Quiz 2 Flashcards
How does our unconscious transform from the physical to the psychological
Relate the exaptation (re-use) of pre-existing innate concepts and structures from early learning concerning the physical world from evolved motives like survival and reproduction to metaphorically related physical concepts which activate the psychological concepts.
Bargh & Morsella 2008: did conscious replace unconscious
Conscious capacities did not replace unconscious mechanisms
Analogy- nuclear power plants still use transistors and cathode ray tube displays because they can’t be taken off-line to replace old technology
Daniel Dennett 1991: our use of analogies
We often use analogies for behaviour, for example: warmth searching = security seeking
Rozin 1976; Reber 1991: conscious depends on unconscious
Unconscious mechanisms furnish inputs into conscious choice and decision processes — the later evolving conscious circuits start with, and depend on, the unconscious mechanisms, so the later are ‘locked in’ the mind forever.
Gollwitzer et al. 2020: broken patterns
Dislike of broken patterns (non-social deviancy) predicts greater moral condemnation and punishment of harm and purity violations.
Gollwitzer 2017: Why do we dislike deviance? And how it’s related to prejudice
Children and adults dislike of broken patterns is correlated with measures of racism and prejudice. “Types” of people and types of behaviour that ‘break the pattern’ are different from what most people are like or do, can be disliked merely because they are different.
Hills, Gladstone et al: Forging through the mind
Participants that played a game where they searched for treasure, food, gold, etc were faster and more productive in searching their memories for examples of types of events or remembering various features of their past. Searching one’s mind for memories is akin to foraging for food, it’s that physical physiological relationship.
McDonald, Webster, Stillman, Tice and Baumeister: Does Tylenol cure breakups
Tylenol reduced the amount of physical pain but also the amount of emotional pain that the individual was feeling because our mind conflates emotional pain with physical pain
Esienberger, Lieberman, Williams: does rejection hurt
Same region of the brain lit up when feeling emotional pain as it does when feeling physical pain
Michael Anderson: Neural Re-use
Distributed representations and circuits that can be applied to analogous, more abstract contexts and situations. Our brain uses similar structures for different contexts that are similar
Gilbert et al. 2005; Xu et al 2015: hunger and shopping
Hunger makes you buy more both at the supermarket (Gilbert), but also at Walmart and Target (Xu). Self reported hunger is correlated with the amount of money spent on the shoppers’ receipts. Hungry people also take more free stuff if it is available
Huang, Sedlovskaya, Ackerman, & Bargh: Disease avoidance and political attitudes
Vaccination against a virus reduces negative attitudes towards immigrants
Using disinfectant after being reminded of the dangers of the flu virus reduces negative attitudes towards immigration
Concern for physical safety underlies concern for social/cultural safety
Zhong & Liljenquist: physical and moral cleansing
Study 1: Participants who imagine themselves committing moral transgressions were more likely to chose hand wipes as a gift rather than something else
Study 2: hand copied stories of moral transgressions then rated several products — rated cleaning products higher
Study 3: willingness to help a desperate grad student was very dependent on whether or not the participant washed their hands after remembering a time where the did something morally wrong. Participants who cleaned there hands were less likely to help.
Lee Schwarz 2019: cleansing of states
Washing hands also washes away temporary states, such as luck, or short term memory. Thats why hockey players don’t shave during the playoffs or athletes don’t wash their gear. Cleansing is a separation between two properties
Chapman et al. 2009: EMG muscle responses to stimuli
Same EMG muscle responses to physically disgusting stimuli and morally disgusting behaviour
Schnall et al 2008: moral judgments in dirty or clean rooms
Moral judgments are more negative and severe when made in clean rooms vs dirty rooms or after exposure to unclean vs clean objects. Highlights the relationship between disgust and moral condemnation (Haidt), and cleanliness and moral purity or goodness.
