Psyc 569 Exam #1

Asch Line Study

Conformity again—ask which line matches, and people tended to conform to answers of confederates even when they knew the right answer

Heuristics and Biases

Making judgements

Heuristic

"Rule of thumb"—something useful in a lot of cases, but not all cases

Personalitt

)Strong character and how personality traits have been used for selection (ex. Military) or discrimination (ex. sexism, racism)

Hot Hand

Assume people will keep doing what they're doing > ex. Assume players who make free throws will continue to make them, and assume those that keep missing will continue to miss > not streakiness when it comes to chance

Happiness: why does it matter?

Are some things that make you happy more important than others? > If you value those things, don't they make you happy?

Monty Hall and Let's Make a Deal

3 doors: behind 1 is a goat, 1 is a car, and the last something random > shows you the door with the goat > do you switch? > regret of switching will be stronger, but you have a 2/3 chance of getting the car if you switch when you only have a 1/3 chance if you don't switch > why? > opening random door would reveal the car 1/3 of the time, which doesn't happen, so opening the door with the goat has a purpose (aka why not open the other door > the choice to show the goat is calculated)> 2/3 chance that the car is in other 2 doors you didn't pick, and you know that one of them is a goat

Coefficient of Loss Aversion

About 2.0 > above example: losing 50$ feels twice as bad as winning $50 feels good > losses are considered worse by us than similar gains

Social Psychology

About experience, but specifically social experience

Divorce

Adaptation is never full, and people often do not return to the baseline happiness of when they originally got married, ESPECIALLY men > ultimately still less bad than if people are unhappily married, but they never return to the original life satisfaction levels

Anchoring and adjustment

Anchor to one fact and adjust based on other factors, but answer will likely still stick closer to the first fact you encountered (ex. Water freezes at 32 degrees, and absolute 0 is -432 ish degrees > average temp in Antarctica is around -30 degrees, but more likely to guess higher if you saw absolute 0 first); also applies to defaults: opt-in vs. opt-out for organ donation—opt-out nudges people to avoid opting out by making them feel guilty

Rational Actor Model—Economics

Assumes that people are rational, selfish, and have the capacity to make rational decisions Rationality: make the most rational decision based on the circumstances Selfishness: Get the most out of what they can—optimize personal payoff or utility Capacity: ability to optimally calculate rational decisions The issue? People are not optimal, rational decision makers

Dissonance

Attitudes lead to behavior—ex. Get a drunken tattoo of your boyfriend's name, justify the tattoo by saying you're 'meant to be'; Fessinger study looked at this as well—had participants twist knobs and were offered either $1 or $20 to lie to next participant and tell them it was fun—people were more likely to lie for more money and change their private opinions about the experiment to match the lie to rid themselves of dissonance

Enlightened Living

Basically live in the moment and don't place happiness in material things > ex. Asked people what they were doing and how they were feeling in the moment > those that weren't mind-wandering and were present in the moment tended to be happier, though content of mind wandering mattered ***Mind-wandering leads to unhappiness, but unhappiness does not lead to mind-wandering*** Basically western cultures seeks to find peak happiness (which you have to come down from and likely spend too much time pursuing) rather than steady happiness

Taboo Trade-off

Basically we consider it wrong to trade money for sacred values > how much money to sell your clothes? > probably like $500 > how much to kick a puppy? > probably not enough money in the world; basically we value life over material objects; ex. Ford Pinto gas tank > flaw in gas tank that would make it explode if rear ended > Ford calculated it would be cheaper to pay for wrongful death lawsuits than to fix the tank Getting around taboos? Framing > $1,000,000 to save 1 life seems less favorable than $1,000,000 to save 10 lives

Frequency, Probability, and Law of Small Numbers

Basically, in enough trials, outcomes will match the average/probability they are supposed to, but that's often not the case with smaller sample sizes

Regrets

Biggest are between action (did and regret) and inaction (didn't and regret) > short term and long term

Passive Harm

Bystander effect and Kitty Genovese, smoke in room experiment > basically people know someone is being harmed and are being passive about the situation and not doing anything

