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Saturday, December 16, 2023

Social psychology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

History

19th century

In the 19th century, social psychology began to emerge from the larger field of psychology. At the time, many psychologists were concerned with developing concrete explanations for the different aspects of human nature. They attempted to discover concrete cause-and-effect relationships that explained social interactions. In order to do so, they applied the scientific method to human behavior. The first published study in the field was Norman Triplett's 1898 experiment on the phenomenon of social facilitation. These psychological experiments later went on to form the foundation of much of 20th century social psychological findings.

Early 20th century

An early, influential research program in social psychology was established by Kurt Lewin and his students. During World War II, social psychologists were mostly concerned with studies of persuasion and propaganda for the U.S. military (see also psychological warfare). Following the war, researchers became interested in a variety of social problems, including issues of gender and racial prejudice. During the years immediately following World War II, there were frequent collaborations between psychologists and sociologists. The two disciplines, however, have become increasingly specialized and isolated from each other in recent years, with sociologists generally focusing on high-level, large-scale examinations of society, and psychologists generally focusing on more small-scale studies of individual human behaviors.

Late 20th century

In the 1960s, there was growing interest in topics such as cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, and aggression. In the 1970s, a number of conceptual challenges to social psychology emerged over issues such as ethical concerns about laboratory experimentation, whether attitudes could accurately predict behavior, and to what extent science could be done in a cultural context. It was also in this period where situationism—the theory that human behavior changes based on situational factors—emerged and challenged the relevance of self and personality in psychology. By the 1980s and 1990s, social psychology had developed a number of solutions to these issues with regard to theory and methodology.

21st century

At present, ethical standards regulate research, and pluralistic and multicultural perspectives to the social sciences have emerged. Most modern researchers in the 21st century are interested in phenomena such as attribution, social cognition, and self-concept. Social psychologists are, in addition, concerned with applied psychology, contributing towards applications of social psychology in health, education, law, and the workplace.

Core theories and concepts

Attitudes

In social psychology, an attitude is a learned, global evaluation that influences thought and action. Attitudes are basic expressions of approval and disapproval or likes and dislikes. For example, enjoying chocolate ice cream or endorsing the values of a particular political party are examples of attitudes. Because people are influenced by multiple factors in any given situation, general attitudes are not always good predictors of specific behavior. For example, a person may generally value the environment but may not recycle a plastic bottle because of specific factors on a given day.

One of the most influential 20th century attitude theories was Cognitive dissonance theory. According to this theory, attitudes must be logically consistent with each other. Noticing incongruence among one’s attitudes leads to an uncomfortable state of tension, which may motivate a change in attitudes or behavior.

Research on attitudes has examined the distinction between traditional, self-reported attitudes and implicit, unconscious attitudes. Experiments using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), for instance, have found that people often demonstrate implicit bias against other races, even when their explicit responses profess impartiality. Likewise, one study found that in interracial interactions, explicit attitudes correlate with verbal behavior, while implicit attitudes correlate with nonverbal behavior.

Attitudes are also involved in several other areas of the discipline, such as conformity, interpersonal attraction, social perception, and prejudice.

Persuasion

Persuasion is an active method of influencing that attempts to guide people toward the adoption of an attitude, idea, or behavior by rational or emotive means. Persuasion relies on appeals rather than strong pressure or coercion. The process of persuasion has been found to be influenced by numerous variables that generally fall into one of five major categories:

Communication: includes credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness.
Message: includes varying degrees of reason, emotion (e.g., fear), one-sided or two-sided arguments, and other types of informational content.
Audience: includes a variety of demographics, personality traits, and preferences.
Medium: includes printed word, radio, television, the internet, or face-to-face interactions.
Context: includes environment, group dynamics, and preliminary information.

Dual-process theories of persuasion (such as the elaboration likelihood model) maintain that persuasion is mediated by two separate routes: central and peripheral. The central route of persuasion is influenced by facts and results in longer-lasting change, but requires motivation to process. The peripheral route is influenced by superficial factors (e.g. smiling, clothing) and results in shorter-lasting change, but does not require as much motivation to process.

Social cognition

Social cognition studies how people perceive, recognize, and remember information about others. Much research rests on the assertion that people think about other people differently than they do non-social, or non-human, targets. This assertion is supported by the social-cognitive deficits exhibited by people with Williams syndrome and autism.

Attribution

A major research topic in social cognition is attribution. Attributions are explanations of behavior, either one's own behavior or the behavior of others.

One element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to internal and external factors. An internal, or dispositional, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by inner traits such as personality, disposition, character, and ability. An external, or situational, attribution reasons that a behavior is caused by situational elements such as the weather.A second element of attribution ascribes the cause of behavior to stable and unstable factors (i.e., whether the behavior will be repeated or changed under similar circumstances). Individuals also attribute causes of behavior to controllable and uncontrollable factors (i.e., how much control one has over the situation at hand).

Numerous biases in the attribution process have been discovered. For instance, the fundamental attribution error is the bias towards make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior. The actor-observer bias is an extension of the theory, positing that tendency exists to make dispositional attributions for other people's behavior and situational attributions for one's own. The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute dispositional causes for successes, and situational causes for failure, particularly when self-esteem is threatened. This leads to assuming one's successes are from innate traits, and one's failures are due to situations.

Heuristics

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts which are used to make decisions in lieu of conscious reasoning. The availability heuristic occurs when people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easy that outcome is to imagine. As such, vivid or highly memorable possibilities will be perceived as more likely than those that are harder to picture or difficult to understand. The representativeness heuristic is a shortcut people use to categorize something based on how similar it is to a prototype they know of. Numerous other biases have been found by social cognition researchers. The hindsight bias is a false memory of having predicted events, or an exaggeration of actual predictions, after becoming aware of the outcome. The confirmation bias is a type of bias leading to the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Schemas

Schemas are generalized mental representations that organize knowledge and guide information processing. They organize social information and experiences. Schemas often operate automatically and unconsciously. This leads to biases in perception and memory. Schemas may induce expectations that lead us to see something that is not there. One experiment found that people are more likely to misperceive a weapon in the hands of a black man than a white man. This type of schema is a stereotype, a generalized set of beliefs about a particular group of people (when incorrect, an ultimate attribution error). Stereotypes are often related to negative or preferential attitudes and behavior. Schemas for behaviors (e.g., going to a restaurant, doing laundry) are known as scripts.

Self-concept

Self-concept is the whole sum of beliefs that people have about themselves. The self-concept is made up of cognitive aspects called self-schemas—beliefs that people have about themselves and that guide the processing of self-referential information. For example, an athlete at a university would have multiple selves that would process different information pertinent to each self: the student would be oneself, who would process information pertinent to a student (taking notes in class, completing a homework assignment, etc.); the athlete would be the self who processes information about things related to being an athlete. These selves are part of one's identity and the self-referential information is that which relies on the appropriate self to process and react to it.

There are many theories on the perception of our own behavior. Leon Festinger's 1954 social comparison theory posits that people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others when they are uncertain of their own ability or opinions. Daryl Bem's 1972 self-perception theory claims that when internal cues are difficult to interpret, people gain self-insight by observing their own behavior.

Social influence

Social influence is an overarching term that denotes the persuasive effects people have on each other. It is seen as a fundamental concept in social psychology. The study of it overlaps considerably with research on attitudes and persuasion. The three main areas of social influence include conformity, compliance, and obedience. Social influence is also closely related to the study of group dynamics, as most effects of influence are strongest when they take place in social groups.

