PSCI 174 Final

Moralization - Rozin (1999)

". . . the process through which preferences are converted into values, both in individual lives and at the level of culture." e.g., cigarette smoking, vegetarianism, health & obesity Issues susceptible to moralization when: Behavior perceived as under individual's control (intention or negligence) Harms not only individual but society Associated with negative affect or stigmatized groups Moral beliefs and attitudes: Drive behavior - stronger influence on policy views greater intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others stronger blame and punishment of those who violate moral value Moral appeals persuade (especially deontological appeals)

Homo Duplex - Durkheim

"Two-level man" Prophane (ordinary) vs sacred

Experimental Evidence

(understand basic idea that people are more skeptical processes of unwanted than wanted information & how studies support this idea)

Video Racial Profiling - Correll et al (2002)

-Participants played simple video game, images of people with gun or other object against complex background and decide whether to shoot -significantly large numbers of errors per 20 trials in unarmed Black -White and Black participants BOTH SHOW EFFECT

General Model of Behavioral Confirmation - Darley & Fazio (1980)

-Perceiver forms expectancy about target → perceiver acts consistent w/ expectancy → target interprets perceiver behavior → target acts consistent w/ interpretation → (Fundamental attribution error) -perceiver interprets target behavior/target interprets own behavior; also happens with hostility

Tool or Gun Studies - Payne (2001)

-Significantly high proportion of misidentification errors in black faces with tools compared to white faces -white participants response to blacks face with gun significantly faster than black face with tool whereas white face with gun or tool had relativity the same amount of time

Self-fulfilling Nature of Attractiveness Stereotype -- Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid (1978)

-examined the self-fulfilling nature of the attractiveness stereotype -Male students had intercom conversation with female thought to be either attractive or unattractive -Blind observers rated attractive females behaviors as more friendly and sociable -Fundamental Attribution Error occurs as we make the assumption that attractive ppl are nicer than unattractive and seek evidence to prove it

Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)

-teacher expectancy study, double-blind experiments keep behaviors from known knowledge to create the behavior -"bloomers" showed substantially greater increases on actual IQ tests -label affects teachers' behavior, "bloomers" receive more attention, instruction as they have more opportunities to respond in class, more feedback, warmer emotional climate

What is a picture worth? - Clark et al (2010)

4 moral dilemmas involving children or not On desk (where the participant are taking the questionnaire) is a framed picture of either a rock or a cute baby Examine ratings of moral responsibility of sacrificing a life DV = Morality of sacrificing child Seeing a rock then dilemma: No Child Dilemmas = 2 Child dilemmas = 4.2 Seeing a pic of baby then dilemma: No child dilemma = 2 Child dilemma = 3.7 Acceptability of killing a child after seeing CHILD pic < Acceptability of killing a child after seeing ROCK pic Recall the concept of visceral cues

Fiske & Taylor Chapter 13:

Affect is a generic term for a whole range of preferences Preferences include relatively mild subjective reactions that are essentially either pleasant or unpleasant The preferences most frequently studied by social psychologists are interpersonal evaluations; that is,simple positive and negative reactions to others, such as attraction, liking, prejudice, and so forth. Such positive and negative evaluations have obvious importance in social interaction, telling us whom to approach and whom to avoid. Moods typically do not have a specific target, are considered as simply positive or negative, and have some duration Emotion refers to complex assortment of affects, beyond merey good feelings and bad, Imply intense feelings with physical manifestations

Brickman et al (1978) - paraplegics vs. lottery winners study

Affective forecasting: predictions about emotional reactions to future events Irrevocable choices allow the synthesis of happiness Changeable choices undermine happiness, because it allows for regret We synthesize happiness to make ourselves happier with the given conditions of our lives When given a choice to change their mind, participants report less happiness and satisfaction than those given an irrevocable choice Amnesiac patients demonstrate the synthesis of happiness perfectly

The better than average effect

Also sometimes called "Lake Wobegon" -- which comes from the NPR radio program that was run by a guy named Garrison Keiller, and it was all about his fictional hometown "Lake Wobegon" He states, "where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" People tend to think they are better than average, but everyone can't be right when they say they are better than average Majority of people hold a flattering view of self -- compared to average person they rate themselves as: More intelligent More ethical Less prejudice And even less bias in their judgments Ex: A better than Average class In the first day questionnaire, you compared yourselves to similar others &..... Only 16% of you thought you had worse than average drivings skills Only 8% of you though you had worse than average social sensitivity skills (i.e., "reading others") Only 20% of you thought your performance on the questionnaire was worse than average! 65% said average Intentional desires to see ourselves and good and competent

Automatic Political Judgments: thin slicing

Ambady & Rosenthal (1993) Thin slicing: 6 seconds of silent video of professors predict end of semester teacher evaluations Same for political candidates

excitation transfer

Arousal: emotional excitation of the sympathetic nervous system, has both automatic and learned origins Core of the theory: (a) arousal is nonspecific and slow to decay (b) people are inept at partitioning the sources of their arousal (c) people cognitively interpret their arousal The learned and unlearned features of arousal theoretically depend on three initially independent factors: dispositional: learned and unlearned skeletal-motor reactions (immediate) excitatory: learned and unlearned arousal reactions (immediate) experiential: assessment of initial reactions and interpretation of the situation (subsequent)

Implicit egoism - Pelham et al. (2002)

Because people have automatic positive associations with themselves, they like things and people the more they remind them of themselves Research has shown that people disproportionately: Live in states and cities that resemble their name (lots of guys named louis live in St. louis) Choose careers that resemble their name (lots of guys names Dennis and Denise are dentist) Marry people whose names resemble their name (lots of people named jones marry people name johnson)

Innate moral sense

Belief that morality is something we are born with, not learned necessarily

sexual prejudice is controversial (p.362)

Both assumptions - that one can freely manipulate a person's apparent sexual identity and that homosexuality primarily concerns the target's stigma-management issues - raise ethical issues. Antigay attitudes are among the most negative prejudice, women less prejudiced than men and lesbians are less targeted than gay men sexual prejudice most centrally entails disgust Sexual prejudice causes more unambiguous hate-crime violence toward gays and lesbians than the violence directed at heterosexual women and older adults. intimate violence with complex causes, also experience daily hassles with prejudice, which can undermine mental and physical health

Proto-morality in monkeys - De Waal Video

Both get cucumber = fair One gets grape/the other gets cucumber = inequity First piece of cucumber is fine, but then she sees the other get a grape -> refuses the cucumber (throws it back)

Bottom-Up (data-driven) vs. Top-Down (concept-driven) Processing

Bottom-up: info processing that is influenced by specific stimulus info Top-Down: info processing that is influenced by organized prior info

Superstition A. Causes - motivated reasoning, misconceptions of chance, confirmation biases B. Urban Legends

Causes - motivated reasoning (belief in fate), misconceptions of chance (multiple coincidences), confirmation biases (includes the feature positive effect, ambiguous confirmation criteria, behavioral confirmation, secondhand confirmation) Urban Legends (Heath et al.) — stories that gain wide acceptance despite no factual basis

Spontaneous skepticism - Ditto et al (2003)

Changes to Bogus Diagnosis Procedure: test strip stays yellow, time limit & envelope Videotape participants while testing Testing time and "Retesting" behaviors The quantity of processing view of motivated reasoning predicts that individuals are more likely to spontaneously question the validity of unfavorable than favorable feedback even when the objective likelihood of the feedback is equivalent. Participants were videotaped self-administering a bogus medical test revealing either a favorable or an unfavorable result. In Studies 1 and 2, unfavorable result participants required more time to accept the validity of the test result and were more likely to spontaneously recheck its validity than were favorable result participants. However, unfavorable results also were perceived as less expected than were favorable results, even though the information supplied about their objective likelihood was identical.

Schemata: Definition, Types, & Functions

Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept including attributes and relations among attributes (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) We store info abstractly in richly integrated bundles or network and use this build-up knowledge to understand the world Types of schemata include: -person scheme (self-schema) -role schema -group schema (stereotype) -event schema (script: how the world moves forward in a temporal fashion)

Free speech & the Supreme Court - Epstein et al (2014)

Conservative judges are more likely to support conservative free speech than liberal free speech Liberal judges are less bias

The "cookie" and "nookie" studies - Ditto et al (2006)

Cookie study of "risk perception" given opportunity to take a gamble to win chocolate chip cookie if win: take all wanted and leave immediately if lose: no cookies and stay late to do pattern recognition problems if not play, no cookies and stay will normal time Nookie study Presented sexually-active, condom-using males with a scenario of a male and female student who meet at bar, go back to her apartment, and are faced with decision of whether or not to have sex without a condom DV = "I would have sex in this situation" Visceral Cues Manipulation -1/2 watch video (MacDonald et al., 1996; 2000) -1/2 read passage describing the video 4.09 intention to have unsafe sex when see passage; 6.42 when watch video

Affective Forecasting - Gilbert TED Talk

Crucial assumption in decision making is that we can predict accurately how choices will make us feel Evidence that we often mispredict our future feelings -- even when we have all the relevant information "Miswanting": want things that we won't like Research has revealed systematic biases in affective forecasts According to research done by Daniel Gilbert, people report being happier with choices they have made: When they believe their choice cannot be changed once they make it

Deterrence or Just Desserts - Carlsmith et al (2002)

Death Penalty: Deterrence or Just Desserts? If you ask people, they say it is for the sake of deterrence (the rational concept of punishment) But if you manipulate factors (give specific scenarios and ask for the rationalization) Deterrence related factors have little or no effect Retribution is what matters: we punish bad people "Enhanced Interrogation" (Carlsmith & Sood 2008) Say it's about intelligence gathering Really about retribution (interrogation as punishment)

Deontological vs. Consequentialist moral reasoning

Deontological: Kant Rule based constraints on action Ends don't justify means About the action, the morality of the action EX. lying is wrong, even though the outcome may be moral Consequentialist : (Utilitarian) Bentham, Singer Cost-benefit analysis Ends can justify means About the consequences of the act, can be moral bc it produces a moral outcome

Depressive attributional style - Seligman et al (1979)

Depressed people show attributions for negative events that are: Internal — caused by me Stable — always true of me in past and future Global — generally true of me Opposite of self-serving bias — non-depressed make external, unstable, specific attributions for negative events; question is who is more right?

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Thinking

Descriptive: Referring to what a thing actually is (its actual characteristics) Fact-based, "objective," theoretically verifiable Prescriptive: Referring to what a thing should or ought to be, its ideal or normative characteristics Value-based, subjective, not verifiable Morality is a prescriptive judgment — evaluative Morally right vs. wrong, facts vs. values BUT psychologists take descriptive approach to study prescriptive (moral) judgments Do not study what is right and wrong, but HOW people THINK about right and wrong

Spontaneous giving and calculated greed - Rand et al (2012)

Do people give or be greedy? People have a gut reaction to give more money Less than 10 seconds: People who made their decisions faster contributed more to the common pool. More than 10 seconds: People contributed less when they were forced to decide more slowly

Costly punishment is crucial to social cooperation -Henrich et al (2009)

Econ games with multiple cultures around the world (Henrich et al., 2006) All display costly (altruistic) punishment We rather hurt ourselves to punish a bad deed than to accept a bad deed In game: 20 cent and game continues with deal or no deal and no one gets anything Punishment is crucial Increased costly punishment = increased altruism, generosity, social coop

How moral beliefs differ from other strong beliefs

Emotional: EX. disgust, contempt Drive behavior, positively or negatively Universally prescribed (unlike other preferences) - people view moral beliefs as universal even though they are subjective Hard to change or defend with "evidence" (not data based)

Empirical & theoretical problems

Empirical: "rational" (expectancy-based) alternative explanations Didn't expect to see the word Theoretical: Logical inconsistency, homunculus, self-deception Blew people's mind in terms of how this effect could happen in the way they understood the psychological system Logical inconsistency → how could you see the word and not see the word at the same time? Either got into the system or didn't Homunculus → little person inside the head "Didn't see that...didn't see that" Bizarre No theory to lay out how it was that your desire to see/not see something could affect your judgments

Tribalism, Political Sectarianism & the Moralization of Politics

Evolution favors small group living Share resources, compete with other groups for resources and rewards Morality turns teams into tribes Tribes share essence (kin, race, nationality) Agreement: righteous; disagreement: sacrilege Motivated reasoning, self-enhancement bias, group-enhancement bias, moral motivated reasoning, political moral reasoning Reverse engineering reality: We see moral reasoning as bottom-up processing, but it is top-down We recruit principles, logic and facts to turn political opinions into facts Political moral views shape how we see and interpret reality Motivated deontology: recruiting a moral principle selectively to support desired moral conclusion Motivated consequentialism: recruiting facts about costs and benefits selectively to support desired moral conclusion Ex: the more participants believed condom education was immoral, the less effective they believed condoms to be and the more they believed condom education just encouraged teen sex. He found this same pattern across a host of different policies: the more immoral a policy was thought to be, the more it was also thought to be ineffective (have few benefits and many costs)

Duration Neglect - Kahneman TED Talk (Kahneman et al, 1993)

Experiencing self in the present is about 3 seconds long Experiencing self and memory are completely different We think of the future as anticipated memories Colonoscopy patients report a better experience from a longer procedure, but no pain at the end (conflict between experiencing self and memory Colonoscopy patients report a worse experience from shorter procedure with pain at the end According to Kahneman's research on memory for past painful experiences, people's memory for how painful a medical procedure was should be most dependent on: How painful the procedure was at the end of the procedure

Greene et al (2001) - Brain Scan Study

Experiment: Greene presented moral dilemma problems (like the trolley and footbridge problems) during an fMRI Results: Personal (footbridge- push a man) vs impersonal (trolley- slip a switch) dilemmas (Personal) Footbridge problem implicates "emotional" regions (Impersonal) Trolley problem implicates "calculation centers" Deontological reasoning is system 1 (automatic) process, whereas consequentialist reasoning is a system 2 process

Chip-Tyrone Studies -- Uhlmann et al (2009)

Experiment: Liberals and conservatives decide whether to save white lives or black lives by sacrificing a white person (Chip) or black person (Tyrone) Liberals were more consequentialist about saving Chip than Tyrone; there was no difference in conservatives and their sacrificial preference Liberals felt that sacrificing a white person (Chip) was worth it to save black lives; liberals value white lives less than black lives Liberals were reluctant to sacrifice an African American (Tyrone) to save white people (Chip); liberals value black lives more than white lives Liberals want to save Iraqi lives Conservatives are very consequentialist about Iraqi lives: sacrificing Iraqis justifies the means to save whites

Valdesolo & DeSteno (2006) Emotion Study

Experiment: People watched a funny or neutral video, then they make moral decisions about the trolley and footbridge problem Results: Positive affect group were 3x more likely than neutral subjects to make utilitarian choices to the footbridge problem Affect showed no effect in the trolley problem negative affect will inhibit consequentialist judgements (to push the fat man in the footbridge problem), and counteracting negative affect will lead to more calculated decisions

Factualization - think about connections to motivated deontology & consequentialism

Factualization - think about connections to motivated deontology & consequentialism Ideo-logical Thinking - Gampa et al (2019) Liberals & conservatives as equally biased - Ditto et al (2019)

Reverse engineering blame - Alicke (1992) cocaine vs. anniversary present study

Free will (Control, intention) → Moral Responsibility (Blame, punishment) But when people do bad things: Moral responsibility → Free will Attribute blame the culprit then think they must have alot of control over their behavior Example: Alicke (1992) Young man gets in accident -- speeding but also environmental hazards (rain, bad roads) Participants see the person speeding as more responsible for the accident (control of behavior) when he is rushing home to hide his cocaine (blame) than rushing home to hide his parent's anniversary present Evaluation of blame then evaluation of control

affect-as-information perspective

Happy people are satisfied with a quick, heuristic judgment, but when motivated, they are perfectly capable of more detailed, controlled processing we use our current moods to make judgments and appraisals, even if we do not know the sources of our moods Our mood can influence basic perceptual processes and attention

Wilson & Gilbert (2003) - impact bias

Impact bias: overestimating the intensity and duration of emotional reactions to future events One cause: focalism: the tendency to underestimate the extent that events influence our thoughts and feelings (esp with negative events) People are less adept at predicting the intensity and duration of future emotional reactions People are adept at picking which option will be more pleasant

Denial of fact vs. denial implication

Implications often hard to prove, even if facts are accepted May accept facts but deny implications Difference between someone getting information and accepting the information is true Example Are you an alcoholic Do you drink alone? In The morning? Yes, those are facts I do both BUT that doesn't make me an alcoholic What makes an alcoholic Hard to pin that Implications are ambiguous Never clear whether they're true or not

Black is Bad Studies - Frank & Gilovich (1988) studies

In American culture*, the color black is associated with negative things ( and white with positive things) Evidence that black can produce negative judgments and behaviors In a study that looks at sports teams we see that teams wearing black leads to negative associations and behaviors. Also, they recieve more penalties.

Resolving the paradox of altruism 1) Inclusive Fitness & Kinship selection 2) Reciprical altruism

Inclusive Fitness & Kinship selection: genes for altruism can evolve if altruism is targeted at kin Reciprocal altruism: genes for altruism can evolve if altruism and vengeance are targeted at those who do and don't return favors, respectively Darwin noted many of our virtues are of little use to us, but great to our groups Selfish people cannot cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be effective Competition within groups and across groups

right wing authoritarianism

Intense ingroup identification coupled with perceived value threat excessive submission to established authority high levels of aggression in the name of the authorities high levels of conventionalism people high in RWA also tend to be high in prejudice against a wide variety of groups

The new look in perception & perceptual defense - Bruner & Postman (1947)

Jerome Bruner- Coin Size Estimation Studies in 1947 Reaction against behaviorist stranglehold on scientific psychology Incorporated " extrastimulus factors" into experimental study of perception; ex. Motivation, experience, personality dynamics "Dirty Words" studies Subjects require longer exposure to recognize anxiety-provoking words than neutral ones Somehow, there was sort of "ego" that was protecting/ preventing people from seeing those words Problem → were subject to all kinds of counter explanations Collapsed under 2 problems Empirical and theoretical

Moral Biases

Lay moral reasoning People are "lay philosophers" People are randomly inconsistent moralists People are systematically biased moralists Motivated moral reasoning People have a moral tool box: Deontological vs consequentialists logic Rationalist process: possible transgression -> find appropriate principle -> make judgement Intuitionist process: possible transgression -> make judgement -> find principle to support judgement

MODE model

MODE model (Fazio, 1990) concentrates on the automatic activation of attitudes, based on the mere encounter with the attitude object. Views an attitude as an association in memory between a given object and one's evaluation of it The stronger the association, the more accessible one's attitude students saw color photographs of other students from various racial groups, which served as positive and negative primes prejudice facilitated evaluatively matched responses immediately following the racial prime suggests that some attitudes (evaluations) activate upon mere observation of the attitude object (different race faces) Attitudes activate more easily when recently or frequently activated in the past or when one has just reviewed attitude-relevant behavior. Accessible attitudes influence perceptions of the attitude object, facilitating attitude-consistent judgments about relevant information and resist contradiction some attitudes can activate immediately upon a perception of the pertinent attitude object

Affect as information - rationality and motivated reasoning

Makes adaptive sense to more carefully scrutinize negative than positive info Behavioral response to positive info is less crucial but makes us vulnerable to being too easy on positive info (don't discriminate good and bad information) Key bias in motivated reasoning: people are gullible consumers of info they want to believe

Memory Reconstruction - Loftus TED Talk

Memory often assumed to be faithful representation of past -Feels like retrieving actual memory from storage Research suggests memory often reconstructed at time of retrivival -Thus biased by aspects of current context Elizabeth Loftus studies of eyewitness memory and the misinformation effect -Memory for past events is often "reconstructed" based on information we are exposed to after the event occurred. -Subjects were shown a series of slides depicting an automobile accident. In later questioning, some subjects were asked questions about when one car "hit" the other car, and some subjects were asked questions about when one car "smashed into" the other car. They found that: A. Subjects estimated that the cars were going faster when the question described the two cars as "smashing into" each other rather than "hitting" each other. B. Subjects were more likely to remember seeing broken glass in the slides when the question described the two cars as "smashing into" each other rather than "hitting" each other.

. Illusions & mental health - Taylor & Brown (1988)

Mental health = contact with reality Data shows depressive realism, "sadder but wiser" Occurs in self-evaluations, beliefs about control, and unrealistic optimism Positive illusions foster: Happiness, ability to care for others, creative/productive work, persistence Mental health = positive illusions

Moral intuitionism and moral dumbfounding

Moral intuitionism: moral judgements aren't cognitively developed in a rational way / we have emotional reactions, and we recruit rationale Moral intuitionism rejects the rationalist view of moral development (i.e cognitive view) right and wrong are things we FEEL more than we think most moral reasoning is post-hoc: response to social request, defense, persuasion, conflict we feel something is wrong and come up with the reasoning later moral dumbfounding: I know it's wrong, but I can't explain it/I don't know why

Self-enhancement bias

Most people have positive feelings about the self, which can lead to judgments that are self-enhancing -- put self in positive light We want/prefer to believe positive things about ourselves

Ditto & Liu (2016): see connections to motivated deontology & consequentialism, coherence & the culture war

Motivated deontology: recruiting a moral principle selectively to support desired moral conclusion Motivated consequentialism: recruiting facts about costs and benefits selectively to support desired moral conclusion

"Hot" vs. "Cold" Cognition

Original Cognitive View - People are like computers Rational, calculating - COLD Thinking as a COLD process Feeling as a HOT process Scientific Metaphor Second Wave of Cognitive Research - people are not so rational, but errors are "cold" ones We are too quick, thoughtless, intuitive, conservative We make mistakes Irrationalities as "glitches in the machine" still COLD Cognitive Miser Metapher They are not processing the information in the correct way Failing to hit rational benchmark not because of some hot process Third Wave of Cognitive Research - people's judgments are affected by moods, emotions & motivations (wishes, fears, goals) Irrationalities are often biases of passion and not reason - HOT They aren't simple mistakes Motivated Tactician metaphor People have goals They are hot creatures that care about how things turn out and pick cognitive strategies based on those hotter emotional affective moods

Hindsight Bias - Fischhoff (1975)

Outcome seem more likely after we know the outcome Leads to assignment of blame after the fact "I could have/should have predicted that" "We should have predicted that"

Ambiguity & Motivated Reasoning - Ditto & Boardman (1995)

Participants take bogus psychological test Receive Feedback (Personality Description & "Diagnosis") -"Barnum" paragraph -Diagnosis either Favorable (resistant to future problems) or Unfavorable (prone to future problems) -Future problems either medical or psychological in nature (had no effect on results) Rate Accuracy of Diagnosis, Personality Description, & Individual Statements Reject application as false while accept the description

Motivated sensitivity - Ditto et al (1998)

People are more sensitive processors of preference-inconsistent information System 2 processing should make people more sensitive to quality of information Adaptive response to threatening information -not to work to disbelieve it (self-deceptive) -but to work to distinguish real from imagined threat Skepticism flows from sensitivity Male subjects told it was study of 1rst Impressions Male is chosen as "Judge" & completes the questionnaire Receives Favorable or Unfavorable feedback from Attractive Female Told she either had High Choice or Low Choice in what she wrote DV = How Much Does She Like You? Be more skeptical about things you don't want to believe/ allocate more about things you believe

Motivated Skepticism - dual-process model of motivated reasoning -- Ditto & Lopez (1992)

People are more skeptical processors of preference-inconsistent information Affect of difference in a sense of how we respond to diff kinds of info when we have a preference for one option over the other Effect of response we have for the info changes the way we process that info Preference-consistent → makes you feel good → doesn't provoke a lot of thoughtful analysis Preference inconsistent → neg affect → makes you think Controlled expectations: Healthy condition → protective factor Set base rates of both to 1/20; Both equally expected Measures of Active Processing Perceived accuracy of TAA test prediagnosis is pretty similar between healthy and unhealthy Higher perceived accuracy of TAA postdiagnosis in healthy condition than unhealthy A similar number of life irregularities cited between healthy and unhealthy in pre diagnosis More number life irregularities cited in unhealthy post diagnosis than healthy

Concluding comments on Error & Bias A. The Bias Blindspot - Pronin (2006)

People easily bias in others judgments But seldom feel their OWN judgments are biased -- blind to our own biases.

Kohlberg's rationalist theory of moral development

People evaluate right and wrong based on principles Children use more and more advanced moral principles as they gain cognitive sophistication Move from simple thoughts to complex thoughts Views babies as lay scientists

Unrealistic Optimism - Weinstein (1980;1982;1984)

People have an "illusion of invulnerability" - which is the same thing as unrealistic optimism We also view our future in a positive way Tend to view their future as more likely to hod good things than bad When asked to rate how likely they are to experience future events, the majority rate themselves as: Less likely than average person to experience negative events (illness, victimization, failure) More likely than average person to experience positive events (good health, success, good fortune) Very robust effect Overall, the idea is that people think they are more likely than average people their age to have good things happen to them and less likely than average person their age to have bad things happen. Compared to average UCI student of your age and sex: Only 14% of you thought you were more likely than average to develop a drinking problem Only 9% of you thought you were more likely than average to have a heart attack before 40 Only 20% of you thought you were less likely than average to live past the age of 80 Only 12% of you thought you were less likely than average to own your own home

Self-serving attributional bias

People make internal attributions for own successes (good outcomes), but external attributions for failures (negative outcomes) Ex: Exam scores -- Why the "A"? -- b/c of my ability, I'm smart Why the "F" -- b/c the test was hard & unfair

The Law of Similarity (sympathy) - know the experimental demonstrations

People reluctant to eat high quality chocolate shaped like dog poop, to put fake rubber vomit in their mouths compared to a rubber duck, to eat salt when labeled as cyanide, throw darts at JFK than Hitler (if coerced, show poorer accuracy in hitting JFK than Hitler)

The Law of Contagion (contact) - know the experimental demonstrations

People reluctant to wear freshly laundered sweater once worn by a person with AIDS (more than if they just owned it and even if worn for only 5min), to drink from a cup touched by a sterilized cockroach, to drink water stirred by a used but sterilized comb, to let an enemy use their hairbrush

Mispredicting Regret - Gilovich & Medvec (1995)

People tend to think that they will regret action more than inaction in the "short term" Regret inaction most in the long term, regret actions more than inactions in the short term Related phenomenon, people think they would prefer "revocable" (changeable) decisions more than "irrevocable' (unchangeable) ones -- but happier when they can't go back & change decision

Hot-Cold Empathy Gaps

People's judgments are affected by their current affective (visceral) state But people have trouble predicting how they will feel in a different affective state than their current one* or how someone else in a different affective state feels Hot to Cold Empathy Gaps: visceral decisions, addiction, thirst, hunger, sex, fear Cold to Hot Empathy Gaps: relapse, treatment nonadherence hot= emotional and physiological arousal cold=rational, calm and indifferent In "cold" state, people underestimate effects of visceral factors - craving/addiction, thirst, hunger, sex, fear, anger In "hot" state, people overestimate the stability of their current state

Big Themes

Phenomenology & misperception: How we feel and act in response to a situation is a function of our subjective impression of it. Our subjective impressions are often incorrect and/or are not shared by others. Power of intuition: Our subjective impression are often based on intuitive or "gut" reactions rather than thoughtful analysis Even when we recognize this, intuition is hard to resist or control Deep Rationality: There is an underlying sense in our intuitive reactions but they are often ill-suited to life in the modern world. Things that shape us evolutionally were in conditions many years ago.

Christensen-Szalanski (1984) Childbirth Study

Preference for anesthesia at the later stages of labor Pre and post labor preference for anesthesia were the same, but during 6-10 cm of dilation preference was high. People projected current state onto anesthesia scenario Pattern equally true for women who had had previous children Demonstrates the the Cold-to-Hot Empathy Gap

Van Boven & Loewenstein (2003) Exercise Study

Projection bias Lost campers scenario -- little food or water Asked if they were in that situation, which would they want more, food or water Complete before or after vigorous exercise Thirst more unpleasant and regret no water in post-exercise, people projected current state onto campers in scenario Demonstrate hot-to-cold empathy gap

Identifiable Victim Effect

Refers to the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid, the likelihood that we feel greater empathy, and an urge to help, in situations where tragedies are about a specific, identifiable individual than vaguer group A picture of a starving child gets more donations than an essay about the country is destroyed

Moral judgments in babies - 60 minutes "Baby Lab" video

Russo thought babies were blank idiots Key findings: Babies preferred puppets that were similar to them over puppets that were not. Babies preferred puppets that punished other unhelpful puppets more than they preferred puppets that helped unhelpful puppets. Babies preferred puppets that punished, rather than helped, other puppets that were not like them. People like the puppets who like what they like - minimal group assignment Babies show a universal moral code for right/wrong Do babies have negative feelings for the different puppets? Babies want the different character treated badly (bias) Babies prefer others who harm others who are unlike them Economic games with kids Kids decide how many tokens they want and to give to strangers: The younger kids choose to get less prizes themselves, just to get more than the other kid (social comparison) As kids get older (around 8) they choose the equal/fair option By 9/10 kids choose to give more to strangers and get less themselves- become generous When we are under pressure, we regress to the younger self and bias

The Death of Amadou Diallo

Searching for "black or hispanic" serial rapist; lurking suspiciously therefore fired 41 shots

Fiske & Taylor Chapter 5:

Self enhancement is the need for and efforts to maintain or create a positive sense of self Respond to threats by making downward social comparisons to less fortunate ones Social validation is being accepted for who we are, helps reducing defensiveness Can satisfy self-enhancement needs by holding positive illusions: self-perceptions that are falsely positive and somewhat exaggerated with respect to actual abilities and social skills More positive, have more control, and unrealistically optimistic about the future

The Cognition-Motivation Debate

Self-Serving Attributional Bias (Miller, 1976; Stevens & Jones, 1976) -Success = Internal Attribution "I succeeded because of my ability" -Failure = External Attribution "I failed because task was unfair, difficult, bad luck" But if high ability person, success is not just preferred, it is also expected -Unclear whether external attribution for failure occurs because people don't WANT to fail or don't EXPECT to fail -- latter is cold and rational People think more deeply in some situations than in others-dual process models Various factors involved: personal relevance, unexpectedness, accuracy motivation, control deprivation, negative affect, etc Motivated reasoning another example of selective allocation of cognitive resources Agnostic judgment has no preference for option over the other yet motivated does because certain option has preference-consistent information or positive affect

The Implicit Association Test

Show pictures of African-American or European-American faces and positive or negative words Trail 1: white or positive vs black or negative (Naturally assume and therefore faster; implicit association) Trail 2: white or negative vs black or positive (Everything is more complicated; slower) Completely counterbalanced, compare speed and errors Most white ppl & some non-white people "biased" toward whites, pro-white bias Measures of implicit prejudice that are based on associations between negative stimuli and minority group images or names may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal dislike. Maybe the negative emotions being measured aren't hostility, but shame or guilt instead. IAT measures attitudes between two different groups. Whites may have a positive attitude toward Blacks but perhaps not as positive as toward members of their own race. Discrimination can still exist even when there is an absence of hostility. Implicit association between goodness and whiteness

Double-edge sword of morality

Source of great good: rescuers But also of great evil: communism, fascism, religious warfare

Experimental evidence for memory reconstruction (stop-yield sign studies, lost in the mall study)

Stop-yield sign studies (Loftus, Miller and Burns, 1978): demonstrated that you can change what people saw and that eyewitness testimony is not very reliable People shown a series of slides showing a car stopped at an intersection one half showing the sign at the intersection: half showed a stop sign, the other half saw a yield sign Participants were asked a series of questions after seeing the slide. The critical question was: "Did another car pass by while the red Datsun was stopped at the stop/yield sign?" Participants receiving misleading post-event information recognized the slide they were seeing 41% of the time, whilst consistent post-event information participants identified correctly 75% of the time. Misleading PEI can get integrated with visual memory, alter it and affect performance on a visual recognition task. Lost in the mall study (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995): to see if false memories could be created in participants through suggestion 24 participants were presented with 4 stories, 3 of them were true and 1 was false. Participants were asked to recall these childhood events. The participants remembered 68% of the true events. 25% recalled the false story, the rest had no memory of the false story event. Research suggests that the simple act of imagining an event has the potential of creating a false memory, this shows false memories are an example of reconstructive memory.

Nonverbal Expectancy Confirmation - Word, Zanna & Cooper (1974)

Study 1 used White interviewers Trained Black & White Interviewees (trained) were interviewed Found that White interviewers show more "immediacy" to White than Black interviewees -- greater eye contact, forward body lean, sat closer, interview longer Study 2 used all White interviewees Trained White interviewers to show either High or Low immediacy -- treat White interviewees as Whites (high) or Blacks (low) had been treated in Study 1 Judges rate performance as better when the interviewee is shown high immediacy (treated like a White) Blind Judges rated Low Immediacy interviewees as performing worse

Biased processing of base rate information - Lench & Ditto (2006)