John Bowlby: Attachment and Loss
Physical warmth is naturally conflated with social warmth in early experience
Williams & Bargh 2008: physical warmth creates social warmth
Example: Drinking a hot beverage gives the feeling of physical warmth which is conflated with social warmth and unconsciously alters our behaviour
Solomon Asch: warm and cold as central traits
Warm or cold descriptors used as traits of individual’s personality
Fiske, Glick, Xu, Cuddy: warm and cold as traits
Traits perceived as either warm or cold dictate universal dimensions of outgroup stereotypes
Williams and Bargh: temperature priming and personality impressions
Replaced the words warm or cold with physical sensations of warm or cold given the same character traits otherwise, people tended to view a person more positively after feeling warm objects vs cold
Ijzerman et al. 2012: warmth priming of daycare aged children
Daycare children primed with warmth shared more if their stickers with other children
Kang, Williams, Clark, Bargh: social neuroscience research: the role of insula
Left anterior insula becomes more activated following cold versus warm temperature sensation , and also becomes more activated following betrayals of trust in the economics game.
Zhong & Leonardelli 2008: warmth after rejection
Greater preference for warm food such as soup for lunch compared to cold food after a rejection experience
Ijzerman & Semin: Room temperature estimation
People estimate room temperature to be colder after rejection experience, and warmer after inclusion experience
Ijzerman et al. 2012: room temperature and rejection (skin temperature change)
Skin temperature decreased by 1/2 a degree after an exclusion event and increased 1/2 a degree after inclusion evenly
Cacioppon 1984: social isolation effect on body
Social isolation and loneliness cause vascular constriction. That’s why you feel colder.
Ingaki & Eisenberger: shared neural mechanisms underlying social warmth and physical warmth
Reading socially warm and neutral messages from friends and family and holding physically warm and neutral temperature objects yielded the same results on in fMRI. Significant correlation between body temperature and feeling close to others at the same time.
Fetterman et al 2017: daily diary study
Reports of feeling warm or cold during the day are related to how many positive pro-social or negative antisocial behaviours the person preformed that day.
The scaffolding model
Evolved goals for survival and physical safety serve as the basis of goals that develop later in the individuals life for psychological and social safety.
Jean Mandler: language acquisition
Early spatial and physical concepts are the scaffold on which language acquisition is based
Early development scaffolding core concepts
We develop psychological concepts based on physical analogies to them
Jean Mendler: psychological concepts based on physical analogies
Infants can analyze and compare externally available information — formation of spatial concepts (left, right, up, down) with no access to internal states. Later those internal states are understood using available physical concepts in analogically fashion.
What are the earliest concepts formed by an infant?
Spatial and other directly experienced physical concepts. These concepts provide the foundational structure for subsequent abstract concepts.
Spatial concepts: Distance
Various forms of distance are swappable. Meaning physical distance can be conflated with social distance
Schubert 2005: your highness
Power and verticality share the same metaphor
Ex: looking up to someone
Nelson & Simmons 2007: spatial/verticality effects
People are more likely to travel south to buy a sale item than to travel north. Idea of conflation of physical distance and social distance.
Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh: haptic (touch) priming and metaphors
Metaphorical effects of physical touch on social judgement
Heavy = serious
Hard = ridged, difficult
Rough = effortful
Smooth = fluent, easy
Haptic priming : hard vs soft
Hard chair = less compromise in negotiations
Michael Schafer et al 2018: soft on crime
Feeling something hard vs soft activates somatosensory cortex. People were more lenient when judging crimes and how much punishment should be given after feeling something soft than something hard. Activation of somatosensory cortex is correlated with harshness of sentence
Haptic priming: rough vs smooth
Ratings of integration between supervisor and employee were rated as easier and more fluent if the participants felt something smooth, and more difficult if they felt something rough
Schaefer, Heinz, & Rotte: replicated studies of social priming
Replicated Ackerman et al. With rough and smooth physical primes. Rough primes caused judgements that interaction was less smooth and coordinated. There was a significant correlation between primary somatosensory cortex activation and rough judgements of interaction coordination.
Meier, Robinson et al: physical and social sweetness
Eating sweet foods is related to prosocial behaviours such as helpfulness, smiling and pleasantness. We also believe that people who like sweet foods are more agreeable and have more prosocial personalities, intentions and behaviour.
