Chapter 4 Flashcards
Snap judgements
Extremely quick judgements with insufficient information
An example of snap judgement would be judging someone’s personality by their facial components and can lead to pros and cons in different conditions. In court, the ones with a perceived ____ personality would be more likely to be released than the ___-ones, but the contrary is true in the job market.
trustworthy; dominant
Although snap judgements are associated with insufficient information, it tends to ____ with later judgements and can lead to ____.
Correlate; biases
Types of misleading firsthand information
pluralistic ignorance & Self-fulfilling prophecy
Pluralistic ignorance is…
A misperception of a group norm from observation of people who are acting at odds with their beliefs in order to avoid social consequences.
An example of pluralistic ignorance: In a classroom setting
Wanting to ask a question in class, but since you have observed that no one raises their hand, you are led to believe that everyone else understands the question, and eventually you quit raising your hand to avoid exposing your “ignorance”.
Self-fulfilling prophecy is…
The tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen.
*ex. Police interrogations
What does the Rosenthal Study illustrate?
This study illustrates the self-fulfilling prophecy, where the teachers put more effort into their students when they are told the students have more potential, even if the two groups of students are at the same level.
Misleading Secondhand Information
Distorted information where people choose what to emphasize and leave out (exaggerations and understatements)
Why does misleading 2nd hand information prevail in the society?
- Entertainment factor: The storyteller want the stories to be more interesting
- Bad-news bias
- “Telephone game”: Information gets distorted every level it goes from the source.
What is bad news bias?
Bad news is more interesting than good news, and they often get more media coverage than good news. This can be due to the competition between private news channels for viewership.
Order effect
The order in which the information is presented to you can affect the judgement
Order effect: Priming effect
The first thing that was exposed to us is matters the most
*Most relevant when information is ambiguous; First impression creates similar slots to follow-up information.
Order effect: Recency effect
The last piece of information is the most important and the most memorable
*Most relevant when there’s a lot of information available and it’s presented in lists
Two subtypes of order effect
Priming & Recency effects
Both of the subtypes of order effect can happen together. In practice, the ____ effect shapes our interpretation of future information, and the ____ effect stands out the most when judging.
priming; recency
Framing effect
The way information is presented can be “framed” for the way it’s processed and understood.
Example of framing effect: Smoking & Praying
The phrase “smoking while praying” adds the negative component to a positive one, making it sound worse than it should. However, the phrase “praying while smoking” adds a positive component to a negative one, making it better than it should. The two phrases convey the exact same condition (smoking and praying at the same time), but how the phrases are framed will give people different impression.
Spin framing
Changes content of what is presented to portray information in a certain way
Positive vs. Negative Framing
emphasizing the good vs. emphasizing the bad
Temporal Framing
The time-scale in which you present things affects judgement
*The far future feels more abstract and inviting — the present seems concrete and daunting
*The reason why 健身房永远能有那么多人办卡
Construal-level theory
The temporal perspective from which people view events has important and predictable implications for how they construe them
*Making decisions sounds great — until you actually have to do them (Outcome vs. Process)
Types of temporal perspectives
- Future vs. Present
- Abstract vs. Concrete
- Meaning vs. Detail
Confirmation Bias
We tend to test propositions by searching for evidence that would support them
*Can lead to biased research since everyone wants their own hypothesis to be supported, and can make people ignore contradictory information.
*Can happen when there is only a suggestion of the “truth”!
Types of information processing
- Bottom-up and Top-down processing
Bottom-up processing forms ____ based on ____
Conclusions; stimuli
Top-down processing filters ____ through ____/____
Information; expectations/knowledge
Bottom-up information starts from ____ ____, while top-down processing starts from ____.
Sensory input; schemas
Our focus is driven by our schemas & expectations; we choose what to focus on and expectations fill in the blanks, and a great deal of information gets lost as noise. This phenomenon is known as…
Schemas and Attention
What does the Waitress/librarian study illustrate?
It illustrates how memory can be unreliable because people tend to remember what they THINK they see.
In the study, the participants were told differently about the identity of the wife in a dinner, and when they took a quiz about what they remembered, the participants relied on the stereotype toward the identity to check the answers.
What is priming effect?
The effect when information activates a concept and makes it accessible.
Why has priming effect been criticized?
It suffers the most from incorrect methodology and/or unethical research, and many of the studies can’t be replicated.
Subliminals
Stimuli below the threshold of conscious awarness
In the Donald study, one group of participants associated Donald with positive descriptive words, and rated Donald ____, while the other group is exposed to negative descriptive words and rated Donald ____. This is an example of ____ ____.
Positively; Negatively; Priming Effect
Which schema are activated and applied in the priming effect?
Recent and frequent ones
List the three ways our intuition and reason can interact with each other and affect our judgement
They can agree or disagree with each other, or our reason can never come in and let our intuition take the full lead.
Our intuition is made ____ (automatically/carefully controlled), and are also called ____
automatically; Heuristics
What is heuristics?
Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient to common problems of judgement
What are the types of heuristics?
Availability, representativeness, and the two combined
Availability heuristic
Judgement of frequency/probability made based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind.
*What you remember SHAPES what you THINK
Fluency
Feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information
*We judge positively when things are more fluent
____ leads people to slow down, which can be helpful when making judgements.
Disfluency
Representativeness heuristic
Assessing events, people, or objects by comparing them to an existing prototype in one’s mind
How accurate the representative heuristic can be depends on three factors:
1. How accurate is your ____
2. How ____ are members of the group?
3. What is the ____ ____?
- prototype
- similar
- base rate
Base-rate information
Information about relative frequency of events or members of different groups
Base rate neglect
When only looking at schema/representativeness heuristic to make decisions instead of the relative frequency
What does the Tom study illustrate?
In the Tom study, the two groups of participants were asked to categorize Tom to different groups of people, and found the two groups to have highly correlated results. This shows that people ignored the base rate and only relied on their prototypes
The combination of availability and representative heuristic can lead to ____ ____, the belief of 2 variables being ____ with each other when they are actually not.
Illusory correlation; correlated
When would base rate be ignored?
When the base rate doesn’t have direct causal significance
*ex. 0.4% of people being lawyers does not CAUSE Tom to be a lawyer or not.
The tendency for things to return to average
Regression Effect
The tendency for us to ignore regression effect
Regression Fallacy
