Lecture 5 - Social Representations and Priming

Describe the Higgins, Rholes & Jones (1977) study. How does the assimilation effect relate to the study?

• Backgrounds:

  • had participants memorize a list of word (either positive or negative)

  • then, had participants read an ambiguous paragraph about a person

  • finally, people were asked to make judgments of donald’s personality

• results

  • primed information was used to disambiguate Donald’s personality

  • assimilation effect: judgment shifted towards the implications of the prime (impression more positive after “adventurous than reckless”)

  • only after cognitively applicable primes (no effect of valanced primes)

Describe the Shantz & Latham (2009;2011) study on practical goal priming.

• Background

  • Contract employees hired to raise money for university

  • 3 groups presented w/ different “goal” conditions

    • no additional goal

    • subtle, implicit goal priming: ideas printed on a backdrop of a photograph of a woman who was winning a race

    • standard, explicit “conscious” goal activation: meet target of $1200 in your 3 hours shift

• Results

  • performance order: explicit conscious goal > subtle goal > no goal

Describe the Strack, Martin, & Schwarz (1988) on priming and dating.

• Background

  • measuring correlation between dating frequency and life satisfaction

    • group a:

      • how often do you date?

      • a few intermediate questions

      • “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with your life-as-a-whole?" (1 = not so satisfied; 9 = very satisfied

    • group b:

      • “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with your life-as-a-whole?" (1 = not so satisfied; 9 = very satisfied)

      • a few intermediate questions

      • “how often do you date”

• Results

  • Group A

    • dating frequency → life-satisfaction r = +.66

  • Group B

    • life satisfaction → dating frequency r = -.12

• Conclusion

  • depending on the order in which the questions were presented you can prime an individual into assessing their life satisfaction differently

Describe the Schkade & Kahneman (1998) study that investigates whether people are actually happier living in California vs. the Midwest? how does focusing illusion relate to the results of this study?

• Background

  • 1993 undergraduate students

  • rated overall life satisfaction as well as satisfactions with 11 aspects of life for SELF and for OTHERS

• Results

  • about the same for CA and midwest

  • CA think people are happier than they actually are

• Conclusion

  • people in california are as happy as people in the midwest of the US. no actual difference

  • People in the California and in the Midwest THINK that Californians are happier. They also both think that California has much better weather

    • weather only plays a minor role in determining overall happiness

  • this suggests that people (in CA and midwest) probably overestimate the influence of weather on life-satisfaction!

  • focusing illusion: overweighting a salient but minor attribute in this case it’s weather

what is the definition of nudging as priming? what experiment was conducted in order to investigate this?

• definition: any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

• study about the fly

  • fly was placed in the urinal

  • this acted as a “nudge” for people’s behavior because an estimated 60-70% start to pee towards the fly

Describe the (Webster et al., 2004; Webster & MacLeod, 2011) studies that investigated contrast with faces.

• Background

  • people shown edited pictures of faces with either abnormally large noses or small noses

  • they were then showed a picture of the same face but unedited

  • subjects asked what they thought of the nose of the original unedited face

• results

  • the appearance of faces is influenced by the characteristics of previously viewed faces. The influence is in the OPPOSITE direction

  • after seeing many faces with big noses, a "typical” nose looks abnormally small. vice versa

what is the difference between assimilation effect and contrast effect? when is assimilation or contrast effect most likely to happen?

• assimilation effect

  • the tendency to interpret new information in a way that aligns with existing beliefs or expectations, rather than critically evaluating it

  • most likely to happen when…

    • target is ambiguous

    • context (prime) can help disambiguate it

    • target ‘seems’ similar to the prime

• contrast effect

  • cognitive bias where our perception of something is influenced by comparing it to something else, especially when the comparison occurs immediately before or simultaneously

  • most likely to happen when…

    • target is not ambiguous

    • context (prime) serves as a standard or comparison

    • target seems dissimilar to the prime

Describe the (Schwarz & Bless, 1992) study that investigates the effect that hearing about a corrupt politician has on our judgments.

• Background

  • Group 1: asked to think about a corrupt politican involved in a scandal (primed)

  • Group 2: not reminded of a scandal

  • Next:

    • groups asked to rate politicians “in general”

    • groups asked to rate three specific politicians (not involved in the scandal)

• results:

  • politician in general: rated similarly between both groups

  • specific politicians: primed group rated specific politicians much higher than the not primed group

• Conclusion

  • when primed about a corrupt politician in scandal, by contrast it makes other politicians not involved in said scandal appear better

Describe the measures of the loneliness study. How do researchers utilize upwards and downwards contrasts in the study? How does the contrast effect relate to the results?

• Background

  • Two measures

    • momentary

    • chronic loneliness measure

  • Two groups

    • downward comparison: describe two ways your present living situation is better

    • upward comparison: describe two ways your present living situation is worse

• Results

  • upwards contrast ALWAYS going to have higher measures of loneliness for both momentary and chronic

  • social and temporal condition show similar results

• Conclusion

  • both momentary feelings of loneliness, and a more enduring trait judgments (UCLA scale) depend on temporal (my life in the past vs present) and social (other people) comparisons

  • contrast effect: thinking about your lonely past or other lonely people makes your current life feel better

Describe the Charlie’s Angels study.

• Background

  • male students asked to rate pictures of a novel “girl who a friend might want to date” on a 1-7 scale

  • two groups: has not seen charlie’s angels, just watched charlie’s angels

    • hot girl movie or something idk

• Results:

  • No Angels: higher mean attractiveness rating

  • Angels: lower mean attractiveness rating

• Conclusion

  • charlie’s angels brainwashed these dudes cause girl hot or something

  • note: guys in committed relationships are unffected

    • maybe there is some hope for humanity

unaffected