Understand Psychology

by Nicky Hayes

Bandura (1989) showed how it is generally a good thing if people have high self-efficacy beliefs because it makes them more self-confident, and more likely to succeed.

even a good thing to have higher self-efficacy beliefs than the evidenc...

Bandura described,

how having high or low self-efficacy beliefs affected children’s work in school.

children in the study had different abilities: some were good at maths, while others weren’t very good at all, but they also ...

psychologist found that the children with high self-efficacy beliefs did much better than the other children, regardless of their level of ability. In other words, even if they really weren’t very good at maths, children with high self-efficacy beliefs did better.

children with low self-efficacy beliefs, on the other hand, would make a single try at the maths problems, and then give up.

Many psychologists nowadays believe that bringing up children and training adults to believe in their own ability to take effective action is one of the most important things of all.

Learned helplessness

Some people go through a series of demoralizing or unpleasant experiences, which they can’t do anything about, and then they just give up trying altogether. So when they are in a situation which they could actually change if they made an effort, they don’t bother. This is known as learned helplessness

learned helplessness has a lot to do with why people suffer from depression.

develop an attributional style, or a way of thinking, which suggests that things happen because of global, large-scale reasons which are always likely to be there, and can’t be controlled.

self-efficacy beliefs are closely linked to the idea of locus of control,

now believed that it was the fact that they had spent the night praying which had actually saved the world.

people were asked to do an extremely boring task for a long time. Then they were asked to go out and tell someone who was waiting outside that the task was interesting.

Nobody in their right mind could really have found the task interesting. Part of it involved giving each of 48 pegs in a pegboard a quarter-turn, one after the other, for half an hour!

participants needed to justify why they had lied to the person in the waiting room. It was OK for those who had been paid $20, because they could say they did it for the money. But being paid only $1 wasn’t enough, so they needed a better reason for their lying. As a result, they convinced themselves that the task hadn’t really been all that bad.

one of the ways that we avoid cognitive dissonance is by blaming other people for what happens to us. This is known as scapegoating, and is a significant mechanism which underlies social aggression such as racism.

can bring out the very worst in human nature.

violent racist incidents increase when the economy is in recession.

United States, too, Hovland and Sears (1940) showed that the number of lynchings of black people in the Southern States was closely linked to the price of cotton. The lower the price, the more lynchings.

key to understanding this side of human nature lies in looking at where all that aggression comes from.

Frustration and aggression

first put forward by Dollard and others in 1939, although at the time they phrased it in a rather limited way. They suggested that people would always react aggressively if they were frustrated in achieving their personal goals.

being prevented from doing something that we feel we should be able to do

some people express that tension in aggression and violent action.

a social belief that a particular group is causing the problems means that the frustration and anger people feel in those situations becomes, wrongly and unfairly, channelled towards that group.

we look for – and sometimes even make up – explanations for what is happening to us.

These explanations are known as social representations, and they are an important key to understanding how economic frustration becomes displaced onto the people who are usually suffering the most from it.

Social representations,

are shared beliefs which are held by groups of people in society.

adopts our own set of social representations, by talking with other people, picking ideas up from the mass media, and fitting these i...

a bit like the personal constructs

but they are shared by other people too.

Among racists, a common social representation is the idea that they are somehow in competition with members of ethnic minorities for the benefits of society.

answer to this question lies in the mechanism of social identification,

basic tendency for human beings to see the world in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’ groups.

We all tend to stereotype groups of people if we don’t know them that well.

racists who engage in violent action tend to be relatively less educated and to undertake unskilled work when they are employed. So, rather than place the blame for their unemployment on those in charge of the economy, who are socially very distant from them, they prefer to blame people who are in a similar economic position, but belong to a different social group.

why violent racism often rises at times of economic recession reveals a number of motivating mechanisms in human behaviour.

frustration and discomfort often produce aggressive reactions in people, partly as a way of getting rid of the tension produced by feeling helpless.

tendency to use shared beliefs, or social representations, as a way of explai...

seize on a visible group who represent a clearly identifiable target, who are close by, and who are in a weaker positio...

Counteracting racism

In a population which is highly sensitized to issues of racism and multiculturalism, the efforts of racists to stir people up into violent action are much less effective.

people tend to co-operate with one another, rather than compete

psychologists believe that this is the baseline for human interaction, and that it takes some kind of disruption, like frustration or illness, before people begin to interact in more unpleasant ways.

1954. Maslow was trying to understand why it is that people never seem to be satisfied with what they’ve got.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

suggested that it is useful to think of human motivation in terms of a hierarchy of needs (Figure 6.1