Liberation Psychology

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It should not surprise anyone that in order for scientific research to be conducted there needs to be funding. Doing practically anything in this country takes money, and research often takes a lot. Yes, there is a drastic difference between building and operating the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and administering a paper-and-pencil survey to undergraduate students on their mental health. Nevertheless, scientists need money.

The question is, where does the money for research come from? Perhaps you might think that we should just be happy with the fact that any scientific research funding is trickling down, considering the political climate we are still scraping ourselves out of. Well, I for one believe that scientists as well as the “everyday person” need to be aware of who is funding research. In the realm of politics, we have qualms about politicians that are supported by corporations because too often those politicians go to bat for the corporations. Similar problems can creep into scientific research. For instance, much of the research that is done on new psychiatric medicine, such as anti-psychotics, is funded by the same drug companies that sell the product. Don’t you think that the scientists conducting the research might be enticed or even coerced into releasing results that only attest to the supposed amazing ability the medicine has to assist those with mental health disabilities?

What about the thousands upon thousands of dollars corporations spend each year trying to get you to buy more of their products? Essentially what these companies are doing is carrying out social psychology research in order to further the science of persuasion and motivation so they can make money off of you. And psychology has a long tradition of scientists using their knowledge of psychological processes to make big money by applying their skills in the for-profit world.

In all science, and perhaps especially psychology, the people funding research often have an overt and covert say in what research will be done. And to boot, the researchers are almost always representative of the groups in power. The early history of psychology to even the present day is mostly a tour of straight, rich white men (though not always American) and their ivory-tower theories of how everyone else acts. In my opinion it is rather amazing that one of the early areas of research in social psychology to really take off was concerning the phenomenon of prejudice. But even there, whose role do you think researchers chose to investigate? The role of the oppressor, the role of the person that is acting with discrimination. It took a long time before psychologists started to pay attention to the subject of discrimination, the recipient of racism or homophobia or ableism. Even now many researchers ignore the experiences of those who are oppressed. The history of research in prosocial behavior is a similar story. Scientists looked at “Who helps?” but only recently have people really started to ask in a scientific framework, “How does it feel to be a helpee?” “What impact does power play in the volunteer relationship?” “What helping might actually lead to empowerment instead of dependency?”

All of this is a roundabout way to get at a relatively new development in the area of community psychology. Liberation psychology follows the lifeline of liberation theology. The main idea of both is that certain institutions should be utilized (community psychology for the former, and religion, more specifically often Catholicism, for the latter) to ensure the empowerment and inclusion of those that are oppressed and un- or underrepresented in society. For me, the notion of liberation psychology runs both with the idea of the purpose of psychology (as an institution) as well as counter to it. It adheres to the goals of many psychological organizations by attempting to “better the human condition.” But I think the idea of liberation psychology would rub many psychologists the wrong way because it seems intrinsically political. I am not so sure it is intrinsically political, but I have the same feelings about research conducted in both many corporate laboratories and university offices. Funding is inherently a political venture.

Another reason I find liberation psychology interesting, and this is definitely something it has in common with its parent discipline of community psychology, is its inherent desire to find applications for theoretical research done in universities and colleges across the world. It is a testament to the psychologist George Miller’s belief that we should “give psychology away.” Obviously those that are economically poor and lack power in our society do not have the thousands and millions of dollars to pour into the research institutions of social scientists. They cannot selectively cut a check or supply a grant to anyone willing to slightly alter their research interests and address issues the funders demand. Liberation psychology is partially about saying that researchers should try to find ways to assist communities of color, empower undocumented immigrants, and lend a voice to those of underrepresented or nonexistent spiritual beliefs.

So what is the role of liberation psychology? Two of the goals are:

- Use statistical knowledge and research experience to improve programs that aim to provide services to those in marginalized groups, ensuring that assistance is empowerment-based, not dependency-based

- Using research and surveys to gather compelling arrangements of the beliefs, feelings, and experiences of those that are oppressed, as well as finding effective ways to convey this information to the public and people in power

But the true goal of any liberation psychology should not be set by those in power. This would obviously be to place the foundations of the discipline in not only the exact same place the whole of social science is currently in, but in a direction that entirely contradicts the logic of liberation psychology.

How does the idea of liberation psychology strike you? Scientific idealism or commie propaganda? What about the issue of funding in science? Take the opportunity to drop a comment below!

For a quick read on liberation psychology, as well as one of the founding figures in the area, check out:

http://www.compsy.org.uk/vivarev1.pdf

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Environmental Psychology

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It All Depends On How You Frame It

Welcome to another delectable slice of Only a Drop in the Bucket. It has been a while since my last post, chalk it up to still getting used to grad school. I think I have a few new strategies for my blog posts to make sure I get one posted every other week or so. However, this one might be a bit old hat still. I am aiming to get the posts much shorter, and the next few should accomplish that. However, I did want to establish some themes for the blog, and thus the longer posts seemed necessary to create those foundations. This edition’s post is the last of those foundational pieces, this time being on environmental psychology.

Environmental psychology is what is mostly sounds like. Psychology being the study of the mind and human behavior, and the environment being, well, the environment! Of course the “environment” has a few interpretations, and really they all relate to what environmental psychology is. So following strands of this blog, the environment obviously means the natural habitat. In that sense, environmental psychology is about how the natural environment, like trees and flowers and all those pretty things, influence us. It also concerns itself with how we treat the environment and why we do things such as recycle or buy organic food.

Environmental psychology also deals with the environment in a more general way as well. Our environment can be anything from a rural farm to a cubicle to a prison (cubicles and prisons are technically different things).So how does one feel living on a farm versus living in a prison cell? What is it about those different settings, those different “environments” that cause us to have different emotions, develop different attitudes, and perform different behaviors? Those and similar questions are ones that environmental psychology troubles itself with.

Other examples of topics in the area include the effects of noise pollution, how we develop an attachment to a place (such as "home"), how we find our way from one place to another, and how architecture affects a person. As evident by all of these topics, environmental psychology encompasses a vast array of issues. In this blog we will mostly be focusing on the aspects of human behavior that relate to the natural environment.

To give a taste of some of the research and theorizing that takes place on the conservation side of environmental psychology, I want to quickly highlight a few studies conducted by the researcher and social psychologist Robert Cialdini and his colleagues. Cialdini has carried out a large number of intriguing studies that are relevant to the topic of discussion today, but I want to point out just a couple.

Cialdini has done a lot of work in influence and persuasion, and much of his environmental psychology research has utilized social norms to bring about behavior change. Social norms are simply the rules that a group uses to determine what is appropriate and inappropriate in a situation. For example, going to a Vikings game at the Metrodome in Minneapolis carries the social norm that you should probably wear a Vikings jersey or at least something purple to the game. If I were to wear my Steelers jersey to the Vikings home game, I would be violating the social norm by cheering against the home team. Because I am not conforming to the social norm, I might be subject to ridicule during the game or even threats after my Steelers get done demolishing the lowly Vikings.

So with social norms and Cialdini in mind, our first setting is a forest. The specific forest was the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. When visitors were welcomed to the forest, they passed a sign that read “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.” Now, is that not a message that would warrant you to get upset that so many people are taking precious wood from the forest? Seems like a good idea to have that sign up in the forest, right?

Well, think for a second what the sign is implying, especially keeping in mind social norms. What is the sign telling us is a relatively normal behavior in the forest? The sign is essentially stating that A LOT of people who visit the forest are stealing. It does not exactly make it seem like an unpopular thing to do, does it? Cialdini and colleagues wanted to test the difference between having a sign that reinforces the idea that many people are stealing, as opposed to a sign that simply asks people not to steal and states why it is important that the wood be left alone. Cialdini and collegaues left pieces of wood that were secretly marked near trails in the forest to determine the amount of stealing of wood with the two different types of signs in place.

And what did they find? They found that having a sign that stated how much people were stealing led to more stealing than a sign that simply asked people not to steal. The sign with the social norm of stealing actually led to 4.5 times as much stealing as the other sign!

One more quick example of Cialdini’s environmental work, this time using the social norm in a different way. They developed different signs for hotel bathrooms asking patrons to reuse their bath towels. One of the signs simply asked people to reuse their towels because it was good for the environment. Another bathroom sign said:

“Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”

And what was the effect this time? This time, since the social norm was framed in a way that expressed the idea that almost everyone was reusing their towels, it was able to outperform the environmental concern message, by around 10% more towel reuse. The total reuse percent for the social norm message was an almost 50% reuse rate for towels!

A few take-away messages from these research studies. First, we need to be mindful of both the explicit and implicit messages we are conveying when we craft messages in order to get someone to conserve energy or recycle. If we are implying that most people are not doing anything, we are decreasing our effectiveness by putting our efforts up against very strong resistance. We need to know when to avoid social norm information, and when we can use it to create the change we are looking for. Second, even though the social norm message in the second study only created a 10% increase over the protection message, that is still a huge change in the grand scheme of things! If every hotel in a city, state, or a nation increased their reuse of towels by 10%, that would make a gigantic difference in energy and water use (not to mention a large money-saver for the hotel).

That is all for now, hope you all enjoyed the post! Leave a message below, nearly 75% of the readers of this blog leave a post at one time or another (doing my best to heed my own advice!).

Cialdini, R.B. (2003). Crafting normative messages to protect the environment. Current directions in psychological science.

http://courses.washington.edu/pbafhall/599C/599%20Readings/cialdini%20environment.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_psychology

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1762

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amydianna/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Volunteerism and Motivation

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Welcome to another edition of Only A Drop In The Bucket! Fall has arrived, and with it has also come my first semester as a graduate student. I am very excited to finally begin my graduate journey, for it has been a long time coming. Hopefully as the semester progresses I will still find the time to update the blog on a semi-regular basis. If weeks go by without an update though, stick with me.

Without further ado, I want to introduce a topic that has been in the news quite a bit over the past year. It relates to the subject of the last blog, that being prosocial behavior. This week’s issue arrived on the scene last fall in large part because of the 2008 presidential election. As presidential candidates vie for the title of Most Patriotic, they often pull no punches trying to create a dramatic vision of the future United States of America. One topic that comes up often during elections but then fades to the background is the issue of volunteerism. In this election John McCain and Barack Obama both made a conscious effort to point out how this country has a strong tradition of volunteering, and how that strength of the nation should be emphasized even more into the future.

Now, to Obama’s credit he and Michelle both have truly backed their rhetoric on this issue. As a couple and as individuals they have led the charge to double the volunteering spirit in this country, often volunteering themselves and speaking publicly to the importance of duty to the country. Obama pressed for legislation to increase funding for national service programs such as AmeriCorps, which in theory operate a lot like volunteer positions. It would appear that though the topic of volunteering tends to come out from its slumber during elections only to retreat in the aftermath, the President’s commitment might bring about a genuine shift in the public consciousness (just check out http://www.serve.gov/). It is with this backdrop that we shall first look at some statistics on volunteering. After that we will look at some social psychology research that has attempted to understand why people volunteer. Finally, I will mention a few resources for those looking to volunteer themselves.