The first major area of social influence is conformity. Conformity is defined as the tendency to act or think like other members of a group. The identity of members within a group (i.e., status), similarity, expertise, as well as cohesion, prior commitment, and accountability to the group help to determine the level of conformity of an individual. Individual variations among group members play a key role in the dynamic of how willing people will be to conform. Conformity is usually viewed as a negative tendency in American culture, but a certain amount of conformity is adaptive in some situations, as is nonconformity in other situations.

The second major area of social influence research is compliance, which refers to any change in behavior that is due to a request or suggestion from another person. The foot-in-the-door technique is a compliance method in which the persuader requests a small favor and then follows up with a larger favor (e.g., asking for the time and then asking for ten dollars). A related trick is the bait and switch, which is a disingenuous sales strategy that involves enticing potential customers with advertisements of low-priced items which turn out to be unavailable in order to sell a more expensive item.

The third major form of social influence is obedience; this is a change in behavior that is the result of a direct order or command from another person. Obedience as a form of compliance was dramatically highlighted by the Milgram study, wherein people were ready to administer shocks to a person in distress on a researcher's command.

An unusual kind of social influence is the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a prediction that, by being made, causes itself to become true. For example, in the financial field, if it is widely believed that a crash is imminent, investors may lose confidence, sell most of their stock, and thus cause a crash. Similarly, people may expect hostility in others and induce this hostility by their own behavior.

Psychologists have spent decades studying the power of social influence, and the way in which it manipulates people's opinions and behavior. Specifically, social influence refers to the way in which individuals change their ideas and actions to meet the demands of a social group, received authority, social role, or a minority within a group wielding influence over the majority.

Group dynamics

Social psychologists study group-related phenomena such as the behavior of crowds. A group can be defined as two or more individuals who are connected to each other by social relationships. Groups tend to interact, influence each other, and share a common identity. They have a number of emergent qualities that distinguish them from coincidental, temporary gatherings, which are termed social aggregates:

Norms: Implicit rules and expectations for group members to follow.
Roles: Implicit rules and expectations for specific members within the group.
Relations: Patterns of liking within the group, and also differences in prestige or status.

The shared social identity of individuals within a group influences intergroup behavior, which denotes the way in which groups behave towards and perceive each other. These perceptions and behaviors in turn define the social identity of individuals within the interacting groups.

The tendency to define oneself by membership in a group may lead to intergroup discrimination, which involves favorable perceptions and behaviors directed towards the in-group, but negative perceptions and behaviors directed towards the out-group.

Groups often moderate and improve decision making, and are frequently relied upon for these benefits, such as in committees and juries. Groups also affect performance and productivity. Social facilitation, for example, is a tendency to work harder and faster in the presence of others.

Another important concept in this area is deindividuation, a reduced state of self-awareness that can be caused by feelings of anonymity. Deindividuation is associated with uninhibited and sometimes dangerous behavior. It is common in crowds and mobs, but it can also be caused by a disguise, a uniform, alcohol, dark environments, or online anonymity.

Interpersonal attraction

A major area of study of people's relations to each other is interpersonal attraction, which refers to all factors that lead people to like each other, establish relationships, and (in some cases) fall in love. Several general principles of attraction have been discovered by social psychologists. One of the most important factors in interpersonal attraction is how similar two particular people are. The more similar two people are in general attitudes, backgrounds, environments, worldviews, and other traits, the more likely they will be attracted to each other.

Physical attractiveness is an important element of romantic relationships, particularly in the early stages characterized by high levels of passion. Later on, similarity and other compatibility factors become more important, and the type of love people experience shifts from passionate to companionate. In 1986, Robert Sternberg suggested that there are actually three components of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment. When two (or more) people experience all three, they are said to be in a state of consummate love.

According to social exchange theory, relationships are based on rational choice and cost-benefit analysis. A person may leave a relationship if their partner's "costs" begin to outweigh their benefits, especially if there are good alternatives available. This theory is similar to the minimax principle proposed by mathematicians and economists. With time, long-term relationships tend to become communal rather than simply based on exchange.

Research

Methods

Social psychology is an empirical science that attempts to answer questions about human behavior by testing hypotheses. Careful attention to research design, sampling, and statistical analysis is important in social psychology.

Whenever possible, social psychologists rely on controlled experimentation, which requires the manipulation of one or more independent variables in order to examine the effect on a dependent variable. Experiments are useful in social psychology because they are high in internal validity, meaning that they are free from the influence of confounding or extraneous variables, and so are more likely to accurately indicate a causal relationship. However, the small samples used in controlled experiments are typically low in external validity, or the degree to which the results can be generalized to the larger population. There is usually a trade-off between experimental control (internal validity) and being able to generalize to the population (external validity).

Because it is usually impossible to test everyone, research tends to be conducted on a sample of persons from the wider population. Social psychologists frequently use survey research when they are interested in results that are high in external validity. Surveys use various forms of random sampling to obtain a sample of respondents that is representative of a population. This type of research is usually descriptive or correlational because there is no experimental control over variables. Some psychologists have raised concerns for social psychological research relying too heavily on studies conducted on university undergraduates in academic settings, or participants from crowdsourcing labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. In a 1986 study by David O. Sears, over 70% of experiments used North American undergraduates as subjects, a subset of the population that is unrepresentative of the population as a whole.

Regardless of which method has been chosen, social psychologists statistically review the significance of their results before accepting them in evaluating an underlying hypothesis. Statistics and probability testing define what constitutes a significant finding, which can be as low as 5% or less, and is unlikely due to chance. Replication testing is also important in ensuring that the results are valid and not due to chance. False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are a hazard in the field.

Famous experiments

Asch conformity experiments

The Asch conformity experiments used a line-length estimation task to demonstrate the power of people's impulses to conform with other members in a small group. The task was designed to be easy to assess but wrong answers were deliberately given by at least some, oftentimes most, of the other participants. In well over a third of the trials, participants conformed to the majority, even though the majority judgment was clearly wrong. Seventy-five percent of the participants conformed at least once during the experiment. Additional manipulations of the experiment showed that participant conformity decreased when at least one other individual failed to conform but increased when the individual began conforming or withdrew from the experiment. Also, participant conformity increased substantially as the number of "incorrect" individuals increased from one to three, and remained high as the incorrect majority grew. Participants with three other, incorrect participants made mistakes 31.8% of the time, while those with one or two incorrect participants made mistakes only 3.6% and 13.6% of the time, respectively.

Festinger cognitive dissonance experiments

In Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance experiment, participants were divided into two groups and were asked to perform a boring task. Both groups were later asked to dishonestly give their opinion of the task, but were rewarded according to two different pay scales. At the end of the study, some participants were paid $1 to say that they enjoyed the task, while the group of participants were paid $20 to tell the same lie. The first group ($1) later reported liking the task better than the second group ($20). Festinger's explanation was that for people in the first group, being paid only $1 was not sufficient incentive. This led them to experience dissonance, or discomfort and internal conflict. They could only overcome that dissonance by justifying their lies. They did this by changing their previously unfavorable attitudes about the task. Being paid $20 provided a reason for doing the boring task, which resulted in no dissonance.

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment was designed to study how far people would go in obeying an authority figure. The experiment showed that normal American citizens would follow orders even when they believed they were causing an innocent person to suffer or even apparently die.

Stanford prison experiment

Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison study, a simulated exercise involving students playing at being prison guards and inmates, attempted to show how far people would go in role playing. In just a few days, the guards became brutal and cruel, and the prisoners became miserable and compliant. This was initially argued to be an important demonstration of the power of the immediate social situation and its capacity to overwhelm normal personality traits. Subsequent research has contested the initial conclusions of the study. For example, it has been pointed out that participant self-selection may have affected the participants' behavior, and that the participants' personalities influenced their reactions in a variety of ways, including how long they chose to remain in the study. The 2002 BBC prison study, designed to replicate the conditions in the Stanford study, produced conclusions that were drastically different from the initial findings.

