SA #6: The Totalitarian Ego

What is analogous to finding a book in a library?

Reexperiencing a prior cognition

on tasks that are personally important, we expect to...

improve on successive performances

Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker provided the first of several demonstrations that information is especially well remembered if the person considers the relation of information to...

self at the time of initial experience

Characteristics that seem undesirable in a political system can nonetheless serve adaptively in...

a personal organization of knowledge

Importance of the topic can sometimes facilitate change, but involvement may be associated more with...

a post persuasion judgment than with the pretest

There is a strong correlation between obtained grade and belief the exam was...

a proper measure

Normals differ from depressives along the beneffectance dimension in a way consistent with the hypothesis of...

a relationship between beneffectance and effective performance

Overconfidence in memory is due at least in part to...

a selective search of memory for evidence that confirms what has been recalled

Behavioral perseverance characteristic of an organization processing the beneffectance is ___________

a survival asset

Epstein extended Kelly's analysis in presenting the view that what we call self is, in effect...

a theory about oneself

Few studies have observed egocentricity, beneffectance, or conservatism in conjunction with....

a variation of ego involvement biases are enhanced by tits presence tho

The article argues a) ego, or self is an ... b) ego is characterized by ____________ strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies c) these totalitarian-ego biases function to...

a) organization of knowledge b) cognitive biases c) preserve organization in cognitive structures

Although procedures for self-awareness and ego-involvement do not resemble each other, the similarity of these mental states is suggested by....

a) their similiar cognitive consequences (increase cognitive consistency and beneffectance) b) attention to ideal/perceived self discrepancies

Students who do well are willing to...; those who do poorly are unwilling to...

accept credit for success accept responsibility for failure, instead seeing the exam (or the instructor) as being insensitive to their abilities

Johnston demonstrated this effect by having subjects believe themselves to be members of two-person teams performing a skilled task (compensatory tracking). Subjects received only team feedback, which indicated that they and their partner, as a team, were performing below average, average, or above average at the tracking skill. Subjects...

accepted credit for the good scores, but assigned most of the blame for the poor scores to their assumed partners

Harvey Harris and Barnes induced some subjects, who were playing the role of teachers, to administer (apparently) severe shocks, while others believed themselves to be adminstering only mild shocks. Subject-teachers....

accorded themselves less responsibility for their learners' apparent distress when the shocks appeared to be severe than when they were mild Additionally, third-person observers saw the teachers as more responsible for the learners' severe distress than did the subject-teachers themselves

A successful paradigm...

accounts for an increasing range of phenomena ("paradigm-centricity"), credits itself with confirmed, rather than disconfirmed hypotheses, and preserves the integrity of its theoretical constructs

Depressives appraised their degree of control over probabilistic outcomes more________ than did normals

accurately (normals overestimate control)

Information is better remembred the more the person plays a/an _________ role

active rather than passive

To scientists the results gained in normal research are significant because they...

add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied

Once a commitment has been made to a specific cataloging scheme, it may be more efficient to maintain consistency with that scheme than to...

allocate librarian effort to revising it (recataloging and reshelving the existing collection) every time an improved indexing or retrieval system becomes available

The potential competitors for this niche are...

alternative cognitive forms, which could be organizations lacking the totalitarian-ego biases or possibly even non-organizations

Depressives' self-evaluations agreed more with ___________ than did those of normals

observers' ratings

Ego, as an organization of knowledge, serves the functions of... It can be characterized therefore, as...

observing (perceiving) and recording (remembering) personal experience A personal historian

The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but _____________

organization

Egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism are indications of...

organization in extrahuman knowledge domains

The biases are interpreted as manifestations of an effectively functioning _____________

organization of knowledge

Totalitarian propaganda and scientific theory are assumed to be unarguable classified as _____________________-

organizations of knowledge

The other side of Jervis's thesis

overperception of self as an intended target of another's action

Overperception of self as an intended target of another's actions is a definig characteristic of _________

paranoia

Object conservation

permanency or perceptual constancy the fundamental cognitive achievement of a conservative nature, followed somewhat later by assimilation

