Social Beliefs and Judgements

Chapter 3
Preview
• How do we judge our social worlds, consciously
and unconsciously?
• How do we perceive our social worlds?

• How do we explain our social worlds?

• How do our social beliefs matter?

• What can we conclude about social beliefs and judgments?

How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds, Consciously
and Unconsciously?
• Daniel Kahneman: We have two brain systems
• System 1, automatic processing
• System 2, controlled processing
Priming
• Priming: activating particular associations in memory

• Embodied cognition: mutual influence of bodily

Intuitive Judgments
• Some advocate “intuitive management”—tuning in to our hunches

• Our thinking is partly automatic and partly controlled

Group Breakout
• Limits of intuitive thinking/ limits of intuition
Think About It
• Are all beliefs false?
Overconfidence
• Overconfidence phenomenon: the tendency to be more confident than
correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
Confirmation Bias
• Confirmation bias: a tendency to search for information that confirms
one’s preconceptions
Group Breakout
• How do we reduce overconfidence?
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

Representativeness Availability
Heuristic heuristic heuristic
• a thinking strategy • Snap judgments of • Quick judgments of
that enables quick, whether someone likelihood of events
efficient judgments or something fits a (how available in
catego memory)
Counterfactual Thinking
• Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes
that might have happened, but didn’t
Illusory Thinking
• Illusory correlation: perception of a relationship where none exists, or
perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists
Moods and Judgments
• Our moods infuse our judgments
• Do you agree with the statement? Why?
How Do We Perceive Our Social
Worlds?
Perceiving and Interpreting Events
• Our first impressions of one another are more often right than wrong; but
on occasion, our prejudgments can be a mistake
Belief Perseverance
• Belief perseverance: persistence of one’s initial conceptions
Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our
Worlds
• Misinformation effect: incorporating “misinformation”
into one’s memory of an event and receiving misleading information
about it
How Do We Explain Our Social Worlds?
• Attribution theory helps us make sense of how such explanations work
Attributing Causality:
To the Person or the Situation
• Misattribution: mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source

• Attribution theory: the theory of how people explain others’ behavior

• Dispositional attribution: attributing behavior to the person’s dispositions and traits
• Situational attribution: attributing behavior to the environment
• Spontaneous trait inference: an effortless, automatic inference of a trait
after exposure to someone’s behavior
The Fundamental Attribution Error
• Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for observers to
underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional
influences upon others’ behavior
• Why do we make the attribution error?
How Do Our Social Beliefs Matter?
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment

• Teacher expectations and student performance

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
What Can We Conclude about Social Beliefs and
Judgments?
• Social cognition studies reveal that our information-processing powers
are efficient and adaptive; but people do sometimes form false beliefs
• Trying hard doesn’t eliminate thinking biases
• Our intuition is vulnerable to misjudgment
• If anything, laboratory procedures overestimate our intuitive powers
• False impressions, interpretations, and beliefs can produce serious consequences
• Heuristic snap judgments, however, enable efficient thinking and can aid in our
survival