Bandura's Bobo doll

Albert Bandura's Bobo doll experiment attempted to demonstrate how aggression is learned by imitation. In the experiment, 72 children, grouped based on similar levels of pre-tested aggressivity, either witnessed an aggressive or a non-aggressive actor interact with a "bobo doll." The children were then placed alone in the room with the doll and observed to see if they would imitate the same behavior of the actor they had observed. As hypothesized, the children who had witnessed the aggressive actor, imitated the behavior and proceeded to act aggressively towards the doll. Both male and female children who witnessed the non-aggressive actor behaved less aggressively towards the doll. However, boys were more likely to exhibit aggression, especially after observing the behavior from an actor of the same gender. In addition, boys were found to imitate more physical aggression, while girls displayed more verbal aggression.

Ethics

The goal of social psychology is to understand cognition and behavior as they naturally occur in a social context, but the very act of observing people can influence and alter their behavior. For this reason, many social psychology experiments utilize deception to conceal or distort certain aspects of the study. Deception may include false cover stories, false participants (known as confederates or stooges), false feedback given to the participants, and other techniques that help remove potential obstacles to participation.

The practice of deception has been challenged by psychologists who maintain that deception under any circumstances is unethical and that other research strategies (e.g., role-playing) should be used instead. Research has shown that role-playing studies do not produce the same results as deception studies, and this has cast doubt on their validity. In addition to deception, experimenters have at times put people in potentially uncomfortable or embarrassing situations (e.g., the Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiment), and this has also been criticized for ethical reasons.

Virtually all social psychology research in the modern day must pass an ethical review. At most colleges and universities, this is conducted by an ethics committee or institutional review board, which examines the proposed research to make sure that no harm is likely to come to the participants, and that the study's benefits outweigh any possible risks or discomforts to people participating.

Furthermore, a process of informed consent is often used to make sure that volunteers know what will be asked of them in the experiment and understand that they are allowed to quit the experiment at any time. A debriefing is typically done at the experiment's conclusion in order to reveal any deceptions used and generally make sure that the participants are unharmed by the procedures. Today, most research in social psychology involves minimal risk, or no greater risk of harm than can be expected from normal daily activities or routine psychological testing.

Replication crisis

Many social psychological research findings have proven difficult to replicate, leading some to argue that social psychology is undergoing a replication crisis. A 2014 special edition of Social Psychology focused on replication studies, finding that a number of previously held social psychological beliefs were difficult to replicate. Likewise, a 2012 special edition of Perspectives on Psychological Science focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion which have contributed to the replication crisis.

Some factors have been identified in social psychological research as contributing to the crisis. For one, questionable research practices have been identified as common. Such practices, while not necessarily intentionally fraudulent, often involve converting undesired statistical outcomes into desired outcomes via the manipulation of statistical analyses, sample sizes, or data management systems, typically to convert non-significant findings into significant ones. Some studies have suggested that at least mild versions of these practices are prevalent.

Some social psychologists have also published fraudulent research that has entered into mainstream academia, most notably the admitted data fabrication by Diederik Stapel as well as allegations against others. Fraudulent research is not the main contributor to the replication crisis. Many researchers attribute the failure to replicate as a result of the difficulty of being able to recreate the exact same conditions of a study conducted many years ago, as the environment and people have changed.

Even before the current replication crisis, several effects in social psychology have also been found to be difficult to replicate. For example, the scientific journal Judgment and Decision Making has published several studies over the years that fail to provide support for the unconscious thought theory.

Replication failures are not unique to social psychology and are found in many fields of science. One of the consequences of the current crisis is that some areas of social psychology once considered solid, such as social priming, have come under increased scrutiny due to failure to replicate findings.

Redlining

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which services (financial and otherwise) are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as "hazardous" to investment; these neighborhoods have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, and low-income residents. While the best-known examples involve denial of credit and insurance, also sometimes attributed to redlining in many instances are denial of healthcare and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods. In the case of retail businesses like supermarkets, the purposeful construction of stores impractically far away from targeted residents results in a redlining effect.

Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer targets majority-minority neighborhood residents with inflated interest rates by taking advantage of the lack of lending competition relative to non-redlined neighborhoods. The effect also emerges when service providers artificially restrict the supply of real estate available for loanable funds to nonwhites, thus providing alternative pretext for higher rates. Neighborhoods which were targeted for blockbusting were also subject to reverse redlining.

In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight originally coined the term to describe the discriminatory banking practice of classifying certain neighborhoods as "hazardous," or not worthy of investment due to the racial makeup of their residents. During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were Black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in the 1980s a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman demonstrated how Atlanta banks would often lend in lower-income white neighborhoods but not in middle-income or even upper-income Black neighborhoods. Blacklisting was a related mechanism employed by redlining institutions to keep track of areas, groups, and people that the discriminating party intended to exclude. In academic literature, redlining falls under the broader category of credit rationing. The documented history of redlining in the United States is a manifestation of the historical systemic racism that has had wide-ranging impacts on American society, two examples being educational and housing inequality across racial groups. Redlining is also an example of spatial inequality and economic inequality.

History

The specific process termed "redlining" in the United States occurred on the background of racial segregation and discrimination against minority populations. It had its origins in sales practices of the National Association of Real Estate Boards and theories about race and property values codified by economists surrounding Richard T. Ely and his Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities, founded at the University of Wisconsin in 1920. With the National Housing Act of 1934 the federal government began to be involved in the practice and the concurrent establishment of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA's formalized redlining process was developed by their Chief Land Economist, Homer Hoyt, as part of an initiative to develop the first underwriting criteria for mortgages. The implementation of this federal policy accelerated the decay and isolation of minority inner-city neighborhoods through withholding of mortgage capital, making it even more difficult for neighborhoods to attract and retain families able to purchase homes. The discriminatory assumptions in redlining exacerbated residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States.

In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and create "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real-estate investments in each surveyed city. On the maps, the newest areas—those considered desirable for lending purposes—were outlined in green and known as "Type A". These were typically affluent suburbs on the outskirts of cities. "Type B" neighborhoods, outlined in blue, were considered "Still Desirable", whereas older "Type C" were labeled "Declining" and outlined in yellow. "Type D" neighborhoods were outlined in red and were considered the most risky for mortgage support. While about 85% of the residents of such neighborhoods were white, they included most of the African-American urban households. These neighborhoods tended to be the older districts in the center of cities; often they were also African-American neighborhoods. Urban planning historians theorize that the maps were used by private and public entities for years afterward to deny loans to people in black communities.

Redlining maps even became prominent under private organizations, such as appraiser J. M. Brewer's 1934 map of Philadelphia. Private organizations created maps designed to meet the requirements of the Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manual. The lenders had to consider FHA standards if they wanted to receive FHA insurance for their loans. FHA appraisal manuals instructed banks to steer clear of areas with "inharmonious racial groups", and recommended that municipalities enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances. Between 1945 and 1959, African Americans received less than 2 percent of all federally insured home loans.

Banks and mortgage lenders were not the only private entities to develop redlining practices. Property insurance companies also instituted rigid redlining policies in the post-World War II period. According to urban historian Bench Ansfield, the postwar advent of comprehensive homeowners' insurance was limited to the suburbs and withheld from neighborhoods of color in U.S. cities. One Aetna bulletin from 1964 advised underwriters to "use a red line around questionable areas on territorial maps." The New York Urban Coalition warned in 1978, "A neighborhood without insurance is a neighborhood doomed to death."

