Lecture 3 Flashcards
Social cognition
The study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them:
interpret the past
understand the present
predict the future
Problems with the accuracy of social info
Bad is stronger than good:
People tend to be more attentive to negative info than positive info
-Implications: for survival, if it bleeds, it leads (news orients to the negative, to get more viewers)
Order effects:
The order in which info is presented affects how we interpret and remember it
-primacy effect: things presented first have a big effect
-recency effect: things presented last have a big effect
-implications: first impressions (but also recent ones), study habits
Framing effects:
The way info is presented influences how we process and understand it
-positive vs negative framing
-health message framing effects
Order effects
The order in which info is presented affects how we interpret and remember it
- primacy effect: things presented first have a big effect
- recency effect: things presented last have a big effect
- implications: first impressions (but also recent ones), study habits
Framing effects
The way info is presented influences how we process and understand it
- positive vs negative framing
- health message framing effects
- > breast cancer study: “benefits of mammography” vs “risk of neglecting mammography” -> detection behavior: negative framing effect
- > flu prevention: positive is better
Assimilation
Interpreting new info in terms of existing beliefs
-see what we expect to see
Hartorf & Cantril (1954) Princeton-Dartmouth game
-each team said that other was cheating and failed to see faults of own team
Rosenhan and colleagues (1973) sane in insane places
-workers saw normal habits of normal people as psychotic because in institution
Confirmation bias
Tendency to search for info that confirms our preconceptions
Sometimes accidental, sometimes motivated
Darley & Gross (1983) Expectations of affluence
-descriptions of girl differed, same video of her intelligence test; those with poorer description rated as more hesitant, etc.
Ross & Lepper (1979) Capital punishment study
-exact same evidence, but supported preconception
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Our expectations lead us to act in ways that cause others to confirm our expectations
Rosenthal’s teacher self-fulfilling prophecy study
Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid (1977) Self-fulfilling prophecy of attractiveness
- men interact with women over intercom (no sight, but have folder with supposed pic and description- only pic varied)
- > participants rated the more attractive pictured women as warmer and friendlier (halo effect)
- > third party voted their voices and they actually were warmer and friendlier, cause all by how the man interacted with her
Belief perseverance
Persistance of one’s initial conceptions, even in the face of opposing evidence
Andersen et al. (1980) Firefighter study
- half told being a risk takes makes for better firefighter, other half told opposite
- > debriefed, then asked their own belief, and agreed with what they were told, even after informed that it was completely false
Overconfidence phenomenon
Tendency to be more confident than correct; to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
Correlation between eyewitnesses’ confidence and accuracy is actually NEGATIVE
Unrealistic optimism
Overly positive expectations for the future
Major exception to optimistic tendency:
Bracing for the worst: becoming less optimistic (even pessimistic) as the “moment of truth” draws near
Bracing for the worst
Becoming less optimistic (even pessimistic) as the “moment of truth” draws near
- Helps soften the blow
- Helps manage anxiety, avoids disappointment
Exam study (Shepperd, Ouellette, Fernandez, 1996)
- overly optimistic 1 month before
- just above actual results 5 days and 50 min before
- 3 sec before feedback, very pessimistic
Heuristics
A judgement strategy (a rule of thumb or a mental shortcut) that is quick but imperfect
Availability heuristic
Used to evaluate the frequency or likelihood of an event on the basis of how quickly examples are readily available in your memory
One explanation- media attention
Risk judgements
Representative heuristic
Used to estimate the extent to which a person (or thing) is representative of the average person (or thing) in the category
-works pretty well most of the time
Prototypes of criminals, serial killers, etc.
Attribution theories
Theories of how people explain other’s (and their own) behavior and the consequences of these causal explanations
- external attributions
- internal attributions
