PSY 217 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Personalization, Family Caregivers, Limbic System
5 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 11
Social Responsibility
Overload: “inability to process inputs from the environment because there are
too many inputs...to cope with” (Milgram, 1970, 1462)
●Adaptations deal with overload
●Involves setting priorities and making choices
●Can involve individuals or institutions
●e.g., (Milgram, 1970, p. 1462)
●Less time on each input
●Disregard low-priority inputs (e.g., homeless)
●Impose boundaries to shift burden to someone else e.g., NYC buses no
longer making change for riders
●Blocking inputs e.g., unlisted number, unfriendly demeanor
●Create institutions to absorb inputs that would swamp the individual e.g.,
welfare system
●Milgram argues that overload leads to deficiencies in social responsibility,
e.g. Bystander effect, Willingness to trust and assist strangers
Bystander Effect
●Darley and Latane (1968) showed that people are less likely to help when
they are in a group
●Larger the group, less likely to help
2 proposals:
1. situational ambiguity
●it can be less clear (ambiguous) whether a situation is an emergency
when among other people
●if others are around and not doing anything, you might start to wonder
about if it is really an emergency
2. diffusion of responsibility
●when others are around, responsibility to help is divided among people
●individuals more likely to say to themselves "someone else will help"
Willingness to trust/help strangers
●e.g., Levine et al. (1976) had students ring doorbells to use the phone -
Urban and rural settings
●Finally, Milgram (1970, pp. 1464-1465) argues that adaptations to urban
living involve the establishment of new norms, e.g. (in)civilities, scope and
time interactions shrink
Defensible Space
●Defensible space: "a residential environment whose physical
characteristics—building layout and site plan—function to allow
inhabitants themselves to become key agents in ensuring their security"
●Canadian architect and urban planner Oscar Newman argued that crime
(robberies, vandalism) in inner city buildings due at least in part to their
design
●3 components :
1. Territoriality
2. Natural surveillance
3. Positive image or milieu
●e.g., Newman’s renovations at Clason Point:
● Assign formerly public areas to particular families using barriers
(territoriality)
●Reduce number of pedestrian routes and improve lighting (surveillance)
●Resurface building and give each residence a different color (positive
image)
●Outcomes:
●Residents twice as likely to ask a stranger why they were in their
neighbourhood
●Violent crime dropped by 61.5%
●Cul-de-sacs and gated communities could be considered extensions of
defensible space theory
●Not everyone agrees with Defensible Space Theory, two criticisms:
1. Newman didn’t actually measure, e.g, feelings of ownership
2. Some studies show that people feel safer but crime rates don’t change
●Defensible space won’t reduce crime unless residents are willing to
defend it
●Less likely in gated communities where surveillance might be
outsourced
●e.g., Wilson-Doenges (2000) looked at 1) low and high-income 2) gated
and non-gated communities in U.S.
●Measured:
1. Sense of community
2. Perceived safety
3. Comparative community safety
4. Actual crime rate
●For low-income, no differences between gated and non-gated
●High-income gated felt safer but little difference in crime rate
●Gated felt less of a sense of community than non-gated
Urban Living and Mental Illness
●Urban living includes environmental stressors:
1. Pollution
2. Noise, etc.
●But also social stressors
●Acute examples:
1. Rude, aggressive people
2. Being negatively judged by people (social evaluative threat)
3. “losing” in a confrontation (social defeat), etc.
●Chronic examples:
1. Unemployment
2. Isolation, etc
●Lederbogen et al. (2011) compared urban and rural responses to acute
social evaluative stress
●Stressor:
●Participants had to solve arithmetic problems under time pressure
●Received negative feedback from the experimenters
●Took saliva sample and brain scan
●Findings:
●More amygdala activation in urban
●Amygdala activation positively correlated with cortisol (stress hormone)
levels
●Is urban living bad for mental health?
●Studies show increased risk in urban areas for:
