Social Psychology by David Myers - Chapter 3

system 1 and system 2

We have two brain systems

System 1

functions automatically and out of our awareness (often called “intuition” or a “gut feeling”). Unconscious, and fast way of thinking.

System 2

requires our conscious attention and effort. Deliberate, controlled, and slower way of thinking.

actions

The big lesson of recent research: System 1 influences more of our _____ than we realize.

Priming

Activating particular associations in memory

Things we don't consciously notice can subtly influence how we interpret and recall events.

Priming examples

People who feel hopeless perceive rooms to be darker—they don't have a "ray of hope".

When sitting in a wobbly chair, people rate other couples' relationships as more unstable.

embodied cognition

The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments

embodied

Our social cognition is _______.

communicate

The brain systems that process our bodily sensations ________ with the brain systems responsible for our social thinking.

spirits.

When two people synchronize their bodies, (dancing, singing,walking together), they may also synchronize their _____.

embodied.

Our social cognition is _______.

Automatic processing

Implicit thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness, roughly corresponds to intuition

Controlled processing

Explicit thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious

1

Our thinking combines both automatic processing (impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness—System _).

2

controlled processing (reflective, deliberate, and conscious—System _).

Schemas

are mental concepts or templates that intuitively guide our perceptions and interpretations of our experience.

Emotional reactions

are often nearly instantaneous, before there is time for deliberate thinking.

expertise

Given sufficient _______, people may intuitively know the answer to a problem.

capacity for illusion

Social psychologists have explored our ______ ___ ______ —for perceptual misinterpretations, fantasies, and constructed beliefs.

believe

Michael Gazzaniga reported that patients whose brain hemispheres have been surgically separated will instantly fabricate—and ______ —explanations of their own puzzling behaviours.

wrong.

As we interpret our experiences and construct memories, our System 1 intuitions are sometimes _____.

overconfidence phenomenon

the tendency to be more confident than correct and to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs.

overconfidence phenomenon examples

Get a job right away after university, construction jobs on the house, the amount of time it takes to get their work done

incompetence

_________ feeds overconfidence.

self-confidence; lack

Deanna Caputo and David Dunning (2005) recreated this phenomenon in experiments, confirming that our ignorance of our ignorance sustains our ___-________.

Follow-up studies indicate that this “ignorance of one’s incompetence” occurs mostly on relatively easy-seeming tasks, such as forming words out of psychology. On difficult tasks, poor performers more often appreciate their ___ of skill.

lowest

It takes competence to recognize competence, note Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999). Students who score the _____ on tests of grammar, humour, and logic are the most prone to overestimating their abilities.

Those who don’t know what good logic or grammar is are often unaware that they lack it.

twice as often

Robert Vallone and his colleagues (1990) had university students predict in September whether they would drop a course, declare a major, elect to live off campus next year.

Although the students felt, on average, 84 percent sure of these self- predictions, they were wrong nearly ____ __ ____ as they expected to be.

Even when feeling 100 percent sure of their predictions, they were right only 85 percent of the time.

intentions

Part of the problem may be that people often give too much weight to their _____ when predicting their future behaviour.

poor

When University of Waterloo students predicted whether they would donate blood, they relied heavily on their intentions to do so.

But their intentions were a ____ predictor of whether they actually donated.

The students failed to appreciate how much their busy schedules, looming deadlines, or simple forgetfulness got in the way of donating.

Stockbroker overconfidence.

Mutual fund portfolios selected by investment analysts perform about as well as randomly selected stocks.

The analysts might think they can pick the best stocks, but everyone else does, too—stocks are a confidence game.

Worse, people who are overconfident invest more and more even when things aren’t going well, digging in their heels after publicly declaring their choices

Student overconfidence.

In one study, students memorizing psychology terms for a test typed in each term's definition and then predicted how much credit they expected to receive. The overconfident students—those who thought they were more accurate than they actually were—did worse on the test, mostly because they stopped studying.

Why does overconfidence persist?

we like those who are confident: Group members rewarded highly confident individuals with higher status—even when their confidence was not justified by actual ability.

