The nature of problem solving in social action.

The nature of scientific problem-solving has been assumed to be appropriate to all problems, including those in the social realm. There are no intractable problems. If problems in the social realm seem intractable, it is assumed that it is because they have not been formulated and attacked scientifically. The social scientists who entered social action after World War II, armed with theories and scientifically tested knowledge, found a world that would not bend to their paradigms. They entered a world governed by values, not facts, where persuasion and power were in the service of different definitions of age-old questions, where the relationship between action and values was more crucial to living than was the requirement that action lead to a solution. Many social scientists reacted with either petulance or bewilderment, and their attempts at social change fared poorly. A malaise set in, a crisis of confidence. How does one justify trying to cope with what may be intractable problems? The nature of the questions belies its origins in the assumption of science that one has to believe that all problems are solvable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cognitive organization of social information: A converging-operations approach.

Investigated the assumption that social information is automatically organized on a person-by-person basis, that the information items about each person are cognitively grouped into one person-category that is separate from the other person-categories. Using a converging-operations approach, the notion that familiarity mediates this cognitive organization of person information was examined in 3 experiments with 96 undergraduates. Three distinct methodologies were used to study the relationship between familiarity and person organization: (a) a speeded-sorting task, (b) a recognition RT task, and (c) a free-recall task. Results indicate that this tendency to organize social information on a person-by-person basis was greater for familiar than for unfamiliar persons. Two of the tasks provided evidence that social information is not organized by person when the stimulus persons are completely unfamiliar. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The norm of self-interest and its effects on social action.

Four studies investigated whether people feel inhibited from engaging in social action incongruent with their apparent self-interest. Participants in Study 1 predicted that they would be evaluated negatively were they to take action on behalf of a cause in which they had no stake or in which they had a stake but held stake-incongruent attitudes. Participants in Study 2 reported both surprise and anger when a target person took action on behalf of a cause in which he or she had no stake or in which he or she held stake-incongruent attitudes. In Study 3, individuals felt more comfortable engaging in social action and expected others to respond more favorably toward their actions if the issue was described as more relevant to their own sex than to the opposite sex. In Study 4, the authors found that providing nonvested individuals with psychological standing rendered them as likely as vested individuals to undertake social action. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the relationship between vested interest, social action, and attitude–behavior consistency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulation of the action control system by social intention: Unexpected social requests override preplanned action.

Four experiments investigated the influence of a sudden social request on the kinematics of a preplanned action. In Experiment 1, participants were requested to grasp an object and then locate it within a container (unperturbed trials). On 20% of trials, a human agent seated nearby the participant unexpectedly stretched out her arm and unfolded her hand as if to ask for the object (perturbed trials). In the remaining 3 experiments, similar procedures were adopted except that (a) the human was replaced by a robotic agent, (b) the gesture performed by the human agent did not imply a social request, and (c) the gaze of the human agent was not available. Only when the perturbation was characterized by a social request involving a human agent were there kinematic changes to the action directed toward the target. Conversely, no effects on kinematics were evident when the perturbation was caused by the robotic agent or by a human agent performing a nonsocial gesture. These findings are discussed in the light of current theories proposed to explain the effects of social context on the control of action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Philosophical tensions influencing psychology and social action.

Debate on psychology's role in social action centers on whether an acceptable minimal standard for social activism by members of the profession and the profession as a whole can be determined. The debate is often couched in political terms. This article examines psychology's role in social action from the vantage point of philosophical tensions that make definition of social action and psychology's role difficult. Three tensions are discussed—tensions between those operating from a perspective of judgment of care versus judgment of rights; tensions between those arguing that the American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles inform choice versus mandate behavior; and tensions between those in the profession who are consumers versus creators of facts. These tensions, although not resolvable, can provide increased understanding of professional and moral decision making within a heterogeneous professional community. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology in action: The social psychology of change: A seminar with academic and social relevance.

Notes that academic psychology's response to pressures for increased social relevance has varied. Some groups act as if these pressures evidence a need for a greater supply of action-oriented practitioners and provide students with an ever-increasing number of practica and field experience. Other groups, who believe that this response is misguided, argue that a concern with basic theoretical and experimental issues is primary and essential to progress in applied realms. Often these viewpoints are treated as mutually exclusive. An alternative course is represented by a graduate seminar in which students conduct interviews with an array of social change agents. Using the interview data, their task is to develop a theory of social intervention which articulates the general principles, not the specific procedures, of a particular approach. In the course of this effort, they are able to study the correct technology of social interventions. This stimulates basic questions about fundamental issues in psychology. Seeking answers to these questions develops research insights and skills in theory building as attempts are made to organize research and theory into conceptually meaningful frameworks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From social talk to social action: Shaping the social triad with emotion sharing.

Seemingly trivial social talk provides fertile ground for emotion sharing (a narrator and audience's realization that they experience the same emotional response toward a target), which in turn creates a coalition between the narrator and the audience, configures the narrator and audience's relationship with the target, and coordinates their target-directed action. In this article, the authors use 4 studies to investigate this thesis. In Studies 1 and 2--where participants rated scenarios in which narrators told them anecdotes--the authors found that when there was emotion sharing (a) participants were more bonded with narrators, (b) the narrator and audience's relationship with the target (as reflected in action tendencies) was determined by the emotionality of the anecdotes, and (c) they coordinated their target-directed actions. Study 3 demonstrated that this effect was indeed due to emotion sharing. Study 4 provided behavioral evidence for the effects of emotion sharing using a 2-person trust game. Together, these studies reveal that the everyday act of social talk is a powerful act that is able to shape the social triad of the narrator, the audience, and the social target, with powerful consequences for social structure and group action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal engagement in social perception: The consequences of getting into the action.

Examined the effects on person perception of varying levels of observer-actor engagement using 60 undergraduates. Ss observed a male actor (confederate) responding to interview questions on a prerecorded videotape under 3 conditions of interpersonal engagement: Ss in a detachment condition knew that they were simply observing a tape; Ss in an anticipated-interaction condition knew that they were observing a tape but expected to interact subsequently with the actor; Ss in an actual-interaction condition thought that they were interacting with the actor over a video hook-up. Half of the Ss observed the actor preface his responses with a positive comment regarding the interviewer's question (positive actor); the other half observed the actor preface his responses with a negative comment (negative actor). It was predicted that anticipated-interaction Ss would demonstrate hopefulness by attributing the positive actor's behavior dispositionally and the negative actor's behavior situationally but that actual-interaction Ss would show the opposite causal attribution pattern in an attempt to protect or enhance their own self-esteem. Results confirm these predictions. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consumer psychology as a social psychological sphere of action.

Brings to the attention of social psychologists the fact that contemporary consumer psychology is essentially social psychology utilized in a specific context, and attempts to stimulate a few social psychologists to engage in social-consumer psychological research. Consumer behavior and consumer psychology are defined and distinguished from each other, and 10 bases for justifying greater social psychological involvement in consumer research are elaborated. This involvement is considered to contribute to the development of both social psychology and the social psychologists who become so involved. (70 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory organization of action events and its relationship to memory performance.

Previous research yielded inconsistent results regarding the memory organization of self-performed actions. The authors propose that task performance changes the very basis of memory organization. Enactment during study and test (Experiment 1) yielded stronger enactive clustering (based on motor-movement similarities), whereas verbal encoding yielded stronger conceptual clustering (based on semantic-episodic similarities). Enactment enhanced memory quantity and memory accuracy. Both measures increased with enactive clustering under self-performance instructions but with conceptual clustering under verbal instructions. Enactment only during study (Experiment 2) or only during testing (Experiment 3) also enhanced enactive clustering. It is proposed that different conditions affect the relative salience of different types of memory organization and their relative contribution to recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social planning and social action do involve psychological processes.

Responds to the comments of J. W. Lounsbury et al (1979) on L. D. Goodstein and I. Sandler's (see record 1979-22507-001) conceptual analysis of community psychology (CP). The conceptual analysis originally offered is defended in its role as a catalyst in the development of new fields such as CP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual organization of behavior: A hierarchical control model of coordinated action.

Compared the behavior of 4 college students and 2 faculty members (including the present author) with a hierarchical control system model of behavioral organization. Ss varied the position of 2 control handles simultaneously to keep the distance constant between 2 pairs of lines. Three variations on this basic experiment that illustrate some fundamental properties of coordinated action showed (1) how independent actions, compensating for unpredictable and undetectable disturbances, can produce a single behavioral result; (2) how the ability to produce a particular result is maintained when the connection between action and result is changed; and (3) how 2 independent outputs can appear to be related as coordinative structures when one output disturbs a result being controlled by the other. The correlation between the behavior of Ss and the model in all experiments was typically on the order of .99. A detailed examination of the operation of the model demonstrated that actions are structured by perception, not by central commands or equations of constraint. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Genetic control of social organization in an ant

A central issue in evolutionary biology is the extent to which complex social organization is under genetic control. We have found that a single genomic element marked by the protein-encoding gene Gp-9 is responsible for the existence of two distinct forms of social organization in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta. This genetic factor influences the reproductive phenotypes and behavioral strategies of queens and determines whether workers tolerate a single fertile queen or multiple queens per colony. Furthermore, this factor affects worker tolerance of queens with alternate genotypes, thus explaining the dramatic differences in Gp-9 allele frequencies observed between the two social forms in the wild. These findings reveal how a single genetic factor can have major effects on complex social behavior and influence the nature of social organization.     

The organization of human abilities.

There are "two unfortunate tendencies in recent work on human abilities: the proliferation of factors and the tendency to think of only the first-order factors as the primary ones. An alternative model is to place factors in hierarchical order as advocated by the British psychometricians, especially Vernon. The application of the hierarchical model to a logical hierarchy of possible tests of mechanical information is presented, some hypothetical correlations are factored in several orders, and the Schmid-Leiman transformation is used to convert the factors back into a single orthogonal matrix manifesting the hierarchical principle. Facet analysis would enable one to define a population of tests… [and] helps restate the need for homogeneity in a test." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The organization of behaviour revisited.

Provides an overview of major themes in D. O. Hebb's thought in behavioural neuroscience. Hebbs saw psychology as a biological science, but one in which the organization of behaviour must remain the central concern. Through penetrating theoretical concepts, including the "cell assembly," "phase sequence," and "Hebb synapse," he offered a way to bridge the gap between cells, circuits and behaviour. He saw the brain as a dynamically organized system of multiple distributed parts, with roots that extend into foundations of development and evolutionary heritage. He understood that behaviour, as brain, can be sliced at various levels and that one of the challenges is to bring these levels into both conceptual and empirical register. He could move between theory and fact with an ease that continues to inspire both students and professional investigators. Although facts continue to accumulate at an accelerating rate in both psychology and neuroscience, and although these facts continue to force revision in the details of Hebb's earlier contributions, his overall insistence that we look at behaviour and brain together, within a dynamic, relational and multilayered framework, remains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental illness, milieu therapy, and social organization in ward groups.

"It was concluded that as degree of mental illness increases, there is a decrease in social organization and social relationship involving positive or negative feelings. This process appears to be reversed by milieu therapy." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The single practitioner and community engagement: Bridging the gap between practice and social action.

Urban communities, with their myriad systemic problems of poverty, social dysfunction, and diminishing public and private resources compounded by endemic health and economic disparities, provide the single psychologist practitioner with a rewarding opportunity to become involved in urban community activities and to make a positive impact. Finding common ground for discourse and action with community members can benefit both the community and the psychologist by helping them to identify, understand, and engage the community in developing solutions for community-based problems faced by residents on a daily basis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)