7 - Cognitive Biases Flashcards
humans as faulty computers
we sometimes fail to understand the forces operating in our social world…. sacrifice accuracy for efficiency in processing
misattribution
common sense psychology
Dispositional attributions (internal)
The person is the cause
Situational attributions (external)
Situational factors or other people are the cause
correspondence bias (overestimate personal/dispostional influences on other’s behavior, underestimate situation)
Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977)
questioners and contestants
both observers and contestants thought the questioner was especially smart, although people were randomly sorted into roles
Perspective Taking - Storms (1973)
Found that when watching video from own perspective (looking AT target participant), people made more dispositional attributions but when it was from the other partner’s perspective, they made more situational attributions (taking target participant’s perspective)
confession study (lassiter and irvine)
participants watched bideos of mock police intetrrogation resulting in a confession
• Judged more coercion if videotaped form perspective of suspect than interrogator
self-awareness
Feningstein and Carver (1978)
Feningstein and Carver (1978) - particpants told to imagine a situation, while wearing headphones playing either……
random noise or own heartbeat
way more self-attributions when thought they were listening to heartbeat
correspondence bias summary
saliency affected by
1.
2.
3.
We may be biased toward certain types of attributions
based on what is perceptually salient to us about the event
What is more or less salient can be affected by:
- perspective-taking or point-of-view
- self-awareness
- culture
Perception is vulnerable - Rothbart & Birrell
Nazi stdy
Perception of person in photograph differed based on biographical description – yet looking at same photo all along
o Our perceptions are influenced by expectations, beliefs, or context
memory is vulnerable
Markus (1986) recall attitude
Bem and McConnell - reacall
• Memory is consciously and unconsciously changed and reconstructed to fit certain situations
• Markus (1986)
- Memories of one’s current attitudes reflect more one’s perception of his/her past attitudes than their actual past attitude.….
• Bem and McConnell (1970) Restrictive University policy experiment
o Participants were asked to recall week old attitudes about policy after doing nothing vs. writing an essay in favor of the policy→after writing the essay, attitudes changed, which makes sense. But their recollection of past attitudes also changed to reflect their new attitudes
misinformation effect
loftus and palmer - car crash study
We use misinformation into our memory of an event after witnessing it and receiving misleading information about it
Loftus and Palmer (1974): Depending on how the questions were asked, participants changed their perception of the car crash video,
reconstructing the crash later
if “smashed” was used in question, they thought the cars drove faster and that they saw broken glass (which wasn’t there)
representativeness heuristic
o Judging the likelihood of things by considering how well they represent or match certain prototypical information
• Fischoff and Bar-Hiller, 1984: People see someone who sounds like a lawyer as a lawyer even in the face of potentially conflicting information
base rate neglect
- Tendency to ignore or underuse base rate information (how common something is) and rather be influenced by a case’s distinct features
- Tversky and Kahneman (1983): Conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than one of the events (statistics)
base rate only used if its usefulness/applicability is made salient
availability heuristic
o Judging probability of something based on availability in memory of information about it
For example: Perceptions of risk
You’re more likely to be in an accident in the bus or in a car, but plane crashes are in the news
Thus,
More people fear planes than people fear cars
Salience matters
illusory correlations and premonitions
evidence
Perception of a correlation or stronger association between two constructs that doesn’t actually exist
Premonitions: we generally remember when unusual events coincide rather than when they don’t
o Ward and Jenkins (1965) - could seeding/rainy days
o The “Hot Hand” (Gilovich, Valone, and Tversky, 1985)
• Kato and Ruble (1994): While according to their diaries, women were not in a worse mood during pre- and post-menstrual period, remeberd selves as such
illusion of control
Schaffner (1985)
• College students trained a boy, Harold, to be punctual…. however arrival times were random, people still saw their ‘influence’ on the boy