In the years of 2005, 2006, and 2007, over 27% of the public in the United States of America volunteered. That means just over one-quarter did some sort of volunteer activity, whether that was cleaning a park, mentoring a child, being a companion for a senior, or perhaps assisting with a fundraiser of some sort. Some volunteer at one-time events and some volunteer on a regular basis. Broken down by state and city, we can see where the true hotbeds of volunteering are:

Top 5 volunteerism states

Utah – 43.9% of the population volunteer

Nebraska – 39.8%

Minnesota – 39.7%

Alaska – 38.6%

Montana – 38.0%

Just a note, our great state of Minnesota is #3. Other than that, to be honest I find these other states a bit surprising.

Top 5 volunteerism cities

Minneapolis- St. Paul – 39.3%

Salt Lake City – 37.2%

Portland – 35.6%

Seattle – 35.5%

Austin – 35.3%

Proud to say that Minneapolis/St. Paul rules the day when it comes to volunteerism!

Back to the national level, in 2007 there were a total of 60.8 million volunteers in the USA, giving a total of 8.1 billion(!) hours of service to their communities. That is quite a staggering number. I know when I saw the stat that 27% of the public in the USA volunteer, I was a little surprised at how low it was. But when you think of how many people and hours that still is, it is quite amazing.

So why are all of these people volunteering? Why sacrifice time and energy, and sometimes money, to support a cause or a community when you could instead spend your time watching CSI or reading the newest Chuck Palahnuik book?

What reasons do people actually give for why they volunteer?

Researchers have spent some time tapping into the motivations people have for volunteering. Vital work in this area has been conducted by a number of people, including a few researchers here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area (Mark Snyder at the University of Minnesota and E. Gil Clary at the College of St. Catherine). I want to focus on one paper in particular, published by Snyder and Clary, along with Ridge, Copeland, Stukas, Haugen, and Miene (the article can be found here for interested readers: http://comm2.fsu.edu/grad/phillips/FunctionalApproachtoVolunteerMotivation.pdf).

Clary et al. decided to look at the function that volunteering plays in the lives of people who choose to volunteer. Essentially, they were curious why people would indeed give up time to help others at such a cost to themselves. They wanted to tap into the motivations people have for volunteering. Through surveying volunteers themselves, they came up with 6 basic motivations for volunteering:

1. Values - Volunteering allows people to express and practice positive social values, such as altruistic or humanistic concern.

2. Understanding – Volunteering gives people a chance to learn and grow, as well as practice skills not otherwise used.

3. Social – People who volunteer provide themselves an opportunity to make new friendships and community connections.

4. Career – Those looking to improve their resume by picking up transferable work skills or experience may find assistance in volunteering.

5. Protective – Some people report that they volunteer to diminish or remove feelings of guilt associated with being more fortunate than others.

6. Enhancement – For some individuals, volunteering brings about a general feeling of well-being and happiness. The enhancement motivation centers on positive emotions generated simply by volunteering.

These were the six types of motivation that the research of Clary et al. discovered. Some of them are other-directed, such as the values motivation. But one thing to take note of is that many of the motivations are to varying degrees self-oriented. This simply means that often people are motivated to volunteer to further their career, build friendships and social networks, or remove feelings of guilt. They all are aimed at bettering the volunteer’s own life.

But before you get too depressed that volunteers are all selfish, the research conducted indicated that people often volunteer for numerous reasons. Maybe someone volunteers at a food shelf to remove guilt, but they also do it because they have positive social values, and at the same time they want to pick up some new skills. To me, this is a beautiful idea that does not make volunteering a one-dimensional behavior that needs to be only motivated for unselfish reasons.

When I was a program coordinator with an AmeriCorps program we used to discuss motivations for people serving in AmeriCorps. In AmeriCorps, people generally serve for one year in a community or educational setting. AmeriCorps members receive little in compensation and often work hard to try to bring about change. A big part of the reimbursement for serving in AmeriCorps is the education award (currently $4,725) that can be used toward student loans and future school costs.

We program coordinators and directors would debate what would happen if the education award were to increase to something a lot more substantial (such as $10,000 a year), and if upping the education award would attract more “selfish” individuals to the AmeriCorps programs. I was always a little hesitant to say that increasing the education award would attract people that would be worse AmeriCorps members, simply because if we were to abolish the education award from AmeriCorps, hardly anyone would join AmeriCorps! The education award is part of the motivation for why people join AmeriCorps. Most AmeriCorps members have numerous motivations to serve: to help their country, receive the education award, pick up new skills, and boost their resume. All of these reasons are part of the palette that leads to one dedicating a year of their life to community service such as AmeriCorps. We need to validate feelings and motivations people have to help, no matter what they are (assuming they are actually helping).

Back to the research, Clary et al. also looked at how motivation changes throughout one’s tenure as a volunteer. It became apparent that motivation for volunteering often changes from when someone begins to volunteer to later on in their experience. So maybe someone starts maintaining trails in a park at first to practice a value of environmental stewardship, but six months into the experience they are actually more motivated to volunteer in order to get a foot in the door for any possible job openings the organization might have. Motivation in general can be a fluid thing, and sometimes habits we start for one reason are maintained for another reason. And that is fine, as long as the habit is not a destructive one.

Of last note from the research, the team of researchers also discovered that tailoring the messages to and expectation of the volunteer leads to a more satisfied volunteering experience. If someone wants to volunteer for career reasons, advertising the volunteer position in the context of the career benefits of volunteering will attract them to the position more. Tailoring and framing the experiences of the volunteer position to what it can do for them on a career level will help that volunteer stay satisfied and even volunteer for a longer amount of time. So if someone is volunteering to pick up new skills, the person in charge of supervising that volunteer should make a concerted effort to ensure the volunteer is getting those skills. This will increase the likelihood that the person will continue to volunteer.

