Chapter 4: Notes PDF

**Chapter 4: Notes** **Think**, how do people make judgements about others? - Todorov and colleagues study... **Ask yourself**: How accurate are the snap judgments we make about people based on their appearance or brief samples of their behavior? - what matters in predicting the outcome of e...

**Chapter 4: Notes** **Think**, how do people make judgements about others? - Todorov and colleagues study... **Ask yourself**: How accurate are the snap judgments we make about people based on their appearance or brief samples of their behavior? - what matters in predicting the outcome of elections is not what is really true but what observers believes to be true. - Book example: U.S. electorate - Book example: Professor classroom performance - Sometimes, even impressions based on extremely brief exposure to other people\'s behavior are correct. - But note...our snap judgments are likely to only contain only a partial picture of the entire picture. - Think, situations in which you've trusted your intuitive judgements only to be proven "not quite right". **Inferring Causes of Behavior** - We don\'t just evaluate others' character based solely on what they look like... - Evaluating people involves evaluation of their actions, which themselves may unfold over a longer period of time. ***The construal principle*:** - **Ask yourself**, what is the construal principle? - Our judgments are based on the meaning we assign to the behavior we witness, whether someone else's or our own. **Causal attribution** - When we\'re trying to figure out we causes of someone\'s behavior, a particularly important question is whether the behavior is the product of something within the person (that is, an internal, or dispositional, cause) - OR a reflection of something about the context or circumstances surrounding the behavior (an external, or situational, cause). **Theories of attribution have focused on**: - how people assess the relative contributions of these two types of causes. - **Ask yourself**, can I define and identify the internal and external causes of a given event? - Determining whether actions are the product of internal or external causes thus requires assessments of what most people are like and what most people are likely to do. - When evaluating causality, people use what attribution theorists have dubbed the covariation principle. - **Ask yourself**, what is the covariation principle? - One type of covariation information, ***consensus***: - refers to what most people would do in a given situation. All else being equal, the more an individual\'s reaction is shared by others (when consensus is high), the less it says about that individual and the more it says about the situation. - **Ask yourself**, can I come up with an example where consensus would apply? - Another type of covariation information, ***distinctiveness***, - The more someone\'s reaction is confined to a particular situation (when distinctiveness is high), the less it says about that individual and the more it says about the specific situation. - **Ask yourself**, can I define distinctiveness? - **How do consensus and distinctiveness affect situational/dispositional attributions?** - A ***situational attribution*** is called for when consensus and distinctiveness are both high. - Book example: When everyone else in your friend\'s statistics class likes it too, and when your friend likes few other math classes, there must be something special about that class. - A ***dispositional attribution*** is called for when consensus and distinctiveness are both low. When few other students like the statistics class, and when your friend claims to like all math courses, her fondness for the course must reflect something about her. **Discounting and counterfactual thinking** - Sometimes the information available to us suggests that there could be multiple causes for a given behavior. - **Ask yourself**, what is a ***counterfactual***? - The judgments people make aren\'t always based on what has actually happened...sometimes they are based on what people imagine would happen under different situations or if a different individual were involved. - **Ask yourself**, can you define ***the discounting principle***? - Our confidence that a particular cause is responsible for a given outcome will be reduced (discounted) if there are other plausible causes that might have produced the same outcome. - Sometimes, we discount the possibility that what we\'ve seen tells us something about the person involved. - **Why?** because we imagine that nearly everyone would act similarly in that context. - When we make causal assessments, our attributions are thus influenced not only by our knowledge of what has actually happened in the past but also by counterfactual thinking (thoughts counter to the facts)-considerations of what might have, could have, or should have happened \"if only\" a few minor things were done differently. **Our attributions influence our emotional reactions to events.** - An emotional reaction tends to be more intense if the event almost didn\'t happen---a phenomenon known as ***emotional amplification***. **Errors and Biases in Attribution** - People\'s causal attributions are subject to errors and biases. - Even if people often rationally infer causes of behavior by following the covariation and discounting principles, [sometimes their causal analysis is "not quite" rational]. - People sometimes reason from faulty premises, occasionally misled by dubious information. - ***The Self-Serving Attributional Bias*** - People are inclined to attribute their failures and other bad events to external circumstances but to attribute their successes and other good events to themselves. - ***The Fundamental Attribution Error*** - The tendency to attribute people\'s behavior to their character or personality, even when powerful situational forces are acting to produce that behavior - **Why \"fundamental\"?