Psychology and Social Policy (186) Syllabus
Winter, 1999
Class Meeting Time: Tu. and Thur. 12:45 - 2:05
Class Meeting Place: Center Hall 214
General People Information
Professor: Dr. Ebbe B. Ebbesen
e-mail: eebbesen@ucsd.edu
Office: 5115 McGill Hall
Phone: 534-3003
Office Hours: T & Th 2:30-3:30
TA: Ms. Heather Flowe
e-mail: hflowe@ucsd.edu
Office: TBA
Office Hours: TBA
3. Assignments and class structure
4. Some of social policy areas covered
5. Readings
This advanced class is designed to force us all (including me) to think about the ways in which the science of psychology can be applied to social policy issues. A social policy issue is any issue that society struggles with. For example, welfare, education, affirmative action, racism, violence, crime, and health care are examples of broad issues with which society is struggling. Each of these broad areas often contains many smaller issues on which people disagree. For example, within the healthcare areas people disagree about how to deliver healthcare services to those who can not afford to pay for them or how to measure a patient's "health" or the role that patients (verses money saving rules established by HMOs -- an HMO is a health maintenance organization, generally a group of MDs, nurses, and office staff, are closely tied to one or more insurance companies and the insurance companies pay the group money for the services that they provide the insured patients) should play in selecting diagnostic and curative procedures. For example, consider the delivery of such healthcare procedures such as visits to a mental health professional, e.g., a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Some HMOs have a telephone operator who reviews a list of behavioral symptoms presented over the phone by a doctor or a nurse or some other office staff (the person listening to the list never sees the patient nor even talks to the patient over the phone) and then decides how many office visits the HMO will pay for. So for depression, they might OK six visits, regardless of patient. Naturally, mental health professionals believe this is an outrage. Different depressed patients will surely need different kinds of care and therefore different numbers of office visits. But the HMOs argue that a system in which healthcare professionals decide how many office visits are necessary is open to too much abuse. They might continue to see patients even when they no longer need help just to drive up their bills. After all, the doctor could say that the patient still needs more visits when, in truth, they do not.
The fact that social policies are filled with many small issues as well as the larger policy ones (in the health care area, should we have nationalized health care or should we return to earlier times when everyone simply paid "fees for service" out of their own pockets whenever they decided to see a doctor or were in a hospital?) makes orderly discussion of social policy and the role that psychology might play in our thinking about policy very difficult. Do we focus on the big picture, the details or everything? My preference is to attempt to do it all. Unfortunately, I always fail because there is never enough time to do it all.
On the other hand, too many social policy issues exist to cover all of them in a class that lasts for only one quarter. However, we can pick a few issues as examples, discuss the issues, and attempt to see whether psychology has anything to offer. In thinking about this, you might consider that psychology often is described (in introductory textbooks, at least) as the science of human (and animal) behavior and thought and that a major part of the understanding that psychologists hope to obtain is achieved by discovering how to predict and control behavior. That is, the ultimate test of a true understanding is the ability to predict accurately and ultimately to control the behavior of people. At the same time, the arguments that we typically hear in favor of or against many social policies are arguments about human behavior, especially about how people will or won't behave when a particular social policy is implemented (predictions?) or as explanations for why current policies need to be changed (theory?). For example, proponents of welfare often argue that welfare recipients are good people who want to contribute to society but are temporarily down on their luck (or are hard workers who have been unfairly treated by some corporation that recently down sized) and as a result they just need a temporary helping hand. In other words, welfare helps people out of difficult situations that are no fault of their own so they can become productive members of society. Proponents frequently add that the people who would suffer the most without such help from government aid programs are young children. And surely the children of parents who are currently unemployed can not be blamed for their own or their parents' plight. In contrast, others argue that welfare forces or encourages people not to work, to have a large number of children (often out of wedlock), to chase biological fathers of children out of the home, and so on. Welfare does this, they argue, because to obtain welfare, the women (typically though not always) must show she has no means of generating income. Were the father of her children readily available, the government agency administering welfare would deny coverage to the women because they would claim the father should pay. Thus, to obtain the payments, the man agrees to leave.
