparing people's answers on attitudinal surveys with their actual behaviour related to said attitudes. Oppenheim (1992) discussed how to write a good attitude questionnaire, and how to avoid the common pitfalls Narrowly defined behaviours provide the best attitude-behaviour link, and how you define a behaviour will affect your results.

McClelland, 1951

Persons and Situations McClelland, 1951: "No one knows enough at present to build a theory. Rather what is needed and what I have tried to do is to find a number of constructs in terms of which we can collect data about personality, perhaps with the ultimate hope of building a theory" Early personality psychologists focussed on measurement issues and data collection, and so had a data-driven rather than theory-driven approach. They were trying to find the best ways to measure personality. This culminated in the 5 domains of personality (OCEAN)

Elaboration Likelihood model:

Persuasive arguments may lead to attitude or behaviour change if you are motivated to process that information, for reasons such as: it is relevant to you. If there are peripheral cues present, such as a role-model who has reacted to something similar in the past, you may take the peripheral route and behave differently but not undergo a long term attitude change. If there is no peripheral cue present and you have the ability to process the information you may undergo central thinking route which may lead to long term attitude change. Motivations to process: You often see in the structure of groups people who are seen as being cognitively integral. If their attitude shifts, everyone else in their group does too. Relevance to the person One factor which can affect motivation to process is need for cognition. This describes whether someone enjoys thinking about things This is similar to the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken 1987)

Deutsch & Gerard (1955):

They pointed out that people may follow norms for different reasons. In situations where they are unsure of what to do they may follow the norm for informational reasons, while other times they may know what they are doing is not correct, but follow the norm so as to fit in with the group. There are different kinds of social norms. There are descriptive norms and prescriptive norms. Descriptive norms assert informational influence by telling you what others are doing. Prescriptive norms assert normative influence by telling you what you ought to be doing and how people should be behaving. Reno, Cialdini and Kallgren (1993): Activating prescriptive and descriptive norms has significantly different behavioural responses (maybe read)

Yale communication studies:

See essay notes. There are a multitude of factors which affect attitude change. They broke these down into source effects, message effects and audience effects. Source: expertise, trustworthiness, likeability, status, attractiveness, similarity, intentions, race, if someone appears archetypal to your group you will listen to them more Message: number of arguments, balanced vs biased arguments, fear provoking, repetition, manner of delivery Audience: relation to the source, including group identity, self-esteem, education, intelligence, personality, sex, age

The bias variance model:

This is a descriptive model which argues that human decision making and error is a function of both bias and variance. Heuristics are high bias and low variance. This isn't necessarily bad if your bias is accurate to the group it's about.

Mechanisms underlying geographical variation in personality:

Selective migration: Jokela et al 2008, Jokela 2009 (Boneva et al., 1998; Oishi, 2010) This is the theory that people will move to places which satisfy their needs, and which will fit their world-view. There are obviously other constraints on where people live which may confound these theories. Where they were born, budget, safety, good schools, space for money etc. Jokela has tracked where people have lived over a number of years, and found that personality traits are associated with propensity to move as well as where it is that you move to. People who are curious and creative (Open) may be more compelled to go to places where people go to universities or be drawn to large cities because there are more opportunities there for employment and other like-minded people. People's political ideology appears to be quite relevant as well. Matt Motyl is interested in ideological migration, he has shown that people are able to make fairly accurate inferences about the political leaning of a household based on pictures of the houses, and based on these cues people made decisions about whether they would fit in with these areas or not, and these decisions seemed to affect their decisions to live there. Social influence: Fowler & Christakis, 2008; Bourgeois & Bowen, 2001; Joiner & Katz, 1999 This claims that people are affected by the thoughts, feelings and actions of those around them, and is similar to informational conformity except that it's also related to ideologies etc. • Essay notes will have more Ecological influence: Schaller, 2006; Schaller & Duncan, 2007; Van de Vliert, 2009, Wei et al (in press) This is the theory that the physical environment, such as the climate, can influence our cognition, emotion, and behaviour People in a warm environment might not have to wear as much clothing, so will place more emphasis on physical appearance and spend more time working out, they also might be more open. This doesn't always apply however, think of the middle-east. Equally think of things like seasonal affective depression in Norway. Wei et al (in press) found that people in warmer areas in China were more agreeable. One potential explanation for this is that warmer environments are more comfortable and so people are outside more and are more likely to be interacting with others, which encourages social behaviour.

Self-efficacy:

Self-efficacy is also helpful in attitude and behaviour change. Self-efficacy is related to perceived and actual behavioural control, which makes sense with relation to changing behaviours. High self-efficacy has been correlated with more successful adoption of healthy behaviours such as quitting smoking. Riet et al (2008) found that smokers with high-efficacy were more likely to be motivated by a "loss-framed" rather than a "gain-framed" message

Lillard, 1993

Siblings can also be good partners for pretend play, which has been shown to assist in development of social cognition (Lillard, 1993), and sibling conflict can lead to parent-led discussion of differing points of view

What are social norms?

