Psychology of Social Beliefs and Judgments

Social Beliefs and Judgments

• Priming activates particular associations in memory, influencing thoughts and actions.
• Subliminal priming affects behaviour if a person is already motivated to engage in that behaviour.
• Priming research suggests much of behaviour is unconscious.
• Intuitive judgments, such as schemas, emotional reactions, expertise, and thin slices, shape thinking.
• Intuitive judgments are often unconscious processes.

Intuitive Judgments: Limits of Intuition

• Subliminal stimuli have minimal impact.
• Hindsight is often prone to errors.
• People are susceptible to illusions.

Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing

• People often seek information that affirms pre-existing beliefs.
• For example, a numerical sequence starts with 2, 4, 6... suggesting a pattern.

Overconfidence

• Overconfidence is the tendency to overestimate one's accuracy in beliefs, judgments of others' and one's own behavior.
• Overconfidence arises from underestimating situational influences.
• It is said, "It takes competence to recognise competence.".
• Overconfidence leads to confirmation bias.
  • Perseverance of Belief: The tendency to maintain beliefs despite evidence to the contrary.
  • Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing: We actively look for supporting evidence for our beliefs while ignoring contradictions.
  • Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Our beliefs influence our behaviour, which, in turn, affects others' beliefs about us, leading to those beliefs coming true.
• Remedies for overconfidence include prompts for feedback, breaking tasks into smaller parts, and considering disconfirming information.

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

• Heuristics are thinking strategies for quick and efficient judgments.
• Limits in processing information lead to heuristics to overcome these limitations.
• The shortcuts sometimes lead to errors.
• Heuristics can result in cognitive biases like attribution bias.

Heuristics: Representative/Availability

• Representative heuristic: Assuming someone or something fits a group based on resemblance to a typical member (ignoring base rates).
• Availability heuristic: Judging likelihood based on how easily relevant instances come to mind.

Counterfactual Thinking

• Imagining alternative scenarios that could have happened.
• Counterfactual thinking underlies feelings of luck or regret.
• Regret can be felt more strongly about things that were not done.

Illusory Thinking

• Illusory correlation: Perceiving a relationship between variables where none exists or where the relationship is exaggerated.
• Illusion of control: Believing one can influence uncontrollable events.

Mood and Judgment

• Moods significantly affect judgments and perceptions of others' behaviour.
• A bad mood leads to detecting fewer positive behaviors.

Perceiving and Interpreting Events

• People perceive media bias, even when it is not present.
• The perception of bias is similar within groups sharing the same outlook. (e.g., those with pro-Israel views perceive bias against Israel)

Belief Perseverance

• Maintaining initial beliefs even after they are disproven.

Constructing Memories

• Misinformation effect: Integrating misleading information into memories of past events.
• False memories result from this.
• Elizabeth Loftus is a pioneer in this study.
• Past attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs can be reconstructed to match the current views.
• Greenwald's "totalitarian ego" is a way of expressing beliefs' strong influence on reconstructing past events.

Attributing Causality

• Attribution theory: Explaining why people behave the way they do.
• Misattribution: Attributing behaviour to the wrong cause.
• Dispositional vs. situational attributions: Determining if behaviour is caused by personality or circumstances

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Underestimating the influence of situations on others' behaviour.
• People tend to attribute others' actions to personal characteristics rather than external factors.
• It is a two-step process in attributions:
  1. Identify behaviour and attribute it to a personal cause.
  2. Adjust that impression to account for situational factors

Attributions and Reactions

• Understanding how attributions lead to reactions.
  • Dispositional attribution results in unfavourable reactions.
  • Situational attribution results in sympathetic reactions.

Teacher Expectations and Student Performance

• Teacher expectations influence student behaviour and performance.
• This is a "self-fulfilling prophecy".

Behavioural Confirmation

• Social expectations influence behaviour in a way that confirms those expectations (self-fulfilling prophecy).