We can see two different views of the psychology of welfare in these positions. On the one hand, people are seen as productive individuals who want to work and who have good intentions. It is the evil social conditions (corporations, the economy, racism, poor educational systems, and so on) that force otherwise noble and honest people into their current state. In the other view, people are seen as individuals who are willing to take money they do not deserve, who would do whatever it takes to avoid work, and who have bad intentions. The only evil social conditions are the government programs that reward people for having children and for not working. These are arguments about human nature and about how different social variables affect human behavior. What should we believe? What is the behavioral evidence in support of these arguments? What kinds of theories of human behavior might help us understand these social issues better?
Many theories about different aspects of human behavior are available to us. We have theories about how we develop, theories about how we learn, theories about how we see, about how we make decisions, about how what we think is fair, about how others influence us, about what makes people act aggressively, and so on. Most of these theories use very broad terms to explain a wide array of very specific behaviors. For example, some of our theories of aggression are based on observations of subjects' ratings, in a laboratory, of how much they would like to hurt someone. Others might record the number of times that people honk their horns when a car does not go at a red light. A key issue we must deal with in this class is: Can we generalize the results from such measures to other "aggressive" behaviors, e.g., a mother's decision to kill her children because her boy friend said he would not marry her because she has children from another man? For that matter, is a mother's decision to kill her children the same thing as a 14 year old gang member's decision to shoot a pizza delivery person because the latter refused to hand over the pizza when the 14 year old demanded that he do so? We could call all of these acts of aggression. But exactly how should we define aggressive behavior?
Clearly many theories about different aspects of human behavior exist in psychology. For example, when Herrnstein & Murray (the authors of "The Bell Curve") say that African-Americans score about 10 to 15 points lower than Caucasian-Americans on standard IQ tests, what are they talking about? What is IQ? How is it measured? When people say that we need to improve K-12 education by decreasing class size or increasing the amount of money that the schools spend per pupil, what, exactly, are their theories about how children learn and what factors will improve that learning. (And is the issue really about how best to educate or what it is that children should learn, e.g., the process of learning or the content of what is learned?) What evidence exists for the different theories (assuming that the different theories are testable, i.e., make testable predictions)?
You may already have strong feelings about some of the social and psychological issues that we will discuss in this class. For example, you may believe that homosexuality is genetically determined and is not something that people can help, or you might believe that it is a life-style choice, or you might believe that it is a sin for which God will punish those who transgress, or that it is a psychological illness. You may believe that affirmative action is a necessary social policy to redress past (and present) wrongs done to minority groups or you may believe that it is discrimination in reverse. You may believe that violent movies, like Pulp Fiction, should not be censored because they have no effect on the prevalence of crime in the US or you may believe in the freedom of artistic expression and that violent movies actually serve to reduce aggression via cathartic release. It is OK that you have those beliefs. What we will do in this class is attempt to examine the foundation of the various beliefs that people have and separate that part of the foundation that is based on value judgments and that part that is based on beliefs about human nature. Once we have made this distinction, we will be able to examine the evidence (about human behavior) for our beliefs about human nature. This is where psychology comes in. We can match our beliefs about human nature with the theory and evidence that comes from psychology. After all, if there is one field that should know something useful about human nature, it is psychology.
Because some of the topics that we may talk about in this class are "hot" topics that can arouse emotion, it is very important to make my position, with regard to this class and the topics that we will discuss, clear at the outset. I believe that we can only come to a reasonable view about the benefits or drawbacks of different social policies if we discuss them in a fully open manner that considers all sides, no matter how repugnant the side we might talking about is to you or me. That is, we have to be able to freely and openly talk about these issues. This means that sometimes, I or some member of the class, may appear to violate the "PC" codes that have become popular in recent years on some college campuses. For example, some people may feel so strongly about a topic that they believe arguments against their position should not even be discussed in a public forum or that someone who is willing to mention the opposing side is the enemy. They might feel "offended" or even harassed by the presentation of arguments against there favorite position. They might feel that their cause is best served by silencing the opposition. Well, this is not the way I plan to run this class. I will encourage free and open discussion. I want us to be able to understand the arguments on all sides of these "hot" issues. Sometimes in free and open discussion, people use terms that others feel are inappropriate. That is, someone might say, "Blacks" instead of African-Americans, or "crackers" instead of poor white, or talk about handicapped people instead of physically challenged individuals, or attack the definition of sexual harassment, or claim that unborn fetuses are not humans, or that some scholars claim that their is strong evidence that there are genetic differences among the races in IQ, or that more crimes are committed by some races than others, and so on. In this class, it is the content of the argument and evidence that is important, not whether the terms used conform to some "PC" code. By warning those of you who might be offended by some of this class's content ahead of time, I hope to avoid confrontation and false accusations later.
