Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies Social Psychology Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast and Frugal Heuristics Table 3.1

Judging Our Social World Counterfactual Thinking Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t Underlies our feelings of luck

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

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

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

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

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

Harold Kelley’s Theory of Attributes Figure 3.4

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

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

Explaining Our Social World Why Do We Make the Attribution Error? Cultural Differences Dispositional attribution Situational attribution Figure 3.7

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

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