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personality and personality disorders complete exam summary UvA psychology
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Personality and Personality DisordersSummary
Module 1 - Lecture 1
There are 2 key steps in the evolution of human cooperation (the article for this lecture).
1. Obligate collaborative foraging: humans have developed strong skills of collaboration.
Joining intentionality is crucial, a strong tendency in young children, intersubjectivity is
the capacity of people to have shared goals and mental states. Shared meanings and
stories come into existence.
2. Group-mindedness: the strong possibility of shared intentionality helps us to develop a
capability for conventions. Children, from then on are born in a world full of pre-existing
conventions that they slowly learn.
History
Groups get histories due to continued transmission of conventions, these are the stories of who
we are and how we became. By telling these stories and reflecting on them, we change our
understanding of who we are. The stories of individuals can be located within larger histories of
the “we” to which we belong.
The self can be seen an actor, which is presented through performances, playing roles, following
scripts, enacting routines and managing the audience's impressions. The effectiveness of the
performance is what matters.
It can also be seen as an agent, making choices, and as a result of these choices, we move
forward in life in a self-determined and goal-directed manner. Agency suggests intention,
volition, will, purpose, and some modicum of personal control in life.
It can also be an author. We become the story we tell. Dan McAdams created the life story
interview (the tutorial content).
The five core concepts are
, 1. Personality: the dynamic organisation within the individual of those psycho-physical
systems that determine characteristic behavior and thought. In terms of description and
attribution: personality is the description of an individual on the basis of repetitive
patterns of acting, speaking and feeling. personality is the attribution of those repetitions
to something.
a. The danger of reification: the description is the outer description of a repetitive
pattern of someone, then we give a name to this behaviour, then we attribute
behaviours to this label, then we make correlations for this label.
b. Persona is the self as an actor, the name comes from a masker, character.
2. The self: the psychological self may be construed as a reflexiv arrangement of the
subjective “I” and the constructed “me”, evolving and expanding over the human life
course.
3. Intersubjectivity: humans are from birth particularly attuned to sharing mental states with
others.
4. Identity: identity formation refers to the self, and how “me” is separated from “we”, and
how “me” is identified within the “we”. The “me” is also the “I”.
5. Symbolic order: cultural practices that are different from behavioural traditions, their
practitioners understand them as shared in the group; they are understood as
conventional. We all have agreed to do them in a particular way, even though we all
know that there are other ways we could do them.
Module 1 - Literature: Two Key Steps in the Evolution of
Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis
(Tomasello)
There are 2 main theories about the evolution of human cooperation which focus on altruism:
- Big Mistake Hypothesis: human altruistic tendencies evolved at a time when humans
lived in small groups of kin. Altruistic acts either benefited kin, or benefited the altruist in
terms of reciprocity (for reputational assessment). In the modern world we still have
some acts of altruism because the proximal small groups are still present.
, - Cultural Group Selection Hypothesis: focuses on a later stage in which human evolution
is characterized by larger groups. Social groups with more altruists will outcompete the
other groups.
Biological adaptation to altruism is not the case, but more so gene-environment interactions in
evolution. The suggestion of the authors is not cooperation as altruistic helping, but as
mutualistic collaboration. The Interdependence Hypothesis explains that at some point, humans
created lifeways in which collaborating with others is necessary for survival and procreation.
This led to altruism. Interdependent collaboration also helps explain humans' unique forms of
cognition and social organisation. This view has two steps. First, there is collaborative foraging.
Second, group-created conventions and norms are formed.
First: Obligate Collaborative Foraging
Although the prisoner's dilemma is widely related to the central challenge of social life, a better
model for real-life cooperation is the Stag Hunt. These situations are those in which individuals
must collaborate for benefits, and collaboration leads to more benefits, all solo alternatives must
be forsaken in order to collaborate. The three main challenges of stag hunt are explained below,
and strategies for them:
- Sharing the spoils: individuals had to find some way to divide spoils at the end of
collaboration such that there was no destructive fighting and such that everyone was
incentivized for future stag hunting
- Temptations to free ride: if there were more people present than needed, then everyone
had the incentive to let others do the hard work, which led to inaction from everyone.
- Coordination: individuals had to find some way to make a confidence-inspiring group
decision about whether to go for the stag, given that each of them had to relinquish their
“hare in the hand” to do so.
Sharing the spoils
From the pool of resources, dominant individuals tend to monopolize all the goods. This
demotivates the others to collaborate later. This doesn't become much of a problem realistically
because the pool is often too big to be monopolized by one individual. This is different in
humans. In hunter-gatherers, there is no harassment, and food is shared with nonparticipants as
, well. Humans are much more generous. Chimps are only generous when the nonparticipant is
helpless. Counter-dominance can emerge when individuals who attempt to monopolize all the
resources are repelled by others, like ostracised. This is why we became dependent on
collaborative foraging. The most successful individuals are the ones that were tolerant towards
others, and did not behave selfishly.
Coordination
Chimps have a shared goal and well-defined roles while hunting. Chimps valued their own needs
if they can achieve it themselves, but if the task required more than one person, then they
collaborated. Humans in contrast communicate to form a joint goal. In humans, better
communicators and collaborators were chosen as collaborative partners. As humans went
From more passive scavenging to more active collaborative foraging, they were faced with
evermore challenging coordination situations and decisions, and this provided these lective
contexts for the evolution of evergreater skills of coordination and communication.
Temptations to free ride
In chimps, this is not possible. In early humans it was not possible as well because they were in
small groups, so everyone had to participate. The most important factor for obtaining things
seems to be proximity. Bystanders sometimes get more meat than hunters. For humans, social
selection by means of reputation solves free riding. They are punished.
Interdependence and Altruistic Helping
It has been shown that humans help people outside of collaborative activities as well. This might
be serving the purpose of guaranteeing future partners.
sB>C
This means reproductive benefits must exceed the costs, when the benefits are conditioned by
stake (relatedness). This relates to group augmentation: if prosperity depends on my social
group, then I should keep them alive. I help others who do things that benefit me. Humans even
compete to be the most altruistic to prove something to others (promote mutualistic
collaboration).
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