Cognitive Psychology
Day 3
Evolution of Language
Theory of mind and extreme male
brains
Can animals talk?
• It always depends on what you call
talking…
• Kepek/evoluciosvideok
• There are two reasons
Arcok a Marson?
• There are two reasons
– We like to hear animals talk
– Kepek/evolucios/tatogo majom
• There are two reasons
– We like to hear animals talk
– Animals like to imitate us
Human language?
• Hockett’s principles
– Arbtrariness (non-necessary connection
between form and meaning)
– Abstractness (ability to talk about events
distant in time or space)
– Duality (from a few meaningless signs an
infinite number of configurations created)
– Productivity (new linguistic elements can be
formed)
Natural signs – natural language
• Closed ( 30-40 signs)
• Holistic
– sounds, smells, facial
expressions
• Analogue (crying)
• Concrete
• inherited
•Open Lexikon
•Arbitrarily changeable
•Analytic Steven Pinker:
nyelvtan= discrete
combinatorial system
•hierarchy
•recursivity
•infinite?
•Digital
•Detached, distanced
•learned
Inherited signs?
• Vervet monkeys
• Playing them recorded signals
– Different shouts :
• Eagle
• Snake
• Leopard
hide in bush
look under feet
run up tree
• It takes learning to get them right
• Are they in-built measures of fear?
• What makes possible sentences infinite?
– Recursion
– Diane said that Peter told her that Mary lied
that she was at school that day.
The mouse that the cat chased ate the cheese.
The mouse that the cat chased that the dog
barked ate the cheese.
What animals can’t do..
•
•
•
•
past
future
question
Lie – cheat ?
The Vervets again
• Ability to cheat!
– Want to get rid of bigger male?
– Want to hide that you’ve found food?
– Just give a leopard cry!
And now the macaques
identifying module
Important aspects
• Nature-nurture
– Species similar to us (apes)
– Species adapted to us (dog, cat)
• Natural communicative signs - artificial
– Animals communicating in their natural habitat
– Arbitrary sign taught by human researchers
Careful!
Der Kluge Hans – Clever Hans – effect
(1907 Oskar Pfungst)
A trap set by our intentional stance
ELIZA: http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
Argumentation valid for all sentient subjects (H.S. as well) (Rico, the Border Collie)
Two important questions
• Nature-nurture (Skinner vs Chomsky)
– Species similar to us (apes)
– Species adapted to us (dog, cat)
• Natural communicative signs - artificial
– Animals communicating in their natural habitat
– Arbitrary sign taught by human researchers
Irene Pepperberg
Alex the African grey parrot
Avian Lanuage teaching EXperiment
..\BME_evolúcióskurzus\evoluc200607BME\nyel
vevolúció\ALex\alextheparrot[1].mov
Is it human language?
Sentence structure : How many blue blocks?
New words coined: „Bannery”
All in all 200 words
• Paul Bloom (Yale)
• „both a baby and a dog are exposed to
language, but only the baby learns to
talk (Science)”
• Children’s word learning – fast
mapping
–PERSPECTIVES
BEHAVIOR:
Can a Dog Learn a Word? Paul Bloom
(11 June 2004)
Science 304 (5677), 1605. [DOI:
10.1126/science.1099899])
The new chimpanzees
• Rico, the Border Collie (video)
• Juliane Kaminski, Leipzig
• Fast mapping and word learning
– „fetch-the-bunny” One word? – can put it in
a box as well or give it to someone
– Novel item – novel word
• Paul Bloom:
– „for psychologists, dogs may be the new
chimpanzees.”
– „If any child learned words the way Rico did,
the parents would run screaming to the
nearest neurologist
The new chimpanzees
• Questions:
– Talent or learning? (nature or nurture)
– Dogs are evolutionarily selected for
attending to the communicative intentions of
humans
– Can Rico demonstrate understanding of a
word other than by fetching an object?
– Could Rico be told not to fetch a specific
object (akin to telling a human child "don't
touch!")?
