Ch. 3, Social Beliefs and Judgment Flashcards
How do we judge events?
informed by implicit rules that guide our snap judgements and by our moods
System 1 and system 2 functions; which influences more?
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)
Priming and its effects
Priming: awakening or activation of certain associations
Priming thoughts, even without awareness, can influence another thought or action
John Bargh and priming
describes priming in terms of bells that only mental butlers (who manage the small unconcious entities) can hear
Embodied cognition
Embodied Cognition: physical sensations prime our social judgments
Schemas:
mental concepts/templates that intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations of our experience
Process of emotional reactions
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)
Explicit vs. Implicit Memory
Explicit: recall consciously
Implicit: skills and conditioned dispositions we remember implicitly, without consciously declaring that we know
Blindsight Cases:
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”
Limits of Intuition
Loftus and Klinger:
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
Overconfidence Phenomena:
we are unaware of our errors that occur in the efficiency of cognitive processing
Stockbrocker and student overconfidence
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
Remedies for Overconfidence
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
Heuristics:
simple, efficienct thinking strategies; System 1
Representative and availability heuristic
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)
Probability Neglect Phenomena
phenomena in which we worry more about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities (worrying about a nuclear war more than climate change)
Illusory Correlation/Thinking
when we expect significant relationships, we easily associate random events, perceiving an illusory correlation
People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs
Gambling and Illusory Thinking
The gambling industry thrives on gambler’s illusions
Gamblers attribute wins to their skill and foresight, while losses become near-misses or “flukes”
Regression to the Mean
Score lower on the next exam because of this statistical phenomena
Belief Perserverance
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
When are memories actually constructed?
We construct memories at the time of withdrawal
Misinformation Effect:
people incorporate misinformation into their memories
False memories look and feel like real memories
Compliant vs. internalized confessions
Compliant Confessions: misinformation induced false memories create false confessions
Internalized Confesisons: people believed their own false confessions after being fed misinformation
Rosy Retrospection:
recall mildly pleasant events more favourably than how they experienced them
Attribution Theory:
analyzes how we explain people’s behaviour and what we infer from it
Disposiitional Attribution:
attribute behaviour to internal causes (the person’s disposition) or external causes (something about the situation) SITUATIONAL ATTRIBUTION
Spontaneous Trait Inference:
the ease with which we automatically infer traits to people
Fundamental Attribution Error
We underestimate the situational deterimnants of others behaviour but not of our own
Actor-Observer Difference
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
Camera Perspective Bias:
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
Dispositional vs. situational attributions
Dispositional Attribution: ascribes behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits
Situational Attributions: atribute to the situation
3 main reasons why attribution errors are important to study
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
Experimentar Bias:
research participants live up to what they believe the researcher expects of them
Behavioural Confirmation:
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.
Medial prefrontal cortex and the self
produces sense of self unity
Associatiev priming
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
Semantic Priming:
priming people to think about word associations
Repetition Priming:
Pavlov’s dog example, after a certain amount of repetitions it will create a primed response
Conceptual Priming:
same type of concept, things that are related because they have a lot of similar functions/attributes
What does confirmation bias cause?
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
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
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
Pros and cons of unrealistic optimism
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)
