CHAPTER 2: THE SELF AND THE WORLD
SPOTLIGHT EFFECT AND ILLUSION OF
TRANSPARENCY

Spotlight Effect
- the belief that others are paying more
attention to our appearance and behavior
than they really are.

Illusion of Transparency
1. Matthew and Jenny experience a problem in their
close relationship. Matthew ascribes more
responsibility to Jenny than himself. But when
things work well at home, Matthew see himself as
more responsible.
2. Shaina is a new student in Johnson’s University. As
a new student, she keeps on observing and
adjusting to the environment.
Our ideas and feelings of ourselves → Affect how we
respond to others → Others help shape our sense of
self
- the illusion that our concealed emotions
leak out and can be easily read by others.
SELF-CONCEPT & HOW WE ACQUIRE IT

*We also overestimate the visibility of our social
blunders and public mental slips.
*When we trigger the library alarm or accidentally
insult someone, we may be mortified. (“Everyone
thinks I’m a jerk”)
*But research shows that what we agonize over,
others may hardly notice and soon forget. (Savitsky
et al., 2001)

Example of application:
Self-Concept
- what we know and believe about ourselves.
1. We compare ourselves to others.
2. Culture creates expectations about how the self
should behave.
3. We create mental structure that direct the self’s
attention.
1. Social Comparison Theory
- Social Comparison (evaluating one’s abilities
and opinions by comparing oneself with
others).
- use of social comparisons to construct our
self-concept, especially when we have no other
objective standard available to us.
- ex. You are walking alone on the beach, you
may not be even thinking about your physical
appearance BUT when someone much more
attractive walks by, the unflattering social
comparison can deliver a small shock to your
previously contented self-concept.
- Social Comparison is sometimes based on
incomplete formation.
- ex. Among students attending Utah Valley
University, those who spent more time on FB
were more likely to believe that other people
were happier and had better lives than they
did. (Chou & Edge, 2012)
- Social Comparison can also diminish our
satisfaction in other ways.
2 Types of Social Comparison:
A. Upward Social Comparison
- people like watching cooking shows with
celebrity for they can get tips on how to
make their own food tastes or looks
better.
examine activation in different areas of the
brain. (Goh et al., 2007; Lewis et al., 2008)
3. Self-Schema Theory
- a long lasting and stable set of memories that
summarize a person’s beliefs, experiences and
generalizations about the self, in specific
behavioral domains.
- the basketball players learn from coaches
B. Downward Social Comparison
- “my cupcakes might not win any reality
show contest, but it’s better than the
cupcake of my friend.”
- refers to the impressions that you have on
yourself and how they influence your behavior.
- all our various self-schema combine and
interact to form our self-concept.
- “I am better than the guy in the next
court who can’t hit a single ball over the
next”

Which Pen Would You Choose?
- When Heejung Kin and Hazel Markus (1999)
invited people to choose 1 of these pens,
77% of Americans but only 31% of Asians
chose the uncommon color (regardless of
whether it was orange or green).
- This result illustrates differing cultural
preferences for uniqueness and conformity.
Culture and Cognition
2. Social Identity Theory
A. Individualism
- the concept of giving priority to one’s
own goals over group goals and defining
one’s identity in terms of personal
attributes rather than group
identifications.
B. Collectivism
- focuses on group goals, what is best for
the collective group and personal
relationships.

The Geography of Thought (2003)
- Richard Nisbett’s book that contends that
collectivism also results in different ways of
thinking.
1. Independent View of Self
- Japanese spontaneously recalled 60% more
background features than did Americans,
and they spoke of more relationships (the
frog beside the plant).
2. Interdependent View of Self
- Americans look more at the focal object,
such as single big fish and less at the
surroundings (Chua et al., 2005; Nisbett,
2003), a result duplicated when studies
- Independent Self (an individual’s ideal self is
largely based on internal, personal qualities)
- Interdependent Self (an individual’s ideal self
is largely based on social, especially
relationships with others.
Culture and Self-Esteem
1. Collectivist Culture
- ex. Would marrying this person lead to
lifelong contentment?, Would landing a
high-paid job make me really happy?
- self-esteem tends to be malleable. (easily
influenced)
- upward comparison is made to facilitate
self-improvement.
NATURE AND MOTIVATING POWER OF SELF-ESTEEM


- pertains to the individual’s subjective,
personal evaluation of their self-concept,
including judgements made about self-worth.
Studies of Affective Forecasting
- reveal that people have greatest difficulty
predicting the intensity and the duration of
their future emotions (Wilson & Gilbert,
2003).
2. Individualistic Culture
- self-esteem is more personal and less rational.
- people mispredict how they would feel some
time after a romantic breakup, receiving a gift,
losing an election, winning a game and being
insulted. (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002; Loewenstein
& Schkade, 1999)
- comparison with others boost their
self-esteem.
Self-Knowledge
Self-Esteem
- overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.

