PSYCH 424 blog

The application of social psychology to personal relationships is what I would consider the bread and butter of much of my professional work as an outpatient psychotherapist. In this setting there are various presentations and although diagnoses may be similar the intricacies of each client can be vastly different. One common theme I have encountered is clients who report concerns related to the navigation of interpersonal dynamics. Many times, their reactions reflect the content described in the lecture handout summarizing the work of Allport (1985) who described hot versus cold cognitions. The theory proposed that hot cognitions are those fast-paced cognitions that elicit action or emotional reactions. Cold cognitions move a little slower and integrate rational derived from previous experiences or other stored information (as cited in Nelson, 2023). Another concept from the lesson was adult attachment styles which expanded upon the idea that developmental attachment styles were the end of the road for attachment. Instead, Bartholomew (1990) proposed four adult attachment styles: secure, preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing. A secure attachment style for an adult is portrayed by a healthy amount of reliance on others, willingness to trust others, and a degree of comfortability with intimacy. A preoccupied attachment is composed of more anxieties regarding being abandoned and a person is hyper reliant on others. Being closed off from others, fearing rejection, and lacking trust in others would delineate a fearful attachment style. Finally, the dismissing attachment style would describe someone who is independent and sort of aloof when it comes to connecting with others, but not altogether concerned by it (as cited in Weber & Dobson, 2017). The essence of this discussion will be to integrate the concepts of hot cognitions and maladaptive adult attachment styles, as they have presented in a specific case I encountered in my work.  

A former client of mine, we’ll call her Laura for the sake of anonymity, embodied the preoccupied attachment style mentioned by Bartholomew (1990) to a tee. She often reported worry her partner would leave her, doesn’t love her anymore, and pulled virtually all her self-worth from positive interactions with him and would be devastated at anything perceived as discontent within their dynamic. In sessions, she would stew and puzzle over seemingly minute interactions that overwhelmed her thinking there was some sort of clue within that would either justify her fear or assuage it.  

When I would see Laura, it was in the context of therapy. I was hardly ever privy to what she called meltdowns wherein she would be overwhelmed by an intense rush of emotions, hopeless, helpless, worthless, to name a few. She would berate herself in the mirror and would be inconsolable. She would beg and plead with her paramour to not leave, to forgive her, but also to humiliate herself, why would you want to be with someone so stupid/ugly/useless?” Reader, when I tell you Laura was her own worst enemy, I am not hyperbolizing. Allport would probably agree, she was a victim of her own hot cognitions. There was very little cognitive time or distance between the trigger for emotional instability and the hot cognitions that led to extreme reactions.  

As I am sure the reader can imagine, this was not a new pattern for Laura. Since adolescence her relationships with muddled with fast, intense reactions and hyper dependency on the current paramour. It was clear to Laura; the long-standing pattern was no longer sustainable, and she wanted to live a happier life with reduced anxiety and smaller scale reactions. Straying away from social psychology for a moment, potential interventions for symptoms like those Laura experienced could be mindfulness, cognitive reappraisals, and implementation of controlled breathing practices. Her attachment style would be addressed if we could just transition her away from hot cognitions and rely more readily on cold thought processes where she could objectively consider an event without immediately reacting. Once she was able to include rational from cold cognitions into processing stressors, that opened the door for looking deeper into the attachment style and how to remedy another complex, pervasive issue.  

The concepts from this lesson have helped me in my creation of conceptualizations of clients. Although specific factors are likely to change, the general outline of processes remains the same, be it the cognitions described by Allport or the attachment styles from Bartholomew. These concepts have been essential to how I approach my clients so that I am able to meet them where they are and provide individualized, empathic, and effective care.  

References  

Nelson, A. (2023). Lesson 12: Relationships/Everyday Life [Class Handout]. Canvas.  https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/canvas/fa23/22381–16042/content/13_lesson/printlesson.html  

Weber, A. & Dobson, J. (2017). Applying social psychology to personal relationships. In Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd Edition ed., pp. 417-434). SAGE Publications, Inc, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071800591 

Alonzo Richardson

PSYCH 424

Get Off My Bench…Or Not?: An Understanding of how Social Psychology Influences Social Design

In recent years, a term by the name of “hostile architecture” was created to describe how cities are designed to keep the homeless population out of certain areas. For a long time, civil engineers and architects have designed room layouts, buildings, roads, and other outer spaces to be conducive to a certain type of environment. The culmination of these constructs are what makes up an area’s social design. Environmental psychologists analyze and evaluate these spaces in order to determine how effective they are at being spaces conducive to growth, from large and small scales. In the case of hostile architecture, it seems to emerge from a type of social design called defensible space. Defensible space is a common technique that civil engineers within a given municipality or city will employ in order to deter crime (Gruman, 2017). So this begs the question: at what point does our protective nature go too far? 

Defensible space is an important development in societies. For example, let’s take design differences on crime rate. Environmental psychologists claim that, even when removing people, the architecture and maintenance of project housing gives more rise to crime because the environment is dirtier and less maintained, and living spaces are more boxed in and close together. This design increases the confidence in potential criminals that they can get away with more. The opposite effect occurs with well maintained apartments, townhomes, or single family homes, where the environment appears to have its own area, meaning the space is more defensible. (Cisneros, 1996). It’s a reflection of how community leaders understand social psychology, and how the environment itself can increase the hostility of a social environment

Hostile design takes the principle of defensible space and gives it too much defensibility. Examples include “anti-homeless” spikes, or putting metal studs on flat surfaces to reduce the ability of homeless people sleeping or lodging around certain areas (Esner, 2021)., It’s a type of social design geared against the homeless population, reflecting. Outside environments not conducive to. This type of social design is influenced by implicit biases about homeless people.

Social design has been proven to be able to influence community behaviors and social perception. Encouraging a more positive environment requires careful thought to be placed in a given area, such as increasing recycling or reducing household energy usage (Gruman, 2017). One example of social psychology applied to the environment in a positive way is a study conducted in 2011, an online intervention directed at reducing driving in college students. For two weeks, the students would report how long they drove each day, how much pollution they contributed, and how much they avoided driving. The result suggests that the process of keeping track of this served as an effective intervention strategy, and reduced driving greatly independent of the feedback received. There is a profound connection between environment/social design and human behavior and well-being.

References

Gruman, J.A., Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology. Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE.

Esner, R. (2021). Hostile Architecture: How Our Cities Attack The Homeless. The Current. Nova Southeastern University https://nsucurrent.nova.edu/2021/02/17/hostile-architecture-how-our-cities-attack-the-homeless/#:~:text=The%20problem%20with%20hostile%20architecture%2C%20and%20the%20source,purposefully%20restricting%20these%20individuals%E2%80%99%20access%20to%20an%20area.

Cisneros, H. G. (1996). Defensible Space: Deterring Crime and Building Community. Cityscape, 15–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20868434

Alonzo Richardson

PSYCH 424

Guilty By Association

Picture yourself, on trial for a crime you did not commit. The night you were arrested, you were driving home from work, and got pulled over. You, thinking you might’ve gone a little over the speed limit, turned to pick up your license and registration, but a voice yelled “put your hands where my eyes can see them”. Instantly, you were thrown out of the car onto the ground, and some hours later, you were sitting in a holding cell. That cell turned into months, and after trial, it turned into years. Some of the judges and jurors even looked like you. 10 years later, more conclusive evidence comes out that incriminates a completely different person, and you’re released. You don’t have much going on for you in the outside world, as most people you knew and loved stopped associating themselves with you once you were convicted, despite there being no evidence. 

Now, why is this situation possible? What is it that made you so suspicious to the point that you became culpable for someone else’s crime? Jurors are people. Police are people. People not only make mistakes, but also have biases. We can only hope that fairness can be upheld by police or within a court of law, but arrests and verdicts don’t always end up that way, and limitations of fairness differ in every single case. There are a few ways in which social psychology can explain this phenomenon, and even serve to help some.

Firstly, I’ll analyze how the police can make this mistake. One way, simply put, is that they might not look like you. Although this might not sound very…sound, this occurrence is made possible by a phenomenon called the “cross-race effect”. A 2012 study conducted by Young, Hugenberg, Bernstein, & Sacco defines this effect as “the tendency for individuals to be better at recognizing and identifying faces of their own race than faces of a different race” (Gruman, 2017). You can literally just look guiltier when you have members of a different ethnic group making your arrest and placing you into criminal investigation. 

Secondly, I’ll analyze how jurors and judges can make this mistake. The reasoning behind your conviction could be due to an expert persuading the jurors of your guiltiness because they might not like your gender or sexuality. It could be due to a judge not liking your race or religious background. For jurors, the verdicts they will reach are influenced by pre-trial beliefs, cognitive biases, and biased interpretations from “experts” (Curley, et. al, 2022). Implicit biases are scarier than explicit biases, as it’s become increasingly harder to openly admit bigoted beliefs. Moreover, research shows that judges usually don’t alert jurors to potential implicit biases that could arise (Kirshenbaum et. al, 2020) so it’s generally up to the jury to maintain a level of honesty and fairness.

