Quiz 3 Flashcards
Where do gut feelings come from?
1) fundamental, evolved motives (natural selection)
2) personal past (early experience)
3) recent past (carryover effect)
4) the present (contagion and context)
5) the future (active goals)
Jeff Simpson et al: attachment at age 1
Attachment at age 1 predicts:
Social ability in grade school
Number of friends in high school
How long their relationships last in their 20s
How the past affects our perception of in/out groups
Soak up the cultural values of people in our group and reject the values of those in an an out group
Ambady, Shih, et al: priming cultural identity
Priming Asian identity in Asian-American 5 year old girls increased their math performance on an age appropriate math test and priming female identity decreased their math performance
Weisbuch et al: steryotipic/racist non-verbal behaviour on TV
Found that on TV white actors viewed African American characters with equal roles as more negative based on non-verbal cues than they did their white counterparts with equal roles to the black characters
Correll et al: the police officers dilemma
Cultural biases became evident under time pressure. White participants shot black people more often when they were unarmed. Did not shoot armed white participants when they had a gun at a much higher rate
Gut feeling (definition):
Clear positive or negative feelings of which you do not know the source or reason
(Implicit learning based on last experience)
Kahneman & Klein: when should you trust your gut?
Experts intuition can be trusted when there is immediate feedback such as a fire fighter.
Stockbrokers or advertisers may be successful on a gut feeling but only when those ideas just happen to work out, it’s pure luck.
Zajonc: Mere exposure
Participants had a greater liking for old rather than new objects in the absence of the ability to discriminate from new at better than chance. Meaning that just having exposure to something leads us to have a positive association to it that implicitly influences our choices.
Implicit memory effect (definition):
Greater liking for previously presented stimuli, in the absence of conscious recognition
How does the mere exposure effect happen?
The more a stimuli is presented, the more easily it is processed the next time. Which builds up and sharpens your internal perceptual representation and leads to perceptual fluency.
Perceptual fluency (definition)
Easily recall information given a stimulus. It is an important meta-cognitive signal, that we use to ‘trust’ our perceptual experiences. Perceptual fluency increases with exposure.
Schwarz & Newman: Truthiness
Fluency can cause stereotypes to mislead us by automatically (fluently, effortlessly) providing information about an individual. It feels like it’s coming from ‘out there’ but it is actually a product of our minds
Even the font of the exact same directions influences our perception of the quality/truthiness of the directions
Fluency (definition)
How easily we can recognize stimuli. Evolved adaptive cue that can be fooled by modern developments such as fonts
Ex: advertisers use mere exposure effect of familiarity with the brand or product
Morewedge intuition studies
People trust their intuitions as if it were a supernatural message (voice of god). We also take our dreams as premonitions and thought content that comes unbidden and not from intentional thought is seen as God talking to you.
Geiselin: the creative process
Answers often come to famous artists and scientists during a dream or while shaving or something while they are not consciously thinking about the problem. This only occurs after a lot of conscious thought has been given to the problem in the first place.
Descartes: dualism
Conscious thought is distinguished from mechanical, physical, bodily reactions. Conscious thought is considered god-like and unconscious thought is your animal nature.
Morewedge intuition study on Descartes and Searle
Conscious thought is original, as in I am the source whereas unconscious though comes from somewhere else that isn’t me.
What are some other things that can fool our modern mind
Photographs or thin slices can trick us because they activate stereotypes because of the fluency with which those stereotypes are activated. Ex: grumpy old man turns out to be nice
Olivola & Todorov: are faces diagnostic?
Faces are not diagnostic of the traits we immediately perceive in a person
Ambady & Rosenthal: Thin slices
People can predict with good accuracy many social and clinical outcomes just from a brief 30 second exposure to expressive behaviours. Having more time didn’t change the accuracy
Ex: teacher effectiveness, therapist effectiveness, depression in patients
Susan Andersen: transference
Morphed photo of a random person with a loved one led to an increased liking of the new person because the recognizable features of the loved one in the novel person contributed to our perception of them.
