• – The study of the ways in which weprocess, store, and, remember information about people.

Cognitive Biases 

·       – Latane and Darley’s theory of why people didn’t intervene in K.G. incident (reasons such as lack of empathy or fear of retribution).

o      As group size increases, each person’s feeling of responsibility (and expectation of blame) decreases. Thus, as the group size increases, the odds of any given person intervening decreases.

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  • Bystander intervention can be thought of as conformity to an unpopular norm (pluralistic ignorance)
  • Latane and Darley (1968) – People put in cubicles and had a conversation over microphones about adjusting to college. One participant has a fake epileptic seizure and they measured how long it takes until others in the study came to help. The more people, the more time it took. Also in (1968b) participants were in a waiting room with smoke pouring in and two confederates and waited to see how long until the participant did anything about it.

·       Latane and Darley’s theory of why people didn’t intervene in K.G. incident (reasons such as lack of empathy or fear of retribution).

o      As group size increases, each persons feeling of responsibility (and expectation of blame) decreases. Thus, as the group size increases, the odds of any given person intervening decreases.

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  • Bystander intervention can be thought of as conformity to an unpopular norm (pluralistic ignorance)
  • Latane and Darley (1968) – People put in cubicles and had a conversation over microphones about adjusting to college. One participant has a fake epileptic seizure and they measured how long it takes until others in the study came to help. The more people, the more time it took. Also in (1968b) participants were in a waiting room with smoke pouring in and two confederates and waited to see how long until the participant did anything about it.

Dispositional and Situational Attributions

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  • Dispositional: an observer “attributes” another’s behavior to internal states (personality)
  • Situational: an observer “attributes” another’s behavior to the environment (situations)

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  • Three basic elements: Person, P; Another Person, O; Impersonal object, idea or event, X. P seeks balance among the elements in a cognitive system, i.e. wants there to be a positive overall.
  • An imbalanced state is characterized by stress, discomfort, or unpleasantness and exists if there are 1 or 3 negative relations in a cognitive system

•  (the Castro essay study) – Attribution research. People think that the person’s attitude corresponds with their paper. They believe that the attitude reflects what’s on the paper, even though the paper writers were told what to write about
  • Participants given an (anti-/pro-) Castro essay, asked to identify the writer’s attitude.

• – Humans have a strong tendency towards cognitive consistency. Holding apparently incompatible or logically inconsistent thoughts about ourselves, others, or the world produces cognitive dissonance.
  • Dissonance is uncomfortable and the mind seeks a resolution to the discomfort by rejecting or changing one or more of the inconsistent cognitions. Dissonance Reduction goes on largely outside of our awareness.

• – Tendency to assume correspondence between others’ behavior and underlying attitudes. Ex. In Jones and Harris and Ross et al. (correspondence bias is to make dispositional attributions and the FAE is to make dispositional attributions even when you know you shouldn’t. It is part of FAE)
  • More Ex. – Getting angry at people on customer service lines, blaming/praising the messenger

• – Tendency to come to conclusions that make you feel good – i.e. belief in afterlife, belief in fairness of society, reluctance to admit flaws in heroes, family members, etc.
  • Motivated Handling of Evidence – People tend to attach more significance to facts that cut their way, and argue that these facts are more important. Obvious in politics
  • Motivated Group Affiliation – Fair-weather fans, etc.
  • Motivated Recall – People tend to remember facts that reflect well on them more than those which do not. People tend to recall facts and evidence that endorse their assumptions more than those that don’t
  • Self Handicapping
  • The Above-Average Effect
  • In self attributions – taking credit through positive things by making dispositional attributions and deflecting blame for negative things by making situational attributions

• – Tendency to overestimate the causal impact of whatever we focus on. (This is the mechanism for actor-observer bias?)
  • When viewing others we see them most focally  and when viewing our own behavior, we see the situation.
  • It is so strong that we often attribute the behavior of inanimate objects to their “personalities” like in the Heider/Simmel movie

• – There was a “doomsday cult” that Festinger and co joined up with. It was led by a Mrs. Keech who spoke to “The Guardians” that promised of a great flood but said they would save believers. Both clocks passed midnight and nothing happened. So Mrs. Keech claimed that their faith had saved the world from the flood.