Children

Children correlated with marital satisfaction > more likely to have children and be happy if you're married than, say, a single parent > lmao in a ranking though, children only ranked 12th on a list of parents favorite things to do in a daily satisfaction survey

Clinical vs. Actuarial Judgement

Clinical: ex. Dr. Phil > uses clinical experience to make judgements and predict diagnosis based on intuition Actuarial: ex. Insurance companies > use statistics to make judgements and predict diagnoses > why they don't go bankrupt and are usually right; basically insurance companies always bet on 'blue' (or the most common outcome) > ex. High insurance rates on teenage male drivers ***Actuarial judgement is almost always right***

Projection

Current state influences decisions > ex. Studying when asked to go out to a bar > decide to go and only have 2 drinks before coming back to study > bad decisions ensure because you think you'll act the same later when you're drunk as when you're sober; also applies to going to the grocery store hungry ***Mismatch between states of forecasting and actually decision making, because later your decisions become biased***

The Endowment Effect

Danny Kahneman > When selling something, the buyer is gaining an item vs. the seller is losing an item > often times seller puts more value on the item than the buy because they are losing something > when someone becomes attached to something, they put more value on it, which is why losses are more salient than gains

Vision Heuristics

Danny Kahneman study—optical illusions with lines and line length—proximity, continuity, and closeness all heuristics the brain uses to make assumptions

Moral Heuristics

Determines what are acceptable things to value > ex. A sweater worn by Hitler > would you wear it even if it had been washed a million times? > probably not

Reciprocity

Door in the face—asked to help juvenile delinquents for 2 years and reject, but then asked to do 2 hours and accept—feel that you owe them something because they "lowered" their ask

Long Term

Long term, people regret inaction > you forget the reasons you didn't act and perceive many opportunities

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Estimate value of something based on past investment, but ultimately chance doesn't care about how much time, money, or energy you've put into something; Basically past investment is irrelevant to current value > ex. Invest a year in creating a startup vs. a week in a startup that has a 40% chance of succeeding > more attached to it and feel you have to make it work if you spent a year vs. a week on it

Availability Heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory > so based on easy to picture, ease of retrieval, and anchoring and adjustment (ex. Easier to thing of words ending in -ing than words where the 5th letter is 'n'; airplanes kill more than sharks, but we assume sharks are more deadly because we see them in the news more often despite the fact that getting bitten by one is unlikely

Adaptation/Hedonic Treatmill

Even after big life events, you adjust back to baseline happiness eventually

Gambler's Fallacy

Ex. Bet on red 8 times when playing roulette > switch to betting on black because your 'luck has to change', but you get red again > basically people who gamble think they have to switch when reality it's all random

Social Value

Ex. Price of the painting and ownership of painting based on value given in a social situation > another example is MLMs and con men, as they trick you into buying into their schemes by appearing rich; basically people attach value and their is value in being attached to people

Frequency and Probability

Ex. Two urns > one big and one small > small one has 9 black balls and 1 red, big one has 7 red balls and 93 black balls > people tend to like the idea of frequency so they'll pick the big urn even though the probability of finding a red ball is smaller Ex. Sherry Lancing > worked for Paramount > released 3 good movies, then 3 bad movies, then got fired, and Paramount had a good movie > was that due to them firing her? Probability not > random processes are STREAKY > 3 years streaks like that are not unusual Ex. Also applies to financial advisors > better chances of picking good stocks if you just throw darts at a board

2 types of anchors

External anchor: sell an old car for $50,000 > way too much money, but by selling it at all, you can anchor a person to the conversation and price in order to sell Internal anchor: think of ideal parents—anchor away from your own experiences if parents are bad, for example, and think of other examples based on what your parents did wrong

Important Aspects of Impact Bias

Focalism and Immune neglect

Surrogacy

Forecast based on other people's past experiences > choice between promotional material and reviews when deciding to go to a resort > People made more accurate decisions based on reviews than on promotional material; ex. Speed dating > people determined compatibility more from reviews of a potential partner than just their profile

Affective Forecasting

Forecasting emotions by predicting how we'll feel about something in the future > we have a good sense of what makes us happy, but do we actually?

Want people to be risky?

Frame in terms of losses (vaccine example > saving 200 kids sounds less risky than taking a 1/3 chance of saving everyone, however, losing 400 kids sounds much riskier, and prompts people to choose the 1/3 chance of no deaths and take that bet)

Value and Gambling with Life

Framing matters: ex. Child flu Choice A: save 200 kids Choice B: 1/3 chance to save everyone Vs. Choice C: let 400 kids die Choice D: 1/3 chance of not deaths A and C + B and D are the same, but in each case, most would have chosen choice A and then choice D because of the way each result is framed

Randomness

Gambler's Fallacy: will switch > about machine > we believe machines are subject to probability Hot Hand: won't switch > about person > we think people aren't subject to probability Randomness is streaky

Beauty

Good looking people LOOK happier, but this does not predict happiness in many domains besides relationships; correlation is not necessarily causation: happier people smile more and tend to spend more time on their appear, but when these things are controlled for, r = .10 Changing appearances? > Plastic surgery, for example, only temporarily increase happiness, but eventually it drops again to the baseline and may even create dissonance

Disjunction Fallacy

Happens because of representative bias—when you think of a bird, your first thought is likely a robin rather than a penguin; ex. Look at a woman—can assume that she's an actress, but more likely that she plays WOW (1,000 women vs. 30 million) > it's even LESS likely that someone is a gamer AND an actress

Money

Happiness is logarithmic when it comes to money > developed nations tend to have higher ratings of overall happiness, but the line is STEEP for poorer countries where more money makes a huge difference; ex. Significant increases are required to make a difference before tapering off > so happiness increases exponentially between an income of $10k and $30k, levels off a bit between $30k and $75k, and decreases even less beyond that

Confirmation Bias

Interpersonal judgements: only see things that confirm your beliefs (Ex. Legal testimony > present evidence and lead witness toward certain conclusion) Wason Card Selection Task > only see cards that you think will prove the rule rather than the things that disprove the rule > basically become better at disproving than proving

Kruger et al.

Investigated changing answers on tests and regret based on number of erased and changed answers—found that students felt worse about changing their answer to the wrong answer than they did by just getting it wrong in the first place, and they remembered more when they changed their answer to the wrong answer, further supporting their usually incorrect instinct of sticking with their "gut" and keeping their first answer

Hsee et al.

Investigated overearning, overworking, and happiness—method included putting participants in two conditions where they had to hear an annoying sound a certain amount of time before being rewarded (low earning had to hear it 120 times, high had to hear it 20 times)—found that people do overwork in order to overearn even at the cost of being happy due to accumulation

Dunn et al.

Investigated spending money on either oneself or someone else and it's link to happiness—tested this through examining various populations, such as employees who just received a bonus, and measured their happiness before and after. Unsurprisingly, people are happier when they spend money on others

Harm

Is debriefing enough? Is it effective? 2 types: active and passive; Milgram study is an example of active harm, where participants thought they were actively hurting someone else

Determining Value

It's relative; $1 to a homeless person means more than $1 to a millionaire

Just World

Karma—people don't like randomness so they want to believe bad things will happen to bad people; ex. Lerner paradigm, sexual assault and victim blaming, lung cancer > asked "are you a smoker?" First

Basically: are we stupid?