Social Norms: Norms, like attitudes, are very present in pop culture. As such many people think that they understand them without actually fully grasping the concept. It can sometimes be difficult to separate norms from things like attitudes and morality. A norm, unlike an attitude, is not something which just exists within your head, a norm actually exists. They guide our behaviour. We perceive norms, and then they influence us. Whether or not we perceive them does not matter however, they still exist. Attitudes are internal, they are not just floating around waiting to be perceived. When attitudes are shared it becomes a social construct, but when they are just yours they aren't. A norm can lead to an attitude, but unless an attitude is shared it cannot lead to a norm. Sander's definition of a norm: Norms are beliefs about what others do and think we should do [social expectations], these "others" are socially relevant [reference groups that we care about] and exert pressure [social influence] to uphold social norms (approval/disapproval). Norms represent social facts. There are different kinds of social norms. There are descriptive norms and prescriptive norms. Descriptive norms assert informational influence by telling you what others are doing. Prescriptive norms assert normative influence by telling you what you ought to be doing and how people should be behaving. They can be described in terms of their central tendency and their dispersion. Central tendency is the average behaviour, and dispersion is how much variance there is in that behaviour.

What are social norms for?

Social norms direct, regulate, and control human (social) behaviour. They help facilitate large-scale cooperation and coordination of beliefs and behaviour. One example of this would be Law and Order. There is a norm that it is bad to break the law, enforced by jail time or death. If there was no norm, people would always have to use jail or death, rather than simply encouraging good behaviour. Norms allow groups to distinguish between conformers and non-conformers, and help establish consensus on the desired course of action. Social norms can promote group cohesion, social harmony, and social integration. Norms function as social heuristics, reducing the cost of individual learning and allowing much of human social behaviour to become automated. They can also be leveraged for less pleasant things, such as intergroup hostility or racism. However, if all we can use social norms for is to describe behaviour rather than predict, they are not especially useful as a concept...

Mischel 1968: The Fall of Personality

The "personality coefficient": "Any correlation between .20 to .30 which is found persistently when virtually any personality dimension inferred from a questionnaire is related to almost any conceivable external criterion... Generally such correlations are too low to have value for most individual assessment purposes." Mischel leveled a damning critique on the field, claiming that the evidence available at the time showed very little association between personality and any important outcomes. If anything he believed that the associations between personality and behavioural outcomes was small - he dubbed this the personality coefficient He believed that personality was in the eyes of the beholder, it is a construct which we rely on to pigeon hole people - Because behaviour changes depending on the situation one finds, personality must not be stable.

The bystander effect:

The Bystander effect is a good example of norm following, as when people are thrown into a situation with which they are unfamiliar they are far more likely to look to social cues to inform their actions. Factors such as pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility both affect the bystander effect, with pluralistic ignorance being related to norms (you all spontaneously form a group with the norm of not helping), once one person breaks that norm many more will move to help.

The Vietnam War as a change of cultural zeitgeist

The Vietnam war shifted people's perspectives away from the power of personality and the individual and towards the situation. This marked a significant shift in emphasis in research away from personality and towards the situation. This eventually led to the "Fall of personality" - a study by Mischel in 1968 which claimed which the correlation between behaviour and personality was only as small as 0.2 to 0.3, and thus that the effect of personality was negligible. As we shall see, this was not quite the death blow which Mischel believed it to be...

Changing implicit attitudes:

The elaboration likelihood model applies somewhat here, but motivation plays a different role because you aren't aware of the bias. Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006)'s APE (associative and propositional evaluation) model claims that similar processes can be used to change implicit as explicit attitudes, they are simply more resilient. Implicit attitudes are very hard to change. They are very deeply held and are often hard to access. Telling someone with an implicit bias that they might be slightly racist does not tend to lead to change. One good way to do it is to give someone a lived experience where they can act on their associations and then reflect on those actions and on what they mean about them as a person. It is important to bear in mind that attitude change must be seen in the context of a range of social and psychological constraints, such as personal preferences, normative vs informational influence and affective experience. It is important to decide if we want to change behaviour or attitude.

Mobile technology helping run experiments:

The experimental method is a good method for testing hypotheses, but sometimes the situations that we construct may be too contrived. Researchers are now beginning to rely on mobile or wearable technology, as most people have smartphones which have all sorts of sensors which can help us, and which they carry with them almost everywhere. This can allow us to get more ecologically valid data from participants as they go about their day. Apps such as Rentfrow's EmotionSense allow researchers to use experience sampling (asking people questions throughout the day) to find out how people feel in different contexts. The app has around 60,000 downloads from people all around the world, and who perfectly fit the characteristics of the average google/android user. They've looked at interactions between personality, situation and mood. They found that people high in extraversion reported higher positive affect when in social situations, and people low on extraversion reported higher positive affect when not in social situations. App technology could be used by psychologists not only for experimental reasons, but also to improve psychological and physical health. One example of the apps being used to improve physical health is in helping people quit smoking. You set a date in the future where you want to stop smoking and, in the time leading up to that date the phone asks you how you are, what you've been doing, and when you've been smoking. At the quit date the phone has made associations between certain triggers and when you smoke. This is a more intelligent approach where it reminds you of the reason not to smoke when you are most likely to smoke, rather than randomly texting you and making you think about the act of smoking, which may introduce temptation where there had previously been none.