• – Use of others’ behavior or attitudes as information or evidence about reality. Exemplified in Sherif experiment.

• – Used the autokinetic effect (the problem in holding fixed points of light on a black background) to experiment on norm formation and uniformity. Used individual and group experiments telling people that the light is moving and asking how much it moves. Example of informational influence.
  • Individually, participants settle on some personal standard estimate of movement.
  • In groups they asked in random order and found two kinds of influence. Within trial – Estimates earlier in trial affect later estimates. Across trials – general tendency to settle on a range.
  • When you start with individual judgment, you see initial diversity and then convergence. When you start with group you see quicker convergence, which persists when individuals are separated.
  • Conclusions – Individuals established a personal range of answers. In groups, they used other members to establish this range. Influence persisted after individuals left the group. In uncertain situations, group influence is high

• ($1/$20 experiment) – Study had participants work on putting pegs into a board and turning them quarter turns. They rated this as very boring. They were then paid either $1 or $20 to persuade another person to do this.
  • Dependent variable – participants rating the task again
  • Participants paid $1 – Rated task as better the second time. They felt a lot of dissonance (“This task was boring and I lied about it for a crummy $1. Why did I do that? Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad of a lie. I guess the talk wasn’t all bad”)
  • Participants paid $20 – Did not rate it better or more interesting. Felt little dissonance (“The task was boring, but hey, they paid me off”)

• (Quiz show example) – Attribution research. Observers think the questioners are more knowledgeable even though it is randomly assigned.
  • Paricipants randomly assigned to be a questioner, answerer, observer. Questioner asked to make somewhat difficult questions.
  • Observers and answerers rated the questioner more knowledgeable though the questioners didn’t rate themselves more.

• A 17^th century theory of Descartes. Believes human reasoning is and should be logical. This is part of an Enlightenment view of a clockwork universe.
  • Characteristics: Cold, logical, deliberate, conscious, defensible, reasonable. In economics selfish, goal-directed, “utility maximizing”
  • People sometimes think like this, but not usually.

• Conformity to the views or expectations of others in pursuit of social approval (avoidance of disapproval) Exemplified in the Asch experiment. Groups create more normative influence than just a bunch of individuals. When your view will be anonymous, less normative influence, but no effect on informational influence. Normative pressure to voice your own opinion can reduce normative influence. Uncertainty increases normative and informational influence. Others’ uncertainty decreases their normative influence on you.

• Interested in conformity and whether people would conform to something contrary to fact. Used 8 confederates and 1 participant in a line judgment test. In 2/3 trials the group unanimously picked the wrong line, though in the individual control group errors were made less than 1% of the time. Example of normative influence.
  • Three classes of reaction – Distortion of perception, reported they saw what the majority saw. Distortion of judgment, decided perceptions were inaccurate. Distortion of action, knew the group was wrong but didn’t want to seem different.

• Strong tendency to overestimate dispositional factors and underestimate situational in attributions of others behaviors. I.e. we tend to attribute others’ behaviors to their personalities and character, not the context of the behavior (situation)
  • Includes Actor-Observer bias, correspondence bias (correspondence bias is to make dispositional attributions and the FAE is to make dispositional attributions even when you know you shouldn’t), and actor-observer bias which functions through focalism
  • Experiments: Jones and Harris, ignoring the pro-/anti- Castro essay assignment or Ross et al. ignoring the quizmaster/answerer role assignment
  • Anchor and Adjust model – Dan Gilbert’s theory that people anchor on a correspondent attribution and then adjust to take context into account but rarely adjust very far. Best thing to avoid this is to try to take other’s perspectives

• Tendency to see our own behavior as a product of the situation and others’ behavior as a product of their internal states (personality). A type of the FAE. The mechanism for this is focalism

• The enforcement of a norm one privately disagrees with. Contributes to the stability of unpopular norms. People falsely enforce to signal the sincerity of one’s conformity. Ex. Salem Witch Trial, gay bashing to prove masculinity, calling out people who don’t understand esoteric scholars to prove erudition.

