Transcript Sometimes schemas can get us into trouble

Schemas and Heuristics
“Please your majesty,” said the knave, “I
didn’t write it and they can’t prove I did;
there’s no name signed at the end.”
“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only
makes matters much worse. You must
have meant some mischief, or else you’d
have signed your name like an honest
man.” –Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Overview
• Schemas: Confirmation biases
– Perseverance effect (last time)
– Expectancy confirmation
– Hindsight bias
– Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Mental shortcuts
– Representativeness
– Availability
– Counterfactual thinking
• Automatic vs. controlled thinking
We may confirm our expectations
by selecting biased evidence.
• Snyder & Swann, 1978
• IV: Expectations about person to be
interviewed: introverted vs. extraverted
• DV: Selection of interview questions.
Slanted toward extraverted, introverted, or
neutral.
• What were the findings?
Example of Tom W.
How might this apply to a clinician’s
diagnosis?
On being sane in insane places
• David Rosenhan et al.
• +7 colleagues gained admission to mental
hospitals (pseudopatients)
• “heard voices,” false name, all else true
• 7 diagnosed with schizophrenia, 1 with
manic-depressive disorder
• What did Rosenhan’s demonstration
show?
What are the implications of this
example for the clinic? Courtroom?
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
• One person’s expectations can affect the
behavior of another person.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: The process
whereby (1) people have an expectation
about another person, which (2) influences
how they act toward that person, which (3)
leads the other person to behave in a way
that confirms people’s original
expectations.
Teacher expectations
• Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)
• IV: Elementary school children labeled as
“intellectual bloomers” or not labeled
• DV: IQ test 8 months later
• Findings?
Mental Shortcuts or Heuristics
• Judgmental heuristics: Mental shortcuts
(rules of thumb) people use to make
judgments quickly and efficiently
• Research on heuristics arose in response to
a view of humans as rational, thoughtful
decision-makers.
– Economists’ models
– Tversky & Kahneman
– Nisbett & Ross
What is the difference between a
schema and a heuristic?
• Schema
– organized set of knowledge in a given domain
(knowledge structure)
– influences processing
– Ex: Rude person – related traits, expected
behaviors, expectations about own reactions, etc.
• Mental shortcut
–
–
–
–
Specific processing rule
Not necessarily tied to a particular schema
Not a “knowledge structure”
Ex: Candidate=Democrat, then I will like him.
Example: Steve
Representativeness heuristic
• The tendency to assume, despite
compelling odds to the contrary, that
someone belongs to a group because
he/she resembles a typical member of
that group.
Base-rate information
Availability Heuristic
• The tendency to perceive events that
are easy to remember as more frequent
and more likely to happen than events
than are more difficult to recall.
People often give too much weight to vivid,
memorable information.
• Hamill, Nisbett, & Wilson (1980)
• IV: Type of information
•
Vivid, concrete atypical + statistical
•
Vivid, concrete typical + statistical
•
Control group (no information)
• DV: Positivity/negativity of attitudes
toward welfare recipients in general
• Results:
Demo: Karen story
Counterfactual Thinking
• We mentally change some aspect of the
past as a way of imagining what might
have been.
Study of Counterfactual Thinking
(Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995)
• Videotaped 41 athletes in the 1992 summer Olympic
Games who had won a silver or bronze metal.
• Quasi-IV: Athlete won silver OR bronze medal
• DV: Judges’ ratings of participants’ emotional state
from “agony” to “ecstasy.” (Judges unaware of
participant’s award status.)
• Results?
• Why?
Automatic Thinking
• Most biases/heuristics operate
automatically (i.e., without conscious
awareness)
• Some are highly automatic (e.g.,
availability), whereas others (e.g.,
counterfactual thinking) appear to have
both automatic and more controlled
components
• Automatic thinking: nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, effortless
• Controlled thinking: conscious,
intentional, voluntary, effortful
Controlled Thinking
• Thought suppression: the attempt to
avoid thinking about something we
would just as soon forget
Example of Thought Suppression &
Ironic Processing
• Homer Simpson tries to not drink beer.
Ironic processing & Thought
Suppression
• Monitoring process (automatic): Search for
evidence that unwanted thought is about
to pop into consciousness.
• Operating process (controlled): Attempt to
distract self from detected unwanted
thought.
• Problem: If under cognitive load (tired,
hungry, stressed, under time pressure),
operating process breaks down.
Conclusions
• Schemas and judgmental heuristics
– help us make sense of the world
– increase our efficiency and speed
– often operate automatically, without conscious
awareness
• But, they can sometimes lead to serious
errors in judgment!