scholarly journals How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Teasdale ◽  
Laurie Maguire ◽  
Felix Budelmann ◽  
R. I. M. Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Real World ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Mental Effort ◽  
Social World ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Cultural Life

Fictional storytelling has played an important role in human cultural life since earliest times, and we are willing to invest significant quantities of time, mental effort and money in it. Nonetheless, the psychological mechanisms that make this possible, and how they relate to the mechanisms that underpin real-world social relationships, remain understudied. We explore three factors: identification (the capacity to identify with a character), moral approval and causal attribution with respect to a character’s behaviour in live performances of two plays from the European literary canon. There were significant correlations between the extent to which subjects identified with a character and their moral approval of that character’s behaviour that was independent of the way the play was directed. However, the subjects’ psychological explanations for a character’s behaviour (attribution) were independent of whether or not they identified with, or morally approved of, the character. These data extend previous findings by showing that moral approval plays an important role in facilitating identification even in live drama. Despite being transported by an unfolding drama, audiences do not necessarily become biased in their psychological understanding of why characters behaved as they did. The psychology of drama offers significant insights into the psychological processes that underpin our everyday social world.

The psychodynamics of ethnic terrorism

1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Vamik D. Volkan ◽  
Max Harris
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Large Groups

AbstractThis paper proposes to examine the phenomenon of ethnic terrorism through a psychological lens. Its intention is not to relegate the importance of "real-world" issues to secondary stature, but to broaden causality to include psychological motivation. In effect, we believe that terrorism is inspired by the complex intertwining of real-world issues and the psychological processes of individuals and large groups.

scholarly journals Personal Life, Pragmatism and Bricolage

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 129-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social World ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Link Structure ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Social Legitimation

Individualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to ‘patch’ or ‘piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that ‘do the thinking’. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a ‘re-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Saks ◽  
Barbara A. Spellman
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Trial Judges ◽  
Rules Of Evidence ◽  
Evidence Rules ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Over Time

Rules of evidence are designed to facilitate trials by controlling what evidence may be presented at trial. Those rules came into being, and evolved over time, due to changes in trial process and structure – especially following the rise of adversarial procedure, whereby control over the marshaling and presentation of facts shifted from judges to lawyers. Refinements and reforms continue to be undertaken to try to improve the scope and clarity of the rules. Trial judges must not only apply the rules, they also have the discretion to make rulings in light of their expectations of the impact they think the evidence will have on jurors. This task involves metacognition: one human trying to estimate the thought processes of others. Thus, evidence rulemakers have been and are, effectively, applied psychologists. The rules of evidence reflect their understanding of the psychological processes affecting, and capabilities and limitations of witnesses, lawyers and jurors. Psychological research and methods provide an additional source of insight and assistance in that endeavor. Better psychological understanding should lead to more effective rules. Psychologists typically employ the scientific method: empirically testing hypotheses in an effort to discover which are valid understandings of how people perceive, store, and retrieve information. To evaluate evidence rules, one could conduct experiments directly on a rule, or borrow from existing knowledge developed in basic research and see whether those understandings support existing or proposed evidence rules.

scholarly journals Historical Materialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 36-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Blackledge
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social World ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
The Real ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Theory Of History

Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers understood historical materialism in this way. This chapter shows that Marx’s theory of history, once unpicked from its misrepresentations, allows us to comprehend social reality as a non-reductive, synthetic, and historical totality. This approach is alive to the complexity of the social world without succumbing to the descriptive eclecticism characteristic of non-Marxist historiography. And by escaping the limits of merely descriptive history, Marxism offers the possibility of a scientific approach to revolutionary practice as the flipside to comprehending the present, as Georg Lukács put it, as a historical problem.

The Rutherford Atom of Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 231-261
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
Cultural Performances ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIncreasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that culture refers to a kind of social form that is entity-like, territorialized, marked by a high degree of shared beliefs and coalescing into patterns of key values that animate a broad range of cultural performances and representations. Ironically, anthropologists and other scholars in cultural studies have overwhelmingly come to reject this view of culture. Arguably, then, the move in psychology to attend to cultural environments has paradoxically further distanced it from the fields most concerned with cultural forms. This essay reviews this state of affairs and offers a proposal how a more nuanced appreciation of cultural life can be articulated with theories and methods familiar and available to psychologists.

The Psychology of CSR

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-47
Author(s):  
David A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Conditions ◽  
Evidence Based Practice ◽  
Stakeholder Group ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Job Seekers ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Stakeholder Groups

This chapter is about the psychological processes through which individuals evaluate and respond to an organization’s CSR practices. To advance scholarly research and evidence-based practice, directions are outlined for future inquiry informed by an integrated review of findings across three independent streams of “micro-CSR” research conducted among employees, job seekers, and consumers. In a section on CSR evaluations, it is described how individuals cognitively process information to form CSR perceptions and CSR appraisals, and the types of CSR initiatives and evaluative-constructs studied among each stakeholder group are summarized. In the next section, research is reviewed on responses to CSR, and recent findings about psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions are organized within three categories of care-based, self-protective, and relational-status (C-S-R) considerations. In a last section, research is described on stakeholders’ CSR awareness, the non-trivial implications that follow from evidence of low CSR awareness among all three stakeholder groups, and suggestions for future research.

scholarly journals Decomposing the motivation to exert mental effort

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitai Shenhav ◽  
Mahalia Prater Fahey ◽  
Ivan Grahek
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Mental Effort ◽  
Control Model ◽  
Expected Value ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Measure Of Performance

Achieving most goals demands cognitive control, yet people vary widely in their success at meeting these demands. While motivation is known to be fundamental to determining these successes, what determines one’s motivation to perform a given task remains poorly understood. Here, we describe recent efforts towards addressing this question using the Expected Value of Control model, which simulates the process by which people weigh the costs and benefits of exerting mental effort. By functionally decomposing this cost-benefit analysis, this model has been used to fill gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms of mental effort and to generate novel predictions about the sources of variability in real-world performance. We discuss the opportunities the model provides for formalizing hypotheses about why people vary in their motivation to perform tasks, as well as for understanding limitations in our ability to test these hypotheses based on a given measure of performance.

scholarly journals Social prevalence information is rationally integrated in belief updating

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Orticio ◽  
Louis Martí ◽  
Celeste Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Belief Change ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social World ◽  
Belief Updating ◽  
The Social ◽  
Other Information

People rely heavily on information from the social world to inform their real-world beliefs. We ask whether the perceived prevalence of a belief, divorced from any direct evidence, serves as an independent cue in belief updating. Using real-world pseudoscientific and conspiratorial claims, our experiment (N = 403 American adults) shows that increases in people’s estimates of the prevalence of a belief led to increases in their endorsement of said belief. Belief change was most dramatic when initial beliefs were most uncertain and when novel prevalence information was most convincing, suggesting that people weigh social information rationally with other information sources. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of online misinformation.

Political Approaches

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett ◽  
Martha Finnemore
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Interstate Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
World Organization

This chapter examines how prominent theories capture the various ways that the UN affects world politics. Different theories of international relations (IR) cast the UN in distinctive roles, which logically lead scholars to identify distinctive kinds of effects. We identify five roles that the UN might have: as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism for interstate cooperation; as a governor of an international society of states; as a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum. Each role has roots in a well-known theory of international politics. In many, perhaps most, real-world political situations, the UN plays more than one of these roles, but these stylized theoretical arguments about the world body’s influence help discipline our thinking. They force us to be explicit about which effects of the world organization we think are important, what is causing them, and why.

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