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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Social Psychology
by David G. Myers 9th Edition
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social World
• We respond to reality not as it is, but to
reality as we construe it.
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• Priming: Activating particular associations in memory
– Unattended stimuli can predispose how we will interpret and
recall events
– Example: if you are listening to the sentence “we stood by
the bank” and the word “river” is played in your ear without
you noticing it, the word will prime your understanding of the
sentence
– One thought can influence another thought and even an action
– Example 2: Watching a scary movie at home can prime us to
interpret noises as coming from an intruder.
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social World
• Perceiving and Interpreting Events: our first impressions of one
another are often more right than wrong
– We interpret things differently saying someone is “okay” can be a good
for one person or bad for another
– Pro-Israeli and Pro-Ara students who viewed network news descriptions
of the Beirut massacre believed the coverage was biased against their side.
• Belief Perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions, as when
the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the
belief might be true survives
– Once you conjure up a rationale it is difficult to dispel a falsehood.
– Ross & Anderson (1982): Implanted a falsehood in people’s minds and
then tried to discredited. Falsehoods were supported with anecdotal
evidence. About 75% remained intact
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our
Worlds
– Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:
• “Memory can be likened to a storage chest in the brain into
which we deposit material and from which we can withdraw if
later needed. Occasionally, something is lost from the chest,
and then we say we have forgotten.”
• 85% of college students agree. However, psychology has
proved the opposite. We construct memories at the time of
withdrawal.
• False Memories
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
– Misinformation effect: incorporating
“misinformation” into one’s memory of the
event, after witnessing an event, after
witnessing an event and receiving misleading
information about it
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
– Reconstructing our past attitudes
• Five years ago, how did you feel about your
parents? If your attitudes have changed, what do
you think is the extent of that change?
• Research shows that people whose attitudes have
changed insist that they have always felt the way
they do
• McFarland & Ross (1985) as our relationships
change we also revise our recollections of other
people
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perceiving Our Social World
– Reconstructing our past behavior: Memory
construction enables us to revise our own
history
• At times it is necessary to remembered events in the
desired manner
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Perception of Media Bias
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
•
Intuitive Judgments
– Powers of intuition: “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”
•
•
•
•
•
We know more than we know we know
We have limited access to what’s going on in our minds
Schemas guide our perception and interpretation of new experiences
Emotional reactions are often instantaneous without time for deliberate thinking
Given sufficient expertise people may intuitively know the answer to a question
–
Example: after hearing just a few words on the phone we can recognize a friends voice
– Limits of intuition:
•
•
•
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The unconscious may not be as smart as we think
There is no evidence that subliminal messages can reprogram the unconscious mind
The planning fallacy: we underestimate how long it will take us to do things
Stockbroker Overconfidence: investment analysts have not over performed randomly
selected stocks
• Political Overconfidence: overconfident decision makers can wreak havoc
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
• Overconfidence
– Overconfidence phenomenon: people tend to recall
their mistaken judgments as times when they were
“almost right”
– Confirmation bias: people tend to not look for
information that may disprove something they believe
– Remedies:
• Be weary of other people’s dogmatic statements (even when
people are sure they are right they may be wrong). Confidence
and competence do not coincide
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
• Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
– Representativeness heuristic: Students were told that a panel of
psychologists interviewed 30 engineers and 70 lawyers and
summarized their impression as follows:
• Twice divorced, Frank spends most of his time hanging around the
country club. His clubhouse bar conversations often center around his
regrets at having tried to follow his esteemed father’s footsteps. The
long hours he had spent at academic drudgery would have been better
invested in learning how to be less quarrelsome in his relations with
people.
• When asked to guess Frank’s occupation 80% said he was a lawyer.
• The scenario was then changed to state that 70% were engineers and
another group of students was asked to guess Frank’s occupation.
– More students still stated that Frank was a lawyer
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
• Representative Heuristic: judging something by
intuitively comparing it to out mental
representation of a category
• Lina is 31, single, outspoken, and bright. She
majored in philosophy in college. S a student she
was deeply concerned with discrimination and
other social issues, and she participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Based on this description,
it is more likely that:
– Linda is a bank teller
– Linda is a bank teller and a feminist
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
– The availability heuristic: judges the likelihood
of things based on how readily they come to
memory
• Do more people live in Iraq or Tanzania?
• You probably answered according to how readily
Iraqis or Tanzanians came to mind
• We often think we are at a bigger risk when in a
plane than in a car, because images of plane crashes
are more readily available in the media
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Our Social World
– Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternative
scenarios and outcomes that might have
happened, but didn’t
• The B+ student who missed the A- by a point feels
worse than the one who barely got a B+
• Thinking of the “if only…”
• “If only I would have told him how much I loved
him”
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Others
• Illusory thinking: we search for order in random
events
– Illusory correlation: perception of a correlation where
none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship
than actually exists
– Illusion of control: perception of uncontrollable events
as subject to one’s control or more controllable than
they actually are
• gambling
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Judging Others
• Moods and judgment: social judgments are
influenced by our moods
– Unhappy people are more self focused
– When we are in a happy mood the world seems
happier
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Explaining Our Social World
• Attributing Causality: To the Person or the
Situation
– Misattribution: mistakenly attributing a behavior to the
wrong source
• Example: misreading warmth as a sexual come-on
– Attribution Theory: analyzes how we explain people’s
behavior
• Dispositional vs. situational attributions
• Dispositional: attributing behavior to the person’s disposition
and traits
• Situational: attributing behavior to the environment
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Explaining Our Social World
– Inferring traits: we often infer that other
people’s actions are indicative of their
intentions and dispositions
• If I observe Rick making sarcastic comments, then I
infer that he is a hostile person
– Commonsense attributions: psychology often
explains behavior logically
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Attribution Theories
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
The Fundamental Attribution Error
• The tendency for observers to
underestimate situational
influences and overestimate
dispositional influences.
• Why do we make this error?
– Perspective and selfawareness
– Cultural differences
• Why we study attribution errors
– To reveal what we think about
ourselves and others
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
The Fundamental Attribution Error
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Attributions and Reactions
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Expectations of Our Social World
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: a brief
that leads to its own fulfillment
• Teacher Expectations and
Student Performance
– Teacher expectations can
influence student performance
• Getting from Others What We
Expect
– Behavioral confirmation: a
type of self fulfilling prophecy
in whereby people’s social
expectations led them to
behave in ways that cause
others to confirm their
expectations
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Attribution Theories
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Social Beliefs and Judgments
Self-Fulfilling Beliefs
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Social Beliefs and Judgments
Expectations and Attributions
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.