Memories are made of these: ambiguity and sensemaking

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Memories are made of these ambiguity and
sense-making

• Derek Heim
• School of Psychology
• University of Central Lancashire

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Overview

• Aim to make the case for the role of ambiguity
  reduction in the formation of biases
• Significance of ambiguity
• Sense-making process
• Constructive nature of memory
• (Nonconscious) self-prepetuation of biases

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Significance of ambiguity / uncertainty(see
Hartmuts presentation)

• Ambiguity aversion
• Resolving ambiguity confirmation biases, belief
  preserverance
• Interpretation of ambiguous stimuli can be
  determined primarily by knowledge structures
• Ambiguity / uncertainty as means of making biases
  apparant
• What about the role of ambiguity in the formation
  of biases?

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Sense-making process

• Condemned to categorise and make sense of the
  world
• Stability and plasticity of mental models
• stable knowledge structures provide blueprint to
  which new situations are compared, sensitising
  individuals to the presence of atypical
  information
• the sense-making process is dependent on both the
  quality of stimuli and on the nature of an
  individuals representation of the stimuli

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The sense-making process
Stimuli
Interpretation
Knowledge
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Constructive nature of memory

• Constructive nature of memory
• Memories (or representations) may be biased by
  inferences made from pre-existing knowledge, e.g.
  Culture
• Inferred and observed knowledge
  undistinguishable, stored identically

7
Nonconscious information acquisition and
perpetuation

• Social / cultural representations
• We are very bad at reporting our own mental
  processes
• Nonconscious knowledge acquisition and
  self-perpetuation of biases

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Knowledge development over time
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Conclusions

• Biases can magnify in a nonconscious
  self-perpetuating manner via interpretation of
  ambigiuous information
• No need for major events or critical
  incidents
• There is a need for progressively stronger
  disconfirming unambigiguous stimuli to stop
  snow-balling process