Attitude formation:

The formation of attitudes has been studied most in the context of racial attitudes. The factors which affect attitude formation include child rearing practices, parental attitudes, peer attitudes, social learning and reinforcement, group membership and social identity. This is related to the Identity lectures Bem's self-perception theory and public exposure and inconsistency are some behavioural influences on attitude formation. Self-perception theory: Bem claims that we understand what/who we are by reflecting on what we do. We often need to work out our attitudes towards something by reflecting on our behaviour if we don't think about it much in everyday life. We know what we have done in the past, we know how people have responded to us, and we know how we reflect on that. We come to know ourselves by witnessing ourselves and what others think of us. Some of us are more concerned about consistency in the public eye than others. This is where we start to blend with personality. Scoring high on conscientiousness might mean that you are very concerned about consistency in your behaviour over time. Often, they are formed through the same route as they change. There have been some arguments for the heritability of attitudes. Olson et al (2001) compared MZ and DZ twins and found that there appeared to be some degree of heritability for attitudes towards athleticism, leadership, sensory experience, equality and appearance. There is some interesting work going on that suggests that some aspects of heritability affects the way we live our lives, and these experiences can affect our attitudes. This is now known as geno-politics, and while it is interesting there are big mis-understandings about how this works in the media. For example "The gene that makes you lean to the left" headline of an article discussing a study (Mendez, 2017) which specifically says that the greatest contribution of the study is not to declare that "a gene was found". They found that number of repeats of a sequence (from 0 to 2) in DRD47R (which is related to development of the dopamine system) was related to number of family friends and liberal views. However this was an exploratory study with a very small sample size! Oskarsson et al 2018: if your biological parents which you have been in contact with are related to political leadership in their community, you are twice as likely to take a political role. These children were adopted. Biology doesn't determine your attitude, but it can help you go down a particular pathway Read some of these studies

Familial factors in risk protection

The impacts of family are one of the more culturally stable and well-studied aspects of a child's environment. A well-functioning family tends to involve parents who have control in a hierarchy above their children, are good at communicating and avoiding relationship problems from affecting their children, and create a sense of family cohesion for the children. The family unit should provide supportive and healthy interaction within the family unit and encourage it without, and be flexible and variable enough to provide tailored support to the child (Peterson and Bush, 2012, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). Parental responsiveness and behavioural control appear to be effective protection factors against problem behaviour across cultures (Li, Martin, Armstrong, & Walker, 2011, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013)(Bond, Toumbourou, Thomas, Catalano, & Patton, 2005, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013), and has been found to foster academic achievement in cultures from the USA (Steinberg, 2001, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013) to China (Leung and He, 2010, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). Similarly, firm and consistent behavioural control, known as parental monitoring, has been found to be a very effective protective factor in reducing the impact of risk on behaviours such as aggression and substance abuse across a diverse range of cultures (Vazsonyi, Hibbert & Blake Snider, 2003, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013)(Bares, Delva, Grogan-Kaylor & Andrade, 2011, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013). The effects of parental monitoring are likely explained by 2 main factors: the first is an increased knowledge of children leading to parenting approaches which are better tailored to the individual child, an effect found universally across cultures. In contrast, the second effect is that parental monitoring has been suggested to convey care and concern to the children at risk, but this effect is only found in collectivistic cultures such as Mexico (Bush, Supple, & Lash, 2004, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013).

Ungar, 2011

The social and cultural context within which a child is raised controls not only what difficulties they will face but also what protective measures they may have access to outside of their family. These protective measures, often referred to as capital, are grouped into 5 categories: social capital (a feeling of belonging to a community as well as their relationships to their caregivers), human capital (opportunities for learning, play and work), financial capital (social welfare programs and healthcare), natural capital (biological diversity and access to open land), and built capital (public transport, housing and recreational facilities etc.) These factors together can allow the community within which a child lives to help alleviate risk factors such as poverty and familial issues (by providing confidants outside the child's inner circle). The impacts of family are one of the more culturally stable and well-studied aspects of a child's environment. A well-functioning family tends to involve parents who have control in a hierarchy above their children, are good at communicating and avoiding relationship problems from affecting their children, and create a sense of family cohesion for the children. The family unit should provide supportive and healthy interaction within the family unit and encourage it without, and be flexible and variable enough to provide tailored support to the child (Peterson and Bush, 2012, in Noltemeyer and Bush, 2013)

