SHDH 3108

SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 3 – SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGMENTS
SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGEMENTS

• Last lecture was mostly about how we perceive ourselves.

• This lecture: how we perceive our social worlds.
• The saying, “perception is reality”, continues to apply
here.
long term memory
• How we see our social worlds is affected by our past
experiences and expectations.
• Remember top-down processing from Intro Psych?
PRIMING *1

• We all have our own past experiences and expectations.

• But ideas can be easily planted in our minds via priming.
• These ideas can in turn influence our judgments and behaviours.
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• Priming: the presentation of one stimulus (i.e., a prime) alters subjects' perceptions of a
second target stimulus.
• Activation of particular schemas in LTM
• Activated schemas are more easily accessible (i.e., certain ideas may come to mind more
easily)
↓ detect vobserve
• Priming can be either conscious or even subliminal (unconscious)
 2025/2/13

Example of
conscious priming
from Intro Psych
(conscious)
•Bargh et al. (1996)
< 60 % in

Rude group
PRIMING
↑
• Result: More than 80% of the
participants in the polite condition
waited at least 10 minutes!
• Explanation: The primes activated
ideas associated with being rude or
being polite in the participants’
minds. This increased accessibility
made the corresponding behaviors
more likely.
(subliminally (

(unconscious)
TIME TO REFLECT…

• At this point, alarm bells should be going off in your head.

• It should be obvious to you by now how easy it is for suggestions/ideas to be planted in
our minds.
• Once an idea is planted in our minds, it becomes part of our preconceptions.
• What if the idea was misinformation or falsehood?
• What if the idea was destructive? Eg., aggressive or violent primes.
• More bad news to come.
 ①
& feedback 11-re feedback
/
the

mean)
Debunking , no

BELIEF PERSEVERANCE ⑤

④ Ask how much you

believe in
your ability
⑤ the +b :
↑ 11 tre :
↓

• Persistence of one’s preconceptions, even when they have been proven to be false.
• Typical study in this area of research:
- Plant an idea in the participant’s mind.
- Ask the participant to explain why the idea might be true (sometimes you don’t even have
to ask; people will voluntarily create an explanation themselves)
- Tell participant that the idea is actually false.
- Measure the extent to which the planted idea remains intact.
BELIEF PERSEVERANCE

• Eg., Ross et al. (1975)

- Participants were given a task of distinguishing whether a suicide note was real or not
- Participants were then given false feedback about their performance
- They were then debriefed and told that the feedback was false
- Result: Participants who received positive feedback thought they were better than the
average person at interpreting suicide notes. Participant who received negative feedback
thought they were worse.
- Therefore the planted idea remained intact.
BELIEF PERSEVERANCE

• Why?
• Once people create explanations for an idea, those explanations will remain in memory
even when the idea has been totally invalidated.

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• Belief perseverance is reduced if people are prevented from creating explanations after
being told an idea. (Fleming & Arrowood, 1979)
• Another solution might be asking people to generate explanations for an opposite idea.
(Lord, Lepper and Preston, 1984. See textbook for more details)
MEMORY RECONSTRUCTION

• Wait a minute, don’t people remember what their beliefs were in the past, before when the
new ideas are planted???
• The problem is, people will misremember their past.
• Memories are reconstructive, not literal copies of exactly what happened in the past.
• When people reconstruct memories of the past, it is their-
current self (at the time of
retrieval) that provides the framework for-
reconstruction. incl newly planed ideas
• People often look at what they believe now and misremember how they were in the past
(e.g., remember the hindsight bias from lecture 1?).
MEMORY RECONSTRUCTION

• E.g., Holmberg & Holmes (1994)

• Time 1: Asked newly married couples how happy they are with their marriage. Nearly all
participants reported being happy.
• Time 2 (two year later): Asked the same couples again how happy they are with their
marriage AND to retrospectively recall how happy they were two years ago.
• Result: Those who were unhappy at Time 2 incorrectly recalled being unhappy at Time 1.

2I ypp =
Is ?
 ·
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• Judgements that are made without reasoning or analysis.

• Ie., Your gut feeling

II Implicit thinking (unconscious, effortless)

• Explicit (conscious, effortful) vs.
• Intuitive judgments come from implicit thinking. X
• Our brains prefer intuitive judgments a lot because they are easier than effortful thinking.
• People like intuitive judgments so much, to the point where there are false lay theories
about the powers of intuitive judgements (eg., “always trust your gut feeling”)
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• But there is only a small subset of situations where intuitive judgements tend to
outperform conscious, effortful thinking.
- When the person has expertise on the subject matter.
- When the judgement involves so much complexity that conscious thinking is overwhelmed
(Dijksterhuis et al. 2006).
• The rest of the time, intuitive judgements are prone to errors, biases and overconfidence.
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• Kruger et al. (2005)

- “First instinct fallacy”
- Participants took Intro Psych exam with MC questions with pencils and erasers
- Researchers then examined eraser marks (= changed answers) on the MC answer sheets.
- Hypothesis: Most changed answers would be from wrong to right. But the students’
intuition would be the opposite due to their lay theories about trusting their gut feelings.
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• Results:
- People seem to value their first
instincts a lot. They think that they would
be worse off by changing their answers.

- In actual reality, whenever people

decided to change answer (ie., rejected
their first instinct, and think more about the
question), they were better off.
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• Overconfidence
• Lyons et al. (2021)
- Tested participants’ ability to judge whether news headlines were fake or authentic.
- Also asked participants to predict their own accuracy rate (i.e., perceived ability).

news
* Fake

* Fact-check
INTUITIVE JUDGEMENTS

• Results:

- Perceived ability: we see the typical

“better-than-average” effect.

- When taking actual performance into

account, over 75% of the participants
showed overconfidence.

- People who were most overconfident

orestimate were also the more likely to visit risky
websites known for producing fake
news.
HEURISTICS 25t

• What are intuitive judgments based on?

• They are often based on heuristics, which are mental shortcuts we use for speedy
processing.
• But there is a speed vs. accuracy trade-off.
• Mental shortcuts are good for simple judgments but are poor for more complex social
judgments.
• Heuristics are often illogical and lead to errors in judgements.
to make action
loss cognitive flexibility
HEURISTICS

1) Representativeness heuristic
- The tendency to presume that someone or something belongs to a particular group if
resembling (representing) a typical member.
- Eg., seeing someone tall and assuming he plays basketball.
- Consider this:
Linda, who is 31, single, outspoken, and very bright. She 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 that description, would you say it is
more likely that
A PAY PATB
a. Linda is a bank teller.
b. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. A + B
HEURISTICS

2) Availability heuristic
- The tendency to judge how common something is based on how easily examples come to
mind.
- Eg., Which country has more people? UK or Nigeria
- You are more likely to say UK because you can more easily thinking of examples of
British people (Beckham, the Queen, the Beatles)
- But the correct answer, of course, Nigeria (3x the population of UK).
HEURISTICS

2) Availability heuristic (continued)

-Vividness of an example can increase availability
-Seeing a vivid example of something can lead people to overestimate how common
something is.
-Implications for social judgments related to prejudice, personal safety, etc.
ASSIGNED READINGS

• Textbook page 80-81; 84-96.