This research has many implications for those that do volunteer recruitment and volunteer management. It also brings up an epic issue that has been around in philosophy and social psychology for a long time. That debate is the issue of whether helping behavior can ever be truly altruistic, or perhaps people only help because it in some way benefits them? That is an issue for a different day and a different blog post.

To end, I simply want to point people in the direction of some places to look if you are interested in volunteering yourself.

Nationwide: VolunteerMatch

www.volunteermatch.org

Twin Cities: Hands on the Twin Cities

http://www.handsontwincities.org/

Good Deeds Society

http://www.meetup.com/Good-Deeds-Society/

National Service programs, such as AmeriCorps:

http://www.nationalservice.gov/Default.asp

As always, thanks for tuning in! Leave thoughts and rants below!

http://www.issuelab.org/closeup/Apr_2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteering

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Kitty Genovese and the Beginning of Prosocial Behavior Research

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Social psychology has been dominated by a number of topics throughout the formal one hundred years of its history. Issues like relationships, group behavior, conformity, prejudice, discrimination, and aggression have been popular ever since it became its own discipline. Another area, prosocial behavior, has also had its own hot and cold periods throughout the history of social psychology. Prosocial behavior research addresses topics like altruism, helping, caregiving, assisting in emergency situations, volunteerism, and civic engagement. These days it is easy to find research in all of these separate areas, but it was not that way 45 years ago. In fact, one lone event is often tied to the founding of prosocial behavior research in social psychology. That event was a tragic murder that occurred back in 1964.

The story is one found (and often misreported) in every social psychology textbook that has been released since the event occurred. On the night of March 13, 1964 Catherine (Kitty) Genovese pulled up to her apartment in Queens, New York late at night. As she was walking to the entrance of her building, a man approached her and began viciously stabbing her. During this time, Kitty screamed and attempted to draw attention. It is at this point what actually occurred becomes a bit sketchy, so I will go with what psychologists are pretty sure at least happened.

A number of neighbors opened up window blinds and peaked through shutters to see what was occurring. Though the scene was supposedly a bit ambiguous to onlookers, at least a dozen people witnessed or heard the event and were concerned about what was occurring. Some thought what they saw was an argument between partners. Others thought it was a physical assault of some sort. One onlooker yelled out his window, demanding the person leave the woman alone. This, it appears, was successful. The attacker left Kitty where she was, now victim of a few stab wounds, and fled the scene. The best evidence we have is that Kitty attempted to stand up at this point and then stumbled around her building, away from the view of the onlookers and outside of earshot. It is unclear whether anyone actually tried to contact the police at this point, but it was at least not a common response by onlookers and if the police were contacted then the police did not make the event a priority. As Kitty was out of sight, no one got out of their building to check on her.

At this point, witnesses saw the attacker return at least 10 minutes later in new clothes and he proceeded to determine where Kitty was. He located her in a back hallway of the apartment building, and it was here he finished attacking the young woman and then raped her. Within a few minutes of the second attack someone from the apartment building discovered Kitty and called the police and requested an ambulance. The police and ambulance arrived at the scene shortly thereafter, and Kitty Genovese died on the way to the hospital.

After the event occurred, it drew a lot of media coverage. Some of the information was confused or misrepresented, which is why the story of the murder is often misreported to this day. At some point, it was accepted as fact that there were 38 witnesses that all saw the event and not one person did anything to help. We now believe that there were more like a dozen witnesses at one stage or another, and perhaps one person did contact the police. Some other facts of the event were messed up as well. But truth be told, the fact still remains that at least a dozen listeners or onlookers were suspicious of the event and little seems to have been done to alert authorities before the second attack was completed. No one followed after Kitty to make sure she did not need help and no one contacted authorities when the man returned to the scene.

From News to Research

Well the media coverage of this, coupled with the sometimes exaggerated story, led to complete outrage by the public. People started talking about the nature of New Yorkers, how they were only self-motivated and unwilling to help others. Some discussed the idea that living in the city turns us into antisocial beings who only care about ourselves. All of this outrage garnered the attention of a few social psychologists by the names of John Darley and Bibb Latane. They decided they would try to track down just why people who would unwilling to offer assistance in this emergency situation.

The first notion Darley and Latane investigated was what is now called the bystander effect. Essentially, the idea of the bystander effect is that, counter intuitively, the more people there are around when an event occurs the less likely it is that someone will help. For example, if I were to scream out for help in an area where there were only one or two people around, it is highly likely they would come to my aid. But if it were a busy area, it would actually tend to be less likely that someone would help me, and this is true on a sliding scale for the amount of people around. Keep in mind that the critical issue here is the social comparison that occurs in groups. If a few people appear concerned and want to help, it will make it more likely that others will help. But if people tend to look unconcerned or afraid to help, this creates a ripple effect in the group and people tend to act in a similar manner. Let me cite one of Darley and Latane’s research studies to elaborate on the idea of the bystander effect.