Universal Grammar

The theory of universal grammar is a wide-ranging theory of language development which has been championed by Noam Chomsky, who argues that the ability to develop language is both universal and innate (Damon, Lerner, Kuhn, Siegler and Wiley, 2006). The theory posits that because language learning doesn't follow the typical processes associated with learning, it must be innate rather than learned. The main theory which is used to explain the innateness of language acquisition is the Principles and Parameters model. This claims that all humans have a Universal grammar which is innate, and that the only input of the environment is to select which of a series of binary switches will be switched on or off during the "critical period" of our development. Proponents of the theory of Universal Grammar claim that the language environment which infants are exposed to during development is not enough for them to develop language due to the fact that: they only hear a fraction of all grammatical phrases, they are not corrected when their utterances are incorrect, and while they hear positive evidence of correct language around them, they are not exposed to examples of incorrect language usage. This theory is known as the Poverty of Stimulus argument.

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind was once thought to be an exclusively human ability, but it has since been found in species ranging from chimpanzees to orangutans to crows (Call and Tomasello, 1998, Bugnyar, Reber and Buckner, 2015). This cognitively demanding task is defined as the ability to attribute mental states such as beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge and emotions to oneself and to others, and to understand that others may have different mental states to our own. According to Piaget's stages of development model of infancy (Piaget 1964) this ability develops at around the age of 4 in typical children in its most basic form: the understanding that others can hold a false belief. This is known as first-order false belief. Second-order false belief doesn't develop until the age of 5-6 in most children, when they gain the ability to understand that people can hold a false belief about another's false belief. While these clear-cut stages of development can be appealing, the reality appears to be one of much greater individual variation. Theory of mind development appears to continue until at least 17, and even at this stage there are still individual differences in performance (Milligan, Astington & Dack, 2007). These individual differences appear to be explained by 3 main factors: differences in executive functioning (Devine and Hughes, 2014), differences in language ability (Milligan, Astington & Dack, 2007), and finally differences in the social influences which children are exposed to.

Genie

There are very few examples of children who have not received at least this much input, as this level of deprivation would be both rare and cruel. One example we do have however is that of Genie, a young girl who was locked up in isolation by her father until her 13th birthday. She was found to have developed no language at all. She was placed into foster care and people attempted to teach her language, but she never learned verbal communication skills. This would seem to support the existence of Universal Grammar, except that this fails to account for the intense psychological trauma which Genie experienced, and the fact that she actually did quickly learn exceptionally good non-verbal communication, both of which lend support to the Usage-based theories. Bear in mind that chimps can learn sign language outside of development but not vocal language - so maybe this can still support the theory of universal grammar

The attitude-behaviour link:

There is an interesting interplay between someone's spontaneous action in the moment and they're actions years down the line. When investigating the attitude behaviour link we can investigate single attitudes linked to single behaviours, or we can look at multiple attitudes and factors linked to a sequence of actions over time. Some of these factors can come from social/public sources, such as social norms. These may cause us to act one way once, but we may then internalize that action into our self-image and thus our attitudes towards the target of the action, and thus may affect our actions down the line. This could be an example of informational conformity or normative conformity leading to a change in self-identity, leading to a change in attitude. Research of the link between attitudes and behaviour has been around for a long time, and for a long time we've been aware that said link is not especially strong. LaPiere (1934) was the first to show this in his research into whether restaurants would take Chinese customers over the phone vs in person. If you get a question on whether attitudes predict behaviour, don't spend the first 2 or 3 paragraphs on Lapiere's study - just say "we've known since LaPiere's work that the relationship between attitudes and relationship is weak" and then go on to discuss the developments that have occurred since. Corey 1937: university education students were asked what their attitudes towards cheating were before being given a test which they were then instructed to self-mark. Most students said that cheating was wrong, but cheated on the test! Bray 1950: He took racist participants and found that having a Gentile confederate caused the same effect size as having a "Jewish" or "Negro" confederate in the Auto-kinetic effect study. Given that this is an example of conformity this shows that even though they should not be a valued in group, they are treated as such for the purposes of behaviour. Wicker (1969) conducted a meta-analysis of the research into this area and concluded that it was more likely that attitudes and behaviour be unrelated than related! He pointed out that the PMCC correlation was rarely above 0.3 and often near zero. Bear in mind that 0.3 is the effect of personality on behaviour! They only interpreted this as a small effect because they expected it to be a powerful predictor. The confounding factors which stop attitude directly translating to behaviour are the interesting bits of the story. The theory of planned behaviour is obviously important here.

