Emotions and Social
Doctorine of Physicalism
It states that everything is physical. It is closely related to materialism.
Where do complex things come from?
Suppose you are walking on a path and your foot gets hurt by a stone, then you might ask the question as to how the stone got there. Then you might get the answer that the stone could have been there since eternity. But suppose you would have found a watch, then the answer would not have been the same as watch is very complex than all other things there. Similarly, we can say the same thing about human organs. This is known as argument from design.
- Problem of creationism: It we believe that we were created by some external entity like god or aliens then it leads to following problem:
- Pushes back the actual question
- There has been proof of evolution
- Poor design, some body parts are not correctly designed like blind spot in eyes, etc.
- Natural Selection: Given by Charles darwin. Evolution was known long before he came but he showed why its there. This is how it happens in brief:
- Random variation
- Random variation gives rise to differences in survival and reproduction and gets passed from generation to generation
- Lastly, the perfect structure is formed
- The brain is the product of evolution
Misconception about evolution and psychology
- Natural selection should have caused humans and animals to spread their genes.
- This is a wrong assumption.
- There is a difference between ultimate causation and proximate causation.
- Evolution did have caused us to feel hunger, etc which is proximate causation.
- Everything we do have adaptive significance.
- Color vision is adaptive change
- Love of TV, chocolates, etc is accident
- Pleasure we get from music or art or humour is still in research as to find why we like it
- Life is possible without emotions
- This is completely wrong. Emotions are fundamental to humans
Facial expressions
- We are more prone to smile when we are happy and we want other people to know it.
- Smiles are social symbol.
- There are different types of smile
- Happiness smile (Duchenne smile, more to do with eyes)
- Greeting smile (kind of fake, more to do below the nose)
- Coy smile (awkward, nervous)
- Babies have the tendency to find the difference between the types of smile
- Couples who have more Duchenne smile are happier
Fear
- Its a social emotion.
- People have fear of snakes, heights, less space,etc. But we never meet someone who is afraid of cars or electric shop.
- It is found that children are afraid of spiders and snakes from a very young age. The classical conditioning cant explain it, but the main reason is evolution.
- Emotions are very hard to fake.
- Study of fear can explain how evolution have affected our emotions.
Kinship and Attachment
- Every animal want to have children. It is loosely related to survival of the fittest which means that animals are always in a tussle to survive either by intelligence or power. Then how do the kindness exist in our personality? There is no use of kindness in the cruel world.
- We have evolved to be nice to our kin.
- We are most attached to our children as they are the closest who are related to us and vie versa. The psychology of attachement poses two questions:
How parent react to children? Adults are innately attracted to babies. We like the features of a babies face.
How children reacts to parent? Children are attracted to anyone who takes care of them. Conditiong and rewarding can be one of the reason (Cupboard theory by Skinner) or Innate attachemnt theory by Bowlby. Children search for a sense of security more than any other things which is explained by this video.
We are nice to non kin as well. How did this kindness came into us?
Reciprocal altruism: We are more likely to help someone who help us
Sometimes we make decisions which appears to be irrational on surface but are actually rational. For eg: The ultimatum game
Social
Social priming
We are influenced by factors outside of our control
Self
- Spotlight effect - We tend to think everyone notices us
- Lakewobegon effect - Suppose in a class, students are asked individually as to how attentive they are. Most of them will say a value above 50 (on a scale of 0-100). Everyone thinks they are above average.
- Self serving bias: We tend to attribute positive things to ourselves rather than negative things. We think positive result are our own doing but negative result is due to external factors.
- Cognitive dissonance theory: When we experience internal inconsistency, we feel unpleasant. We want to get rid of that feeling.
- We avoid incosistent information. Humans generally want what they think to be true. Most people who go for second opinion try to get a feedback of their liking.
- Insufficient justification effect: If we dont have enough justification for a doing, we might change our opinion about it.
Attribution theory
- Why a behaviour occurs?
- We intuitivly thinks of others action as part of their personality
- We have the tendency to see actors as the character they play
Liking
- Why do we like other people?
- Apart from noral traits like honesty, kindness, etc there are some psychological factors as well.
- Familiarity is important. More we see something, more we like it. People who live close or daily see each other, develop a sense of familiarity and then liking. This is known as Mere-exposure effect.
- Similarity also attracts.
- Attractive people tends to be smarter, wiser, moral, get more marks
- Mathew effect: Rich gets rich and poor gets poor. Attractive people gets everything else as well.
- First impressions are very very important.
- First impressions are formed very quickly called thin slices.
- What effects do our perception of other people have on other people? This also plays a significant role.
- Self fulfilling prophecies: When our belief and expectations create a reality or influence our or others behaviour. Also known as pygmalion effect.