Chapter 3 Social Psychology Notes PDF

Chapter 3 Notes We have two brain systems: 1. System 1 - The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking. Also known as automatic processing/thinking Automatic thinking - “Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; r...

Chapter 3 Notes We have two brain systems: 1. System 1 - The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking. Also known as automatic processing/thinking Automatic thinking - “Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as System 1. Examples: Schemas, emotional reactions, expertise on something (skills), conditioned dispositions, snap judgments 2. System 2 - The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking. Also known as controlled processing/thinking. Controlled thinking - “Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. Also known as System 2. Examples: Facts, names, past experiences Things we don’t even consciously notice can subtly influence how we interpret and recall events. Imagine wearing earphones and concentrating on ambiguous spoken sentences such as “We stood by the bank.” When a related word (river or money) is simultaneously sent to your other ear, you don’t consciously hear it. Yet the unheard word “primes” your interpretation of the sentence. Our memory system is a web of associations. 3. Priming - is the awakening or activating of certain associations. Even physical sensations, thanks to our embodied cognition, prime our social judgments and vice versa. 4. Embodied cognition - The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments Example: People who feel hopeless perceive rooms to be darker — they don’t have a “ray of hope” (Dong et al., 2015). Humans have an incredible capacity for illusion — for perceptual misinterpretation, fantasies. 5. Illusory intuition - occurs when someone believes that there is a relationship between two people, events, or behaviors, even though there is no logical way to connect them. As we interpret our experiences and construct memories, our automatic System 1 intuitions are sometimes wrong. Usually, we don’t realize our errors — in other words, we display overconfidence. 6. Overconfidence phenomenon - the tendency to be more confident than correct or to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs. People also tend not to seek information that might disprove what they believe. We are eager to verify our beliefs but less inclined to seek evidence that might disprove them. 7. Confirmation bias - a tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions. Confirmation bias appears to be a System 1 snap judgment, where our default reaction is to look for information consistent with our presupposition (Gilead et al., 2019). Stopping and thinking a little — calling up System 2 — makes us less likely to commit this error. Remedies for overconfidence: Prompt feedback To get people to think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong With precious little time to process so much information, our cognitive system is fast and frugal. It specializes in mental shortcuts. With remarkable ease, we form impressions, make judgments, and invent explanations. We do so by using heuristics. 8. Heuristics - a thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments. Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify decision-making and problem-solving.  9. Representativeness heuristic - the tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member. To judge something by intuitively comparing it to our mental representation of a category is to use the representativeness heuristic. 10. Availability heuristic - a cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace. Said simply, the more easily we recall something, the more likely it seems. The availability heuristic explains why vivid, easy-to-imagine events, such as shark attacks or mass shootings, may seem more likely to occur than harder-to-picture events. Easily imagined, cognitively available events also influence our experiences of guilt, regret, frustration, and relief. Imagining better alternatives, and pondering what we might do differently next time, helps us prepare to do better in the future. 11. Counterfactual thinking - imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t. Another influence on everyday thinking is our search for order in random events, a tendency that can lead us down all sorts of wrong path 12. Illusory correlation - a perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists. In other words, people easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs. If we believe a correlation exists, we are more likely to notice and recall confirming instances. If we believe that premonitions (visions or feelings about future events) correlate with events, we notice and remember any joint occurrence of the premonition and the event’s later occurrence. Gambling - The gambling industry thrives on gamblers’ illusions. Gamblers attribute wins to their skill and foresight. Losses become “near misses” or “flukes,” or for the sports gambler, a bad call by the referee or a freakish bounce of the ball. Another way by which an illusion of control may arise is that we fail to recognize the statistical phenomenon of regression toward the average. 