02A Lesson Proper for Week 3
I. How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds, Consciously and Unconsciously?
1. Priming
System 1 - The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.
System 2 - The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of
thinking.
Priming - Activating particular associations in memory.
Embodied Cognition - The mutual influence of bodily sensations on
cognitive preferences and social judgments.
2. Intuitive Judgments
Automatic Processing - “Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and
without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as
System 1.
Controlled Processing - “Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and
conscious. Also known as System 2.
3. Overconfidence
We often overestimate our judgments.
Overconfidence Phenomenon - The tendency to be more confident than
correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
Confirmation Bias - A tendency to search for information that confirms
one’s preconceptions.
4. Heuristic
When given compelling anecdotes or even useless information, we often
ignore useful base-rate information.
Heuristic - A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
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.
5. Counterfactual Thinking
§ Counterfactual thinking - Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes
that might have happened but didn’t.
6. Illusory Thinking
Illusory correlation - Perception of a relationship where none exists, or
perception of a stronger relationship than exists.
We are often swayed by illusions of correlation and personal control.
6. Mood and Judgment
Moods infuse judgments. Good and bad moods trigger memories of
experiences associated with those moods. Moods color our interpretations of
current experiences. And by distracting us, moods can also influence how
deeply or superficially we think when making judgments.
Other experiments have planted judgments or false ideas in people’s minds
after they have been given information. These experiments reveal that as
before the- fact judgments bias our perceptions and interpretations, so
after-the-fact judgments bias our recall.
Belief perseverance is the phenomenon in which people cling to their
initial beliefs and the reasons why a belief might be true, even when the
basis for the belief is discredited.
Far from being a repository for facts about the past, our memories are
formed when we retrieve them, and they are subject to strong influence by
the attitudes and feelings we hold at the time of retrieval.
II. How Do We Explain Our Social Worlds?
Attribution theory – It involves how we explain people’s behavior.
Misattribution - attributing a behavior to the wrong source—is a major
factor in sexual harassment, as a person in power (typically male) interprets
friendliness as a sexual come-on.
Fundamental Attribution Error - We attribute their behavior so much to
their inner traits and attitudes that we discount situational constraints,
even when those are obvious. We make this attribution error partly because
when we watch someone act, that person is the focus of our attention and
the situation is relatively invisible. When we act, our attention is usually on
what we are reacting to—the situation is more visible.
III. How Do Our Social Beliefs Matter?
Our beliefs sometimes take on lives of their own. Usually our beliefs about
others have a basis in reality but studies of experimenter bias and teacher
expectation show that an erroneous belief that certain people are unusually
capable (or incapable) can lead teacher and researchers to give those people
special treatment This may elicit superior (or inferior) performance and
therefore, seem to confirm an assumption that is actually false.
Similarly, in everyday life we often get behavioral confirmation of what we
expect. Told that someone we are about to meet is intelligent and attractive,
we may come away impressed with just how intelligent an attractive he or
she is.
IV. What Can We Conclude About Social Beliefs and Judgments?
Research on social beliefs and judgments reveals how we form and sustain
beliefs that usually serve us well but sometimes lead us astray. A balanced
social psychology will therefore appreciate.
