WEEK 1: SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS AND MISPERCEPTIONS

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WEEK 1: Social Perceptions and Misperceptions

Psychological Construction of Reality

Confirmation Bias

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Thin Slices - Social Judgments in the Blink of an Eye

What Other People Think of YOU!

1. Psychological Construction of Reality

We don't all share the same perception of life

Our experience of reality is psychologically constructed

We see what we expect to see and don't see what we don't expect to see

E.g. Princton/Dartmouth Football Game - what the crowd saw differed - it simply wasn't the same "thing" they were seeing (game, President, Spinach etc)

Richard Wiseman.com card trick - change blindness

Green grass picture example - question before - any chance you can turn this grass green?Perceptions combine what is going on in our heads and what is going on in the world

2. Confirmation Bias

Peter Watson's 4 card problem - A,D,4,7 - even = vowel. To test if lying, flip 4 & 7

preference for information that is consistent with a preconception

Disease and symptom - look at all 4 cells to confirm correlation and look at % across the table, not down

When groups of people interact they have expectations which don't receive a fair test

Confirmation biases preserve and strengthen social expectations and stereotypes

Social expectations affect both the person holding the expectation and the other side as well

3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

social expectation impact the person about whom the expectation is held - becomes self-fulfilling

Defined by Robert Merton in 1948 - a misconception that later becomes true

Rosenthal & Jacobson Pygmalion Effect - school experiment identified "bloomers" at random but they subsequently became bloomers - not all and not by much by statistically significant

Political science "Security Dilemma" - arming up in anticipation of war - e.g. WWI - mispections of aggression and can't test without a control group - therefore never know for sure

"Behavioural Confirmation" - people's social expectations lead them to act in a way that causes others to confirm these expectations - Reaction Time contest - beliefs can create reality

All cases of behavioral confirmation involve self-fulfilling prophecies, but not all self-fulfilling prophecies involve behavioral confirmation

4. Thin Slicing - Social Judgement's in the Blink of an Eye

social perception influenced by context effects, change blindness, confirmation bias etc, BUT can also work with surprising efficiency - thin slicing!

thin slicing discovered from meta-analysis - 5 minutes of behavior judgement was just as accurate

5. What Other People Think of You

The Human Zoo - interview and forming an impression

takes 5 seconds to form an impression

8 positive interactions to erase a single bad one

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