Tasting something sweet increased self reports of helpfulness and agreeableness
Stepper & Strack: Postural feedback
Slouching or upright posture during tests; sloucher’s feel less proud upon learning they’d succeeded in a test. Effect directed from body to emotions
Chen & Bargh: evaluation and muscular readiness
Positive evaluation produces approach muscular tendency, negative evaluation produces avoidance muscular tendency
Tom et al: Head shaking and evaluation
People liked the pen they were using more when they happened to be shaking head up and down compared to when they were shaking their head from left to right
Strack et al: reverse engineering the emotion-expression connection
Holding pen between teeth or lips (simulating a smile or frown) affected the participants judgement on how funny a cartoon was
Lakoff & Johnson: metaphorical thought
We think and communicate easily in terms of analogies. Abstract terms are metaphorically related to basic physical terms: hot-head, close relationship etc
Barsalou: embodied cognition
The physical direction which you looked affected how many birds (looking up) you could name or flowers (looking down) you could name in an unfurnished room.
Akpinar & Berger: analogies with physical experience
Phrases and concepts that contain physical experiences are much more likely to catch on in popular usage than other forms of description
Ex: Hot topic
Embodied cognition
Memory encodes bodily states associated with experiences, including psychological states associated with emotional experiences
Innate
Hard-wired connections have developed over evolutionary time between physical states and common concepts and motives
Early learning
Scaffolding of more abstract, higher order concepts onto early formed original concepts based on physical experiences
Shared reality/ social communication with analogies
We all share the same physical experiences and easily talk to one another, and understand one another, when we make analogies to those physical experiences
Early-developed guides to adaptive behaviour
Genetic: genetic motives such as survival, reproduction, food etc
Epigenetic: very early life experiences (with care takers)
Cultural: behaviour influenced by cultural norms and current environment
Learning: even more fine-tuned guides, given local circumstances
Jeff Simpson and colleagues: early attachment
Attachment at age 1 predicts:
Social abilities in grade school
Number of friends in high school
How long their relationships last in their 20’s
Mischell: the marshmallow test
Measured how long the child could wait and eat the marshmallow or pretzel stick. Kids that could wait at age 4, had better grades in high school, had lower chances of teen pregnancy, and drug abuse, lower arrest rates, and greater income at 30, and lower divorce rate.
Block & Block: physical safety motivations and political attitudes
Fearful 4 year old children were more likely to report conservative attitudes at age 23
Dunham et al. 2008: stereotypes and inter group biases
There exist tendencies at birth to favour one’s in group and stereotype out groups — also children soak up cultural views about social values at early ages
IAT: implicit association test
Measures the associative strength between pairs of concepts such as social categories and attributes. Measures implicit biases.
Gilbert 1993: soaking up cultural influences “the assent of man”
Similar to automatic disposition model — first stage is to accept what you’re told as true, second stage is to correct, but only if you have time, ability and motivation to do so. Accept cultural influences as true. This develops stereotypes.
Chanowit & Langer 1981: premature cognitive commitment
We accept cultural stereotypes early on and don’t counter-argue because it is not relevant to us at the time — but it can come back to bite us later in life
Steele & Aronson 1995: stereotype activation (group identity)
Activating or making group identity salient has effect in persons motivation and performance
Ambady, Shih, Pittinsky: cultural infusion of stereotypes
Made gender or ethnicity salient through simple drawings of two children playing together and then administered an age appropriate math quiz. Asian American 5 year old math performance increased when priming their Asian identity.
Fredrickson et al: priming stereotypes
Asked to rank 3 consumer products — unisex fragrance, clothing and food item, including trying on a swimsuit or sweater in the mirror, then took 15 min GMAT quiz. Women who tired on the bathing suit did worse on the math test, males’ math performance was unaffected
Weisbuch, ambady, et al: steryotipic/racist nonverbal reactions
Edited sound out of clips of popular tv shows and analyzed how much character liked who they were talking to based on facial expressions. There was a significantly greater dislike shown toward black vs white characters even though they were of equal status.
