Module 9 - Theories of Social Development Flashcards
Freud’s Theory of psychosexual development
Core elements:
–> Unconsciuos - peoples experiences are often influences by underlying psychological drives (dream interpretation)
–> Id, Ego and the Superego - Id is the unconscious pleasure-seeking drives, Ego is the conscious, rational problem solving part, and the Superego is the internalized morality standards, what you think is right and wrong (Ego is the middle man to balance the Id and Superego)
–> Psychosexual developmental stages - as children age, begin to seek pleasures from different erotically sensitive areas, erogenous zones
social development
development of children’s understanding of:
- others behaviours, attitudes and intentions
- the relationship between the self and others
- how to behave and interpret their social world
what are the 5 stages of Freud’s psychosexual developmental stages?
- oral: mouth (sucking, eating)
- anal: defecation
- phallic: genitalia
- latent: period of calm, desires hidden
- genital: full-blown sexual maturation
why do we care about Freud?
- his ideas were controversial, wacky, empirically, unsupported ideas about development
- he introduced new language and new ways of thinking about development
- Ideas that he kinda started: not everything is consciously apparent to us, early experiences matter, sexuality from a developmental perspective
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development
- eight developmental stages, eight crises (challenge)
1. trust vs. mistrust (birth - 2 yrs, trusting in intimate relationships)
2. Autonomous vs. shame/doubt (2-3 yrs, fostering of independence)
3. initiative vs. guilt (4-6 yrs, healthy conscience development)
4. industry vs. inferiority (6- 8yrs, can I contribute to the world?)
5. identity vs. role confusion (8-11yrs, Who am I? Where do I fit in?) - he was one of the first to note adolescence as an important period of development
learning
any change in behaviour or knowledge due to experience
define classical condition
learning of an association between two previously unrelated stimuli
- unconditioned stimulus: naturally evokes behaviours without previous condition (food)
- unconditioned response: response to the unconditional response (drooling)
- neutral stimulus: initially doesn’t elicit any response (yelling dinner)
- conditioned stimulus: a stimulus that was previously natural, that now evokes a conditioned behaviour (food associated with the word dinner)
- conditioned response response to the conditioned stimulus that wouldn’t have occurred prior to conditioning (drooling from hearing dinner being yelled)
John Watson
- saw children as blank states, waiting to be conditioned by parents and others
- no innate temperaments
- experience is everything
- nurture > nature
what was the famous case of “little Albert”
- john watson studied this orphan
- looking at how you can condition children to elicit an emotional response to virtually anything
- showed him a white lab rat (neutral stimulus), initially had no fear
- paired the rat with a loud sound (UCS) and this made the baby scared/fearful (UCR)
- quickly, just the rat alone (CS) provoked the feeling of fear in the baby (CR)
- this fear was shown to generalize to other similar things (stimulus generalization)
- while this is a famous study, we didn’t learn much from it, very unethical
operant conditioning
Whether a behaviour occurs is largely dependent on its perceived consequences
- reinforcement: reward, increases the tendency to make the response (positive reinforcement: giving a good thing, negative reinforcement: removing the bad thing)
- punishment: decreasing the tendency to make a response (positive punishment: giving a bad thing, negative punishment: removing a good thing)
B.F. Skinner
- advocating using operant conditioning in parenting and teaching children (rewarding good and punishing bad behaviours)
- attention as potent reinforced for kids (time-outs, taking away your behaviour = negative punishment) (Ferberizing infants, letting them cry it out)
- power of intermittent schedules of reward and punish (only should do this some of the time = increase resistance to extinction_
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
- most humans learning in social
- humans can learn through observation and imitation (witnessing reinforcement/punishment happen to someone else, can alter one’s own behaviour accordingly)
- animals also engage in observation learning as well
- bobo doll study
what is Bandura’s Bobo Doll study?
- preschools kids would watch an adult assault a Bobo doll
- 3 conditions: see the adult get rewarded, see the adult get punished, no consequences
- when left alone, kids who saw adults get rewarded or no consequences, acted the most violent
- kids who saw adults get punished, acted less violent
- children engaged in vicarious reinforcement (learning from someone else being rewarded/punished)
- then he offered children a prize if they replicated what they had originally seen, no matter the condition
- all groups acted violented = even the kids who didn’t act spontaneously act violently had learned from their observations
- exposure alone was enough for them to learn from it
Dodge’s Social Information-processing theory
- some people will interpret ambiguous social situation as accidental or intentional (ex. spilling coffee on your work)
- Hostile attribution bias (HABs); tendency to assume people’s ambiguous actions stem from hostile intents, associative with reactive aggression