So if we are talking about IQ score differences among different racial groups, I do not, and I am sure no one in the class, intends to "put down" or humiliate any individual or group of individuals being discussed. Furthermore, you should infer nothing about my private beliefs on any of the issues that we will be discussing in this class from the arguments that I make. I believe that I have to challenge my own and other people's ideas but taking the "other side" and that it is only by taking the other side that I can come to understand evidence for and against a particular issue. In other words, we will be talking about some delicate issues, but I do not want students in this class to feel they cannot raise questions or present evidence on an issue just because someone in (or out) of the class my find that evidence to be against what they believe or to be emotionally distasteful. We will discuss difficult issues. We will present all sides to those issues. If you believe that these types of discussions should not take place because by raising them it gives them more due than they are worth or that it is a symbol of tacit acceptance or some other equivalent argument that stifles a free and open discussion of difficult issues, then you are advised not to take this class. I believe that it is only by free and open discussion of all sides of issues that we can develop reasoned and accurate foundations for the positions that we hold on the issues.
Coming to some agreement early on about this problem of open and uncensored discussion is important. I will assume that if you take this class you have agreed that you are willing to discuss issues in an open and thoughtful manner and that you will not be offended if people attack your most cherished positions. Instead, you will attempt to mount a reasoned argument based on fact that shows them to be completely wrong -- and you will do it in a polite and courteous manner.
What will you learn about in this class?
As I noted above, many different social policy issues exist and new ones emerge every day. We could, for example, discuss whether censorship on the internet is something that should be encouraged or discouraged. Clearly, this issue did not exist several years ago (although closely related issues have been with us for many years, e.g., should libraries be able to decide that certain books are inappropriate for their collections and should governments be allowed to censor the content of newspapers?). We cannot discuss every social policy issue, even though I would like to. Of course, you will learn a lot about the ones covered in your readings and the ones that we discuss in class. That is, you will learn the kinds of arguments that are used on both sides of several social issues. But more than this, I hope that you will eventually learn a style of analysis that can be applied to all social issues and polices.
Let me foreshadow what I mean by "style of analysis" a bit. Social policy discussions often come down, at least in part, to differences in assumptions about the nature of human behavior. Consider one of the topics that you may have heard about, pornography. Some people argue that pornography should be made illegal because it is a cause of (and, for others, is by its very nature) aggression against woman. That is, exposure to pornography is considered a cause of such things as rape, spousal abuse, and pedophilia (sexual activity with children). Those who defend pornography, sometimes claim that pornography not only does not increase aggression against woman, it actually reduces it by allowing otherwise sexually deprived males to obtain some substitute sexual satisfaction. (I will leave it to your imagination to figure out in what behaviors males might engage with pornography to achieve this goal.) It should be obvious that both of the above positions about pornography rest on arguments about the effect that pornography has on human (mostly male-- but some might argue that pornography affects females, as well) behavior. How should we decide which position to take? What kinds of evidence do we need to collect before we should agree or disagree with the different positions? For example, several laboratory experiments have been conducted that examine the "effects" of watching pornographic films on ratings that males made of women after they watched the film. Is this the kind of evidence that would test the claims being made? The main lesson to take away from this discussion is to begin asking yourself how we should evaluate different social policies. What is the "style of analysis" that you will use? Will you base your beliefs on feelings and what others have told you, or will you ask what kind of evidence do I need to hold my beliefs and then examine the evidence that exists?
