David Myers
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
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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
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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
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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
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Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the
event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading
information about it
 Reconstructing our past attitudes
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We remember the last event which overrides the previous
 Reconstructing our past behavior
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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
 What is blindsight?
 Not being able to recognize the stick but being able to
 Determine if it’s vertical or horizontal
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Judging Our Social World
 The Limits of Intuition
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Can subliminal messages make you eat popcorn?
 Illusory Intuition
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To follow…
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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
 Stockbroker overconfidence
 Political overconfidence
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Judging Our Social World
 Confirmation Bias
 Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s
preconceptions

2-4-6 what is the rule to generate another 3 number set?
 -Any three ascending numbers (P. C.Watson, ‘60)
 Search for disconfirming information
Helps explain why our self-images are so stable
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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
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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
 How does this affect a supervisor’s appraisal of an employee’s
performance?
 What can be done about it?
 What percent of U.S. adults are homosexual?
 Why do people overestimate?
 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
 How should I award grades to make you all feel better?
 Should you change an answer on your test?
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
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--”if I had only….” “shouda, wouda, couda”
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Judging Our Social World
 Illusory Thinking
 Our search for order in random events
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Illusory correlation
 Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception
of a stronger relationship than actually exists
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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
 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.
 What about stock market successes?
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Judging Our Social World
 Moods and Judgments
 Good and bad moods
trigger memories of
experiences associated
with those moods
 Moods color our
interpretations of
current experiences
A temporary good or bad mood strongly influenced people’s
ratings of their videotaped behavior. Those in a bad mood
detected far fewer positive behaviors.
 Priming again!
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Explaining Our Social World
 Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
 Misattribution
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Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
 Attribution theory
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Theory of how people explain others’ behavior
 Dispositional attributions
 Are most workers lazy or conscientious?
 Is it something about them?
 Situational attribution
 Are most workers lazy or conscientious?
 Is it something about the situation? What could that be?
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Explaining Our Social World
Internal or external cause? Attribution theories
 Inferring Traits
 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?
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Explaining Our Social World
 Fundamental Attribution Error (Lee Ross)
 Tendency for observers to underestimate situational
influences and overestimate dispositional influences
upon others’ behavior
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Example: Assuming questioning hosts on game shows are
more intelligent than the contestants
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Explaining Our Social World
 Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
 Perspective and situational awareness
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Actor-observer perspectives
 Attribute good behavior to self / bad to external causes
 Self-serving bias
Camera perspective bias
Perspectives change with time
 “that was the old me..” –someone else
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Explaining Our Social World
 Why Do We Make the
Attribution Error?
 Cultural Differences
 Dispositional attribution
 Situational attribution
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“the clock made me do it!”
Where could that happen?
We follow the causal chain to
find whatever suits our belief
Attributions and Reactions
How does this play out when you are
approached by a panhandler?
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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
 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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