Subjects selectively recalled information that confirmed experimentally established...

positive or negative self-expectations

Totalitarian-ego biases succeed intrapsychically because they... and behaviorally

preserve the cognitive organization in which they exist and that they succeed behaviorally because they facilitate goal attainment via perseverance in goal seeking

Biases help to

preserve the knowledge system's organization and allow it to link efectively with behavior

Ego-involvement

procedures that are assumed to activate ego processes, usually by attaching a sense of personal importance on the part of a subjecto to an experimental task e.g. informed a task yields reliable measure of intelligence

Winston Smith

protagonist - daily revision of history in the office of the Ministry of Truth

We are especially attracted to, and therefore may seek out, people who...

provide us a pattern of improving evaluations

Egocentricity and conservatism biases may provide a "protective belt" that preserves...

the "hard core" belief that all of one's memory is the interrelated experience of a single entity - the one called MYSELF

Resistance to change of prior judgements is especially strong when...

the topic is important to the person and there is some commitment (ego-involvement in) the prior position

The present analysis complements motivational and informational explanations of cognitive bias by focusing on the role of...

the totalitarian-ego organization in facilitating its own continued existence

Normal science's object is to solve a puzzle for whose very existence..

the validity of the paradigm must be assumed

Brenner found that in a group setting, subjects focused on.... (performance)

their own performance at the expense of retaining information from the just preceding or just following performances of others

Psychologists are strongly inclined to disregard research results inconsistent with...

their theoretical hypotheses

The three cognitive biases correspond disturbingly to...

thought control and propaganda devices that are considered to be defining characteristics of a totalitarian political system

Why do we engage in egocentric biases? Enhancement theories:

to protect self-esteem; engaging in biased processes so that I feel better about myself

The cognitive biases can also be found in the operation of two types of systems:

totalitarian society scientific theory

The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only...

under a totalitarian regime

Schlenker and Miller demonstrated a similarly strong bias in a knowledge-test group task, even when...

using a form of group feedback that provided enough information for subjects to have made more accurate inferences about their individual performances

When team feed back was "average", subjects...

were inclined to assume that this must have resulted from a combination of their own better than average performance with the person's worse than average performance

Subjects were induced to choose to write an essay opposing that opinion (university curriculum or student control). The counterattitudinal role playing reliably produces opinion change in the direction of the role-played position - in this case averaging about 10 points on a 60 point single item rating scale. The subjects showed a recall error that average about 10 points. In effect...

"Remembering" opinions that agreed with what their post-role-playing opinions should have been, rather than with what their pretest opinions actually were.

Wicklund and Brehm accorded _______________ a central role in dissonance theory Greenwald and Ronis suggested this was equivalent to an assertion that...

"personal responsibility" dissonance reduction occurs only when there is some cognitive involvement of self

cognitive conservatism

Resistance to cognitive change

A variety of cognitive biases can be grouped into three categories:

1. egocentricity 2. beneffectance 3. conservatism

Dissonance likely to be aroused to the extent that...

the potentially dissonant cognitions were important to the person (as a result, much research done under conditions of high ego involvement)

Why do we engage in egocentric biases? Consistency theories :

to maintain consistency of our beliefs (we don't want to be wrong or contradicted)

Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian consideration

to make their predictions come true

2 generic explanations for egocentric biases

1. In order to be consistent (consistency theories) 2. To feel better (self enhancement theories)

Deutsch, Krauss, and Rosenau deliberately varied ego-involvement and found that...

"dissonance did not seem to occur in the low involvement condition"

Jervis, a political scientist, presents an analysis of egocentric misperceptions in international politics. These involve a decision maker unreasonably perceiving the act of a foreign nation as being either....