The analysis of social policy issues in terms of assumptions they make about human behavior is the first part of the analysis style that I hope you will learn. Other parts include ideas about measurement and about causal analysis. The three most important analysis issues that we will struggle with in this class are: 1) "How should that (whatever the that is) be measured?" 2) "What constitutes sufficient evidence that x causes y?" and 3) "Is that an issue about individual differences or about differences between social contexts (or both)?"
Disagreements about social policy do not originate only from differences in beliefs about human nature. Another source of disagreement is what can be called value judgments. That is, differences between people in how much they value different outcomes. For example, regardless of what one's theory is about the effects of AFDC (aid to families with dependent children) payments are on women's decisions to have children, people can differentially value children who are suffering. Some might simply say, "That's life. Some have it good, others don't. I don't feel any sorrow for a starving child. Hopefully, the strongest survive. Human life isn't that sacred to me that we need to worry about a few children suffering." Others might feel profound sorrow when a child simply misses a meal. They might value every single human life to point that they would give up almost everything they have to help even the worst individual human (think of the vows of service and self-sacrifice that some nuns and priesthoods take). The point is that part of what we need to learn about social policy is the ability to discriminate value differences from differences in theory about human nature. We need to do this because sometimes the values that we place on social outcomes and policies are based on incorrect understandings of how human behavior works. We also need to be concerned about the fact that some people might value their position so strongly that they might distort the evidence to suit their values. As scientists, we want to let the evidence speak for itself.
Still another set of skills that I hope you will learn in this class consists of being able to break down social problems into behavioral detail. By this I mean learning to recognize the need to define broad terms about human behavior very carefully and precisely before we can have an intelligent discussion about them. For example, in Federal procedures that congress voted on recently to reform welfare, namely, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, most adults must get a job within two years or lose benefits. In addition there's a lifetime cap of five years on how long people can be on welfare. In addition, the Act also requires that each year, states must have more welfare clients in work or training programs - 50% by 2002 - or risk losing some of their federal funds. One of the main reasons often cited in support of this policy is the claim that prior to the reform, the system rewarded people for not working and thereby increased the number of people who decided to go on welfare and increased the length of time they decided to stay on welfare. That is, people decided to go on welfare because they found welfare to be "better" than work. The latter are assumptions about human nature and the impact of social variables on that nature. They assume rewards determine the choices that people make and that welfare is a reward. What kind of evidence might we collect to test whether welfare is a reward that controls behavior in the manner claimed by critics of welfare?
Assignments and class structure
Before you decide to take this class, you should know that the structure for this class is in flux. In a sense, therefore, you are taking a risk by enrolling in this class. I am not sure, as I write this, what the exact structure of the class will be this year. Part of the difficulty in designing the details is knowing how many people will actually be taking the class. Regardless, here are some of my initial ideas.
I would like to discuss with you a number of social issues (e.g., crime/violence/aggression, affirmative action, welfare, racism, education, health care, and so on). To do this reasonably, you will need to read many opinions and claims about the different policy issues so that I won't have to describe all sides to all of the issues in class. Obviously, we will go over some of them in class, but I won't have time to describe all of the issues on some many different topics. I would also like to lecture about some of the theories and facts that I believe might be relevant to the discussions about various social policy issues. These will be such topics as: reinforcement and punishment theory, social learning theory, equity theory, theories of aggression/emotion, social influence and social comparison, prejudice, delay of gratification, ingroup/outgroup effects, memory, IQ, and genetic influences on behavior. How much of this I can cover in the class is not clear. It will depend on how much time we devote to discussion and how much to lecture. Regardless, we will have a mid-term that covers the first half of the class on Thursday, February 4, 1999. This midterm will cover all of the reading assignments and lecture material up to that time. This exam will consist mostly of short answer and short essay questions designed to see how well you know the kinds of arguments in favor of and against the various social policy issues that we have discussed, how well you know whatever evidence has been presented up to that point, and how well you know some of the theoretical ideas that might relate to the different issues. Because we are interested in how you analyze the material, and not in how well you can memorize details, it will be an open-book exam. (After all, I can't recall every fact that I need to know from memory. I sometimes have to look things up. If I can get away with looking things up, so should you.)