13. Regression toward the average - the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward their average Because exam scores fluctuate partly by chance, most students who get extremely high scores on an exam will get lower scores on the next exam. If their first score is at the ceiling, their second score is more likely to fall back (“regress”) toward their own average than to push the ceiling even higher. That is why a student who does consistently good work, even if never the best, will sometimes end a course at the top of the class. Conversely, students who earn low scores on the first exam are likely to improve. Social judgment involves efficient information processing. It also involves our feelings: Our moods infuse our judgments. Our moods color how we judge our worlds partly by bringing to mind past experiences associated with the mood. When we are in a bad mood, we have more depressing thoughts. Mood-related thoughts may distract us from complex thinking about something else. Thus, when emotionally aroused — when either angry or in a very good mood — we become more likely to make System 1 snap judgments and evaluate others based on stereotypes. We also view our social worlds through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values. That is one reason our beliefs are so important; they shape our interpretation of everything else. 14. Belief perseverance - the persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.  In a time when “fake news” (false stories often designed to attract clicks and thus advertising profits) spreads on social media, it’s especially important to understand why people continue to believe false information. When an experimenter or a therapist manipulates people’s presumptions about their past, many people will construct false memories. Asked to imagine that, as a child, they knocked over a punch bowl at a wedding, about one-fourth will later recall the fictitious event as something that actually happened. In its search for truth, the mind sometimes constructs a falsehood 15. Misinformation effect - Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it. In relation to memory, the construction of positive memories also brightens our recollections. Terence Mitchell, Leigh Thompson, and colleagues (1994, 1997) reported that people often exhibit rosy retrospection — they recall mildly pleasant events more favorably than they experienced them. However, Cathy McFarland and Michael Ross (1985) also found out that as our relationships change, we also revise our recollections of other people. For instance, they had university students rate their steady dating partners. Two months later, they rated them again. Students who were still in love had a tendency to overestimate their first impressions — it was “love at first sight.” Those who had broken up were more likely to underestimate their earlier liking — recalling their ex as somewhat selfish and bad-tempered. Memory construction enables us to revise our own histories. Greenwald stated that we all have “totalitarian egos” that revise the past to suit our present views. Thus, we underreport bad behavior and overreport good behavior. Our social judgments are a mix of observation and expectation, reason, and passion. Our judgments of people depend on how we explain their behavior. Depending on our explanation, we may judge killing as murder, manslaughter, self-defense, or heroism. Depending on our explanation, we may view a homeless person as lacking initiative or as victimized by job and welfare cutbacks. Depending on our explanation, we may interpret someone’s friendly behavior as genuine warmth or as ingratiation. Attribution theory helps us make sense of how such explanations work. 16. Attribution theory - the theory of how people explain others’ behavior — for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations (for example, something about the situation). A teacher may wonder whether a child’s underachievement is due to a lack of motivation and ability (an internal cause or a dispositional attribution) or to physical and social circumstances (an external cause or situational attribution). 17. Dispositional attribution - Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits. 18. Situational attribution - Attributing behavior to the environment. 19. Misattribution - Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source. Example: Men are more likely than women to attribute a woman’s friendliness to sexual interest. We often assume or infer that other people’s actions are indicative of their intentions and dispositions. The ease with which we infer traits is a phenomenon called spontaneous trait inference. 20. Spontaneous trait inference - an effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior. Example: For example, if someone steps on a partner's feet on the dance floor, it elicits the inference that they are clumsy. 21. Fundamental attribution error - the tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior. It is a psychological concept where people tend to attribute others' behavior more to their personality traits rather than situational factors. When explaining someone’s behavior, we often underestimate the impact of the situation and overestimate the extent to which it reflects the individual’s traits and attitudes. We may infer that people fall because they’re clumsy rather than because they were tripped; that people smile because they’re happy rather than faking friendliness; and that people speed past us on the highway because they’re aggressive rather than late for an important meeting. In short, we tend to presume that others are the way they act — even when we don’t make the same presumption about ourselves. For example, Cinderella cowering in her oppressive home, people (ignoring the situation) infer that she is meek (quiet and submissive); dancing with her at the ball, the prince sees a suave and glamorous person. Cinderella knows she is the same person in both situations. Cinderella’s own awareness that she is the same person in both situations highlights how the fundamental attribution error overlooks the impact of external circumstances on behavior. Observers tend to focus on inherent personality traits rather than recognizing how context can shape behavior. So, the fundamental attribution error involves misattributing behaviors to personal