1.

The difference between an intuitive psychologist and a professional

psychologist is, that intuitive psychologists have no baseline data. They go by
their interpretation of social responses as per how they have learnt through
their experiences and accordingly these largely depend upon subjective
impressions and intuitions.
2. On the other hand, a professional psychologist relies upon well-defined
sampling techniques and statistical procedures for estimating the
commonness of particular responses. Through strict experimentation and
observation the professional psychologist comes to interpret something and
these estimates are relevant to subsequent interpretations and inferences
and, therefore, he can proceed with confidence in his data.
3. The experiments on false consensus biases that we going to talk about today
are based on the attribution theory by Kelly.
4. The false consensus effect is a phenomena which centralises on people’s
tendency to project their ways of thinking onto other people, thinking that
other people actually think the same way as they do.
5. Prof Lee Ross conducted a research on biases in human inferences,
judgements and decisionmaking especially on the cognitive, perceptual and
motivational biases that lead people to misinterpret each other’s behaviour
and that create the color barriers to dispute resolution and the
implementation of peace agreements.
6. The results show that there is a perception of consensus and most of the
subjects thought that other people would do the same as them, regardless
of which of the two responses they actually chose themselves. This validates
the phenomena of the false consensus effects because in reality people do
not naturally or always believe or behave the way that we do. Another
observation that emerged from this study was that when participants were
asked to describe the attributes of the people who will likely make the choice
opposite their own, the subjects made extreme predictions about these
people
7. This is a famous study done by Jane Elliot, she was a teacher for third graders
in Iowa and the study is named “A Class Divided”.
8. if you give a positive feedback to an individual he or she feels better about
it, feels more confident and does or tries better knowing that he can do well.
9. This exercise shows that racism is a learned trait. How we behave with an
individual brings in the reactionary measure. That is how you can implant
these ideas on an individual not only for racism. This experiment by Jane
 Elliot is thus very important in our context as well. When we talk about
communalism, when you talk about discrimination or prejudice in any form,
this exercise really gives us an insight of people who have gone through the
sufferings themselves. You would be able to empathise with the individuals
who are going through such sufferings now. On the other side, we see in
society people who feel that because they have gone through this torment
earlier, why not let the others feel the same.
10. Nobody is evil by birth, it is learnt process by which ordinary individuals can
do wicked things so long as they have the proper framework in which to
rationalise them.
11. Androgynous come from the word Andro that is male and gyne that is
female. Androgynous means an individual who has both the masculine
characteristics as well as the feminine characteristics. Before the 70s, this
concept was unthinkable and as we move in society as per the desirability of
the society, most of the times a male would be expressing more masculine
traits and female expressing more feminine traits. One could not have both
the traits, or they would be considered pathological. That is why Bem’s study
on the sex role and especially on androgyny was a revolutionary study.
12. Bem came about with the idea of the sex role inventory. Named after her, it
is known as the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). This was the first and the
most influential of these tests. Several tests were created later but this is the
first one on sex role and especially to assess androgyny and this is one of the
most influential of the tests. It is still used and you will see publication even
in as frequently as in 2013 and in 2016 using Bem’s scales.
13. Bem published this article on the Measurement of Psychological Androgyny
in 1974 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and she describes
the development of the BSRI, so the implicit prediction of the scale was it
should be possible to design a questionnaire which reliably and validly
measures a person’s degree of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny.
14. This questionaire has two subscales with 20 items each and 20 neutral items.
So there are 20 items on masculinity that is how masculine is your
psychological profile and 20 on femininity that is how feminine is your
psychological profile. The scores are rated on a 7-point scale, and so if you
have a score of 4 you are exactly in the middleIf people score above median
on both scales, they are considered to be androgynous. That is if somebody
has a high masculinity as well as a high femininity score, then they are known
 to be androgynous. Now let us see the construction of the test. To start with,
Bem needed to have an item selection
15. The social desirability score indicates how much a person describes himself
or herself in a socially desirable way on neutral items. That again ranges from
1 to 7, so that is whether we want to be perceived as more approving of our
social role. If you take the BSRI which is available online, you will see that you
will identify the neutral items from which actually the social desirability is
calculated.
16. constructing a scale, then I would suggest that you go through books, one of
them being Krech and Crutchfield on social psychology and another by
Horowitz.
17. Bem’s study showed that there would be a different interpretation of mental
health and it also changed the traditional assumption of sex typing to begin
focusing on the behavioural and societal consequences of more flexible sex-
role self-concepts.
18. It just means that our societal responsibilities or reactions or demand that
we have are more flexibility in our sex roles and that is what this study
actually shows. Bem in 1975 found that androgynous individuals show sex
role adaptability across situations. They behave as the situation requires
even though this means behaving in a sexually inappropriate waY.
19. In this study there are two main hypothesis that are divided. First that is the
scores on the BSRI predicts certain kinds of behavioural preference and
second that androgyny is a good indicator of psychological well-being and
mental health. This is the first study of its kind that actually contradicts the
sex-role typing that was done earlier. This study also brought about a change
in the way people started perceiving themselves.
20. Walter Michelle and his colleagues in an experiment famously known as the
Marshmallow Test.
21. This was a very interesting study that Walter Michelle tried out with children
on their selfcontrol. He explored this for the last 40 years and his
experiments using the marshmallow test as it came to be known, laid the
ground work for the modern study of self-control.
22. Milgram argued there that to deal with obedience you could not see to the
comfort and well-being of the participants initially.
23. y Walter Michelle and his colleagues. This also led to a new concept of the
hot and cool systems and the development of a framework displaying the
human ability to delay gratification. Walter Michelle proposed the hot and
 cool system to explain why willpower succeeds or fails. The cool system is
more cognitive in nature so it is essentially a thinking system, incorporating
the knowledge about sensation, feelings, actions and goals reminding
yourself, for instance, why you should not eat the marshmallow. So it tells
the individuals of cool system actually is like a control system trying to stop
the person from going beyond the telling the person what is right and wrong.
The hot system is responsible for quick responsive reactions or responses to
certain triggers, so it is more impulsive in nature. It wants immediate
gratification, so it does not really care for the longterm consideration or long-
term implications.
24. So the pattern had remained for more than 40 years and the researchers
found that the prefrontal cortex was more active in subjects with higher self-
control and the ventral straitum which is a region for processing desires and
rewards, showed boosted activity in those with lower self-control.
25. Michelle also found that those who were deferred gratification 40 years
earlier were more competent and received higher SAT scores than their
peers meaning that these characteristics likely remained with the person for
life.