Kuhl, 2006 Social gate theory

These examples of the impact of culture reaffirm the earlier claim that one on one contact is important for infants to develop, as well as showing that the social components of an infant's environment can also affect their language development, and thus that social factors should also be considered as important components of the language environment. This concept is championed by Patricia Kuhl, who created the Social Gate theory (Kuhl, 2006). This theory claims that the social brain "gates" the computational mechanisms involved in human language learning. She claims that If social factors 'gate' computational learning, infants would be protected from meaningless calculations, as learning would be restricted to signals that derive from live humans rather than other, meaningless sources. One of the crucial finds of Social Gate theory and Kuhl was that social interaction seems to assist early speech learning, and that not only the words which are used, but also the way in which they are spoken is crucial to language development. One study by Kuhl (Kuhl, Tsao and Liu, 2003, in Kuhl, 2006) found that children who interacted with mandarin speakers face to face rather than through a monitor were better able to distinguish separate phonemes between 9 and 10 months of age, and Brooks & Meltzoff (2002, in Kuhl, 2006) found that during live exposure tutors focus their gaze towards pictures in the books or on the toys they talk about, and infants' gaze tends to follow the speaker's gaze. This engagement increases arousal and attention in infants, which Kuhl claims predicts the degree of phoneme and word learning in infants. Tomasello (2003a, in Kuhl, 2006) suggests that understanding of the communicative intentions of other humans (which is linked to attention to objects which another person has pointed out) enhances attention to the intention of a communicative act which thus assists the uptake of any language which was used in that act. Finally, one study by Goldstein, king and west (2003, in Kuhl, 2006) found that social interaction alone can aid language learning, as it seems to spur infants on to attempt developmentally more advanced sounds, causing them to practice more and develop faster than non-stimulated infants. Social gate theory and the empirical findings surrounding it thus imply that face to face social engagement is also important for language development.

Eating offal - Lewin 1951:

These studies date back to WWII. During this time Lewin and his colleagues were looking into the fact that people were not very keen on eating offal. Recent immigrants from Europe ate more of it, but the American people were not. This meant that a huge amount of protein was going to waste, in a time where food was important. They tried having a 5 star general give a lecture on eating offal, but found that only 3% changed their buying decisions. So instead they got the house wives together, explained the issue, and then let them discuss how they would solve it among themselves. 32% changed their practices. Individuals memories, beliefs, attitudes and goals really matter when they are shared with other people. They form the group culture. Lewin argued that you had to break the cultural structure (i.e. we won't eat offal), then reform it and discuss it to affect change

Christiansen and Chater (2008)

They argued that the relatedness between human language learning style and human language which is foisted by Universal Grammar as being explicable by innate biological traits could not in fact have evolved biologically as language evolves faster than biology could possibly keep up. They argue instead that language has evolved to fit the human brain rather than the reverse, as any language which was not easily learned by humans would soon find itself under its own extreme form of selection pressure.

Cicchetti and Blender (2006)

They found that while all individuals possess a certain amount of neuroplasticity, some children possessed an innate capacity to recover more successfully from damage to neural substrates which had been caused by risks during their early development

Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz (1969):

They had confederates stand on a street corner and look up into the sky, and recorded how many people joined in. The decision to look up or not is about the potential cost/benefit: if you look up and no-one is there, you lose little. If there is an alien space ship, it's good to get some warning. The heuristic being used here is that if everyone is doing something, it must be sensible and there must be a reason for it. They varied the size of the crowd to see at what point people began to attend to the social cues. They found that when there was just 1 person, no-one cared. As the size of the crowd went up, the number of people who would stop and look up increased. This showed that people intuitively understood that the more people were following a norm, the more adaptive it would be to also follow it.

The wisdom of the crowd:

This is a major explanation for accuracy in social opinion. It helps delineate when it is and isn't adaptive to conform. It can be adaptive to follow the wisdom of the crowd if the crowd is relevant and informed, such as "9 out of 10 doctors recommend" (Except that they may be paid to recommend such a product). Cai, Chen, and Hanming (2009) found that highlighting the most popular dish on the menu increased the demand for the dish by between 13 and 20%. Maybe it's the most popular dish because it's the tastiest, or because most people didn't get food poisoning is. This isn't so much wisdom of the crowd as it is informational conformity The Condorcet's Jury Theorem: This was a theory created by the Marquis of Condorcet in 1784. It argues that if members of a group have a probability of greater than 0.5 to make the correct decision, adding more people to the group will cause them to converge on the correct answer so long as they are voting independently. This is the theory behind a Jury. Obviously, it is theoretical, as not every person has a greater than 0.5 chance of getting the correct answer. The wisdom of the crowd is a simplified version of this theory with simplified conditions. When independently formed judgements are aggregated, the average estimate of a (large) group is as good, and often more accurate, than any individual judgment Galton 1906: He wanted to prove that people were stupid. He went to market and put an ox on a weighing scale and had people guess its weight. He thought that people would over or underestimate the actual value, and this would prove that they were dumb. He found that the average of the 800 guesses were almost exactly the actual weight of the ox. The crowd was remarkably accurate on average. This works mathematically because if people's judgements are independent then they should have the same variance above and below the correct answer, which should average out to the correct answer. There may be some experts which would do better than most, but not get the perfect average. There are 4 conditions necessary for the wisdom of the crowd effect to be useful to us. Diversity of opinion: you need multiple opinions to have variation Independence: You can't be actively influenced by other people's votes (this is obviously often violated by norms in social situations) Decentralization: each member should have individual skill or experience that other members don't have Aggregation: You need to have a good mechanism of aggregating opinions across the group to arrive at a group estimate. Group influence can both be unhelpful and helpful to the final answer. Trump lying might be bad, but a mathematics expert might help you guess the right amount of beads in a jar.

