Psych 315 1st Edition Lecture 4Outline of Last Lecture I. Justification system, belief systems and attractivenessOutline of Current Lecture II. Belief system: need for controlIII. Just world beliefsIV. Terror management TheoryCurrent LectureBelief Systems: The need for control: we all want to feel that life is predictable and good things happen to good people. Personal control over our personal life. Experiment: “For God or country: the hydraulic relation between government instability and belief in religious sources of control”. God provides the external control for people. Also, government can also act as a external control. These two systems work hydraulically, meaning that when your belief in God increases, belief the government decreases.  Need for order, control, and predictability in our lives. Two sources of control: Personal and External Proposal 1: Belief in God provides one source of external support that leads us to see our worldas orderly, in control, and predictable.Proposal 2: One’s national government provides another source of the belief in your environment as being orderly, in control, and predictable. Proposal 3: In order for the government to function as a source of control etc., it must be seen as stable, capable, and able to provide control us on External Control in this study Hypothesis 1: When the government is seen as unstable, people will report a stronger belief in God.These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute. Hypothesis 2: When God is perceived to be unable or willing to intervene in the lives of humans, support the national government will increase. Study 1 – people read material that made the Canadian government (study was done in Canada) seem stable and in control of events or unstable and unable to control events.  Results: People who read that the government was unstable reported stronger beliefs in God. Study 2 – Study participants read material that made is seem more or less likely that God intervenes in human affairs (e.g., answers prayers, etc.)  Results: People who read that God was less likely to intervene in human affairs reported more support for the government.  Study 3: In Malaysia, people reported stronger belief in God when the government was unstable than when it was more stable. Belief systems: Just world Beliefs Just World Hypothesis: most want to belief the world is just. A study testing the hypothesis: “Do Innocent Victims Threaten the Belief in a Just World?Evidence from a Modified Stroop Task” It’s a color naming task. Words will come in different colors and you have to name the color not the word. The more you pay attention to the words the slower your color naming becomes Study 1: Study participants read newspaper stories that dealt with an innocent victim of a robbery. Some of them read stories in which the robber was caught and jailed. Others read stories in which the robber got away with his crime. Why these two different endings?  The researcher wanted to know whether either or both of these studies would raise concerns about justice in unconscious, pre-verbal processes. She used a Stroop Test to determine this.  What is the Stroop Test? The higher the accessibility of a word or concept is in unconscious thought, the slower the color naming response – because high accessible words or concepts create more interference.  What should happen on the Stroop Task if the participants were thinking pre-verbally about justice? Results: Slower reaction times on the Stroop Task when words were justice words(compared to neutral words), primarily when the story told that the robber had gotten away. If you read a story about justice, it was harder to ignore injustice words and it was harder to ignore that word meaning slower coloring naming. Study 2: purpose was to study reactions to the stories used in Study 1 at both the pre-verbal and verbal levels Results: First, Did the same Stroop Task and got the same results. Second, asked the participants questions about the victim in the stories they read. Asked two kinds of questions: A. derogation questions: Was the victim a careless and irresponsible person or not B. Questions were asked about how similar to them was the victim. - Results for the questions: Participants saw the victim as rather careless/irresponsible and as more dissimilar to them when the robber was not caught. - Why?- Also, these trends were stronger for people who showed more pre-verbal concern aboutjustice on the Stroop Task. - A second study by another experimenter showed that victims raise concerns about justice pre-verbally (Stroop Task) when they are innocent victims and that victims who are members of one’s in-group raise strong concerns about justice than victims of out-groups. You get more concern about justice when victims are similar to you. Why? We try to make the victim seem less like us because that is reassuring. - We see blaming the victim in rape victims. We think they are bad people because they were raped. Belief System: Terror Management Theory: - Terror Management Theory deals with unconscious thoughts about death and their impact on beliefs about you Cultural World View (i.e., the things you believe in). - Unconscious Death Anxiety: we are all afraid of death. But at the conscious level some people are or aren’t afraid of death.- Combating this anxiety – We combat this anxiety by forming a system of beliefs and values (our Cultural World View, CWV) and adhering to those beliefs and values. Adherence to the dictates of your CWV creates a sense of self-esteem and a sense that your life is meaningful in a way that defends your conscious mind from constant awareness of death. It keeps your unconscious death awareness in check so that you can live your life without experiencing terror regarding your inevitable death.How can we see this system in operation? How can we prove that CWV’s protect against unconscious death anxiety?- We attempt to do so with what are called mortality salience studies. They made death more conscious in our mind. - Major Hypothesis I. Increasing awareness of mortality should lead you to support your CWV more strongly and oppose people do not adhere to your CWV.  Study 1: Setting Bail for Prostitutes. For most people’s CWV, a prostitute is a bad thing and