traits while underestimating the role of situational factors. Cinderella’s case illustrates how people can misinterpret someone’s character based on limited or specific contexts without recognizing that the situation can greatly influence behavior. Why do we tend to underestimate the situational determinants of others’ behavior but not of our own? Attribution theorists have pointed out that we observe others from a different perspective than we observe ourselves. When we act, the environment commands our attention. When we watch another person act, that person occupies the center of our attention and the environment becomes relatively invisible. If I’m mad, it’s the situation that’s making me angry. But someone else getting mad may seem like an ill-tempered person. Cultures also influence attribution error.. An individualistic Western worldview predisposes people to assume that people, not situations, cause events. People in Eastern Asian cultures are somewhat more sensitive than Westerners to the importance of situations. Thus, when aware of the social context, they are less inclined to assume that others’ behavior corresponds to their traits. Fundamental attribution error is fundamental because it colors our explanations in basic and important ways. Our social beliefs and judgments do matter. They influence how we feel and act, and by doing so may help generate their own reality. When our ideas lead us to act in ways that produce their apparent confirmation, they have become self-fulfilling prophecies. 22. Self-fulfilling prophecy - a belief that leads to its own fulfillment. A self-fulfilling prophecy is when a person’s expectations about a situation come true due to changes in their own behavior. Example: Anxiety can lead to negative self-talk. If you convince yourself that you’ll fail the interview, your behavior might reflect this belief. Ironically, this can create the very outcome you fear—like not getting the job. Another example: Believing that your partner will be your life partner can shape your behavior. You invest more effort, communicate openly, and act lovingly, which encourages similar behaviors from your partner. Voilà! A self-fulfilling prophecy of a lasting relationship. Several experiments conducted by Mark Snyder (1984) at the University of Minnesota show how, once formed, erroneous (false) beliefs about the social world can induce others to confirm those beliefs. This phenomenon is called behavioral confirmation. 23. Behavioral confirmation - a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations. In other words, our beliefs and expectations about someone can influence their behavior, causing them to act in ways that align with our expectations. For example, male students talked on the telephone with women they thought (from having been shown a picture) were either attractive or unattractive. The supposedly attractive women spoke more warmly than the supposedly unattractive women. The  men’s false beliefs had become a self-fulfilling prophecy by leading them to act in a way that influenced the women to fulfill the men’s stereotype that beautiful people are desirable people. Behavioral confirmation also occurs as people interact with partners holding mistaken beliefs. People whom others believe are lonely behave less sociably (. People who believe they are accepted and liked (rather than disliked) then behave warmly — and do get accepted and liked. Men whom others believe are sexist behave less favorably toward women. Job interviewees who are believed to be warm behave more warmly. Chapter 4 Notes Behaviors and Attitudes 1. Attitudes - defined as beliefs and feelings related to a person or an event, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events. HOW WELL DO OUR ATTITUDES PREDICT OUR BEHAVIOR? State the extent to which, and under what conditions, our inner attitudes drive our outward actions. - Allan Wicker (1969) reviewed several dozen research studies covering a variety of people, attitudes, and behaviors. Wicker offered a shocking conclusion: People’s expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behaviors. - The reason why our behavior and our expressed attitudes differ is that both are subject to other influences — many other influences. When Attitudes Predict Behavior Our attitudes do predict our behavior when these other influences on what we say and do are minimal, when the attitude is specific to the behavior, and when the attitude is potent. WHEN SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON WHAT WE SAY ARE MINIMAL 2. Implicit Attitudes - our often unacknowledged inner beliefs that may or may not correspond to our explicit (conscious) attitudes. a. ▯ implicit biases are pervasive. For example, 80% of people show more implicit dislike for the elderly compared with the young. b. ▯ people differ in implicit bias. Depending on their group memberships, their conscious attitudes, and the bias in their immediate environment, some people exhibit more implicit bias than others. c. ▯ people are often unaware of their implicit biases. Despite believing they are not prejudiced, even researchers themselves show implicit biases against some social groups. 3. implicit association test (IAT) A computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes. The test uses reaction times to measure people’s automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. Easier pairings (and faster responses) are taken to indicate stronger unconscious associations. WHEN OTHER INFLUENCES ON BEHAVIOR ARE MINIMAL So, would averaging across many situations enable us to detect more clearly the impact of our attitudes? - principle of aggregation: the effects of an attitude become more apparent when we look at a person’s aggregate or average behavior. WHEN ATTITUDES ARE SPECIFIC TO THE BEHAVIOR