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Social Psychology
David Myers
10e
Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies
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Chapter Three
• Social Beliefs and Judgments
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Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• Priming
– Activating particular associations in memory
• Example: Watching a scary movie at home may prime
us to interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder
– Perceiving and interpreting events
• Kulechov effect
• Spontaneous trait transference
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Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• 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
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Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our
Worlds
– Misinformation effect
• Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of
the event after witnessing an event and receiving
misleading information about it
– Reconstructing our past attitudes
– Reconstructing our past behavior
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Judging Our Social World
• Intuitive Judgments
– Powers of intuition
• Controlled processing
– Reflective, deliberate, and conscious
• Automatic processing
– Impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness
» Schemas
» Emotional reactions
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Judging Our Social World
• Overconfidence Phenomenon
– Tendency to be more confident than correct – to
overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
• Incompetence feeds overconfidence
– Planning fallacy
– Stockbroker overconfidence
– Political overconfidence
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Judging Our Social World
• Confirmation bias
– Tendency to search for information that confirms
one’s preconceptions
• Helps explain why our self-images are so stable
• Self-verification
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Judging Our Social World
• Remedies for Overconfidence
– Give prompt feedback to explain why statement is
incorrect
– For planning fallacy, ask one to “unpack a task” –
break it down into estimated time requirements
for each part
– Get people to think of one good reason why their
judgments might be wrong
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Judging Our Social World
• Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
– Representativeness heuristic
• Tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary
odds, that someone or something belongs to a
particular group if resembling (representing) a typical
member
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Judging Our Social World
• Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
– Availability Heuristic
• Cognitive rules that judges the likelihood of things in
terms of their availability in memory
– The more easily we recall something the more likely it seems
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Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Table 3.1
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Judging Our Social World
• Counterfactual Thinking
– Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that
might have happened, but didn’t
• Underlies our feelings of luck
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Judging Our Social World
• Illusory Thinking
– Our search for order in random events
• Illusory correlation
– Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception
of a stronger relationship than actually exists
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Judging Our Social World
• Illusory Thinking
– Illusion of control
• Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s
control or as more controllable than they are
– Gambling
– Regression toward the average
» Statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme
behavior to return toward one’s average
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Judging Our Social World
• Moods and Judgments
– Good and bad moods
trigger memories of
experiences associated
with those moods
– Moods color our
interpretations of
current experiences
Figure 3.3
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Explaining Our Social World
• Attributing Causality: To the Person or the
Situation
– Misattribution
• Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
– Attribution theory
• Theory of how people explain others’ behavior
– Dispositional attribution
– Situational attribution
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Explaining Our Social World
• Inferring Traits
– We often infer that other people’s actions are
indicative of their intentions and dispositions
• Commonsense Attributions
– Consistency
– Distinctiveness
– Consensus
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Harold Kelley’s Theory of Attributes
Figure 3.4
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Explaining Our Social World
• Fundamental Attribution Error
– Tendency for observers to underestimate
situational influences and overestimate
dispositional influences upon others’ behavior
• Example:
– Assuming questioning hosts on game shows are more
intelligent than the contestants
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Explaining Our Social World
• Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
– Perspective and situational awareness
•
•
•
•
Actor-observer perspectives
Camera perspective bias
Perspectives change with time
Self-awareness
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Explaining Our Social World
• Why Do We Make the
Attribution Error?
– Cultural Differences
• Dispositional attribution
• Situational attribution
Figure 3.7
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Expectations of Our Social World
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
– Belief that leads to its
own fulfillment
• Experimenter bias
• Teacher expectations and
student performance
Figure 3.8
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Expectations of Our Social World
• Getting from Others What We Expect
– Behavioral confirmation
• Type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social
expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause
others to confirm their expectations
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