Chapter 3: Social Beliefs and Judgements Flashcards
Brain Systems: Involuntary (Rabbit) System
- Effortless
- Fast
- Intuition
- Involuntary Control
- Many of our judgements come from this one
- Occasionally makes errors in perception
Brain Systems: Voluntary (Turtle) System
- Analytical
- Constructed Thoughts
- Concentration
- Effort
- Reason
- Patience
Priming
- System 1
- Activating specific memory associations
- Influence certain thoughts and actions
- Bells that only “subconscious butlers” can hear
Embodied Cognition
- The 3-way street of body sensation, cognitive preferences, and social judgements
- Wobbly chair = unstable relationship
Intuitive Judgements
- We have innate trust in our system 1
- Most of our behavior is unconscious (system 1)
- Unconscious intuitions are not better than thought out conclusions
Power of Intuition: Automatic Processing
Subconscious thoughts that are effortless and habitual - correlates to our intuition (System 1) (driving etc.)
Power of Intuition: Controlled Processing
Conscious thoughts that are deliberate (System 2)
Automatic Processing: Schemas
Mental templates formed over time that guide our perceptions
Automatic Processing: Emotional Reactions
Instant reactions from our thalamus (sense switchboard) to our amygdala (emotional control) before the cortex can process events
Automatic Processing: Blindsight
Functionally blind people may implicitly comprehend visual info
Automatic Processing: Subliminal Perception
Seeing something negative makes us feel ashamed without realizing it
Intuition Limits
- Subliminal stimuli barely effect our feelings
- We have error-prone hindsight
- Low capacity for illusions
- We create reasons for our intuitive actions
Overconfidence Phenomenon
- We tend to be more confident in our beliefs than correct
- This is true of facts, judgments of others and their behavior, and our own behavior
- Result of incompetence and underestimation of situational forces
Kahneman and Tversky: Optimal Challenge
- We want a challenge, but not too difficult
- This is fueled by our overconfidence
- Incompetence feeds overcondifence
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to seek info that confirms our beliefs (system 1)
Confirmation Bias: Ideological Echo Chambers
Surrounding yourself with opinions that align with your own
Confirmation Bias: Seeking Feedback
- We seek feedback that affirms our self-beliefs (positive or negative)
- People like others who see them as they see themselves
Confidence in Intuition VS Statistical Prediction
- Trust our decisions more than data
- Intuition is less reliable than stats
- Even when experts are given data, they still can’t use it to make more accurate predictions
Remedies for Overconfidence
- Prompt Feedback on behaviour
- Consider Disconfirming Info
Heuristics
Thinking strategies that enable quicker judgements
Representative Heuristic
Making judgements about the probability of an event without evidence
Availability Heuristic
Things seem more likely when they come to mind easily
Availability Heuristic: Probability Neglect
Availability Heuristics make us more scared of stories than actual data
Counterfactual Thinking
- The tendency to imagine how scenarios could have gone differently
- Causes our feelings of luck
- We feel worse when we barely don’t achieve something than when we easily achieve something worse (2nd vs 3rd place)
Illusory Thinking: Illusory Correlation
The tendency to correlate circumstantial things, especially when we expect them to be correlated (confirmation bias)
Illusory Thinking: Gambling
People bet more when they feel they have control - wins are skill while losses are flukes
Illusory Thinkning: Illusion of Control
The perception of events as controllable even when they are out of your control
Moods & Judgement: Unhappy People
- Tend to brood
- More understandable and controlled
Moods and Judgement: Happy People
- Tend to be positive
Moods and Judgement: Past behavior
- Good mood causes happier perception of past behavior
- Bad mood does the opposite
- If we acknowledge our mood, we can help shift these perspectives
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Events
- First impressions (system 1) are generally good
- Beliefs and schemas shape how we perceive events
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Politics
- We tend to view those we disagree with as having biased opinions
- Debates with no clear winner tend to reinforce positions on both sides
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Belief Perseverance
- We tend to keep our initial beliefs, even when discredited
- Even when a belief was planted by experimenters, 75% of participants held onto it
- Once we explain our beliefs, we are more likely to hold them
- Explanations can help understanding, but can also trap our beliefs
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Memories
- Memories aren’t preserved but constructed from our current feelings and fragments
- We often revise these to fit our current knowledge (after-the-fact judgements)
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Misinformation Effect
- We often incorporate “misinformation” into our memory after being fed false info about this event
- COMPLIANT CONFESSIONS happen when accused are sleep deprived and manipulated
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Reconstructing Past Attitudes
- People tend to filter out unpleasant events in pleasant experiences, or vice versa
- This can turn into a feedback loop, since everytime you remember something it reinforces your feelings about it and you remember it better or worse
Perceiving Our Social Worlds: Reconstructing Past Behavior
- We tend to shift memories toward us succeeding
- We have a TOTALITARIAN EGO that reconstructs the past to point out these successes
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Attributing Causality
- We analyze negative behavior from others more closely
- Happy partners attribute actions to situational factors, while unhappy ones attribute them to personal vendettas
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Misattribution
We often attribute behavior inaccurately
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Attribution Theory
Analyzes how we explain people’s behavior and what we infer from it
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Dispositional Attribution
(Internal Cause) We attribute actions to person’s disposition
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Situational Attribution
(External Cause) We attribute actions to a person’s situation
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Inferring Traits
Inference can happen when someone acts outside of the norm in a situation
Explaining Our Social Worlds: Spontaneous Trait inference
We subconsciously infer traits when perceiving behavior
Fundamental Attribution Error
- We tend to overestimate dispositional influences on others behavior
- AKA correspondence bias
- We even underestimate our own effect on behavior
- We don’t do this to ourselves
FAE: Perspective & Situational Awareness
- The environment informs our perceptions
- Others are part of the environment
- We usually understand environmental factors on our own behavior
- We usually get better insight with time
FAE: Camera Perspective Bias
- Interview footage is biased based on who the camera shows
- We find causes where we look for them
FAE: Cultural Differences
- Individualist cultures are more likely to perform the FAE
Social Beliefs: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
- Beliefs that cause an outcome that confirms the belief
- BEHAVIOURAL CONFIRMATION: When prepared to think a certain way about someone, we will notice these things more than others
Social Beliefs: Experimenter Bias
Research participants will follow DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS given by researchers that can affect data
Social Beliefs: Teacher Bias
Teacher expectations affect the attention they give - students that get more attention have more opportunities which affirms the teachers expectations
