Dual Process Theories and Affect Misattribution PDF

**1. Dual Process Theories Overview** - Dual process theories divide mental processes into **automatic** (quick, unconscious) and **controlled** (deliberate, effortful) categories. - Early models addressed specific phenomena (e.g., impression formation), while generalized models so...

**1. Dual Process Theories Overview** - Dual process theories divide mental processes into **automatic** (quick, unconscious) and **controlled** (deliberate, effortful) categories. - Early models addressed specific phenomena (e.g., impression formation), while generalized models sought domain-independent principles. - Formalized models use mathematical techniques to analyze the joint contributions of automatic and controlled processes. **2. Phenomenon-Specific Models** - **Impression Formation**: Explores how stereotypes or category-based information dominate early impressions but can shift to person-specific details under certain conditions. - **Attribution Models**: Explain how people infer others\' traits or motives (e.g., the \"fundamental attribution error\"). - Examples: - **Two-Stage Model (Trope, 1986)**: Includes automatic behavior identification followed by controlled dispositional inference. - **Three-Stage Model (Gilbert, 1998)**: Adds situational correction, emphasizing cognitive effort to adjust initial judgments. **3. Persuasion Dual Models** - Models like the **Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)** and **Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM)** describe when people rely on superficial cues (automatic processing) versus in-depth argument analysis (controlled processing). **4. Attitude-Behavior Models** - The **MODE Model (Fazio, 1990)** examines how motivation and opportunity affect whether attitudes guide behavior automatically or through deliberation. **5. Prejudice and Stereotyping** - **Dissociation Model (Devine, 1989)** highlights the automatic activation of stereotypes and the effortful rejection of prejudicial beliefs. - Research on **weapon bias** shows how stereotypes influence split-second decisions, revealing that even well-intentioned individuals can exhibit biases unintentionally. **6. Generalized Dual Models** - **System 1 and System 2 Processing (Kahneman, 2003)**: - System 1 is intuitive, fast, and automatic. - System 2 is logical, slow, and deliberate, often monitoring or adjusting System 1 outputs. **7. Formalized Models** - These models, like **Process Dissociation (Jacoby, 1991)**, quantify how automatic and controlled processes interact, particularly under tasks with opposing influences. **8. Applications and Criticisms** - Applications include addressing societal issues like prejudice through bias-reduction strategies (e.g., cognitive training, counter-stereotypic thinking). - Criticisms include reliance on conceptual frameworks without novel empirical predictions. Lesson 10: Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) ------------------------------------------------ ### **Step 1: Key Concepts** 1. **Misattribution**: - **Definition**: Mistaking the source of an emotional reaction (e.g., a reaction caused by a prime is mistakenly attributed to something else). - Example: Feeling tense because of a loud noise but attributing it to the people around you. 2. **Projection**: - **Definition**: A type of misattribution where the source is within oneself, but the reaction is attributed externally. - Example: Feeling nervous and assuming someone else is upset with you. 3. **Affect**: - **Definition**: A basic emotional reaction (pleasant or unpleasant). ### **Step 2: General Procedure of AMP** 1. **Setup**: - Participants are shown a **prime** (an image or object) designed to elicit a positive or negative reaction. - Next, they see a neutral, ambiguous **target** (e.g., a Chinese pictograph or abstract symbol). 2. **Task**: - Participants are asked to judge the target (pleasant or unpleasant). - **Instruction**: Ignore the prime and focus only on the target. 3. **Goal**: - Measure how the emotional reaction caused by the prime influences the judgment of the target. - This demonstrates **affective transfer**---the emotional impact of the prime gets \"projected\" onto the target. ### **Step 3: Key Assumptions of AMP** - **Affective Transfer**: Participants unintentionally project their feelings from the prime onto the target. - **Implicit Nature**: - Participants are not asked to report attitudes directly. - Even when warned to avoid bias, misattribution still occurs, showing it is unintentional. ### **Step 4: Experiments Overview** #### Experiment 1--4: - **Purpose**: Test the replicability and reliability of AMP. - **Findings**: - Priming effects were strong and resistant to warnings. - Factors like longer prime-target intervals reduced, but did not eliminate, the priming effect. #### Experiment 6 (Measuring Racial Attitudes): 1. **Design**: - Participants saw primes (images of Black or White individuals) followed by ambiguous Chinese pictographs. - Task: Judge the pictograph as \"pleasant\" or \"unpleasant.\" - Conditions: With or without a warning about potential bias. 2. **Findings**: - White participants judged targets more positively after White primes than Black primes. - Warnings had no effect on reducing bias. - Highly motivated participants showed a mismatch between their explicit (self-reported) and implicit (AMP) racial attitudes. ### **Step 5: Why Does AMP Work?