A Sociocognitive Approach to Social Norms by Dubois Nicole;Jellison Jerald;

Author:Dubois, Nicole;Jellison, Jerald; [NICOLE DUBOIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Table 5.1 Traits that differentiate desirability and utility at the positive and negative poles

Devos-Comby and Devos (2000; 2001) obtained results with the same basic meaning. They generated two lists of trait words, one “related to social utility” and one “related to attractiveness”, and then asked subjects to assess targets infected with the AIDS virus in a situation involving romantic love (proven to be normative) or in a situation involving hedonistic love (proven to be non-normative). In five experiments reported over two papers, they found that non-normative subjects were deemed more responsible for their own situation than normative subjects. This judgment of responsibility was apparently strongly mediated by evaluation differences on the social utility traits since the targets were not differentiated on the attractiveness traits. In short, ill individuals who had experienced a romantic relationship were described in personological terms as socially more useful than ill individuals who had experienced a hedonistic relationship and were therefore seen as less responsible. But the latter were not more attractive or desirable because of it. Regression analyses showed that the perceived social value of the targets was an excellent mediating variable between how normative the target behavior was and how responsible the target was judged to be (Devos-Comby and Devos, 2001).

The opposition between these two trait families, one that makes persons desirable (or attractive) and the other that makes them useful, thus supplies us with an empirical criterion for testing the target desirability-utility contrast. Now if it is true, as the proponents of the sociocognitive approach assume, that normative events are first and foremost defined by their social utility (rather than by their affective desirability), then one can expect normative persons, whose worthiness is enhanced by the assignment of normative events, to be more readily described in “useful” terms than in “desirable” ones. This is what the Devos-Comby and Devos (2000, 2001) results already showed in an indirect way, and it is also what was shown in two experiments by Cambon, Djouari, and Beauvois (2001), the first of which will be described below.

Students who were not taking psychology had to study three peer couples by reading their alleged answers to a questionnaire (judge paradigm). For the first couple, the questionnaire was an internality norm questionnaire; for the second it was a self-sufficiency norm questionnaire; and for the third it was a consistency preference norm questionnaire. Each questionnaire consisted of 15 questions (norm of internality: see Dubois and Tarquinio, 1997; norm of self-sufficiency: see Beauvois and Dubois, 2001; norm of consistency: see Channouf and Mangard, 1997). For each couple, the alleged answers of one of the two peers were of average normativity (7 or 8 normative answers of 15). The degree of normativity of the second peer varied across subject groups (4, 13, 14, 15 normative answers; n=20 subjects per group). After having studied the answers given by the three couples, the students had to describe the six peers by choosing three of the twelve adjectives proposed, which were the traits on Gallay’s list that maximized the desirability-utility and positive-negative contrasts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.