– Can Rico learn a word for any object that is
not small and fetchable?
– Can the same results be produced with
nonlinguistic sounds?
Important aspects
• Nature-nurture
– Species similar to us (apes)
– Species adapted to us (dog, cat)
• Natural communicative signs - artificial
– Animals communicating in their natural habitat
– Arbitrary sign taught by human researchers
Monkeys speaking
• Maybe they could
use a simpler proto
language?
• Ability not used?
• 3 methods
– Natural speech
– ASL- sign language
– Lexigram signs
• Spoken language
• ASL – American sign
Language
• lexigrams
Gua
(Kellogg & Kellogg, 1933)
– Raised as a family member (9
months)
– Intimate relationship
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/history/wnk/ape.html
Emotional reactions
feeding
Where is your
nose?
In spite of all this, Gua
– Never produced intelligible words
– Only understood few
Viki
(Hayes, 1951)
• Family member
• Reinforceent learning
• After 7! years
– Badly articulated 4 words: mama, papa, up, cup
– Only family members understand him
– Understands few words
60’s teaching chimps
• Complete fiasco
• Is the problem physiological?
– Lack of fine motor coordination
– Movement of tongue
– Control of breathing
– Voluntary control of emitting sounds
Different physiology
Larynx higher -> smaller pharynx and nasal cavity
• Spoken language
• ASL – American sign
language
• lexigramok
• Three stars
• Washoe
(chimpanzee)
• Nim Chimpsky
(chimpanzee)
• Koko (gorilla)
Washoe
(Gardner & Gardner, 1960’s)
• Captured in Africa
• Started to learn at 11 months –
teaching during 51 months
• Brouht up as a deaf child (games,
social activities)
• idea
– Chimps use gestures as a natural sign in
their communication
– They do not use signs
► ASL, American Sign Language
What did Washoe learn?
Lexicon
• production: 150-200 signs
• Understood more
• More syntactic categories (N, V, Adj,
Pro)
• Could create new signs (?)
Duck = water + bird
Grammar
• overgeneralization
• Combining signs
–
–
–
–
–
Washoe sorry
Baby down
Go in
Hug hurry
Out open please hurry
Nim Chimpsky & Herbert Terrace
Nim Chimpsky
(Terrace, Petitto, Sanders & Bever, 1979)
• What does his name remind you
of?
• Washoe’s family
• ASL: stricter design
What has Nim Chimpsky learned?
• 125 signs, BUT stricter criteria would ca 25
– (strict criteiria meaning double-blind studies with
signers)
• A maximum of two combinations→if there is az
more, it is usually repetition
– banana me eat banana eat
• The length of sentences does not grow over time
• No relationship between the complexitiy of
sentences and their length (rather, he learned that the
more he signs, the sooner he gets what he wants…)
• No spontaneous signs
Nim Chimpsky
• His utterances
– 90%: reaction, relates to a „here and
now aspect” (eat, play, drink)
– 40%: straight repetition
• Interrupts the signing of teacher
• Does not add new information to the
situation
► „You can teach that to a dove with
operant conditioning” (Herbert
Terrace)
Koko and dr Penny Patterson
..\BME_evolúcióskurz
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\nyelvevolúció\koko\k
oko_first3signs_56[1].
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..\BME_evolúcióskurz
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oko_sign_history_56[
1].mov
..\BME_evolúcióskurz
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eet_koko_psa_56[1].
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Francine Patterson
33 year-old gorilla, learned the
language in infancy (ASL)
Longest ongoing research:
worked together for 33 years
Only research involving a gorilla
Supposedly knows a 1000 signs
and understands written English.
Chatted on America Online
Can communicate toothache
But let’s see that
chat…
• Spoken language
• ASL –
• lexigrams
David and Ann Premack
Savage Rumbaugh
One of the fiascos
MercurySince he did not learn language at
all, he was transferred to do other
experiments
Bad news – good news
• Matata and her son Kanzi
– After 2,5 years of training Matata still wasn’t
very good at lexigrams – they gave up and
sent her to a Primate Center
– They kept Kanzi – luckily!