Back in 1968 Darley and Latane conducted a laboratory experiment to attempt to harvest a better understanding of the bystander effect. They devised a study where an individual subject was brought into an empty room and they were shown how to operate a communication device that was supposedly connected to other subjects in the study. Each supposed subject (there was only one real subject each time, the rest were “in” on the experiment) was in their own room and the subjects were supposed to be talking about their college experiences. So to the subject, the study was just about two, three, or six subjects (depending on the study group the subject was in) talking about college life and college experiences. Also important to know is that there were no researchers available in the communications, they were all outside the doors of the rooms the subjects were in. But what those sneaky social psychologists were really trying to tap into was how likely it was that the subject would look for help in an emergency situation. So the conversation would start, and the conversation group would either be:

The subject and one other person

or

The subject and two other people

or

The subject and five other people

During each conversation, one of the false subjects eventually faked like they were having an epileptic seizure over the communication system. Darley and Latane wanted to see if the subjects would be willing to look for help either more or less depending on the number of people in the conversation, and if the time it took to help would change as well. With knowledge of the bystander effect it should not surprise you what was found.

Darley and Latane discovered that if the subject was having a conversation with only one other person (and that person had the seizure), 85% of subjects left the room and found help for the other person. On top of that, it only took subjects on average 52 seconds to find that help. If there were three people in the group (subject, person having seizure, and one other person), the response rate decreased to 62% and the average help time was 93 seconds. Finally, if the group size was six people, the helping rate fell to an abysmal 31%! And the seconds it took for those that did help was 166 seconds, almost three minutes to respond!

These were amazing (and somewhat depressing) findings to say the least, and went against what common wisdom was, which said that the more people around the more likely it should be that you get help. Darley and Latane conducted more studies with similar goals (and they are very interesting if you care to look them up) and found the same results again and again.

Diffusion of Responsibility

But the results begged the question, why should more people around an emergency make it less likely that help will be given? There are a few ways to approach that question, but one common response is the idea of diffusion of responsibility. This is a more general phenomenon, but fits well with the bystander effect. Essentially diffusion of responsibility says that the more people that are around, the less each person feels responsible for an event, such as helping. So if you witness someone getting attacked and you know there are 30 other people watching, you say to yourself, “Why should I help? Everyone else here is just as responsible to help and someone else can take the first step to take care of this.” Diffusion of responsibility also allows for reduced guilt because of inaction, allowing one to say, “Maybe I did not help, but neither did any of those other people.”

Diffusion of responsibility is a strong psychological trick that has been used for many years in a number of interesting settings. For example, traditionally during the use of firing squads one of the shooters is randomly given a weapon with a blank. This is communicated to the entire firing squad, so if the shooters desire they can tell themselves after the execution that they had the blank weapon and did not actually shoot the individual. This has been done with electric chairs as well, where there are a number of switches that are simultaneously turned but one is not actually connected to the electric circuit.

Conclusion

Now there are other important factors that influence if someone will help in an emergency or not, but the bystander effect has been shown to be a powerful predictor. Other things that could influence willingness to help are similarity between yourself and the individual needing assistance, the perceived risks and dangers of helping, and belief that others will help.

To end, I just wanted to highlight a couple of ways people have tried to circumvent the bystander effect to elicit more helping behavior from people. One useful way is in the case of an emergency where there is a crowd of people, selecting specific people to assist with specific tasks. Maybe you have heard this before in safety trainings, but it is really a useful habit and derives directly from Darley and Latane’s research. Picking one person from the crowd to call for an ambulance or call the police will make it far more likely those tasks are accomplished. Also, letting people know ahead of time that they are safe to help if they act in good faith can allay some peoples’ anxieties about helping. Some organizations even do bystander training, highlighting issues discussed here and also training people on what to do in the event of an emergency.

Well, I think I will end it here. This is a fascinating topic and one that has already led to a very long posting. Next time I think we will take a look at another specific type of prosocial behavior: volunteerism. As always, thanks for reading and leave your thoughts/questions/concerns below!

For more on the supposed vs. real events of the Kitty Genovese murder visit:

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~bmoehlma/KGmyth.pdf

Most of the information for this post was taken from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese#cite_note-7

and

http://www.wadsworth.com/psychology_d/templates/student_resources/0155060678_rathus/ps/ps19.html

image courtesy of bixentro http://www.flickr.com/photos/bixentro/379813149/

Sense of Community

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What is a community? I am not going to rip off some dictionary and actually define the word for you. But just think of the places and groups you consider yourself a community member. I myself, as of this blog post, consider the following all communities of mine: NE Minneapolis resident, vegetarians, University of Minnesota students, AmeriCorps alum, Twin Cities hip-hop fans, self-identified progressives, agnostics...I could go on and on with the communities, some more and some less, I consider myself a part of. And you could obviously rank the communities in order of important to me. Twin Cities resident being high on that list, and WonderWash user being relatively low on the scale of important communities.

Now, there are different ways to think about what a community is. There are overt physical communities, like I am currently a NE Minneapolis dweller. Or perhaps you have a community that meets in a certain place like a church or a music venue. Those are physical communities.

Then there are communities which do not necessarily have much of a consistent or locatable physical boundary. An example could be someone who plays World of Warcraft. This individual may have never met the people they are playing with, and yet I have no doubt that there are World of Warcraft players that consider the World of Warcraft community very important to them.

These sorts of communities are more psychological in nature. Yes, they have physical manifestations such as communicating with people over distances and the physiological and neurological events that physically take place. But these are examples of how we choose to identify, no matter what is going on physically. I know when I studied abroad in Australia for a semester during my college years, I still considered myself a community member of the University of Minnesota Duluth. This is exactly what is meant when social scientists use the term “sense of community.”

Sense of community focuses more on the experiential feelings toward the group of concern, rather than why that actual community exists in the world or the structure of its existence. Psychologists and other social scientists gauge things like beliefs, attitudes, emotions, experiences, and behaviors to tap into how a person lives and experiences the communities they are part of. Sense of community attempts to address how connected people feel, the level of commitment, and perhaps predict other related behaviors like cooperation, civic engagement, or prosocial behavior.

