Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    "Brothers" in arms: an investigation into the effects of kinship, culture of honour, kinship metaphor, and threat on parochial altruism
    ABOU ABDALLAH, MARIA ( 2014)
    Present in many forms of violent inter-group conflict, parochial altruism is characterised by a high amount of ingroup benefit, self-sacrifice, and intended harm towards an outgroup. Extreme examples include action taken by soldiers and suicide bombers, but parochial altruism can also be enacted by non-militant individuals in more mundane intergroup conflicts. Evidence from kin altruism and kin recognition research suggests that acts of great self-sacrifice are more likely to occur for the benefit of one’s kin than for other types of ingroup members. To wit, anthropologists and psychologists have argued that parochial altruism is more likely to occur for kin than for others, and instances in which it occurs for the benefit of non-kin are those of fictive kinship. In light of this reasoning, a two-part cultural-evolutionary model for the elicitation of parochial altruism is proposed in order to explain these potential relationships between kinship, fictive kinship, and parochial altruism, and to provide a testable framework. The first part of the model, called the parochial altruism kinship script (PAKS) explains why parochial altruism may be more likely to occur for the benefit of kin than others. In doing so, it takes into consideration the role of threat to the ingroup for eliciting parochial altruism, cultural norms surrounding the PAKS, and potential differences between honour and nonhonour cultures in the application of the PAKS. The second part of the model explores how the PAKS may be applied to non-kin by the use of kinship metaphors, leading to an increase in parochial altruism on their behalf. In addition, birth order, which prior research suggests may affect the extent to which individuals are susceptible to kinship metaphors, is included in the investigation of the second part of the model. The model was tested across five studies using samples from Australia, Lebanon, and the United States.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Conceptions about humanness across cultures
    Park, Joonha ( 2011)
    What it means to be human is a fundamental question in psychology. Research on lay theories of the concept has recently emerged from two lines of work on dehumanization processes. Leyens et al. initiated a systematic approach to the concept by suggesting secondary human emotions as the human essence. Haslam’s theory proposes two independent senses of humanness: human nature and human uniqueness. However, neither approach has examined how concepts of humanness vary across cultures. The current thesis aimed to take a cultural psychological approach to extend their understandings. First, I questioned whether there is basic agreement or disagreement in understanding what it means to be human across cultures, in terms of the relationships between human nature and human uniqueness and in terms of how they related to dimensions of self-construal. Results showed that Australians, Japanese, and Koreans were not dramatically different in understanding the basic concept and that a relationism-reflecting aspect of self-construal was universally central to concepts of human nature. Second, I investigated whether people’s attributions of humanness in interpersonal relations are consistent or different across cultures. Results indicated that the basic tendency of self-humanizing exists in all three countries. Finally, I attempted to examine effects of empathy on interpersonal attributions of humanness in a controlled setting. Results implied that empathy tended to reduce self-humanizing effects in both Australia and Japan, but the degree was greater in Japan than in Australia. On the basis of these findings, I conclude that to some extent, cultures share basic views of what it means to be human as well as the ways of applying the concept in interpersonal perceptions, although some differences in specific aspects exist.