Kanzi
(Greenfield & Savage-Rumbaugh, 1990)
• A real star
(played together
with Paul
McCartney-vel +
Peter Gabriel)
• bonobo: supposed
to be more
intelligent, social,
communicative
• Has NEVER been
taught, only her
mother
Kanzi and Alia
• Compared them with a
comprehension test, with
toys Kanzi has never seen
before, only videos and
pictures
•
•
•
•
Kanzi, make the dog bite the snake
Kanzi, tickle Rose with the bunny
500 novel sentences
Both Alia and kanzi were 70%
correct
Kanzi video: http://www.iowagreatapes.org/bonobo/meet/kanzi.php#
Conclusion about ape studies
ape
• Here and now
• No syntax
• explicit teaching
• Does not refuse badly formed
sentences
• Rarely forms questions
• Not using symbols
spontaneuosly
child
• timeline
• syntax
• No explicit teaching –
spontaneous signs with deaf
children)
• Refuses badly formed
sentences
• Frequent questions
• Referential use of symbols
• MLU same
• MLU grows and so does
complexity
•
•
Banana me me me eat.
I am going to eat all the bananas.
Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch
„Human language is an embarrassment for
evolutionary theory”
David Premack
When
• A. when did language evolve in the history
of mankind?
– evidence:
• Human fossils (speech organs and brain tissue) –
2 million years
• tools – 100 thousand years
• Art – 30-35 thousand years
• B. What is the point?
How did language evolve?
1. Evolutionists
• The meteors of
Chomsky
Two questions
Continuous or discontinuous?
Adaptation or exaptation?
• Step-by-step evolution
– Different linguistic levels? Bickerton
– A evolutionary stable strategy of grammar
Bickerton elmélete
– 0. Australopithecus –apes today (categorize)
– 1. Erectus – protolanguage, without syntax
– 2. Archaic homo sapiens – symbolic language
with syntax
– 3. developed language
– languages diverging, different language
families (Luigi Cavalli-Sforza)
ESS – Evolutionary stable
strategies
• Think of all the things you might want to
talk about
• What if you invented a different sound for
each?
• Solution
– categorization
– combination
Syntax evolution: the problem
Syntax evolution: the answer
Number of word learnings per individual – x axis
Event rate matrix – frequencies at which these events occur.
A , 4 events 4 objects
B , 6 events, 6 objects
C, 10 events, 10 objects
Saltatoric appearance
• Noam Chomsky: language could not have
evolved by natural selection
– Too complex
– All the interim forms bring no advantage
• Exaptation?
Evolution theories
How did language evolve?
• Early linguistic theories
• Ecolocigal models
– hunt
• Social explanation
– Building social relations
• Sexual selection
How did language evolve?
• Early linguistic theories
• Ecolocigal models
– hunt
• Social explanation
– Building social relations
• Sexual selection
Egypt – an interesting experiment
• Pharaoh Psammeticos (7th century B.C.)
– Given two babies to a shepherd to raise them without
saying a word to them – the most ancient language
would be the one they start to speak
– Once they happened to say the word „bheccos”
– It means bread in phrueg, a language now extinct
• Kaiser Franz II. Germo-Roman emperor (10th
A.C.)
– same experiment
– no result
• Jacob IV Scottish king (XVth A.C.)
– The child started to speak something like Hebrew.
Similarity in onomatopaeia
•
Afrikaans: miaau!
Albanian: mjau!
Arabic (Algeria): miau miau!
Bengali: meu-meu!
Catalan: meu, meu!
Croatian: mijau!
Danish: mjav!
Dutch: miauw!
English: meow!
Esperanto: miaŭ!
Estonian: näu!
Finnish: miau! kurnau!
French: miaou!
German: miau!
Greek: niaou!
Hebrew: miyau!
