Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to lesson three,
module two. Now we’re going to talk about high effort social cognition.
Let’s move on to slide two and get started. High effort or controlled
thought, the kind of thought that you might use when choosing a date or
choosing a marriage partner, buying a car, or buying a home. We’re very
good at being able to control our thoughts. In fact, there's been some study of what we call ironic processes. Typically what this means is
that we can successfully engage in thought suppression for some period
of time. That is, if you’re told to not think about white bears, you
can try very hard to not say anything or to try not to think about white
bears and then instead try to judge bears based on furriness, even if
there’s a bear right in front of you. However, this takes effort and
once we’ve expended a great deal of effort, we have what we call a
rebound effect. In the following hour or two hours
after you’ve left that bear situation you might be more likely to notice
the whiteness of the bears around you, you might be more likely to
mention white bears, and even tell someone about this story. The more
effort it took to suppress that thought, the sooner the rebound effect
will occur. Children also to learn to
use thought suppression, we call it monitoring and operating. First in order
to control your thoughts, you must monitor them to determine whether the
thoughts you’re having are the ones you’d like to have. Then
operating to distinguish those thoughts from appropriate thoughts and then extinguishing
any thoughts that are inappropriate.
Children learn very early to use distraction, so if they put children in
a situation where there may be some very tempting cookies or candy in
front of them and tell the children very clearly that they’re not to eat
any until the experimenter returns, children will distract themselves,
so to avoid having to think about the cookies and be tempted, they will
close their eyes, they will close their ears, they will sing a song,
they will start playing with a toy, they’ll start fiddling with a button
on their clothes, they do things in order to operate against those
thoughts that are tempting them to do something they feel they
shouldn’t.
In order to suppress our
thoughts, it requires a great deal of effort which requires lots of
resources including our time, our energy and our motivation. For
example, if you’re trying very hard not to mention someone’s disability,
it may be very difficult for you to do so the more things you have going
on. So it might be quite easy if you’re in a quiet room and being able
to focus your attention solely on not mentioning the disability,
however, if you’re also having to answer phones and refer other people
down the hall and deal with a lot of other requests, you’re going to be
less able to do this. Also some people don’t suppress these thoughts
because they don’t have any motivation to do so.
Let’s move on to slide
three. Controlled thoughts. Affirmative action, EEOC messages are both
ways in which we try to have people control their thoughts. We give
people a specific message that they should not consider race, national
origin or other people labels when considering folks for a job and were
able to do this for a little while. For example, you may be able to get
through an entire interview without thinking about a person’s
nationality or religion or Vietnam veteran war status, however, there’s
going to be a rebound effect and that means that once you’ve expended all
of your energy and you’ve used your energy and time to do this, and
control those thoughts, they’re going to rebound and those thoughts are
going to come back two-fold.
Let’s move on to slide
four. There’s also a perseverance effect. This is when you believe
that knowing there is a good reason to dismiss the belief. So you have
a belief and you know that it’s a wrong belief or that there’s reasons
not to have the belief but you continue to hold that belief.
A great example of this is
illustrated in slide five and the belief perseverance study on page 66
of your textbook it's outlined in more detail. Ross and colleagues in 1975 brought the participants into the lab and had them
distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. As they distinguished
each suicide note and gave an answer, they were told that they had
either gotten the answer right or failed and got the answer wrong. The
independent variable here is success versus failure. That is, people
are randomly assigned so instead of getting accurate feedback, they were
given bogus feedback, that they were getting most of them right or that
they were getting most of them wrong. They then had participants rate
themselves on their performance, their ability and future performance,
but before they did those ratings, they were told you’ve actually been
randomly assigned to receive success or failure feedback. In fact we
randomly determined when we would tell you you were right and when we
would tell you you were wrong and our feedback to you had nothing at all
to do with your actual performance.
However,
if you move on to slide six, you will see that people were unable to
dismiss that belief. If they were told that they had 24 of
them right, the bars should actually look exactly the same as those told
they had
10 right. But when asked how many they believe they actually got
correct, the people who were told they got more correct said they were
more correct and those that were told that they got fewer correct said
they received fewer correct answers. If they were asked to predict
their future performance, and as you can see, those who were told they
had 24 out of 25 right said they would do very well in the future, while
those who were told they had 10 right, felt they would do only fairly
well. When asked to rate their ability in terms of how many they
got right and whether they could do this in the future and how good they
were at rating suicide notes as being fake or real, those who were told
that they got 24 right actually thought they had more ability to do this
than those who were told that they got 10 right, even though these are
people who had just been told that the feedback that they received had
nothing to do with their actual performance.
Let’s move
on to slide seven. Counterfactual reasoning. Olympic medal
winners. If you look at Olympic medal winners, the ones who
exhibit the most happiness tend to be the gold and the bronze
medalists. Those winning the silver are rarely happy. After all
they’re second. If only they had one more thing right, perhaps
they would be standing on the gold pedestal. Then why are the
bronze folks so happy. Because they’ve been separated from those
who did not medal at all and those who did win a medal. Why do we
do this? Overconfidence in our reasoning powers. We tend to
believe that our reasoning powers are very good and so we engage in what
they call counterfactual reasoning, thinking if
only I had done this. You’ve probably had the experience of having a
professor ask a question and not knowing if you know the answer, so you
don’t raise your hand. You may have a good guess and then the professor
tells you the right answer, you find out that your guess was indeed
right and you think oh if only I had raised my hand and you may feel
very bad about that instead of feeling very pleased with yourself that
you did in fact know the right answer.
Let’s move
on to slide eight. Anchoring and adjustment are also part and
parcel of high effort thinking. Many times we use scales and
scales in turn use essentially arbitrary numbers. We have to determine how
to use the scale in order to give a report. So if I ask you to rate the
attractiveness of several individuals on a 10 point scale, you first
have to decide what I mean by 10. So you may have to look at the
pool of candidates that I’m having you rate and figure out who is the
best looking person and give that person a 10. And then you rate
everyone else compared to that. However, if I asked you to rate
people’s attractiveness and I gave you a celebrity figure as a 10 who
was very attractive, then everyone else would receive lower scores. The
scales tend to be fairly arbitrary and our use depends on where you’ve
anchored the ends of the scale.
Another example would be evilness. If
I had you rate evilness of for example President Bush, you might give
that a rating. However, if first I asked you to rate the evilness of
Hitler, chances are Bush would receive a much less evil rating. Biased
sampling. Let’s assume that your experience is generalizable, that is
whatever happens to you must happen to everyone. We’re not very good at
deciding which things about us are different from others, that would allow
us to have a different experience. So for example children growing up
may have different words for things in the home. For example a wash
cloth may be a wash rag to some people or a face cloth. Some people
call a dish cloth a dish rag. So there’s a series of words that we
use. Now as grownups we don’t tend to be very upset by this, we
understand that people who call a sub sandwich a sub sandwich, could
also call it a hoagie if we were in Philly and a hero if we were in
another part of the country. However children are a prime example of
this biased sampling. They assume that whatever they’ve been taught is
absolutely correct and absolutely generalizable and everyone should
understand what the proper words are and of course proper is defined by
what their experience is. In adults you see this in larger cases, so not so much
concerned about what to call things, but more about how relationships
might work or how much you should tip or what the typical behavior is
for someone in the post office. We assume that our experience is generalizable. Even though we’ve never been to the post office and we
ourselves weren’t also in the situation.
That concludes lesson three, module two. Thank you.
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