Social Beliefs and Judgments

Social Beliefs and Judgments:

• Social psychology studies social beliefs and judgments.

Priming:

• Priming involves activating particular associations in memory.
• Priming can influence thoughts and actions.
• Subliminal priming is short term.
• Subliminal priming is more effective if already motivated to engage in the primed behavior.

Intuitive Judgments:

• Priming research shows that much of our behavior is unconscious.
• A lot of thinking is unconscious:
  • Schemas
  • Emotional reactions
  • Expertise
  • Thin slices
• Subliminal stimuli only have a minor effect.
• Error-prone hindsight affects intuitive judgement.

Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing:

• Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms your existing beliefs.

Overconfidence:

• Overconfidence is the tendency to be more confident than warranted.
• Overconfidence involves overestimating the accuracy of your beliefs.
• Overconfidence applies to factual information, judgments of others' behavior, and judgments of own behavior.
• Incompetence and underestimation of the importance of situational forces feed overconfidence.
• "It takes competence to recognize competence".
• Overconfidence leads to confirmation bias.
• Perseverance of beliefs is the tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited.
• Confirmatory hypothesis testing seeks out information that reinforces your pre-existing beliefs.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy also affects confidence.
• Remedies for overconfidence:
  • Prompt feedback
  • Break up a task into its subcomponents
  • Consider disconfirming information

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts:

• Heuristics are thinking strategies that enable quick, efficient judgments.
• Heuristics can lead to attribution biases.
• Ability to process information is limited; therefore, shortcuts are taken.
• These shortcuts sometimes lead to errors.
• Representativeness heuristic is the tendency to presume that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member.
• Representativeness heuristic ignores base rate information.
• Availability heuristic judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory.

Counterfactual Thinking:

• Counterfactual thinking involves imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but did not.
• Counterfactual thinking underlies our feelings of luck.
• Typically more regret over things not done.

Illusory Thinking:

• Illusory correlation is the perception of a relationship where none exists.
• Illusory correlation is the perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
• Illusion of control is the perception of uncontrollable events as subject to your control, or more controllable than they are.

Moods and Judgement:

• A temporary good or bad mood strongly influenced people's ratings of their videotaped behaviour.
• Those in a bad mood detected far fewer positive behaviours.

Perceiving and Interpreting Events:

• Pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students believed the news coverage was biased against their point of view.

Belief Perseverance:

• Belief perseverance is persistence of one's initial conceptions, even in the face of disconfirming evidence.

Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds:

• Misinformation effect incorporates "misinformation" into one's memory of an event.
• Potential for the creation of false memories can occur.
• Rosy (or less then rosy) retrospections affect one's recalled attitude.
• Recalling smoking fewer cigarettes, voting more often is a way of reconstructing past behaviour.
• Greenwald's "totalitarian ego" affects construction.
• In retrospect, you may revise your past to match your current beliefs.

Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation:

• Attribution theory is how we explain people’s behaviour.
• Misattribution is mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause.
• Dispositional versus situational attributions is an example of asking why a driver cut me off on the highway.

Fundamental Attribution Error:

• Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate the impact to the situation on the behaviour of other people.
• Attributions are made in 2 steps:
  • Identify behaviour and make a personal attribution
  • Adjust that impression to account for situational factors

Attributions and Reactions:

• How negative behavior is explained impacts how you feel.

Teacher Expectations and Student Performance:

• Teacher expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Getting from Others What We Expect:

• Behavioural confirmation is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy where peoples' social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.