1. Schemas and Heuristics
“Please your majesty,” said the knave, “I didn’t write it and they can’t prove I did; there’s no name signed at the end.”
“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes matters much worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.” –Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

2. Overview Schemas: Confirmation biases Perseverance effect (last time)
Expectancy confirmation
Hindsight bias
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Mental shortcuts
Representativeness
Availability
Counterfactual thinking
Automatic vs. controlled thinking

3. We may confirm our expectations by selecting biased evidence.
Snyder & Swann, 1978
IV: Expectations about person to be interviewed: introverted vs. extraverted
DV: Selection of interview questions. Slanted toward extraverted, introverted, or neutral.
What were the findings?

4. Example of Tom W.

5. How might this apply to a clinician’s diagnosis?

6. On being sane in insane places
David Rosenhan et al.
+7 colleagues gained admission to mental hospitals (pseudopatients)
“heard voices,” false name, all else true
7 diagnosed with schizophrenia, 1 with manic-depressive disorder

7. What did Rosenhan’s demonstration show?

8. What are the implications of this example for the clinic? Courtroom?

9. Self-fulfilling Prophecy
One person’s expectations can affect the behavior of another person.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: The process whereby (1) people have an expectation about another person, which (2) influences how they act toward that person, which (3) leads the other person to behave in a way that confirms people’s original expectations.

10. Teacher expectations Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)
IV: Elementary school children labeled as “intellectual bloomers” or not labeled
DV: IQ test 8 months later
Findings?

11. Mental Shortcuts or Heuristics
Judgmental heuristics: Mental shortcuts (rules of thumb) people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
Research on heuristics arose in response to a view of humans as rational, thoughtful decision-makers.
Economists’ models
Tversky & Kahneman
Nisbett & Ross

12. What is the difference between a schema and a heuristic?
organized set of knowledge in a given domain (knowledge structure)
influences processing
Ex: Rude person – related traits, expected behaviors, expectations about own reactions, etc.
Mental shortcut
Specific processing rule
Not necessarily tied to a particular schema
Not a “knowledge structure”
Ex: Candidate=Democrat, then I will like him.

13. Example: Steve

14. Representativeness heuristic
The tendency to assume, despite compelling odds to the contrary, that someone belongs to a group because he/she resembles a typical member of that group.

15. Base-rate information

16. Availability Heuristic
The tendency to perceive events that are easy to remember as more frequent and more likely to happen than events than are more difficult to recall.

17. People often give too much weight to vivid, memorable information.
Hamill, Nisbett, & Wilson (1980)
IV: Type of information
Vivid, concrete atypical + statistical
Vivid, concrete typical + statistical
Control group (no information)
DV: Positivity/negativity of attitudes toward welfare recipients in general
Results:

18. Demo: Karen story

19. Counterfactual Thinking
We mentally change some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

20. Study of Counterfactual Thinking (Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995)
Videotaped 41 athletes in the 1992 summer Olympic Games who had won a silver or bronze metal.
Quasi-IV: Athlete won silver OR bronze medal
DV: Judges’ ratings of participants’ emotional state from “agony” to “ecstasy.” (Judges unaware of participant’s award status.)
Results?
Why?

21. Automatic Thinking
Most biases/heuristics operate automatically (i.e., without conscious awareness)
Some are highly automatic (e.g., availability), whereas others (e.g., counterfactual thinking) appear to have both automatic and more controlled components

22. Automatic thinking: nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless
Controlled thinking: conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful

23. Controlled Thinking
Thought suppression: the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget

24. Example of Thought Suppression & Ironic Processing
Homer Simpson tries to not drink beer.

25. Ironic processing & Thought Suppression
Monitoring process (automatic): Search for evidence that unwanted thought is about to pop into consciousness.
Operating process (controlled): Attempt to distract self from detected unwanted thought.
Problem: If under cognitive load (tired, hungry, stressed, under time pressure), operating process breaks down.

26. Conclusions Schemas and judgmental heuristics
help us make sense of the world
increase our efficiency and speed
often operate automatically, without conscious awareness
But, they can sometimes lead to serious errors in judgment!