(a) made in response to a prior act of the decision maker (illusion of control) OR (b) made with the intent of eliciting some response from the decision maker

How does intrapsychic evolution proceed compared to genetic evolution?

Rapidly (within the period of formation of the individual personality)

What do people do to memory in situations for which this seems dubiously appropriate?

Rapidly rewrite or fabricate

Examples of informational interpretations are those stated in terms of...

- perceived covariation - correspondent inference - focus of attention - perception of contingency - selective transmission of favorable information

Ego's cognitive biases are pervasive in and characteristic of _______ personalities

normal

Egocentric Biases

I'm going to interpret information that's out there in the world regarding my self-interest May end up ignoring stuff contrary to self-interest Keep to self humiliations I have experienced today "Self enhancing" biases "Self protective biases" All of these things have to do with perception, interpretation, memory, attribution, etc

What are the ego's cognitive biases?

1) Ego-centricity 2) "Beneffectance" 3) Cognitive Conservatism

What is the survival criterion in intrapsychic evolution? (compared to reproduction in genetic evolution)

A cognition (percept, category, proposition, etc.) survives by being know. REcognized.

Subjects who received feedback indicative of team success felt responsible AND performed better on the tracking task than did subjects who received feedback of repeated poor performance. Johnston attributed the performance deterioration of the latter subjects to...

a decline in morale associated with their declining self-evaluation

The breakdown of this belief is considered...

a pathological condition (in the forms of multiple personality, amnesia, fugue, or depersonalization)

Totalitarian Ego paper

Anthony Greenwald

Self-Affirmation Theory (Steele)

If you experience a threat to your self in one specific domain, then you will instead focus on success in a different, separate domain Example: I am a good chef and I am a good runner If I ran 10k in over 70 minutes, I will focus on how good I am at cooking Sometimes this shift may be temporary, sometimes longlasting "I quit running! Too much time commitment" Sometimes you attempt to escape your self/consciousness Self-medicating through drugs/alcohol

These biases are enhanced by...

Procedures believed to increase ego's role in cognition (i.e. by ego-involvement)

All scientific research progammes may be characterized by their 'hard core'... We must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent 'auxillary hypotheses', which form a protective belt around this core... It is this protective belt of auxillary hypotheses which has to..

Bear the brunt of testes and get adjusted and readjusted or even completely replaced to defend the thus-hardened core

Cognitive response process

Complex form of confirmation bias Involves not only selective retrieval from memory of information that supports existing opinion but also active construction of new arguments required to refute novel, opinion-opposing arguments

Mishcel, Ebbesen, and Zeiss found that subjects selectively examined available information to...

Confirm experimentally established positive or negative self-expectations

Self-Verification Theory (Swann)

Consistency theory that if you see yourself in a particular way you will surround yourself with people who agree with you and who will verify your idea of your self "People would prefer to be known than to be adored" Reactions of high self-esteem people align with both enhancement and consistency theories

The ego/self uses three cognitive biases to maintain self-esteem and confirm info:

Egocentricity : tendency to record events in terms of the person, focus on self as an axis of cause and effect Beneffectance : belief in yourself as the origin of good effects but not bad ones Cognitive conservatism : preservation of existing knowledge structures through confirmation bias and rewriting memory

The "new, improved" product example

Differs from its predecessor mainly in packaging design, or the corporation annual report in which accountants reorganize last year's data

The three biases are found in actively functioning

Higher level organizations of knowledge

What is Greenwald trying to do?

Import totalitarianism to think about the mind, government spending overtime to control information to which you are exposed and also to whatever information you are exposed to make sure that it is biased in favor of the stat What he's trying to say is those processes are what we're all engaging in about our own sense of self (automatically) Introduces information biases, end up ignoring things that are inconsistent, processing things that are very consistent If I have particular vies of myself and i see contradictory information, I'm just not gonna see it, or if i do see it i will reframe/reinterpret in a biased way such that it doesn't make me feel hideous/casts me in better light If I see myself positively, and I get this information out there about myself that's negative, one thing i might do is reject that negative information or reinterpret so its not so negative

What does the ego do to history?