Hindi: myaau! myaauu!
Hungarian: miau!
Icelandic: mjá!
•
Indonesian: ngeong!
Italian: miao!
Japanese: nyaa!
Korean: (n)ya-ong!
Mandarin Chinese: miao miao!
Norwegian: mjau!
Polish: miau!
Portuguese: miau!
Russian: myau!
Slovene: mijau!
Spanish: miau!
Swedish: mjau!
Thai: meow meow! (with high
tone)
Turkish: miyauv! miyauv!
Ukrainian: myau!
Vietnamese: meo-meo!
Otto Jespersen – the reason of the
ban in 1886
• Interlingua – International Auxiliary language
• Bow-wow theory
– Imitating animals - onomatopeia
• Pooh-pooh theory
– Emotion-laden signs (pain, happiness)
• Ding-dong theory
– A sort of verbalizing non-verbal communivation
• Yo-he-ho theory
– Vocalization while working, singing
• La-la theory
– Love, art, poetry, music
How did language evolve?
• Early linguistic theories
• Ecolocigal models
– hunt
• Social explanation
– Building social relations
• Sexual selection
A difference in vocabulary?
• Hunter-gatherers:
– 5000-6000 words
– Half of them is verb, connected to survival
• Modern language:
– 50-60 housand words
– 10-15% verbs
• Language had a larger role in this?
What do you need to know to
survive?
• Places of plants and migration of animals
• Today’s hunter-gatherer’s – little evidence,
more gestures (max. 1-2 words)
• Talk: basicly gossip – life of people, affairs
Tools and DIY
• Constructional ability
• You need
– Model of the outside world
– Manipulation abilities
• Both language and toolmaking are
– sequential
– hierarchical
• Two possibilities
– Making tools presupposes abilities that bootsrap
language
– Making tools needs teaching and cooperation
presupposing language
DIY in hunter-gatherers
• Rarely do they say instructions
– Mostly direct observation
• Cathleen Gibson
– Division of labour
– Social effect
–
Gibson, K. R. and Ingold, T. eds. Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
How did language evolve?
• Early linguistic theories
• Ecolocigal models
– hunt
• Social explanation
– Building social relations
• Sexual selection
• Robin Dunbar
• grooming:
cavorite-lis
n
-fGET
favorite-lis
tg/stores/d
communit
rate-item
cust-rec
just-say-no
true
m/justsay
– Hygenic function - originally
– Social and emotional bonds
– Endogene opiates
A
Grooming time for hominids
• Group size ~ grooming
– Reduces agression
– Gets social support
• Max: 70 (20-25% of time)
• Group size ~ brain size
– Cogitive restraint
• humans: 147,8 (150) (42% of time!)
Average size of human tribes
The magic number of 150
• The average size of hunter-gatherer
groups
• Basic military unit
• hutterites – one colony
• Gore-Tex fabric Ltd. 150 parking places
And the solution is…
• Language – a more efficient way of grooming?
– Can groom various persons at a time
– The hands are free to manipulate
• Trading social information
• Indirect experience – learn novel situation
• Group identity - dialects
• It was 250-300 thousand years ago we reached
this 70 person limit
Talking
Women
Men
free time
free time
politics, culture
politics, culture
social activities
social activities
work
work
How did language evolve?
• Early linguistic theories
• Ecolocigal models
– hunt
• Social explanation
– Building social relations
• Sexual selection
Geoffrey Miller
Univ of New Mexico
• Altruism of speaker –
are we giving away
information
• language=nothing
more than a sexual
ornament, a way of
wooing
30
25
20
same sex
both sexes
15
10
5
0
men
women
• Name great writers in History
• Fitness indicator:
• Intelligence correlates with vocabulary 80%
• 60% genetically determined
• Cyrano effect
• Seherzade effect
However
• Women are better at verbal intelligence,
aren’t they?
