4. Social beliefs and judgements Flashcards
Bias
Assumptions and prejudgements guide our perceptions, interpretations and recall.
Priming
Activating associations in memory.
Subliminal messaging
Sensory stimuli below an individual’s threshold for conscious perception.
Categorical thinking
Using social cues to categorise.
Perceiving the social world
Priming -> categorical thinking -> perceiving and interpreting events
Belief perseverance
We become prisoners of our own thought patterns.
Strong evidence needed to correct our belief.
Reconstructing memories
We reconstruct our past by using our current feelings to combine memory fragments.
We are highly susceptible to influence.
Automatic processing
Maybe rooted in subconscious bias.
Controls majority of behaviour.
Controlled processing
Might not feel as natural
Takes time to process
Takes time to develop
Types of schemas
Schemas are cognitive frameworks that help us to organise information.
Self-schemas
Person-schemas
Role-schemas
Event-schemas
Social stimulus and schemas
Social stimulus -> social encoding -> schema
Social stimulus -> pre-attentive analysis -> focusing of attention -> comprehension -> elaborative reasoning -> schema
Overconfidence
The tendency to be more confident than correct.
Incompetence feeds overconfidence.
Can’t even predict our own behaviour.
Our ignorance of our ignorance sustains our overconfidence.
Remedies for overconfidence
- Seek immediate feedback
- Break tasks down into smaller parts
- Play devils’ advocate
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts used to make quick decisions. Straightforward rules of thumb based on past experiences. Not about making the correct decision but a quick decision.
Representativeness heuristic
The tendency to assume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member.
Availability heuristic
Assuming the likelihood of something based on historical evidence.
Recognition heuristic
To assume that what is easily recognised is important.
Attribution theory
How people explain others’ behaviours; by attributing it to internal dispositions or external situations.
Influences on attribution theory
Misattribution
Can be supportive if viewed as external
Gender differences
Fritz Heider’s (1958) ‘theory of naïve psychology’
We assume people’s behaviour is motivated and intentional, not random. Leads to more internal attributions.
Jones and Davis’s (1965) ‘theory of correspondent inference’
We assume people’s actions are the result of their intentions and dispositions.
Harold Kelly’s (1973) ‘covariation model’
We assume internal or external causes based on 3 factors.
The 3 factors in the covariation model
- Consistency - how consistent is the person’s behaviour in the situation?
- Distinctiveness - how specific is the person’s behaviour to the situation?
- Consensus - to what extent do others in the situation behave similarly?
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behaviour.
Why do we make the attribution error?
Actor-observer difference
The false consensus effect
The self-serving bias (take the explanation which suits us best).
The just world hypothesis (assuming the world is just and good and everything happens for a reason).
Factors that affect the just world hypothesis
Proximity (if you’ve experienced it, then can be more empathetic to it).
Empathy (different levels in different people. Less empathy, more judgy and less likely to help).
Personality characteristics - value security, conformity, and conscientiousness.
Locus of control (internal vs external).
Attributional complexity
- Level of interest or motivation
- Preference for complex rather than simple explanations.
- Presence of metacognition concerning explanations.
- Awareness of the extent to which people’s behaviour is a function of interactions with others.
- Tendency to infer abstract or causally complex internal attributions.
- Tendency to infer external causes operating at a spatial distance.
- Tendency to infer external causes operating at a temporal distance.
