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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Priming
 Activating particular associations in memory

Example: Watching a scary movie at home may prime us to
interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder
 Perceiving and interpreting information
 Embodied Cognition
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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Intuitive Judgments
 The Powers Of Intuition: Our thinking is partly


Automatic- impulsive, effortless, and w/o awareness, and
Controlled: reflective, deliberate, and conscious
 The Limits of Intuition
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Intuitive Judgments
 Schemas are mental concepts or templates that guide
our perceptions and interpretations
 Emotional reactions are often nearly instantaneous,
that is, happening before there is time for deliberate
thinking; one neural shortcut take information from
the sensory organ(eye, ear) to the brain sensory
switchboard (the thalamus) and to the brain’s
emotional center (the amygdala) before the thinking
cortex has time to intervene
 Given sufficient expertise, people may intuitively know
answers to problems
How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Overconfidence: Unaware of our errors


Confirmation Bias: eager to verify our beliefs, less inclined to
disprove them.
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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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts


The Representativeness Heuristic: The tendency to presume,
sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something
belonged o s particular group if resembling a typical member.
Availability Heuristic: A cognitive rule they judges the
likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory.
If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it
to be commonplace.
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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Counterfactual Thinking: Mentally simulating what
might have been.

The Price is Right
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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 Illusionary Thinking

Illusory Correlation: Perception of a relationship where none
exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually
exists.
 Gambling
 Regression Toward the Average
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How Do We Judge Our Social Worlds,
Consciously and Unconsciously
 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.
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Moods (cont-d)
 Emotions affect cognitions: Unhappy people tend to
be more self-focused and brooding; a depressed mood
motivates more thinking –search for information that
makes the environment more understandable and
more controllable.
 Happy people are more trusting, more loving and
more responsive;
 Moods pervade our thinking; good mood evokes happy
memories; bad mood primes our memory of negative
events; our mood colors our judgment
How Do We Perceive Our Social
World?
 Perceiving and Interpreting Events
 Political Perceptions

Experiment of Vallone, Ross, Lepper
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How Do We Perceive Our Social
World?
 Belief Perseverance: Persistence of one’s initial
conceptions, such 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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How Do We Perceive Our Social
World?
 Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds
 Restructuring our Past Attitudes


Rosy retrospection
Underestimate earlier liking
 Reconstructing our Past Behaviors
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Explaining Our Social World
 Our judgment of people depends on how we explain
their behavior
 We are motivated to explain, to make sense of the
world, to be able to predict future behavior of others,
to prepare to whatever may happen, to protect
ourselves
 This is sometimes called illusion of control
 We try tom explain and understand especially when
we experience something negative or unexpected
Cont-d
 Spouses’ answers to questions about the relationship
correlate with marriage satisfaction.
 Unhappy couples usually offer distress-maintaining
explanation for negative acts; When the partner
behaves positively, their explanations similarly work
either to maintain distress or enhance the
relationships.
 Misattribution: misreading of behavior, e.g. men may
attribute a woman’s friendliness as a sexual invitaion.
How Do We Explain Our Social
World?
 Attributing Causality: To the Person or the Situation
 Misattribution

Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source
 Attribution theory

Theory of how people explain others’ behavior
 Dispositional attribution
 Situational attribution
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How Do We Explain Our Social
World?
 Inferring Traits
 We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative
of their intentions and dispositions
 Normal or expected behavior tells us less about a person
than does unusual behavior
 Spontaneous Trait Inference
 The effortless, automatic inference of a trait after
exposure to someone’s behavior.
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How Do We Explain Our Social
World?
 Fundamental Attribution Error
 Tendency for observers to underestimate situational
influences and overestimate dispositional influences
upon others’ behavior

Example: Assuming questioning hosts on game shows are
more intelligent than the contestants
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How Do We Explain Our Social
World?
 Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
 Perspective and situational awareness: we observe
others from a different perspective that we observe
ourselves; when we act, the environment commands our
attention; when we watch another person act, the
person occupies the center of our attention


Actor-observer perspectives
Camera perspective bias: In some studies people viewed a
person confessing in court. When the camera was focused of
the suspect they perceived the confession as genuine.
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The Fundamental Attribution Error (cont-d)
 Perspectives change with time: Studies have shown that though
people tend initially to infer behavior on the basis of internal traits,
when asked at a later date about a third of the subjects tend to
regard the situation as affecting the behavior.
 Cultural differences: Western cultures stress personal
responsibility rather than providing situational excuses to our
failures. In Asian cultures there is more awareness of situational
contexts.
 We often make inferences and express attitudes that may be based
on the Fundamental Attribution Error: We tend to blame people for
the misfortune that befalls them.
How Do We Explain Our Social
World?
 Why Do We Make the
Attribution Error?
 Cultural Differences
 Dispositional attribution
 Situational attribution
Attributions and Reactions
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How Do Our Social Worlds Matter?
 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
 Belief that leads to its
own fulfillment

Experimenter bias
 Teacher Expectations
and Student
Performance
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
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How Do Our Social Worlds Matter?
 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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