SOCIAL SKILLS

Achievement and aggression• One of the most

obvious ways in which culture exerts its influence on motivation is in the degree of self-assertion expected or permitted among its members.

• Even societies with a similar racial background may vary widely in this respect.

Achievement Motivation

• The achievement motive involves the desire for success. It is present whenever someone is concerned with attaining some sort of standard, set by himself or others.

• This standard implies a certain degree of excellence, so that the individual is pleased with competence and disappointed with incompetence.

Family and Cultural Influences

• Children who are encouraged to use their abilities constructively and to find out things for themselves, especially at early ages, are likely to be high in achievement motivation in later years.

• Another influential factor is the parents' occupational level, to which the child is regularly exposed. The higher the level, the greater is the probable achievement motivation in the child.

Family and Cultural Influences

• Third, birth order is a factor because the greater the number of children, the less is the attention that the parents can give each child.

Cultural Differences in Subway Norms

Role of Self-Concept • We can imagine and

interpret the world in a way apparently impossible for other organisms, and a critical factor here is the self-concept, which is the way a person thinks about himself or herself in a global sense.

• It includes a person's most important self-feelings and self-attitudes. I

Recognition and Achievement

• The research revealed, that workers were motivated to increase production not so much by the specific improvements in their environment as by their increased feelings of importance.

• They had been selected for a special investigation and apparently the company was interested in them as individuals, rather than as cogs in an industrial machine.

Problem of Aggression

• Football, our national pastime in many respects, is not just a contact sport but collision sport. Our theatre and television include innumerable cowboy shoot-outs, war stories, and murder mysteries. In many parts of the country there has been a steady increase in criminal behavior.

• Aggravated assault occurs most commonly within the family, and approximately 50 percent of the instances involve spouses killing one another.

Uncomfortably hot weather and aggressive reactions Between 1980 and 1982 in Houston, murders and rapes were more common on days over 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees centigrade), as shown in the graph.

Summary of neuroimaging findings related to aggressive and violent behaviour in children

and adolescents

Aggression Among Animals• This problem is so extremely prevalent that some

scientists today believe the human inclination to aggression is innate, a condition of our inheritance. These investigators generally approach this question from backgrounds in ethology and animal behavior, noting the aggressiveness in the animal kingdom.

• Animals fight for these reasons: to obtain food or a mate, to establish a territory, and to gain a position in a social hierarchy. Human beings, it is claimed, have all of these concerns.

Psychoanalytic View of Aggression• Another prominent view of human aggression as

innate comes from psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud, widely recognized for postulating two human instincts. One of these, the life instinct, motivates us to selfpreservation, love, and sexual urges that result in the preservation of the species. The death instinct, in contrast, impels us toward the cessation of the tensions of life. The ultimate aim of life, in this sense, is death, which is brought about by our destructive tendencies toward ourselves and others.

• Freud arrived at this conclusion through studies in evolutionary biology, but he was also much influenced by World War I. For him, the life and death instincts were constantly at odds, but the eventual winner was always the death instinct.

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

• For other investigators more compelling evidence on the origins of aggression is found in the environment, and one early hypothesis pointed to the role of frustrating circumstances.

• When the boss is unusually nasty, we speculate that he just failed to negotiate a business deal or that someone rejected him. Similarly, a child denied a cookie may have a temper tantrum.

Frustration-aggression hypothesis

• “Aggressive behavior always presupposes the existence of frustration," and frustration inevitably leads to some form of aggression.

Management of Aggression• The argument over the role of innate and learned factors

in aggression arises in part because different definitions are involved. Sometimes aggression is defined as a vigorous pursuit of self-preservation, as when dispassionate animals merely kill for food. On this basis almost all organisms are potentially aggressive, for all of us have an innate desire to satisfy physiological needs.

• But aggression is also defined as the desire to inflict harm on another individual or object, even when there is no obvious gain. This behavior, involving violence, certainly seems learned, for it does not seem to appear in animals or even in most human beings. Of course many behaviors are regarded as self-preservation by some and violence by others, but the important issue is the underlying question.

Contact with Others

• Each of us goes through an extended period of infantile helplessness, and this dependency, longer than that of any other species, could lead to our later need for affiliation.

• Our desire for the company of others may be partly a vestige of childhood fears of abandonment, apart from whatever other satisfactions it may offer.

Anxiety and Affiliation• Highly anxious persons, expecting a painful situation,

wanted to be with other people. • Those who were less anxious were more likely to be

indifferent about affiliation.• A variety of methods may be employed to deliver

social skills training, but especially with diagnosed antisocial disorders, the most effective methods are systemic therapies which address communication skills among the whole family or within a peer group of other antisocial children or adolescents. These probably work best because they entail actually developing (or redeveloping) positive relationships between the child or adolescent and other people.

Group norms

• Although group norms are relatively enduring, they do change in line with changing circumstances to prescribe attitudes, feelings and behaviours that are appropriate for group members in a particular context.

• Norms relating to group loyalty and central aspects of group life are usually more specific, and have a more restricted range of acceptable behaviour than norms relating to more peripheral features of the group.

Group norms

• High-status group members also tend to be allowed more deviation from group norms than lower-status members.

Conformity

People may have conformed for one of two reasons, each linked to a distinct form of social influence:1. They may have been concerned about social evaluation (e.g. being liked or being thought badly of ) by the others in the group (normative influence).2. They may have used the other group members’ judgements as useful information to guide them in an ambiguous task on which they had no previous experience (informational influence).

Minority influence• For most of us, conformity means coming into line

with majority attitudes and behaviours. But what about minority influence? Minorities face a social influence challenge. By definition, they have relatively few members; they also tend to enjoy little power, can be vilified as outsiders, hold ‘unorthodox’ opinions, and have limited access to mainstream mass communication channels.

• And yet minorities often prevail, bringing about social change. Research suggests that minorities must actively create and accentuate conflict to draw attention to themselves and achieve influence.

How groups get things done• Most groups exist to get things done, including making

decisions and collaborating on group projects. Working in groups has some obvious attractions – more hands are involved, the human resource pool is enlarged, and there are social benefits. Yet group performance is often worse than you might expect.

• Potential group gains in effectiveness and creativity seem to be offset by negative characteristics of group performance, including the tendency to let others do the work, sub-optimal decision making, and becoming more extreme as a group than as individual members. As we shall see, some of these drawbacks are due to problems of coordination, and others are due to reduced individual motivation.

Group Think and Group Polarization

• If you've ever been involved in a group decision making process, you've probably seen such things happen: either the group agrees on all of the major issues, or there is significant dissent that splits the group. When we all agree, and are happy with that agreement, we typically do not want to hear opposing arguments. This phenomenon is referred to as Group Think. It can lead to impulsive decisions and a failure to identify and/or consider all sides of an argument.

• Similar to this, Group Polarization refers to a groups tendency to talk itself into extreme positions. In this case, a group gets so focused and energized about a decision, which pushes itself forward faster than originally intended.

Social loafing• This theory states that as a group gets larger,

the individual contribution decreases disproportionate to the group size. This is due to the diffusion of responsibility created as the size of the group increases. As more people are added to the group, you will end up with a small percentage doing a large portion of the work and a large percentage doing a much smaller proportion.

• Bystander Effect. The internal push to help a person in need decreases as the group gets larger, very similar to Social Loafing. In this instance, however, people tend to be followers and will only get involved if they witness another person getting involved.

How groups get things done• Most groups exist to get things done, including

making decisions and collaborating on group projects. Working in groups has some obvious attractions – more hands are involved, the human resource pool is enlarged, and there are social benefits. Yet group performance is often worse than you might expect.

• Potential group gains in effectiveness and creativity seem to be offset by negative characteristics of group performance, including the tendency to let others do the work, sub-optimal decision making, and becoming more extreme as a group than as individual members.

Group decision makingResearch on social decision schemes identifies a number of implicit or explicit decision-making rules that groups can adopt to transform diversity into a group decision. These include:•unanimity – discussion puts pressure on deviants to conform;•majority wins – discussion confirms the majority position, which becomes the group decision;•truth wins – discussion reveals the position that is demonstrably correct; and•two-thirds majority – discussion establishes a two-thirds majority, which becomes the group decision.The type of rule that is adopted can affect both the group atmosphere and the decision-making process.