by B. Renee Ahnert

From the discussion last week: CHR explanations may form a curvilinear relationship with respect to familiarity of groups, in that CHR use is low when a group is completely unfamiliar, then increases when some general information is known, then decreases if the group is very familiar (if the explainer is part of the group, for example).

Andersen, Glassman, & Gold article

This curve could also be related to the Anderson article, in this case familiarity refers to an individual: a non-significant other would elicit high CHR use (some general information is available, but not a whole lot), which would decrease for significant others and further decrease for the self, for whom a lot of specific information is available.

Andersen et al. did not explore explantions but the content of mental representaitons: They found that private, unobservable information is used more as familiarity increases -- it is low for non-significant others, higher for significant others, and even higher for the self. This progrssion of familiarity could be more roughly divided into 'ingroup' (self and significant others) and 'outgroups' (non-significant others). For example, if I know a person in the English dept. and many in the Psych. dept., my representation of the members of the Psych. dept. will contain more unobservable information.

The discussion then moved on to the different amounts of blame that people assign to self, ingroups, outgroups, etc. For negative behavior, blame would be high for non-significant others (outgroup), lower for significant others (ingroup), and even lower for the self. This might be due to a self-serving bias, according to which people try to put themselves in the best possible light, so they avoid blaming themselves and people they are close to.

However, we identified several refinements of this pattern: If an ingroup member performs a negative behavior that is destructive to the group itself, blame will be high. If a teammate is yelling at their own team, we may feel a lot of blame and anger towards them, but if they are yelling at someone else we may not blame them so much, we may defend them. If an outgroup member performs a behavior that does not have any consequences for us, attention will be low and we show indifference rather than blame (and no sympathy for the victim of the negative behavior).

We also related attention and blame to each other. We may pay more attention to negative behaviors for ourselves and our ingroup, but not necessarily put blame on the individual. It takes quite strong negativity, and novelty, for people to pay attention to negative events far away from (and with little relevance to) themselves.

Another variable is the type of group we are talking about. If the group is highly dependent on one another, we may see less blame among the members, but if there is competition in the group we may see more blame.

Are there cultural differences? One hypothesis is that Easterners are less likely to place blame on individual ingroup members (but perhaps criticize the whole group), whereas Westerners are more focused on individuals and find it more acceptable to criticize them. However, Easterners also focus on constant improvement so it would be acceptable for them to constructively criticize ingroup members. Also, individualism may decrease blame since there is less reflection on other group members if one person does something negative. On a basketball team, for example, if one person plays badly, it may create an opportunity for other team members to show their skills. On a football team, where there is more interdependence among the team members, blame might be higher since one bad player could lead to more negative outcomes for the whole the team.

Responses to blame/criticism depend on who is offering the criticism. If it's an ingroup member, we may try to deal with it constructively. If it's a person from outside the group, we tend to 'circle the wagons' and defend the group (an other self-serving bias?). For example, during a war, when we are defending our group against an outside attack, we blame that group, not it's situation -- just look at all of the negative propaganda we use about our enemy. And we don't do this constructively, the purpose is definitely a negative one.

When we're a third party seeing an attack by one group on another, we tend to place more blame on the group which is of no advantage to us (ex.: Gulf war).

Attention to and blame of negative behaviors also depend on the personality of the observer: Some people pay attention to a greater variety of behaviors, whereas others concentrate only on highly relevant ones. People also define ingroup and outgroup differently: Some people in some situations consider all of humanity as their ingroup.

Often the information you pay attention to is limited -- media pre-selects the stories about which they report; we never hear about the other ones.

You'd also pay more attention to a behavior if it was unusual -- we become habituated to very frequent actions (even if they are negative) as long as they don’t directly affect us.

Somebody argued that maybe the ingroup vs outgroup distinction is not so important, we just like flashy stuff whether it's in our group or not. But someon replied that millions of people died in Rwanda, but we never took notice until 5 Americans died. Then, we increased our attention and we also placed more blame on the perpetratot of violence.

Personal experience can influence what we perceive the ingroup and outgroup to be -- Ting placed more attention on the Holocaust after visiting a concentration camp. She felt sympathy for the Jewish people, which lead her to place more blame on the Nazis. Also, she'd be more likely to place blame if the behavior occured nowadays than if it did decades ago -- this may have to do with relevance.

Negative events are more unusual than positive ones, so they stand out and we pay more attention. However, there is a threshold -- we don't stare at a pile of mutilated bodies, it's too much for us. The media tries to capture the middle ground, where it's gross enough to grab our attention without thoroughly disgusting us (and turning us away).

We are continually raising the level of gruesomeness we accept, and raising it quickly. Our current level of accepted gruesomeness becomes normal, we habituate to it, then it takes more to grab our attention. Shows like ER and Millenium are borderline acceptable, but soon they may become the norm. This raising of tolerance for watching gruesome events may, under certain condiutions, lead to greater tolerance of performing these gruesome behaviors.

Maybe we could re-sensitize people by having them not watch TV for a week. The rest (the normal watchers) would serve as the control group.

Shocking or gruesome events are portrayed as mostly brought about by and happening to people outside of the white middle-class, which is what the media portrayes as the ingroup in the US.

We are most comfortable viewing gruesome behavior in close but not directly relevant groups. Would they show LAPD in LA, or would that be too relevant? Would people who lived in the neighborhoods in which the crimes happened in the show watch the program?

Journalism is also only concerned with observable behavior, because this is easily portrayed and gives the impression of being objective -- they don't have to make inferences, as they would if they talked about internal events. One could argue that they make inferences anyway, though (about character, future behavior, etc.).

It seems counterintuitive, maybe bothersome, that even in today's 'highly evolved' society that we only care about events that are personally relevant.

What is personally relevant may be getting broader, with globalization. Yet we assume that the media will report relevant information, and don't look any further. This is probably dangerous.

Barr & Kleck article

Actors have access to internal states but can only guess what is displayed on the face. Observers have access to the face but can only guess what is inside the self. This may lead actors to think they display more, since they are aware of the events going on inside (some of which may be intense without being displayed with the same intensity).

Victims of abuse show less facial expressiveness, maybe they are more aware of what they don’t show since they learn to hide it?

They, too, may overestimate their facial expressiveness, however, because both actor and observer rate facial expressiveness lower -- but observers still lower than actors.

In acting, it has been shown that the same effect is true of voice -- the self thinks that their voice shows more expression than the other thinks it does, or even if the self later hears a recording of their own voice.

The opposite can sometimes be true, too. Sometimes a partner will say, "Stop Yelling!", and the actor didn't even realize that they were yelling.

This is strange, it seems, since we can hear our own voice -- unlike facial expression, the self also has access to voice. But the self is distracted by thoughts and planning ahead what they will say next, so little attention is paid to the tone of voice itself.

Summary: Two main components to the self-other discrepency as applied to facial expression:

• -we cannot see our own facial expression
• -we are overwhelmed by our internal states

The observer advantage is that they can see the actual expression and are not distracted by internal events (but they have a disadvantage judging the internal events).

Somebody argied that children might be more in tune with others’ body language, voice, ect., maybe also facial expressiveness. One example was that of a child who quickly picked up on her mom's distress from her tone of voice. Another example would be of an infant being upset when mom is upset, even if mom is not aware of showing any visible signs of her distress -- research shows that infants respond to very subtle cues like the mom's heartbeat.