To prevent scenarios like this from happening, there is no easy solution. Curing people of bias is impossible, but there are ways to better equip the legal system for these scenarios. For example, the deliberation process to reach said verdict is influenced by jury size, demographic backgrounds of the jurors, and many various other things. Jury size is typically 6-12 people chosen at-large from their community, based on the current American standard for trials, called the “adversarial model” (Gruman, 2017). Research shows that larger and more diverse juries tend to deliberate more than smaller ones and take more time to reflect on evidence (Gruman 2017), so that alone can reduce groupthink and really emphasize the importance of deliberating. Police and judges could benefit from more education on implicit bias (Kirshenbaum, et. al, 2020) and careful investigation, but it’s generally a pretty slow process.

References

Kirshenbaum, J. M., & Miller, M. K. (2020). Judges’ experiences with mitigating jurors’ implicit biases. Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 28(5), 683–693. https://doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2020.1837029

Curley, L. J., Munro, J., & Dror, I. E. (2022). Cognitive and human factors in legal layperson decision making: Sources of bias in juror decision making. Medicine, science, and the law, 62(3), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/00258024221080655

Gruman, J.A., Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology. Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE.

Alonzo Richardson

PSYCH 424

Is attraction learned or inherent?

Environmental Psychologists say the fittest go first. Cognitive Psychologists say it’s about shared beliefs. Freud said it’s your mom. Or dad. Whatever the case may be, we as humans can’t get enough of what we’re attracted to. The same part of our brain activates when we see a sunset or a supermodel (Yang, et, al, 2005). The source of that attraction is highly debated, but there are key similarities that we all share in regards to physical attractiveness, according to modern social psychology. Social dynamics are affected by our standards of attractiveness as well, providing benefits to those we consider more attractive and vice versa for those we consider less attractive. So it begs the question: is attractiveness more a matter of socialization or is it universal? 

Well for starters, First, I’d like to explain the evolutionary side. Across cultures, people share similar interests in attractive people to almost an innate level. From an evolutionary perspective, factors that influence this include but are not limited to, face shape and the shape and size of facial features, height, weight, shoulder length (in men for women), or hip width (in women for men) (Little, et. al, 2011). Although this research does seem to be decently conclusive, it is generally limited to certain places and cultures, even within relatively diverse countries. For example, in a cross-cultural study in 2021, men and women from five different countries (China, South Africa, India, France, and Japan) were tasked to assess attractiveness and health in women from those respective countries from different age groups and health backgrounds. These ratings generally showed people tended to view women from their own background as more attractive and healthy, in all places, but India, where raters showed statistical bias against South African and Indian women. The only metric by which women were universally deemed less attractive and healthy were the older women (Voegeli, et. al, 2021).

Next, I’ll describe the social dynamics of attractiveness. On the internet, I’ve come across two terms that have gotten quite popular recently on social media, called “pretty privilege” and “lookism”. These terms are used somewhat interchangeably depending on a range of contexts. “Pretty privilege” is generally what is used in pop culture to describe what is known in the psych world and academia as the “halo effect” phenomena, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype” (Gruman, 2016). The halo effect describes a social situation where someone who is perceived as very attractive is often assumed to have more positive “angelic” qualities, like being smarter, more confident, and more likable. The reverse of this phenomenon is called “lookism”. Similar to racism and sexism, ”lookism” is a way that others discriminate against those deemed less physically attractive. Both are usually unjustified and unsubstantiated, but statistically these issues rein true. For example, in a 1994 study conducted by Hamermesh and BIddle concluded that employers generally prefer attractive job applicants (Gruman, 2016). 

In all honesty, I believe when it comes to an innate or it’s a bit of both. Even though attractiveness isn’t universal, it is usually pretty generalizable. It doesn’t take a scholarly article or university blog for most people to distinguish between those we find as highly attractive and not very attractive at all. But when we evaluate the intersections of society that lead to certain biases, then human attraction becomes much more complex.

References

Yang, T., Formuli, A., Paolini, M., Zeki, S. (2022). The neural determinants of beauty. Eur J Neurosci. doi: 10.1111/ejn.15543. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34837282/

Little A.C., Jones B.C., DeBruine, L.M.. (2011) Facial attractiveness: evolutionary based research. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0404. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130383/

Voegeli R, Schoop R, Prestat-Marquis E, Rawlings AV, Shackelford TK, Fink B. (2021) Cross-cultural perception of female facial appearance: A multi-ethnic and multi-centre study. PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245998. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7822532/

Gruman, J.A., Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology. Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE.