Ch. 3, Social Beliefs and Judgment

Question 1

How do we judge events?

Answer 1

informed by implicit rules that guide our snap judgements and by our moods

Question 2

System 1 and system 2 functions; which influences more?

Answer 2

System 1 functions automatically and out of our awareness (gut feeling)/ System 2 requires our conscious attention and effort
System 1 influences much more of our actions
System 1 (impulsive, effortless and without awareness, AUTOMATIC PROCESSING) and System 2 (reflective, deliberate, CONSCIOUS PROCESSING)

Question 3

Priming and its effects

Answer 3

Priming: awakening or activation of certain associations
Priming thoughts, even without awareness, can influence another thought or action

Question 4

John Bargh and priming

Answer 4

describes priming in terms of bells that only mental butlers (who manage the small unconcious entities) can hear

Question 5

Embodied cognition

Answer 5

Embodied Cognition: physical sensations prime our social judgments

Question 6

Schemas:

Answer 6

mental concepts/templates that intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations of our experience

Question 7

Process of emotional reactions

Answer 7

often nearly instant, before there is time for deliberate thinking (PROCESS OF EMOTIONS: INFO IS TAKEN FROM THE EYE OR EAR TO THE THALAMUS (SENSORY SWITCHBOARD) AND TO THE AMYGDALA/EMOTIONAL CONTROL CENTER BEFORE THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX CAN INTERVENE)

Question 8

Explicit vs. Implicit Memory

Answer 8

Explicit: recall consciously
Implicit: skills and conditioned dispositions we remember implicitly, without consciously declaring that we know

Question 9

Blindsight Cases:

Answer 9

when people have lost some of their visual capacity they are still able to guess right most of the time when asked what they “See”

Question 10

Limits of Intuition
Loftus and Klinger:

Answer 10

argue that the unconcious may not be as smart as previously believed
There is no evidence that subliminal audio recordings can “Reprogram” your unconcious mind for success

Question 11

Overconfidence Phenomena:

Answer 11

we are unaware of our errors that occur in the efficiency of cognitive processing

Question 12

Stockbrocker and student overconfidence

Answer 12

Stockbroker Overconfidence: stocks are a confidence game, and this is often horribly overestimated, people who are overconfident invest more and more even when things arent going well
Student Overconfidence: stopping studying because they are too overconfident

Question 13

Remedies for Overconfidence

Answer 13

Prompt Feedback: receiving clear, daily feedback helps with this (weather forecaster)
Second method: get people to think of one good reason why their judgements might be wrong

Question 14

Heuristics:

Answer 14

simple, efficienct thinking strategies; System 1

Question 15

Representative and availability heuristic

Answer 15

Representativeness Heuristic: to judge something by intuivtiely comparing it to our mental representation of a category
Availibility Heuristic: the more easily we can recall something, the more likely it seems (events that we can more easily recall seem more likely to have occurred)

Question 16

Probability Neglect Phenomena

Answer 16

phenomena in which we worry more about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities (worrying about a nuclear war more than climate change)

Question 17

Illusory Correlation/Thinking

Answer 17

when we expect significant relationships, we easily associate random events, perceiving an illusory correlation
People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs

Question 18

Gambling and Illusory Thinking

Answer 18

The gambling industry thrives on gambler’s illusions
Gamblers attribute wins to their skill and foresight, while losses become near-misses or “flukes”

Question 19

Regression to the Mean

Answer 19

Score lower on the next exam because of this statistical phenomena

Question 20

Belief Perserverance

Answer 20

Shows that beliefs can take on a life of their own and survive the discrediting of the evidence that inspired them
We become prisoners of our own thought patterns: our beliefs and expectations powerfully affect how we mentally construct events

Question 21

When are memories actually constructed?

Answer 21

We construct memories at the time of withdrawal

Question 22

Misinformation Effect:

Answer 22

people incorporate misinformation into their memories
False memories look and feel like real memories

Question 23

Compliant vs. internalized confessions

Answer 23

Compliant Confessions: misinformation induced false memories create false confessions
Internalized Confesisons: people believed their own false confessions after being fed misinformation

Question 24

Rosy Retrospection:

Answer 24

recall mildly pleasant events more favourably than how they experienced them

Question 25

Attribution Theory:

Answer 25

analyzes how we explain people’s behaviour and what we infer from it

Question 26

Disposiitional Attribution:

Answer 26

attribute behaviour to internal causes (the person’s disposition) or external causes (something about the situation) SITUATIONAL ATTRIBUTION

Question 27

Spontaneous Trait Inference:

Answer 27

the ease with which we automatically infer traits to people

Question 28

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 28

We underestimate the situational deterimnants of others behaviour but not of our own

Question 29

Actor-Observer Difference

Answer 29

When we act, the environment commands our attention
When we watch another person act, that person occupies the centre of our attention and the situation becomes relatively invisible to us

Question 30

Camera Perspective Bias:

Answer 30

when people view a video of a suspect confessing during a police interview, with the camera focused on the suspect. They perceived the confession as genuine: if the camera was focused on the detective, they perceived the confession as coerced

Question 31

Dispositional vs. situational attributions

Answer 31

Dispositional Attribution: ascribes behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits
Situational Attributions: atribute to the situation

Question 32

3 main reasons why attribution errors are important to study

Answer 32

Reveal how we think about ourselbves and others
Humanitarian reasons: one of social psychology’s humanizing messages is that people shouldn’t always be blamed for their problems; IMPORTANT TO RECOGNIZE SITUATION RATHER THAN DISPOSITION
We are mostly unaware of these biases and can benefit from greater awareness; people see themselves as less susceptible than others to attribution errors

Question 33

Experimentar Bias:

Answer 33

research participants live up to what they believe the researcher expects of them

Question 34

Behavioural Confirmation:

Answer 34

erroneous beliefs about the social world can induce others to confirm those beliefs: we can elicit responses and behaviour in others based on our expectations (if we expect that someone is nice and we’re nice to them, that may cause them to also be nice even if theyre not; Self-fulfilling prophecy focuses on the behavior of the perceiver in electing expected behavior from the target, whereas behavioral confirmation focuses on the role of the target’s behavior in confirming the perceiver’s beliefs.

Question 35

Medial prefrontal cortex and the self

Answer 35

produces sense of self unity

Question 36

Associatiev priming

Answer 36

MOST GENERAL, concepts that are related to each other (cat and mouse) things that are often related in real life (students—exams), two ideas things/concepts that are often linked together but they’re not the same type of concpet

Question 37

Semantic Priming:

Answer 37

priming people to think about word associations

Question 38

Repetition Priming:

Answer 38

Pavlov’s dog example, after a certain amount of repetitions it will create a primed response

Question 39

Conceptual Priming:

Answer 39

same type of concept, things that are related because they have a lot of similar functions/attributes

Question 40

What does confirmation bias cause?

Answer 40

CAUSES Social polarization: people get “entrenched” in their camps of belief and constantly look for info that confirms their perspective
Belief Perservance: to maintain your beliefs and pleasant feeling, you will minimize the beliefs of others
Illusory associations: perceive significant associations that aren’t true, but we’ll still seek confirmatory info (social media makes kids gay)
Discrimination: involves illusory associations, people develop stereotypes that are negative about an identifiable group and therefore look for info that confirms it
Conspiracy Theories: one of the most extreme cases of confirmation biases

Question 41

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:

Answer 41

beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment, when our ideas lead us to act in ways that produce their apparent confirmation (ask a person you believe is smart different questions from how you would interact with in a different way), cannot necessarily consciously create this in someone else

Question 42

Pros and cons of unrealistic optimism

Answer 42

ADVANTAGES: promotes self-efficacy, defensive pessimism helps people prepare for problems
DISADVANTAGES: “illusory optimism” which increases vulnerability to engaging in risky behaviour (belief than you won’t experience a divorce)