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COURSE NOTES: Social



	Based on the course PSY/SOC 301, taught at The Sage Colleges by Prof. Susan Cloninger. This class uses the following textbook, which provides the chapter organization that you see on the menu on the left side of this page: Myers, D. (2005). Social Psychology (8th ed.) New York: McGraw Hill.

Chapter 3:

Social Beliefs and Judgments

EXPLAINING OTHERS

Attributing causality: to the person or the situation?

The fundamental attribution error

Why do we make the fundamental attribution error?
How fundamental is the fundamental attribution error?

Why we study attribution errors

Attributing causality: to the person or the situation?

Attribution theory

Inferring Traits

Commonsense Attributions

Information Integration

The fundamental attribution error

the tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others' behavior
ex: She's late, because she's disorganized.

Consider an experiment.

Ss listened to speeches in favor of, or opposed to, Fidel Castro. They believed that the speech-giver decided which attitude to argue. Then Ss judged the real attitude of the person who gave the speech.
Ss attributions of the real attitudes of those who gave pro- or anti-Castro speeches. [graph]
pro- or anti- was chosen by speech-giver; (Jones & Harris, 1967)
That's no surprise.
If the speech had to be "pro" or "anti" at the flip of a coin, the real atttitudes of the speech-givers would be the same, on average, in the groups that gave pro- and anti-Castro speeches. (Of course.)
The fundamental attribution error in Ss attributions of the real attitudes of those who gaves pro- or anti-Castro speeches. [graph presented in lecture]

Here's a different experiment.

The fundamental attribution error in Ss ratings of how knowledgeable were participants in a "contest". [graph]
Gosh, even the contestants made the fundamental attribution error. Observers were worse, though.

Why do we make the fundamental attribution error?

Perspective and situational awareness: the actor-observer difference
The camera perspective bias
Perspectives change with time
Self-awareness (individual differences)

Why did the student fall asleep in class? [example explained in detail in class; attributions affect reactions of blame or sympathy]

Culture differences in the attribution error

Western emphasis on people (not situations) as causes
Americans: "She is kind"; India: "Her friends were with her"
for discussion: But what about "victim" mentality? Isn't that situational?

How fundamental is the fundamental attribution error? [graphic example in lecture]

Why we study attribution errors

Because it might be on the test?
TO IMPROVE THINKING! by helping us realize that although attributions are generally adaptive, we are unaware of our attribution errors and they make us less humane toward others.

CONSTRUCTING INTERPRETATIONS AND MEMORIES

Perceiving and interpreting events
Belief perseverance
Constructing memories
We perform very complex mental acts every day. Consider the following puzzles:
- [examples presented in class]
Let's try another mental task. This one is more complicated.
- [Class exercise!]

REMEMBER: Science requires the possibility of disconfirmation (of hypotheses).

confirmation bias

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established in 1992 to help people who were falsely accused of abusing children.

Monitoring lawsuits against more than 700 patients and 200 therapists.
Accusers usually (7 in 10 times) are women ages 31 to 60.
71% of accusers have siblings who do not believe the accusation
http://advicom.net/~fitz/fmst/

While some accusations are true, others are false, and illustrate the social impact of constructed memories.

Reconstructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds

Reconstructing Our Past Attitudes
Reconstructing Our Past Behavior
Reconstructing Our Experiences: Misinformation and Priming
- Laboratory experiments demonstrate that memories can be changed by subsequent events.
- the "misinformation effect": research by Elizabeth Loftus and others
- priming

JUDGING OTHERS

Intuitive Judgments

Cognitive psychologists recognize that "intuition" is sometimes accurate, but very often it is not.
The powers of the unconscious
The limits of intuition

Judgmental overconfidence

Consider the following predictions (which we now know were overconfident): [examples given in lecture; other examples in the text]

confirmation bias: “a tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions” (Myers, 2005, p. 112)

Remedies for overconfidence:

prompt feedback
thinking of reasons why our judgments might be WRONG

Class exercise: general knowledge about causes of death [class demonstration]

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

representativeness heuristic
- ignoring base-rate information (the base-rate fallacy)
the availability heuristic
counterfactual thinking

Illusory thinking

illusory correlation
illusion of control
- gambling
- regression toward the average

Illusory thinking: examples of illusory correlations

"It always rains right after you wash the car."
"You always seem to need something just after you've thrown it away."
"The phone always rings when you're in the shower."
"The elevator (or bus) always seems to be heading in the wrong direction."

Statistical "regression toward the mean (average) can explain:

why sequels are often worse than the great movies they follow
why poor presidents have better successorshy extremely intelligent women tend to have slightly duller husbands
why great ski runs in the olympics are followed by a decline
why being on the cover of Sports Illustrated is followed by a slump in performance (the "Sports Illustrated Jinx")

The illusion of control

Gamblers demand 4 times as much money to sell a lottery ticket if they have selected the numbers themselves, rather than having them assigned by E

Mood and judgment

We are more sensitive to information that matches our current mood.

SELF-FULFILLING BELIEFS

Teacher expectations and student performance

Clever Hans: the horse that could do math

Experimenter Expectancy Effects

Rosenthal's "maze-bright" and "maze-dull" rats
Teacher expectations and student performance

Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers' expectancies: Determinates of pupils' I.Q. gains. Psychological Reports, 19, 115-118.

"late bloomers" identified by an alleged "Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" (really an IQ test used for a pretest)
students in grades 1-6
Teachers were told which students were predicted to be "late bloomers" on the basis of the test (but really determined at random).
(Note the true experiment: a great way to determine cause-effect relationships!)
Results:
- I.Q. score gains: Grades 1 through 6
- These data indicate:
- Experimental group children averaged an increase of 12.2 points; control group children averaged 8.2 points.
- The greatest effect was in grades 1 and 2.
- Half of grade 1-2 children in the experimental group increased 20 IQ points or more (in grades 1 and 2), compared to less than 1/5 of the control group.

How does this work?

Another study videotaped teacher-student interactions in one class and found that teachers treated the (randomly selected) "brighter" students differently: (Chaiken, Sigler, & Derlega, 1974)
- smiled at them more often
- made more eye contact
- responded more favorably to student comments in class
And as a consequence the "bright" students
- enjoy school more
- receive more constructive comments from teachers on their mistakes
- try to work harder to improve

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" (Myers, 2005, p. 124)