Stimulus Generalization and Stereotyping

Hey all! Right when I thought I was going to finally be consistent with writing, I end up missing last week's deadline haha. In my defense, I got pretty sick, so I didn't feel like writing. Regardless, I've been thinking a bit here and there, so hopefully I should be able to keep up after this haha. Anyways, on with the writing (and even a bit of continuity haha)!

Anyways, some of you may remember from two posts back that I talked about Wes and his affiliation with Grace on Campus, or GOC. Like I mentioned, one of the things that GOC very heavily pushes is evangelism. This may work for some people, but for others it may push them away, and I personally did not take a super positive view towards this method...

I realized in hindsight, though, that this may have created the wrong idea. I was not trying to rag on GOC, nor was I trying to give negative views towards all of those who are GOC. Anyone who may read this and is actually at UCLA may know of GOC people other than the one person I mentioned, and thus have a different view of them. Yet, for anyone that doesn't go to UCLA, I may have just inadvertently painted an image of what all GOC people function like, whether or not it is entirely true.

Thinking about this reminded me of a classic psychology of learning experiment... Essentially, in this experiment, there was a set of rats. A tone would be played, and the rats would be able to press on a lever to get food. Essentially, this tone served as a signal for when the rat could press on the lever to obtain food, thus being a form of classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning. For anyone that cares about specific psych terms, the tone was a conditional stimulus paired with bar pressing (the unconditional stimulus) to obtain food (the unconditional response). But yes! Anyone may notice that this isn't really that spectacular and lots of experiments have been emulated to do this. Yet, in this experiment, the frequency of the tone was changed in the second phase. For example, all the rats may have been conditioned to an 800 Hz tone initially, with the amount of times they responded measured. In the second phase of the experiment, the researchers may have used 770 Hz, 740 Hz, or 700 Hz tones and measured the amount of response for the rats then.

Depending on how far away the new tone was in comparison to the original tone, the amount of bar presses by the rat went down by the same comparison. Thus, the rats may have responded more to the 770 Hz tone over the 700 Hz tone. In fact, when the measurements were all plotted out on a frequency distribution, it gave a nice little bell curve type of shape. The researchers labelled the idea of responding to stimuli that are somewhat similar to one thing a sign of stimulus generalization. Or, for a more specific definition from About.com, stimulus generalization is "...the tendency for the conditioned stimulus to evoke similar responses after the response has been conditioned. For example, if a rat has been conditioned to fear a stuffed white rabbit, it will exhibit fear of objects similar to the conditioned stimulus." Hence, this is why the rats would still exhibit bar presses even if the tone was not exactly the same: the tone was subject to stimulus generalization. Of course, this is only a very small example of something that is much bigger in life, whether or not we are exactly conscious of it (esp. since classical conditioning arguably tends to function this way hahah).

So, other than throwing in some psych spheal (I have to give my major some recognition here and there haha), what exactly was the point of this? Well, it's a bit of a stretch, honest to goodness, but like I said, I believe a lot of our learning happens this way in real life. Whether or not this is noticed, we tend to learn a lot about certain phenomena by making generalizations from specific instances. In this case, think back to Wes from GOC. Now, from what I presented before, you (as the reader), should know only about GOC through Wes (again assuming you don't actually go to UCLA/have heard of GOC before). Yet, if we take a step back, how accurately do Wes's actions, just one person I've met from GOC, represent GOC's actions in general? You see, Wes can be totally indicative of GOC, yet he may also represent a tiny fraction, if even any, of what GOC's like. Of course, I realize in my other post I did mention that the idea of evangelism is something that GOC purports and holds on to very strongly. Yet, we can ignore that and try to gauge GOC's tenets simply be Wes's actions, and we can even question my perceptions as to whether they are entirely accurate, since I have so little interaction with GOC.

I guess what I'm essentially trying to get at here is that sometimes our generalizations/judgments of things may not be always accurate of the larger picture. In a sense, this can function as stereotyping, since you're simply taking one instance and making it representative of the entire population that you're applying it to (such as Wes for all of GOC). Of course, there may be other ways to find out about some larger organization thing, such as asking other members/looking directly into their goals and what not. Yet, asking other members can fall victim to the same problems as before, assuming you don't find out from enough people... Hence, that's why in Stats you have to use a large enough sample size to find out something representative of the population you're applying it to, for using a sample size of one is quite risky for not correctly representing the population. Of course, that is something more quantitative as compared to qualitative, yet the same principles could still apply. Also, one must remember that there is still a room for error, even with a large number of people.

Thus, looking for what demonstrates something's core principles can be the most efficient way to learn about something. Yet, due to laziness and/or time constraints, how many of us actually do this? I mean, imagine how many groups there are out there, or even religions... How many of us have taken the time to look into any religion that is not our own? I know I'm definitely victim to this, for most other world religions I don't know about except through a few followers of that religion and stuff I learned from (most likely, even if unintentional) biased people. This information acquisition should be something important, yet the difficulty of acquiring correct information is hard to do, especially with how many conflicting sources there are about something, thus making it hard to get at the "core" of a group or religion. Thus, while not obtaining perfect information may be understandable, it still doesn't exactly make it right...

All in all, I just want to confer the idea that maybe we shouldn't be as quick to stick with judgments that we make or have. For example, it's definitely a possibility that one member could be representative of the population (also taking note that some people may more accurately represent the population/core tenets than others), yet to stick to that judgment after just one person almost seems too hasty. It may be a normal just to classify things and easily think that we have groups/things figured out, whether or not that picture is accurate. Just becoming aware of how we make judgments, though, may be an action towards reducing such quick steps, and possibly a re-evaluation of our own thoughts towards other groups that we may already have. So yes, hopefully we'll all be aware now not to be so quick with our inferences of groups, and I also hope that I've given you some food for thought...