– Contradictory findings
•
•
•
•
•
Fluency tests
Verbal intelligence test
Vocabulary tests – only until the age of 3-5
The aphasia myth
The autism myth – that is actually true…
Climbing the hierarchy
• Robbins Burling
– In egalitarian societies the chieftain is going to
be the person communicating best
– Although – Baron-Cohen!
First onomatopeic sounds
First comprehension evolves –
then production (look who’s talking
now!)
Constructing conversations
Filling in the gaps
• Communication is rather fragmentary
– What do you want to eat?
– Well, have you got money on you?
– I don’t have that much time.
Scripts – Schank and Abelson
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Scripts are groups of causal chains that represent
knowledge about frequently experienced events (e.g. going
to a restaurant). In other words, a script is a stereotyped
sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation
and has associated with it:
a number of roles for the actors (different points of view on
the
situation, e.g. customer vs waiter vs cook),
different tracks (e.g. restaurant, fast-food),
different scenes (e.g. enter, order, eat, pay); each scene
has a
MAINCON, i.e. a main conceptualization, which must have
happened if the scene is instantiated,
as well as props, entry conditions, results, branches and
loops
Bartlett and Freud
• Freud – repression – later defense mechanisms
– interpretation of dreams
– Many cognitive scientists argue that current ideas are
completely different
– Not because of threatening emotional content but
overwhelmed cognitive systems
• Mistakes in remembrance
–
–
–
–
–
–
Omission
Rationalization
Elaboration
Condensation
Distorsion (- falsification)
Reversals (– reaction formation)
False Memories
• Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott,
1995  DRM
• Hill, valley, climb, summit, top, molehill,
peak, plain, glacier, goat, bike, climber,
range, steep
– MOUNTAIN (critical word/lure)
• Presentation of strong associates results
in high probability of falsely remembering
the critical word
Why do we falsely remember?
• Implicit Activation Response (IAR)
hypothesis
– When people encode words, they (implicitly)
think of associates to those words; critical
words then seem familiar at test and are
falsely recognized
• If we know about false memories, can we
prevent them from happening?
Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997
• Can we avoid false memories if we know
that they might occur?
– Roediger & McDermott (1995) excluded one
participant who failed to have false memories
because she reported that “the lists seemed
designed to make her think of a nonpresented
word”
– Informal demonstrations with knowledgeable
participants still show false memories
Loftus, G.
• Law and psychology
– Witnesses see the crime commited in suboptimal
conditions (dark, far away)
– Witnesses are exposed to posterior suggestive
information
• Show-up and line-up procedures
– Line-up still problematic
•
•
•
•
Physical bias – how to select the fillers
Physical bias – odball effects
Lack of double blind policeman
Unconscious transference - familiarity
• Problems with perceptual encoding at
the time
– Distance as a factor is systematically
undervalued
• Judges overestimate the importance of
self-confidence
Conclusion
• We’re filling in gaps constantly not only in
language, but in other domains as well.
Mental health
And its evolutionary accounts
Mental disorder - definition
• Normal and abnormal
– Deviant
– Maladaptive
– Personal distress
Cultural variations
• Main disorders everyhere – but with minor differences
• Culture bound disorders
• 􀂉 Koro
– 􀂉 an obsessive fear that one’s penis will withdraw into one’s abdomen,
seen only in Malaya and other regions of southern Asia.
• 􀂉 Windigo
– intense craving for human flesh and fear that one will turn into a
cannibal, seen only among Algonquin Indian cultures
• 􀂉 Anorexia nervosa
– an eating disorder characterized by intentional self-starvation, until
recently seen only in affluent Western cultures
Olympe de Gauges
• She was diagnosed in 1973 with an illness
called „revolutionary hysteria”
– Abnormal sexuality – excessive menstruational flow
– Narcissism (predilection of daily baths)
– Lack of moral sense (refusal to remarry)
• Mental illness as a category seems to change
– Geographically
– With time
Today
Evolutionary models
• Why are there illnesses if we are so nearly
perfected by evolution?
