SOCIAL BELIEFS

AND
JUDGEMENTS
• Perceiving our • Judging our • Explaining our • Expectations of
social worlds social worlds social worlds our social worlds
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
• Priming
• Perceiving and Interpreting Events
• Belief Perseverance
• Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds
Perceiving Our Social Worlds:
Priming

Priming
– is the awakening or activating of
certain associations.
Experiments show that priming
one thought, even without
awareness, can influence another Posting the second sign may prime
customers to be dissatisfied with the
thought, or even an action. handling of their complaints at the first
window.
Perceiving Our Social Worlds:
Perceiving and Interpreting Events
Perceiving and Interpreting
Events
• Despite some startling and oft-confirmed
biases and logical flaws in how we perceive
and understand one another, we’re mostly
accurate (Jussim, 2005).
• Our first impressions of one another are
more often right than wrong. Moreover, the
better we know people, the more accurately Some circumstances make it difficult
to be unbiased.
we can read their minds andfeelings.
Perceiving Our Social Worlds:
Perceiving and Interpreting Events
Kuleshov Effect
– mental phenomenon by which
viewers derive more meaning from
the interaction of two sequential
shot from a single shot in isolation.
Spontaneous Trait Transference
– occurs when communicators are perceived
as possessing the very traits they describe in
others.
Perceiving Our Social Worlds:
Belief Perseverance
Belief perseverance
– is the 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.
Perceiving Our Social Worlds:
Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds
RECONSTRUCTING OUR PAST
ATTITUDES

Rosy retrospection RECONSTRUCTING

– the psychological phenomenon OUR PAST BEHAVIOR
of people sometimes judging the
past disproportionately more
positively than they judge the
present.
Judging Our Social Worlds
• Intuitive Judgments
• Overconfidence • Counterfactual Thinking
• Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts • Illusory Thinking
• Moods and Judgments
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Intuitive Judgments
THE POWERS OF INTUITION
“The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” -Blaise Pascal

Our thinking is partly controlled (reflective, deliberate, and conscious) and—

more than psychologists once supposed—partly automatic (impulsive, effortless,
and without our awareness).
Controlled processing Automatic processing
“Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, “Implicit” thinking that is effortless,
reflective, and conscious. habitual, and without awareness,
E.g. Facts, Names, and Past experiences roughly corresponds to “intuition.”
E.g. Schemas, Emotional reactions, Expertise,
and Unconscious thinking
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Intuitive Judgments
THE LIMITS OF INTUITION
• “a general consensus that the unconscious may not be as smart as previously believed”
- Elizabeth Loftus and Mark Klinger (1992)
• Social psychologists have explored not only our error-prone hindsight judgments but
also our capacity for illusion—for perceptual misinterpretations, fantasies, and
constructed beliefs.
• Illusory thinking also appears in the vast new literature on how we take in, store, and
retrieve social information. As perception researchers study visual illusions for what
they reveal about our normal perceptual mechanisms, social psychologists study illusory
thinking for what it reveals about normal information processing. These researchers
want to give us a map of everyday social thinking, with the hazardsclearly marked.
Judging Our Social Worlds:

Overconfidence phenomenon
– the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate
the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
“Incompetence feeds overconfidence.”
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Overconfidence
• Planning fallacy
– most of us overestimate how much we’ll be getting done, and therefore how
much free time we will have.
• Stockbroker overconfidence
– Investment experts market their services with the confident presumption that
they can beat the stock market average, forgetting that for every stockbroker or
buyer saying “Sell!” at a given price, there is another saying “Buy!” A stock’s price is
the balance point between those mutually confident judgments.
• Political overconfidence
– Overconfident decision makers can wreak havoc
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Overconfidence
CONFIRMATION BIAS
– A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s
preconceptions.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Overconfidence
REMEDIES FOR OVERCONFIDENCE
• Three techniques have successfully reduced the overconfidence bias:
1. Prompt feedback (Lichtenstein & Fischhoff, 1980). In everyday life, weather
forecasters and those who set the odds in horse racing both receive clear, daily
feedback. And experts in both groups do quite well at estimating their
probable accuracy (Fischhoff, 1982).
2. Unpack a task —to break it down into its subcomponents—and estimate the
time required for each.
3. Think of one good reason why their judgments might be wrong; that is, force
them to consider disconfirming information (Koriat & others, 1980).
• Overconfidence can cost us, but realistic self-confidence is adaptive.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