It fabricates and revises it

Fischoff's __________________ effect and Bem and McConnel's ________________finding are perfect illustrations of the paradoxical combination Orwell had in mind

Knew-it-all-along Misrecall-of-prior-opinion

Costs of biases' predilection for fabrication and revision of history

Knowledge system must sometimes operate with out-of-date or inaccurate information

Is belief perserverance only in opinions?

No, factual memory too

Paranoia

One sees oneself as the intended victim of actually benign others

Change being perceived when none has actually occurred takes place when...

People compare their past versus present selves on evaluative dimensions

Beneffectance

Perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes

As with the library, such consistency of encoding over time...

Preserves access to already stored information in a growing organization of knowledge

Manifestations of egocentricity

Self-reference and self-generation as facilitators of memory and the illusion of control CONCEPTUALY CLOSE TO THE NOTION OF EGO INVOLVEMENT

How fast were the cars going when they SMASHED vs HIT each other?

Smashes results in remembering greater speed

Asking if the car passed the red datsun while stopped at the stop sign can result in...

Ss asserting that there was a stop sign (when it was a yield sign)

Ss answered questions by assigning a probability of correctness to one of two alternative answers. Some first informed of the correct answers and then asked to indicate the probability judgements they would have given had they not first been told. Results?

Ss substantially overestimated their prior knowledge of correct answers, as indicated b comparison of their judgments with correctness-probability judgments of naive subjects

Vicarious (sympathetic) beneffectance Students after foorball game

Students showed more evidence of identifying with their university, in the form of wearing clothing that displayed the university affiliation, in Monday classes after a Saturday football victory than in ones following a loss Also more likely to use first-person for win "we won", than loss "they lost"

Illusion of control

Takes the form of people seeing their behavior as capable of influencing outcomes that are, objectively determined by chance

Conservatism

The disposition to preserve that which is already established

Explain Luchin finding

The first paragraph establishes an impression of the target person and the subject then interprets the second paragraph with a confirmation bias that tends to negate its independent, opposing effect

doublethink

The power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.

Primacy (confirmation bias)

The relative potency of information received early in a description

Zeigarnik effect Exceptions?

The tendency to recall uncompleted tasks better than completed ones. Exceptions among subjects who felt they had performed poorly on the interrupted tasks

The chief qualification of a mass leader

Unending infallibility, he can never admit an error

The fabrication of memory seemed to be accomplished with the same ease with which we...

Unthinkingly nod agreement in response to conversational references to past events ("You remember last year, when we were talking at...") whether the referred-to event ever took place

Beneffectance in group settings

When a task is performed collectively by members of a group, individual-ability feedback may not be available. This provides free regin for people to believe that they have contributed more than their equal share toward a group success but less than an equal share toward a failure

When a subject is being asked to remember, very often the first thing that emerges is something of the nature of________. The recall is then....

an attitude A construction, made largely on the basis of this attitude, and its general effect, is that of justification for the attitude

A bias that resists change in knowledge (the conservatism bias) prolongs the life of...

an incorrect theory

The thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism act to preserve knowledge organizations leads to the proposal of...

an intrapsychic analog of genetic evolution, which in turn provides an alternative to prevalent motivational and informational interpretations of cognitive biases

When asked to give answers to difficult general information questions and then asked them to estimate the probability of correctness of their answers, people tend to...

be overly confident in estimating their correctness

Self-enhancement is a component of __________ and is just slightly less obviously so for __________

beneffectance cognitive conservatism

Reduced level of effective action associated with depression could be a consequence of depressives' lack of a _____________

beneffectance bias

Beneffectance is a compound of...

beneficence (doing good) and effectance (competence)

Ego-involvement causes _______ memory

better

Most people believe that the present is... and that the future..

better than the past will be better still

Confirmation bias in information search Snyder and Swann showed that hen asked to determine if an interviewee was, say, an introvert, subject-interviewers selections questions that were...

biased toward the introvert hypothesis

Although motivational and informational interpretations have sometimes been formulated as antagonists - as in the dissonance theory versus self-perception theory debate and in the interpretations of cognitive bias by Miller and Ross and Bradley - the two classes of explanations can _________

coexist

Self and scientific theory resemble each other in sharing....

cognitive biases - the same ones that characterize totalitarian thought control

Orwell's characterizations of thought control at the totalitarian-society level could stand as a summary of....

cognitive biases at the individual-person level

Snyder and Uranowitz found a similar memory selectivity in their subjects' retrieving information about a target person so as to...

confirm a recently established belief about that person's sexual orientation (hetero vs homo)

The self acts like a totalitarian regime →

controlling information to preserve the system's existing knowledge structure

People sometimes arrange excuses or hedges ("self-handicapping") so as to....

create a situation in which actual performance is likely to improve upon expectation

Total domination is possible only if...

each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions

People sometimes require overly optimistic/pessimistic subjective probabilities to goad them into...

effective action or prevent dangerous action

It is consistent with Bandura's theory to conclude that the likelihood of effective performance may be greater for a person whose...

efficacy expectations are generally inflated (i.e. a person with a beneffectance bias) than for one whose expectations may be more objectively accurate

The finding has variously been labeled....

ego-defensive, self-serving, egocentric, or egotistic

Egocentricity is

ego-involvement

Egocentricity encompasses the notion that...

events are only important ot the extent that one's self is involved

The past is remembered as if it were a drama in which self was the leading player. In part, this observation refers to the autobiographical or episodic character of much of memory -- the tendency for...

events to be encoded and recorded in terms of the person's location at the time of original experience

Normal science seems an attempt to...

force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies

Allport suggesteed when there is ego-involvement, there are _______________. When there is no ego-involvement there are no ___________.

genereal traits This hypothesis never received a strong test

Intrapsychic evolution cannot proceed in total independence of ______________

genetic evolution

People perceive themselves readily as the origin of ______ effects and reluctantly as the origin of _____ effects

good ill

Winston Smith's "victory over himself"

his loss of individuality, his complete subservience to the state

proclivity to take credit more for success than for failure is greater the more ________ these outcomes are to the subject

important

The incorporation of self into the causal structure of events reveals a tendency to...

impose ego-involvement onto event perception

The totalitarian state, as a center of cognitive organization, suberts and preempts knowledge organization at the ___________ level

individual-person

Ross and Sicoly, investigating egocentric processes in group settings, in addition to confirming Brenner's finding of people remembering best their own contributions to a group effort, also found that...

individuals accepted more responsibility for a group product than other participants attributed to them

Cognitive conservatism is bias that incorporates a sense of personal _________

infallibility

Motivational forces are organism-__________ and informational forces are organism-________

internal external

In the "intrapsychic evolution" type of explanation, cognitive-system characteristics such as the totalitarian ego biases cannot become pervasive unless they achieve a criterion of...

intrapsychic survival

Zajonc suggested that the emphasis on volition in the Brehm and Cohen presentation of dissonance theory is equivalent to an assumption that...

involvement of self is important to dissonance arousal

Ego-involvement reveals ________________ in the form of cognitive consistency

knowledge interdependencies

Persuasive impact is readily predictable from...

knowledge of the target's prior opinion - people tend to reject messages that disagree with their prior opinions, while being accepting of messages hat reinforce existing opinions (cognitive response process)

The role of totalitarian-ego biases in facilitating intrapsychic survival (recognition) can be understood by demonstrating their function in...

maintaining the cognitive organization of which they are part

Existing theoretical interpretations of cognitive biases attribute causal efficacy either to... or to...

motivational forces informational forces

Motivational explanations interpret cognitive biases as occurring in the service of...

motives or needs

Examples of motives that have been hypothesized to account for some portion of the totalitarian-ego biases are...