Evolution of mental illnesses
Some assumptions
• Homo sapiens evolved 200.000 years ago
– there have been no change in brain
capacity relative to body size
– So: what we experience psychologically and
emotionally was almost certainly experienced
throughout evolution
Implicit cognition and therapy
• Psychopathologies:
– lack of intentional control
– Irrational
– Affectional in nature
• Freud, TAT
– More contamination
– fakeable
Cognitive models of anxiety
• Maladaptive fear schema
– More attentive to threatening cues
– Interpretation of ambiguous situations
– Automaticity of fear schemas
• Explicit: not going to be fatally attacked by
daddylonglegs
• Implicitly: avoidance
Anxiety disorders
• Watson versus
genetics
General Anxiety Disorder
Phobic disorder
• A persistent and irrational fear of an object
or situation that presents no realistic
danger
Arachnophobia
Arachnophobia and IAT
• There is no natural implicit opposing
category to spiders
– Snakes?
– Household items?
– Blood-injection?
• Mixed results
• Go-NoGo task
Go-noGo task
Has to answer quickly – otherwise it is not automatic – 1400
ms window
• Spider fear
– Participants had to approach a frighteninglooking spider
– They had to report anxiety level
– on the basis of the distance they were
groupes into high-fear group and low-fear
group
Evolutionary explanation
• It is not against all harmful animals (big cat
phobia is rare)
• The fear seems to be directed
– Difficult to perceive
– Not physically, but chemically dangerous (venomous)
– Yet – the bigger, the more frightening (logical with
some spiders, but the opposite with snakes)
• Not without foundations – Indian statistics
– 925 by tigers
– 20,000 deaths caused by snakes
The guy also says that there are no really venomous
snakes in Australia, whereas other sources list 5 out
of the 10 most dangerous to be there (Including the
tiger snake, death adder and the taipan)
• Snakes are dangerous – a misconception
– Mind you- this would undermine the simple evolutionary
theory
– Snakes in fact are not less afraid of humans, than
humans are of them
–
–
–
–
–
–
Cobra’s hoods
What would be the
Elevated stance (3/4th!)
point of evolving it?
Ability to pit
Playing dead
Most venomous bites are not deadly
The more poisinous, the less deaths it provokes (based on mice
though)
– 20% of deaths is a result of trying to kill a snake
• Co-evolution – they evolved to accomodate human phobia and
try not to evoke it and being beaten to death?
Source Brian Bush’s article http://members.iinet.net.au/~bush/myth.html
Depression
Depression
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Impairs motivation, cognition and behaviour
Psysical and emotional energy is lessened
Motivation to achieve set goals
Concentration is limited
Personal inadequacy
Nothing seems interesting
Slowed physical movements
No heed to appearance
Depression
• Unipolar and bipolar
Biological basis
Behaviourial basis
• Implicit and ecplicit views
– Negative schemas activated
– Dual process theory of depression?
– Behaviorial Activation system
• Positive appetitive incentive
• Specific to depression
– Behaviorial Inhibition System
•
•
•
•
Avoidance behaviour
Associated with anxiety disorders – particularly social anxiety
Seems to be more general in psychiatric diseases neuroticity
Depressive inhibition – it is detached from environmental
cues – has a life of its own
• Questionnaires (explicit):
– BDI
– CSQ (Cognitive Style Questionnaire)
– General distress Scale
• IAT (Implicit)
– Self (own name, personal data taken)
– Positive adjectives
3 week follow-up
Evolution
• The general description of depression is
difficult, because probably there is no such
unitary illness
• Various evolutionary theories exist, but
generally each explains a segment or type
of depression, not the disorder in general
SADS – seasonal affective disorder
• Low on behaviourial activation system to conserve
resources
– Cold weather
– Vastly reduced vegetation
– Scarcer prey
– Zombies – winter hybernation
– Sufferers respond easily to exposure to artificial or natural light
– All animals seem to become less active with cold – including
deers
– Optimal temperature coincides with plant vegetation
– BUT what about the Eskimo?
