Enrique Sarabia Sánchez - personal identifier: G6533073
DD210 – TMA 06/EMA - PART 1 – Word Limit: 1800
‘Psychologists who have studied a range of different phenomena have offered
valuable insights into why people sometimes have difficulty understanding the
world and each other.’ - Evaluate this claim (above), drawing upon examples of
research from across the module to support your answer
This paper will examine the extent to which psychology has contributed to
understanding how people find it difficult to understand the world and others. In doing
so, the paper will address studies relating to the theory of mind, heuristics, self-esteem
and conflicts in close relationships. How people change and evolve and what skills and
competencies manifest themselves as adults it’s very important for our development.
We try to see if these skills are developed when we are a child. To do this, we look at
social skills and try to find out how they evolve, and we do the same with other types of
skills.
One of the first things that psychologists study to understand our development is the
Theory of Mind (TOM). Through TOM, we measure our capacity to understand others
and we do it wondering why are they thinking or feeling in some way (Heal, 1986). One
of the mechanisms that we have to study our abilities for mindreading while we are
children yet is through the false belief tasks. A good example of it is the studies that
have shown that children under 4 years of age use to make mistakes in these false belief
studies while the children over 5 years old use to get better results in understanding
these false belief tasks. One of the most important studies about this is the “Sally-Anne
task” (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) that was based on the original false belief task
experiment that was the Maxi-task (Wimmer H. And Perner J. 1983). These studies
showed that already at this early stage, children have some difficulty understanding that
other people have different knowledge from them and will act differently from them
when confronted with the same situation. These studies as well suggest the possibility
that people use certain mental concepts, such as "desire", "thought", etc., to be able to
interpret and anticipate their own and other people's behaviour. This means that we
assume that people's actions are the result of an inner mind, which unconsciously
interprets the people around us to understand their behaviour. Possessing a TOM would
be something like being able to recognise the mental states of ourselves and others and
thus has some ability to predict and anticipate the actions of other human beings.
Executive function skills are the abilities that we need/have to plan, execute and get our
tasks done. For example, to measure the “inhibitory control” in children there is a test
called the “bear-dragon” task (Carlson and Moses, 2001). In this test, two puppets are
presented to the children, a bear and a dragon. Children have to follow the instructions
from the bear and ignore the ones from the dragon. Younger children fail in this test
being unable to inhibit the dragon’s instructions (Sabbagh et al., 2006). Psychologists
have found that usually children that fail in false beliefs tasks also fail in this test.
Psychologists suppose that the reason that children fail in the test it’s because they
didn’t develop completely their executive function skills yet.
, Language skills are also very important to understand our development and could be a
good explanation of why children below 4 years of age may fail on false belief tasks.
Syntactic structures and syntax competencies are sometimes not so well implanted yet
in children at such an early stage and could be a good explanation of why language
could be a basis for children to understand beliefs and false beliefs (de Villiers and de
Villiers, 2000). More studies like (de Villiers and Pyers, 2002; Milligan et al., 2007 in a
meta-analysis of 104studies) have found that children below 4 years of age find it very
difficult to understand sentences like the ones in the Sally-Ann experiment. From these
studies, it can be seen that a certain syntactic and semantic mastery is needed in addition
to a good understanding of the sentences of the experiment to assess why children under
4 years of age tend to fail in false belief experiments.
The abilities that we have to understand other’s people minds are studied by
developmental psychologists and are taking big steps to know when and how we get our
mindreading skills. As we have seen one of the most important tests that we have to do
at an early stage is through the false belief tasks. But current designed studies are not
just to test false belief tasks, as we have seen there are other studies designed that helps
us to measure language, executive, vision and other kinds of skills.
Heuristics are also a good way to comprehend how we can understand others and
provide information to guide us about potential failures in decision-making. Heuristics
are driven by practical reasons, which suggests that wherever there is a decision-making
mechanism to which we do not devote corresponding effort, heuristics appear. This
means that a good portion of all our mental mechanisms is governed by this logic.
Prejudice is one of the mechanisms by which we mentally cut off and we use it when
we are confronted with a reality about which we do not have enough information. There
are three types of heuristics: The representative heuristic consists of shortening and
accelerating the thinking mechanism and we use it to make a decision based on a
stereotype (Kahneman and Tversky, 1972). The availability heuristic is based on the
fact that we make decisions having only a portion of the information or partial
information based on some recent event. This information being recent makes it easier
for us to make the decision and also makes it easier for us to make a mistake because we
do not have the complete information (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973). The anchoring
heuristic (Kahneman and Tversky, 1974) teaches us that when we have to make a
numerical decision, based on a frequency or probability, and we are presented with a
numerical value beforehand, this will influence us when we make the decision. Thus we
would not be basing our decision on the facts.
Self-esteem has a direct link to how we build relationships with others. The most
important psychological measure of self-esteem is (RSES), (Rossenberg, 1965). This
measure is just valid to evaluate high or low self-esteem. To have high self-esteem or
low self-esteem can affect a lot about the way that we look toward ourselves or others
and how we set links in the community. For example, narcissism affects the way we act
in front of others because we would like to be valued (Morf, 2010) and low self-esteem
is more related to a self-protection case (Baumeister, 1993). Keeping our self-esteem
high will affect how we relate with groups. A person with high self-esteem can admit
that he/she can be valuable in the eyes of other people. A person with high self-esteem
is not easy to manipulate and is available when there is a need to collaborate with a
group or another person. He can enjoy diverse experiences and is sympathetic to the
feelings of others. He is comfortable and makes it easier to get along with the group.
Excessive levels of self-esteem, whether high or low, can be detrimental (Mehendran,