Following a National Housing Conference in 1973, a group of Chicago community organizations led by The Northwest Community Organization (NCO) formed National People's Action (NPA), to broaden the fight against disinvestment and mortgage redlining in neighborhoods all over the country. This organization, led by Chicago housewife Gale Cincotta and Shel Trapp, a professional community organizer, targeted The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the governing authority over federally chartered Savings and loan associations (S&L) that held at that time the bulk of the country's home mortgages. NPA embarked on an effort to build a national coalition of urban community organizations to pass a national disclosure regulation or law to require banks to reveal their lending patterns.

For many years, urban community organizations had battled neighborhood decay by attacking blockbusting (deceptive encouragement of white flight from neighborhoods in order to buy up real estate at a huge discount and then rent to low-income, usually black tenants), forcing landlords to maintain properties, and requiring cities to board up and tear down abandoned properties. These actions addressed the short-term issues of neighborhood decline. Neighborhood leaders began to learn that these issues and conditions were symptoms of disinvestment that was the true, though hidden, underlying cause of these problems. They changed their strategy as more data was gathered.

With the help of NPA, a coalition of loosely affiliated community organizations began to form. At the Third Annual Housing Conference held in Chicago in 1974, eight hundred delegates representing 25 states and 35 cities attended. The strategy focused on the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), which oversaw S&Ls in cities all over the country.

In 1974, Chicago's Metropolitan Area Housing Association (MAHA), made up of representatives of local organizations, succeeded in having the Illinois State Legislature pass laws mandating disclosure and outlawing redlining. In Massachusetts, organizers allied with NPA confronted a unique situation. Over 90% of home mortgages were held by state-chartered savings banks. A Jamaica Plain neighborhood organization pushed the disinvestment issue into the statewide gubernatorial race. The Jamaica Plain Banking & Mortgage Committee and its citywide affiliate, The Boston Anti-redlining Coalition (BARC), won a commitment from Democratic candidate Michael S. Dukakis to order statewide disclosure through the Massachusetts State Banking Commission. After Dukakis was elected, his new Banking Commissioner ordered banks to disclose mortgage-lending patterns by ZIP code. The suspected redlining was revealed. Richard W. "Rick" Wise, a former community organizer who led the Boston organizing, has published a novel, Redlined, which gives a somewhat fictionalized account of the anti-redlining campaign.

NPA and its affiliates achieved disclosure of lending practices with the passage of The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. The required transparency and review of loan practices began to change lending practices. NPA began to work on reinvestment in areas that had been neglected. Their support helped gain passage in 1977 of the Community Reinvestment Act.

Redlining was prevalent in Canada from the 1930s to 1950s in Ontario, with intergenerational consequences that persist to the present day.

Efforts to end

Legislation

In the United States, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to fight the practice of redlining. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, "The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to discriminate in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale of a dwelling because of race or national origin. The Act also makes it unlawful for any person or other entity whose business includes residential real estate-related transactions to discriminate against any person in making available such a transaction, or in the terms or conditions of such a transaction, because of race or national origin." The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity was tasked with administering and enforcing this law.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) is a United States law (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1691 et seq.), enacted 28 October 1974, that makes it unlawful for any creditor to discriminate against any applicant, with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction, on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age (provided the applicant has the capacity to contract); to the fact that all or part of the applicant's income derives from a public assistance program; or to the fact that the applicant has in good faith exercised any right under the Consumer Credit Protection Act. The law applies to any person who, in the ordinary course of business, regularly participates in a credit decision, including banks, retailers, bankcard companies, finance companies, and credit unions.

The part of the law that defines its authority and scope is known as Regulation B, from the (b) that appears in Title 12 part 1002's official identifier: 12 C.F.R. § 1002.1(b) (2017). Failure to comply with Regulation B can subject a financial institution to civil liability for actual and punitive damages in individual or class actions. Liability for punitive damages can be as much as $10,000 in individual actions and the lesser of $500,000 or 1% of the creditor's net worth in class actions.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress in 1977 required banks to apply the same lending criteria in all communities.

Regulatory lawsuits

In May 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that Associated Bank had agreed to a $200 million settlement over redlining in Chicago and Milwaukee. The three-year HUD observation led to the complaint that the bank purposely rejected mortgage applications from black and Latino applicants. The final settlement required AB to open branches in non-white neighborhoods.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a settlement with Evans Bank for $825,000 on September 10, 2015. An investigation had uncovered the erasure of black neighborhoods from mortgage lending maps. According to Schneiderman, of the over 1,100 mortgage applications the bank received between 2009 and 2012, only four were from African Americans. Following this investigation, The Buffalo News reported that more banks could be investigated for the same reasons in the near future. The most notable examples of such DOJ and HUD settlements have focused heavily on community banks in large metropolitan areas, but banks in other regions have been the subject of such orders as well, including First United Security Bank in Thomasville, Alabama, and Community State Bank in Saginaw, Michigan.

The United States Department of Justice announced a $33 million settlement with Hudson City Savings Bank, which services New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, on September 24, 2015. The six-year DOJ investigation had proven that the company was intentionally avoiding granting mortgages to Latinos and African Americans and purposely avoided expanding into minority-majority communities. The Justice Department called it the "largest residential mortgage redlining settlement in its history." As a part of the settlement agreement, HCSB was forced to open branches in non-white communities. As U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman explained to Emily Badger for The Washington Post, "[i]f you lived in a majority-black or Hispanic neighborhood and you wanted to apply for a mortgage, Hudson City Savings Bank was not the place to go." The enforcement agencies cited additional evidence of discrimination in Hudson City's broker selection practices, noting that the bank received 80 percent of its mortgage applications from mortgage brokers but that the brokers with whom the bank worked were not located in majority African-American and Hispanic areas.

On January 12, 2023, City National Bank of California agreed to pay $31,000,000 to resolve allegations of redlining from 2017 to at least 2020, brought by the United States Department of Justice.

Community organizations

ShoreBank, a community-development bank in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, was a part of the private sector fight against redlining. Founded in 1973, ShoreBank sought to combat racist lending practices in Chicago's African-American communities by providing financial services, especially mortgage loans, to local residents. In a 1992 speech, then-Presidential candidate Bill Clinton called ShoreBank "the most important bank in America". On August 20, 2010, the bank was declared insolvent, closed by regulators and most of its assets were acquired by Urban Partnership Bank.

In the mid-1970s, community organizations, under the banner of the NPA, worked to fight against redlining in South Austin, Illinois. One of these organizations was SACCC (South Austin Coalition Community Council), formed to restore South Austin's neighborhood and to fight against financial institutions accused of propagating redlining. This got the attention of insurance regulators in the Illinois Department of Insurance, as well as federal officers enforcing anti-racial discrimination laws.

Current issues

Racial segregation in American cities

The United States Federal Government has enacted legislation since the 1970s to reduce the segregation of American cities. While many cities have reduced the amount of segregated neighborhoods, some still have clearly defined racial boundaries. Since 1990, the City of Chicago has been one of the most persistently racially segregated cities, despite efforts to improve mobility and reduce barriers. Other cities like Detroit, Houston, and Atlanta likewise have very pronounced black and white neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods that were originally redlined by financial institutions decades ago. While other cities have made progress, this continued racial segregation has contributed to reduced economic mobility for millions of people.

Formerly redlined neighborhoods in places like Los Angeles have been shown to be more likely to have a gang injunction issued against them, as the work of geographer Stefano Bloch and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips shows.

Race wealth gap

The practice of redlining actively helped to create what is now known as the Racial Wealth Gap seen in the United States.

Black families in America earned just $57.30 for every $100 in income earned by white families, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. For every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold just $5.04. In 2016, the median wealth for black and Hispanic families was $17,600 and $20,700, respectively, compared with white families' median wealth of $171,000. The black-white wealth gap has not recovered from the Great Recession. In 2007, immediately before the Great Recession, the median wealth of blacks was nearly 14 percent that of whites. Although black wealth increased at a faster rate than white wealth in 2016, blacks still owned less than 10 percent of whites' wealth at the median.

A multigenerational study of people from five race groups analyzed upward mobility trends in American cities. The study concluded that black men who grew up in racially segregated neighborhoods were substantially less likely to gain upward economic mobility, finding "black children born to parents in the bottom household income quintile have a 2.5% chance of rising to the top quintile of household income, compared with 10.6% for whites." Because of this intergenerational poverty, black households are "stuck in place" and are less able to grow wealth.

A 2017 study by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists found that redlining—the practice whereby banks discriminated against the inhabitants of certain neighborhoods—had a persistent adverse impact on the neighborhoods, with redlining affecting homeownership rates, home values and credit scores in 2010. Since many African-Americans could not access conventional home loans, they had to turn to predatory lenders (who charged high interest rates). Due to lower home ownership rates, slumlords were able to rent out apartments that would otherwise be owned.

Retail

Brick and mortar

Retail redlining is a spatially discriminatory practice among retailers. Taxicab services and delivery food may not serve certain areas, based on their ethnic-minority composition and assumptions about business (and perceived crime), rather than data and economic criteria, such as the potential profitability of operating in those areas. Consequently, consumers in these areas are vulnerable to prices set by fewer retailers. They may be exploited by retailers who charge higher prices and/or offer them inferior goods.

Online

A 2012 study by The Wall Street Journal found that Staples, The Home Depot, Rosetta Stone and some other online retailers displayed different prices to customers in different locations (distinct from shipping prices). Staples based discounts on proximity to competitors like OfficeMax and Office Depot. This generally resulted in higher prices for customers in more rural areas, who were on average less wealthy than customers seeing lower prices.

Liquorlining

Some service providers target low-income neighborhoods for nuisance sales. When those services are believed to have adverse effects on a community, they may considered to be a form of "reverse redlining". The term "liquorlining" is sometimes used to describe high densities of liquor stores in low income and/or minority communities relative to surrounding areas. High densities of liquor stores are associated with crime and public health issues, which may in turn drive away supermarkets, grocery stores, and other retail outlets, contributing to low levels of economic development. Controlled for income, nonwhites face higher concentrations of liquor stores than do whites. One study done on "liquorlining" found that, in urban neighborhoods, there is weak correlation between demand for alcohol and supply of liquor stores.

Financial services

Student loans

In December 2007, a class action lawsuit was brought against student loan lending giant Sallie Mae in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. The class alleged that Sallie Mae discriminated against African American and Hispanic private student loan applicants.

The case alleged that the factors Sallie Mae used to underwrite private student loans caused a disparate impact on students attending schools with higher minority populations. The suit also alleged that Sallie Mae failed to properly disclose loan terms to private student loan borrowers.

The lawsuit was settled in 2011. The terms of the settlement included Sallie Mae agreeing to make a $500,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund and the attorneys for the plaintiffs receiving $1.8 million in attorneys' fees.

Credit cards

Credit card redlining is a spatially discriminatory practice among credit card issuers, of providing different amounts of credit to different areas, based on their ethnic-minority composition, rather than on economic criteria, such as the potential profitability of operating in those areas. Scholars assess certain policies, such as credit card issuers reducing credit lines of individuals with a record of purchases at retailers frequented by so-called "high-risk" customers, to be akin to redlining.

Banks

Much of the economic impacts we find as a result of redlining and the banking system directly impact the African American community. Beginning in the 1960s, there was a large influx of black veterans and their families moving into suburban white communities. As blacks moved in, whites moved out and the market value of these homes dropped dramatically. In observation of said market values, bank lenders were able to keep close track by literally drawing red lines around the neighborhoods on a map. These lines signified areas that they would not invest in. By way of racial redlining, not only banks but savings and loans companies, insurance companies, grocery chains, and even pizza delivery companies thwarted economic vitality in black communities. The severe lacking in civil rights laws in combination with the economic impact led to the passing of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977.

Racial and economic redlining set the people who live in these communities up for failure from the start, so much so that banks would often deny people who came from these areas bank loans or offered them at stricter repayment rates. As a result, there was a very low rate at which people (in particular African Americans) were able to own their homes; opening the door for slum landlords (who could get approved for low interest loans in those communities) to take over and do as they saw fit.

Insurance

Gregory D. Squires wrote in 2003 that data showed that race continues to affect the policies and practices of the insurance industry. Racial profiling or redlining has a long history in the property-insurance industry in the United States. From a review of industry underwriting and marketing materials, court documents, and research by government agencies, industry and community groups, and academics, it is clear that race has long affected and continues to affect the policies and practices of the insurance industry. Home-insurance agents may try to assess the ethnicity of a potential customer just by telephone, affecting what services they offer to inquiries about purchasing a home insurance policy. This type of discrimination is called linguistic profiling. There have also been concerns raised about redlining in the automotive insurance industry. Reviews of insurance scores based on credit are shown to have unequal results by ethnic group. The Ohio Department of Insurance in the early 21st century allows insurance providers to use maps and collection of demographic data by ZIP code in determining insurance rates. The FHEO Director of Investigations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Sara Pratt, wrote:

Like other forms of discrimination, the history of insurance redlining began in conscious, overt racial discrimination practiced openly and with significant community support in communities throughout the country. There was documented overt discrimination in practices relating to residential housing—from the appraisal manuals which established an articulated "policy" of preferences based on race, religion and national origin. to lending practices which only made loans available in certain parts of town or to certain borrowers, to the decision-making process in loans and insurance which allowed the insertion of discriminatory assessments into final decisions about either.

Mortgages

In reverse redlining, lenders and insurers target minority consumers by charging them more than a similarly situated white consumer would be charged, specifically marketing the most expensive and onerous loan products. In the 2000s, some financial institutions considered black communities as suitable for subprime mortgages. Wells Fargo partnered with churches in black communities, where pastors would deliver "wealth building" sermons encouraging new mortgage applications. The bank would then make a donation to the church in return for every new application. Many working-class blacks wanted to be included in the nation's home-owning trend. Instead of empowering them to contribute to homeownership and community progress, predatory lending practices through reverse redlining stripped the equity homeowners sought and drained the wealth of those communities for the enrichment of financial firms. The growth of subprime lending, higher cost loans to borrowers with flaws on their credit records, prior to the 2008 financial crisis, coupled with growing law enforcement activity in those areas, clearly showed a surge in manipulative practices. Not all subprime loans were predatory, but virtually all predatory loans were subprime. Predatory loans are dangerous because they charge unreasonably higher rates and fees compared to the risk, trapping homeowners in unaffordable debt and often costing them their homes and life savings.

A survey of two districts of similar incomes, one being largely white and the other largely black, found that bank branches in the black community offered exclusively subprime loans. Studies found out that high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase mortgages compared to low-income whites. Fueled by deep racism, some loan officers referred to blacks as "mud people" and to subprime lending as "ghetto loans". Lower savings rate and distrust of banks, stemming from this legacy of redlining, may explain why there are fewer financial institutions in minority neighborhoods. In the early 21st century, brokers and telemarketers actively encouraged subprime mortgages to be offered to minority residents. A majority of the loans were refinance transactions, allowing homeowners to take cash out of their appreciating property or pay off credit card and other debt.

Redlining has helped preserve residential segregation between blacks and whites in the United States. Lending institutions such as Wells Fargo have shown that they treat black mortgage applicants differently when they are buying homes in white neighborhoods than when buying homes in black neighborhoods by offering them subprime and predatory loans when black residents try and integrate neighborhoods.

The inequality in loaning extends past residential to commercial loans as well; Dan Immergluck writes that in 2002, small businesses in black neighborhoods received fewer loans, even after accounting for business density, business size, industrial mix, neighborhood income, and the credit quality of local businesses.

Several State Attorneys General have begun investigating these de facto practices, which may violate fair lending laws. The NAACP filed a class-action lawsuit charging systematic racial discrimination by more than a dozen banks.

Environmental racism

Policies related to redlining and urban decay can also act as a form of environmental racism, which in turn affect public health. Urban minority communities may face environmental racism in the form of parks that are smaller, less accessible and of poorer quality than those in more affluent or white areas in some cities, which may have an indirect effect on health, since young people have fewer places to play, and adults have fewer opportunities for exercise. A 2022 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters found redlined areas in 202 US cities had higher levels of air pollution (nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter) in 2010, so 80 years later.

In 1990, Robert Wallace wrote that the pattern of the AIDS outbreak during the 1980s was affected by the outcomes of a program of "planned shrinkage" directed at African-American and Hispanic communities. It was implemented through systematic denial of municipal services, particularly fire protection resources, essential to maintain urban levels of population density and ensure community stability. Institutionalized racism affects general health care as well as the quality of AIDS health intervention and services in minority communities. The over-representation of minorities in various disease categories, including AIDS, is partially related to environmental racism. The national response to the AIDS epidemic in minority communities was slow during the 1980s and 1990s, showing an insensitivity to ethnic diversity in prevention efforts and AIDS health services.

African-Americans are 75 percent more likely than others to live near facilities that produce hazardous waste and pollutants. Philadelphia, which has a 44 percent Black population, received a warning from the American Lung Association in 2019: "If you live in Philadelphia County, the air you breathe may put your health at risk." It was found that a refinery in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia was responsible for most of the toxic air emission in the city. The refinery had not been in compliance with the Clean Air Act for 9 out of the 12 quarters through 2019.

Environmental justice scholars such as Laura Pulido, Department Head of Ethnic Studies and Professor at the University of Oregon, and David Pellow, Dehlsen and Department Chair of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argue that recognizing environmental racism as an element stemming from the entrenched legacies of racial capitalism is crucial to the movement, with white supremacy continuing to shape human relationships with nature and labor.

Workforce

Workers living in American inner cities have more difficulty finding jobs than suburban workers do.

Digital redlining

Digital redlining is a term used to refer to the practice of creating and perpetuating inequities between racial, cultural, and class groups specifically through the use of digital technologies, digital content, and the internet.Digital redlining is an extension of the historical housing discrimination practice of redlining to include an ability to discriminate against vulnerable classes of society using algorithms, connected digital technologies, and big data. This extension of the term tends to include both geographically based and non-geographically based discrimination. For example, in March 2019 the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged Facebook with housing discrimination over the company's targeted advertising practices. While these charges included geographically based targeting in the form of a tool that allowed advertisers to draw a red line on a map; they also included non-geographically based methods that did not use maps but rather utilized algorithmic targeting using Facebook's user profile information to directly exclude specific groups of people. A press release from HUD on March 28, 2019, stated that HUD was charging that "Facebook enabled advertisers to exclude people whom Facebook classified as parents; non-American-born; non-Christian; interested in accessibility; interested in Hispanic culture; or a wide variety of other interests that closely align with the Fair Housing Act's protected classes."

Political redlining

Political redlining is the process of restricting the supply of political information with assumptions about demographics and present or past opinions. It occurs when political campaign managers delimit which population is less likely to vote and design information campaigns only with likely voters in mind. It can also occur when politicians, lobbyists, or political campaign managers identify which communities to actively discourage from voting through voter suppression campaigns.

Redlining and Health Inequality

Health inequality in the United States persists today as a direct result of the effects of redlining. This is because health in America is synonymous with wealth, both of which minority groups have been denied as a result of discriminatory practices. Wealth affords the privilege of living in a neighborhood or community with clean air, pure water, outdoor spaces and places for recreation and exercise, safe streets during the day and night, infrastructure that supports the growth of intergenerational wealth through access to good schools, healthy food, public transportation, and opportunities to connect, belong, and contribute to the surrounding community. Wealth also provides stability of home as those with capital are not confined to the deteriorating housing stock that minority groups who were redlined were forced to try and rehabilitate without access to loans. For example, a concept called supermarket redlining has been proposed as a cause of lower access to supermarkets that is characteristic of some scholarly definitions of food deserts. The concept describes how large chain supermarkets tend to relocate out of or refrain from opening stores in inner-city areas or impoverished neighborhoods due to perceived urban and economic obstacles, decreasing certain communities' access to supermarkets.

Redlining intentionally excluded black Americans from accumulating intergenerational wealth. The effects of this exclusion on black Americans' health continues to play out daily, generations later, in the same communities. This is evident currently in the disproportionate effects that COVID-19 has had on the same communities which the HOLC redlined in the 1930s. Research published in September 2020 overlaid maps of the highly affected COVID-19 areas with the HOLC maps, showing that those areas marked "risky" to lenders because they contained minority residents were the same neighborhoods most affected by COVID-19. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) looks at inequities in the social determinants of health like concentrated poverty and healthcare access that are interrelated and influence health outcomes with regard to COVID-19 as well as quality-of-life in general for minority groups. The CDC points to discrimination within health care, education, criminal justice, housing, and finance, direct results of systematically subversive tactics like redlining which led to chronic and toxic stress that shaped social and economic factors for minority groups, increasing their risk for COVID-19. Healthcare access is similarly limited by factors like a lack of public transportation, child care, and communication and language barriers which result from the spatial and economic isolation of minority communities from redlining. Educational, income, and wealth gaps that result from this isolation mean that minority groups' limited access to the job market may force them to remain in fields that have higher risk of exposure to the virus, without options to take time off. Finally, a direct result of redlining is the overcrowding of minority groups into neighborhoods that do not boast adequate housing to sustain burgeoning populations, leading to crowded conditions that make prevention strategies of COVID-19 nearly impossible to implement.

After years of de facto discrimination achieved through redlining, a system of structural racism blocking the achievement of health equity for all Americans has developed. As a result, a de facto health narrative that does not inspire belonging, compel political participation, nor dictate strategic change towards the social justice model for health equity has matured. In order to eliminate health inequality in America, a new de facto health narrative needs to dictate strategy. The process for achieving health equity relies on healthcare leaders articulating, acting on, and building the vision into all decisions and structures that support equity. Sufficient resources must be allocated to establishing a governance structure that can oversee health equity work. This includes taking specific action to address the social determinants of building intergenerational wealth as well as confronting institutional racism within health systems themselves. Next, health systems need to address the socioeconomic determinants of health which disadvantage minority groups. Through training, education, support groups, housing support, improved transportation, resource assistance, and community health programs, health equity organizations can begin to break down the long-lasting barriers that tactics like redlining have imposed on achieving health equity. In addition to ensuring the equal health outcomes of patients, healthcare organizations can also utilize their position as employers to develop a more diverse workforce through improved hiring practices and ensuring living wages to minority employees.

Strategies to reverse effects of redlining

Redlining has contributed to the long-term decline of low-income, inner city neighborhoods and the continuation of ethnic minority enclaves. Compared to prospering ethnic minority areas, historically redlined or other struggling black communities need targeted investments in infrastructure and services in order to prosper.

Some of these strategies include:

Targeting planning resources to improve employment, incomes, wealth, the built environment, and social services in struggling communities.
Recognize the importance of public transportation as a means for low-income communities to access jobs and services.
Provide jobs near the labor supply through targeted economic development.
Invest in the housing stock through neighborhood revitalization programs.
Utilize inclusionary zoning (IZ) ordinances to improve amounts of high quality housing.
Equitably distribute hazardous waste sites so they are not concentrated in low-income and minority areas.

Social determinants of mental health

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_determinants_of_mental_health

The social determinants of mental health (SDOMH) are societal problems that disrupt mental health, increase risk of mental illness among certain groups, and worsen outcomes for individuals with mental illnesses. Much like the social determinants of health (SDOH), SDOMH include the non-medical factors that play a role in the likelihood and severity of health outcomes, such as income levels, education attainment, access to housing, and social inclusion. Disparities in mental health outcomes are a result of a multitude of factors and social determinants, including fixed characteristics on an individual level – such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation – and environmental factors that stem from social and economic inequalities – such as inadequate access to proper food, housing, and transportation, and exposure to pollution.

Definitions

Mental health, as defined by the CDC, encompasses individuals' emotional, psychological, and social well-being, while the most common mental disorders include anxiety-disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, and panic disorder; depression; and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The concept of social determinants stems from the life course approach. It draws from theories that explain the social, economic, environmental, and physical patterns that result in health disparities and vary across different stages of life (e.g. prenatal, early years, working age, and older ages). Identifying the social and structural determinants of mental health, in addition to individual determinants, enables policy makers to promote mental health and reduce risk of illness by designing appropriate interventions and taking action beyond the health sector.

Inequities in mental health

Globally, in 2019, 1 in every 8 individuals (12.5% of the population) lived with a mental disorder; however, in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that number grew dramatically by around 27%. While mental illnesses and disorders have become more prevalent, studies have shown that mental health outcomes are worse for some populations and communities than others. One such inequity is that of gender: females are twice as likely to have a mental illness than males.

Fixed characteristics

Fixed characteristics refers to those that are genetic and biological and/or are not subjected to be influenced by the environment or social living conditions of an individual.

Gender

The second leading cause of global disability burden in 2020 was unipolar depression, and research showed that depression was twice as likely to be prevalent in women than in men. Gender-based mental health disparities suggest that gender is a factor that could be leading to unequal health outcomes.

Research studies included in Lancet Psychiatry Women's Mental Health Series focuses on understanding why some of these gendered disparities might exist. Kuehner in her article Why is depression more common among women than among men? mentions several risk factors that contributes to these inequities, including the role of a women's sex hormones and "blunted hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis response to stress". Other factors include a woman's increased likelihood to body shaming and rumination and stressors on an interpersonal level, as well as sexual abuse during childhood. Further, the prevalence of gender inequality and discrimination in society against women may also be a contributing factor. Li et al. finds that the monthly and lifespan fluctuations of sex hormones oestradiol and progesterone in women may also influence the gender gap, especially in the context of trauma-related, stress-related, and anxiety disorders, such as through increasing vulnerability to development of these disorders and permitting the continued persistence of symptoms for these disorders.

Increased likelihood of gender-based violence for women compared to men is also another risk factor that was studied by Oram et al. Researchers found that women have a higher risk of being subjected to domestic and sexual violence, thereby increasing their prevalence to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. Also notable to consider in the context of gender-based trauma are female genital mutilation, forced and early marriage, human trafficking, and honor crimes.

While women are reported to experience higher rates of depressive and anxiety related disorders, men are more likely to die by suicide than women: in the United Kingdom, suicide is the biggest cause of death for men 45 and younger, and in the likelihood of dying by suicide, men are four times more likely in Russia and Argentina, three and a half times more likely in the United States, and three times more likely in Australia, than women, to name a few countries. Gender differences in suicide are commonly explained by pressure for gender roles and higher risk-taking behavior among men.

Sexual orientation

In studies comparing mental health outcomes between members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (questioning), intersex, asexual and agender (LGBTQIA+) community with heterosexuals, the former showed increased risks of poor mental health. In fact, LGBTQIA+ individuals are twice as likely to have a mental disorder compared to their heterosexual counterparts, and two and a half times more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and substance misuse.

Based on the minority stress model, these mental health disparities among LGBTQIA+ people are due to discrimination and stigma. In fact, LGBTQIA+ individuals have expressed difficulty in accessing healthcare due to experienced discrimination and stigma, which as a result, causes them to not seek healthcare at all or rather delay it. Further societal isolation and feelings of rejection may also contribute to the prevalence of mental disorders among this community. In addition to the perceived and experienced stigma, LGBTQIA+ have an increased likelihood of being victims of violence. These factors, alongside others, contribute significantly to differences in mental health experiences for members of the LGBTQIA+ community in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts, thereby result in mental health inequities by sexual orientation.

Race/ethnicity

Studies in the conducted in the United States have indicated that minorities have similar or smaller rates of prevalence for mental health disorders as their majority counterparts. Blacks (24.6%) and Hispanics (19.6%) have lower depression rates than their White counterparts (34.7%) in the United States. While racial/ethnic minority groups may have similar prevalence rates, the consequences because of mental illness are more prolonged – which may be partly explained due to the smaller access rates for mental health treatments. In 2018, while 56.7% of the general US population who had a mental illness didn't seek treatment, 69.4% and 67.1% Black and Hispanics didn't access care. Further, in the instances of some mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, Blacks in the United States have been reported to have higher rates compared to their White counterparts, however, research suggests that this could be due to an overdiagnosis among clinicians and underdiagnosis for other illnesses, such as mood disorders, for which Blacks had lower reported prevalence rates for major depression. These instances of misdiagnosis may be due to "lack of cultural understanding by health care providers,...language differences between patient and provider, stigma of mental illness among minority groups, and cultural presentation of symptoms.

Environment

According to Paul and Moser’s meta-analysis, countries with high income inequality and poor unemployment protections have worse mental health outcomes among the unemployed.

Environmental factors

In addition to fixed characteristics, environmental factors, such as adequate access to food, housing, and health and exposure to pollution,

impacts an individual’s likelihood and severity of mental health outcomes. Although these factors can not directly change an individual's fixed characteristics of the social determinants of mental health, they can affect the degree to which an individual is influenced.

Inadequate access to proper food

Mental illnesses are common among those that are food insecure due to associated factors of stress and weaker community belonging. Food security refers to the state of having access to sufficient and nutritious foods in order to maintain a healthy and active life, and deviations from this can lead to food insecurity. While seen as an economic indicator, food insecurity can increase the risk to mental illnesses through stress, making individuals more vulnerable to worse mental health outcomes.

Another contributing factor that can explain this association between food insecurity and mental illnesses is social isolation. Research, for instance, shows that the majority of food insecure individuals in Canada do not have access to community food programs or food banks, suggesting that there is little to no access to social resources for these people. This factor can impact an individual's ability to feel supported or a sense of belonging within their community, thereby increasing their vulnerability to mental illnesses.

