Karteikarten
Social Lecture 8 Flashcards
Karten in diesem Stapel (18)
- 1The Self 1: Making life easier, better and more positive.Example from Moskowitz:
-Jo decides to bottle feed her children.
-We all breast fed our children so feel negative towards Jo.
- However, Jo argues she's researched and found flaws in evidence for breast feeding.
- We find evidence to back up our argument and this is known as expectancy confirmation bias.
- We tend to defend ourselves when under attack.
- So, when firmly committed to an action, we find it difficult to see someone elses view, as we want to preserve our valid decision. - 2Desire to see the self in positive termsSome suggest there is something faulty with the way we process info, but there's more to it.
Subjective biases arising from our desires and needs - high self-esteem, control and affiliation.
Tend to see ourselves as better than others e.g. more moral.
There is something in us that protects and defends when we receive negative info. - 3Terms we use to describe thisPositivity bias
Ego-protection
Self-esteem enhancement
Positive illusions
Moskowitz (2005) - we are motivated to enhance the positivity of our self conceptions and to protect the self from negative information. - 4Positive IllusionsIt's healthy to see the self in positive terms (until it becomes delusional)
Three categories:
I. Unrealistically positive self-views
II. Unrealistic optimism
III. Exaggerated perceptions of personal control. - 5Unrealistic positive views of the selfWe have self-serving bias
We have a tendency to take credit for our successes and blame the situation for our failures.
How we explain our behaviour differentiates and optimism bias increases over time. - 6Example of Unrealistic positive views of the self"static built up from my thick jumper and caused the printer I was using to print my essay to malfunction"
Relating this to attribution:
Positive illusions happen because:
- We attribute our own negative outcomes to the situation but...
Positive outcomes are viewed as arising from dispositional and stable causes.
We want to protect our ego from assault.
Cognitive factors play a role, as we expect to have more successes than failures. When success happens the expectancy is confirmed. There's a collision of expectancy and reality. So the success is encoded in memory.
People who have this attribution: Are more likely to stick to tasks in future.
Are more likely to get back to work after unemployment.
Tend to be more popular. - 7Stevens and Jones (1976)Wanted to assess how pps attribute their successes and failures.
Asked pps to do a task and gave false feedback about their performance. Some pps got positive and some negative.
Second IV was consensus info: when they were told they performed badly he either told them most other people perform like this or barely anyone does.
He then wanted to see how pps attributed their successes and failures, asked them to share 100 points between ability, effort, task difficulty and luck.
He found success = personal ability; failure = bad luck; most extreme when blow to self-esteem and consensus was to do well. (18% personal ability, 40% luck). - 8Motivated scepticismWe tend to seek out or discount information that does or does not confirm our expectancies.
Usually, feedback that is positive is delivered first, then something we can improve on, before ending with positive feedback. - 9How are we sheltered from damaging feedback?1. Feedback is typically positive, or if negative, sugar coated - receiving neg feedback can lead us to stop persevering because it affects our self esteem.
2. We choose friends with similar views - this maximises opportunity for expectancy feedback.
3. We tend to see ambiguous feedback in most positive light for us (ignore it if unambiguous and negative).
4. We opt to denigrate source of negative feedback- we often try to discredit the person who is giving us negative feedback. - 10Cognitive dissonance reductionLots of students smoke. When we're told its bad for us we can:
a) pretend its not happening and ignore the info.
b) accept inconsistency
c) try to reduce discrepancy. - 11How do different people react to negative info?How it affects people depends on their resting levels of self-esteem.
It'll affect people with high self-esteem more because there's a bigger gap between what you expect about yourself and the feedback. - 12How to reduce dissonance that involves the self?Eliminate negative behaviour that is causing dissonance - not always easy e.g. give up smoking.
Justify/rationalise discrepant act to accommodate undesirable behaviour.
How? next card. - 13How? Bluffers guide to rationalisation1. Seek cognitions consistent with discrepancy - I smoke but so did my aunt and she smoked 60 a day, living until 80.
2. Change your attitude so two cognitions not discrepant - not all research shows a link between smoking and illness.
3. Affirm sense of self as positive in other related domains - I smoke but I donate to cancer charities.
4. Trivalization - yes I smoke but I could be knocked over by a bus tomorrow. - 14Defensive pessimism and self-handicappingPeople who do this expect the worse so they can rationalise their failure. These people usually motivated to over-prepare, to prevent the failure from happening. But is being pessimistic really protecting the self? There's a lack of empirical evidence.
Self-handicapping = doing something to increase chance of failure, to have a good excuse for it - get drunk before exam.
This helps us to preserve our sense of self. - 15Unrealistic optimismWe don't like to think negative events will happen to us. Is good until this becomes delusional optimism, can cause people to overlook the facts.
- 16Kunda (1987) - Motivated inferenceCame up with biased theory generation. Wanted to look at tendency to engage in unrealistic future views and understand why.
Wanted pps to assess own attributes, how these relate to future event (marriage) and their success at marriage.
She gave pps scenario to read about a married or divorced man or woman. They were also given other info such as were extrovert/introvert.
Then asked to assess attributes about themselves - the likelihood of them getting divorced themselves.
DV: how much attributes affected outcome.
They found shared attributes promoted good marriage. And pps therefore saw their chances of getting divorced to be 20% even though national average is 50%/
Overall: you are more critical about info that has negative implications for you, more accepting of info that favours you. - 17Kunda (1987)Found caffeine consumption and links to fictitious disease linked to breast cancer.
High caffeine users were under threat, so said they didn't believe info.
Caveat: positive illusions can help preserve mental health, but increase poor physical health. - 18Predictions of a bright future.People seem inaccurate at predicting impact of positive and negative events.
Example - tend to think positive events will bring far greater and long lasting joy than they do (failure to accurately gauge impact, duration and power).
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- Karteikarten am Social Lecture 8 Flashcards, erstellt von Hanna Bourne am 19/11/2016.
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- Hanna Bourne
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