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Red Bull According to focus groups, compared to other brands
• Is in a can that’s too small
• Is more expensive than competitors
• Tastes like pee
Does being a parent make you happy?
• Lower emotional wellbeing
McLanahan &b Adams, 1989
• Less frequent positive emotions
Simon & Nath, 2004
• More frequent negative emotions
Ross & Van Willigen, 1996
• Lower marital satisfaction
Somers, 1993
• More prone to depression
Evenson & Simon, 2005
Parenting costs vs. Compensating benefits result
Read US Department of Agriculture data (2004) showing that it costs an average middle-income family in the Northeast $193,680 to raise a child to the age of 18
Also received info that adult children provide financial and practical support to aging parents so that parents are often more financially secure in old age than nonparents are
Greater costs produce a greater need for justification
People need to feel consistent, Discrepancies lead to XXX
dissonance
cognitive dissonance:
Contradiction/inconsistency between thoughts and actions
Unpleasant feeling of being aware of holding two conflicting beliefs or a belief that conflicts with a behavior
Initiation rites and hazing, cognitive dissonance
• Put themselves through pain, embarrassment, or discomfort to join a group
• Conflict between not liking pain or embarrassment and making the choice to experience
it – dissonance
• Resolve dissonance by inflating the importance of the group and commitment to it
• The discomfort was worth it because the group is so important/special
• See Aronson & Mills (1959) ‘The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group’ and
Gerard & Mathewson (1966) replication: suffering leads to liking
What happens the day after doomsday?
The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view
Cognitive dissonance and smoking
Behavior (smoking) conflicts with the thought/belief (smoking is harmful)
Generally easier to change a thought than a behavior
Reduce dissonance between behavior and thought by:
Changing the behavior (stop smoking – difficult)
Rationalizing away the conflict. Convince self that stress of quitting is worse for health than quitting. Or rationalize that other healthy behaviors (diet and exercise) cancel out danger
Changing the belief (convincing themselves smoking is not that harmful)
Smokers believe that smoking is less harmful than nonsmokers do (Leavens et al., 2019)
Cognitive Dissonance & boring experiment
• Participants perform two boring tasks
for half an hour each
• Asked to lie and tell the next
participant that the experiment was
interesting
• Paid $20 (e.g. male in video)
• Paid $1 (e.g. female in video)
• Asked in follow up interview: Did you
enjoy the task?
• Beliefs
• I am an honest person
• The task was boring
• I lied to another person about enjoying the task
• I was paid $20
• Justifies action of lying
• Did you enjoy the task?
• No.
• I was paid $1
• Insufficient justification
Behavior can cause attitudes
Foot in the door phenomenon: Agreeing to a small commitment frequently leads to larger commitments
• Sign study (Freedman & Fraser, 1966)
• Experimental condition – asked to comply
with a small request and later asked a
considerably larger request (52.8%)
• Controls – only asked the larger request
(22.2%)
Cognitive dissonance and a pill (attribution)***
Misattribution of arousal as a means of dissonance reduction
• Arousal manipulation
• Positive: Pictures of Playboy foldouts
• Negative: Color photos depicting war and accident victims, surgical operations
• Neutral: Pictures of interior decorating scenes
• Counter-attitudinal essay about legalizing heroin
• Attributes arousal to the pictures to avoid the pain of changing cognitions
• Survey environment to see what is causing the arousal. Attribute it to the
pictures rather than dissonance
Self Perception Theory (Bem, 1967)
• Ask nursery school children to do drawings, then go play
• Condition 1: Great drawing, here’s a gold star
• Reduced spontaneous drawing
• Condition 2: Just took the drawing from them
Self-perception theory is an alternative to XXX
cognitive dissonance theory
In most cases, cognitive dissonance and self-perception theory make THE SAME or DIFFERENT predictions
the same
Self-perception theory vs. cognitive dissonance
• Self-perception theory
• Accounts for responses when people’s attitudes are ambiguous (internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable)
• Learn your attitude by inferring from observations of own behavior. Act like outside observer
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Accounts for responses when people have well-defined attitudes (attitude-discrepant behavior; attitude and behavior dissonance)
3 main ways to reduce the feeling of dissonance
change your attitude
change your behavior
rationalize/trivialize the discrepancy
People will change their attitude (and value) to fit with a recent behavior (a choice they have made)… Generally believed to involve XXX and XXX
attention and explicit memory
Brehm (1956) experiment with housewives and appliances… What if the fox did not remember that the grapes were out of reach? Would he still believe they were sour? (Does this actually depend on explicit memory?)
Rating for chosen painting increases, non-chosen decreases for control and amnesiacs
Choice blindness
Participants are (falsely) told of their choice
Ratings and justifications for choice are indistinguishable from those given to the faces they did choose
People need to feel justified and consistent
So… why do people drink red bull?
