Studies Flashcards
Nisbett and Wilson (1977)
In “Telling more than we can know” these authors review evidence that subjects do not actually have direct introspective access into their higher-order cognitive processes, rather we confabulate what we think the answer should be. They have three main conclusions: 1. People often cannot report accurately on effects of a particular stimuli on higher-order responses, or even on the existence of a stimuli or a response, 2. When they do give a report on higher-order cognitive processes, people are actually consulting a priori theories rather than their actual memory, 3. People are occasionally correct on the subject they introspected for, but this is just because of the correct application of their a priori theory, not because of introspective access.
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)
They studied cognitive dissonance with the $1 and $20 conditions, and expected that the people paid $1 would have insufficient justification to say the things they did and so would have more of a shift in their actual beliefs.
Loftus
In “Making my memory: how advertising can change our memories of the past”, they explores the use of autobiographical advertising and the effects it has on memory recall. Specifically, they were looking at memory inflation (an increase in confidence that any memories had happen, real or not), and the creation of false or impossible memories. This is also the law chick.
Strayer and Johnson (2001)
In “Driven to Distraction”, they explore the link between cell phone usage and performance on a simplified driving simulator. They wanted to know why, and eventually found out that performance on the simulator only decreased when a conversation needed to be actively attended to on the cell phone. No difference was found in the groups that just repeated back words, or listened to the radio or books on tape. The attentional hypothesis is where it’s at.
Kruger and Dunning (1999)
In “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, they show that the incompetent in a given field consistently rate themselves as more competent than they actually are, and fail to recognize competence in other’s work when they see it. On the other hard, the competent, who originally thought they were worse than they were, were able to revise their self-estimates after seeing the performance of their peers. Kruger and Dunning attribute this to a lack of meta-cognitive abilities on the part of the incompetent, meaning the very skills needed to discern competence were absent due to their incompetence. They also found that training completely fixed everything.
Maier (1931)
In “Reasoning in Humans”, they explore what causes people to come up with solutions to a given task. He does this in the string experiment, with two strings hanging from distances such that they could not be tied together just by grabbing both. He was interested in what would happen if he gave some hints to people to help them figure it out, and found that the hints that actually helped were never salient to the individuals who they helped, despite the fact that everyone solved the problem after receiving the hint.
Hall and Johaneson (2008)
In “Using Choice blindness to study decision making and introspection”, they explore the phenomenon of choice blindness by using an experiment where they gave 120 participants 15 choice trials, 3 of which were manipulated to have the wrong face, and then they asked the participants why they chose the face that they did. Participants, given variation in all variables of the experiment, failed to recognize the majority of the switches. What’s more, subjects afterwards failed to realize that this phenomenon might have applied to them, saying only that other people might have been affected.
Hall, Johaneson, and Strandberg (2012)
In “Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and
Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey”, they survey 160 participants walking through a park about their moral opinions, and given statements that they could agree or disagree with on a 9-point bidirectional scale. They then changed some of the participants answers, and asked them if they could explain their (now switched) answers. The majority of these switched answers went undetected, even to the extent that when pressed the subjects felt there was absolutely nothing “off” about the survey they were given.
Bem and McConnel (1970)
Asked subjects to write an essay going against their opinions on a specific topic. Some subjects were heavily bribed, and others were not. Subjects who were not bribed, or were manipulated into thinking they had a choice in the matter, shifted their opinion towards the opposite of what it had been originally. Moreover, and the point of this study, was that the subjects when asked after writing the essay what their position had been previously, they said it had been what their new position was the entire time (they didn’t know their position changed).
Goethals and Reckham (1973)
Subjects were asked what their opinions on school busing for integration were, and then were sorted into a group of three students with the same views and one confederate with the opposite view and strong arguments for his position, and a control pool where there was no such confederate. While the control group recalled their original opinions, the group with the confederate recalled their original positions as the opposite of what they were, despite they had been convinced otherwise! They did not experience an opinion change, in fact they thought their opinion had been that way the entire time.
Nisbett and Schachter (1966)
Subjects were sorted into two groups, a control, and one with a placebo pill which they were told would induce heart palpitations, breathing irregularities, and tremors. They found that subjects given the pill were able to take on average 4 times more shock that those who were not. When interviewed, the subjects said they did not attribute their ability to take more shock to the pill, and said they didn’t even think about it during the shock. (only 3 of 12 said the pill could have helped) They then confabulated. The experimenter described the hypothesis, and even then the subjects said they thought it was interesting and might apply to other people, but not themselves.
Latané & Darley (1970)
Less likely to help others the more people are around, the bystander effect.
Semantic Cuing Experiment (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)
81 male psychology students were told to memorize eight word pairs. Some of these word pairs were supposed to elicit a specific response when a certain question was asked. Such as “ocean-moon” word pair was supposed to elicit a response to name a detergent as “Tide”. On average, subjects doubled likelihood that they would say the word that was being cued for after memorizing the word pairs, but never listed the word pairs as a reason for choosing that word, rather they confabulated. The “awareness ratios” varied from 0-244%, with this being the #people thought they were affected by the #people actually affected.
Positional Valuation Experiment (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)
Last garment 4x more likely to be chosen even though it was identical.