Bill Swann: Self-verification theory:

This theory claims that people will have a tendency to seek information about the self which is consistent with their own self-views, whether that information is positive or negative. Not only do we seek information which verifies our self-views, but also people. (Tie-in with identity) Our perception of self is partly constructed by our idea of how others perceive us. We both navigate our social world by relying on our perception of ourselves, and form our perception of selves by navigating our social world. People are motivated to have stable, coherent self-concepts (tie-in to attitudes and cognitive dissonance). Information which is contrary to our self-concept threatens the stability of said self-concept, and makes us uncomfortable - making us dislike interacting with people whose perceptions of ourselves are different from our own. This is a rather controversial theory, in part because the implication is that people with negative self-views may actually seek out others who verify this negative self-view. People don't tend to have problems with the opposite side of this theory - that people who see themselves positively seek out others who see themselves positively. Swann has had to conduct loads of research to evaluate this theory. The evidence seems to support this theory. People do indeed seek out relationship partners who verify their self-beliefs. The typical paradigm is that people complete self-assessments about how they view themselves. They then complete these measures and are told that someone has provided an assessment of their personality. Sometimes you are given 2 assessments by 2 different assessors. One assessment is very favourable and the other is not. The people are then given the opportunity to decide which of the 2 assessors they'd like to interact with (i.e. they are told that they will have to work on a project with someone for several days vs have to chat to them for a few minutes).

Milgram 1963

This was an exceptionally influential study which aimed to investigate "The Banality of Evil". The obedience experiments began in July 1961, months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" These war criminals all appeared very normal when put on TV, during the war they were wearing Nazi uniforms, but now they were dressed in normal civilian clothing. One of their primary defences was that they were simply following orders. This claim became known as the banality of evil: that anyone in this situation would be led to do evil things by authority figures Apparently Milgram came up with this idea to see if obedience would be higher in Germans than in other nationalities. Around this time there was a great interest in national culture thanks to WW2. All of his participants were white middle-class men. They gave participants the cover story that they were investigating the effects of punishment on learning. There were 2 participants, of which one was a teacher, and the other (secretly a confederate) was a learner. The teachers read word pairs which the confederate then had to learn and repeat back, being shocked upon an incorrect answer. The participants were given a mild shock and told that this is what the learner was going to experience. They varied the proximity of the learner and the teacher, and increased the voltage every time the confederate "got an answer wrong". The different proximities were: o Experiment 1: cannot be heard apart from pounding on walls between 100 and 315 volts 65% carried on until 450 volts o Experiment 2: voice feedback 62.5% continued to 450 volts o Experiment 3: same room 40% continued to 450 volts o Experiment 4: forcing learner's hand on to shock plate 30% continued to 450 volts (presumably these people did not "die" at the higher voltages...) So far it's easy to see how this was taken as very good evidence for the power of the situation, given that 450V is easily enough to kill someone, and many people went this far simply because of a change in the situation... However, it is important not to miss the fact that there are individual differences in the degree to which people are likely to go all the way to 450v! Why did some people go all the way, and some not if the situation was the same? So, interpersonal differences in the original study suggest that something other than the situation was having an effect, but was that factor personality? Well, we know that personality traits have been linked to obedience and aggression, in fact: Milgram's own research indicated that participants with authoritarian personality traits were more likely to obey the experimenter! More recent replications such as Begue et al (2015) have found that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were related to whether or not participants obeyed the experimenter. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were related to whether or not participants obeyed the experimenter. Conscientiousness in the broad sense is about satisfying social norms, so it makes sense that people high in conscientiousness are more likely to obey an authority figure. Equally agreeableness is about avoiding conflict - they were also more likely to listen to the authority figure. Check whether the stuff about his findings being faked is true, as Rentfrow hasn't mentioned it. Look for some more recent studies about it. Also get some more details about the PTSD and epileptic fits etc. So, this seems a good example of the importance of an interaction between personality and situation in behaviour.

