By David Myers’ Book

Chapter 3:
Social Beliefs and Judgments

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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

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Perceiving Our Social Worlds
Our assumptions and pre-judgments guide what we see, interpret and recall
We construct our own reality
Priming
Activating particular associations in memory
 Example: Watching a scary movie at home may prime us to
interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder
 -”embodied cognition” –bodily sensations -> judgments

Perceiving and interpreting events

 Kulechov effect –what is it?
 Spontaneous trait transference -what is it?
 Are you a gossiper? Or just gossip?

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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
 Explain why a risk taker makes a better firefighter..
 The more we examine our explanations for our beliefs, the
stronger we belief 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
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Perceiving Our Social Worlds

Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds

Elizabeth Loftus
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
 We remember the last event which overrides the previous
Reconstructing our past behavior
 Rosy retrospective
 Downward spiral (Holmberg found what?)

 Underestimated earlier liking of partner

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Judging Our Social World

Intuitive Judgments
 Powers of intuition
 Explicit
 Controlled processing
 Reflective, deliberate, and conscious

 Automatic processing
 Impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness

 implicit

 Schemas

 Emotional reactions

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Judging Our Social World

Overconfidence Phenomenon

 D Kahneman & Tversky

Tendency to be more confident than correct – to
overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
 Incompetence feeds overconfidence
 Don’t let his happen on the exam!!!! How can you avoid it?

 Are you ignorant of your ignorances?

 Planning fallacy

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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

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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

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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
 Is linda a bank teller or

 Bank teller and feminist activist?

 Two conjunctive events can’t be more likely than either one

alone (Kahneman & Tversky)

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Judging Our Social World

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

 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

 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

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Judging Our Social World

Counterfactual Thinking
Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that
might have happened, but didn’t
 Mentally simulating what might have happened

 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….” “should, would, could”

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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

 We ignore unusual events that don’t confirm the perceived
relationship

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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 (азарт игр)

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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.

When everything is going great, something will go wrong, and that

when life is dealing us terrible blows, we can usually look forward to
things getting better.

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Judging Our Social World

Moods and Judgments

Good and bad moods trigger memories (Вызвать
воспом) of experiences associated with those moods
Moods color our interpretations of current experiences

Priming again!

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Explaining Our Social World
Attributing Theory
Attribution theory: theory of how people explain others’
behavior
Misattribution: mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong
source
Dispositional attributions: attributing behavior to the person’s
disposition and traits.
Situational attribution : attributing behavior to the
environment
 The reason of a child’s underachievement…
 Is it due to lack of motivation and ability?

 Is it to physical and social circumstances?

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Explaining Our Social World
Inferring Traits (spontaneous trait inference)
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?

It was also found that people often discount a contributing cause of behavior if other
plausible causes are already known. If we can specify one or two sufficient reasons a
student might have done poorly on an exam, we often ignore or discount
alternative possibilities.

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Theory of correspondent inferences

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Explaining Our Social World
Fundamental Attribution Error

Tendency for observers to underestimate situational

influences and overestimate dispositional influences
upon others’ behavior
When viewing a movie actor playing a “good-guy” or a “bad-guy”
role, we find it difficult to escape the illusion that the scripted
behavior reflects an inner disposition.

We tend to presume that others are the way they act

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Explaining Our Social World

Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?

Perspective and situational awareness
 Actor-observer perspectives
 Attribute good behavior to self / bad to external causes

 Perspectives change with time

 “that was the old me..” –someone else

 When recalling our past. we become like observers of someone

else

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Explaining Our Social World

Attributions and Reactions

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Expectations of Our Social World

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Belief that leads to its
own fulfillment
 Experimenter bias

Teacher Expectations
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
and Student
Performance
 Do students learn more if they
expect the professor is good?
(Feldman & Prohaska ‘79)

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Expectations of Our Social World

Self ful-filling prophecy(искажение убеждений,

ожиданий)
Does it happen at work?
In marriages
In friendship relationships?
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
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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

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