Social Judgments and Bias

Social Judgments and Bias

• People respond to their perception of reality
• People are susceptible to overt and subtle influences
• One of these influences is priming

Priming

• Priming is the awakening or activating of certain associations
• Priming prepares us to view things in a particular way
• Priming can be fairly obvious
• Priming cues can be subtle, even unconscious and subliminal

Social Thinking

• Two types of processing exist: Controlled and Automatic

Controlled Processing

• The controlled processing is reflective, deliberate, and conscious
• Involves logic, analysis, and deliberate recall

Automatic Processing

• The automatic processing is impulsive, effortless, and unconscious
• Involves schemas, emotional reactions, and expertise
• Automatic processing does much more work
• People remember and know more than they realize

Automatic Errors

• Most thinking is automatic
• Automatic thinking is prone to significant errors
• Overconfidence, heuristics, illusory thinking and mood effects are all examples of automatic errors

Overconfidence

• People tend to have too much confidence in their own judgments and abilities
• The more incompetent someone is, the more overconfident they tend to be
• This only applies to relatively easy tasks

Why Overconfidence?

• People tend to recall being wrong as being almost right
• Confirmation bias makes people eager to verify our beliefs, but discount evidence against them
• Confirmation bias helps keep self-images and worldviews stable, overconfidence can also make people unable to admit when they are wrong

Reducing Overconfidence

• Three proven ways to reduce overconfidence: prompt feedback for being incorrect, unpacking information into their components, and forcing people to think of at least one way that their answer could be wrong

Heuristics

• Representativeness involves judging something by how closely it resembles a mental representation

• Saves time and effort but limits individual differences.

• Nothing is ever 100% representative of any group

• Availability involves easily recalling something, which makes it seem more likely

• The more someone hears something, the more believable it becomes

• Examples include big, emotional, or unusual events

• Counterfactual thinking involves what might have been

• Second place finishers tend to feel worse than third place finishers

• The narrower the miss, the more intense counterfactual thinking is

• Counterfactual thinking can cause people to second-guess themselves or mistrust information

Illusory Thinking

• Illusory correlation involves thinking two things are related when they are not
• Illusion of control involves the idea that chance-based events are within our control
• Regression towards the mean involves things eventually ending up being average, performing well on a test means individuals are likely to do worse on the next test, and vice versa

Mood Effects

• When people are happy, they tend to judge things positively
• When upset, people tend to judge things negatively
• People are completely unaware of this effect

Perception and the World

• People on two sides of a conflict will see the same news reports as biased against their side
• People are far more accepting of evidence that supports their side and critical of evidence against it
• People tend to attach traits to those who mentions them frequently

Belief Perseverance

• Once someone has a belief, it is very hard to break it, even in the face of strong evidence against it
• Individuals hear and form beliefs based on information
• People eventually come up with an explanation for why their belief is true
• Even if the original information is discredited, the point remains
• Best relief is to force someone to think through their belief

The Illusion of Memory

• Memories are not exact copies of events
• Current feelings impact past memories
• The misinformation effect is when given incorrect information about a past event, it can be incorporated into memories
• People tend to insist that they have always believed something or held an attitude, even when they have not

Judging Others – Attribution Theory

• Attribution theory asks: is a person's behavior guided more by their personal characteristics or the situation?
• People are eager to infer traits based on as little as one observation
• Spontaneous trait inference is less common in collectivist Asians
• This comes down to 3 different components: Consistency, Distinctiveness, and Consensus
• People ask themselves these three questions:
• Does the person usually act this way?
• Does the person behave differently in this situation than in others?
• Do other people behave the same way in this situation?

Fundamental Attribution Error

The fundamental attribution error involves a tendency to give too much weight to disposition and not enough to the situation

• People assume traits to others that they may not have
• On the other hand, people use the situation to excuse their own behavior

Why Fundamental Attribution Error?

• Partly results from self-serving bias
• Likely influenced by how we perceive ourselves and others
• When someone acts, the environment takes up their attention, and we assume others act in the same way
• However, there are too many factors involved, like our own changes with different situations

Culture

• People everywhere are prone to the "fundamental" attribution error
• Collectivists or Easterners are somewhat less prone to it.

In Sum

• These biases and tendencies exist because they help as well as harm
• People cannot individually analyze every single person and situation
• Understand that our judgement is imperfect
• Always catch yourself when you start judging
• Call out these errors when they occur in others

Explore social judgments and biases, focusing on how people respond to their perception of reality. Learn about overt and subtle influences like priming, which activates associations and shapes our views. Understand controlled and automatic processing in social thinking.