Chapter 4: Social Cognition Flashcards
Primacy effect
A type of order effect whereby the information presented first in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment
Occur often when the information is ambiguous.
What come first influences how the later information is interpreted.
Asch 1946 study
Aim: primacy effect
Procedures: Participants were asked to evaluate a hypothetical individual described by the following terms: intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious.
Participants rated the individual favorably, no doubt because of the influence of the two very positive terms that began the list. A second group read the same trait adjectives in the opposite order and formed a much less
favorable impression because the first two descriptive terms (stubborn and envious) were negative.
Recency effect
A type of order effect whereby the information presented last in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment.
Framing effects
The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented.
Spin framing
A form of framing that varies the content, not just the order, of what is presented
Positive versus negative framing
Positive framing is focusing on the good like meat is describe as 75% lean
Negative framing focuses on the negative/bad like meat being described as 25% fat.
The both mean the same thing just the framing is different
McNeil et al. 1982 Study
Aim: Positive versus negative framing
Procedures: More than 400 physicians were asked whether they
would recommend surgery or radiation for patients diagnosed with a certain type of cancer. Some were
told that of 100 previous patients who had the surgery, 90 lived through the postoperative period, 68 were still alive after a year, and 34 were still alive after five years. Eighty-two percent of these physicians recommended surgery. Others were given the same information, but it was framed in different language: 10 died during surgery or the postoperative period, 32 had died by the end of the first year, and 66 had died by the end of five years. Only 56 percent of the physicians given the
information in this form recommended surgery.
Implication: Negative information tends to attract more attention and have a greater psychological impact than positive information.
Construal level theory
A theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking: Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it.
Crocker 1982 Study
Aim: examine confirmation bias
Procedures: One group of participants was asked to determine whether working out the day before an important tennis match makes a player more likely to win. Another group was asked to determine whether working out the day before a match makes a player more likely to lose. Both groups could examine
any of four types of information before concluding: the number of players in a sample who worked out the previous day and won their match, the number of players who worked out and lost, the number of players who didn’t work out
the previous day and won, and the number of players who didn’t work out and lost.
Findings: However, participants tended not to seek out all the necessary information. Instead, participants exhibited confirmation bias: they were especially interested in examining the information that could potentially con firm the
proposition they were investigating.
Snyder & Swann 1978
Aim: confirmation bias
Procedures: Researchers asked one group of participants to interview someone and determine whether the target person was an extrovert; another group was asked to determine whether the target person was an introvert. Participants selected their interview questions from a list provided.
Overconfidence bias
The tendency for individuals to have greater confidence in their judgments and decisions than their actual accuracy merits.
Bottom-up processing
“Data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment.
Top-down processing
“Theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations
Schemas
Organized coherent packages in which related information is stored together
How do schemas affect our judgments?
They direct our attention, structure our memories, and influence our interpretations. But schemas can sometimes leads us to mischaracterize the world.
How does schema direct our attention?
Attention is selective since we can’t focus on everything.
The knowledge we bring to a given situation enables us to direct our attention to what’s most important while largely ignoring everything else.
Simons & Chabris 1999 study
Aim: Schemas and expectations guide our attention
Procedure: Participants watched a video of two teams of
three people, each passing a basketball back and forth. Members of one team wore white shirts, and
members of the other team wore black shirts. The researchers asked each participant to count the number of passes made between the members of one of the teams. Forty- five seconds into the action, a person wearing a gorilla costume strolled into the middle of the scene. Although a large gorilla might seem hard to miss, only half the participants noticed it!
Findings: The participants’ schemas about what is likely to happen in a game of catch directed their attention so intently to some parts of the video that they failed to see a dramatic stimulus they weren’t expecting.
How does schema influence memory?
We are most likely to remember stimuli that have captured our attention.
Information that fits a preexisting schema often enjoys an advantage in recall
Cohen 1981 Study
Aim: Schemas influencing memory
Procedure: Students watched a video of a husband and wife having
dinner together. Half of the students were told that the wife was a librarian and the other half that she was a waitress. The students later took a quiz that assessed their memory of what they had witnessed. The researchers asked them, for example, whether the woman was drinking wine (librarian stereotype) or beer (waitress stereotype) and whether she had received a history book (librarian) or romance novel (waitress) as a gift .