Housing

Studies have found a co-occurrence between homelessness and mental illnesses. The “housing first” intervention in Canada – the At Home/Chez Soi study – which aimed to provide permanent housing to individuals reported that for the study cohort, suicidal ideation diminished over time. Another study, one of the largest of its kind aimed to characterize the health of Canada's homeless youth, reported that 85% of its participants had high levels of psychological distress and 42% attempted suicide at least once.

In addition to suffering from mental illnesses, homeless individuals also have trouble accessing care: for example, 50% of homeless men in a New York City shelter reported being overtly mental ill, and nearly 20–35% of mentally ill homeless individuals were in need of psychiatric services. While homeless shelters were once viewed as transient facilities, they have been burdened to take up the role of providing care for the large number of mentally ill homeless people that occupy these shelters. However, a United Kingdom survey found that only 27.1% of homeless shelters believed that their mental health services were adequate to meet the needs of the homeless youth population surveyed in the study.

Pollution

Despite the vast literature on the effect of air pollution on physical health outcomes, research on the mental health effects of air pollution are limited. Data from the China Family Panel Studies found a positive relationship between air pollution and mental illnesses, where an 18.04 μg/m3 increase in average PM_2.5 has a 6.67% increase in the probability of having a score corresponding with a severe mental illness, approximating a cost of US$22.88 billion in health expenditures associated with mental illness and treatment.

New evidence, although still non-conclusive, suggests the association between various mental health disorders and major environmental pollutants, including air pollutants, heavy metals, and environmental catastrophes, and have found that these pathogens have a direct and indirect role on the brain and in the generation of stress levels. For instance, noise pollution could affect wellbeing and quality of life as a result of disturbances in circadian rhythms, noise annoyance, and noise sensitivity.

Climate

In addition to the role of pathogen and pollutant exposure on mental health, adverse environmental and climate changes can lead to climate-related migration and displacement that burdens and causes a mental health toll on impacted individuals. From the disruption of social ties and support systems in their native communities to the financial and emotional stress (often due to the stigma that make it hard for climate migrants to integrate) that arises due to relocating, climate migrants experience negative mental health outcomes. Forced migrants, compared to host populations, experience more common mental health disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, major depression, psychosis, and suicidality due to the stressors that they experience.

Changes in climate can also impact food security in regions, food prices, and household livelihoods, thereby impacting the mental health of residents. In an Australian sample, drought was reported to affect food availability, resulting in individuals skipping meals; individuals consuming below-average food levels expressed higher levels of distress compared to those eating at above-average levels.

Social factors

The social factors of the determinants of mental health looks at the role of social influences, such as discrimination and stigma, that increase the likelihood of mental health disorders among certain minority communities.

Discrimination

Extensive literature has pointed to the strong association of discrimination on mental health and worse psychological wellbeing of individuals – with some studies even suggesting that the role of discrimination on mental health is greater than on physical health outcomes. In the scope of ‘physical health’, studies have found that discrimination in health care delivery affects standard of care for ethnic minority communities: for example, African Americans and Latinos are less likely than their white counterparts to receive sufficient pain medication for long bone fracture or kidney stones.

Focusing on mental health specifically though, community and laboratory studies have found that discrimination, such as racial/ethnic discrimination, is associated with worse mental health outcomes through increased depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. Occupational discrimination – discrimination in work organizations – also points to this same trend, in which regardless of race, those who acknowledge being discriminated against had worse poorer mental health outcomes. The literature suggests that discrimination, despite the type, is harmful for mental health.

Researchers have also studied the role of multiple types of discrimination on mental health risk and have pointed to two risk models– first, the risk model in which groups that experience discrimination have an increased risk for worse mental health and second, the resilience model, in which these groups become more resilient to various other forms of discrimination. An extensive literature review on existing studies found that generally the findings aligned with the risk model, as opposed to the resilience model. Specifically, there were a higher risk for symptoms of depression among groups that experienced various forms of discrimination – including racism, heterosexism. The role of multiple forms of discrimination on other mental health problems, such as anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance use, are less, and the results are mixed.

Discrimination also exists in mental health care delivery among marginalized communities. Provider discrimination can affect mental health treatment among racial minorities, for example: in the United States, minority groups have similar or lower prevalence rates of mental disorders when compared to their white counterparts, however Blacks were only half as likely as whites to receive treatment for diseases of similar severity.

Stigma

Studies have found that the stigma associated with mental health problems can impact care seeking and participation. Reasons that decrease the likelihood of care seeking include prejudice against people with mental health illnesses as well as just the expectation of prejudice and discrimination for those who seek treatment. Further, lack of knowledge of mental illnesses and how to access treatment can also impact care seeking behaviors; the associated stigma surrounding mental health issues can contribute to this knowledge gap. Corrigan et al. 2014 outlines three levels of stigma – public stigma that results from label avoidance, self-stigma that results from self-shame, and structural stigma. Given these varying structures of stigma and a person's varying interactions with them, the avoidance for care seeking and participation behaviors may vary vastly. A global review on the stigma of mental illnesses and discrimination found that “there is no known country, society, or culture where people with mental illness (diagnosed or recognized as such by the community) are considered to have the same value or be as acceptable as persons who do not have mental illness”.

Economic factors

Economic factors can influence the frequency and severity of mental health outcomes in people of all ages. Economic factors include proximal factors such as assets, debt, financial strain, food security, income, relative deprivation and unemployment, as well as distal factors such as economic inequality, economic recessions, macroeconomic policy and subjective financial strain. According to research, there is a complicated and bi-directional relationship between economic factors such as unemployment, food insecurity, poverty and increased prevalence of adult common mental disorders in low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries. The relationship between economic factors and mental health is relevant throughout the lifecourse.

Other factors

Biological factors

Biological factors can also affect the likelihood of certain mental illnesses among individuals. When considering major depression, for example, the HTR1A −1019C>G genotype was found to be significantly associated among patients in Utah, United States. Further, the functional BDNF Val66Met polymorphism has also been found to be a potential genetic risk factor for depression because it impacts the volume of the hippocampus, and stress-induced hippocampal atrophy has been associated with the origination and development of affective disorders. Extensive research and literature in the fields of neuroscience and psychology – and their intersection – aim to identify these genetic and anatomical risk factors.

Interventions

Research has been conducted into examining mental health treatments and interventions that consider these social determinants of mental health and the roles they play in mental health outcomes. For example, nutritional psychiatry is an emerging area of study which aims to improve mental health of individuals through diet and food: Adan et al. 2019 highlights that intervention studies have found that diet and lifestyle could potentially influence mental health treatment and prevention.

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Saturday, December 16, 2023

Social psychology

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Schemas

Self-concept

Social influence

Group dynamics

Interpersonal attraction

Research

Methods

Famous experiments

Asch conformity experiments

Festinger cognitive dissonance experiments

Milgram experiment

Stanford prison experiment

Bandura's Bobo doll

Ethics

Replication crisis

Redlining

History

Efforts to end

Legislation

Regulatory lawsuits

Community organizations

Current issues

Racial segregation in American cities

Race wealth gap

Retail

Brick and mortar

Online

Liquorlining

Financial services

Student loans

Credit cards

Banks

Insurance

Mortgages

Environmental racism

Workforce

Digital redlining

Political redlining

Redlining and Health Inequality

Strategies to reverse effects of redlining

Social determinants of mental health

Definitions

Inequities in mental health

Fixed characteristics

Gender

Sexual orientation

Race/ethnicity

Environment

Environmental factors

Inadequate access to proper food

Housing

Pollution

Climate

Social factors

Discrimination

Stigma

Economic factors

Other factors

Biological factors

Interventions

Philosophy of physics