Chapter 3: Social Beliefs and Judgements

Question 1

What are the two major brain systems?

Answer 1

• System 1: Automatic - Functions automatically and out of our awareness. Often called intuition or a gut feeling. Influences more of our actions than we realize
• System 2: Requires attention - Requires our conscious attention and effort

Question 2

What’s priming?

Answer 2

• A phenomenon/technique whereby one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus
• More impactful on system 1 (automatic)
• Can influence our thoughts and actions

Question 3

How does priming work?

Answer 3

• Because of the mental associations we have in our mind (ex. we feel heat, we think of the sun)

Question 4

Which two studies outline the effects of priming on perception and behaviour?

Answer 4

• Study 1: People perceived others as being warmer/friendlier if they walked in holding a warm coffee as opposed to a cold coffee.
• Study 2: People were more likely to distribute a gift certificate if the other person was holding a warm object as opposed to a cold object

Question 5

What’s one of the major conditions for priming to work?

Answer 5

• An effective prime needs to be strong enough to impact behaviour, but not so strong that it enters conscious thought

Question 6

What are the different kinds of priming>

Answer 6

• Semantic priming - using specific words to elicit a specific behaviour
• Associative priming - elicit concepts that are heavily related to one another (ex. mouse -> cheese)
• Repetition priming (ex. Pavlov’s dog) - often involves creating new associations
• Conceptual priming - using similar items to elicit other ideas (ex. computer, tablet, smartphone)

Question 7

What’s confirmation bias?

Answer 7

• A tendency to search for, notice, and interpret info that confirms one’s preconceptions
• Feels great to know we’re “right”. Don’t like feeling wrong
• Will “forget” disconfirming info.
• Selectively recall confirming info

Question 8

What are the causes of confirmation bias?

Answer 8

• Social polarization(!) (ex. ideological echo chambers)
• Belief perseverance (maintain pleasant feeling that you’re right, no matter what)
• Illusory associations (ex. negative stereotypes about other races, not grounded in real evidence)
• Discrimination
• Conspiracy theories (QAnon)

Question 9

What’s a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 9

-Beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment
- Whour ideas lead us to act in ways that produce their apparent confirmation

Question 10

What’s an example of self-fulfilling prophecy in education?

Answer 10

• Teacher expectations of other students can become self-fulfilling prophecies
• Ex. Had an older sibling in previous years who was great, will expect their younger sibling to be the same when they come into their class

Question 11

What’s an availability heuristic?

Answer 11

• Establishing likelihood based on what is “mentally accessible”
• What is mentally available depends on: recency, significance, frequency of thought, ease to remember

Question 12

What’s embodied cognition?

Answer 12

• The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgements

Question 13

Which processing system is explicit and which one is implicit?

Answer 13

• Explicit - System 2 (conscious)
• Implicit - System 1 (automatic)

Question 14

T/F: Confirmation bias helps explain why our self-images are so stable

Answer 14

• TRUE

Question 15

What does the term representativeness heuristic mean?

Answer 15

• To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category

Question 16

What is probability neglect?

Answer 16

• When we worry about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities
• Ex. An athlete training for a task that is out of reach, while ignoring the risk of potential injury (more likely to occur)

Question 17

What’s counterfactual thinking?

Answer 17

• Mentally stimulating what might have been.
• Easily picture an alternative outcome
• The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking

Question 18

What’s misinformation effect?

Answer 18

• People will incorporate false details/narratives into their memories during recall
• Children are especially susceptible to this

Question 19

What’s attribution theory?

Answer 19

• Analyzes how we explain people’s behaviours and what we infer from
• Misattribution occurs when we mistake someone’s intentions for their behaviour for something else.

Question 20

Dispositional attribution vs. Situational attribution?

Answer 20

• Dispositional - blame their consequences on their character/their disposition.
• Situational - balme their consequences on their external environment/the situation their in (it was out of their control)

Question 21

What’s spontaneous trait inference?

Answer 21

• The ease with which we infer other traits

Question 22

What’s the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 22

• Humans often underestimate the impact of the situation on an individual’s behaviour
• We value the situation more when evaluating our own behaviour

Question 23

What’s behavioural confirmation?

Answer 23

• People’s social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations

Question 24

What is attribution theory?

Answer 24

• How we explain people’s behaviour
• Done within and outside the individual

Question 25

Why do we make the attribution error?

Answer 25

• Perspective and situational awareness (actor-observer difference) - We know everything that’s going on in our lives
• Cultural differences (individualistic cultures are more likely to engage in FAE as opposed to collectivistic cultures