How can we improve our judgements based on intuition
Check if the context matches the evolutionary conditions
Take our intuitions seriously but not as the only basis for a decision
Remove carryover effects by sleeping on it
Think about who the decision will affect
The beauty premium: real life consequences of attractiveness
More women and men were called back for an interview if they were perceived as more attractive given the same resume than people that were perceived as unattractive. You were better off not sending a photo at all than being unattractive.
Shane Fredrick: The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT)
Measures the tendency for someone to override a gut feeling
Kahneman- system 1 and system 2
System 1 makes the errors and system 2 corrects them
Gerd Gigerenzer - fast and frugal judgments
If system 1 is error prone why did it evolve in the first place?
When can you trust your intuitions?
In domains of expertise and considerable past experience with feedback regarding being right or wrong. Always check intuitions for potential biases
George Miller: mental life
Mental life is about what you do. It’s about your active goals
What are our active goals?
Active goals are the present states we are trying to maintain and the future states we are trying to attain
Freud: unconscious motivation
There is A separate, pre-conscious unconscious, full of destructive motive and drives
Karen Horney: alignment of explicit and implicit motives
True self and the social self can be misaligned which can result in anxiety from having to be publicly a different person than you are in private.
Weinberger & McClelland: implicit motivation
Peoples implicit motivations can be influenced thus there is a distrust of self reported measures of motivations and goals. They looked at ways people implicitly express those motivations
McClelland: implicit measures of needs
Need for achievement (John Atkinson)
Need for power (David winters)
Need for affiliation
Beaumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice: The agentic self
Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhibiting behaviour , and making plans of action and carrying out those plans. The self exerts control over itself and the external world.
Bandura: conscious choice is involved in all behaviour and judgments
All self regulation is conscious and intentional
Fiske: category based effect
There is an immediate affect on cognition with mere exposure of something if it has been categorized
See a carrot, think carrot, associate carrot with good. The more exposure to that the more automatic it becomes.
Bargh: motivation without cognition
Goals become tied to their usual situations such as location. See the office, think office, associate with goal of making money. Context matters for the goal (present)
Cohn Fehr & Marechal: situated identities
Priming investment banker identity lead to increased instances of cheating in the coin toss game. If their banker identity was not primed then they did not cheat. Didn’t need to be in the office to cheat, simply asking them what they did for work primed the identity.
Aarts & Dijksterhuis: the silence of the library
Student taking a note to the library or the cafeteria has different behaviour depending on the location of where they were going. They were quieter in the hallway when going to the library because their library identity was primed.
Neisser model for goals
Preconscious analysis of environment triggers higher mental processes and these executive processes develop the goal.
Auto-motive model
The environment influences the goal because the goal is triggered pre-consciously and that goal affects the executive process
Bargh et al: unconscious goal pursuit
Goals can be triggered by external stimuli in the absence of conscious intentions and will produce the same effects as when they are consciously chosen
The dachenhaus experiments
Found that goals were influenced by external stimuli. Achievement goal priming resulted in better performance on the word search test and priming cooperation lead to more cooperation in the resource management experiment. Both unconsciously.
Over & Carpenter: unconscious goal pursuit in infants
18 month olds helped more after priming subtle signs of interpersonal bonds
Classic qualities of conscious goal pursuit
1) persistence
2) resumption
3) consequences for mood & motivational strength
Kurt Lewin: signature qualities of motivational states
Priming Goal pursuit will result in overcoming obstacles (perseverance) and resuming interrupted tasks
What are the stages of goal pursuit?
Goal selection —> goal pursuit —> completion of attempt —> self evaluation —> repeat
Chatrand: qualities of unconscious motivational states: changes in mood
Post performance mood was more dramatically affected when the achievement goal is operating even unconsciously. Those that had achievement primed also viewed the task as easier or harder when the achievement goal was activated.
What are the similarities between unconscious and conscious goal pursuit
Goal activation and operation can be both conscious and unconscious
Goal operation extends over time
Unconsciously pursued goals produce the same outcome as conscious pursuit of the same goal and have the same motivational qualities of persistence, resumption, and self-evaluation apply.
