SOCIAL BELIEFS

AND JUDGEMENT
• How do we perceive our world?
• How do we judge our social worlds?
• How do we explain our social worlds?
• How do our expectations of our social world matter?
• What can we conclude about social beliefs and judgments?
What is “motivated reasoning”? “2/3
or what we see is behind our eyes” 

• Perceiving our Social World Judging

• Our Social World Explaining
• Our Social World Expectations of
• Our Social World
Perceiving Our Social Worlds Our
assumptions and pre-judgments guide
what we see, interpret and recall.

We construct our own reality

The overarching point: “We respond not to

reality as it is but to reality as we
construe it.”
 ICE BREAKER

• Complete this word while I go and grab some

food.
Here is the word — S _ _ p
• Did you say it is soup? Ok, what if I go and
take a shower? What word will it be now?
S__p
• Did you say soap this time?
 PRIMING
 Activating particular associations in memory
 Experiments show that priming one thought even
without awareness , can influence another thought and
action.
• Example: Watching a scary movie at home may prime
us to interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder
• For many psychology students, reading about
psychological disorder and reading about the
symptoms similarly primes medical students to worry
about their congestion, fever, or headache.
embodied cognition bodily sensations judgments

• Much of our social information is automatic.

 EMBODIED COGNITION
The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive
preferences and social judgments.

Example: After holding a warm drink, people become more

likely to rate someone more warmly and behave generously.

After receiving a cold shoulder treatment, people judge the

experimental room as colder than do those treated warmly.
 PERCEIVING AND INTERPRETING
EVENTS

• Impressions of one another are

more often right than wrong.
Moreover, the better we know
people, the more accurately we
can read their minds and feelings.
• "Once you have a belief, it
influences how you can perceive
all other relevant information."
-Political scientists (Robert Jervis,
1985)
• Political Perception - Social perception are very
much in the eye of beholder, even a simple stimulus
may strike two people quite differently.
• Our perception of others. Filmmakers control people's
perception of emotion by manipulating the setting in
which they see a face. They call this the "Kulechov
Effect" after the Russian film director who would
skillfully guide viewers in manipulating their
assumptions.
OTHER'S PERCEPTION
OF US.

• When we say something

good or bad about another,
people tend to associate that
trait within us---- a
phenomenon they called
Spontaneous trait
Judge for yourself: Is this
transference. person’s expression cruel
or kind? If told he was a
Nazi , would your reading
of his face differ?
 PERCEIVING OUR
Belief Perseverance
SOCIAL WORLDS
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.
• Explain why a risk taker makes a better firefighter..
• The more we examine our explanations for our beliefs,
the stronger we believe in them
• What effect does this have on the juror’s initial
impression of guilt or innocence of the defendant?
• Explanations survive well!
• What’s the way to avoid this trap? Explain the other
side! (Lord, Lepper, & Preston, ‘84
 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/behaviors
*Construction of positive memories brightens our recollection *People
often exhibit Rosy retrospection- people recall mildly pleasant events
more favorably than they experienced them.
*Memory construction enables us to revise our own histories
 HOW DO WE JUDGE OUR
SOCIAL WORLDS
Initiative judgments- advocates of intuitive management believe
we should tube into our hunches.

The powers of intuition:

Controlled Processing- "explicit" thinking that is deliberate,

reflective and conscious

Automatic Processing- "implicit" thinking that is effortless,

habitual, and without awareness roughly corresponds to
intuition. HOW DO WE JUDGE OUR SOCIAL WORLDS
• Schemas are mental concepts or templates that intuitively
guide our perceptions and interpretations. Whether we hear
someone speaking of religious sects or sex depends not only
on the word spoken but also how we automatically interpret
the sound.
• Emotional reactions – are often instantaneous, happening
before there is time for deliberate thinking.
• Given sufficient expertise, people may intuitively know the
answer toa problem.
• Faced with a decision making but lacking the expertise to
make an informed snap judgment, our unconscious thinking
may guide us toward a satisfying choice.
 JUDGING OUR SOCIAL
WORLD
Limit of intuition. Social psychologists have explored not
only our error- prone hindsight judgments but also our
capacity for illusion-for perceptual misinterpretation,
fantasies and constructed beliefs.
Overconfidence bias- person's subjective confidence in
his or her judgments
*Planning fallacy-underestimate the time *Stockbroker
confidence (can beat stock market average)
*Political overconfidence- overconfident decision makers
can wreak havoc. (Adolf Hitler)
Overconfidence Phenomenon
Tendency to be more confident than
correct – to overestimate the
accuracy of one’s beliefs
Incompetence feeds overconfidence.
It takes competence to recognize
what competence is.
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
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

