PSYC 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Boston Fire Department, Mahzarin Banaji, Visible Minority

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 331
• Professor: Donald Taylor

Document Summary

He wrote a paper about a guy rowing a boat across the river. It led to an explosion almost as big as for cognitive dissonance theory. Point: heider was bringing behavior in the equation of social judgment: huge! When we make judgments about others and about ourselves, we try to understand the other person: that is the initial reason why we do judgment. Why do we want to understand another person then: we want to understand other people to be better able to interact with them. By understanding, we know how to interact with that person. What is it about them that i want to understand: their behavior, bingo, now, we have behavior in the equation. The idea is that we can now simplify behavior and thus get a way to study it. Scientists ultimately want to understand the universe they live in: by understanding we mean knowing the cause of an event.