Methodological issues in the person situation debate

To study the effects of situational variables on behaviour, situationists typically focus on one-off behaviours in a single situation. Situationists try to study the impact which situations have by designing experiments which manipulate one environmental or situational factor to see whether its presence or absence will cause a change in behaviour. Often these studies will use bar graphs showing averages rather than individual responses, which can reduce the seeming impact of individual personality on behaviour (as they don't show the outliers, people who behaved differently than expected). By contrast, personality psychologists tend to focus on aggregates of behaviour across multiple situations in order to try and find continuity caused by personality. This different conceptual approach leads to a different methodological approach. Personality psychologists might look at correlations rather than means, and might look at aggregate behaviour over lots of different situations rather than behaviour in 1 situation. This contrast in methodological approach means that often neither side fairly tests the alternate hypothesis of the other (i.e. by testing it using the other side's methods - on their home soil). We should instead look at both the situation AND the personality. We should look at the average behaviour, AND at the outliers. Could do with some studies here Another key issue with this debate is that one of the central components of experimental social psychology research is random assignment, because it controls for the potential impact of individual differences on behaviour, allowing for more control and ensuring that differences are due to manipulated variables rather than participant differences. The obvious problem here is that personality psychologists want to see the impact of these individual differences. This denies individuals the opportunity to choose their environment and constrains behaviour in a way that minimises individual differences. In our everyday lives we are not randomly assigned to behaviours, we seek out situations that suit our personality. Thus, assigning people to the same situation no matter who they are might cause issues in the representativeness of their behaviour. Maybe if they are out of their comfort zone, they might be more likely to undergo informational conformity. This leads to the famous quote: "Once individuals are in their chosen situation, their words and actions are genuine reflections of their personalities..." Ickes, Snyder, & Garcia, 1997 Another significant methodological challenge is that while personality is very well defined and operationalized thanks to the data-driven approach taken by early personality psychologists, there is no such consensus on a definition or way of operationalizing the situation. Some consider it related to physical surroundings, and some in terms of the social situation.

Norm internalization:

Van der Linden (2015,2017): The Do-it-in-the-dark campaign: They showed students at Princeton the energy consumption of other colleges and got them to compete against each other to have the lowest. They found that energy consumption did fall dramatically during the competition, but quickly climbed back to where it had been previously afterwards. The competition had not run long enough for them to internalize the norm Allcott, 2011: This was the reducing household energy consumption experiment. They found that while the effect did continue for some time after the end of the experiment, it eventually decayed. Thus, we need to work out how to get from a social norm to a personal norm. Read Van der Linden 2011 Factors which affect norm internalization: Norms are most easily changed when barriers are low. Voigtlander and Voth (2014) found that Nazi indoctrination was most effective in areas such as Lower Bavaria where antisemitic thoughts were already more prevalent Broockman and Kalla (2016): they found that persuasion to change to a less transphobic norm through door-to-door canvassing was most effective when done by trans people and this effect seemed to robust over 3 months. Norms work in cycles which can be vicious or virtuous. Virtuous cycles are going the way you want. There is a norm so people conform which strengthens the norm which increases conformity etc. - this is good if it is going the right way, but makes it difficult to shift norms going the wrong way. Government decisions can signal a change in the norm, rather than the other way around. Tankard and Paluck (2017) surveyed people's perception of the norms relating to same-sex marriage both before and after the supreme court decision to legalise it. The perception of the norm shifted significantly (positively) after the decision. The implication is that the government is a good signal of a society's norm, so when the government makes a change, people assume that the norm has changed. Interestingly, they found that while perception of the norm had changed, people's private attitudes had not! This is because private attitudes often lag behind the norms, as they must be internalized Sparkman & Walton, 2017: They experimented with introducing a norm of not eating meat. They found that with no norm, roughly 20% of people avoided meat. When they introduced a static norm (simply saying how many people are vegetarian now) they number of people avoiding meat actually went down, as it highlighted that they were in the minority. However, when they used a dynamic norm - that "more and more people are becoming vegetarian", they found that around 33% of people avoided meat! They labelled this effect "Pre-conformity"

Social tipping points:

Van der Linden (2017): found that once a critical mass of people adopted a new behaviour it would very suddenly spread through a social network. He used the ALS ice bucket challenge as an example, operationalized using google searches. Viral consensus can often be momentary, as it loses momentum (as you can't sustain infinite growth indefinitely) and thus the norm doesn't have long enough to become internalized. The ALS people tried a second campaign in 2015 and it gathered no momentum. Central figures in groups can provide social tipping points by adopting a new norm. Paluck et al (2016) found that asking central figures in social groups to introduce a norm of being anti-bullying and conflict reduced peer-conflict by 30% across 56 US schools. The same effect was still found 1 year later. The Spread-Activation Model: Look this up Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg (2008): In the disorder "no graffiti" condition (in which there was a no-graffiti sign but there was graffiti on the walls) 69% of people littered vs 33% in the clean condition in which there was no graffiti. Interestingly in a second experiment, only 13% of people stole money from an envelope wedged in a post-box in the clean environment, vs 27% in the disorder graffiti environment. This could be related to the embodied cognition relationship between cleanliness physically and morally.

