Social Cognition: Reality and the Dark Side of Schemas

Reality is ambiguous; perception, interpretation, and memory are active categorization processes rather than passive recordings.
These processes are heavily influenced by internal needs, wishes, and expectations.
Schemas guide experiences and help categorize the world.

Confirmation Bias: The tendency to interpret or remember evidence as supporting existing beliefs. This occurs through: * Biased Hypothesis Testing: Asking questions in ways that lead to "yes" answers to confirm expectations (e.g., Snyder & Swann (1978)). * Biased Interpretation: Interpreting ambiguous evidence as confirmatory, as seen in Hastorf & Cantril (1954) ("They saw a game").
Perseverance Effect: The tendency for beliefs to persist even after they have been discredited. * Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard (1975): Participants who received random "success" or "failure" feedback on a "Social Sensitivity" test maintained their self-beliefs even after the feedback was revealed to be bogus. * Real-world application: Jurors instructed to ignore comments often still let those comments influence their judgment.
Barnum Statements: Ambiguous information (like horoscopes) that individuals interpret as specific confirmatory evidence because it is vague enough to apply to anyone (Forer (1948)).

Memory is an active, reconstructive process that rebuilding the original event using current schemas.
Language Influence: Loftus & Palmer (1974) found that using different verbs (e.g., "smashed" vs. "contacted") to describe a car accident altered participants' estimated speeds.
False Memories: Geraerts et al. (2008) demonstrated the "Egg Salad Study," where approximately $1/3$ of participants developed a false belief and subsequent avoidance behavior after being told a false story about getting sick from egg salad as children.
Memory of the Self: Our current beliefs about how traits change over time influence our recall. * People use schemas (e.g., "fitness decreases with age") to reconstruct their past abilities (McFarland, Ross, & Giltrow (1992)). * Conway & Ross (1984): Students in a "skills course" recalled their past performance as worse than it actually was to justify their perceived improvement.

Definition: When an individual's behavior causes another person to act in accordance with the individual's expectations.
Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968): Teachers told certain students were "bloomers" (randomly assigned) resulted in those students actually gaining more IQ points because of the teachers' increased encouragement.
Employment Context (Word, Zanna, & Cooper (1974)): * Step 1: Observed racial gaps in interview competence. * Step 2: Found a correlation between interviewer warmth and applicant performance. * Step 3: Experimentally confirmed that when white interviewers were trained to be "cold," applicants (regardless of race) were rated as less competent by impartial judges.

Classroom Task (Extraversion): Students were asked to determine if a peer was extroverted using three "yes/no" questions. Most asked questions biased toward extraversion (e.g., "Do you enjoy making friends?"), leading to an overestimation of extraverts in the room.
Search Engine Demonstration: Searching "is the sun harmful?" yields results confirming harm, while searching "is the sun healthy?" yields results confirming benefits, illustrating biased hypothesis testing in digital environments.
Practice Item: Amy, an online instructor, finds blue-eyed students performed worse than green-eyed students after the exam was taken but before she knew their eye color. * Answer: Option D ("None of the above"). Since colors were identified after the recording of grades, it cannot be a self-fulfilling prophecy (which requires behavioral interaction) or a schema bias impacting the grading itself.