Heuristic
— A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient
judgments.
• Heuristics enable us to live and make routine decisions with minimal
effort (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008).
• Representativeness Heuristic
• Availability Heuristic
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
REPRESENTATIVENESS AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
HEURISTIC — A cognitive rule that judges the
— The tendency to presume, likelihood of things in terms of their
sometimes despite contrary odds, availability in memory. If instances
that someone or something of something come readily tomind,
belongs to a particular group if we presume it to be commonplace.
resembling (representing) a typical
member.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual thinking
— Imagining alternative
scenarios and outcomes
that might have happened,
but didn’t.
Counterfactual thinking:
When Deal or No Deal game show contestants
deal too late (walking away with a lower
amount than they were previously offered) or
too early (foregoing their next choice, which
would have led to more money) they likely
experience counterfactual thinking—
imagining what might have been.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Illusory Thinking
Illusory correlation
— Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a
stronger relationship than actually exists.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Illusory Thinking
Illusion of • GAMBLE
control
• REGRESSION
— Perception of TOWARD THE
uncontrollable AVERAGE
events as
— The statistical
subject to one’s tendency for
control or as extreme scores or
more extreme behavior
controllable to return toward
than they are. one’s average.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Moods and Judgments
Moods and Judgements
• Social judgment involves efficient, though fallible, information processing. It
also involves our feelings: Our moods infuse our judgments. We are not cool
computing machines; we are emotional creatures.
• Unhappy people—especially those bereaved or depressed—tend to be more self focused
and brooding. A depressed mood motivates intense thinking—a search for information
that makes one’s environment more understandable and controllable (Weary & Edwards,
1994).
• Happy people, by contrast, are more trusting, more loving, more responsive. If people
are made temporarily happy by receiving a small gift while mall-shopping, they will
report, a few moments later on an unrelated survey, that their cars and TV sets are
working beautifully—better, if you took their word for it, than those belonging to folks
who replied after not receiving gifts.
Judging Our Social Worlds:
Moods and Judgments
A temporary good or
bad mood
strongly influenced
people’s ratings
of their videotaped
behavior.
Those in a bad mood
detected far
fewer positive
behaviors.
Source: Forgas & others, 1984.
Explaining Our Social Worlds
• Attributing Causality: To the Personor the Situation
• The Fundamental Attribution Error
Explaining Our Social Worlds:
Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
Misattribution
— Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
Explaining Our Social Worlds:
Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
Attribution theory
— The theory of how people
explain others’ behavior—for
example, by attributing it
either to internal dispositions
(enduring traits, motives, and
attitudes) or to
externalsituations.
Explaining Our Social Worlds
Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
Dispositional attribution Situational attribution
— Attributing behavior to the — Attributing behavior to the
person’s disposition and traits. environment.
Explaining Our Social Worlds:
Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
INFERRING TRAITS
Spontaneous trait inference
— An effortless, automatic
inference of a trait after
exposure to someone’s
behavior.
Explaining Our Social Worlds:
Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
COMMONSENSE ATTRIBUTIONS
Harold Kelley’s Theory of
Attributions
• Consistency:
How consistent is the person’s behavior
in this situation?
• Distinctiveness:
How specific is the person’s behavior to
this particular situation?
• Consensus:
To what extent do others in this
situation behave similarly?
Explaining Our Social Worlds
The Fundamental Attribution Error
Fundamental attribution
error
— The tendency for observers to
underestimate situational
influences and overestimate
dispositional influences upon
others‘ behavior. (Also called
correspondence bias, because we
so often see behavior as
corresponding to a disposition.)
Explaining Our Social Worlds
The Fundamental Attribution Error
WHY DO WE MAKE THE ATTRIBUTION ERROR?
PERSPECTIVE AND SITUATIONAL CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
AWARENESS
• Actor versus Observer Perspectives
• The Camera Perspective Bias
• Perspectives Change with Time
• Self-Awareness
Explaining Our Social Worlds
The Fundamental Attribution Error
WHY WE STUDY ATTRIBUTION ERRORS
• Reveal how we think about ourselves and others. If our capacity for illusion and self-deception is shocking,
remember that our modes of thought are generally adaptive. Illusory thinking is often a by-product of our mind’s
strategies for simplifying complex information. It parallels our perceptual mechanisms, which generally give us
useful images of the world but sometimes lead us astray.
• A second reason for focusing on thinking biases such as the fundamental attribution error is humanitarian. One
of social psychology’s “great humanizing messages,” note Thomas Gilovich and Richard Eibach (2001), is that
people should not always be blamed for their problems. “More often than people are willing to acknowledge,”
they conclude, “failure, disability, and misfortune are . . . the product of real environmental causes.”
• A third reason for focusing on biases is that we are mostly unaware of them and can benefit from greater
awareness. As with other biases, such as the self-serving bias (Chapter 2), people see themselves as less
susceptible than others to attribution errors (Pronin, 2008). My hunch is that you will find more surprises, more
challenges and more benefit in an analysis of errors and biases than you would in a string of testimonies to the
human capacity for logic and intellectual achievement. That is also why world literature so often portrays pride
and other human failings.
Expectations of Our Social
Worlds
• Teacher Expectations and Student Performance
• Getting from Others What We Expect
Expectations of Our Social World
Self-fulfilling prophecies
—beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment.
Expectations of Our Social World:
Teacher Expectations and Student Performance
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Teacher expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. But for the most part,
teachers’ expectations accurately reflect reality (Jussim & Harber, 2005).
Expectations of Our Social World:
Getting from Others What We Expect
Behavioral confirmation
— A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social
expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm
their expectations.
— Behavioral confirmation also occurs as people interact with partners
holding mistaken beliefs.