Program & Abstract Book - EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009

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EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009: Understanding Violence S-19 44 February 11-13 2009 st r e s s a s a g e n e r a t o r o f s o c i a l i m b a l - a n c e Sandi, Carmen; Cordero, M. Isabel; Marquez, Cristina; Timmer, Marjan Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics Brain Mind Institute EPFL, Switzerland Stress is frequently regarded as an inevitable drawback of many hierarchical arrangements of social groups. Most notably, subordinate individuals have frequently been shown to display clear signs of chronic stress (including weight loss, increased levels of glucocorticoid hormones, deficiencies in the immune system, and even increased death rate). Given that high stress and increasing stress hormone levels are linked to both physical and mental health problems, stress has been proposed as a key mediator of the wealth of health problems resulting from social inequity. Despite substantial evidence indicating that, on its turn, stress can have a major impact on aspects of social dominance –such as aggressiveness, success in competition for resources and social anxiety– the contribution of stress to creating social imbalance is still largely disregarded in psychosocio-biological contexts. This talk will present evidence from animal work showing that stress affects social hierarchies in different aspects, and potentiates aggressions among affected individuals, with all these examples illustrating how, eventually, stress has a profound impact not only in the directly stressed individuals but also in their interacting partners and offspring. The first part of the talk will deal with a model whereby being stressed at the time of a first social encounter (already established hierarchies are largely immune to disruption by stress) can have major consequences on the longterm establishment of the resulting social hierarchy, with stress acting as a two-stage mechanism: (i) by influencing the rank achieved after the social encounter; and (ii) by having a long-term impact on the subsequent status of the individual in future encounters with either the same (by promoting a long-term memory for the specific hierarchy) or with other (winner-loser effects) individual/s. The second part of the talk will discuss how stress during early development can affect individuals’ aggressiveness later on life and, on its turn, life quality and health in their social environments. Identifying stress among the critical mechanisms contributing to create social imbalance widens the potential interventions to reduce psychosocial and societal problems due to uneven status.
EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009: Understanding Violence S-20 Abstracts for Speakers gr o u p s , by s t a n D e r s a n D t h e in f o r m a l re g u l a t i o n o f vi o l e n c e Levine, Mark Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UKA Ever since Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) essay, “Telling More Than We Can Know”, social psychologists have been sensitised to the fact that people have very little introspective access to the underlying causes of their own behaviour. In other words, what our participants tell us in questionnaires and interviews and focus groups should not be treated as a veridical route to psychological reality. This raises some important questions about methods and the conclusions we draw from them. For example, in the study of helping behaviour, there is often a gap between what people say and what they do in real-life helping situations. Thus, reactive and non-reactive measures need to be combined in order to develop a more complete picture of the likelihood of helping. This strategy of combining verbal reports and behavioural studies works well, as long as it is possible to combine both levels of analysis. However, there are some domains in which it is difficult, for ethical and practical reasons, to carry out robust behavioural research. The study of violence, and in particular, bystander intervention in violence, is one such domain. There are many ethical challenges to be overcome in attempting to expose research participants to violent events, and many logistical difficulties in (re)creating violent events that can be used and manipulated in robust empirical studies. In this paper I will suggest that, one consequence of this has been a rather partial view of the role of groups in social psychological explanations of violence. For the most part, in traditional social psychology, groups tend to be seen as psychologically dangerous. On the one hand, the presence of others can lead to ‘peer-group pressure’, ‘mob violence’ or mass hysteria – all threats to individual rationality which are likely to produce anti-social behaviour. On the other hand, the presence of others can lead to ‘diffusion of responsibility’, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ and ‘bystander apathy’ – threats to individual rationality that are likely to prevent people from helping those under threat of violent attack. Thus, groups are damned for causing ‘excitation’ and damned for causing ‘inhibition’ – with both paths deriving from the same set of circumstances. I will argue that this idea of the danger of the group misunderstands the role of group processes in violence. I will demonstrate, using data from experiments exploring bystander behaviour in emergencies, that groups can facilitate pro-social behaviour. I will then go on to describe a detailed behavioural analysis of a corpus of 42 clips of CCTV footage 45
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