Study 1: 18% of U.S. college students can expect to have a gifted/retarded child Study 2: It is very unlikely that U.S. college students will have a gifted/retarded child" Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate, in two different contexts, that people are consistently optimistic in their predictions, despite identical base rates for positive and negative events. People optimistically interpret base rates and that this optimism is due to an effortless affective process. Optimistic bias was again prominent and positive events were embraced and negative events rejected after exposure to stimuli that evoked matching incidental affect. Positive affect facilitated the acceptance of potential positive events, whereas negative affect facilitated rejection of potential negative events Base rate information influenced judgments about the likelihood of future outcomes. The desirability of potential future events clearly biased subjective likelihood judgments, above and beyond the influence of base-rate information. This optimistic interpretation of base rates was not dependent on prior experience, motivation, or cognitive processing, and instead appears to result from reliance on an effortless, affective process

separate-systems view

Suggests that affective and cognitive processes proceed in parallel paths without influencing each other much Affective reactions are primary Evaluations are made and the justified, decisions are based on preference rather than computation Basic: evaluation is a major and universal component of virtually all perception and meaning Inescapable demandingly present in a way that simple knowledge is not Irrevocable affect is less vulnerable to persuasion than cognition Implicates the self affective judgment describe one's own reactions to the object while cognitive rest on feature inherent in the object Difficult to verbalize words for affective reactions seem to fall short of the experience May not depend on cognition the features that people use to discriminate a stimulus may not be the same features that they use to decide whether or not they like it Be separated from content knowledge One sometimes remembers how one feels about a person but cannot remember the details of where or how the person was previously encountered.

The Trolley & Footbridge Problems - Why such different reactions?

Taking Personal versus impersonal actions personal dilemma; evolved emotional component that compels us to action impersonal dilemma; no evolved emotional component that compels us to action

Presidential height

Tall people are seen as better leaders Tall people rate themselves as better leaders

Subtlety of Expectancy Processes - Darley & Gross (1980)

Testing a rich kid who we expect to be smart or a poor kid who we expect to be dumb Half then rate her intelligence, other half hear tape of "conflictual" test performance then rate SES Info Only Results → not significantly different b/w "R" and "P" Hannah SES + Test (listen to tape of her answering questions- conflictual ambiguity (somethings will tell you she is smart and others parts will say she is not) Results → Rich hannah is significantly smarter than poor Hannah Rich Hannah-Get the easy question wrong, people think "Maybe she wasn't paying attention"; Get the hard question right, people think "Wow, she is so smart" Poor Hannah-Gets the easy question wrong, people think "she isn't smart"; Gets the hard question right, people think "She was lucky" SES stereotype by itself didn't directly create judgment

Memorial Confirmation of Expectancies - Snyder & Uranowitz (1978)

There was always something funny about her Participants read long narrative about Betty K One week later, told she is either heterosexual or a lesbian When lesbiain label, participants asked for memory of narrative: Remember more expectancy-constituent information Didn't like dresses No steady boyfriend Liked sports Make more expectancy-consistent errors; Remembered she had short hair or abusive father Inserted things that weren't there More liekly to say she had these things if she had lesbian label Reinterpreted expectancy-inconsistent information: If remembered she went on dates She was "trying to pass" Once you have this stereotype → there was always something funny about her It is the current situation that is biassing memory from the past Didn't notice at the time → "oh yeah it makes sense now"

Morality as evolved intuitions to suppress selfishness - Haidt TED Talk on self-transcendence

Think of the mind like a house with many rooms, but then an unfamiliar door appears. We climb the staircase, and experience self-transcendence. Bradly "met" God, then wanted to die. He felt like the world wasn't meant for him. He used to be selfish and self-righteous. He grew a forgiving heart and could forgive his enemies. Religions use dancing, drugs, and meditation to transcend War brings people together- transcendence (my -> our I -> we) Durkheim called us homo duplex "two-level man:" propane/ordinary and level of the sacred He believed function of religion was to unite people Is the staircase a feature of evolution or a mistaken system? How could it be adaptive to overcome self-interest? Darwin noted many of our virtues are of little use to us, but great to our groups Selfish people cannot cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be effective Competition within groups and across group If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem, cooperation can not sustain It's simple: put people in the same boat Once several wasps belonged to the same hive, they were forced to cooperative It happened again with people in tribes Communal interest requires us to become a whole We evolved to be religious: we evolved to see sacredness around us and join with others around these sacred ideas/activities Politics are both self-interested and cooperative Modern secular society was built to satisfy the sacred levels People are not purely selfish, they long to belong and cooperate

racial prejudice is not plausibly evolved (pp.350-352)

This essentialism persists despite: (a) the dearth of biological evidence validating the genetics of racial groupings as currently, socially defined (b) the lack of evidence for an evolutionary predisposition to encode race automatically common wisdom often assumes that racial prejudice is a hard-wired adaptation to alien social groups yet the differentiation of other people as racial ingroup or outgroup does not fit a plausible evolutionary explanation encoding systems could easily have adapted to detect natural kinds that differ both perceptually and in their underlying shared properties. This encoding system plausibly could be recruited to respond to human physical differences socially defined as racial differences as if they were natural kinds Race detection might also be the by-product of sensitivity to distinct social groups and their coalitions Race encoding is not mandatory, but socially constructed cues to coalitions (ingroups and outgroups) may racial judgments operate by various routes, first via a categorical route (phenotype); via a single feature (skin tone) combined with relevant cues; via a configuration of race-related features; from individual race-related features associated with stereotypic traits

The "Up" and "Down" sides of Schematic Processing

Up side of schematic processing: provide continuity to experience -direct attention to relevant stimuli and disambiguate ambiguous stimuli, helps guide behavior in functional ways Down Side of schematic processing: leads to inherent conservation of experience-cognitive inertia -direct attention away from schema-inconsistent information and bias perception of ambiguous stimuli -schema-consistent

The bogus diagnosis paradigm - Jemmott et al (1986)

When given that everything else is equal to negative diagnosis, they think it is a less accurate test Expectancy problem leads to irrational reasoning

Sacred Value Protection Model 1) Quantity Insensitivity 2) Taboo trade-offs

When sacred values come under secular assault, people struggle to protect their private selves and public identities from moral contamination by the impure thoughts and deeds implied in the taboo proposals. Quantity Insensitivity: Sacred objects violate economic logic - ∞ value Taboo trade-offs- sacred & profane (lives for $): Money makes things worse -- Ginges et al 2007; Convert to Profane-profane or Sacred-Sacred (Tragic)

Expectancy Confirmation Processes

When we expect something to occur, cognitive and behavioral processes lead us to perceive the world in a way that confirms our expectations Once beliefs are established, they have a self-fulfilling quality -- affect (bias) processing of incoming information. But people fail to realize this (naive realism) & so provides powerful subjective confirmation of prior beliefs.