** - Because the problem being solved (figuring out what someone is like from a sample of behavior) is so essential - ++ In addition to the tendency to think dispositionally (i.e., attribute behavior to the person while ignoring important situational factors) being quite common. - *Remember*, a pervasive tendency to see the behavior of others as a reflection of the kind of people they are rather than as a result of the situation they find themselves in. **Why are people prone to the fundamental attribution error?** - When people try to solve an important inferential problem we often face in our daily lives-namely, deciding how much credit to give to those who are succeeding in life and how much blame to direct at those who are not. - *Book examples*: how much praise and respect should we give to successful entrepreneurs, film stars, and artists? And to what degree should we hold people in poverty accountable for their economic condition? - **Remember**, people tend to assign too much responsibility to individuals for great accomplishments and terrible mistakes and not enough responsibility to the particular situations those individuals are in, to broader societal forces. - **Result of the tendency to attribute effects to potential causes that stand out perceptually.** - Features of the environment that more readily capture our attention more likely to be seen as potential causes of an observed effect. - Because people are so noticeable and interesting, they tend to capture our attention more than other aspects of the environment. - **So...attributions to the person** have an edge over situational attributions in everyday causal analysis because people are usually more salient than situations. - **Ask yourself**, can you define the ***actor-observer difference***? - We should be more subject to the fundamental attribution error when explaining someone else\'s behavior than when explaining our own. - The degree to which you\'re oriented toward the person versus the situation depends on whether you\'re engaged in the action yourself or just observing someone else. - **IF "actor"** more interested in determining what kind of situation you\'re dealing with than assessing what kind of person you are. - **IF \"observer,\"** primarily interested in determining what kind of person you\'re dealing with. - **SO =** actors should be more likely than observers to make situational attributions for a particular behavior-to see their own behavior as caused by the situation. - **BUT...**observers of the very same behavior are more likely to focus on the actor\'s dispositions. - Also ask yourself, how does **cultural variation** have an impact on the attribution process? - Also ask yourself, how do **gender** **differences** have an impact on the attribution process? A close-up of a text Description automatically generated **How information is presented.** - **Every single decision and judgement we make in our lives,** is based not only on what information is available to us but also on how that information is presented. - Variations in the presentation of information-how it is presented and even when it is presented-can have profound effects on people\'s judgments. **Order effects** - The way information is presented, including the order of presentation, can \"frame\" the way it\'s processed and understood - Order effects are a type of framing effect the frame of reference is changed by reordering the information even though the content of the information remains exactly the same. - Several types: **Primacy effect** - Sometimes the information presented first exerts the most influence - primacy effects most often occur when the information is ambiguous - What comes first influences how the later information is interpreted **Recency effect** - The information presented last has the most impact - Remembered information receives greater weight than forgotten information. - Later items sometimes exert more influence on judgment than information presented earlier. **Other types of framing effects** - ***Spin framing*** - Form of framing that varies the content, not just the order, of what is presented... - *Book example*: we hear advocates of different positions talk of \"illegal aliens\" versus \"undocumented workers,\" \"torture\" versus \"enhanced interrogation,\" and \"election integrity\" versus \"voter suppression.\" - The power of words! Used terms have an impact on "the spin" of how the relevant issues are being presented... - ***Positive vs. Negative Framing*** - Even if the exact same information is provided in each frame; the focus changes. - Negative frames more salient than positive frames. - **The emotional salience + extremity** of how a scenario is described affects how salient that information is to us... - Most things can be described, or framed, in ways that emphasize the good or the bad... - *Book example*: a piece of meat described as 75 percent lean seems more appealing than one described as 25 percent fat.  **Schemas influence the interpretation of information.** - Schemas important top-down "tools" for understanding the world, ***as opposed to*** the bottom-up processing of information from the outside world. - Schemas guide attention, memory, and the construal of information, and they can directly prompt behavior. - Being exposed to certain stimuli (hospital) often has the effect of priming the concepts with which they\'re associated (doctor). - Makes target concepts momentarily more accessible in memory = salient. - The more recently and the more frequently a schema has been activated, the more likely it is to be applied to new information. - ***But note***, conscious awareness of a schema is not required for it to have an influence. A close-up of a text Description automatically generated **Reason, Intuition, and Heuristics** - People have two systems for processing information: - Further leisure reading: fast-and-slow book! - An intuitive system and a rational system. Intuitive responses are based on rapid, associative processes. - Rational responses are based on slower, rule-based reasoning. - **Heuristics** = mental shortcuts that provide people with sound judgments most of the time, even if they sometimes lead to errors in judgment. - People use ***the availability heuristic*** when judging the frequency or probability of some event by how readily relevant instances come to mind. - It can cause people to overestimate their own contributions to group projects. - Can lead to faulty assessments of the risks posed by memorable hazards. - The ***sense of fluency*** in people experiences when processing information can influence the judgments they make about it. - Disfluent stimuli lead to more reflective thought.  - People use ***the representativeness heuristic***... - When trying to categorize something by judging how similar it is to their conception of the typical member of a category or when trying to make causal attributions by assessing how similar an effect is to a possible cause. - In occasions, this may lead you to overlook highly relevant considerations, such as ***base-rate information***. - Ask yourself, what is base-rate information? - Availability + representativeness heuristics = ***illusory correlations***: - Thinking that two variables are correlated... - *Why?* Because they resemble each other and because the simultaneous occurrence of two similar events stands out more than that of two dissimilar events. - People often fail to consider ***the regression effect*** extreme values on one variable tend to be followed by less extreme values on another variable and believe they have discovered a causal relationship where none truly exists.  **\ ** **Chapter 14: Notes** **Morality** **The social-intuitionist model of moral Judgement (Haidnt, 2001).** **What does the social intuitionist model of moral judgement claim?** - Jonathan Haidt\'s social intuitionist model posits that moral judgments are primarily driven by immediate emotional intuitions, which are later justified through reasoning. - Our moral judgments are the product of fast, emotional intuitions, like the gut feeling that incest is wrong, which then influence how we reason about the issue in question. - Our judgements of whether something is wrong or is deserving of punishment begin with deep intuitions that are shaped subsequently by reason. **According to Haidt's model, why do people often rely on gut feelings and intuitions when making moral decisions?** - Moral decisions are often driven by feelings and intuitions rather than deliberate reasoning. - Strong emotional responses can guide moral judgments in the absence of clear rational justifications. - Reason often follows our immediate gut feeling, serving to justify the moral conviction we arrived at intuitively. **What is the primary focus of Haidt's model?** - We feel our way to our moral judgments; we don\'t think our way there. - Examines how people *actually* make moral judgments in relatively plausible real-life situations. - Alternative account to primary rationalist models proposed until the early 2000's (e.g., Kohlberg's rationalist theory of moral reasoning and development, Greene's dual-process model of moral reasoning). **Moral dumbfounding** - People may hold strong moral convictions without being able to provide rational explanations, indicating that gut feelings guide judgments. - When all possible reasons have been refuted, people typically say, \"I can\'t explain why, I just know this is wrong. - Broadly, phenomenon thought to be reflective of how gut feelings, or intuitions, guide many of our moral judgments (even when we don't know why). **Moral Intuition and Reason in the Brain** **What was early research on morality and the brain about?** - Trolley and footbridge dilemmas. - Moral judgments involve quick emotional responses followed by more deliberative reasoning. - Greene and colleagues presented participants with moral dilemmas (i.e., the trolley dilemma) and asked for quick decisions about what they would do. Some of the moral dilemmas were likely to engage mainly impersonal, rational calculations. - Participants brains were scanned using fMRI. **What did Greene and colleagues find?** - Personal moral dilemmas like the footbridge problem activated regions of the brain that are involved in emotional processing - Non-moral dilemmas and relatively impersonal moral dilemmas like the trolley problem activated brain regions associated with working memory and deliberative reasoning. - According to Greene, in the footbridge dilemma. The action is highly emotional: Participants must imagine placing their own hands on the stranger to push him to his death. **Moral Foundation Theory** **Think about:** what does the social-intuitionist model achieve and what are its limitations? - Social intuitionist theory offers an account of how we make moral judgments. What the theory doesn\'t detail are the specific bases of our moral intuitions... - Our moral judgments are shaped by culturally-universal deep intuitions organized within five \"foundations,\" or domains - A universal blueprint for morality in every culture. - Shaped by the social, economic, and religious dimensions of that culture. **Haidt\'s **moral foundations theory** identifies five core domains underlying our moral intuitions:** 1. **Care/Harm**: Centers on empathy and concern for the suffering of others. Emotions like compassion motivate actions to protect and care for vulnerable individuals. 2. **Fairness/Reciprocity**: Focuses on justice and equitable treatment. Violations trigger emotions like anger and a desire for retribution. 3. **Ingroup Loyalty**: Pertains to allegiance to one\'s social group. Promotes group cohesion through pride and can lead to feelings of betrayal when loyalty is breached. 