 Two conjunctive events can’t be more likely

than either one alone (Kahneman & Tversky)
Linda, 31, single outspoken and very bright. She
majored in philosophy in college . As a student, she
was deeply concerned with discrimination and other
social issues.
• A. Is linda a bank teller
• B. Linda is Bank teller and feminist activist?
HEURISTIC DEFINITION EXAMPLE BUT MAY
LEAD TO
REPRESENTATIVENESS Snap judgments Deciding that Discounting other
of whether Carlos is a important
someone or librarian rather information
something fits a than a trucker
category because he better
represents one’s
image of librarians
Availability Quick judgments Estimating teen Overweighting
of likelihood of violence after vivid instances
events (how school shootings and thus, for
available in example, fearing
memory) the wrong things.
Availability heuristic
 Cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms
of their availability in memory
• The more easily we recall something the more likely it
seems
• How does this affect a supervisor’s appraisal of an
employee’s performance?
• What can be done about it?
 What percent of U.S. adults are homosexual?
• Why do people overestimate?
• What impression do most people who saw “The Wire”
think of the crime rate in Baltimore?
• We underestimate high probability events and overestimate
low probability events
Counterfactual Thinking
 Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that
might have happened, but didn’t
• Mentally simulating what might have happened
• How should I award grades to make you all feel better?
• Should you change an answer on your test?
 Underlies our feelings of luck
• Good luck… good outcome and we imagine a negative
outcome
• Bad luck…bad outcome and we imagine a good one

--”if I had only….” “shouda, wouda, couda”

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
-We ignore unusual events that don’t confirm
the perceived relationship
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
-Lowest scoring students on the exam will likely do
better
 Exceptional performance tends to decline over the
long run.
• What about stock market successes?
Moods and Judgments

Good and bad moods trigger

memories of experiences
associated with those moods
Moods color our
interpretations of current
experiences
• Priming again!
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.
 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 attributions
-Are most workers lazy or conscientious?
-Is it something about them?
• Situational attribution
- Are most workers lazy or conscientious?
-Is it something about the situation? What could that be?
• Spontaneous trait inference- effortless,
automatic inference of a trait after exposure to
a someone's behavior
• Fundamental attribution error- tendency to
observers to underestimate situational
influences and overestimate dispositional
influences upon others behavior.
  EXPLAINING OUR SOCIAL
WORLD INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL
CAUSE
Attribution theories:
 Inferring Traits
• We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative of
their intentions and dispositions
 Commonsense Attributions – theory of correspondent
inferences
-Consistency – same behavior in similar situation?
-Distinctiveness – only in this situation?
-Consensus –how do others behavior in this situation?
Fundamental Attribution Error (Lee Ross)

 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
Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?

 Perspective and situational awareness

• Actor-observer perspectives
-Attribute good behavior to self / bad to external
causes
-Self-serving bias
• Camera perspective bias
• Perspectives change with time
“that was the old me..” –someone else
Why Do We Make the
Attribution Error?

Cultural Differences
• Dispositional attribution
• Situational attribution
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
 Belief that leads to its own fulfillment
• Experimenter bias

 Teacher Expectations and Student

Performance
• Do students learn more if they expect the
professor is good?(Feldman & Prohaska
‘79)Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
 TEACHER'S EXPECTATION AND
STUDENT'S PERFORMANCE
• Teacher's expectation : "Rena's older brother
was brilliant, I bet she is too"

• Teacher's behavior: "Smiling more, teaching

her more, calling her more for recitations"

• Student's behavior: "Rema responds

enthusiastically" 
Self fulfilling prophecy
 Does it happen at work?
 In marriages
 In friendship relationships?
Getting from Others What We Expect
 Behavioral confirmation – a type of self-
fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s
expectations lead them to behave in ways that
cause others to confirm their expectations.
What can we conclude? Social cognition
powers are impressive
But fallible! Be on guard and use reason
Illusions are persistent
Rely on intuition but check whenever possible
- especially for important decisions
Remember the biases in thinking and notice
when they occur