PSYCHOLOGY REVISION

Information, notes and revision on everything we've studied so far. 

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Cue-Dependency Theory of Forgetting

Proposed by Tulving in ‘75, the theory applies to long-term memory (LTM), not short-term. Basically, the idea is that forgetting occurs when the correct cues are not available for memory retrieval, therefore suggesting that memory is dependent on cues being present and that forgetting occurs when this is not possible. 

Tulving had the idea that there are two events necessary for recall:

- memory trace - information which is already there and retained in a store as a result of the original perception of an event. 

- retrieval cue - information present in the individual’s cognitive environment at the time of retrieval which matches at the time of recall. For example, a physical or emotional state, an environment, a sound, etc. 

----> context-dependent cue - the situation or context is different from that at encoding.

----> state-dependent cue  - the person’s state or mood is different from that at encoding.

Tulving says “we remember an event if it has left behind a trace and if something reminds us of it”, and describes forgetting as “the inability to recall something now that could be recalled on an earlier occasion.” 

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Evaluation of Trace Decay

STRENGTHS:

- Though it does not prove that trace decay actually exists, there is physical evidence to back the theory: Penfield’s work with epileptic patients, where he probed the brains of the still-conscious sufferers, found that there are specific areas of the brain which hold particular memories. 

- It can be applied to people who suffer with Alzheimer’s - the people who have this illness appear to actually lose their memories, as opposed to being unable to retrieve them, thus backing up the idea that memory is a physical process. 

WEAKNESSES:

- It is incredibly difficult to actually measure trace decay in the short-term store (STM) due to there being the possibility that new information has simply displaced the old rather than the old just decaying, or that there has been interference. 

- It seems that some memories are entirely resistant of forgetting, and it is hard to see why some traces would be more resilient than others as some of these memories can seem to hold no significance at all. Bahrick and Hall (’91) found that people can still remember the algebra they learned at school, despite not rehearsing it for years, and after practice can improve their skills - thus suggesting that traces could not have been lost.

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Evidence for Trace Decay

(Roughly taken from Christine Brain’s AS Psychology textbook)

Reitman (’74) and Mckenna and Glendon (’85) carried out studies into trace decay. In one study, its main focus being on the short-term store (STM), male students were shown a list containing five words for two seconds, and then had to listen for a faint tone over head-phones. The tone was given after fifteen seconds. The participants had to then try to recall the words. Word recall fell by 24% in the first fifteen-second period before recall, when recall rate was compared with no fifteen second gap.

The passage of time seems to be what led to forgetting, thus implying that the forgetting occurred due to the decay of the trace. Listening for the tone prevented rehearsal and prevented new information from being thought about (due to distraction) – thus suggesting that decay was what led to the loss of information.

In a study focussed on the long-term store (LTM), shop and office workers volunteered to take part in a task where they had to learn how to resuscitate someone. Their performance was measured up to three years later. After three years, the recall of the technique was poor. The conclusions drawn were that such skills needed renewing to be remembered and that the memory trace in the LTM had decayed. Seeing as memory worsens over time, it can be concluded that time leads to decay.

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Trace Decay

This particular theory is best understood by using ideas relating to the “multi-store model” of memory, in which there is a short-term (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) store – the theory applies to both.

Basically, it proposes that memories have a physical trace, which gradually decays over the course of time, until it is eventually lost altogether. Memory traces are thought to be stored as things called engrams, and these engrams are subject to decay – meaning that the memories they hold are lost and forgetting occurs. However, there is a way the traces can be renewed: through repetition and rehearsing the information. When the information is first stored, it is supposed that the trace is somewhat fragile, and can be lost at any time – linking to the STM – but through rehearsal the engrams can take a more firm place in the mind. Whilst it is a cognitive idea, an engram is neurochemical as it is believed to be a physical thing in the brain.

[pyrrhicvictories]

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but in order to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into gas chambers is able to justify his behavior on the grounds that he is only following orders from above. Thus there is fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its consequences.The person who assumes full responsibility of the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

Stanley Milgram (1976) p.183-84.

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MEEUS AND RAAIJMAKERS' STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1986): G.R.A.V.E. EVALUATION

G: GENERALISABILITY

STRENGTHS:

consisted of Dutch adults from the country's general population.

Possible to generalise findings across European countries with similar cultures.

R: RELAIBILITY

STRENGTHS:

Carefully planned controls, such as the specific fifteen negative comments and the verbal prods, meaning the study can be replicated and tested for reliability.

A: APPLICATION

STRENGTHS:

Supports Milgram's findings.

Planned in order to compare with Milgram's studies, meaning the results can be applied to real life atrocities.

WEAKNESSES:

Takes place in a different culture and time to Milgram's study of obedience (1963) - the studies were 20 years apart.