• Sometimes, we infer our attitudes from our behavior
• Did something weird, justify why you did it retrospectively
• Want to decrease these feelings of dissonance
• Paid a lot for this small, gross drink. Cognitive dissonance - justify the behavior, come
to love it, believe it gives them lots of energy.
• Adapt our preferences to what we have already chosen
• Keep a consistent self-perception
Persuasion
The active and conscious effort to change an attitude or behavior, usually with a message of some kind
Occurs when a person’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior are influenced by a message or communication
2012 – Procter & Gamble spent $2 billion on research and development
Spent $9 billion on advertising trying to persuade you that its products are better than its competitors
Two routes to persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)
Deep processing (central route), systematic persuasion
Requires the person you are persuading to be motivated, think carefully about the information and use reasoned analysis and deliberation
Appeals to logic and reason; Produces lasting change/agreement
Shallow processing (peripheral route), heuristic persuasion
Does not require the person you are persuading to think deeply about the content or even pay much attention to it. Shallow, superficial, and emotional factors do the work (e.g. if salesperson is attractive, if brand is familiar). Relies on heuristics (rules of thumb) to trigger reactions
Which applicant do you want to hire?
one with more bullet points, but isn’t saying anything new
XXX and XXX sell (for monkeys too)
Sex and Status
6 Principles of social influence
Reciprocation / Reciprocity
Consistency
Scarcity
Social Validation
Liking
Authority
Does reciprocity exchange have to be equal?
No.
Exchange doesn’t have to be equal. Give you something free and now you owe them.
Example of reciprocity in real world
Charities sending you a nickel or address labels.
and mint tipping example
Reciprocal concessions (Door in the face)
• More likely to agree to a small request after refusing a large request
• You reject my large request. I compromise to smaller request. You feel obligated to compromise too. Owe me a yes.
• Ask random people to volunteer to chaperone juvenile detention center inmates on a day trip to the zoo – 17% agreed
• Ask other random people a larger request – serve as an unpaid counselor at the center 2 hours per week for 2 years – 0% agreed
• “If you can’t do that, would you chaperone a group of juvenile detention center inmates on a day trip to the zoo?” – 50% said yes
Commitment & Consistency + tactics that exploit it
Need to feel that you’re consistent
Tactics which exploit this:
• Foot in the door (small request: sign a petition first, then larger request: donation, display sign, etc.)
• Labelling
• Low ball
• Bait-and-switch
• Make a public commitment.
Restaurants can reduce no-show
reservations by asking “Will you
please call if your plans change?”
And waiting for the person to agree.
• Reduce missed appointments by
18% by having the patient rather
than the staff to write down
appointment details on the future
appointment card
Why conform? (2 main reasons)
Informational
Situation is ambiguous or novel, other people are experts
Somewhere you’ve never been – look around you for what other people are doing to know how to act and copy them
Normative
Behavior shaped by a desire to fulfill others’ expectations – often to gain social approval
Need to belong. Feels good to be part of the group.
Psychologically costly – isolating yourself
Milgram Obedience Studies (1963)
Told purpose of study was to examine how punishment affected learning and memory
Milgram experiment is a classic case of responding to authority, but could also involve cognitive dissonance and wanting to be consistent
Reactance
Unpleasant feeling that arises when people feel they are being coerced
How to alleviate reactance
by doing the very thing they were being coerced not to do – to prove to themselves they can
• Pennebaker & Sanders, 1976: signs in college restrooms
• “Please don’t write on these walls”
• “Please don’t write on these walls under any circumstances”
Object Permanence
Schema that objects continue to exist even if they are no longer in view
Jean Piaget thought this developed around 9 months during the sensorimotor stage (prior, infants won’t search for an object when it is out of sight)
Rod-block on a screen with infants experiment
At 4 months and as young as 2 months, infants will be surprised (dishabituated) to the broken rod (Jusczyk, et al., 1999)
Object permanence: Violation-of-expectation (XXX)
VOE
The violation-of-expectation (VOE) paradigm is a method used in developmental psychology to study infants' understanding of object permanence. It relies on the idea that infants will look longer at events that violate their expectations, suggesting they possess an understanding of the hidden object's continued existence.