• Bowins:The Amplification effect
– Human intelligence has amplified emotional
states as a by-product – it made us the most
emotional species
– Cognitive activating appraisals (basis of
emotion) are more pronounced
• Intensive because conscious associations
– (loose your job – scenarios of hunger and necessity)
• Extension over time
– The representation of past and future give rise to the
amplification of negative scenarios
Psychopathy
Explicit-implicit debate
• Similarity to the rationality – emotionality
debate
• The difference is only about exactly where
you store those memories
– „go with your guts”
Damasio’s self
• Feeling of emotions depends on the
activation of the somatosensory cortices
and the insula in particular
• Descarts: Je pense donc je suis.
– Memory storage in the body via OMPFC
• „the somatic marker” hypothesis
The Iowa gambling task
Preliminary galvanic skin response
OFC lesion impairs task
Preliminary galvanic skin
response
OFC lesion impairs task
Delusions
• Capgrass delusion
– Significant others have been replaced by
impostors, robots or aliens
• Contrast – prosopagnosia
• Contrast – Fregoli syndrome
Social implicit cognition
Social cognition
• Attitudes : consist of three components ABC
– Affect
• - physiological
– Behaviorial
• – verbal or action (! differing)
– Cognition
• – cognitive evaluation (how do you know if not verbally?)
• La Piére”s Chinese couple in the USA
– Explicit attitudes cannot predict actual behaviour
• Emotion is overexploited
– Why sex in advertisements? Why not candy?
New implicit methods
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
IAT – Implicit Association Test
LIB (Linguistic Intergroup Bias)
Affective priming
The visual-probe test
Go-NoGo tasks
Extrinsic affective Simon Task
Emotional Stroop
Applied implicit cognition
• Social cognition:
– The IAT (Greenwald, McGee and Schwartz,
1998)
– Implicit Association test
– Applied to attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem
• “the introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately
identified) trace of past experience that mediates
R” where R refers to the category of responses
that are assumed to be influenced by that
construct
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Women (names or faces)
BUTTON B
Men (names or faces)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Positive traits (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative traits (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Women (names or faces)
Positive traits (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Men (names or faces)
Negative traits (horrible)
Validity
• Less fakeable – unless done various times
• Does not always correlate with reported
measures – which one is true?
Disadvantages
• Sometimes arbitrary categories have to be
chosen, no natural contrasts exist
– Spiders
– Cocaine
• Unipolar versions – there is simply one
category and a control condition
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Spider names (black widow,
tarantula)
Positive words (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Positive words (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Spider names (black widow,
tarantula)
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Cat names (Siamese,
Persian)
Positive words (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Negative words (horrible)
The implicit association test
BUTTON A
Positive words (wonderful,
glorious)
BUTTON B
Cat names (Siamese,
Persian)
Negative words (horrible)
Basic idea
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
spider
cat
1000
800
600
400
200
0
negative
positive
Race and prejudice
• The willing and able problem
– Self report measures are transparent to most
people
– Remember the Chinese couple travelling
through America.
White names
Black names
desirable
undesirable
Jamal
Sue-Ellen
wonderful
disgusting
Explicit measures
• Semantic differential
–
–
–
–
–
–
7 point
Beautiful – ugly
Pleasant – unpleasant
good – bad
Honest – dishonest
Nice - awful
• Feeling thermometer
• Explicit and implicit measures
– sometimes correlate (Dovidio et al, 1997)
– Sometimes they don’t (Greenwald et al. 1998)
• Actual behaviour (interaction with black
experimenter)
– correlates slightly more significantly with implicit
measures (0.39) than explicit ones (0.33)
• but in this study the two measures (implicit and explicit)
correlate
Learning attitudes
• Olson & Fazio (2001)
empathic
cruel
Attitudes
• IAT task – positive vs
negative
love
death
The BeanFest Game
• Faizio, Eiser and Shook
– Imgaine you’re on a new
planet and have to live off
beans. You have an
energy of 100 initially,
which decreases if you
eat bad beans or do not
eat at all, and increases if
you eat. Your goal is to
survive on the planet.