• The purposeful breaking of social norms. Useful for…Identifying what is and is not a norm, studying how norms and conformity are upheld in society. People just think these norms are enforced
  • Emily Post – how hosts should respond to breaches of proper etiquette
  • Howard Garfinkel – Used breaching experiments to study how social order is upheld.
  • Stanley Milgram – Had students ride NYC subway trains and ask riders for their seats. They reported diverse reactions, weird looks, frequent compliance, and extraordinary stress.
  • Now common in entertainment - Borat

• The purposeful breaking of social norms. Useful for…Identifying what is and is not a norm, studying how norms and conformity are upheld in society. People just think these norms are enforced
  • Emily Post – how hosts should respond to breaches of proper etiquette
  • Howard Garfinkel – Used breaching experiments to study how social order is upheld.
  • Stanley Milgram – Had students rude NYC subway trains and ask riders for their seats. They reported diverse reactions, weird looks, frequent compliance, and extraordinary stress.

• The tendency of groups to make poor decisions when desires for unanimity outweigh careful, informed decision-making. Challenger was a big ol’ example of groupthink because everyone knew that it would be too cold for the O rings to work properly but they couldn’t mobilize to make the right decision at the group level
  • Symptoms – Illusion on invulnerability, unwavering belief in the morality and/or competence of the group, collective rationalizing of group decisions, shared stereotypes of out-group, group members withhold criticism, perception of (false) consensus, pressure on dissenters, self-appointed group protectors who insulate the group from criticism or dissent.

• The tendency of  people to believe they are above average in valued domains
  • Ex. People believe they are more popular, more attractive, better drivers, better teachers than average. 99% people rated themselves above average in getting along with others. Also applies to “Holier than Thou” in that people believe they are morally above average.
  • Why? Driven my misperceptions of self
  • Discussed in “Unskilled and Unaware of it” –
  • The Below Average Effect – some people underestimate themselves as far as juggling, odds of living past 100. Uses Anchor and adjust theory

• Unpopular norms – When a norm is privately unpopular, but publicly accepted by most people, like when a group mistakenly thinks a view is held by a majority but it is actually held by a plurality. When “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes”. Groupthink often involves these.
  • Ex. Students at Princeton over-estimated other’s comfort with excessive drinking
  • Mechanisms – Bad sampling (i.e. information cascades in restaurant popularity) and more visible behavior more easily viewed than invisible. Held by normative influence…people are afraid to speak their minds and look stupid to others

• We are all mini-psychologists, trying to determine the causes of others’ behaviors. Includes the main types of attribution: dispositional and situational.
  • People tend to link behaviors and events to stable factors which allows for simplicity and basic prediction but leads to underestimation of situational influences.

• When people find their cognitions at odds or inconsistent somehow, they seek to resolve the dissonance (create consonance or consistency). There are four ways to resolve dissonance between A and B:
  • Disregard – Stop believing in one
  • Change belief – flip belief in A or B (not A, not B)
  • Distort – Distort one to fall in line with the other
  • Add – Add an additional cognition that resolves conflict

• Woman returned home in Queens and grabbed and stabbed on her way from her car to her apartment. She screamed that she had been stabbed and people turned their lights on. One man yelled, “Let that girl alone.” The attacker left and came back, she screamed “I’m dying!” More people and lights turned on, so the attacker left again. Then he came back and finally killed her and the police arrived after the first call at 3:50 in 2 minutes. A man who called the police only did so after consulting a friend because he “didn’t want to get involved.” 37 witnesses did nothing.