3 pieces of infant knowledge
A ball on a pool table will not move unless something touches it. Babies are surprised if objects move without being touched (Spelke, Phillips, and Woodward, 1995). Objects only move through contact
Babies are surprised when objects in motion suddenly disappear and reappear somewhere further down the line (Spelke et al., 1995) Objects travel through space in a continuous path
A screen placed in front of an object tilts all the way back without hitting the object - babies look longer (Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman, 1985) (because the object has fallen through a hidden trap door). Objects are solid
Mind Reading - Theory of Mind (ToM)
• Cognitive ability to ‘mind read’ or ‘mentalize’ – interpret what is going on in the minds of others
• Develop the ability to understand or predict what people around us are thinking, feeling, and planning
• Hold a belief (i.e. a theory) about what thoughts, feelings, and intentions are going on in someone else’s mind; understand that the mind produces representations of the world and these representations guide behavior
• Egocentrism: the failure to understand that the world appears different to different people
Egocentrism
the failure to understand that the world appears different to different people
False belief task – change of location, egocentrism
Wimmer & Perner (1983) – Maxi puts the chocolate in the green cupboard. When Maxi was out of the room, his mother used some of the chocolate for baking and then put the chocolate in the blue cupboard. When Maxi comes back, where will he look for the chocolate?
Intentional reasoning
Meltzoff (1988) – 18-month old toddlers understand adult’s intentions
Autism and Theory of Mind
Children with autism may have difficulty communicating with other people because they have trouble acquiring a theory of mind (Frith, 2003)
Find it difficult to understand the inner lives of other people (Dawson et al., 2007; Peterson et al., 2016)
Slower to recognize that other people can believe what they don’t believe themselves
Trouble understanding belief-based emotions such as embarrassment and shame (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Heerey, Keltner & Capps, 2003)
Children with autism and others who have not yet acquired a theory of mind are not susceptible to “contagious yawning” – need to imagine what the yawner is experiencing (Platek et al., 2003; Senju et al., 2007)
Age at which a theory of mind is acquired differs
• Number of siblings
• Frequency in which the child engages in pretend play
• Whether the child has an imaginary companion
• Socioeconomic status of the child’s family
• Culture
• Language seems to be the most important (Astington & Baird, 2005)
• Language about thoughts and feelings is an important tool for helping children make sense of their own and others’ minds (Harris et al., 2005)
• Language skills and how caregivers talk to children are both good predictors of how well children perform – hearing the words ‘think’, ‘know’, ‘want’ (Ruffman et al., 2018
Magical beliefs
View distinct individuals as having special value over perfect duplicates
The chair J.K. Rowling sat in while writing the 1st two books of the Harry Potter series sold for $394,000 in 2016
Preference for attachment vs non-attachment objects
• 3- to 6-year-olds bring their attachment object (e.g. stuffed toy or blanket) and non-attachment toys to the lab
• Shown a magical “copying machine”
• Watch toys get copied
• Non-attachment: choose duplicate 62%
• Attachment: choose duplicate 23%
• Attachment item: want to keep
original “because it’s mine”
• 20% of children refused to place attach attachment in box at all item for fear of it being duplicated
• Value original more than physically identical replica
Laws of Sympathetic Magic – Frazer and Mauss
Law of contagion – transfer of properties from one object to another by brief contact
Undergraduates value a t-shirt previously worn by a loved one much more highly than one worn by a less desirable person
Law of similarity – the image equals the object
People reject acceptable foods (e.g. fudge) shaped into a form of a disgusting object (dog feces)
Voodoo magic involves XXX and XXX
contagion and similarity
Law of similarity Destroying photographs of sentimental objects
Adults bring in childhood attachment objects or jewelry (e.g. wedding rings/engagement rings)
Greater electrodermal activity (measure of anxiety) when destroying a photograph of a sentimental object compared to another valuable personal possession or a matched object
Even if alone (experimenter not watching) and if photo is blurred
Infer causality between events
Automatically infer causality between events even when they occur independently
Heider and Simmel (1944) – we attribute animacy and social goals (including to shapes!)
How do they do those magic tricks?
• Misdirection. Guiding your visual attention.
• Telling you what they are doing, giving you a story/interpretation
• Priming and shaping your interpretation
• Changing your memory
Active misdirection
Controls our focus of attention but does so via the social interactions of the magician rather than the physical properties of the environment
Magician may use their eyes to direct your attention toward the areas where he is looking
Clippy
Other people guide our attention
• Newborn babies typically orient their gaze toward faces
• By one year old will look at objects that are looked at by others
• Adults show a strong tendency to look at faces and will automatically follow the gaze of others
• Adults will follow another person’s gaze even when they are explicitly warned not to do so
“Look at me when I’m talking to you”
• We automatically look at people when they ask us a question
• Social attentional misdirection
• Magician asks a question while establishing eye contact (social cues) to guide your attention (attentional misdirection) to their face
• People struggle not to look at a magician’s face when they ask a question
Magic is ‘plausibly impossible and activates XXX in the brain
conflict areas
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex → involved in monitoring conflict
Anterior cingulate cortex → involved in resolving conflict