PSYC20009 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Personality Psychology, Lab Report, Psych
14 Jun 2018
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Lecture 1 - Monday 24 July 2017
PSYC20009 - PERSONALITY & SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 1
MORALITY
TODAY
•Introduction
•Administrative matters
•Intro to personality and social psychology
•The structure of the course
•The psychology of morality
SUBJECT INFORMATION
LECTURE SERIES STRUCTURE
•1. psychology of morality, cultural dynamics
•2. relationships, self-regulation, personality disorders
•3. individual differences in motivation and emotion
•4. (quant. Methods): memory
•5. psychology of religion
AIM OF THIS COURSE
•Method(s) for thinking about (big) questions of the self and the !
social world from a scientific point of view.
•Conflict, morality, persuasion, relationships, liking and loving, evolution, emotion, self-control...
•Think about these issues with a grounding in empirical research...
•Personality psychology:
•Attempts to understand the self and the social world with an emphasis on how stable individual
differences influence behavior, thought and feeling.
•Social psychology:
•Attempts to understand the self and the social world with an emphasis on how the situation
shapes behavior, thought and feeling.
SIMILARITIES & DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SOCIAL & PERSONALITY PSYCH
•Similar questions, different approaches
•Cross-situational stability (P) vs. situational contingency (S)
•Person vs. situation (topic of one of the debates)
•E.g., conflict
•P – are certain people more prone to conflict than others?
•S – are certain situational factors likely to lead to conflict?
•Both grounded in empirical research
•Collect data and analyze with quantitative statistical techniques
•Broad disciplines with fuzzy boundaries
•Blend into other areas (biological, cognitive, developmental...)
•Blend into each other
COURSE STRUCTURE
•Self-contained lecture topics of (hopefully) wide interest
•Readings selected to extend the lectures (rather than simply summarize or repeat)
•Statistical techniques – correlation and regression
•Lab classes (tutorials)
•Skills: data analysis, lab report writing, critical thinking, spoken communication/debate
Lecture 1 - Monday 24 July 2017
PSYC20009 - PERSONALITY & SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
MORALITY
•What is right and wrong about the following situations?
•1. A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the
chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
•2. A woman was dying, and on her deathbed she asked her son to promise that he would visit her
grave every week. The son loved his mother very much, so he promised to visit her grave every
week. But after the mother died, the son didn't keep his promise, because he was very busy.
•3. A girl wants to use a swing in a playground. A boy is currently playing on the swing. The girl
pushes him off so she can use the swing.
PSYCHOLOGICAL vs PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO MORALITY
•Often methodological differences.
•Psychological vs. philosophical
•Phil: linguistic analysis, conceptual analysis
•Psych: Empirical regularities or facts about moral judgment and behaviour with an aim to
uncovering psychological mechanisms underlying moral judgment and behaviour
•Naturalized approach
•Descriptive (psych) vs. normative/prescriptive (phil)
•Is/ought
•Fact/value
•e.g., Murder
•Morality is defined, in philosophy, as:
•The Definition of Morality (1970) –McIntyre, Anscombe, Foot, Strawson
•Gert (2005) – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
•Code of conduct or set of rules pertaining to “right” /“good”/ “wrong”/ “bad”, held by an
individual or group.
•Morality is defined, in psychology, as:
•Response-dependent: what counts as moral is that set of phenomena to which people have
‘moral’ responses
•But what counts as a moral response?
•Important distinction between moral and conventional.
THE MORAL/CONVENTIONAL DISTINCTION
→ Turiel et al (1987) and the moral/conventional task.
•Violations of rule
•One child hits another
•One child pushes another off a swing
•A child wears a dress to school
•A child talks out of turn in class
•Asked: wrong/serious, punishable, authority dependent (e.g., what if a teacher in a school said
that X was ok. Would it still be wrong?), general in scope (temporally and geographically), how is
the wrongness explained (rights, harm, justice)
THE SIGNATURE MORAL/CONVENTIONAL RESPONSES
•The signature moral response (SMR):
•Serious, wrong, bad
•Punishable
•Authority independent
•General in scope (universal)
•Appeals to harm
Lecture 1 - Monday 24 July 2017
PSYC20009 - PERSONALITY & SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
•The signature conventional response (SCR):
•Less serious, less wrong, less bad
•Less punishable
•Authority dependent
•Local in scope
•No appeals to harm
•Discovered that the key distinguishing feature of stimulus: harm or welfare (also rights and
justice)
•If harm (or justice or rights), then SMR
•But is this all there is to it?
A CHALLENGE
→ Haidt, Koller & Dias (1993)
•Said that non-harm violations evoke the signature moral response. Challenged Turiel’s claim.
•Authority independent
•General in scope
•So said there may be more involved than harm. You don’t necessarily need harm.
ANOTHER CHALLENGE
•Kelley, Stich, Haley, Eng, & Fessler (2007)
•Not all harms evoke the signature moral
response (screenshot).
•Authority dependence
•Local in scope
•These guys said even when you do have clear
physical harm, you don’t always get a moral
response.
AUTHORITY DEPENDENCE
•More people think it is okay to harm
somebody when an authority permits it.
Harm is seen to be worse when not
permitted by an authority. Basically harm is
authority dependent.
Document Summary
Today: introduction, administrative matters, intro to personality and social psychology, the structure of the course, the psychology of morality. Lecture series structure: 1. psychology of morality, cultural dynamics, 2. relationships, self-regulation, personality disorders, 3. individual differences in motivation and emotion, 4. (quant. Course structure: self-contained lecture topics of (hopefully) wide interest, readings selected to extend the lectures (rather than simply summarize or repeat, statistical techniques correlation and regression, lab classes (tutorials, skills: data analysis, lab report writing, critical thinking, spoken communication/debate. Morality: what is right and wrong about the following situations, 1. A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it: 2. A woman was dying, and on her deathbed she asked her son to promise that he would visit her grave every week.