Overconfident individuals spoke first, talked longer, used a more factual tone, making them appear more competent than they actually were.

Even when groups worked together repeatedly and learned that the overconfident individuals were not as accurate as presented, group members continued to accord the overconfident people with status.

Overconfident people are seen as more desirable romantic partners than the less confident.

If confidence, but not ability, helps people become leaders, general overconfidence can be distressing.

Belief perseverance

Persistence of one's initial conceptions, as when the basis for one's belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives

Misinformation effect

Incorporating misinformation into one's memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it

Overconfidence phenomenon

The tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs

Confirmation bias

A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions

confirmation bias examples

that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. Whenever this person encounters a person that is both left-handed and creative, they place greater importance on this "evidence" supporting their already existing belief.

people often choose their news sources and Facebook friends to align with their beliefs, a phenomenon known as “_________ ____ ______”.

people often choose their news sources and Facebook friends to align with their beliefs, a phenomenon known as “ideological echo chambers”.

System 1 snap judgment

Confirmation bias appears to be a ________________________________, where our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition.

Stopping and thinking a little—calling up System 2—makes us less likely to commit this error

shifted

For example, Ivan Hernandez and Jesse Lee Preston (2013) had college students read an article arguing for the death penalty.

Those who read the article in a dark, standard font did not change their opinions.

But when the words were in light grey and italics, more ____ their beliefs— probably because straining to read the words slowed down participants’ thinking enough for them to consider both sides.

stable; self- views

Confirmation helps explain why our self-images are so remarkably ____.

In several experiments, William Swann and Stephen Read discovered that students seek, elicit, and recall feedback that confirms their beliefs about themselves.

People seek as friendswho verify their own ___-____ —even if they think poorly of themselves.

her experience at the party confirms her self-image.

Swann and Read (1981) compared this self-verification to how someone with a domineering self-image might behave at a party.

When she arrives, she seeks out those guests who she knows acknowledge her dominance.

In conversation, she then presents her views in ways that elicit the respect she expects.

After the party, she has trouble recalling conversations in which her influence was minimal and more easily recalls her persuasiveness in the conversations she dominated.

Thus ____________________________________.

confirms

Snyder and Swann found that people often test for a trait by looking for information that _____ it. If people are trying to find out if someone is an extrovert, they often solicit instances of extroversion (“What would you do if you wanted to liven things up at a party?”).

Testing for introversion, they are more likely to ask,“What factors make it hard for you to really open up to people?” In response, those probed for extroversion seem more sociable, and those probed for introversion seem more shy. Our assumptions and expectations about another help elicit the behaviour we expect.

These findings reveal that confirmation bias can sometimes cause our self-concepts to shift, even while it generally upholds the stability of our self-concepts through self-verification.

Russell Fazio and his colleagues (1981) reproduced this finding and also discovered that those asked the “extroverted questions” later perceived themselves as actually more outgoing than those asked the introverted questions.

An accomplice of the experimenter later met each participant in a waiting room and 70 percent of the time correctly guessed from the person’s behaviour which condition the person had come from.

unreliable

Statistical predictions are indeed _______.

But human intuition—even expert intuition— is even more _________.

Daniel Kahneman notes that we now have some 200 studies comparing clinical and statistical prediction, most of which favour the latter, with the rest a draw. These include efforts to predict the following:

Medical outcomes: cancer patients’ longevity, hospital stays, cardiac diagnoses, babies’ susceptibility to sudden infant death syndrome

Economic outcomes: new business success, credit risks, career satisfaction

Government agency outcomes: foster parent assessments, juvenile offender re-offence, violent behaviour

Miscellaneous other outcomes: football winners, Bordeaux wine prices

Two techniques to reduce the overconfidence bias.

prompt (clear and daily) feedback

get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong

Heuristic

A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments

errors.

In most situations, our System 1 snap generalizations—“That’s dangerous!”—are adaptive. The speed of these intuitive guides promotes our survival. BUT In some situations, however, haste makes ____

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

Representativeness heuristic example

thinking that because someone is wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, that they must be a lawyer, because they look like the stereotype of a lawyer.

Availability heuristic

A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace

readily available in our memory

Availability heuristic example

media attention to gay–lesbian issues makes gay people cognitively available.

Thus, the average person in one survey estimated that 25 percent of people are gay or lesbian —more than five times the number who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual in surveys.

plane crashes can make people afraid of flying. However, the likelihood of dying in a car accident is far higher than dying as a passenger on an airplane

truth

Our use of the availability heuristic highlights a basic principle of social thinking:

People are slow to deduce particular instances from a general truth, but they are remarkably quick to infer general ____ from a vivid instance.

struggles

The availability heuristic make us more sensitive to unfairness, as our _____ are more memorable than our advantages.

Students think that their parents were harder on them than on their siblings.

emotions

By now it is clear that our naive statistical intuitions, and our resulting fears, are driven not by calculation and reason but by ______ attuned to the availability heuristic.

Counterfactual thinking

imagining what could have been

Counterfactual thinking example

If our team loses (or wins) a big game by one point, we can easily imagine how the game might have gone the other way, and thus we feel greater regret (or relief).

In Olympic competition, athletes’ emotions after an event reflect mostly how they did relative to expectations; but they also reflect the athletes’

luck

Counterfactual thinking underlies our feelings of ___.

“Bad luck,”

____ on the other hand, refers to bad events that did happen but easily might not have.

intense

The more significant and unlikely the event, the more _____ the counterfactual thinking.

Bereaved people who have lost a spouse or child in a vehicle accident, or a child to sudden infant death syndrome, commonly report replaying and undoing the event.

Illusory correlation

Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of stronger relationship than actually exists

Illusory correlation example

A man holds the belief that people in urban environments tend to be rude. Therefore, when he meets someone who is rude he assumes that the person lives in a city, rather than a rural area. A woman believes that pit bulls are inherently dangerous.

People easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs.

If we believe a correlation exists, we are more likely to notice and recall confirming instances.

If we believe that premonitions correlate with events, we notice and remember the joint occurrence of the premonition and the event’s later occurrence.

We rarely notice or remember all the times unusual events do not coincide.

If, after we think about a friend, the friend calls us, we notice and remember this coincidence.

Illusion of control

Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one's control or as more controllable than they are

Illusory correlation can help explain why clinicians continue to express confidence in uninformative or ambiguous tests.

Pioneering experiments by Loren Chapman and Jean Chapman (1969).

They invited both university students and professional clinicians to study some test performances and diagnoses.

If the students or clinicians expected a particular association, they generally perceived it.

For example, clinicians who believed that suspicious people draw peculiar eyes on the Draw-a-Person test did, in fact, perceive such a relationship—even when shown cases in which suspicious people drew peculiar eyes less often than non suspicious people.

If they believed in a connection, they were more likely to notice confirming instances.

confidence

Michael Wohl of Carleton University and Michael Enzle of the University of Alberta have found that being the person who throws the dice or spins the wheel increases people’s _____.

“near misses” or “flukes”

Observations of real-life gamblers confirm these experimental findings.

Dice players may throw gently for low numbers and forcefully for high numbers.

The gambling industry thrives on gamblers’ illusions.

Gamblers attribute wins to their skill and foresight.

Losses become ______________________.

Alas, the illusion of control breeds overconfidence in stock market trader

Stock traders also like the “feeling of empowerment” that comes from being able to choose and control their own stock trades, as if their being in control can enable them to outperform the market average.

One ad declared that online investing “is about control.”

Regression toward the average

The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one's average

fall back (“regress”)

Because exam scores fluctuate partly by chance, most students who get extremely high scores on an exam will get lower scores on the next exam.

If their first score is at the ceiling, their second score is more likely to _____ _____ ( ) toward their own average than to push the ceiling even higher.

That is why a student who does consistently good work, even if never the best, will sometimes end a course at the top of the class.

improve

Conversely, the lowest-scoring students on the first exam are likely to _____.

If those who scored lowest go for tutoring after the first exam, the tutors are likely to feel effective when the student improves, even if the tutoring had no effect.

improvement.

