PSY3402 Culture Journal

Week 6 – Political Psychology of Groups

The given article starts somewhat by introducing intuitive theories and in my words, intuitive theories can be explained in such a way that they act as functions in the human mind to help make quick perceptions or judgments of different domains.

From what I understood regarding the experiments, people prefer voting as the decision method when resolving individuals’ conflicting beliefs. Also, chance is not preferred as a decision method when there is some sort of danger in one of the decision options. Overall, these preferences do not change with the change in group size. When a vulnerable minority condition was added, the participants preferred consensus more than voting. In this scenario, I was interested to know how practical this information would be in national elections of societies with ethnic or religious minorities and how this issue of tyranny of the majority can be resolved among different societies.

Regarding some concepts, I had interesting questions in my mind. For example, when I stumbled upon the concept of entitativity, I wondered how entitativity plays a role in collective choice in groups and how this question could be researched. A prominent difference between collective choice and combined choices needs to be noted down; collective choice occurs when individuals follow the aim of making the same choice together and combined choice occurs when individuals make the same choice together as a result of following individual aims. The article gives examples of honeybees and elephants for these definitions respectively. However, I think it is not always easy to draw a clear boundary between these two concepts since collective decisions might also involve individual preferences at times, for example, casting a vote for a political leader is a personal choice, however, once that political leader is elected, it will be considered a collective choice as it sums up the population’s voting choice and hence, impacts the whole society as well.


Comments

One response to “Week 6 – Political Psychology of Groups”

  1. elif yildirim Avatar
    elif yildirim

    You touch upon an important subject. I also wondered how can we adapt the vulnerable minority condition to real life. Can depolarization create an environment which people understand the costs minorities pay, or is the situation limited to only preference of voting? As you can understand, I also don’t have the answer to your question unfortunatelly. The other thing you were wondered, the role of entitativity in collective choice. I think it can be investigated through simple themes like the article did. For example, they can create a situation which has 2 conditions. 1- You are sitting with your friends at a cafe, then police came and arrested you and your friends etc., 2- You were sitting alone at a cafe, then police came and arrested everyone. What I am trying to say is, I also think that this should be investigated and can be investigated with basic situations and maybe it is investigated already. You mentioned interesting parts of the topic, thank you. I tried to generate some thoughts, I hope it was helpful.

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