News magazines and TV news broadcasts
Poverty in America stories disproportionally depicted black families (65% of the time) even though black families only represented 29% of americas poor population
Payne et al: historical roots of racial bias
Can trace the historical roots of implicit racial bias in slavery by overlaying IAT scores with density of slavery
Uhlmann, Poehlman, and Bargh on Max Weber: the Protestant work ethic
Fascination in America of the minimum wage dishwasher who wins the lottery and continues working. Only occurs in America
Uhlmann et al: the puritan ethic
Founding puritan ethic for austerity and denial of pleasure, against promiscuity and for self-denial and control
Second Asian Americans possess both Asian and American identities
Zillman & Bryant: excitation transfer theory
Arousal carries over to other activities
Right after exercise on a bike = awareness of arousal and awareness of its source = no effect
10 minutes afterward = no arousal, no awareness or arousal = no effect
5 minutes afterward = arousal still present, no awareness of arousal = effect
Dutton & Aron: pedestrian bridge
After getting given a pretty girls phone number: more calls after walking across the rickety bridge than the safe bridge because the person is more aroused. Even though participants insisted it had nothing to do with the bridge
Schwarz & Clore: weather effect on mood
The days weather significantly affected life satisfaction ratings, but not when attention was called to the weather. Illustrates the misattribution of current feelings to plausible cause, and demonstrates general lack of awareness of true source of those feelings
Hirshleifer & Shumway: how the weather affects us
Found that sunshine was strongly and significantly correlated with stock returns and showed that the days weather induces happiness and upbeat moods that transfers to economic behaviour
Post conscious effect/carryover effects
Misattribution of the reason for later behaviour or feeling to features of the present, not realizing the effect of the recent past
Maxur, Amir & Ariely: the dishonesty of honest people
Given the opportunity to cheat by recycling their answer sheet after so there was no evidence how many they did people cheated given the opportunity but not when they recited the 10 commandments prior to the test
Sharif et al: meta-analysis of religious priming studies
Unconscious reminders, prompts, and cues about religious beliefs increase subsequent prosocial behaviour, moral behaviour, and altruistic behaviour
Gary Dell 1986: cascade model of language production
How thoughts and ideas are put into grammatically correct order, unconsciously
Storms 1958: Task carry over effects
Tasked participants with memorizing words and then had them freely associate them. Unexpectedly, storms found that words presented in memory task were more likely than usual to be given as associates
Segal 1966/67; Koriat & Feuerstein 1976: priming as an experimental technique
Words presented in a first task were more likely that usual to show up as free associates in a subsequent task, even though participants had failed to recall them at the end of the first task.
Implicit memory
Influences of experience on judgement and behaviour in the absence of explicit memory for those experiences
Schacter, Weiskrantz, Reber: Amnesiac priming effects intact in dense amnesia
Exposure to words in the first task increases likelihood of use in the second task even though they do not remember even being in the first task at all
Higgins, Rholes & Jones: memory words effect on impression
Participants studied “memory words” (trait words like adventurous) and then were given an impression task. Participants tended to interpret ambiguous behaviours in terms of memory words and their liking of the target person in the impression task was influenced by the memory words from the first task — a carryover effect of one task to the next
Srull & Wyer: priming effects on judgement using scrambled sentence test
Exposure to trait terms influenced the participants judgment of the target in the story they read afterwards.
Bargh, Chen, Burrows: carryover effects on behaviour (study 1)
Primed rude or polite words on a purported language task then measured how long it took for the participant to interrupt a conversation in the hallway. Most participants did not interrupt at all after polite priming
Fouls et al: contagion rudeness in the workplace
Catching rudeness is like catching a cold
Study 1: partners rudeness in negotiation affected own rudeness in next 2 interactions
Study 3: witnessed rude (or polite) behaviour of one employee to another after being asked to take the weekend shift then answered customer emails; those who witnessed rude behaviour were more likely to be rude when writing back.
