Psyc 3315 - Ch.3

• Motivated reasoning – gut-level liking or disliking can powerfully influence how we interpret evidence and view reality
• System 1 – automatic and out of awareness “intuition” or “’gut-feeling"
• System 2 – requires conscious attention and effort
• System ? influences more of our actions than we realize

  Which number?

  1
• Priming -Activation of particular associations in memory
• Embodied condition – physical sensations that prime our social judgements
• Intuitive Judgements - Knowing something without reasoning or analysis
• Powers of Intuition

  Controlled – active, deliberate, and conscious

  Automatic – impulsive, effortless and without awareness
• Example of automatic thinking

  Schema, Emotional reactions, Expertise, and Snap Judgement
• Schemas – mental concepts or templates that intuitively guides our perceptions and interpretations
• Emotional reactions – instantaneous; before deliberate thinking
• Expertise – people may intuitively know the answer to a question
• Snap judgments – quick decisions based on limited information
• Blindsight – loss of a portion of the visual cortex that makes one a person blind at some areas of visual field due to stroke or surgery
• Overconfidence phenomenon – tendency to be more confident than correct
• Confirmation Bias - People tend not to seek information that might disprove what they believe but we are quick to find information that may prove our beliefs
• Self-verification – we tend to seek friends and spouses who bolster their own self-views; to seek experiences that will confirm perceived self-image
• Heuristics – a simple shortcut that helps us make decisions and judgements quickly

  • Enables us to make routine decisions with minimal effort
• Representativeness heuristic – tendency to presume despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group when it resembles a typical member
• Availability heuristic – cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of availability in memory, when it is readily available to our mind, we tend to see it as a common place (easier recall -> more likely it seems)
• Probability neglect – we worry about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities
• Over-precision - identifying too narrow a range

  Examples: Arriving late, Missed Flights
• Remedies for overconfidence

  1. Prompt feedback
  2. Estimate probable accuracy
  3. Get people to think of one good reason why their judgements might be wrong
• Counterfactual thinking - Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have been, but didn’t
• "I could've caught the bus today if only it didn't rain"

  is an example of?

  counterfactual thinking
• illusory correlation - Perception of a relationship when none exist, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exist
• Gambling - We act as if we can control or predict chance event
• Belief Perseverance - Persistence of one’s initial conceptions such as when the basis for that belief is discredited, we somehow believe it
• Misinformation effect – incorporating misinformation into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misinformation about it
• Rosy retrospection – recall mildly pleasant events more favorably than the experienced
• Totalitarian egos – underreport bad behavior and overreport good behavior
• Misattribution – mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
• men are more likely to attribute women’s nice gesture as flirting or sexual interest which can contribute to sexual harassment

  this is an example of?

  Misattribution
• attribution theory – theory of how people explain others’ behavior by attributing it to internal(personal dispositions or traits) or external dispositions (person’s situation)
• dispositional attribution – attributing behavior to person’s disposition and traits
• situational attribution – attributing behavior to environment
• spontaneous trait inference – effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior
• fundamental attribution error – tendency for observers to underestimate situational influence and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior

  • discounting of the situation
• dispositional attribution – attributing behavior to person’s disposition and traits
• situational attribution – attributing behavior to environment