PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Fallacy, Daniel Kahneman, Konrad Lorenz
Chapter 4: Social Cognition: Thinking about People and Situations
• Joel Rifkin murdered 17 women, making him the most prolific serial killer in New York history—1993
• Those who knew Rifkin expressed shock at the news
• Social judgments can have serious consequences
• Mistaking a serial killer as someone who’s gentle and safe to be around can be a lethal mistake
• More generally, effective action requires sound judgment about the world around us
• Our judgments are only as effective as the quality of the information on which they are based, yet the
information available to us in everyday life is not always accurate or complete
• The way information is presented, including the order in which it is presented and how it is framed, can
affect the judgments we make
• We don’t just passively take in information
• We often actively seek it out, and a pervasive bias in our information-seeking strategies often
distorts the conclusions we reach
• Our preexisting knowledge, expectations, and mental habits can influence the construal of new
information and thus substantially influence judgment
• Two mental systems—intuition and reason—underlie social cognition, and their complex interplay
determines the judgments we make
The Information Available for Social Cognition
• Social cognition depends first of all on information
• Understanding other people depends on accurate information; but sometimes people have little or no
information on which to base their assessments, and sometimes the available information is misleading
• Sometimes the way that they acquire information affects their thinking unduly
Minimal Information: Inferring Personality from Physical Appearance
• One of the most interesting things about impressions based on the briefest glances is how quickly we
make them
• The term snap judgment exists for a reason
• Janine Willis and Alex Todorov showed participants a large number of faces and had them rate how
attractive, aggressive, likeable, trustworthy, and competent each person seemed
• Some participants were given as much time as they wanted to make each rating, and their
estimates were used as the standard of comparison—as the most confident impressions
• Other participants were asked to make the same ratings, but after seeing each face for a second,
half a second, or a tenth of a second
• The hurried judgments corresponded to the confident judgments quite well
• A great deal of what we conclude about people based on their faces is determined almost
instantaneously
Perceiving Trust and Dominance
• What is it that people so quickly think they see in another’s face?
• Todorov and colleagues had participants rate a large number of photographs of different faces, all with
neutral expressions, on the personality dimensions people most often spontaneously mention when
describing faces
• When they looked at how all these judgments correlated with one another, they found that two
dimensions tend to stand out
• One is a positive-negative dimension, involving such assessments as whether someone is seen as
trustworthy or untrustworthy
• The other centres around power, involving such assessments as whether someone seems
confident or bashful, dominant or submissive
• It appears then, that people are set to make highly functional judgments about others—whether they
should be approached or avoided (dimension 1) and where they are likely to stand in a status or power
hierarchy (dimension 2)
• Hyper-masculine features, such as a very pronounced jaw, make people look dominant and the
features, such as the shape of the eyebrows and eye socket, make people look trustworthy
• Trustworthy, non-dominant faces tend to look like baby faces
• Large round eyes, a large forehead, high eyebrows, and a rounded, relatively small chin
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• They are judged to be relatively weak, naive, and submissive
• Those with small eyes, a small forehead, and an angular, prominent chin tend to be judged as strong,
competent, and dominant
• Ethologist Konrad Lorenz speculated that the cuteness of the young in many mammalian species
triggers a hardwired, automatic reaction that helps ensure that the young and helpless receive
adequate care
• The automatic nature of our response to infantile features makes it more likely that we would
overgeneralize and come to see even adults with such features as trustworthy and friendly
• These assessments have dramatic implications: baby-faced individuals receive more favourable
treatment as defendants in court but have a harder time being seen as appropriate for adult jobs
such as banking
The Accuracy of Snap Judgments
• Are people with baby faces really more likely to be weak and submissive?
• It’s easy to imagine how being treated by others as weak and submissive might encourage something
of a dependent disposition
• But are the facial features people associate with different personality traits valid cues to those traits?