Weakness of Will & Visceral Influences on Judgment

Why do people do things that they almost immediately regret? -Things they "know" to be risky or wrong Strong Arousal/Desire -Sex, hunger, drug cravings The paradox of akrasia (Aristotle, 4th Century B.C.E.) Idea that people do things that they know are wrong Sensory cues (sights, smells) indicating proximity to objects of desire Mischel: Delay of Gratification Loewenstein (1996) Behavior more impulsive in the presence of visceral cues People don't recognize power of visceral cues

Perceptual Confirmation - Rosenhan (1973), Duncan (1976)

expectancies influence the perception of ambiguous stimuli perfectly rational and functional process, can bias people to see "what they expect to see" Rosenhan (1973): study how much of mental illness was a social construct by examining how does the label "insane" affect perception of behaviors Normal behaviors perceived as mental illness, pseudopatients behavior interpreted bc they were admitted On being sane in insane places Duncan (1976): The Ambiguous Shove study in which exactly same behaviors were perceived differently based on race Interpret ambiguous info with the expectancies, biases and prior knowledge The tendency to attribute negative behavior of members of an outgroup to internal factors and therefore perpetuate stereotypes

Behavioral Confirmation (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy)

expectancy affects behavior toward "target" which leads "target" to behave in expectancy-consistent way-objective confirmation Perceptual confirmation occurs without interaction-passive perceiver Active player as you create the behavior you expect

ingroup favoritism

exploits the relative advantage of ingroup over outgroup, even to the detriment of self and own group's absolute outcomes. people even sacrifice their own and their ingroup's absolute outcomes to maintain relative differences

complexity-extremity hypothesis

focuses on affective consequences of informational intricacy People evaluate outgroup members (low complexity) more extremely than ingroup members (high complexity), all else being equal. theory predicts that the greater the complexity of a schema, the more moderate the affect it typically elicits obtains in the absence of public commitment refers to initial evaluations at one point in time

Motivated Memory - Sanitioso et al (1990)

informed subjects that a given trait (extraversion or introversion) is linked with success (experimenters instilled success). asked to list memories of past behaviors that reflected their standing on the extro-intro dimension. If you say people are more introverted are smarter, they recall more introverted behaviours, and list them quicker If you say people who are more extroverted are smarter, they recall more extroverted behaviors, list them first and quicker Realistically motivated enhancement caused by reality. Systematic bias in memory, and one way in which our goals influence our behaviour Search mem with same kinds of bias towards positive impressions of self When there is a mismatch between expectation and reality, the same bias can be exhibited. (as when subjects were random but within a constraint)

Socialization

learning the norms, values, and beliefs of a culture Selective exposure and group polarization Residential "safe spaces" (sorting)

social dominance orientation

measures individual differences in preference for hierarchy within any social system & domination over lower-status groups; belief that society should be hierarchically structured by power & status legitimates and maintains existing intergroup relations. highlights the role of people's beliefs in a hierarchy that frequently advantages their own group's position High on SDO possess power and control, low on SDO help those on the bottom rungs of society

Three forces of Polarization

moralization, factualization, socialization

Living wills as institutionalized affective forecasting

people predict when healthy what kinds of medical treatment they will want when they are very ill

. Implications of Affective Forecasting Research for End-of-Life Decision Making

people predict when healthy what kinds of medical treatment they will want when they are very ill in the hypothetical scenario of CPR predicted desire was low but the actual patient desire was high

Moralization

political tribalism, understand the moral psychology of the opposing sides of our currently raging culture war

stereotype content model

stereotypes along with the two fundamental dimensions warmth/trustworthiness and capability/agency result from structural relations between groups Perceived competition for societal resources predicts warmth stereotypes Highly competitive-not warm; warm-less competitive Perceived status predicts competence stereotypes High in status- high competence; low in status- low competence High warmth & low competence: pity (low competitiveness and low status), ex. Disabled, elderly Low warmth & low competence: contempt (highly competitive & low status), ex. Poor, homeless Low warmth & high competence: envy ( highly competitive and high status), ex. Very rich High warm & high competence: admiration (low competitiveness & high status), ex. middle-class

minimal intergroup paradigm

the base conditions for the experience of belonging in a group and then to add progressively realistic conditions until biases emerged proposes that the minimal condition for group biases is simply being a member of a group. Has shown that irrelevant and arbitrary distribution into groups can cause individuals to favor their group over others and show prejudice towards members of other group

hostile vs. benevolent sexism

two factors of Ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996, 2001) hostile sexism resents women who pursue nontraditional roles, gaining respect but forfeiting affection benevolent sexism cherishes women who stay within prescribed gender roles, gaining protection but forgoing respect

Motivated skepticism - Ditto & Lopez (1992)

we are skeptical of evidence that goes against what we want to believe despite the strength of the evidence.

Black also affects Behavior

•Subjects put into teams with black or white uniforms and asked to pick games they'd most like to play •Black uniforms lead subjects to choose aggressive-sounding games ("chicken fights", "dart gun duel") vs. nonaggressive-sounding games ("block stacking", "putting contest")