Perception-behaviour Link
- Principle ideomotor action
- Mimicry, imitation, vicarious learning
- ‘Mirror neurons’ and premotor cortex
Hommel and others: Ideomotor action (monkey see monkey do)
Perceiving another’s actions make it more likely you will do the same thing because of shared representations for the same kind of action
Jeannerod 1999; perani et al 1999; Grezes & Decety 2001: activation of motor representations
Merely hearing a verb, or retrieving a verb from memory, activates corresponding motor representations in the brain
Chameleon effect
Non conscious behavioural mimicry
Perception-behaviour link
Infants show mimicry at a very young age, supporting its “hard-wired” nature
John cacioppo: loneliness
knowing just 1 lonely person increases your risk of loneliness by 40%
Kramer et al 2014: Facebook study
Facebooks own researches manipulated ‘news feed’ to make it more positive or more negative than usual, by allowing more of one or the other type of post through usual filter. Changing the news feed changed users’ own mood or positivity/negativity of their own posts
Chatrand and Bargh: Chameleon study 2
Confederate deliberately imitated participant, participant later rated the interaction as having gone more smoothly, and liked the confederate more if they had subtly imitated vs not imitated them. Unconscious imitation thus increases bonding and liking between initial strangers.
Chatrand & Bargh study 3: ratings of smoothness interaction
People who are more empathetic also found to imitate more than non empathetic individuals
Jacob et al: effect if mimicry on sales of electronics
When customers were mimicked they were 80% more likely to buy a MP3 compared to 62% of those not mimicked; there was also a greater liking of the clerk and the store itself
Wiltermuth & Heath: synchrony and cooperation
More rhythmic synchrony produces ‘group-like’ bonds between strangers. Participants engaged in activity together creates greater trust and cooperation among former strangers in economic game.
Ex: church rituals
Zajonic, Niedenthal 1987: couples and their appearance
Couples judged as looking more similar the longer they’ve been together because they mimic facial expressions and behaviour
4 External cues for behaviour
Action concepts: trait terms, verbs
Observed behaviour of others
Signs/consequences of behaviour of others
Situational features
Mark Frank: Positive interrogation techniques (chameleon effect)
Facilitating bonding through imitation and mimicry increased information attained and also the quality of the information attained
Harris, Bargh, Brownell 2009: food ads prime eating behaviour
Children and adults viewed 5 min TV comedy show with embedded food ads. There was a bowl of snacks in front of the participants. Those exposed to food ads ate 45% more of the snacks while watching the tv show
Naimi et al (2016): Alcohol ads and teenage drinking
Strong positive relation between the number of alcoholic drinks consumed and the amount of alcohol ads viewed. Only worked on kids that had already tried drinking before
Contagion and conformity
Perceive more than just the physical, we also perceive situations that have certain kinds of behaviours associated with them
Langer et al: situational scripts
We assume that certain events will follow the usual pattern and sequence that we are accustomed to for example church service, daily routines. It saves limited attention but can miss deviations and cause us to make mistakes.
Situational cues to behaviour
Features of common situations can also activate behavioural tendencies, and promote conformity to social norms
Aarts & Dijksterhuis: the silence of the library
Student taking a note either to the cafeteria or the library. Student taking note to the library were quieter and talked more softly in the hallways than if they were on the way to the cafeteria. Location influences behaviour
Kay, Wheeler, Bargh & Ross: Briefcase and the Backpack: priming the prisoners dilemma
Backpack primed cooperative behaviour, briefcase primed competitive behaviour
Berger et al: priming contextual influences on voting behaviour
Voting in a school resulted in more support for education. Voting in churches resulted in voting in line with religious or church positions. Contextual priming influences important real world decisions
Cohn, Fehr, & Marechal: situated identities
Significantly greater over-reporting for bankers when their banker identity was primed in the coin toss game than when it was not. Situated model of behaviour, using priming produce unconscious influences
Lhermitte syndrome
Patients had Frontal lobe damage, those who Lhermitte mentioned the word museum to prior to entering an apartment proceeded to tour it, inspecting objects as if it were a museum. Patients also primed with the word doctor, acted as if they were a doctor and took the examiners blood pressure.
Keizer et al: the spreading of disorder
Anti-social behaviour is contagious. If more graffiti is seen in the area this results in an increase of anti-social behaviour. Another example are the highway death toll signs that resulted in an increase in the amount of deaths on the highway instead of a decrease
Robert Cialdini: social norms and disobedience
Having three burglars on the national park signs preventing taking redwood bark resulted in an increase in redwood bark being taken than signs with only one burglar.
California electricity consumption study: main factor was neighbours behaviour but respondents said it was the least influential factor
Must we always do what others are doing?