The format for the second half of the class is somewhat up in the air and depends on the number of students who eventually enroll. We will either continue doing what is planned for the first half of the class, e.g., lecture and discussion, or we may try some form of public debate/presentation on various social policy issues. Were they to occur, these debates/presentations would be conducted in front of the rest of the class. The class would be free to ask questions of the discussants. I would not lecture, but I would ask questions and critically evaluate the positions if I think it is necessary. If we do this, we will form debating/discussion teams during the first half of the class by having people tell us their class and work schedules so we can assign people to groups according to their schedules of free time. Each list will then become a debate/presentation team. We will assign each team to become very familiar with the social issue and prepare themselves to debate/discuss that issue with the rest of class or with another debate team. The teams would then write a position paper that supports their side and refutes that of the other side. These position papers would be graded. If the class works hard enough on the debates, and the papers, I could make these position papers the final exam. Otherwise, we will have a regular final exam that will be held at the regularly scheduled final exam time. If there is a final exam, at this point in time, my intention is to make it a take-home exam that would be due on the date and time of scheduled final exam, although I will talk more about this later. I have also been thinking that we might simply use a procedure in which I assign readings for the week and that we discuss them in class by me randomly asking different students to answer questions about the reading material. This is a procedure that is sometimes used in law schools. It works well if everyone reads the material and genuinely interested. Currently, I am leaning toward this last approach since I have tried the others and they haven't worked as well as I had hoped they would. I will entertain whatever feedback you wish to send me regarding these different options for the second half of the class.
Some of the social policy topics that we will cover
in this class include:
1. Crime: How should it be measured, what causes it, how
should it be prevented?
a. Gun control: What is it? What are
it's effects?
b. Media violence and crime: Does
media violence increase or decrease the likelihood of crime?
c. Prison's and punishment: Do they
work?
d. Role of pornography in crime.
e. Role of drugs in crime.
2. Racism: What is racism, how should it be measured, how
should it be prevented?
a. Affirmative action: What is it?
How should we select people for schools, for jobs, for the military?
b. How should race be defined?
c. History and sociology of race.
3. Education: Does it need improving? How can it be improved?
a. Voucher systems.
b. Money, time, class size, teacher
training vs. the role that parents play.
c. What determines performance?
4. Welfare: What is it's purpose? What are it's
consequences?
a. Who is on welfare?
b. Is workfare working?
c. What about "deadbeat"
dads and child support.
5. Family values: what are they? How should they be
measured?
a. Are single parent families really
the problem?
b. Do children learn more from the
peers than from their parents?
c. What about divorce? Should we
return to traditional values and make divorce very difficult to obtain?
d. Is sexual liberation a good or a
bad thing?
One more thing, I would like you to be involved in this class.
That is, I want you to have an opportunity to discuss the issues in class.
These are fun issues. They involve some basic assumptions about human nature
and human social systems. You probably already have some ideas about these
topics and it should be fun to talk about them. Therefore, I am formally making
it clear that I encourage class discussion. You should feel free to raise your
hand and ask questions, challenge me, or make points that you believe are
important.
All of the reading assignments for this class will be contained in a reader that is being printed as you read this. We will hand out the reading assignments as soon as the reader is printed.
I also plan to provide what you might think of as study aids for some of the readings. This study aids will be available at this web site. You will be able to download them at your leisure. These will help you concentrate on what I believe are the key issues in various readings. I should mention that the reading in this class is a wild mix from many different sources. This makes the class more difficult because a text book author has not organized all of the material for you. This means that you will have to organize the material in the class. In fact, this is what I see as one of the more interesting parts of this class, namely, thinking about how to put together very different types of arguments and evidence for particular social policy issues. As consumers of information, we get our information from many different sources, e.g., the news media, other people's opinions and beliefs, scientific sources (academic ivory tower types), social policy gurus (people who work for institutes or organizations that have a particular social policy goal or ax to grind), politicians, friends and family. One of the major skills to learn in this class is how to analyze the claims that these different sources make. Hopefully, we will be able to do this together in some specific cases, but I cannot imagine having enough time to do it for all of the readings in the class.
Each of you should have an email account. We are living in the age of the Internet.
You can't fight it. If you do not have a computer at home, you can access your
email and this web site using any of a number of public and free access
computers supplied around the campus. I will speak more about this in class.