Self-Efficacy
- degree to which individuals believe that they
are capable of completing a specific task or
achieving a particular goal.
1. Predicting Our Behavior


Impact Bias
- one specific type of optimistic bias.
- overestimating the length/intensity of future
emotional states In reaction to either good/
bad occurences.
- it is unjustified confidence that one’s own
project, unlike similar projects, will proceed
as planned.
- don’t worry about bad event in future
because it is unlikely to be disastrous if that
event occurs.
Planning Fallacy
2. Predicting Our Feelings
- if a good event occurs doesn’t mean that the
future will be heavenly.

Self-Serving Bias
- a tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
- Self-compassion (self-care)

Self-Serving Bias Attribution
- a form of self-serving bias; the tendency to
attribute positive outcomes to oneself and
negative outcomes to other factors.

False Consensus Effect (Lee Ross)
- tendency to overestimate the commonality
of one’s opinions and one’s
undesirable/unsuccessful behaviors.
- false assumption that other people share our
values, perceptions and beliefs.
- we are more likely to “friend” people on FB
who agree with most of our beliefs.

Self-Presentation Theory (Impression Mngmnt)
- tendency to adjust the selfand perform in
slightly different ways for varying others to
gain social infliuence.
Specific Tactics:
1. Other-enhancement & Opinion Conformity
> Other-enhancement
CHAPTER 3: SOCIAL COGNITION
> Opinion Conformity
- short-term impression management
tactic where people endorse the
opinion of others to increase liking
and attraction and gain social
influence.
False Uniqueness Effect (Lake Woebegone)
- tendency to underestimate the commonality
of one’s abilities and one’s
desirable/successful behaviors.

- short-term impression management
tactic where people compliment
another person and seem to admire
them to increase liking and attraction
and gain social influence.
2. Self-enhancement & Entitlements
> Self-enhancement
- people imply that their actual
accomplishments are more significant
than they first appear to be.
> Entitlement
- a person takes credit for positive
events he or she wast not a part of.
Social Cognition - the study of how people combine
intuition (gut feeling) and logic to process social
information.
Intuition (System 1)
Logic (System 2)
Emotional
Analytical
Associative
Rule-directed
Automatic
Controlled
Effortless
Effortful
Implicit
Explicit
Intuitive
Reasoned
Quick
Slow
3. Conspicuous Consumption
- publicly displaying the use of expensive
products in an attempt to impress
others.
How do we judge our social worlds consciously and
unconsciously?
1. Priming
- incompetence feeds overconfidence
- activating or awakening particular associations
in memory.
- it takes competence to recognize competence
(Justin Kruger and David Dunning, 1999)
- a situation that occurs when stimuli or events
increase the availability in memory or
consciousness of specific types of information
held in memory.
- examples:
- examples:
A. Because you have just seen a violent movie,
it has activated your schema for
aggression and you may be more likely to
perceive a person aggressive.
B. Boat
(/) Goat
(X) Deer
identifying too narrow a range (also known as
Overprecision).

A. Students who score the lowest on tests of
grammar, humor and logic are the most
prone to overestimate their abilities.
Those who don’t know what good
logic/grammar is are often unaware that
they lack it.
B. If you make a list of all the words you can
form out of the letters in “psychology”,
you may feel brilliant but then stupid
when a friend starts naming the ones you
missed.
Confirmation Bias
- tendency to search for information
that confirms one’s preconceptions.
- people are eager to verify their beliefs
but less inclined to seek evidence that
might disprove them.
- stopping and thinking a little (calling up System
2) makes us less likely to commit the error
(confirmation bias).
4. Heuristics (Mental Shortcuts)
2. Intuitive Judgments
- tuning into our hunches or guess (to use
System 1)
- ex. When hiring or firing, we should listen to
our premonitions.
3. Overconfidence Phenomenon
- tendency to be more confident than correct -to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
- Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979)
gave people factual statements and asked
them to fill in the blanks, as in the following
sentence: “I feel 98% certain that the air
distance between New Delhi and Beijing is
more than ___ miles but less than ___ miles.
- most individuals were overconfident:
Approximately 30% of the time, the correct
answers lay outside the range they felt 98%
confident about it. Even when participants
were offered lottery tickets for a correct
answer, they were still too overconfident,
- enables us to make routine decisions with
minimal effort.
- the speed of these intuitive guides promotes
our survival.
- the biological purpose of thinking is less to
make us right than to keep us alive.

Representativeness (typicalness) Heuristic
- to judge something by intuitively
comparing it to our mental
representation of a category.
- ex. Linda, who is 31, single, outspoken
and very bright is majored in
philosophy in college. As a student,
she was deeply concerned with
discrimination and other social
issues and she participated in
antinuclear demonstrations. Based
on the description, would you say
that:
- quick judgments of likelihood of events
(how available in memory)
- our use of the availability heuristic
highlights a basic principle of social
thinking: People are slow to deduce
particular instances from a general
truth, but they are remarkably quick to
infer general truth from a vivid
instance.
- ex. Estimating teen violence after
school shootings.
- most people think b is more likely
partly because Linda better represents
their image of feminists.
- ex. Deciding that Carlos is a librarian
rather than a trucker because he
better represents one’s image of
librarian.
5. Counterfactual Thinking
- tendency to imagine other outcomes in a
situation than the ones that actually occurred.
- “What might have been”
- it underlies our feelings of luck. When we have
barely escaped a bad event (ex. Standing near
a falling icicle) we easily imagine a negative
counterfactual. (Teigen et al., 1999)
- “bad luck” refers to bad events that did
happen but easily might not have.