Here are some things correlated with high psychological sense of community, taken from the pages of Wikipedia itself (and their citations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_community):

- Greater community participation

- Increased feelings of safety

- Increased quality of interpersonal relationships

- Greater sense of control in community

- Able to function effectively in community

As well as: (https://www.msu.edu/~socomm/1997original.pdf)

- Decrease in crime behavior in that community

- Increased community health

Now, keep in mind that these findings are correlations. This means that as sense of community increases with an individual and in a community, then these above events are also taking place. To state it another way for example, a person with a high sense of community also tends to have greater community participation. What we do not necessarily know is if greater community participation leads to someone having a higher sense of community, or if having a higher sense of community led to them participating in their community more. Or, it is even possible that something else is causing both of those things, such as living in a community for a longer amount of time leads to both a greater sense of community and increased community participation.

Sense of community was first heavily studied by McMillan and Chavis, starting back in 1986. Their version of the idea has been tested and retested over the years to highly satisfactory results. They considered sense of community to have four essential parts. They are:

Membership – including things such as boundaries, emotional safety, sense of belongingness and identification, personal investment, and a common system of symbols

Influence – The fact that sense of community is somewhat determined by how much influence you have over a community, and how much influence that community has over you

Integration and fulfillment of needs – People need to feel like they are harvesting a benefit from being a member of the community

Shared emotional connection – This means everyone is participating and on satisfactory levels, and also that people are invested in the history of the community and the future of the community.

So these four attributes – membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection – are what McMillan and Chavis believe are vital to measuring someone’s sense of community in regard to any one community.

And really, I feel like these all make some sense. Take my passion as a Steelers fan. When it comes to membership, I have a sense of who is and is not part of this community. We also have common symbols we share, which encompass for example who the starting cornerbacks are and what the Steelers symbol is. The Steelers community has influence over me, and I feel like I have enough knowledge to influence other Steelers fans, for example over the fact that William Gay will be a more than adequate replacement for Bryan McFadden. I feel like I receive positive benefits from being a Steelers fan, mainly because the team repays us with so many Super Bowl victories. And finally, I am emotionally invested in the team, the fan base, the history, and their future.

So, one would think that if I took a scale created by McMillan and Chavis that aims at measuring sense of community, I would probably score pretty high on it in relation to the Steelers community. Well, good news! I have tracked down a scale that they did create in order for not only me to measure my Steelers sense of community, but for you to try out with a community of your choosing.

Well, here it is. This is called the Sense of Community Index. It gauges an individual’s sense of community in relation to a community of their choosing, all according to the McMillan and Chavis guidelines.

Directions are this: First, pick a community you are part of. Second, go through the following statements and assign values to them according to the scale below. Below the statements you will find the directions for scoring your overall sense of community, and then how to score the various subscales that correspond to the four areas that McMilan and Chavis believe comprise sense of community.

How well do each of the following statements represent how you feel about this community?

0= Not at All 1= Somewhat 2= Mostly 3= Completely

1. I get important needs of mine met because I am part of this community.

2. Community members and I value the same things.

3. This community has been successful in getting the needs of its members met.

4. Being a member of this community makes me feel good.

5. When I have a problem, I can talk about it with members of this community.

6. People in this community have similar needs, priorities, and goals.

7. I can trust people in this community.

8. I can recognize most of the members of this community.

9. Most community members know me.

10. This community has symbols and expressions of membership such as clothes, signs, art, architecture, logos, landmarks, and flags that people can recognize.

11. I put a lot of time and effort into being part of this community.

12. Being a member of this community is a part of my identity.

13. Fitting into this community is important to me.

14. This community can influence other communities.

15. I care about what other community members think of me.

16. I have influence over what this community is like.

17. If there is a problem in this community, members can get it solved.

18. This community has good leaders.

19. It is very important to me to be a part of this community.

20. I am with other community members a lot and enjoy being with them.

21. I expect to be a part of this community for a long time.

22. Members of this community have shared important events together, such as holidays, celebrations, or disasters.

23. I feel hopeful about the future of this community.

24. Members of this community care about each other.

Next, add up your scores for each scale:

Total Sense of Community Index = Sum of Q1 to Q24

Subscales Reinforcement of Needs = Q1 + Q2 + Q3 + Q4 + Q5 + Q6

Membership = Q7 + Q8 + Q9 + Q10 + Q11 + Q12

Influence = Q13 + Q14 + Q15 + Q16 + Q17 + Q18

Shared Emotional Connection = Q19 + Q20 + Q21 + Q22 + Q23 + Q24

What did you get?

I was unable to find an official scorecard for what constitutes high or low sense of community, but you can get a sense by 2’s equaling mostly positive feelings, and 0’s being not at all positive feelings, where your average is for the community.

For the Steelers community, here are my scores:

Total Sense of Community Index – 38

Reinforcement of needs – 11

Membership – 9

Influence – 9

Shared emotional connection – 9

So my total sense of community with the Steelers seems to be average or a little below average. This may surprise people who do not know me well and are only reading this blog. But this actually seems pretty accurate for a few reasons. First, being a Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Minnesota, there are not too many of us around. I do not count any real Steelers fans among my friends or family. Thus, I have little interaction with other fans or the team, and it makes for a very personal community, almost a contradiction of terms. Second, I have traces of self-loathing about the fact that I like football and the Steelers, mainly because I do not entirely support the athletes and the amount of money they make and the amount they complain, and also because I find it frustrating that so many football fans are quick to attend a game where 60,000 people show up, but are hesitant to show up at a social or political rally of any sort. So with these qualms in mind, I find my results make sense. And the subscale that was the most positive for me? Reinforcement of needs, which makes sense since I feel the Steelers are extremely rewarding in the fact that they have had a very successful team for many years.

