A2 Core Studies: Conclusions

• Ill people are more likely to be helped than drunk people
• Men are more likely than women to help a male victim (in a mixed-sex group)
• People are more likely to help others of the same race as them (in a mixed-race group), particularly if they deem the victim's situation to be of his own making (eg.drunk)
• No strong relationship between number of bystanders and speed of helping victim
• When escape is not possible and bystanders are face-to-face with a victim, help is likely to be forthcoming
• A cost-reward analysis is conducted by bystanders when deciding whether to help a victim or not
• Subsequent spontaneous help from others was irrespective of race or victim

• The helping of strangers is a cross-culturally meaningful characteristic of a place
• There are large cross-cultural variations in helping rates
• Helping across cultures is inversely related to a country's economic productivity
• On average, countries with the cultural tradition of simpatia are more helpful
• Faster cities tend to be less helpful than slower cities, however, the link between economic health and helping is not a by-product of a fast pace of life in affluent societies
• The value of collectivism-individualism is unrelated to helping behaviours

• In situation where a participant directs his attention to the reception of a message fro  one ear, and rejects a message from the other ear, almost none of the vebal content of the rejected message is able to penetrate the block set up.
• A short list of simple words presented as the rejected message shows no trace of being remembered even when presented many times.
• Subjectively 'important' mesages, (e.g. person's name) can penetrate the block; therefore a person will hear instructions if they are presented with their own name as part of the rejected message.
• It is very difficult to make 'neutral' material important enough to break through the block set up in dichotic shadwing (although it is not impossible)

• Individuals have a sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events
• Individuals fail to notice an ongoing and highly noticeable but unexpected event if they are engaged in a primary monitoring task
• Inattentional blindness is a ubiquitos perceptual phenomenon (rather than an artefact of particular dispaly conditions)
• The level of inattentional blindness depends on the difficulty of the primary task
• Individuals are more likely to notice unexpected events if these events are visually similar to the events they are paying attention to.
• Objects can pass through the spatial extent of attentioanl focus (and the fovea) and still not be 'seen' if they are not specifically being attended to
• There is no conscious perception without attention

• There is an invarient developmental sequence in an individual's moral development
• Each stage of moral development comes one at a time and always in the same order
• An individual may stop at any given stage at any age
• Moral development fits with Kohlberg's stage-pattern theory
• There is a cultural universality of sequence of stages
• Middle-class and working-class children move through the same sequence but middle-class children move faster and further
• This 6-stage theory of moral development is not significantly affected by widely ranging social,cultural or religious conditions but the only thing affected is the rate at which an individual progresses through the sequence

• In the realm of lying and truth telling, a close relationship between socio-cultural practices and moral judgement exists.
• Specific social and cultural norms have an impact on children's developing moral judgements, which in turn, are modified by age and experience in a particular culture
• Chinese children rate truth telling in prosocial situations less positively and lie tellung in the same situations less negatively than Canadian children
• Both Chinese and Canadian children show similar moral evaluations of lie telling and truth telling related to antisocial behaviours
• The emphasis on self-effacement and modesty in Chinese culture increasingly exerts its impact on Chinese children's moral judgement
• Moral development is a highly contextualised process and is affected by the culture and/or social environment in which individuals are socialised

• Visual experiences in the early life of kittens can modify their brains and have profound perceptual consequences
• A kitten's visual cortex may adjust itself during maturation to the nature of its visual experience
• A kitten's nervous system adapts to match the probability of occurence of its visual input
• Brain development is determined by the functional demands made upon it, rather than pre-programmed genetic factors
• The environment can determine perception at both a behavioural and physiological level (at least in cats, questionnable about generalisability to humans)

• There are regionally specific structural differences between the hippocampi of licensed London taxi drivers compared to those who do not drive London taxis
• The professional dependance on navigational skills in liscensed London taxi drivers is associated with a relative redistribution of grey matter in the hippocampus
• It can be suggested that the changes in the arrangement of hippocampal grey matter are acquired - due to nurture
• Indicate the possibility of local plasticity in the structure of a normal brain which allows it to adapt in response to prolonged environmental stimuli

IQ tests:

• Are culturally and historically biased
• Do not measure innate intelligence
• Are tested in an unreliable way often
• May not produce valid results
• Can lead to tragic consequences if poorly and inappropriately administered

Nations can be graded by their intelligence

America is a nation of morons!

Psychopaths:

• Are more likely to describe cause and effect relationships when describing their murder
• Are more likely to view their crime as a logical outcome of a plan
• Focus more on physiological needs than higher level social needs
• Are focused on a lower level of necessities in Maslow's heirachy of needs
• Will ligustically frame their homocides as more in the past and use more psychologically distant terms
• Give less emotionally intense descriptions of their crime an use less emotionally pleasant language
• Describe powerful emotional events (theri crimes) in an idiosyncratic manner
• Operate on a primative but rational level
• Their language is substantially more disfluent than that of non-psychopaths