Social Beliefs and Judgments Quiz

Social Beliefs and Judgments

• Priming happens unconsciously, activating particular associations in memory.
• Priming can influence thoughts and actions.
• Subliminal priming is short-term and only effective if a person is already motivated to engage in a specific behavior, requiring unconscious activation in specific circumstances.
• Much of our thinking is unconscious, including schemas, emotional reactions, expertise, and thin slices.
• Priming research suggests much of behavior is unconscious.

Intuitive Judgments

• Subliminal stimuli have a minor effect. People tend to come up with explanations to justify their reactions.
• Intuitive judgments are prone to errors.
• The conscious mind tries to create explanations after the event.
• People have the capacity for illusion.

Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing

• Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing describes the bias to prove oneself right, via seeking out information that reinforces existing beliefs.
• People tend to look for evidence to support their preconceived ideas rather than disproving them, which is rooted in confirmation bias.
• The tendency is to assume one is right and then seek validation for those assumptions.
• People are often not trying to assess which view is most correct, but rather aim to seek out validation for their ideas.

Overconfidence

• Overconfidence is the overestimation of one's answers and beliefs.
• Overconfidence phenomenon is the tendency to be more confident than warranted, overestimating the accuracy of one's beliefs.
• Overconfidence can come from factual information, judgments of others' behavior, and judgments of one's own behavior.
• Overconfidence is fed by incompetence and underestimation of the importance of situational forces.
• Recognizing one's competence takes competence.

Overconfidence Leads to Confirmation Bias

• Overconfidence leads to confirmation bias.
• Confirmation bias is persevering one's beliefs even when they have been discredited. People will look for ways to excuse the discredited source by blaming issues externally rather than internally.
• Overconfidence influences confirmatory hypothesis testing. People seek out information that confirms existing beliefs.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are a component of overconfidence.
• Remedies for overconfidence include prompt feedback; breaking tasks down into subcomponents, and considering disconfirming information.

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

• Heuristics are thinking strategies for quick and efficient judgments.
• Heuristics can lead to errors like attribution biases due to limited processing ability.
• People often take mental shortcuts as they have limited mental processing resources.

Heuristics: Representativeness and Availability

• Representativeness Heuristic: Judging if someone or something belongs to a category based on resemblance to a typical member, ignoring base rates.
• Availability Heuristic: Judging likelihood of things based on how easily examples come to mind, emphasizing availability in memory.

Counterfactual Thinking

• Counterfactual Thinking: Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that could have happened but didn't.
• Counterfactual thinking underlies feelings of luck and regret, particularly for missed opportunities.
• People tend to regret things they didn't do more than things they did do.

Illusory Thinking

• Illusory correlation: Perceiving a relationship where none exists, or perceiving a stronger relationship than exists.
• Illusion of control: Perceiving uncontrollable events as subject to one's control or more controllable than they are.

Mood and Judgment

• Mood dramatically affects judgment. People in a good mood tend to perceive behavior more positively and those in a bad mood negatively.

Perceiving and Interpreting Events

• People tend to interpret events based on their expectations. Events might be seen as biased based on existing beliefs.
• Biases are present in interpreting information and potentially the media.
• Groups will perceive perceived bias based on their own beliefs and/or affiliations.

Belief Perseverance

• Belief perseverance is the persistence of initial conceptions even when faced with disconfirming evidence. Once a decision is made, people maintain that belief despite contradictory evidence.

Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds

• Memories are constructed and reconstructed.
• The misinformation effect is the incorporation of inaccurate information into one's memory after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information.
• False memories can be created.
• Past attitudes and behaviors are sometimes rosy (or less rosy) and revised to conform to current beliefs.

Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation?

• Attribution theory is the process of explaining the causes of behavior (one's own and others').
• Misattribution: Mistakenly attributing behavior to the wrong cause (e.g., personality vs. situation).
• Dispositional attributions: Attributing behavior to personal characteristics.
• Situational attributions: Attributing behavior to external factors.

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Fundamental Attribution Error: Tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation on the behavior of others and overestimate the role of personal characteristics. It's a two-step process.

Attributions and Reactions

• Attributions influence reactions to others' behavior.
• Dispositional attributions lead to unfavorable reactions, while situational attributions evoke sympathetic responses.

Teacher Expectations and Student Performance

• Teacher expectations can influence student behavior and performance through self-fulfilling prophecies.
• Teacher behavior, influenced by expectations, affects student responses.

Getting From Others What We Expect

• Behavioural confirmation is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy where social expectations lead people to behave in ways that encourage others to confirm their expectations.