Kinda > toolbox of heuristics works, but not always

Choice

Lack of choices actually increases happiness (basically minimizes what ifs) > ex. Movie poster > choose to take one home, but aren't as happy if you have the option to swap the post than if the door is closed and if you have to keep it > why? Likely due to justification of choice and elimination of what ifs

Benefits of Happiness

Literally being happy, positive emotions, helps with relationships, relieves stress, fosters creativity; ex. Yearbook pictures > those that looked happier in their yearbook photos were happier in their future relationships; ex. Nun diary entries > if their language in the dairy entries was happier and there was more affect, they often lived longer

Marriage

Married people are happier than unmarried, but unhappily married people are even less happy than unmarried people > happier people tend to get married more often, but eventually, people habituate to their marriage and come out of the honeymoon phase (but not completely if you stay happily married) Widowed? After about 8 years, people return to the normal baseline of when they first got married to their spouse

Individual Differences: Maximizer vs. Satisficer

Maximizers (those who try to get the most out of the situation) > buy car with all info > 4.5/5 satisfaction level Satisficers (those who are satisfied with what the situation has to give) > buy car because it's cool > 4.3/5 level of satisfaction Basically not much difference, so spend less time being a maximized

Why perpetuate harmful behavior?

Maybe modeling behavior (Bobo doll experiments), maybe compliance, maybe consistency, maybe reciprocity, and lastly maybe dissonance

Lay Theory

Memory, but similar to forecasting, so you use past experiences and memories to inform future forecasts about people, situations, etc. > ex. Sad scene in the Lion King > expect kids to cry, but rough and tumble bikers to not > but they have fathers too and would likely cry; ex. Women and PMS > women assumed they became more emotional when they were on their period > had them keep a diary of physical and emotional symptoms > found that physical symptoms changed more than emotional symptoms, but only recalled emotional effects due to lay theory of previous knowledge and experience

Two kinds of happiness

Momentary: ex. Drugs, sex, video games Life Satisfaction: ex. Narrative, more authentic forms such as family, charity, etc. Can they be separate? Global experience and expectaitons

Value is ambiguous

Money is money > ex. Would you drive across town to get a $200 radio for $100? Probably, but would you drive across town to get a $19,000 for $18,900 > probably not even though it's the same amount of money

Zajonc (1965)

More arousal = better performance; basically the more aroused you are when others are around, the better you tend to perform, HOWEVER, too much arousal can lead to panic (ex. Choking in sports) and too little can lead to sleepiness

Groupthink

More likely to abide by the decisions.majority of the group, especially when no one voices their misgivings (ex. Going to party despite COVID—some people might be uneasy, but don't speak up about how dangerous it may be to go, so everyone assumes that it's fine and they go; Challenger explosion)

Base Rates and Conditional Probability

Not everything is equally as likely > ex. Chance of being an American Idol: 100% chance they can sing, 2% they can dance, so not everyone who becomes and American Idol can sing AND dance—alternatively, the chance of being able to sing in the population? 1/1000 vs. Chance of being American Idol? 1/10,000,000-so base rate of being able to sing in the population is higher than the chance of being American Idol; HIV testing: test always returns true positives > 1% fallacy rate > chance of having HIV if you get a false +? Not actually 1% > 100,000 people get tested and only 100 get a false + > only actually a 1% chance of having it if it's a false positive

Triplett (1898)

One of the first laboratory experiments—had people rid bicycles by themselves and with others; found that people actually rode faster with others than by themselves > also applies to Tour de France times—people rode faster when racing others than in singular time trials

Relativity

Others: comparing to others > appreciate your house if you see a homeless person, but hate it if you see a millionaire's home Self: comparing to past performance > feel better when you lose and win at blackjack than if you win then lose

Impact Bias

Over-estimate the power of life events and how impactful they may be > ex. Get broken up with in high school > tend to overestimate how being broken up with will affect your life; ex. Assistant professors doing research > will they get tenure? > asked APs how they would feel if they do and don't and found that those that got tenure didn't feel as good as they thought and those that didn't get tenure didn't feel as bad as they thought they would

Asymmetries in Value—Prospect Theory

People are more risk averse for gains than losses (losses are risk seeking—people are more willing to be risky to get back to 0/having not lost anything) > flip a coin to either win $50 or nothing > what amount of money would be required for someone to take that bet? > basically you'd need to offer $100 in order for someone to take that bet (so offer them twice of what they would lose) Thank of graph: ex. Crime spree > rob bank, so might as well kill witnesses because you've already committed crimes