needs for cognitive consistency, self-esteem, belief in a just world, effective control, subjective competence, and social approval

The behavior of subjects, inappropriate as it is from the standpoint of rationality in the inferential contexts studied, may arise from...

pursuit of important, higher order epistemic goals such as a) importance of stability to beliefs/belief-systems and b) real-world constraints on time

People's readiness to rewrite memory permits new information to be...

received and incorporated into the cognitive system without the system's registering the occurence of change (this correction'updating od memory does not disrupt the sense of infallibility)

The workings of a library provide a useful analogy to the process of...

recognition

In a totally fictitious world (e.g. totalitarian society), failures need not be..

recorded, admitted, and remembered

Kuhn and Lakatos have proposed that the predispositin to confirm existing theoretical beliefs is pervasively characteristic of...

research behavior of scientists

The thesis of an analogy between the cognitive operations of the human personality and ____________ was developed by Kelly in The Psychology of Personal Constructs

scientific theory construction

ego-centricity

self as the focus of knowledge

The three totalitarian-ego biases are interrelated in their bearing on _________

self esteem

Self-awareness is induced by...

self-focusing manipulations (including presence of a mirror, camera, tape recorder, audience, or sound of one's own voice)

Aronson presented a version of dissonance theory in which the centrality of _______________ was explicitly suggested

self-relevant cognitions

By retaining previously used cognitive categories, the conservatism bias ensures that...

similar information encountered at different points in time is encoded into the same categories

In a library, success in locating a book requires that the organization existing at the time of shelving the book still be in existence at the time of searching for it. Recognition, similarly, should be facilitated by...

stability of the organization of memory

Self-awareness

state in which one's attention is focused on oneself, such that discrepancies between actual and ideal self become salient

Selective recall of ________

success

The evolutionary interpretation of the totalitarian-ego biases starts from the observation of their pervasiveness, which serves as an index of their survival value; it proceeds to consider why cognitive systems that contain these biases may...

survive better than do ones that lack them

Beneffectance is thus the tendency to...

take credit for success while denying responsibility for failure

Bem and McConnell showed that subjects in this role-playing procedure usually had no awareness of the opinion change that had occurred. These results can be viewed as a laboratory model of...

the behavior of politicians who declare themselves as having always supported a previously unpopular policy that has just recently proven wise

In either case they are external to...

the cognitive organization being explained

The sense in which ego is conceived as an organization of knowledge can then be considered by way of analogy to...

the cognitive-organizational aspects of totalitarianism and scientific theory

A form of belief in personal infallibility is evident in...

the confirmation biases that operate in information and memory search an din response to persuasion attempts

Cognitive conservatism is not being put forth as an absolute virtue. The gains of a new conceptualization (cognitive change) are to be set off against...

the costs of repairing the organization that is damaged by the change

Cognitive conservatism

the disposition to preserve existing knowledge structures, such as percepts, schemata (categories), and memories

Informational explanations suggest that biases are communicated to the person by...

the environment

In the library, book finding is possible because of the existence of an organized system for shelving books and recording the locations of shelved books. By this analogy...

the existence of organization in human memory should be an aid to recognition

Assimilation

the fitting of new events into existing cognitive classifications, or category conservation

The parallels between these knowledge systesms and ego suggest...

the go has comparable organizational status and the totalitarian ego biases generally signal the existence of an actively functioning organization

The domain in which the totalitarian-ego organization develops is...

the individual nervous system

Luchin's 1957 finding: The impression resulting from two somewhat contradictory person-descriptive paragraphs varies sharply as a function of...

the order in which they are presented, being guided more by the first of the two

Rosenzweig and Glixman established the importance of this exception to the usually Zeigarnik effect by showing...

when interruption of performance was a signal of personal failure and completion was a signal of success, the effect was reversed - successful (completed) tasks were remembered better than were failed (interrupted) ones; that is, memory supported an association of self with success more than with failure