Social Psychology #4

Social Cognition

Snap Judgements

people often make judgments on the basis of very little information

• like inferring personality based on physical appearance

• people often agree with one another in their snap judgments, but evidence that those agreed-upon judgments are accurate is harder to come by

Todorov Study (Todorov 2008)

• had participants rate photographs of different faces and personalities

• 2 dimensions stood out: positive-negative dimension (trustworthy/untrustworthy, aggressive/not aggressive); and focus on power (confidence/bashful, dominant/submissive)

• Todorov used computer models to generate faces representing various combinations of these two dimensions

Results:

• people are predisposed to make quite important snap judgments about others

  • whether they should be approached or avoided (dimension 1)

  • whether they’re likely to be top dog or underdog (dimension 2)

• baby faces tended to look less dominant and trustworthy

• Baby-faced individuals receive more favorable treatment due to their “helpless and weak” look

  • but they have a harder time being seen as an adult

US candidate study (Todorov 2005)

• participants were shown for 1 second pictures of the Republican and Democratic candidates in US congressional elections and asked to indicate which candidates looked more competent

Results:

• those judged to be more competent by most of the participants won 69% of the races

—> important to note that these judgments might not be accurate, but people still want to believe what they believe

teacher study (Ambady & Rosenthal 1993)

• participants were shown thin slices of professor’s performance in the classroom (3 silent, 10-second video clips)

• asked each participant to rate the professors on a variety of dimensions (anxiety, competence, activeness, and warmth)

Results:

• these quick relatively quick assessments correlated significantly with student’s’ evaluations of the professors at the end of the semester

• in other words, the quick reactions did a decent job of predicting later judgments that were based on exposure to much larger samples of behavior

covariation principle

the idea that behavior should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behavior

• when a person often engages in a particular behavior (that others often don’t), we tend to attribute the behavior to the person

• when a person behaves in a similar fashion in many different circumstances, we similarly tend to attribute the behavior to the person

consensus

A type of covariation information

• refers to what most people would do in a given situation

• whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation

• the higher the consensus (the more an individual’s reaction is shared by others), the less it says about the individual and more about the situation

distinctiveness

A type of covariation information

• whether a behavior is unique to a particular situation or occurs in many or all situations

• refers to what an individual does in different situations

• the higher the distinctiveness (the more someone’s reaction is confined to a particular situation), the less it says about that individual and the more it says about the specific situation

Situational attribution

• when consensus and distinctiveness are both high

• when everyone else in your friend’s statistics class likes it too, and when your friend likes few other math classes, there must be something special about that class

dispositional attribution

• when consensus and distinctiveness are both low

• when few other students like the statistics class, and when your friend claims to like all math courses, her fondness for the course must reflect something about her

discounting principle

the idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced the same behavior

counterfactual thinking

thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had occurred differently

• “thoughts counter to the fact”

• can affect attribution

• if people can readily generate alternative outcomes of an event, joy or pain is amplified

Emotional amplification

an increase in emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening

• ex. Olympic paradox: 2nd silver medalists tend to be less happy than 3rd place medalists because they are consumed by what they did not receive (first place)

self-serving attributional bias

the tendency to attribute failures and negative outcomes to external circumstances and attribute successes and postitive outcomes to oneself

• students tends to do this for their failures (“the questions were ambiguous”) and success (“my hard work paid off”)

fundamental attribution error

the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior

• attributing behavior to personal characteristics while ignoring situational factors that may have been more important

• this occurs often because features of the environment are more likely to capture our attention and to be seen as potential causes of an observed effect

• college students took part in a quiz-game competition, much like the television show jeopardy

• half of them were assigned the role of the questioner and the other half the role of contestant

• the questioner’s job was to think of challenging (but not impossible) general-knowledge questions (ex. who were the 2 coinventors of calculus?) and the contestant would try to answer the questions

• from a self-presentation standpoint, the questioners had a tremendous advantage; it was relatively easy for them to come off well because they could focus on whatever personal knowledge they happened to have and ignore various pockets of ignorance