** 1. **Automatic Processes**: - AMP taps into quick, automatic evaluations that are hard to control. - The effects occur even when participants are warned or instructed to avoid bias. 2. **Efficient and Rapid**: - Judgments are made very quickly, preventing deliberate thought. 3. **Unawareness**: - Participants are often unaware that their judgments are influenced by the prime. ### **Step 6: Key Lessons from AMP** 1. **Automaticity**: - AMP reveals implicit attitudes that participants might not admit or even realize they hold. 2. **Resilience to Warnings**: - Even explicit warnings to avoid bias do not stop the effects of priming. 3. **Measuring Implicit Attitudes**: - AMP is particularly useful for exploring sensitive topics like racial bias, where explicit self-reports might be unreliable. ### **Step 7: Conclusion** - AMP highlights how unconscious emotional reactions (affect) can influence judgments in ways people cannot control. - It is a powerful tool for studying implicit attitudes and understanding how automatic processes shape social cognition. Lesson 11-12: Attention and Encoding ------------------------------------ ### **Step 1: What Are Attention and Encoding?** 1. **Attention**: - **Definition**: Whatever occupies your focus or consciousness. It is selective and involves effort. - **Two Components**: - **Direction**: What you focus on. - **Intensity**: How much mental effort you dedicate. - **Key Role**: Determines what enters thought and memory. 2. **Encoding**: - **Definition**: The process of transforming an external stimulus into an internal representation. - **Key Role**: Influences how we interpret, store, and later recall information. - **Attention**: You notice their face and voice. - **Encoding**: You remember their smile as \"friendly\" or \"kind.\" ### **Step 2: What Attracts Attention in Social Contexts?** 1. **Faces**: - Faces are key to social interaction and are automatically noticed. - **Gaze**: - Direct gaze grabs attention faster than averted gaze (Macrae et al., 2002). - Averted gaze also directs our attention (e.g., following someone's gaze to see what they're looking at). 2. **Face Perception**: - **Holistic Processing**: We perceive faces as a whole, not as individual parts (eyes, nose, etc.). - **Inversion Effect**: Recognizing inverted faces is much harder, as it disrupts holistic processing. - **Spontaneous Trait Inferences**: - We instantly infer traits from facial expressions (e.g., an angry face = \"hostile\"). - Judgments made in just 100 milliseconds can predict outcomes like elections (Todorov et al., 2005). 3. **Baby Faces**: - **Traits of Baby-Faced Adults**: - Perceived as warm, naive, and less dominant. - **Evolutionary Perspective**: - Baby-like features trigger caregiving instincts, which can influence judgments of adults with such features. 4. **Salience**: - Salient stimuli stand out because they are unique in their context (e.g., being the only woman in a male-dominated meeting). - **Effects**: - Salience leads to extreme evaluations (positive or negative). - Salience amplifies attention and influences impressions. 5. **Vividness**: - **Definition**: Stimuli that are emotionally interesting, imagery-provoking, or close in time/space. - **Example**: A vivid story about a plane crash may stick with you more than a statistic about crashes. - **Impact**: Surprisingly, vivid stimuli often have less impact on judgments than expected. ### **Step 3: Accessibility** 1. **Definition**: The readiness with which a category or concept comes to mind. - Influenced by: - **Recency**: Recently activated concepts (e.g., \"adventurous\" after reading about explorers). - **Frequency**: Regularly activated concepts (e.g., \"trustworthy\" for a probation officer who evaluates honesty daily). 2. **Priming**: - **Definition**: Exposure to one stimulus influences how you interpret subsequent stimuli. - **Example**: - Priming \"politeness\" makes someone wait longer before interrupting. - **Situational Accessibility**: - Concepts primed before encoding (e.g., \"hostility\") influence how ambiguous behavior is interpreted. 3. **Chronic Accessibility**: - Some categories are always accessible due to frequent activation or personal history. - **Example**: An individual who values honesty might interpret ambiguous actions as honest or dishonest automatically. ### **Step 4: Assimilation vs. Contrast** 1. **Assimilation**: - **Definition**: Interpreting a stimulus consistently with the activated category. - **Example**: After discussing \"daylight,\" you interpret \"light\" as brightness. 2. **Contrast**: - **Definition**: Interpreting a stimulus as opposite to the activated category. - **Example**: If primed with \"hostility\" using extreme examples like \"Dracula,\" you might judge a target as less hostile to create contrast. 3. **Conditions**: - **Assimilation**: Likely when stimuli are ambiguous or priming is subconscious. - **Contrast**: Likely when priming is obvious or the stimulus is unambiguous. ### **Step 5: Summary of Key Insights** - **Attention** determines what we focus on and ultimately encode into memory. - **Encoding** transforms external stimuli into internal representations, influenced by attention, accessibility, and priming. - **Priming** shapes interpretation and memory, both in the short and long term. - **Faces** and social stimuli like salience and vividness are strong drivers of attention, but their impact varies. - **Accessibility**---recent, frequent, or chronic---profoundly influences perception and memory.