PSYC 241 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: The Painful Experience, Fishing Reel, Social Exclusion
15 Jun 2018
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Department
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Professor
WEEK 7
Groups:
- Hard to define—there are so many different kids of groups
- Text book definition “two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact
with and influence one another, and perceive one another as ‘us’”
- Some degree of interdependence: on a continuum
- Within a group, people have different roles –e.g. leader, caregiver etc.
- One attributes that groups have are norms
o What they should be doing – injunctive norms
o What they are doing – descriptive norms
- Why we join groups
o Evolutionarily advantageous
▪ Safety from predators – harder to be attacked by predators if we are in
group
▪ Division of roles – makes things more efficient and enables survival of
group
▪ Hunting and gathering food
o People who had a propensity to form attachment to others were more likely to
survive
o Fundamental need to belong
▪ We need positive interactions with group members and need satisfying
interactions.
▪ We need to have some extent to a history or a feeling of attachment with a
certain group
- The painful experience of exclusion from a group
o Because we have adapted in a way that favours group membership, it follows that
we find the experience of exclusion to be very aversive
o Can be a minimal group; even a group that we dislike
o E.g. cyber ball toss study: throw the ball to person A or person B, you’re all
sharing the ball at first. Then the computer programs that the other wo people
throw the ball and leave you out
o E.g. cyber ball toss study with group you don’t like: same study as before, but
people were told that they were playing with two white supremacists—when left
out they felt excluded and upset.
o Found that regardless of who is doing the exclusion – it is painful
- Social exclusion and self-defeating behaviour
o Hypothesis: people whose social ties are threatened will be willing to engage in
behaviours that will produce bad outcomes for them
o Each study had a similar design:
▪ Personality inventory
▪ To increase credibility, accurate information was given on the dimension
of extraversion
▪ Read “personality type” (independent variable)
• Future belonging, future alone and health misfortune
▪ Mood rating
▪ Task
o Future belonging feedback:
▪ Basically said nice things
o Future alone feedback
▪ Basically said bad things and that you would be alone
o Health misfortune feedback
▪ Likely to be accident prone
o Healthy behaviours
▪ Made three choices
▪ High numbers indicate they made healthy decisions
Future belonging
Health misfortune
Future alone
2.11 – 2/3 healthy
choices
1.77 – 2/3 healthy
choices
0.78 – less than 1/3 of
the healthy choices
o It is not just about bad news because health misfortune is closer to future
belonging than future alone is specific to exclusion later in life
o Conducted tests on cognitive capacities
▪ Given GRE Aptitude test
▪ Those given difficult questions
• Future alone scored lower
▪ Those given easy questions – the scores did not differ greatly from each
other
o “cognitive deconstruction”
▪ People become psychologically undone
▪ Put people in a room with out a clock and were then asked how long they
were in the room – for future alone, time drew on slower
▪ Put in front of a mirror → future alone did not want to look at reflections
o Prosocial behaviours
▪ Experimenter dropped pencils and future alone people helped pick up less
pencils than others
▪ Future alone helped less and donated less money than the other groups
o Self regulation
▪ Future alone could not stop themselves from eating cookies
o The program of research by Twenge and colleagues underscores the “fundamental
need to belong”
o We find the experience of being excluded from groups painful and aversive; akin
to physical pain
o Loneliness and exclusion also have implications for health (cardiovascular health,
how long it takes wounds to heal)
o The same area of the brain activated from physical pain is also activated when
being rejected.
o People who are more sensitive to physical pain will be more receptive of social
pain
Pressman et al 2005
- 83 healthy college freshmen
- Loneliness measured using UCLA scale as well as other measures (depression,
neuroticism, extroversion, health behaviours)
- Were given a flue shot
- Measured vaccine and Ab titers via blood draws 1 month and 4 months post-vaccination
- Flu shot more effective for those high in loneliness and not effective for this low in it.
The effects of groups on performance
- Social facilitation
o Social facilitation theory: how is our behaviour affected by the presence of
others?
▪ Normal Triplett conducted a study which is often credited as the very first
published social psychology study
▪ Hypothesized that performance is enhanced by the presence of a group
• Noticed this with bicyclists
• Conducted a study assessing children winding a fishing reel
▪ Further research: inconclusive, conflicting
o Zajonc
▪ The mere presence of others seems to our increase arousal. This increases
our dominant response
▪ If someone is confident, the audience helps
▪ If it is a hard task and we aren’t confident, we will do worse
o Cockroach studies on social facilitation
▪ The dominant response for a cockroach is to run away from a light
▪ Two independent variables:
• Maze: simple or complex
• Social condition: alone, with another cockroach, or being watched
with other cockroaches
• Slower with other cockroaches and also slower with audience
watching them when going through the complex maze than if they
were just running alone.
• Faster with other cockroach and faster with audience
o Works with people too
▪ Researches watched student splaying pool at a student union
▪ Identified experts and novices
▪ Confederates went and stood near the pool players and watched them
▪ Experts did better, novices did worse
o Doesn’t even have to be a real person watching you – a screensaver with a
favourite character or one of a random character has the same effect
Document Summary
Hard to define there are so many different kids of groups. Text book definition two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another, and perceive one another as us" . Some degree of interdependence: on a continuum. Within a group, people have different roles e. g. leader, caregiver etc. One attributes that groups have are norms: what they should be doing injunctive norms, what they are doing descriptive norms. Loneliness measured using ucla scale as well as other measures (depression, neuroticism, extroversion, health behaviours) Measured vaccine and ab titers via blood draws 1 month and 4 months post-vaccination. Flu shot more effective for those high in loneliness and not effective for this low in it. It does not matter what it is, there is something that is distressing/distracting us. Easy tasks: performance improved easy tasks: performance impaired.
