Chapter 3 Flashcards
HOW WE JUDGE OUR SOCIAL WORLDS, CONSCIOUSLY & UNCONSCIOUSLY?
The Two Brain Systems (Daniel Kahneman 2011)
System 1 - intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.
System 2 - deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking.
- Activating particular associations in memory
- Experiments show that _______ one thought, even without awareness, can influence another thought, or even an action. (Herring et al., 2013).
PRIMING
The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.
Embodied Cognition
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS
THE POWERS OF INTUITION
- Automatic Processing
- Controlled Processing
- “Implicit” thinking that is e ffortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as System 1.
- Automatic, intuitive thinking happens “offscreen”
Automatic Processing
- “Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. Also known as System 2.
Controlled Processing
Samples of Automatic Processing:
- Schemas
- Emotional Reactions
- Expertise
- Blindsight
Mental concepts/templates that intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations.
Schemas
Expert skill in a particular field
Expertise
- Often nearly instantaneous, happens before deliberate thinking.
- Thalamus to Amygdala
Emotional reactions
Ability to detect & respond to visual stimuli w/o having perceived it.
Blindsight
- The unconscious may not be as smart as previously believed
- There is no evidence that subliminal audio recordings can “reprogram your unconscious mind” for success.
In fact, a significant body of evidence indicates that they can’t. (Greenwald, 1992).
THE LIMITS OF INTUITION
- Tendency to be more confident than correct —to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
Overconfidence Phenomenon
- Incompetence feeds overconfidence. It takes competence to recognize competence. (Justin Kruger and David Dunning, 1999)
- Stockbroker overconfidence
- Political overconfidence
- Student overconfidence
- A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
- Appears in System 1
- Helps explain why our self-images are so remarkably stable.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
When our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition.
Snap Judgement
Three techniques for reducing overconfidence bias:
- Prompt feedback
- Making people think of reasons their judgements might be wrong
Encouraging individuals to consider disconfirming information. Promoting more realistic judgments by including reasons why proposals might not work.
Making people think of reasons their judgements might be wrong
-Simple, efficient thinking strategies that enable quick, efficient judgments
HEURISTICS: MENTAL SHORTCUTS
Enable us to make routine decisions with minimal e ffort.
Heuristics
The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
Ex. Image of people with glasses as or a person with a tattoo as a criminal.
REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC
- A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
Ex. Fruits: apple, banana, mango, lemon > persimmon, durian, buddha’s hands
- Vivid, memorable—and therefore cognitively available—events influence our perception of the social world.
AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
The resulting “_______ _________” often leads people to fear the wrong things, such as fearing flying or terrorism more than smoking, driving, or climate change.
probability neglect
- Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t.
- Easily imagined, cognitively available events also influence our experiences of guilt, regret, frustration, and relief.
- Imagining worse alternatives helps us feel better.
- Imagining better alternatives, and pondering what we might do di erently next time, helps us prepare to do better in the future.
(Epstude & Roese, 2008; Scholl & Sassenberg, 2014).
- _______ ________ underlies our feelings of luck.
COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
- Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
- People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs. (Crocker, 1981; Ratli & Nosek, 2010; Trolier & Hamilton, 1986)
- Gambling
Illusory Correlation
The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one’s average.
Regression towards the Average
________ __________ involves e cient information processing. It also involves our feelings: Our moods infuse our judgments.
Social judgment
Our ______ color how we judge our worlds partly by bringing to mind past experiences associated with the _____. When we are in a bad ______, we have more depressing thoughts. _____-related thoughts may distract us from complex thinking about something else. Thus, when emotionally aroused—when either angry or in a very good mood—we become more likely to make System 1 snap judgments and evaluate others based on stereotypes (Bodenhausen et al., 1994; Paulhus & Lim, 1994).
Mood(s)
- Despite some startling biases and logical flaws in how we perceive and understand one another, we’re mostly accurate (Jussim, 2012). But sometimes our prejudgements blur our perception too.
PERCEIVING & INTERPRETING EVENTS
- Perceiving the other party against their views.
Ex. : Sports fans perceive referees as partial to the other side. Political candidates and their supporters nearly always view the news media as unsympathetic to their cause (Richardson et al., 2008).
Political Perceptions
- Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
- It is di cult to demolish a falsehood after a rationale is conjured.
BELIEF PERSEVERANCE
- Our memories are not exact copies of experiences that remain on deposit in a memory bank. Rather, we construct memories at the time of withdrawal.
- We reconstruct our distant past by using our current feelings and expectations to combine information fragments.
- “Memory isn’t like reading a book: It’s more like writing a book from fragmentary notes.” (John F. Kihlstrom , 1994)
CONSTRUCTING MEMORIES OF OURSELVES & OUR WORLDS
- Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.
- This process a ects our recall of social as well as physical events. (Jack Croxton and colleagues, 1984)
Misinformation E ffect
- People whose attitudes have changed often insist that they have always felt much as they now feel.
- Our current emotional state colors memories.
- It’s not that we are totally unaware of how we used to feel, but when memories are hazy, current feelings guide our recall
RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST ATTITUDES
Recalling mildly pleasant events more favorably than experienced.
Rosy Retrospection
Memory construction enables us to revise our own histories
RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST BEHAVIOR
- We revise the past to suit our present views. Thus, we underreport bad behavior and overreport good behavior.
Totalitarian Ego
Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
Misattribution
- The theory of how people explain others’ behavior—for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.
- Analyzes how people explain others’ behaviour and what we infer from it.
Attribution Theory
analyzes how people explain others’ behaviour and what we infer from it. Attribution theory pioneer ______ _______ (1958) & others after him analyzed the “commonsense psychology” of how people explain everyday events.
Fritz Heider
Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits.
Dispositional Attribution
Attributing behavior to the environment.
Situational Attribution
We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions (Jones & Davis, 1965).
INFERRING TRAITS
- an e ffortless, automatic interference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior.
Spontaneous Trait Inference
– The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences & overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior.
THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
WHY DO WE MAKE THE ATTRIBUTION ERROR?
- PERSPECTIVE & SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
- CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
- How we explain someone’s negative behavior determines how we feel about it.
Attributions and Reactions
WHY WE STUDY ATTRIBUTION ERRORS?
- Explains some foibles and fallacies in our social thinking.
- Focusing on thinking biases such as the fundamental attribution error is humanitarian.
- Focusing on biases is that we are mostly unaware of them and can benefit from greater awareness.
HOW DO OUR SOCIAL BELIEF MATTER?
Our social beliefs and judgments do matter. They influence how we feel and act, and by doing so may help generate their own reality.
Beliefs that lead to its own fulfillment. (Robert Merton, 1984).
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES
- Teachers’ evaluations correlate with student achievement: Teachers think well of students who do well. That’s mostly because teachers accurately perceive their students’ abilities and achievements.
- “About 75 percent of the correlation between teacher expectations and student future achievement reflects accuracy,” report Lee Jussim, Stacy Robustelli, and Thomas Cain (2009).
TEACHER EXPECTATIONS & STUDENT PERFORMANCE
- a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.
- once formed, erroneous beliefs about the social world can induce others to confirm those belief, (Mark Snyder, 1984)
Behavioral confirmation
Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (1980) recommendations:
● Train people to recognize likely sources of error in their own social intuition.
● Set up statistics courses geared to everyday problems of logic and social judgment.
● Make such teaching more e ective by illustrating it richly with concrete, vivid anecdotes and examples from everyday life.
● Teach memorable and useful slogans.