- Passive contagion influences are overridden by current purpose
- Motivations and goals dominate other influences when they conflict
What is good for the current goal is the main determinant of what you do
Macrae & Johnston 1998: priming helping
When helping was primed they picked up more pens unless the pens were leaky. Thus there was an increase in helping when primed except when it conflicted with an important goal
Chatrand, Maddux, & Lakin 2005: motivational moderators of perception-behaviour effect
More likely to imitate people in your group to build rapport, affiliate goals, develop interdependent culture and an empathetic personality
Leander et al: you give me the chills
Imitation by in group member results in the room feeling warmer
Imitation by out group member results in the room feeling colder
What are the things we make immediate and unintended evaluations of
- Faces
- Beauty/attractiveness
- Group membership
- Similarity to self
Willis & tordorov 2006: faces
Trait judgements of faces presented for 100 milliseconds were no different than notches made with no time constraint. Additional time may increase confidence but it doesn’t change the judgement itself. For all judgements — attractiveness, like ability, trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness did not change with increased time
Ballew & tordorov 2007: competence judgments and faces
Given 100 ms, 250 ms, and unlimited time individuals made the same choice of the competence of us gubernatorial and senate candidates. Ratings predicted 69% of governor and 72% of senate races.
Fiske, cuddy, Glick 2007: dimensions of impression formation
The two most important dimensions of impression formation:
1) warm/cold — friend or foe?
2) competence, ability — are they capable
Olivola & Todorov 2010: faces and diagnostics
Faces are not diagnostic of the traits we immediately perceive in them
Darwin 1872: expression of emotions in animals and man
The social nature and purpose of emotional expression is an immediate and involuntary communication to others about the current situation
Why are faces so powerful?
Short term expressions are valid cues as to probable behaviour that is relevant to us
Zebowitz & Montepare: overgeneralization of inferences from faces
We overgeneralize the automatic inferences we make from faces, placing too much confidence in them and acting on them as if they were strongly diagnostic even though they aren’t
Why we like symmetric faces
We see symmetric faces as more attractive, averaging faces via morphing procedure produces more attractive faces: the more faces included in the average, the more attractive the face is.
Probably a cue to disease and health status
Slater et al: newborns prefer attractive faces
Infants spend more time looking at attractive faces
Karremans et al 2009: men distracted by attractive women
Men work in on a demanding cognitive task in psychology experiencing were more distracted and did worse on the task when in the presence of an attractive vs unattractive female
Misattribution of immediate affective responses
Affect comes from unknown source or a source we think shouldn’t influence us, those feelings are then misattributed to other more plausible causes, often what we are currently consciously focusing on.
Why is the automatic affect especially prone to misattribution?
Because the person is not aware of the process that produced it. Also because they experienced it immediately and preconsciously and it is therefore trusted as valid
What is the halo effect
The tendency to believe that attractive people also possess other positive qualities beyond their physical appearance
Brusetta et al 2013 — in Maestripieri et al: real life effects of attraction driven by reproduction goal
Job applicants that were viewed as attractive received a disproportionate amount more callbacks that those that were viewed as unattractive
Why is friend or foe important
During our species long development, violent death at the hands of others was common, so it was important for survival to make quick judgements on who was a friend and who was a foe
Kelly et al: infants and ingroup preference
Preferential attention task: how long do infants look at the same race vs different race faces? Caucasian children measured looking tune within pairs of own race vs other races
Newborns: no preference
3 month olds: prefer looking at faces of the same race as themselves
Greenwald, Banji, Nosek: automaticity of stereotype affect: the implicit associations test
Negative (or positive) affect automatically associated with social category. It becomes active immediately and automatically to influence responses without intention and despite attempts to control it
What will the IAT show
If you implicitly associate white with good and black with bad, you will be faster when the white and good buttons are the same and black and bad buttons are the same, slower if reversed
Affective bases of prejudicial behaviour
Immediately produced affect can be misattributed to the person with whom one is interacting. This is especially problematic when a person’s group membership (stereotype) produces the affect, so negative affect is attributed to his or her behaviour, appearance, personality, etc.
How do stereotypes form?
