1. Star Trek: the rational Vulcan Mr. Spock in the first Star Trek series vs. the android, Data, in Star Trek: the Next Generation... see the description of Data's struggles to be human, p. 5
2. W hat about the robots in Asimov's Foundation and Empire series? The three laws of robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Eventually a fourth law, created by R Daneel Olivaw, the wisest and most human-like of the robots, introducing the good of "humanity" as overriding the other three laws (notice the problems that enter any effort to predict Olivaw's behavior based on this fourth law)
The inspiration for this change comes from a long-ago suggestion from "Partner Elijah Bailey" (who as he dies becomes "Friend Elijah)... Giscard, who can read emotions, notes that Daneel is becoming more and more human-like.... Giscard and Daneel similarly develop what seems more and more like a friendship, and Giscard too eventually implements the fourth law, although it overloads his positronic brain.
In essence, these robots of Asimov's are built to serve humans... Is there anything equivalent in the way humans are created? Is there a set of laws that can predict human behavior (the laws of Humanics, as R. Daneel terms them)?
Asimov's conclusion, embodied in his Foundation and Empire series: no such laws for predicting individual human behavior, but in large numbers (trillions of people, across 20,000+ worlds) key events in social development can be predicted by what he terms "psychohistory"
Of course, all this is just imaginative and perhaps evocative fiction... what about social science?
3. Human nature.... the rational choice model: people act in way that minimizes their costs and maximizes their rewards, in light of the knowledge they have... makes possible a social science that doesn't have to take account of individuals in all their complexity and difference... the psychology of B.F. Skinner, the sociology of George Homans, the economics of Gary Becker
Here is Homans' take on the laws of human behavior, first laid out in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association's annual meeting back in the early 1960s, titled "Bringing Men Back In"
1. For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action. (the success proposition)
2. If in the past the occurence of a particular stimulus has been the occasion on which a person's action has been rewarded, then the more similar the present stimuli are to past ones, the more likely the person is to perform the action or some similar action now. (the stimulus proposition)
3. The more valuable to a person is the result of his action, the more likely he is to perform the action. (the value proposition)
4. The more often in the recent past a person has received a particular reward, the less valuable any further unit of that reward becomes to him. (deprivation-satiation proposition)
5. When a person's action does not receive the reward he expected or receives a punishment he does not expect, he will be angry; he becomes more likely to perform aggressive behavior. (the aggression proposition)
6. When a person's action receives the reward he expected, especially a greater reward than he expected, or does not receive the punishment he expected, he will be pleased. He becomes likely to perform approving behavior. (the approval proposition)
In summary, rational choice theory sees people as maximizing their rewards (both in terms of material goods and in terms of social approval) and minimizing their costs.
TPS: Do you see any problems in this? Are there types of behavior or types of people that would be hard to explain using these laws?
NY Times, July 2002: "Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate" ...classic cooperation "game" with one participant wired to study which parts of brain are activated... 2 participants, who for each of 20 repetitions can choose to cooperate or go it along; if both choose cooperate, each earns $2; if one chooses cooperate and the other to go it alone, the first makes $1 and the second $3; if both choose go it alone, each makes $1.
1. What would be the optimal strategy in terms of making money?
2. The part of the brain that registers pleasure and satisfaction activated by choosing to cooperate.... (evolutionary biology?)
"In place of the question, what is real?, we prefer to ask: What are some of the beliefs and practices that make up different realities?"
1. Assumption about human nature: rationality
2. People act in a way that will maximize rewards and minimize costs, in light of the information that is available to them
1. Much like utilitarianism, but no assumption of rational behavior; instead, your behavior is created by your particular reinforcement history... what have you been rewarded and punished for in the past. The basic approach comes from psychology or even economics, and was brought into sociology by George Homans under the heading of exchange theory (though he never liked the term)
2. Current practice in Sociology lumps the approaches under A and B together under the heading of "rational choice theory. " The basic image is of human beings maximizing their rewards and minimizing their costs, recognizing that rewards and costs are not only economic but social.
Example: Trends in marriage, drawing on "Why are there so many single Americans?" New York Times, January 1, 2007... really about the marriage gap between college grads and those less educated... more educated people more likely to be married, more likely to rate their marriages as "very happy" and more likely to say divorces should be harder to obtain.... comes down to earning power, according to the sociologists cited in the article. Question: 50 years ago, why were college educated men more likely to "marry down?"
1. tripartite self: id, ego, superego
2. dreams, psychoanalysis
3. Not strong on the nature and causes of socialized behavior, although Freud does try to address this issue in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents. Not particularly influential in modern social psychology and we will give Freud no attention in this course.
1. Primary emphasis on thought processes, what information people pay attention to, how they store and recall it, how they organize and use it
2. Perception itself, and especially self-perception, a constructive as well as a reflective process
In my view, the most interesting approach in psychological social psychology, represented by figures like Festinger, Aronson (The Social Animal)
1. Dfn: language = "complex combinations of symbols used for communication"... also make possible imagining and remembering
2. Dfn: symbol = "an abstract representation of something that may or may not exist in tangible form"
3. W.I. Thomas, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead. Thomas Theorem again: "What men (people) define as real is real in its consequences."
Example: Meaning of marriage (NY Times article again). "While marriage used to be something you did before launching a life or a career, now it is seen as something you do after you're financially stable--when you can buy a house say. The same is true for all social classes." How was the meaning of marriage socially constructed for my grandparents, who married in the early 20th century, versus my children, who may marry in the early 21st century?
1. Perhaps it isn't possible to generalize about what motivates people, about what they value. They may learn very different meaning and value systems through the process of interaction and relationships. In one culture or subculture, they grow up learning the enormous importance of religious meanings; in another, individualism and wealth; in another, cooperation and equality
2. Aronson: humans as rational or humans as rationalizers
1. Psychologism (Fundamental attribution error): tendency to overpsychologize in our explanations of human behavior, to put too much emphasis on character and personality and too little on the power of social situations and affiliations (Assessment Committee: graduates of our department should know the difference between individual explanations and structural explanations.)
2. Reification: treating an abstract concept as if it were real; in this case, giving too much reality to society, which exists only as an abstraction... we need to recognize the power of social forces but at the same time that they are open to modification, somewhat by individuals and certainly by groups