Social and ID Core Studies

A: to study the factors affecting whether people would help a collapsed man on the New York underground.

P; pps were about 4450 men and women who used the NY subway on weekdays between 11.00am and 3.00pm between April 15 and June 26, 1968. about 45% were black, 55% white.

P: experimenters fakes collapse on new york underground trains, and the number of people who helped and the time taken to help were recorded. The race, apparent responsibility of the victim (ill or drunk), the presence of a model helper, and the number of passengers present were varied.

F: 79% of victims received help. Help was more likely if the victim appeared to be ill. There was some increased tendency for people to help those of their own race. The number of bystanders made little difference, and most people were helped before the model could initiate helping.

C:Provided people are in a closed environment where they cannot simply leave, they are likely to help someone in need. Helping is most likely when the victim is seen as not responsible for the situation and is the same race as the helpers. The number of bystanders is not important in this situation.

A: to investigate differences in non-emergency helpers helping behaviour towards strangers in a range of cultures and to understand differences in terms of cultural traditions and economic productivity.

P: a total of 1198 pps in 23 counties were given the opportunity to help in one of three situations involving a dropped pen, someone with a bad leg struggling to pick up dropped magazines, or a blind person requiring help to cross the street.

F: there were significant cultural differences in helping, ranging from 93% in Rio de Janeiro to 40% in Kuala Lumpar. People in countries with a cultural tradition of simpatia and low economic productivity were more helpful.

Conclusion: there are significant cultural differences in non-emergency helping  behaviour. These are associated with both economic factors and cultural values.

A: investigate what level of obedience would be shown when pps were told to administer shocks by an authority figure.

P; volunteer, 40 male pps, 20-50 years from new haven via advert for $4.50

P; Mr Jack williams wore a grey lab coat. You met mr wallace another ‘pp’. Rigged trick - drew papers. Pps had to ask the learner mcq and when they got them wrong, had to administer shocks. They had a certain phrases to say to the pp. They were not allowed to withdraw.

F;100% of pps went to 300v65% of pp went all the way

C:People are surprisingly obedient to orders given by people in authority. However they become distressed when obeying orders to hurt another person.

extremely unethical = some pps had severe seizures, deception etc

Aim: to see how many people will comply with an unethical request and how many will respond by ‘whistle-blowing’ to a higher authority. A secondary aim was to compare actual rates of disobedience and whistle-blowing to estimated rates.

P: 149 students were given an unethical request, to write a statement designed to convince other students to participate in a traumatic sensory deprivation experiment. Pps were then left alone to see what they would do. In a separate procedure 138 students were told about the scenario and asked both what they would do, and what they thought the average student would do.

F: when questioned, most pps said they would report the unethical experiment and that the average student would disobey. However, 76.5% acc obeyed and only 9.4% whistle-blew

C: although most people believed they will disobey unethical instructions and report conduct, in practise the majority comply with instructions.

A: to record a case of the oedipus complex

P; Longitudinal sudy of a little boy, Little Hans, from 3yrs old to 7yrs old.

P: a boy was followed through the course of a phobia of horses, to the end of the phobia. His dreams, anxieties and fantasies were recorded by his father and passed on to Freud, who interpreted them in line with his idea of the oedipus complex

F;Hans’ fear of horses was interpreted as anxiety caused by a threat to castrate him in the context of his father banning him from his parent’s bed; The Plumber dream; The Giraffe dream

C; Hans experienced castration anxiety and the oedipus complex, but resolved them through his fantasies.

A: to test whether high-functioning adults with autistic spectrum disorders struggle to identify emotions from photographs of eyes (the eyes task)

P : 16 adult volunteers with an autistic spectrum disorder were shown 25 photographs of pairs of eyes, and were asked to identify the emotions in them. Control groups of 50 adults with no disorder, and 10 with tourette’s syndrome carried out the same task.

F; The autism group did significantly worse than the control groups in identifying emotions

C: even high-functioning adults with autism struggle to recognise mental states in others.

A: highlight fundamental issues with intelligence testing, specifically in research carried out by Robert Yerkes (1921)

P: the research method used by Yerkes within Gould’s article was psychometric testing. 1.75 million US army recruits underwent mental testing during the WW1. Pps took one of three tests: army alpha (written) army beta (pictorial) or individual examination (spoken). Each recruit was graded a - e and the scores used to determine placement in military ranks. Gould reviews and critiques Yerkes’ methodology in his article.

F; found the average mental age of an american to 13; Black men scored lower on average than white men; Fairer people of northern and western europe had higher scored than darker people of southern and the slavs of eastern europe; Gould finds systematic errors in the content, design and administration of such tests.

C:Yerkes’ found the average man could be considered a ‘moron; He also concluded that it is possible to grade individuals on intelligence by the colour of their skin; Gould concludes that intelligence testing of this kind is highly susceptible to bias and leads to racial discrimination

A: to examine how features of language are used in crime narratives by psychopaths

P  self-report. Researchers analysed transcripts of interviews using statistical text analysis. Pps were 52 male murderers recruited through a volunteer sampling technique who were classified as psychopaths or non-psychopaths (control group)

F: the study showed that psychopaths were more likely to describe cause and effect relationships when describing their crime; They also used twice as much language relating to basic physiological and self-preservation needs, while the control group used language relating to social needs; Psychopaths used language that framed their murder as more in the past and in more psychologically more distant than the control group.

C; Psychopaths used language in a fundamentally different was than non-psychopaths, with less focus on emotion and greater emphasis on meeting their basic needs.