• the contestants, however, suffered from the disadvantage of having to field questions about the questioner’s store of knowledge (which doesn’t typically match their own)

Results:

• the hapless contestants failed to answer many of the questions correctly

• the contestants came away quite impressed by the questionnaire’s abilities rating their knowledge and intelligence higher than their own (even if the situation was clearly unfair)

actor-observer difference

a difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment

• the actor is inclined to make situational attributions

• the observer is inclined to make dispositional attributions

College Major Study (Nisbett et al. 1973)

• participants had to explain why they chose the college major that they did or why their best friends chose the major that they did

Results:

• participants more often referred to characteristics of the person when explaining someone else’s choices than they did when explaining their own choice

• they typically focused on the specifics of the major when explaining their own choice

—> example of actor-observer difference

cultural differences and causal attributions

• people in interdependent cultures are more likely to attribute an actor’s behavior to the situation than independent cultures

• people in independent cultures are more likely to attribute an actor’s behavior to individuals

• fundamental attribution error is more widespread and pronounced for Westerners than Easterners

• puerto Rican children describe themselves using fewer traits than European-American children do, and they are less likely to use traits to describe other people’s behavior

• Mexican and Mexican Americans are also less likely than Anglo-Americans to make trait inferences

Line square study (Kitayama et al. 2003)

• had Japanese and American participants observe a square with a line drawn at the bottom

• then the participants went to another part of the room and saw a square of different sizes

• they then had to draw either a line of the same length as the original or a line having the same length in relation to the original square

Results:

• the Americans were better at the absolute judgment, which required ignoring the context

• the Japanese were better at the relative judgment, which required paying attention to the context

—> demonstrates how East Asians and Westerners differ in how much attention they give to context (even when perceiving inanimate objects

fMRI line square study (Hedden et al. 2008)

• researchers used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine activation in the frontoparietal area of the brain which is associated with difficult perceptual judgments

• this was used while participants were completing the line-judgment task used by Kitayama et al.

Results:

• there was more activity in that region when participants had to do the task that did not come as naturally to them

• East Asians showed more activity when assessing absolute line length (and thus had to ignore the context)

• Westerners showed more activity when making proportional judgments (and thus had to attend to the context)

Gas stove study (Na & Kitayama 2011)

• presented participants with information about a person that could be expected to lead them to make an inference about the person’s personality

• the statement “she checked twice to see if the gas was on in the stove before she left” might lead a participant to infer that the person was careful

• when participants were later shown a picture of the person along with the word reckless:

Results:

• American participants exhibited a pattern of brain activity associated with surprise

• the Korean participants did not

—> East Asians are not just more likely to notice situational cues that might correct a dispositional inference, but they appear to be less likely to make a dispositional inference in the first place

gender and attribution

• men are more likely to attribute failures to lack of effort

• women are more likely to attribute failures to lack of ability

Teacher feedback study (Dweck et al. 1978)

• researchers observed different teacher’s feedback patterns in elementary school classrooms

Results:

• while the girls (on average) outperformed the boys in schools, teacher’s negative comments about the girls’ performance tended to be directed at intellectual inadequacies (“this is not right Lisa”)

• criticism of the boy’s work tended to refer to nonintellectual factors (“this is messy Bill”)

• positive evaluations were related to the intellectual quality of girls’ performance less than 80% of the time; for the boys it was 94%

—> observed that girls learn that criticism means they may lack intellectual ability, whereas boy learn that criticism may just mean they haven’t worked hard enough or paid enough attention

Gender feedback study (Dweck et al. 1978)

• performed an experiment in which they gave both boys and girls the same kind of feedback (either the kind that girls usually receive or the boys typically receive)

Results:

• found that both genders tended to view subsequent failures accordingly, either as a reflection of their lack of ability or their lack of effort and attention

• therefore whatever other reasons there be for their successes, both genders’ patterns are reinforced by the treatment they receive in the classroom

primacy effect

a type of order whereby the information presented first in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment

• information presented first exerts the most influence because it affects the interpretation of subsequent information

• most often occur when the information is ambiguous

• part of “order effects”

Recency effect

a type of order whereby the information presented last in a body of evidence has disproportionate influence on judgement

• information presented last has the most impact because it is more available in memory

• part of “order effects”

adjective order of effect study

• asked people to evaluate a hypothetical individual described by the following terms: intelligent, industrious, impulsiv,e critical, stubborn, and envious

• the first group read it as presented above (the two positive adjectives first), while the second group read the same adjectives in the opposite order (negative word first)

Results:

• group 1: participants rated the individual favorably because of the influence of the two very positive terms that began the list

• group 2: participants rated the individual as less favorable because of the influence of the two very negative terms that began the list

—> there was a substantial primacy effect; traits presented at the beginning of the list had more impact than those presented later on

framing effect

the influence on judgement resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented

• order effects are a type of framing effects

• “pure” framing effect: the frame of reference is changed by reordering the information even though the content of the information remains exactly the same

spin framing

a form of framing that varies the content, not just the order, of what is presented

• a company whose products is of a higher quality than competing products will introduce information that frames the consumer’s choice as one of quality

• another company whose product has a lower price will feature information that frames the consumer’s choice as one of savings

positive and negative framing

most things can be described (or framed) in ways that emphasize the good or the bad (use whichever is beneficial to the situation)

• ex. a piece of meant described as 75% lean seems more appealing than one described as 25% fat (even if the percentages are equivalent)

surgery study

• more than 400 physicians were asked whether they would recommend surgery or radiation for patients diagnosed with a certain type of cancer

• group 1: were told that of 100 previous patients who had the surgery, 90 lived through the postoperative period, 68 were still alive after a year, and 34 were still alive after five years

• group 2: were given the same exact information but it was framed in a different way; that 10 died during the surgery or the postoperative period, 32 had died by the end of the first year and 66 had died by the end of five years

Results:

• group 1: 83% of these physicians recommended surgery

• group 2: only 56% of the physicians recommended surgery

—> negative information tends to attract ore attention and have a greater psychological impact, information framed negatively tends to elicit a stronger response

temporal framing

the tendency to think about actions and events within a particular time perspective

• can influence how information is interpreted

• far-off events are construed in more abstract terms, whereas imminent events are construed more concretely

construal level theory

the temporal perspective from which people view events had important and predictable implications for how they construe them

• a theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking

• psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms

• actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms

abstract vs. concrete terms

• decisions that sounds great in the abstract are sometimes less thrilling when fleshed out in concrete details

  • ex. “furthering my education” or “expanding my horizons” sounds better than “studying” or “spending time in the library”

• sometimes decisions are more enticing at the concrete level than in abstract level

  • at the abstract level you might have sworn that you’d stick to your diet no matter what, yet when you’re standing in front of the buffet, you find it easy to indulge

confirmation bias

the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it

• people more readily, reliably and robustly seek out evidence that would support the proposition rather than information that would contradict the proposition

• can lead to all sort of false beliefs because we can find support evidence for amost anything

tennis match study

• asked one group of participants to determine whether working out the day before an important tennis match makes a player more likely to win

• another group was asked to determine whether working out the day before a match makes a player more likely to lose

• both groups could examine any of four types of information before coming to a conclusion: the # of players in a sample who worked out & won the match, who worked out & lost, who didn’t work out & won, who didn’t work out & lost

Results:

• all 4 types of information are needed to make a valid determination but particiapnts tended not to seek out all the necessary information

• participants exhibited the confirmation bias: they were especially interested in examining the information that could potentially confirm the proposition they were investigating

extravert/introvert question study

• researchers asked one group of participants to interview someone and determine whether the target person was an extravert

• another group was asked to determine whether the target person was an introvert

• participants selected their interview questions from a list provided

Results:

• group tasked to determine extraverts tended to ask questions that focused on sociability

• those charged with determining whether the target was an introvert tended to ask questions focused on social withdrawal