Indeed, when things reach a low point, we will try anything, and whatever we try—going to a psychotherapist, starting a new diet–exercise plan, reading a self-help book—is more likely to be followed by __________ than by further deterioration.

regression effect

Sometimes we recognize that events are not likely to continue at an unusually good or bad extreme.

Experience has taught us that when everything is going great, something will go wrong, and that when life is dealing us terrible blows, we can usually look forward to things getting better.

Often, though, we fail to recognize this ______ _____

normality

We puzzle at why baseball’s rookie-of-the-year often has a more ordinary second year: Did they become overconfident? Self-conscious? We forget that exceptional performance tends to regress toward _______.

By simulating the consequences of using praise and punishment, Paul Schaffner (1985) showed how the illusion of control might infiltrate human relations.

He invited students to train an imaginary Grade 4 boy, “Harold,” to come to school by 8:30 each morning.

For each school day of a three-week period, a computer displayed Harold’s arrival time, which was always between 8:20 and 8:40.

The students would then select a response to Harold, ranging from strong praise to strong reprimand.

As you might expect, they usually praised Harold when he arrived before 8:30 and reprimanded him when he arrived after 8:30.

Because Schaffner had programmed the computer to display a random sequence of arrival times, Harold’s arrival time tended to improve (to regress toward 8:30) after being reprimanded.

For example, if Harold arrived at 8:39, he was almost sure to be reprimanded, and his randomly selected next-day arrival time was likely to be earlier than 8:39.

Thus, even though their reprimands were having no effect, most subjects ended the experiment believing that their reprimands had been effective.

judgments

Social judgment involves our feelings: Our moods infuse our _______.

Unhappy people—especially those bereaved or depressed—tend to be more self-focused and brooding.

Happy people – are more trusting, more loving, more responsive.

When we are in a happy mood, the world seems friendlier, decisions are easier, and good news more readily comes to mind.

From Germans enjoying their team's World Cup soccer victory to Australians emerging from a heartwarming movie, people seem good-hearted; life seems wonderful.

Let a mood turn gloomy, however, and thoughts switch onto a different track. Now the bad mood primes our recollections of negative events.

Our relationships seem to sour.

Our self-image takes a dive.

Our hopes for the future dim.

Other people’s behaviour seems more sinister.

Joseph Forgas had often been struck by how people’s “memories and judgments change with the colour of their mood.”

Let’s say that you’re put in a good or a bad mood and then watch a recording (made the day before) of you talking with someone.

If made to feel happy, you feel pleased with what you see, and you are able to detect many instances of your poise, interest, and social skill.

If you’ve been put in a bad mood, viewing the same video seems to reveal a quite different you—one who is stiff, nervous, and inarticulate

Given how your mood colours your judgments, you feel relieved at how things brighten when the experimenter switches you to a happy mood before leaving the experiment

snap judgments; stereotypes

Mood-related thoughts may distract us from complex thinking about something else.

Thus, when emotionally aroused—when angry or even in a very good mood—we become more likely to make ____ ________ and evaluate others based on _______.

biasing

if we acknowledge our moods, we can keep them from ____ our judgments.

The phenomenon is commonplace

Sports fans perceive referees as partial to the other side.

Presidential candidates and their supporters nearly always view the media as unsympathetic to their cause.

Saying that Justin Trudeau is “an okay prime minister” may seem like a put-down to those who admire him but praise to those who despise him.

values.

We view our social worlds through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and ___.

That is one reason our beliefs and schemas are so important; they shape our interpretation of everything else

belief perseverance

tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them

belief perseverance examples

"rounding the corner,"

30% of americans believe the election was stolen, despite the fact that theres recounts and evidence.

"I wont get Covid" even though we are still in a pandemic

"Climate change is a hoax" world is literally on fire

world supposed to end in 2012 - still believe even through we in 2023

Asteroid is going to hit the earth and kill us.

Nevertheless, the new belief survived approximately 75 percent intact, presumably because the participants still retained their invented explanations for the belief.

Craig Anderson, Mark Lepper, and Lee Ross (1980) planted a falsehood in people’s minds and then tried to discredit it.

Their research reveals that it is surprisingly difficult to demolish a falsehood, once the person conjures up a rationale for it.

Each experiment first implanted a belief, either by proclaiming it to be true or by showing the participants some anecdotal evidence.

Then the participants were asked to explain why it is true.

Finally, the researchers totally discredited the initial information by telling the participants the truth: The information was manufactured for the experiment, and half the people in the experiment had received opposite information.

When that information was discredited, the people still held their self-generated explanations and, therefore, continued to believe that risk-prone people really do make better (or worse) firefighters.

Anderson, Lepper, and Ross (1980) asked people to decide whether people who take risks make good or bad firefighters.

One group considered a risk-prone person who was a successful firefighter and a cautious person who was an unsuccessful one.

The other group considered cases suggesting the opposite conclusion.

After forming their theory that risk-prone people make better (or worse) firefighters, the individuals wrote explanations for it—for example, that risk-prone people are brave or that cautious people have fewer accidents.

After each explanation was formed, it could exist independently of the information that initially created the belief.

closed

These experiments also show that the more we examine our theories and explain how they might be true, the more ____ we become to information that challenges our belief.

misinformation effect

Incorporating "misinformation" into one's memory of an event, after witnessing an event and then receiving misleading information about it.

misinformation effect example

an eyewitness being asked: "Did you see the broken light" rather than "Did you see a broken light". The first assumes there was a broken light

The results were that people incorporate the misinformation into their memories:

They recall a yield sign as a stop sign, hammers as screwdrivers, Vogue magazine as Mademoiselle, Dr. Henderson as “Dr. Davidson,” breakfast cereal as eggs, and a clean-shaven man as having a moustache.

In experiments involving more than 20 000 people, Elizabeth Loftus and her collaborators explored our mind’s tendency to construct memories.

In the typical experiment, people witness an event, receive misleading information about it (or not), and then take a memory test.

The results find a misinformation effect in which people incorporate the misinformation into their memories:

real

false memories feel and look like ___ memories.

Thus, they can be as persuasive as ___ memories—convincingly sincere, yet sincerely wrong.

58 percent of preschoolers produced false and often detailed stories about the fictitious event.

Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck demonstrated children's suggestibility by asking children, once a week for 10 weeks, to "Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you."

For example, "Can you remember going to the hospital with the mousetrap on your finger?" Remarkably, when then interviewed by a new adult who asked the same question ...

"imagination inflation”

This “_______ ______” happens partly because visualizing something activates similar areas in the brain as does actually experiencing it.

Misinformation-induced false memories provide one explanation for a worrying phenomenon: false confessions.

Among 250 closely studied cases in which DNA evidence cleared wrong- fully convicted people, 40 involved false confessions.

Many of these were compliant confessions—people who confessed when worn down and often sleep-deprived (“If you will just tell us you accidentally rather than deliberately set the fire, you can go home”).

Others were internalized confessions—ones apparently believed after people were fed misinformation.

The construction of positive memories brightens our recollections.

Terence Mitchell, Leigh Thompson, and colleagues (1994, 1997) report that people often exhibit rosy retrospection—they recall mildly pleasant events more favourably than they experienced them.

Cathy McFarland and Michael Ross (1985) found that as our relationships change, we also revise our recollections of other people.

They had university students rate their steady dating partners.

Two months later, they rated them again.

Students who were more in love than ever had a tendency to recall love at first sight.

Those who had broken up were more likely to recall having recognized the partner as somewhat selfish and bad-tempered.

The worse your current view of your partner is, the worse your memories are, which only further confirms your negative attitudes.

Diane Holmberg and John Holmes (1994) discovered the same phenomenon among 373 newlywed couples, most of whom reported being very happy.

When resurveyed two years later, those whose marriages had soured recalled that things had always been bad.

current

It’s not that we are totally unaware of how we used to feel, just that when memories are hazy, ____ feelings guide our recall.

When widowed people try to recall the grief they felt upon their spouse’s death five years earlier, their current emotional state colours their memories.

When patients recall their previous day’s headache pain, their current feelings sway their recollections.

Depressed people who get Botox—which prevents them from frowning—recover from depression more quickly, perhaps because they find it more difficult to remember why they were sad.