Vroom: goal selection
Goal selection depends on the reward value. The reward value is dependant on the probability that the goal will be achieved times the value of the reward. Thus a person will not try hard for a very low expectancy of attaining the goal. They will also not try for a goal with little value
Custer & Aarts: goal motivation affected by incentives
Participants given an activity and some sort of either positive or negative stimulus (incentive). Participants later preferred to engage in the activity associated with positive stimuli
Lantham et al: Field studies of high performance goal priming
Combining role of achievement and motivation demonstrated real results for performance like raising more money after being primed with a picture of someone winning a marathon.
Lantham et al: Organizational psychology
Better customer service and problem solving skills after CEO weekly email contained achievement and high performance primes or desktop graphics primed friendly customer service agent.
Papies et al: obesity and snack primes
Recipe fliers with healthy/diet primes reduce grocery store snack purchases for obese individuals and only obese individuals if they had the goal of losing weight.
Autonomous goal operation
1) goals become active independently of the ‘agentic self’
2) goals can operate outside of conscious awareness & control, even increasing and decreasing in strength according to environmental feedback
3) unconscious goals produce the same outcomes in the same manner of consciously pursued goals
Huang & Bargh: the selfish goal
Autonomy is a feature of all goal pursuits whether they are conscious or not. The active goal pursues its ends, guiding selective attention, evaluating events and objects in terms of how good they are for the goal, not necessarily for the individual and stay active until completed and turning off when completed all on their own.
What connects genetic influence and adaptive behaviour?
Motivations and goal programs are the crucial link between genetic influences from the deep past and adaptive behaviour in the present-day environment
Bargh & Gollwitzer et al: original goal priming studies (dachenhaus experiments)
1) achievement priming increased task performance
2) cooperation priming increased cooperation
3) primed goals produced the same outcomes as the same conscious goal
4) participants showed no sign of being aware of the unconscious goal even right after pursuing it
Bandura: consequences of goal pursuits
Individuals mood and goal strength is highly dependant on success or failure of the goal attempt
Spelke et al: skills of divided attention
Ability to do multiple complex information processing tasks at the same time like driving a car with no memory of the last 20 kilometres. Fluency and unconscious thought theory
Warrington & Weiskrantz: blindsighted
Cues to the blind eye help responses
Dijksterhuis & Aarts: attention without awareness
Focus of conscious attention determines whether it is conscious or unconscious thought. Thinking about the car while focus is on the car is conscious thought. Thinking about the car while focus is directed elsewhere is unconscious thought
Dijksterhuis, Maarten, Nordgren, Van Baaren: unconscious thought theory
Given a difficult choice with a correct answer like picking a car or an apartment those that were given a distractor task, thus they were thinking about the decision unconsciously had more correct answers than those who consciously thought about the decision the whole time.
Marien et al: does unconscious goal operation use the same working memory?
6 experiments showing that unconscious achievement and other motives operate using the same working memory structures and executive processes as in conscious goal pursuit.
Pessiglione & Frith: value and effort: subliminal reward cues
Same region of the brain lights up when given subliminal reward cues or clear reward cues
Goal autonomy means independence from intentions and wishes
1) goals turn off even if you want them to stay on
2) goals stay on when you do want them on
3) goals also stay on when you do not want them on
Atkinson & Birch: goal turn-off effects
Goals cooperate with each other by taking turns
When one goal is attained the goal turns off in order to allow another goal a chance at pursuit
From a period after completion, then, even goals that are desirable all the to become inactive and inhibited.
Made public statement against sexism then given task of hiring in a male dominated industry, those that made the public statement hired men disproportionately more. Which went against their initial statement
Mornin and Miller: moral licensing and moral bank accounts
Participants were given the opportunity to disagree with bluntly sexist comments. This fulfilled their goal to be egalitarian and non-sexist. They were then more willing than a control group to recommend a man rather than a woman for a stereotypical male job.
