psy 261 ch. 3

How do we judge our social worlds?
  • We have 2 brain systems:
    • System 1: intuitive, automatic, unconscious and fast way of thinking; gut feeling; automatic processing; functions out of our awareness
    • System 2: deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking; controlled processing; requires our attention

Priming

  • Priming: activating particular associations in memory
    • priming one thought, even without awareness, can influence another thought or even an action
  • Much of our social info processing is automatic, unintentional, and unconscious
  • Embodied cognition: the mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments
    • The brain systems that process our bodily sensations communicate with the brain systems responsible for our social thinking

Intuitive Judgments

  • Intuition: immediately knowing something without reasoning or analysis
  • automatic thinking: “implicit” thinking that’s effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to ‘intuition’, also known as system 1
    • examples: schemas; emotional reactions; expertise (and therefore intuitively knowing something); snap judgements; skills
  • controlled thinking: “explicit” thinking that’s deliberate, reflective, and conscious, also known as system 2
    • examples: remembering facts and names'; recalling past experiences
  • limit of intuition: illusions and illusory thinking

Overconfidence

  • Our automatic system 1 intuitions are sometimes wrong. usually, we don’t recognize our errors, and we display overconfidence
  • overconfidence phenomenon: the tendency to be more confident than correct; to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
  • Overconfidence is not limited to experts. Ironically, incompetence feeds overconfidence
    • Beginners don’t start out overconfident, but wildly overestimate their skill and knowledge after gaining limited experience
  • Overconfident individuals spoke first, talked longer, and used a more factual tone, making them appear more competent than they actually were
    • If confidence, but not ability, helps people become leaders and attract mates, pervasive overconfidence seems less surprising — but perhaps more distressing.
  • confirmation bias: tendency to search for info that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoid info that might disprove them
    • Confirmation bias appears to be a System 1 snap judgment, where our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition
    • calling up system 2 and thinking a little bit more makes us less likely to commit this error
  • 2 techniques have successfully reduced overconfidence bias:
    • prompt feedback: receiving prompt, frequent feedback about things helps our ability to estimate things accurately
    • get people to think about why their judgments might be wrong: force them to consider disconfirming info

Heuristics

  • Heuristics: a thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments with minimal effort (system 1 snap generalizations)
    • The speed of these intuitive guides promotes our survival. The biological purpose of thinking is not to make us right — it’s to keep us alive. In some situations, however, haste makes errors.
  • representativeness heuristic
    • tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling/representing a typical member; To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category
  • 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
    • People are slow to understand specific examples from a general truth, but they are remarkably quick to infer general truth from a vivid example
    • The availability heuristic explains why vivid, easy-to-imagine events, such as shark attacks or mass shootings, may seem more likely to occur than harder-to-picture events

counterfactual thinking

  • imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might’ve happened, but didn’t
  • The more significant and unlikely the event, the more intense the counterfactual thinking

Illusory thinking

  • illusory correlation: perception of a relationship where non exists, or a perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists
    • People easily misperceive random events as confirming their belief
  • regression toward the average: the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward their average
    • ex: a student who scores super high on one test is more likely to score lower on the next one; and a student who scored really low on the first one is likely to score higher in the next one
    • exceptional performance tends to regress toward normality

Moods and Judgments

  • our moods infuse our judgments; Our moods color how we judge our worlds partly by bringing to mind past experiences associated with the mood
  • Mood-related thoughts may distract us from complex thinking about something else. Thus, when emotionally aroused — when either angry or in a very good mood — we become more likely to make System 1 snap judgments and evaluate others based on stereotypes
How do we perceive our social worlds?
  • We respond not to reality as it is but to reality as we construe it.

Perceiving and interpreting events

  • We view our social worlds through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values. That is one reason our beliefs are so important; they shape our interpretation of everything else

Belief Perseverance

  • it is surprisingly difficult to demolish a falsehood after the person conjures up a rationale for it
  • belief perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives

Constructing memories

  • we reconstruct memories at the time of withdrawal
  • misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading info about it
  • rosy retrospection: recalling pleasant events even more favorably than they experienced them
  • when memories are hazy, current feelings guide our recall
How do we explain our social worlds?

Attributing causality

  • attribution theory: theory of how people explain others’ behavior: for example, attributing it to internal dispositions or external situations

    • dispositional attribution: attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits
    • situational attribution: attributing behavior to the environment
    • misattribution: mistakenly attributing behavior to the wrong source

  • spontaneous trait inference: an effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior

  • fundamental attribution error: tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior

  • When recalling our past, we become like observers of someone else

  • a reason for the attribution error: We find causes where we look for them.

How do our social beliefs matter?
  • self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment
  • behavioral confirmation: a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations