Social Psychology Chapter 3 PDF

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 3 Social Beliefs and Judgments PRIMING ▪ Activating particular associations in memory ▪ Can influence our thoughts and actions ▪ Subliminal priming ▪ short term ▪ if you are already motivated to engage in that behaviour...

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 3 Social Beliefs and Judgments PRIMING ▪ Activating particular associations in memory ▪ Can influence our thoughts and actions ▪ Subliminal priming ▪ short term ▪ if you are already motivated to engage in that behaviour 3 INTUITIVE JUDGMENTS  Priming research suggests that much of our behaviour is unconscious. Much of our thinking is unconscious ▪ Schemas ▪ Emotional reactions ▪ Expertise ▪ Thin slices 4 INTUITIVE JUDGMENTS The limits of intuition  Subliminal stimuli only have minor effect  Error-prone hindsight  Capacity for illusion 5 CONFIRMATORY HYPOTHESIS TESTING ▪ 2, 4, 6, ……. OVERCONFIDENCE Overconfidence phenomenon: ▪ The tendency to be more confident than warranted – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs ▪ Applies to factual information, judgments of others’ behaviour, judgments of own behavior ▪ Fed by incompetence and underestimation of the importance of situational forces ▪ “It takes competence to recognize competence” 7  OVERCONFIDENCE Leads to confirmation bias ▪ Perseverance of Beliefs ▪ The tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited ▪ Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing ▪ We seek out information that reinforces our preexisting beliefs ▪ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Remedies for overconfidence  Prompt feedback  Break up a task into its subcomponents  Consider disconfirming information 8 HEURISTICS: MENTAL SHORTCUTS Thinking strategies that enable quick, efficient judgments ▪ Lead to attribution biases ▪ We are limited in our ability to process information, so we take shortcuts. These shortcuts sometimes lead us to make errors. 9 HEURISTICS: MENTAL SHORTCUTS Representativeness heuristic  The tendency to presume that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member  Ignores base rate information Availability heuristic  A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory 10 COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING ▪ Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but did not ▪ Underlies our feelings of luck ▪ Typically more regret over things not done 11 ILLUSORY THINKING Illusory correlation  The perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists Illusion of control  The perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they are 12 MOODS AND JUDGMENT 13 PERCEIVING AND INTERPRETING EVENTS 14 BELIEF PERSEVERANCE Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, even in the face of disconfirming evidence 16 CONSTRUCTING MEMORIES OF OURSELVES AND OUR WORLDS Misinformation effect ▪ Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of an event, after witnessing the event and receiving misleading information about it ▪ Potential for the creation of false memories ▪ Elizabeth Loftus 17 CONSTRUCTING MEMORIES OF OURSELVES AND OUR WORLDS Reconstructing past attitudes  Rosy (or less then rosy) retrospections Reconstructing past behaviour  Recall smoking fewer cigarettes, voting more often  Greenwald’s “totalitarian ego”  We revise our past to match current beliefs 18 ATTRIBUTING CAUSALITY: TO THE PERSON OR THE SITUATION? ▪ Attribution theory ▪ How we explain peoples’ behaviour ▪ Misattribution ▪ Mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause ▪ Dispositional versus situational attributions ▪ e.g., Why did that driver cut me off on the highway? 19 QUIZ SHOW!!!! FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR ▪ The tendency to underestimate the impact to the situation on the behaviour of other people. ▪ Two step process for making attributions: ▪ (1) identify behaviour and make a personal attribution ▪ (2) adjust that impression to account for situational factors ATTRIBUTIONS AND REACTIONS 22 TEACHER EXPECTATIONS AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE 23 GETTING FROM OTHERS WHAT WE EXPECT Behavioural Confirmation A type of self-fulfilling prophecy where peoples’ social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations Person’s Expectations Your Person’s Behaviour Behaviour towards the towards You Person 24