V: VALIDITY

STRENGTHS:

The distress of the participants made it evident they believed they were really changing the interviewee's chance of getting a job.

WEAKNESSES:

Artificial setting - a job interview is unlikely to occur in a lab.

E: ETHICS

STRENGTHS:

Participants were all fully debriefed and given a questionnaire. 

The participants were consensual.

WEAKNESSES:

Many participants were caused stress by their involvement - made it clear they felt their actions to be unfair.

No obvious right to withdraw in the experimental group.

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MEEUS AND RAAIJMAKERS' STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1986): RESULTS

92% (22 out of 24) of participants in the experimental group were obedient and made all 15 negative comments.

0% of participants in the control group were obedient. 

The experiment shows that, when instructed to, people are more likely to psychologically hurt someone rather than physically hurt someone. Upon interview, the participants stated that, although they had not considered the questions to be fair, the responsibility of the stress placed upon the confederate interviewee was that of the experimenter’s and not their own.

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MEEUS AND RAAIJMAKERS' STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1986): SUMMARY (notes)

AIM: to test obedience in a more modern way - using psychological punishment as opposed to physical punishment.

Took place in a modern university in HOLLAND (a country known for its more liberated culture).

39 participants of all genders and backgrounds, aged 18 to 55 with at least high school education.

Like in Milgram's study, advertised in a newspaper.

Paid $13.

Participants had to conduct a job interview, making negative comments when the interviewee incorrectly answered a question.

The job interviewee was, as with Mr. Wallace in Milgram's study, a confederate.

TWO GROUPS: EXPERIMENTAL GROUP AND CONTROL GROUP.

EXPERIMENTAL GROUP: 24 participants, given verbal prods.

CONTROL GROUP: 15 participants, not prodded. 

15 hurtful comments, the mildest being "your answer to question nine is wrong" and the harshest being "according to the test it would be better for you to apply for lower functions."

Two-thirds of the way through the interview, the confederate would accuse the participant of giving false information and refuse to answer any further questions. 

In the experimental group the experimenter was present. In the control group, they were not.

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S AGENCY THEORY (1974): S.C.O.U.T. EVALUATION (notes)

S: SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

Milgram's '63 study of obedience showed how a social situation can put an individual into an agentic state in which they feel they have no choice but to obey the authoritative figure despite knowing their behaviour is wrong.

Further variations and adaptations of his study, such as Meeus and Raaijmakers' 1986 study of obedience also emphasise this and Hofling et al. (1966) showed that obedience occurs in real-world situations too.

C: CONFLICTING EVIDENCE

Although over half of the participants followed the experimenter's instruction in Milgram's study of obedience, 35% still did not. 

O: OTHER EXPLANATIONS

Personality: some people are naturally less likely to follow orders simply due to their personalities; if we are all socialised in a similar way then agency theory suggests we should all be equally as likely to enter an agentic state. This is not the case.

Charistmatic leadership: obedience is partly due to the leader's individual characteristics rather than their position in authority.

Rewards: people are more likely to obey in return for money or other reward, as opposed to simply just because they are told.

U: USEFULNESS 

Like Milgram's study of obedience (1963), agency theory can be used to explain things such as genocide, the holocaust, and, on a smaller scale, the London riots.

T: TESTABLE

The theory has been tested numerous times, both in and out of a natural environment and with people of different gender and background: Milgram, Meeus and Raaijmakers, Hofling et al., etc.

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S AGENCY THEORY (1974): SUMMARY

In 1974, Stanley Milgram proposed the idea of Agency theory, which suggests that social rules are required in order to keep a stable society and that by following these social rules we surrender some of our conscience. 

Autonomous state: "normal" state; we act in accordance to our conscience and our own free will.

Agentic state: we give up our own free will and act on behalf of a wider group. 

Agentic shift: moving from autonomous to agentic state. 

Moral strain: becoming uncomfortable due to knowing your actions are wrong.

Denial: refusing to believe something is true.

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): G.R.A.V.E. EVALUATION (notes)

G: GENERALISABILITY 

STRENGTHS:

Has been repeated with very similar results

WEAKNESSES:

Only done with 40 men from one area, none of which had authorial occupations

R: RELIABILITY

STRENGTHS:

Tight controls due to lab setting

Standardised procedure; all received same treatment and verbal prods

A: APPLICATION

STRENGTHS:

Applicable to real life situations; helps us to understand why things such as the holocaust and genocide happen and thus can help us to prevent them.

WEAKNESSES:

In aforementioned situations there is true threat to the "teacher", such as physical punishment and even death.

V: VALIDITY

STRENGTHS:

Experimental validity: their physical reactions of distress showed that the participants really believed they were harming the learner. 

WEAKNESSES:

Ecological validity: participants were paid, were in an artificial setting (laboratory), unrealistic task (mundane realism)

E: ETHICS

STRENGTHS:

Debrief: all participants were told afterwards of the experiment's true intentions, were shown Mr. Wallace unharmed, were interviewed and checked up on.