• research examined which sites people visited, “liked” and forwarded on Facebook

• the investigators examined the Facebook habits of 2 groups of users

• group 1: included people whose likes were on posts that embraced various conspiracy theories 95% of the time

• group 2: 95% of the user’s likes were for posts that embraced scientific claims

Results:

• researchers found that the more these Facebook users favored one type of post over the other, the more their friends tended to be highly polarized as well

• the more often these individuals responded to the occasional post that challenged their beliefs by finding (or revisiting) posts that reinforced their beliefs

motivated confirmation bias

people can fall prey for the confirmation bias when they have no motivation to confirm a specific outcome

• when you are suggested of something you are more likley to evaluate it

death penalty study

• proponent’s and opponents of capital punishment read about studies of the death penalty’s effectiveness as a deterrent to committing a crime

• some participants read state-by-state comparisons purportedly showing that crime rates are not any lower in states with the death penalty than they are in states without; but they also read about how crimes rates within a few states decreased as soon as the death penalty was put in place

• another group read about studies showing the exact opposite: state-by-state comparisons that made the death penalty look effective and before and after comparisons that made it look ineffective

Results:

• those who favored the death penalty interpreted whichever set of evidence they were exposed to as strongly supporting their position

• those opposed to the death penalty thought that the evidence warranted the opposite conclusion

• both sides jumped on the problems associated with the studies that contradicted their positions, but readily embraced the studies that supported them

—> their preferences tainted how they viewed the pertinent evidence

top-down processing

“Theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

• the meaning of stimuli is not passively recorded; it is actively construed (using schemas to understand new information)

• tools for understanding the world

bottom-up processing

“Data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment

• takes in relevant stimuli from the outside world like text on a page, gestures in an interaction, or sounds at cocktail party

the influence of schemas

• affects our judgments

• direct and guide our attention

• structure our memories

• influence our interpretations

• directly prompt behavior

Gorilla study (simons & Chabris 1999)

• participants watched a video of two teams of 3 people, each passing a basketball back and forth

• members of one team wore white shirts, and members of the other team wore black shirts

• the researchers asked each participant to count the number of passes made between the members of one of the teams

• 45seconds into the action, a person wearing a gorilla costume strolled into the middle of the scene

Results:

• only half of the particiapnts noticed it

• the participants’ schemas about what is likely to happen in a game of catch directed their attention so intently to some parts of the video that they failed to see a dramatic stimulus they weren’t expecting

waitress vs. librarian study

• students watched a video of a husband and wife having dinner together

• half of the students were told that the wife was a librarian and the other half that she was a waitress

• the students later took a quiz that assessed their memory of what they had witnessed

• the central question was whether their memories were influenced by their stereotype of librarians and waitresses

• they asked them, for example, whether the woman was drinking wine (librarian stereotype) or been (waitress stereotype) and whether she had received a history book (librarian stereotype) or romance novel (waitress) as a gift

• the video had been constructed to contain an equal number of items consistent and inconsistent with each stereotype

Results:

• student show thought the woman was a librarian recalled librarian-consistent information more accurately than inconsistent information

• the same was for the waitress consistent information

—> information that fits a preexisting schema often enjoys an advantage in recall

Donald Study

• Donald is a fiction person who has been used as a stimulus in numerous experiments examining the effects of prior knowledge on social judgment

• students participated in what they thought were two unrelated experiments

• in the first, they viewed a number of trait words projected on a screen as part of a perception experiment (half were shown words like adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent, while the other half were shown the words reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn)

• after completing the perception experiment, the participants moved on to the second study on reading comprehension, where they had to read a short paragraph about Donald and rate him on a number of trait scales

Results:

• those who had been exposed to words like adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent formed more favorable impressions of Donald than the other group

—> the information that is most accessible in emmory can influence how we construe new information

priming

The presentation of information is designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible

• the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question

• we do not need to be conscious about the prime for it to be effective

Black Jack priming study

• participants played a simplified game of Blackjack

• a computer dealt participants two cards and they had to decide whether to bet that the sum of their two cards would exceed the sum of two cards that would soon appear for the dealer or whether they wanted to pass and go to the next round

• if they decided to bet, they won 5 points if their cards were higher than the dealers and lost 5 points if they were lower

• during each trial right before the participants made their decisions a word was presented so quickly that participants weren’t aware of it

• on some trials the word was gamble or wager; on others it was fold or stay

Results:

• even though the primes were presented too quickly for participants to consciously perceive them, participants were more likely to bet on trials preceded by the words gamble or wager than after the words fold or stay

subliminal (stimuli)

Below the threshold of conscious awareness

• the stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness

intuitive system

• operates quickly and automatically

• based on associations

• performs many of its operations simultaneously (in parallel)

Rational system

• slower and more controlled

• based on rules and deduction

• performs its operations one at a time (serially)

intuitive and rational system

• both can agree

• both can disagree

• intuitive system can create a response that seem right with speed such that the rational is never engaged

heuristics

intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgement

• they are mental shortcuts that provide people with sound judgments most of the time, although they sometimes lead to errors in judgement

availability heuristics

the process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind

• it can cause people to overestimate their own contributions to group projects

• it can lead to faulty assessments of the risks posed by memorable hazards

• ex. are there more words start with r, or that have r as its third letter? many may respond with the words that start with r, although that is not the case, because we are more likely to remember words starting with r rather than as the third letter

• ex. do more people die of homicide or suicide? suicides outnumber homicides, but do not get enough attention. things reported do not capture it all, but also overemphasize repetitiveness in the world (making it seem more dangerous, more likely, etc.)

representativeness heuristics

the process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect

• attempt to categorize something by judging how similar it is to our conception of the typical member of the category

• sometimes this tendency leads people to overlook highly relevant considerations

• ex. instead of wondering “how likely is that person a republican?” they wonder, “is this person similar to my prototype of a republican?”

married couple responsibility study

• married couples were asked to apportion responsibility for various tasks or outcomes in their daily life (how much each person contributed to keeping the house clean, maintaining the social calendar, starting arguments, etc.)

Results:

• the respondants tended to give themselves more credit than their partners did

• in most cases, when estimates made by the two participants were summed, they exceeded the logically allowable maximum of 100

fluency

the ease or difficulty associated with information processing (term used by psychologists)

• we judge fluent names to be more famous, fluent objects to be more prototypical members of their categories

• when the font of a recipe is hard to read, people assume that the recipe itself if hard

• influences how people process relevant information

• less fluent = more time, more effort, more carefulness

Fluency study

• a tested was printed in either a normal highly readable font or a degraded, harder to read font

• performing well on the cognitive reflection test required stifling an immediate gut feeling to get the correct answer to each question

Results:

• participants gave more correct answers when the questions were presented in degraded and hence disfluent, font

• the difficulty merely reading the question caused respondents to slow down, giving their more analytical processes a chance to catch up with their immediate intuitive responses

base-rate information

information about the relative frequency of events or members of different categories in a population

• ex. the chances of an individual being republican in a republican neighborhood rather than a democratic neighborhood

Boar and turtle study

• college students were asked to make inferences about the attributes of members of (hypothetical) tribes

• one group read about a tribe that ate wild boar and hunted sea turtles for their shells

• a second group read about a tribe that ate sea turtles and hunted wild boar for their tusks

Results:

• the students’ responses indicated that they assumed the characteristics of the food would “rub off” on the tribe members

• members of the turtle-eating tribe were considered better swimmers

• those who ate wild boar were thought to be more aggressive

Illusory correlations

the belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not

• this can occur when availability and representativeness heuristics operates together

• this can occur when variables resemble each other and because the simultaneous occurrence of two similar events stands out more than that of two dissimilar events

regression effect

statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other

• ex. tall parents tend to have tall kids, but not as tall as the parents themselves

regression fallacy

the failure to recognize the influence of the regression and to instead offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity