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.