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5 Making Judgments

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Learning Objectives

By the end of the chapter you should be able to

• Contrast conscious and automatic processes.

• Evaluate schemas and scripts as well as their importance.

• Describe the value of heuristics and explain each type.

• Summarize the various errors in judgment that can be made.

• Explain how the self-fulfilling prophecy can affect behavior.

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Section 5.1 Conscious and Automatic Processes

Many a disastrous date is doomed from the beginning. A few minutes on a blind date can often be enough to determine whether a second date is warranted. In the 1990s, Rabbi Yaacov Deyo was working as the educational director for a Jewish resource group and wanted to encourage the single men and women he worked with to get married, but the traditional one-on-one dinner and a movie seemed cumbersome and time-consuming. His solution was to introduce a large number of men and women to one another and to limit their interaction to 7 minutes (Deyo & Deyo, 2003). And thus, speed dating was born. Speed dating had the advantage of introducing a large number of people to one another as it weeded out unlikely pairings without either party investing a great deal of time.

From the more routine to the more specific situations of our daily life, we make a number of decisions and judgments. Our cognitive systems are built to help us make those decisions efficiently, though, at times, those efficiencies lead us to errors. In this chapter, we will discuss both our conscious processing of informa- tion and our unconscious, automatic information processing. Some of our quick assessments of objects and events and our quick decision making rely on the work of unconscious systems. But such judgments lead to errors and can influ- ence how others respond.

5.1 Conscious and Automatic Processes When you make a decision, do you weigh your options, carefully sorting out pros from cons? Have you ever made a decision because you had a gut feeling? Psychologists believe that our cognitive processes operate at two levels: the conscious and the automatic. The thought pro- cesses we are aware of and tend to direct are on the conscious level. We might involve con- scious thought when we make a decision by carefully weighing our options. Processes that are done without our intention or awareness, such as when we make a decision based on our gut feeling, occur on the automatic level. Researchers have called these levels a variety of names, but they all focus on a rational, conscious process and another more emotional or experientially based unconscious process (Epstein, 1994; Kahneman, 2003, 2011; Peters, Hess, Vastfjall, & Auman, 2007; Reyna, 2004).

Table 5.1 summarizes the basic differences between these systems. As you can see from the table, we are not generally aware of the processing of the automatic system. It processes or interprets stimuli that come from our environment, and when it has completed processing or gets stuck, something researchers call “disfluency,” it alerts the conscious system (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). The capacity of the conscious system is much smaller than that of the automatic system, but it is a system we can direct. The unconscious system may be processing something you are not interested in working on; it is only the conscious system that allows you to deliberately focus on a particular idea, situation, or problem.

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Section 5.1 Conscious and Automatic Processes

Sometimes these systems conflict. An example of the conscious and the unconscious systems working against each other can be seen in the Stroop color–word task (Stroop, 1935). In this task, people are asked to identify the color in which letters or words are printed. When the letters are meaningless—such as the lines of X’s in column 1 of Table 5.2—the task is easy, and people go through the list quickly. However, when the letters spell a color that differs from the color of the ink, people tend to stumble. The time it takes someone to go through the second list is much longer than that of the first list. This is because reading color words is a well-practiced skill for most adults; most of us read the word whether we want to or not. When the two do not match, there is a fight between the automatic system, which says “Green! The word is green!” and the conscious system, which focuses on the color of the blue ink (although, not everyone agrees with this interpretation; see Besner, Stolz, & Boutilier, 1997). This slower response when dealing with two conflicting stimuli is called the Stroop effect . The Stroop effect was named after J. R. Stroop, who developed the task in the 1930s and wrote about the phenomenon. Since then, a variety of other tasks have been developed that produce similar responses (MacLeod, 1991).

Table 5.1: Characteristics of the automatic and conscious systems

Automatic system Conscious system

Fast Slow

Outside of conscious awareness Within conscious awareness

Effortless Effortful

Large capacity Limited capacity

May do many tasks at once Limited to very few tasks at once

Imprecise, general responses Nuanced responses

Table 5.2: The Stroop color–word task For each column, identify the color of the ink in which the letters are written. For example, in the first column the first set of letters is red.

Column 1 Column 2

XXXX Green

XXXX Blue

XXXX Red

XXXX Blue

XXXX Brown

XXXX Red

XXXX Green

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Section 5.1 Conscious and Automatic Processes

The conscious and automatic systems can also work together at times. Imagine you are at a busy and boisterous bar and are talking with a small group of people. Suddenly, you hear your name being spoken by someone in the group beside you. You were not actively listening for your name and were engrossed in your conversation, yet you somehow heard it. This often occurs when we recognize our own name or other self-relevant information amid other dis- tracting stimuli without consciously listening for it (Conway, Cowan, & Bunting, 2001; Moray, 1959; Wood & Cowan, 1995). In this scenario, your conscious system is oblivious to what those in the other group are talking about, but your automatic system is monitoring what is going on around you, something known as the cocktail party phenomenon. When your name is spoken, your unconscious system alerts the conscious system to pay attention, and suddenly you are straining to hear what is being said about you (Alexopoulos, Muller, Ric, & Marendaz, 2012; MacLeod, 1998; Nakane, Miyakoshi, Nakai, & Naganawa, 2016). Similarly, our own faces jump out at us from a sea of others’ faces; you may have noticed this phenome- non if you have ever looked at a group picture and quickly noticed your own face (Tacikowski & Nowicka, 2010).