4. **Authority/Respect**: Relates to adherence to social hierarchies and traditions. Emotions such as respect and embarrassment play roles in maintaining societal structures. 5. **Purity/Sanctity**: Involves the avoidance of contamination and immoral actions or thoughts. Disgust is the primary emotion driving this foundation. - **Think about:** What/how certain social and economic dimensions may influence each of these 5 moral foundations? **Altruism** **What is altruism?** - Daniel Batson proposed that... - in any altruistic action, several motives are likely to be in play. - Social reward. - Personal distress **Selfish motive: Social reward** - Being esteemed and valued by others in the form of praise, an award, or recognition, for example, in the mass media or social media. - Our desire for the reward of being respected leads us to sacrifice personal desires for the greater good of the environment - **Think** of how key example may translate to other scenarios.... - **Review** social reward motives may trigger \"arms races\" of altruism (i.e., competitive altruism). - People will try to outdo one another in their altruistic acts, all in the service of being the most highly esteemed. - Book example: In laboratory studies, group members will give greater social status to other group members who act altruistically **Personal distress** - Why is personal distress a selfish motie? - People are motivated to help people in need in order to reduce their own distress - When we watch someone else experience pain, it motivates us to act in ways that return us to a more peaceful state. - Book example, baby and tape study... **Empathic concern** - Taking the other\'s perspective (sympathy, compassion). - The feeling people experience when identifying with someone in need, accompanied by the intention to enhance the other person\'s welfare. - When we encounter somebody else who is suffering or in pain, we imagine what that person must be experiencing. - An empathic state of concern, which motivates us to enhance that person\'s welfare, even at our own expense. - fast and intuitive = selfless altruism (an automatic, emotion-like impulse to help others). **Situational Determinants of Altruism** - Think about, what processes inhibit empathic concern and altruistic action, to make people reluctant to intervene during emergencies? **Presence of other people** - **Bystander intervention**: - People are less likely to help when others are around - the presence of other bystanders at emergencies reduces the likelihood of helping because of a **diffusion of responsibility**: - Assuming that others have seen the situation, each bystander tends to assume the others will intervene-indeed. - Assumption that others may be better positioned to intervene. - Results in each person feeling less responsibility to help out. - In summary, people failing to help someone in obvious need because they don\'t interpret the situation as an emergency or because they assume that others will help. - **Victim characteristics** - People are most likely to help when the harm to the victim is clear and the need is unambiguous. - Bystanders help victims who scream and make their needs known, but they are less likely to help silent victims. - People are more likely to help others who are similar to them - Those from their own racial or ethnic group - Those in a similar social class background. - Revisit book example: Study on black Americans by Chiao et. al. - The wealthy tend to systematically direct their acts of philanthropy to institutions and organizations that largely benefit people like themselves, rather than social service organizations that benefit poorer socioeconomic groups. **Construal Processes** - Think about and define, what are the construal processes that influence whether we help or not? - Potential helper first has to believe that assistance is actually needed based on clues from the victim\'s behavior. - People are more likely to aid others when they are vividly aware of the events that led to the victim\'s distress - The surrounding social context also influences whether bystanders think help is needed. - A form of **pluralistic ignorance**: - When people are unsure about what\'s happening and assume that nothing is wrong because no one else is responding or appears concerned. - When everyone in a potentially dangerous situation behaves as if nothing is wrong, each person will tend to mistake the others\' calm demeanor as a sign that there\'s no emergency. - **But note**...bystanders are less likely to fall prey to piurastic ignorance if they can clearly see one another\'s initial expressions of concern. - Being able to see others\' initial, spontaneous reactions may lead people to interpret the incident as a true emergency requiring their help. **Culture and Altruism** - The prevalence of altruistic behavior varies depending on culture (i.e., geographical region, social class, and religiousness-on altruism). - For example, people in rural areas report higher levels of empathic concern. - Strangers are significantly more likely to be helped in rural communities than in urban areas (but, this depends on the density of the population). - Milgram (1970) attributed it to ***stimulus overload***. - The amount of stimulation in modern urban environments is so great that no one can register all of it. - Too many environmental inputs, so people may shut down making them less likely to attend to the needs of others = less likely to act altruistically. - **The diversity hypothesis** - On average, you\'re more likely to encounter someone similar to yourself in a rural environment than you are in an urban environment. - **Diffusion of responsibility + urban density** - Diffusion of responsibility could discourage people from helping out in urban settings (where there is higher pop. density). - Also, likely that people\'s actions are more likely to be observed by people who know them and who can comment on their reputation to others.