Resilience from essay

While a child can encounter risk and protect against it at a number of different ecological levels, the point at which resilience is possibly at its most impressive and "magical" is at the individual level. This involves the child facing pervasive adversity and still managing to resist it through a combination of character traits which combine to make it "resilient". There doesn't appear to be any one universal protective trait, and protective factors likely vary based on the child, risk factor, and outcome being studied. Resilience is also rarely made up of a single factor, but instead consists of a suite of traits that facilitate positive adaptation in the presence of risk factors. These protective factors can be either biologically encoded or the result of more environmental influences. Insofar as they are relatively immutable and predetermined, biological protective factors could be considered to be more magical. One such example of a biological adaptation to risk is neural plasticity, a claim which was advanced by Cicchetti and Blender (2006). They found that while all individuals possess a certain amount of neuroplasticity, some children possessed an innate capacity to recover more successfully from damage to neural substrates which had been caused by risks during their early development. Cicchetti has conducted a number of studies into the resilience of maltreated children, and has repeatedly found that genetic variation can lead to the development of a variety of biological protective factors. Examples of these genetically encoded adaptive traits include differences in secretion of adrenal hormones from the pituitary gland as well as the organization of the emotion-processing areas of the brain (Cicchetti and Rogosch, 2009). Despite their more "magical" biological origin, these protective factors are still nothing more than particularly well-functioning aspects of the human adaptational system, which conforms to Masten's "ordinary magic" description of resilience measures as being made up of normative traits. One somewhat controversial protective factor which involves both biological and cultural determinants is cognitive ability. Researchers are divided on the status of intelligence as a protective factor and the results of studies into the issue can at first appear inconclusive. One study (Flouri, Tzavidis, & Kallis, 2010) conducted on 4,000 3-year-old children in the UK found that those who scored highly on tests of non-verbal abilities showed fewer emotional and conduct deficits than those who scored low, implying that non-verbal skills were protective against the impacts of these risks. Similar results were found for those children who hit developmental milestones early, but Sameroff et al (2003) did not find evidence for this theory in verbal intelligence. They found that children with high IQs who were exposed to multiple risks still performed worse at school than lower IQ children who were not, implying that IQ was not an effective protective factor.

Hughes and Devine (2018)

While the effects of these social influences in typical groups seem to be fairly constant, levels of exposure are not. Hughes and Devine (2018) conducted a cross-cultural analysis of Hong-Kong and the UK looking into purported deficits in theory of mind development in Asian countries. They used a 2 generation design which investigated the parents of the children as well, and found that performance on false belief tasks was strongly related to levels of mind-mindedness (description of their children using attributions of mental states) in both countries, implying that the differences in theory of mind development could be explained by differences in levels of mind-mindedness in Chinese parents.

Comparative evidence:

Whiten, Horner, & De Waal, 2005: they introduced a new technology for obtaining food into populations of captive chimps. They found that most chimpanzees conformed to using the method over time (read this). A few groups rejected the new norm, but in most groups the norm of using the new technology spread. Not every group had enough momentum to conform

Ungar 2008

conducted a study across 11 countries known as the International Resilience Project, which concluded that cultural beliefs played a significant role in shaping the beliefs and attitudes of children towards adversity, and thus that culture strongly impacted the expression of protection factors in children. Ungar (2008) offered an alternative definition of resilience to that given by Masten (2001): "'...resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to health-sustaining resources... and a condition of the individual's family, community and culture to provide these health resources and experiences in culturally meaningful ways"

Flouri, Tzavidis, & Kallis, 2010

conducted on 4,000 3-year-old children in the UK found that those who scored highly on tests of non-verbal abilities showed fewer emotional and conduct deficits than those who scored low, implying that non-verbal skills were protective against the impacts of these risks. Similar results were found for those children who hit developmental milestones early

Sameroff, 2003

did not find evidence for this theory (That IQ Helps resilience) in verbal intelligence. They found that children with high IQs who were exposed to multiple risks still performed worse at school than lower IQ children who were not, implying that IQ was not an effective protective factor.

Kuhl, Tsao and Liu, 2003

found that children who interacted with mandarin speakers face to face rather than through a monitor were better able to distinguish separate phonemes between 9 and 10 months of age

Brooks & Meltzoff (2002)

found that during live exposure tutors focus their gaze towards pictures in the books or on the toys they talk about, and infants' gaze tends to follow the speaker's gaze. This engagement increases arousal and attention in infants, which Kuhl claims predicts the degree of phoneme and word learning in infants.

Goldstein, king and west 2003

found that social interaction alone can aid language learning, as it seems to spur infants on to attempt developmentally more advanced sounds, causing them to practice more and develop faster than non-stimulated infants.

(Lederberg and Everhart, 1998)

hearing mothers of deaf toddlers seem to continue to communicate with them primarily through speech, despite the fact that their children aren't attending to it

Tomasello (2003a)

suggests that understanding of the communicative intentions of other humans (which is linked to attention to objects which another person has pointed out) enhances attention to the intention of a communicative act which thus assists the uptake of any language which was used in that act.

Peterson, 2000

there is now fairly compelling evidence that children with siblings have more opportunities to think about how others are feeling, and thus are more able to learn theory of mind