【Social Psychology】Chapter 03 — Main Points
* All the following abstractions are excerpted from <Social Psychology>, David G. Myers, 12th edition
Chapter 03 — Social Belief and Judgments.
— How Do We Perceive Our Social Worlds?
Our preconceptions strongly influence how we interpret and remember events. In a phenomenon called priming, people's judgments have striking effects on how they perceive and interpret information.
Other experiments have planted judgments or false ideas in people's minds after they have been given information. These experiments reveal that as before-the-fact judgments bias our perceptions and interpretations, so after-the-fact judgments bias our recall.
Belief perseverance is the phenomenon in which people cling to their initial beliefs and the reasons why a belief might be true, even when the basis for the belief is discredited.
Far from being a repository for facts about the pasts, our memories are actually formed when we retrieve them, and they are subject to strong influence by the attitudes and feelings we hold at the time of retrieval.
— How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds?
We have an enormous capacity for automatic, efficient, intuitive thinking. Our cognitive efficiency, although generally adaptive, comes at the price of occasional error. Because we are generally unaware of those errors entering our thinking, it is useful to identify ways in which we form and sustain false beliefs.
First, we often overestimate our judgments. This overconfidence phenomenon stems partly from the much greater ease with which we can imagine why we might be right than why we might be wrong. Moreover, people are much more likely to search for information that can confirm their beliefs than for information that can disconfirm them.
Second, when given compelling anecdotes or even useless information, we often ignore useful base-rate information. This is partly due to the later ease of recall of vivid information (the availability heuristic).
Third, we are often swayed by illusions of correlation and personal control. It is tempting to perceive correlations where none exist (illusory correlation) and to think we can predict or control chance events (the illusion of control).
Finally, moods infuse judgments. Good and bad moods trigger memories of experiences associated with those moods. Moods color our interpretations of current experiences. And by distracting us, moods can also influence how deeply or superficially we think when making judgments.
— How Do We Explain Our Social Worlds?
Attribution theory how we explain people's behavior. Misattribution — attributing a behavior to the wrong source — is a major factor in sexual harassment, as a person in power (typically male) interprets friendliness as a sexual come-on.
Although we usually make reasonable attributions, we often commit the fundamental attribution error (also called correspondence bias) when explaining other people's behavior. We attribute their behavior so much to their inner traits and attitudes that we discount situational constraints, even when those are obvious. We make this attribution error partly because when we watch someone act, that person is the focus of our attention and the situation is relatively invisible. When we act, our attention is usually on what we are reacting to — the situation is more visible.
— How Do Our Expectations of Our Social Worlds Matter?
Our beliefs sometimes take on lives of their own. Usually, our beliefs about others have a basis in reality. But studies of experimenter bias and teacher expectations show that an erroneous belief that certain people are unusually capable (or incapable) can lead teachers and researchers to give those people special treatment. This may elicit superior (or inferior) performance and, therefore, seem to confirm an assumption that is actually false.
Similarly, in everyday life we often get behavioral confirmation of what we expect. Told that someone we are about to meet is intelligent and attractive, we may come away impressed with just how intelligent and attractive he or she is.
— What Can We Conclude About Social Beliefs and Judgments?
Research on social beliefs and judgments reveals how we form and sustain beliefs that usually serve us well but sometimes lead us astray. A balanced social psychology will therefore appreciate both the powers and the perils of social thinking.