Learning goals 2: Belief and judgement Flashcards
What are schemata and what function do they have?
Shema is mental templates/ patterns that structure knowledge about objects, people, roles and events.
Their function is:
- Guiding memory
- Complexity reduction
- Contribute to predictability
- Provide behavioural scripts
What is priming?
Priming is to activate a particular association in memory.
Assosiation is learned relationships. Ex. One part is activated because it is there, and then the associated part becomes activated as well.
We categorise our mind into shemas or categorization. Visual features might therefore prime certain assosiations. This is linked to stereotyping, discrimination and prejudice.
What is the consequence of some personality traits being more central than others?
The central traits influence the perception of other traits.
Ex. The words “cold” and “warm” influence how you see and describe the words Intelligent, skillful, determined and practical.
What is the confirmation bias?
The confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that confirms ones preconceptions, rather than considering opposing information.
Name and explain the representativeness heuristic and availability heuristic.
Heuristic is a thinking strategy and problem solving method that enabeles quick and easy judgement and serrch prosedures. There are several heuristical problems, among them are:
The representativeness heuristic:
- The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
- It is a snap judgement of whether someone/ something fits a category.
Availability heuristics:
- A rule of thumb or a quick judgement of the likelihood of events or things based on their availability in memory.
- If something comes readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
- We can quickly over-weighting vivid instances.
- Ex. How people fear airplane crashes much more than car crashes, although car crashes is much more prevalent.
What is an illusory correlation?
Illusory correlation is a perception of a relationship where none exists or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
We search for order in random events
- We remember certain coincidences, but we seldome remember all the times when events do not coincidence.
Norsk: En falsk assosiasjon kan dannes fordi sjeldne eller nye hendelser er mer fremtredende og derfor har en tendens til å fange ens oppmerksomhet
What is the fundamental attribution error?
The fundamental attribution theory is the tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences in explaining other people’s behaviour.
It has also been called correspondence bias because we so often see behavior as corresponding to a disposition.
Ex.
Vi dømmer andre i steden for å se på sitauasjonen. Eks. Du møter en ny person, de oppfører seg ikke bra = de er frekk. Der ser vi ikke på om omstendighetene kan forklare oppførselen, vi dømmer bare personen som frekk basert på handlingen deres.
What is the belief in a just world?
The tendency to believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve. Because people want to believe that the world is fair, they will look for ways to explain or rationalize away injustice, often blaming the person in a situation who is actually the victim.
It is used to understand stigma and victim derogation:
- Rape victims
- AIDS
- Eating disorders
- Gender discrimination in workplace.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when peoples expectations lead to the occurrence of the expected behavior or outcome.
Ex. A teachers expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
- Teachers expectation: “Frida’s older brother was brilliant so I bet she is too”.
- Teachers behavior: Smiling more at Frida, teaching her more, calling on her more, giving more time to answer.
- Students’ behavior: Frida responds enthusiastically.
What are attributions?
Attributions is 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.
In short: how we explain other peoples behaviour.
What attribution dimensions are there?
There are two dominant attribution dimensions based on locus of causality:
- Dispositional: the persons dispositions and traits
- Situational: the environment.
Provide examples of what kinds of reasoning leads us to assume internal versus external causes for behavior.
We tend to assume peoples behaviour is not random, but motivated and intentional.
Based on the findings of Jones and Davis (1965) they concluded that we use 5 different sources of information to judge wheter a behaviour should be an internal or external explaniation:
- Was it freely choosen? –> internal
- Was the behaviour unusual? internal
- Was it socially desirable behaviour? –> not so informative
- Does it serve self-interest? –> internal
- Does it have a high impact on us personally? –> internal
We have a preference for internal attributions as they make people appear more predictable to us, owing to stable traits and dispositions.
What is the meaning of the statements: “we respond not to reality as it is but to reality as we construe it” (Myers, 2020) - provide example studies illustrating this idea.
The statement relates to how we perceive and interpret information.
- We precive and recall events through the filters of our own culturally influenced asuptions.
- Judge events,informed by our intuition, by implicit rules that guide our snap judgements, and by our moods.
- Explain events by attributing them to the situation or to the person.
Both attributions and different biases plays a role.
We precive and respon to the world as we take it in. this is therefore affected by our shemas, stereotupes, attributions etc.