Well, with that I will wrap up. What do you think of the idea of Sense of Community? Useful tool? And if you went through and scored your sense of community, what community was it and what were your results?

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A Primer on Peace Psychology

photo courtesy of Jayel Aheram http://www.flickr.com/photos/aheram/283162678/

The field of psychology is a vast enterprise. Since everything we do is inherently a personal and psychological experience, branches have developed within psychology to study virtually every aspect of human (and nonhuman animal) life. The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest professional organization in the world that represents psychologists from all walks of life. The APA currently has a member base of 150,000 members and is host of a yearly budget of approximately $70 million. With its overall goal to advance the psychological sciences, the APA has a vast sea of divisions that are dedicated to the study, research, and discussion of certain aspects of psychology. There is Division 2 for the Teaching of Psychology, Division 10 for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Division 44 is for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues. Division 50 is for the study if Addictions, and Division 36 is for the Psychology of Religion. Currently with 56 divisions, the APA is host to a cornucopia of knowledge and research that makes all of us social science nerds drool.

One of the recent arrivals on the scene (founded in 1990) is Division 48, the Society for the Study of Peace, Violence, and Conflict: Peace Psychology Division. The vision statement for Division 48 is as follows:

“As peace psychologists, our vision is the development of sustainable societies through the prevention of destructive conflict and violence, the amelioration of its consequences, the empowerment of individuals, and the building of cultures of peace and global community.”

http://www.webster.edu/peacepsychology/

With a textbook (free to download online! http://academic.marion.ohio-state.edu/dchristie/Peace%20Psychology%20Book.html ) and nearly 20 years running, the division is home to a large and eclectic range of research and study. This is not your group of peaceniks that are busy doing drugs and hoping hugs can heal the world. They are an active and resourceful group that deliberately throw themselves into difficult and convoluted situations to try to understand bit by bit why we have so much violence and conflict in this world, and how to build new systems where those possibilities are less and less likely.

Peace psychology really grew out of the Cold War era, where so many people, not just psychologists, were amazed and horrified that most life on this planet was within a few button pushes of oblivion. It is the theme which we run into more and more in our world these days where humans utilizing science have developed technologies in which we are not mature enough to handle or smart enough to resist using.

So from those soils peace psychology was formed. How can we find ways for individuals, groups, cultures, organizations, and nations to reduce and handle conflict effectively without even threatening to use nuclear weapons or other forms of violence? The field of peace psychology really entails four somewhat separate ways to address violence, conflict, and peace issues. They are:

1. Direct Violence
2. Structural Violence
3. Peace Making
4. Peace Building

Direct violence is the most overt and obvious subject matter that peace psychology looks to address. Events like physical abuse, random violence, war, and genocide are some examples of the direct violence peace psychologists seek to understand and stop. With ethnic and religious conflict within countries (rather than between countries) being the major contributor to violence in the world, psychologists pay especially close attention to the role cultural conflicts play in the eruption of war and genocide.

Another form of violence, and one that is labeled and addressed less often, is structural violence. At the heart of structural violence is inequitable distribution of choice, power, and resources in a nation, to the extent that is has a detrimental effect on the lives of its citizens. For example, someone with a disability has to battle stigma and stereotypes to have a chance at a job. A person of color may have to be concerned about their safety if they choose to go to the police. A person in a low income situation may not have equal access and a fair process in the legal world. Or they may be forced to live in a housing situation that could be an environment that is unsafe or reinforces harmful behaviors or beliefs.

The point is that structural violence is something the public is usually either ignorant of or apathetic towards. Homelessness and poverty are examples of things we all know exist and continue to be fine with. Sure, maybe we all wish that everybody had a home and a paycheck that was enough to live comfortably with. But we don’t really do much about it. And that is the danger of structural violence, it is either invisible or so overt that we have become habituated to it. We come up with justifications for these continued inequities, such as “those people deserve what they get”, “there are lazy”, or “there is nothing that can be done about it.” But as Gandhi said “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” Poverty and related systemic issues ARE violence, structural violence.

So we have direct violence and structural violence. Direct violence being a response to conflict, and structural violence being the result of unjust systems and operations. The third and fourth limbs of peace psychology deal with how to address these two concerns.

Peacemaking is the effort to use effective techniques to stop direct violence from occurring. An example is using a mediator to help the parties resolve their conflict by peaceful means before violence is about to erupt or is at risk of escalating. Essentially peacemaking is an attempt to stop a bleeding wound. Little is done to address the underlying issue, but violence and the associated negative events are stopped where they stand. Sometimes peacemaking is relatively simply and includes methods to keep conflicting parties separate. A defining aspect of peacemaking is conflict resolution.

Peacebuilding is the response to structural violence and sustained direct violence. It is an effort to tap into systemic issues that are perpetually-sustained grounds for violence and conflict to erupt and or be managed ineffectively. One clear wording difference that indicates a distinct approach from peacemaking is that peacebuiling uses the phrase “conflict transformation,” the idea obviously being that conflict is an opportunity to acknowledge needs and desires and find ways to create real adjustments. Another distinction is to say that peacemaking is a reactive and peacebuilding is proactive.