Bargh, Green, Fitzsimmons: unintended helping, unintended failure to help
Participants actively engaged in helping specific person with a picture identification task were more willing to give money to a charitable cause than did control participants. But, those no longer engaged with helping the participant were now less likely to donate to charity or help the honours student compared to the control condition.
Cofer & Apley: incubation effects (the unconscious never sleeps)
When trying to remember something that you know you know, the answer often pops into your head later on while doing something else entirely, sometimes you’ve forgotten you ever wanted to remember it.
Fichten et al: the troubling thoughts of the night
The main predictor of not getting back to sleep at night were negative, anxiety provoking thoughts about the near future. Namely Incomplete or unfulfilled important goals
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: ruminitions
Can’t stop thinking about something even if you really want to stop thinking about it. (Think the family guy with the tiny bones in the maracas thing)
Daniel Wegner: ironic processes
Trying not to do something requires keeping in mind what you do not want to do, this keeps it accessible in your mind. Then when distracted or under attentional load, it is more likely than usual to be thought, said, done etc.
Bargh, Green, Fitzsimmons: waiter report study
Job interview for a waiter or crime reporter. Told to evaluate the candidate for the job when there was many interruptions for the interviewer and the interrupter was either polite or very rude. After watching the tape, they were asked to share their opinion of the interrupter, if they were interviewing for crime reporter, they liked rude mike more, if they were interviewing for waiter they liked polite mike more. Kind of like situated identities
The downside of the selfish goal and goal autonomy
What is good for the goal may not be good for the individual in the long term, or reflect their long term values
Unconscious goal pursuit in everyday life
1) once triggered, operates in service of that goal
2) effects on attention, evaluation, choices, behaviour
3) continue to operate until completed
4) turn off when completed
What are real life triggers of unconscious goal pursuit
Perceived goals of others
Common, naturally occurring contexts
Situational power
External reminders about one’s own goals
Mere thought about significant others
Threats and need states (homeostasis)
Emotions
Goal contagion
We get our goals from other people, from merely perceiving their goal directed behaviour. Or mearly thinking about important people in our lives (psychological presence) which activates the goals we usually pursue with them.
Aarts Gollwitzer & Hassan: goal contagion
Participants either read about someone that needed money or not then were given a chance to earn money if they had enough time at the end of the experiment. Those primed with earning money were more likely to choose to do the final money earning task. Their goal strength was measured on how quick they clicked to get to the money making task. Money goal activated participants own need for money.
Hamlin, Hallinan, & Woodward: goal contagion with infants
7 month olds saw experimenter preform a goal-directed (grabbed or reached for) or non-goal-directed (pointed at) action towards the toy. Infants preferred to play with the reached-for object than the pointed to object
Ackerman et al: you wear me out/ ego depletion
Watching or reading about another person who engages in difficult self-regulation for extended periods of time reduces the observers own ability to self regulate afterwords. As if the other persons willpower causes you to simulate your own use of willpower which taps into the same limited willpower resource. Only get ego depletion when putting yourself in others shoes.
Kay, Wheeler, Bargh & Ross: priming and the prisoners dilemma game
Backpack primes cooperative behaviour in the prisoners dilemma whereas a briefcase primes competitive behaviour
Holland, Hendricks, and Aarts: olfactory goal priming
The mere perception of an odour directly guide actions. Participants subliminal exposed to the scent of all purpose cleaner and were given a crumbly biscuit to eat and were asked the 5 things they were gonna do for the rest of the day and the measured how many times the cleaned the crumbs up. Those that were primed with the cleaning scent said they would clean more that day and cleaned up the biscuit more.
Rodger Barker: Midwest city
The setting of a persons behaviour is by far the best predictor of what they will do there
Situational cues to behaviour
Features of commonly experienced situations can also activate behavioural tendencies, and promote conformity to social norms
Berger et al: location influences behaviour of voters
Priming influences voting behaviour based on the location. If voting in a church, you are more likely to vote in line with religious/church positions. If voting at a school, you’re more likely to vote for more educational support.
How does power exert its influence over us?
Power is the ability to get your important goals, thus, power will tend to become associated with a persons most important goals. Overtime those goals may become automatic
