WEEK 1: SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS AND MISPERCEPTIONS

WEEK 1: Social Perceptions and Misperceptions Psychological Construction of Reality Confirmation Bias Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Thin Slices - Social Judgments in the Blink of an Eye What Other People Think of YOU!

1. Psychological Construction of Reality We don't all share the same perception of life Our experience of reality is psychologically constructed We see what we expect to see and don't see what we don't expect to see E.g. Princton/Dartmouth Football Game - what the crowd saw differed - it simply wasn't the same "thing" they were seeing (game, President, Spinach etc) Richard Wiseman.com card trick - change blindness Green grass picture example - question before - any chance you can turn this grass green?Perceptions combine what is going on in our heads and what is going on in the world

2. Confirmation Bias Peter Watson's 4 card problem - A,D,4,7 - even = vowel. To test if lying, flip 4 & 7 preference for information that is consistent with a preconception Disease and symptom - look at all 4 cells to confirm correlation and look at % across the table, not down When groups of people interact they have expectations which don't receive a fair test Confirmation biases preserve and strengthen social expectations and stereotypes Social expectations affect both the person holding the expectation and the other side as well

3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies social expectation impact the person about whom the expectation is held - becomes self-fulfilling Defined by Robert Merton in 1948 - a misconception that later becomes true Rosenthal & Jacobson Pygmalion Effect - school experiment identified "bloomers" at random but they subsequently became bloomers - not all and not by much by statistically significant Political science "Security Dilemma" - arming up in anticipation of war - e.g. WWI - mispections of aggression and can't test without a control group - therefore never know for sure "Behavioural Confirmation" - people's social expectations lead them to act in a way that causes others to confirm these expectations - Reaction Time contest - beliefs can create reality All cases of behavioral confirmation involve self-fulfilling prophecies, but not all self-fulfilling prophecies involve behavioral confirmation

4. Thin Slicing - Social Judgement's in the Blink of an Eye social perception influenced by context effects, change blindness, confirmation bias etc, BUT can also work with surprising efficiency - thin slicing! thin slicing discovered from meta-analysis - 5 minutes of behavior judgement was just as accurate

5. What Other People Think of You The Human Zoo - interview and forming an impression takes 5 seconds to form an impression 8 positive interactions to erase a single bad one

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