One important process involved in peacebuilding is empowerment. Building peace includes the notion that people are more and more in position to make informed decisions that heavily impact their own lives. It is concerned with research and theory that leaves all groups on more of an even playing field. Research in peace psychology often addresses the themes of peacebuilding by investigating stereotypes, prejudice, peace education, and group behavior. It might look like changing opinions and attitudes towards the LGBT community in hopes of creating a more peaceful atmosphere where it is safe to be out and celebratory of differences in sexual orientation or gender identity. It looks like addressing incorrect beliefs everyone has that keep people in poverty from accessing and utilizing resources they need. Peacemaking and peace psychology should look at how to get people immigrants and refugees involved and respected in the political process. These are ways to build peace in this country in a way that is somewhat self-sustaining and self-correcting.

Well, this has been a quick primer on the field of peace psychology and related disciplines. I wanted to set the stage and give a context for future discussion along these lines. We will delve into these four areas and corresponding research in the future, but for now go outside and enjoy the beautiful summer! Thanks for reading, and as always consider leaving a comment/thought/question below!

photo courtesy of Kamoteus (A Better Way)

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Mindfulness and Consumption

photo courtesy of Mosieur J. ’s

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jblndl/2503412198/

One day not too long ago, I was perusing the aisles at my local Rainbow Foods. While weaving in and out of the shopping carts in the dairy section, I surprisingly began to nod my head. I had not even noticed the background music before, and I was humming along before my brain had even digested what my ears were swallowing. On the PA system was Bob Marley, reminding me to “get together and feel alright.” And you know what? I did. But was I being played? Had Bob Marley been resurrected, only to unconsciously convince me to spend more money at the supermarket? Was this all an elaborate ploy to get me to purchase things my body had little use for?

Well, I caught the subliminal influencing before it had a chance to sway my purchasing. In that moment I was proud of myself for catching on to their feeble attempts to manipulate consumers by pumping feel-good jams into our systems. I did study psychology as an undergrad, after all. Other people perhaps fall for music influencing their behavior, but not me.

With this sudden enlightenment, I headed for the checkout register. And what happened next? While moseying through the frozen food aisle, I was caught by a yellow tag that exclaimed “Hot Pockets On Sale!” Now, for all of you who were not cheap college male freshmen in the past, these are a disgusting excuse for a food item. Taste like crap, absolutely fattening and no good for you, full of funky artificial coloring and preservatives and other junk no human body has learned to utilize as nutrients. And sure enough, I reached into that frigid cooler and pulled myself out a two-pack. I honestly cannot recall the last time I purchased Hot Pockets. It had been years, probably since early college. And yet, there I was.

Did Rainbow Foods win the day? Had Bob Marley been my Judas, the one that betrayed me for perpetual influence over the American public? Well, sorry to say that the research I have seen does not support the notion that subliminal or background music influences purchasing behavior. However, I wanted to take a moment to discuss a different mechanism that may have played a role in my terrible buying decision that day in Rainbow.

Enter a study conducted back in 1998 by C.L. Pollock and her colleagues. Pollock et al. decided to investigate the role advertising has on a consumer’s decision to purchase an unnecessary item (in this case, either a small or large box of chocolates). They examined an advertising technique called the “That’s-Not-All (TNA)” technique, which everyone who has stayed up past 1 a.m. with the television on should recognize. Pollock et al. chose the “reduced cost” version of TNA, which is the ploy used by infomercials around the world, where that magical useless item is reduced from $29.95 to $19.95 in the middle of the program.

Pollock et al. wanted to use the TNA technique to examine if consumers’ purchasing behaviors were automatic or mindful when presented with either a small item that was discounted or a large item that was discounted. Participants in the study were also given a justification for purchasing the small or large box of chocolate. They were either given no special reason to buy the discounted item, they were given a terrible reason (“this candy is made of chocolate and sold in this box”), or a decent justification (“These Sweet Shop chocolates are fudge hand-dipped in chocolate with pecans. Also, Sweet Shop has been in business over 20 years.”). So the variables in the study:

1. The size of the box of chocolates.
2. The justification message given for buying the box (None, terrible, or decent).

When the smaller boxes of chocolates were sold to participants, it only mattered if the participants were told any justification for buying the box. That is, if participants were offered the small box, they did not like to have zero justification. But if you told them either redundant information (“this candy is chocolate”) or the decent justification the buying probabilities were the same.

This notion did not hold true for the bigger box of chocolates though (sadly I do not know the actual size difference, and thus price difference, between the small and big boxes). It turned out that participants that were allowed to purchase the large box of chocolates were much more mindful of the reasoning offered, and thus accepted, for buying an item.

Pollock et al. argued that the distinction between purchasing a lower-priced item versus a higher-priced item came down to being more aware and mindful. Or to put it another way, participants were less automatic when presented with a more expensive item. People tuned in their awareness when more was at stake during their purchases. If someone is presented with a smaller item, as long as they are told any gibberish, they are more likely to buy as a reflex without any careful thought.

The take away message from the study was that we need to put extra energy into being mindful and conscious during purchases we perceive to be of minimal importance, especially when reasoning is given to purcahse it. It really does not matter what that justification is for that small item. Perhaps if I had focused less on the music of Bob Marley (which probably did not have an effect on my Hot Pocket purchase) and more on the sale tag that smiled at me, I might have continued my streak of avoiding the disgusting Hot Pockets brand. If we were only more mindful and focused on what we actually need and what we truly want for our body, we probably would not be purchasing so many needless items. If we try to be a bit more mindful, we might even restrain ourselves from buying items that we know are harmful to our planet and our communities.

What do you think of the role mindfulness plays in consumption and purchasing? It is the key? Just one variable involved? Or perhaps it completely misses the real cause of our unnecessary consumption? Let me know what you think below!

Link to the Pollock et al. article:
http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/11/1153

photo courtesy of mtr0212 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtr0212/266331141/