Perceiving the World

1
Perceiving the World
2
A Social Cognitive look

• Social Cognition -- process of thinking about
  ourselves, others, and our world
• Social reality is constructed.
• People are motivated tacticians
  (Fiske Taylor, 1991)
• to
• to
• to

3
What do you see?

• What info is attended to affects everything!
• Basic perceptions are influenced by previous
  experience, current distractions, etc

4
Constructing a Personal Reality

• How did the ref miss that call?!
  I saw it all the way up here!
• Self-serving views of own abilities status
• Students perceptions of football games (Hastorf
  Cantril, 1954 Loy Andrews, 1981)
• Other examples

5
Motive To manage the Self- imageFeeling Control

• ...influences how we subsequently perceive events
• Illusory correlation --
• People find evidence of control when there is
  none!
• Overconfidence --
• What implications does this have for legal
  systems?

6
Motive To manage the Self- image Seeing what we
want to see

• Confirmation bias --
• related to development of Self
• Belief Perseverance --
• Negated by

7
Motive To manage the Self- image Remembering our
Way

• Memory is process of backward reasoning
  reconstruction of events as you see them
• Memory of past (attitudes actions) is
  influenced by
• EX
• EX

8
Motive Conserve effort

• Our goal is to be just good enough
• adaptive for an information-rich world
• Intuitions --
• information
• Preferences need no Inferences
• more complicated than book lets on
• Cognitive heuristics --

9
Exercise

• 1. How are you more likely to die?
• Homicide..Diabetes
• Cancer (all)..Heart Disease
• LighteningAppendicitis
• Floods...Lightening
• Firearm accident.Pneumonia
• AIDS.Leukemia
• Tornadoes..Infectious hepatitis

10
Exercise 2

• 2. A die with 4 green sides and 2 red sides is
  rolled - you win if your chosen pattern is
  rolled. Which of these two do you
  choose? RGRRR GRGRRR

3. David Andrews works at a new medical clinic
that employs 5 doctors, 3 physicians assistants,
and 12 nurses. David finished his education at
the top of his class. He has received a lot of
praise for his work at the clinic. He is 42,
married, 2 children, and plays hockey. What are
the chances that he is a doctor? 0 10 20
30 40 50 60 70 80 90
100
11
Exercise 3

• 4. If a test is used to detect a disease with a
  prevalence of 1 in 1000 people has a false
  positive rate of 5 (false positive rate is a
  of times the test mistakenly indicates that the
  disease is present), what is the chance that a
  person found to have a positive result actually
  has the disease, assuming you know nothing else
  about the person.

12
Motive Conserve effort Cognitive Heuristics

• Typically discussed in terms of short-comings
• Availability --
• Representativeness --
• Ignoring Base-rate Information --
• Anchoring Adjustment --

13
Motive To be accurate

• People CAN be accurate social thinkers
• interpret use information systematically
• Attribution theory -- how people explain events
  in their worlds
• internal attributions --
• external attributions --

14
Motive To be accurate

• Commonsense Psychology (Heider, 1958)
• 1. people attempt to understand events
• 2. people believe that environmental personal
  factors are inversely related in causing events
• 3. the need for a predictable world leads to more
  attributions to stable personality dispositions
• dispositions determined by
• 4. covariation of cause effect is fundamental

15
Motive To be accurateAn Attribution Model

• Covariation model (Kelley, 1967 1972)
• attributions use an orderly process
• systematic users of 3 types of information
• Results Situational or Dispositional attribution
• Distinctiveness -
• Consistency -
• Consensus -

16
Kelleys Attribution model
attribution
Consensus
Consistency
Distinctiveness
attribution