Decision Weight Function

People calculate probability POORLY > tend to overweight low probability and underweight high probability; ex. Cars vs. planes: both are relatively safe, but planes are about 100x safer than cars (so 99% safe vs. 99.9% safe) > seems small, but can be significant

Set Point

People have a baseline happiness that is largely genetic and relatively stable (this accounts for about 50% of everyone's happiness > other 50% is choices, such as choosing to socialize more vs. choosing to work more)

Consistency

People like sticking to what they've done in the past—ex. Present people with a sticker or a sign that says 'Drive Safely', most chose the sticker, but when asked again had to choose the sign in order to remain consistent with their past behavior; this also applies to donations

Hawthorne Effect

People tend to work harder and faster when others are around or they feel they are being watched/evaluated

Auto-Kinetic Effect

Perception—put people in a dark room with a dot and then ask them after how much it moved despite the fact that it didn't move at all; people conformed to others answers

Regression to the Mean

Phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement; ex. Punishment vs. encouragement of workers > yell when they call coin flips incorrectly and reward them when they call them correctly as if these things will chance the outcome > doesn't matter because outcome is random, but the more flips there are, the closer to a 50/50 mean the flips will get; Outstanding father, but average sons Reverting to randomness > when random error is high on one trial, it will likely be smaller on the next.

Fascism Scale (F-Scale)

Post WWII—Easy to blame Germans... power of the situation > Milgram study

Milgram Study

We knew this one already come on—authority is a powerful motivator and makes people do things they normally wouldn't

Probability

Probability of 1 individual thing happening is always higher than 2 things at once; ex. Disjunction fallacy

Money

Root of all evil? > can inspire perseverance and independence, but not prosociality Prosociality: participants had to unscramble words and eliminate words > those primed with words regarding money were less likely to give researchers their contact info Perseverance: people more likely to persist in solving a maze if money is involved Independence: participants placed chairs further apart from one another if they were primed with money

Short Term

Short term, people regret action because you focus on clear moments that are vivid, but eventually you invoke rationalization

Made-up Value and Signalling

Signaling in regards to social value > ex. Simple painting sells for millions—when you hang it in your house, you signal to visitors that you're rich

Loewenstein et al.

Something about mountaineering and utility—basically that mountaineers get more out of experiences than material items, and that the reason they do it vary from self-esteem to impressing others and goal completion to mastery of the craft, but ultimately this can become dangerous in the long runq

Expectations and value

Something may be 'better' because we expect it to be > ex. Expensive wine vs. cheap wine >

Money vs. Experiences

Study down found that people got more happiness out of experiences than out of material goods > ex. House size vs. commute to work: some people tend to buy bigger houses in the suburbs, creating a longer commute to work > study found that those with smaller houses, but shorter commutes were happier than those with larger houses and longer commutes > why do (white) people tend choose bigger houses anyway? > both due to comparison and due to duration neglect that makes them forget their commute

Utility

Subjective appeal (the value you give something based on how you feel about it = in terms of money, it becomes less subjectively valuable to you the more you have) of something vs. objective appeal (the physical value of something = in terms of money, the exact amount of money you have) of something; sub. on y axis and obj. on x axis: theoretically should be a straight line with a slope of 1, but in reality, is subject to diminishing marginal utility: ex. In terms of food, think that your favorite meal is good at first, but the more you have it, the less interested in it you become

Joint vs. Separate Evalutions

Tend to enjoy things differently in isolation vs. together > ex. Buying a speaker and comparing the specs in order to choose, when you would enjoy each of them perfectly fine individually; ex. College housing > compare dorms and want to be in nicer dorms, but ultimately fend up focusing on similarities of dorm living and enjoying your time with friends anyway, so you don't hate it as much as you expect; ex. Chips and chocolate > think you'll enjoy chips less when chocolate is in view, but ultimately enjoy chips anyway when you're actually eating them ***Basically: forecast jointly, enjoy separately***