• The current evidence is mixed
• Some investigators report moderately high correlations between the judgments made about people
based on their facial appearance and those individuals’ own reports of how approachable, extraverted,
and powerful they are
• But similar studies have found no connection between judgments based on facial appearance and self-
reports of agreeableness and conscientiousness
• When behavioural observations rather than self-ratings are used, evidence that people can accurately
assess other people’s personalities based on facial appearance alone is even harder to find
• Perhaps the fairest summary of current research in this area is that people’s snap judgments about
facial appearance may hold a kernel of truth, but it is a very small kernel
• Sometimes, it is more important to predict not what a person’s personality is, but rather what other
people in general think
• Evidence indicates that the majority of people predict rather well
• In one study, participants were shown, for 1 second, pictures of the Republican and Democratic
candidates in U.S. congressional elections and asked to indicate which candidates looked more
competent
• Those judged to be more competent by most of the participants won 69 percent of the races
• The person judged to be more competent might not actually be more competent; what matters in
predicting the outcome of elections is not what is really true, but what the electorate believes to be true
• Whether individual professors who are evaluated by their students as warm and competent actually are
warm and competent cannot be shown, but judgments based on very brief exposure to the professors’
behaviour in the classroom predicted students’ end-of-semester evaluations rather well
Misleading Firsthand Information: Pluralistic Ignorance
• In many cases the information collected firsthand is more accurate because it has the advantage of not
having been filtered by someone else, who might slant things in a particular direction
• But firsthand experiences can also be deceptive, as when we are inattentive to information about
events that occur before our eyes or when we misconstrue such events
• Our own experience can also be unrepresentative, as when we judge what the students are like at a
given university from one student we encounter
• Some of the firsthand information we acquire is information we extract some other people’s behaviour
• But people’s behaviour sometimes springs from a desire to create an impression that is not a true
reflection of their beliefs or traits, leading to predictable errors in judgments
• Pluralistic ignorance: misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are
acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences—actions that
reinforce the erroneous group norm
• For example, the professor asking a bunch of confused students if anyone has any questions, yet
nobody raises their hand; the students conclude that everybody else understands the material
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• It is embarrassing to admit that you did not understand a lecture when you think that everybody
else understood it
• However, when everyone follows that logic, an illusion is created and everyone misperceives the
group norm
• Pluralistic ignorance is particularly common in situations where toughness is valued, leading people to
be afraid to show their kinder, gentler impulses
• Gang members
• Nicole Shelton and Jennifer Richeson predicted that individuals might worry that someone from another
ethnic group would not be interested in talking to them
• Initiating conversation would therefore seem risky, something they might want to avoid due to fear
of being rejected
• When both people assume the other is not interested, neither one makes to effort to become
friends
Misleading Secondhand Information
• Because so many of our judgments are based on secondhand information, a comprehensive
understanding of social cognition requires an analysis of how accurate this information is likely to be
Ideological Distortions
• Transmitters of information often have an ideological agenda—a desire to foster certain beliefs or
behaviours in others—that leads them to accentuate some elements of a story and suppress others
• Sometimes such motivated distortion is relatively innocent
• Of course, not all distortions are so innocent
• People often knowingly provide distorted accounts for the express purpose of misleading
Distortions in the Service of Entertainment: Overemphasis on Bad News
• One of the most pervasive reasons for distortion in secondhand accounts is the desire to entertain
• On a small scale, this happens in the stories people tell one another, sometimes exaggerating to make
them more interesting
• Being trapped on an elevator with 20 people for an hour sounds like a more entertaining story than
being trapped with 6 people for 15 minutes
• On a larger scale, the desire to entertain distorts the messages people receive through the mass media
• In the world as seen through the media, 80 percent of all crime is violent; in the real world, only 20
percent is violent
• In addition, news coverage of crime does not correlate with the rise and fall of the crime rate
• The world as presented in motion pictures and television dramas is even more violent
Effects of the Bad-News Bias
• There is a positive correlation between the amount of time spent watching television and the fear of
victimization
• As with all correlational studies, however, this finding by itself is difficult to interpret
• To address this problem, researchers have collected a variety of other measures (income, gender,
race, etc.) and examined whether the findings hold up when these other variables are statistically
controlled
• The correlation between television-viewing habits and perceived vulnerability is substantially reduced
among people living in low-crime neighbourhoods, but it remains strong among those living in high-
crime areas
• People who live in dangerous areas and do not watch much television feel safer than their
neighbours who watch a lot
• Thus the violence depicted on television can make the world appear to be a dangerous place,
especially when the television images are similar to certain aspects of a person’s environment
Differential Attention to Positive and Negative Information
• Are audiences simply more interested in, titillated by, or receptive to negative information?
• The answer seems to be yes: even if positive and negative information are presented in equal
measure, they do not have symmetrical effects
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