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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Table 3.1

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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. Harold Kelley’s Theory of Attributes
Figure 3.4

19. 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

20. 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

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

22. 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

23. 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