Focalism

Tend to focus on events and ignore other things > so focus on what is missing rather than what isn't missing (ex. hand amputated > focused on your hand missing that you don't think about the fact that you still have other good things in your life); ex. Weight loss journey > requires going to the gym and exercising > focus on losing weight and don't consider exercising portion of the weight loss journey due to focalism > Exercise is the mediator

Milgram

Tested obedience and authority; participants administered a quiz to what they thought was another participant, and then administered a shock that increased in intensity if the "other participant" got an answer wrong—60% of participants went all the way to the max shock level; calls into question the ethics of experiments like this as well as the effectiveness of debriefing

Harker & Keltner

Tested out positive expression and appearance of happiness In yearbook photos predict life and relationship outcomes—had participants look at photographs and code positive expressions before examining well being and marital status of these people at various stages in their lives—found that those who expressed more positive emotions in their yearbook photos had better well being and relationship outcomes

Demographic Factors

The above (money, beauty, marriage, divorce, and children) only account for 20% of the variance in happiness

Immune Neglect

The human tendency to underestimate the speed and the strength of the "psychological immune system," which enables emotional recovery and resilience after bad things happen > basically we forget that we have an immune system to help us feel better and expect to feel worse than we actually will because of this ***Large events trigger the psychology immune system > more likely to forgive a cheating partner due to the psychological immune system than to forgive them for something small such as forgetting to do the dishes > we are happier to try and resolve bigger things than to deal with smaller more annoying things*** We also tend to rationalize things > ex. Someone being rude to someone else, the person who is experiencing the rudeness will actually hate the person being rude to them less because they'll try and rationalize their behavior, whereas observers will hate the person being rude more; another example: person who got kicked out of the Beatles > rationalize it as a good thing because he got to spend more time with his family

Gladwell—Black Swan

The main theme was basically that people are as unpredictable as the market, and that a lot of things in life are left up to chance

Duration Neglect

The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value > when we encode memories, we tend to neglect to encode the duration within which they occur, and instead follow the peak-end rule, where we encode the peak of the experience and the end > ex. Danny Kahneman study > had one group stick their hand in ice water for 60s and another group stick their hand in ice water for 60s and then slightly less cold water for 30s after > most people would pick first group, but ultimately those in the second group globally appraised their experience to be better because they remember the NICE ending ***Peak-end rule***

Faulty Affective Forecasting

There are extreme cases of forecasting that seem obvious, but might not be: like having to choose between being paralyzed or winning the lottery > Most people would choose to win the lottery, but ultimately studies have found that those who are paralyzed live happier day to day lives than lottery winners (many lottery winners get harassed)

Better Than Average (BTA) Effect

Think you're better than average at most things, when in reality you're worse than average in 50% of the things you do (fall in the bottom half) > worse than average effect? No, it's the same > ignores base rates and uses absolute value as relative value

Levin & Norenzayan

This study looked at how the pace of life impacted well-being of residents in communities. Levin et al. Did this by investigating the differences in pace across many countries, examining the community characteristics that predicted these differences, and then explored the consequences on well being. The way these were measured included walking speed, postal speed, and clock accuracy. This study revealed that warmer cities are slower, and places with vital economies and individualistic cultures are faster. Overall, faster paces of life resulted in great SWB, but also higher death rates from disease.

Probability Matching

Try to beat the odds > ex. Blue and green squares, will earn more money if you guess only blue or green, but we try to beat the system

Cultural Context and Value

Value is often based on context and is determined by consensus > it is difficult to determine the value of something without context of culture > ex. Price of mangos may differ in other countries and you don't know what to expect because you don't know the cultural context if you're visiting a new country

Memory Bias

We tend to remember extreme examples, which effects our ability to predict the future based on the past > ex. Have been to beach thousands of times, but get bit by a shark once and the shark becomes all you think about when you go to the beach even though the chance of getting bitten again is low; ex. Missing the train > assume missing it every time will be as bad as missing it the worst time they missed it in the past

Representativeness and Template Matching

Who makes a good professor? CEO? What makes a good job? > Use previous judgements and experiences to decide, so when we think of a CEO we think of a white man usually