Copyright 2010 McGraw-Hill Companies
1
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
 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 events


Kulechov effect
Spontaneous trait transference
2
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
3
Perceiving Our Social Worlds
 Constructing Memories of Ourselves and Our Worlds
 Misinformation effect

Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the
event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading
information about it
 Reconstructing our past attitudes
 Reconstructing our past behavior
4
Judging Our Social World
 Intuitive Judgments
 Powers of intuition


Controlled processing
 Reflective, deliberate, and conscious
Automatic processing
 Impulsive, effortless, and without our awareness
 Schemas
 Emotional reactions
5
Judging Our Social World
 Overconfidence Phenomenon
 Tendency to be more confident than correct – to
overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs

Incompetence feeds overconfidence
 Planning fallacy
 Stockbroker overconfidence
 Political overconfidence
6
Judging Our Social World
 Confirmation bias
 Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s
preconceptions


Helps explain why our self-images are so stable
Self-verification
7
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
8
Judging Our Social World
 Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
 Representativeness heuristic

Tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that
someone or something belongs to a particular group if
resembling (representing) a typical member
9
Judging Our Social World
 Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts
 Availability Heuristic

Cognitive rules that judges the likelihood of things in terms of
their availability in memory
 The more easily we recall something the more likely it seems
10
Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Table 3.1
11
Judging Our Social World
 Counterfactual Thinking
 Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that
might have happened, but didn’t

Underlies our feelings of luck
12
Judging Our Social World
 Illusory Thinking
 Our search for order in random events

Illusory correlation
 Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception
of a stronger relationship than actually exists
13
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
14
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
Figure 3.3
15
Explaining 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
16
Explaining Our Social World
 Inferring Traits
 We often infer that other people’s actions are indicative
of their intentions and dispositions
 Commonsense Attributions
 Consistency
 Distinctiveness
 Consensus
17
Harold Kelley’s Theory of Attributes
Figure 3.4
18
Explaining 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
19
Explaining Our Social World
 Why Do We Make the Attribution Error?
 Perspective and situational awareness




Actor-observer perspectives
Camera perspective bias
Perspectives change with time
Self-awareness
20
Explaining Our Social World
 Why Do We Make the
Attribution Error?
 Cultural Differences
 Dispositional attribution
 Situational attribution
Figure 3.7
21
Expectations of Our Social World
 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
 Belief that leads to its
own fulfillment


Experimenter bias
Teacher expectations and
student performance
Figure 3.8
22
Expectations of Our Social World
 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
23