Availability Heuristic
- the more easily we recall something,
the more likely it seems.
B. If we change an exam answer, then get it
wrong we will inevitably think “If only..”
and will vow next time to trust our
immediate intuition -- although contrary
to student lore, answer changes are more
often from incorrect to correct (Krugger et
al., 2005)
6. Illusory Thinking
a. Linda is a bank teller
b. Linda is a bank teller and active in
the feminist movement.
outcome, and thus we feel regret (or
relief). Imagining worse alternatives helps
us feel better.
- examples:
A. If our team loses (or wins) a big game by 1
point, we can easily imagine the other
- search for order in random events, a tendency
that can lead us down all sorts of wrong paths.
- it is easy to see a correlation where none exists.
When we expect to find significant
relationships, we easily associate random
events, perceiving an Illusory Correlation.
7. Moods and Judgments
- our moods infuse our judgments. When we are
happy, the world seems friendlier, decisions
are easier and good new more readily comes
to mind.
- it also color how we judge our worlds partly by
bringing to mind past experiences associated
with the mood. When we are in a bad mood,
we have more depressing thoughts.
- mood-related thoughts may distract us from
complex thinking about something else. Thus,
when emotionally aroused (either angry or
happy) we become more likely to make System
1 snap judgments and evaluate others based
on stereotypes.
- Confirmation Bias (tendency to look for,
interpret and remember information according
to your beliefs)
- Belief Perseverance (state wherein a person
refuses to change his beliefs even though his
beliefs might be wrong)
3. Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our
Worlds
How do we perceive our social worlds?
1. Perceiving and Interpreting Events
- we view our social worlds through the
spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes and values.
-
- our memories are not exact copies of
experiences that remain on deposit in a
memory bank.
1. Attributing Causality: To the Person or To the
Situation
- we endlessly analyze and discuss why things
happen as they do, especially when we
experience something negative or unexpected.
- ex. If worker productivity declines, do we
assume the workers are getting lazier? Or
the workplace became less efficient?

- mistakenly attributing a behavior to
the wrong source.
- rather, we construct memories at the time of
withdrawal.
- ex. Date rape often begins with a man’s
misreading a woman’s warmth as a
sexual come-on.
- thus, we can easily (unconsciously) revise our
memories to suit our current knowledge.
2. Belief Perseverance
- 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.
- it is often used interchangeably with
Confirmation Bias, which is incorrect.

Misinformation Effect
- incorporating misinformation into
one’s memory of the event, after
witnessing an event and receiving
misleading information about it.
How do we explain our social worlds?
Misattribution

Attribution Theory
- analyzes how we explain people’s
behavior and what we infer from it.
> “Commonsense Psychology” (Heider)
- concluded that when we observe
someone acting intentionally, we
sometimes attribute that person’s
behavior to:
A. Internal Causes (person’s
disposition or mental state)
B. External Causes (situation)

Dispositional Attribution
- attributing behavior to the person’s
disposition and traits.

2. The Fundamental Attribution
- tendency for observers to underestimate
situational influences and overestimate
dispositional influences upon others’
behaviors.

- we often infer that other people’s
actions are indicative of their
intentions and dispositions.
Perspective and Situational Awareness
- we observe others from a different
perspective than we observe ourselves.
- ex. When I’m mad, it’s because of the
situation. But when someone else is
mad, it may seem like an
ill-tempered person.
Situational Attribution
Inferring Traits

Cultural Differences
- a belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
- ex. If people are led to believe that their
bank is about to crash, they will race to
withdraw their money, their false
perceptions may create reality.
Further Explanations:
Why do we make attribution error?

We observe others from a different perspective
than we observe ourselves.

When we act, the environment commands our
attention.

When we watch others act, we focus more on
the person itself (dispositional) rather than the
impact or influence of his or her environment to
his or her behavior.
- when we are aware of the social
context, we are less inclined to assume
that others’ behavior corresponds to
their traits.
> Spontaneous Trait Inference
- an effortless, automatic inference
of a trait after exposure to
someone’s behavior.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Why do we make the Attribution Error?
- attributing behavior to the
environment.


Consider this: Are you generally quiet, talkative, or
does it depend on the situation?
How do our Social Beliefs matter?

Most common answer would be “depends on
the situation.”

However, people expect the situation to rule
their emotions; they underestimate the
importance of their own internal dispositions.
Why do we study attribution error?

To reveal how we think about ourselves and
others.

How we explain someone’s negative behavior
determines how we feel about it.
Negative Behavior
“A man is rude to his colleague”
Dispositional Attribution
Situational Attribution
“The man is a hostile
person.”
“The man is unfairly
evaluated.”
Unfavorable Reaction
Sympathetic Reaction
“I don’t like this man.”
“I can understand.”
CHAPTER 4: *