Milgram was a competent psychologist and had consulted others before conducting the study

WEAKNESSES:

Deceit: participants were not told in the advert what they would actually be doing, had given no informed consent. The experiment was not real.

Right to withdraw: participants had no obvious right to withdraw; unless they asked five times they could not leave but instead were given verbal prods. 

The experiment caused a great deal of psychological distress. 

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): ETHICS

Milgram's experiment raised many alarms with regards to ethics, for a number of reasons:

Participants were lied to regarding the experiment's true nature and thus gave no informed consent.

The participants were deceived as shocks they believed they had administered were not real.

They were given no obvious right to withdraw; although if they asked to leave five times they would have been allowed to stop the experiment, this was not made clear to them. Instead, on their first four requests they were instructed to simply carry on.

The participants experienced clear, obvious psychological distress.

However, following the experiment all participants were debriefed and told the true nature of Milgram's experiment. They were also interviewed to ensure they were unharmed and checked up on in 12 months' time. 

Also, Milgram was a highly competent social psychologist and had consulted many other psychologists before conducting the study.

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): METHODOLOGY

EXPERIMENTAL VALIDITY:

The procedure was well standardised and obedience was accurately measured by the amount of voltage given. However, the experiment has been criticised by some; Orne and Holland (1968) suggested that the learner did not believe the subject would really come to harm and that they were in a 'pact of ignorance' in the way that an audience member may put one's head beneath a guillotine which has just split a cabbage in two. Furthermore, following an investigation of the test, Australian psychologist Gina Perry claimed that Milgram had manipulated his results."Overall, over half disobeyed," Perry claimed. For those who obeyed, there were, on one occasion, many more than four promptings, in fact as many as 26. Several times, in fact, some subjects asked to swap places with the learner. Perry further claims that some subjects thought the entire procedure was a reality TV show. 

ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY:

It could be argued that the experiment lacks ecological validity due to its environment; the test, which took place in a laboratory, was an unnatural environment. In addition, the only participants were male and from only one place - New Haven. However, further results from future adaptions of this study have found similarly high results from all people, regardless of gender, environment, age and nationality. 

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): RESULTS

STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): RESULTS

Prior to conducting the study, Milgram consulted a number of other social psychologists - all of which believe that only 1% of participants would continue to the full 450V; they claimed that only people of a psychopathic nature would be inclined to do such harm to another person. Their predictions were far from the true results, however.

In the experiment, 65% (26 out of the 40 participants) continued to give shocks to the learner all the way up to the maximum of 450V, though often with great discomfort. At some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.

There was not a single participant who stopped before 300V.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority

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STANLEY MILGRAM'S STUDY OF OBEDIENCE (1963): METHOD

In 1963, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience. He placed a newspaper advert requesting an hour of the time of 500 men in exchange for $4.00 (plus a further 50c to cover their travel) in order to carry out a study regarding memory and learning. The participants Milgram asked for were men from the New Haven area, aged between 20 and 50. The full advertisement can be seen below.

(click here for full size)

40 of the applicants were chosen for the experiment. 

Upon each subject's arrival at Yale University, he was introduced to another man whom he believed to also have applied for the study, though was actually a confederate of Milgram's. Both of the two men drew a slip of paper to determine who would be teacher and who learner, though it was rigged in order for the subject to always be the teacher; both cards said 'teacher' and the confederate always said his read 'learner' instead. The confederate was then taken to a room and had electrodes strapped to his body and given a sample electric shock of 45V. The subject was taken to a room containing an electroshock generator, ranging from 15V to 450V with interludes of 15V. It was explained to him that he must read to the learner word pairing questions, and that each time the learner incorrectly answered the teacher must administer to him an electric shock, increasing by 15V for each incorrect answer, though in reality no shocks were being given.

Recordings of the learner reacting to these shocks was played to the teacher, though he believed them to be the real reactions of the learner. After several voltage increases, the learner would bang on the wall which separated them both, and at 300V he complained of heart conditions and refused to answer any further questions. From 315V to the final 450V, no sound or answers came from the learner. 

Several people asked not to continue further with the experiment as the learner displayed his discomfort, and at these points four verbal prods were given. These prods were:

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice, you must go on.

Should the subject have still wished to stop after the four prods, the experiment would be over. Should he not, however, then the experiment would continue until all shocks up to 450V had been given. There were also other prods for more specific comments; if the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on." If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."

After the experiment ended, the participants were fully debriefed and told of the true intentions of the study, and were re-introduced to the uninjured confederate, Mr. Wallace. 12 months later, all participants were given a survey in order to review that they remained psychologically undamaged by the experiment.

A VIDEO ABOUT THE EXPERIMENT CAN BE WATCHED HERE