Automatic stereotype activation during perception produces negative affect without person knowing
Donn Byrne — Attitude Similarity
Manipulated similarity of attitude and value surveys, people liked the other person more to the extent their attitudes and values overlapped. In-group membership also signals shared goals and values
Pelham et al: implicit egotism
The tendency to prefer people, places, or things that remind one of oneself like similar birthdays or similar names. This unconscious bias occurs because most people posses highly favourable unconscious associations about themselves
Pelham & Cavallo: Name-letter effect
Positive feelings about self spill over to objects, events, people, outcomes, that share one’s initials, birthday, other self-defining features
Ken = more likely to move to Kentucky
Pelham & Carvallo 2015: superficial similarities also help
Shared birthday, month, hometown or states, shared initials, help with positive notions of objects, places, people, and things.
Sharing one’s birthday has a significant influence on the choice of spouse, disproportionately marry someone with the same birthday number as them.
Walton et al, 2012: role of identity-similarity on motivation
Found that a shared birthday with a math award winner in October had actual positive effects in students math class performance that year in May because of the superficial similarity
Adolf hitler and rose nienau
Hitler befriended a 9 year old Jewish girl because she had the same birthday as him
Zajonc 1980: immediate unconscious evaluation
Argued against standard model of rational, deliberate, effortful, and feature-based evaluations. Instead: immediate affective appraisal, and a separate ‘affective processing systems’. Affective and cognitive processing can proceed in parallel, and affective responses can be faster and precede cognitive analysis
Zajonc 1980: mere exposures
Affective reactions are independent of cognition. Present novel objects 1, 3, 9, 25 times. Participants had a greater liking for ‘old’ than ‘new’ in the absence of ability to discriminate old from new at better than chance
Implicit memory effect:
Greater liking for previously presented stimuli, in absence of conscious recognition
Fiske 1982: category based effect
Association of an item as good (or bad) over time creates an automatic association. Example of mere expression
Fazio et al: automatic attitude activation
Immediate affect without separate systems. Automatic evaluation on mere presence (perception) of stimulus
Posner & Snyder 1975: sequential priming task
Only automatic responses possible until 500 ms. Strategic responding possible after 500ms
Sequential priming task
Shown photo, and then a word association and there’s a choice between good or bad, and the measure the time between the choices. Strong attitudes resulted in quicker responses
Fazio et al: evaluation of attitudes
Associated a photo with 2 words then decided if they were good or bad. Strong attitudes but not weak attitudes primed targets at short time intervals. Strong attitudes become active automatically, weak ones do not.
Bargh, Chaiken et al (1992,1993,1996), re-do of Fazio et al.
- Removed conscious evaluation task
- Inserted a two day delay between measure of attitude strength and test of automaticity
Found that the results worked for both strong and weak attitudes towards different things
Herring et al: 25 years of automatic evaluation research
Everything immediately evaluated as good or bad
Roe & Simpson and Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist: functional adaptive reason for direct influences of evaluation on behaviour
Nature can only select based in overt behaviour, not on what is going on in the animals head
Bargh and Morsella 2009: unconscious behavioural guidance systems
Automatic immediate affective reactions would not have evolved if they only lived in the head. Natural selection works on behaviours, whether they increase or decrease survival and reproductive success. Thus all of the automatic attitude and other immediate affective reactions must have a direct influence on our behaviour in the moment.
TC Schneirla 1959: approach and withdrawal across animal kingdom
Nearly all species including single called paramecia show approach/avoid motivations. Immediate evaluation is in the service of immediate action. Survival advantage and natural selection work on overt behaviour, not internal processes
Chen & Bargh: approach vs withdrawal
Bad vs good things on screen automatically generated response wither to push away (bad) or pull towards (good)
Slepian, Young, Rule, Weisbuch, and Ambady: house vs face classification task
Participants pull faster in response to trustworthy compared to untrustworthy faces
Examples of behavioural consequences of unconscious evaluations
- Voting for candidates
- More likely to hire and promote attractive people
- More likely to trust or not
- Choices of places to live, occupation, when and who you marry
Corrrell et al 2002: the police officer dilemma
Already have weapon drawn and ready to fire but stereotypes and implicit biases govern if they actually pull the trigger or not