– With time on every trial
you lose -1
– You gain +10 with good
beans
– You lose -10 with bad
beans
Learning attitudes
• Luupites and Niffites
– They were told different stories about Luupites
and Niffites
– There were names to the different categories
• Positive and negative nouns
•
Gregg, A. P., Banaji, M. R., & Seibt, B. (2006). Easier made than undone: the asymmetric malleability of automatic preferences. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 1–20.
LIB
• The Linguistic intergroup bias
– the tendency to describe stereotypic events in more
abstract terms than counterstereotypic events.
• Distancing from the self?
Abstract - concrete
• Descriptive action verbs (hit)
– refer to objective descriptions of observable
behaviors that have a clear beginning and
end
• interpretive action verbs (hurt)
– describe a general class of behaviors and
have positive or negative connotations
Abstract - concrete
• state verbs (hate)
– refer to enduring states without a clear
beginning or ending
• adjectives (is violent)
– describe highly abstract personal dispositions
Jim Jones hit the guy.
Jim Jones hurts the guy.
Jim Jones hates the guy.
Jim Jones is violent.
Jim Jones hit the guy.
Jim Jones hurts the guy.
Jim Jones hates the guy.
Jim Jones is violent.
She is violent.
She hit the guy.
Priming
Homophobia
• Homophobic individuals
– are threatened or sickened by their own personal attraction to
gay individuals
– somewhat odd and likely false to suggest that the phobic
individual harbors a secret attraction to the phobic object (e.g., a
snake in the case of snake phobia
•
Freud, S. (1936). The problem of anxiety. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company.
• Adams et al.
– Homophobic men (versus non-homophobic men)
became physiologically aroused (i.e., had increased
penile tumescence) when presented with short video
clips of gay men involved in sexual activity
– (only half of them!)
• Shields & Harriman, 1984
– homophobic men exhibit physiological signs of fear
and anxiety while viewing pictures of gay men
– similar to that exhibited by spider phobics when
viewing spider stimuli
• Defensie and non-defensive homophobia
types
– high homophobia in the context of high levels
of self-deception should take a defensive form
– low levels of self-deception should take a nondefensive form
– Individual differences in self-deception
correlate positively with unrealistic selfportrayals in self-report
• phobic participants (i.e., spider, snake, and
bloodinjection phobias) choose to view phobic
objects for a shorter time than non-phobic
individuals
• Participants had to rate the pleasentness of
pictures of heterosexual or homosexual pairs in
romantic contexts – actually the measure taken
was viewing time
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
GAY
heterosexual
Questionnaires
• Self deception
– Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding
• I always know why I like things;
• Homophobia
– Index of Homophobia
• I would feel uncomfortable if I learned that my neighbor was
homosexual
• I would feel comfortable working closely with a male
Homosexual
• It would disturb me to Wnd out that my doctor was
homosexual
•So it all boils down to self-deception?
•Homophobia can be cured with selfconsciousness theories and teaching psychology?
(the current method is either backlash or
teaching sociology)
Vocal categoization task:
gay or neutral
adjectives
Positive or negative –
press button on a
response box
(The tasks are simultaneous)
870
860
850
840
830
820
810
negative
positive
800
790
780
gay
neutral
Racism
Subliminal prime
Blank screen or white face
Had to scale liking of black
or wite (old and new faces)
4,7
4,6
4,5
4,4
white exposed
control
4,3
4,2
4,1
4
black face
white face
Affective priming
100 ms ISI
200 ms prime presentation
Target appears
evaluative categorization
lexical decision
pronounciation
So today…
• We learned that not all knowledge is
conscious (still have to study anyway…)
• Implicit learning is probably multiple
phenomena
• Uncnscious parts of attitudes are reflected
in behaviour, even more than conscious
attitudes