Findings: Students who thought the woman was a librarian recalled librarian-consistent information more accurately than librarian-inconsistent information, whereas those who thought she was a waitress did precisely the opposite.
How do schemas influence how we construe information?
The information that is most accessible in memory can influence how we construe new information.
Higgins, Rhole & Jones 1977 Study
Aim: Schemas influencing construal
Procedures: First, participants viewed several trait words projected on a screen as part of a perception experiment. Half the participants were shown the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent among a set of ten traits. The other half was shown the words reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn. After, the participants moved on to the second study on reading comprehension, in which they read a short paragraph about Donald and rated him on several trait scales.
Findings: As the investigators expected, participants who had been exposed to the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and
persistent formed more favorable impressions of Donald than those who were shown the less flattering words.
Implication: Thus, participants’ schemas about personality traits like adventurousness and recklessness influenced the inferences they made about Donald.
Priming
The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question.
Subliminal stimuli
Below the threshold of conscious awareness stimuli can prime a schema sufficiently to influence subsequent information processing
What are the ways schemas can be activated?
Recency- how recent the schema
frequency of the activation of the schemas
What is recency?
If a schema has been brought to mind recently, it tends to be more accessible and hence ready to use
What is frequent activation?
If a person uses a particular schema frequently, it may become chronically accessible.
What is the intuitive system?
Operates quickly and automatically, is based on associations, and performs many of its operations simultaneously
What is the rational system?
Slower and more controlled, it is based on rule and deduction, and performs its operations one at a time.
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts that provide serviceable answers to common problems of judgment
Availability Heuristic
The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind
Representativeness heuristic
The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and groups prototypes or between cause and effect.
What are the risks of the availability heuristic?
Risks involve assessments of the likelihood of different hazards.
Since people will be worried about hazards they hear a lot about in the media and are not as worried about hazards that receive less attention, even if the latter is actually more dangerous.
Fluency
The feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information
How does fluency affect people?
Fluency influences the judgments people make.
Influence how people process relevant information
How can the representative heuristic be useful?
It can make accurate judgments about people and events depending on the extent that our prototype of the category is accurate and most members of the category resemble the prototype
What is the problem with the representativeness heuristic?
If relied on exclusively, it can blind us to other potentially useful sources of information like base-rate information.
It also affects people’s assessments of causality. Since we think that big effects are thought to have big causes, small
Base-rate Information
Information about the relative frequency of events or members of different categories in a population
Kahneman and Tversky 1973
Aim: Ignore or underutilize base-rate information when assessing whether someone belongs to a particular category
Procedures: Participants were asked to consider the following description of Tom. One group of participants ranked nine academic disciplines in terms of the
likelihood that Tom chose them as his field of specialization. A second group ranked the nine disciplines in terms of how similar
they thought Tom was to the typical student in each discipline. A final group did not see the description of Tom; they merely
estimated the percentage of all graduate students in the United States who were enrolled in each of the nine disciplines.
Findings: The participants’ responses were
based entirely on how much the description of Tom resembled the typical student in each eld. By basing their responses exclusively on representativeness, the participants failed to consider the other useful source of information: base-rate frequency.
What is the impact of the joint operation of availability and representative heuristics?
Can create an illusory correlation between two variables.
A judgment of representativeness leads us to expect an association between the two entities, and this expectation, in turn, makes us more likely to remember instances in which they are paired.
Illusory correlation
The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not
Regression effect
The statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other
Regression fallacy
The failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to instead offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity.
Rosenthal and Jacobson Pygmalion in the Classroom
Aim: examined the effect of teachers’ expectations on students’ intellectual development and achievement
Procedures: All students in a particular school took an IQ test. At the beginning of the school year, the researchers told the teachers that about 20 percent of their students were “late bloomers”, they were expected to show substantial IQ growth over the year.
Findings: The gains for young children were shockingly high–15 points for first-graders and 10 points for second-graders. These increases seemed to indicate that teachers’
expectations for children created a powerful self-fulling prophecy: If the teacher believed the child was going to gain in intelligence, the teacher behaved toward the child in a way that such a gain was likely to occur
Incremental theory of intelligence
The belief that intelligence is something people can improve by working at it.
Malleable quality
Entity theory of intelligence
The belief that intelligence is something people are born with and can’t change.
Fixed, predetermined thing