Expand Your Knowledge: Stroop Effect

To try out the Stroop effect for yourself, click on the link provided. The program will time you as you identify the ink color in two different tasks. You can compare those times to see if naming an ink color in a contrasting color word slows you down.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html

Test Yourself

• What are some characteristics of the conscious system? The conscious system is slow, operates within conscious awareness, is effortful, has a limited capacity, is limited to very few tasks at once, and provides nuanced responses.

• What are some characteristics of the unconscious system? The unconscious system is fast; operates outside conscious awareness; is effortless; has a large capacity; may do many tasks at once; and provides imprecise, general responses.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html

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Section 5.2 Schemas and Scripts

5.2 Schemas and Scripts Our automatic system allows us to make shortcuts and come to conclusions without taxing the conscious system (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008). In fact, when our resources are depleted, we are more likely to use the shortcuts offered by the automatic system (Masicampo & Baumeis- ter, 2008). The automatic system has two ways of doing this: One focuses on things like objects or people, while the other focuses on events, what they include, and how they are sequenced.

Schemas Chapter 2 introduced the idea of the schema as a knowledge structure that organizes what we know and that can affect how we process information (Gilboa & Marlatte, 2017). Self- schemas are knowledge structures about the self, but we can have schemas about many other things in our world, such as animals, objects, places, and concepts (Figure 5.1). When we are making judgments, schemas may affect those judgments. For example, a boss might have a schema about an employee as a good, reliable worker. If that employee is late one day, the boss makes a different judgment about that employee than she would if she had a schema about that employee as being lazy and irresponsible. Because of the positive schema about her employee, the boss might also remember the employee’s contributions to past projects, eventually concluding that the employee had a good reason to be late.

Figure 5.1: Schemas

Your schema for a baseball game may include a baseball diamond, a salute to the flag, and peanuts.

Dorling Kindersley RF/Thinkstock, iStockphoto/Thinkstock, iStockphoto/Thinkstock

“Would you like to go to the baseball game?”

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Section 5.2 Schemas and Scripts

While schemas can help us remember things by organizing them into preconceived struc- tures, they may also create false memories (Lampinen, Copeland, & Neuschatz, 2001; Yamada & Itsukushima, 2013). If you were to sit in a professor’s office for several minutes and then were later asked what you saw in that office, your schema could help you answer. You expect to see bookshelves with books, a desk, a computer, a stapler, and some pens in a professor’s office. As you remember what was in the office, your existing schema might help you remem- ber that you saw a bookshelf. But the schema may lead you to remember something that was not there or to place something that was there but in an unexpected place—not where you might have expected it to be (Lew & Howe, 2017). If you expected to see a stapler, you might report that a stapler was there, even if it was not. The cup of pens oddly perched on a high shelf on the bookshelf might, in your memory, move to the desk.

Schemas can also help us remember items if they violate the schema. If you were to see a stuffed teddy bear in a professor’s office, you might remember and recall it because it was outside of your schema for a typical professor’s office (Yamada & Itsukushima, 2013). This type of effect may have serious consequences when we examine the role of schemas in eye- witness testimony in court. Researchers have found that schemas for crimes can influence the details people remember about crimes they witness (Tuckey & Brewer, 2003), particularly in older adults or those with fewer cognitive resources (Overman, Wiseman, Allison, & Ste- phens, 2013). For example, you would expect a bank robbery to include a thief with a bag; a bag is a schema-consistent element. You would not expect the thief to wear bright clothing; bright clothing is a schema-inconsistent element. People tend to be accurate about schema- consistent and schema-inconsistent information. Information that is irrelevant to the schema is most likely to be forgotten. You may not be able to report whether or not there were any parents with children inside the bank because that is fairly irrelevant to your schema of the bank.

Schemas can help us make choices. For example, the way we categorize food can influence what we eat (Ross & Murphy, 1999). If you want to consume a vegetable for an afternoon snack, you are unlikely to eat rhubarb, botanically a vegetable but most often part of our fruit schema, but you may eat some sliced cucumbers, botanically a fruit but most often part of our vegetable schema. Meat eaters who categorize meat substitutes in the same category as meat may choose to eat that meat substitute as the main part of a meal (Hoek, van Boekel, Voor- douw, & Luning, 2011). If a meat substitute stays outside of the meat schema, it may never get on a meat eater’s plate, or it may appear as a side dish.

Our food schemas may be helpful in deciding what is and is not food and what should and should not be eaten at certain times of the day. But these schemas can also backfire if we avoid a food because it is not in our schema as an appropriate food for an occasion, such as if we want to appear masculine and have a salad in our schema of feminine food or want to appear feminine and have nachos in our schema of masculine foods (Bock & Kanarek, 1995; Wilson, 2015). We might find ourselves avoiding foods that are good for us or that we might enjoy.

Schemas can be fairly broad, applicable in a wide variety of situations or with a wide variety of objects or people, or relatively narrow, being very specific to one or two objects, people, or situations. Broader schemas take us longer to learn, as we encounter different ways to think about and view a particular entity or problem. But these broader schemas may allow us to be more flexible (Chen & Mo, 2004). For example, as a child you might have learned the concept of sharing toys and applied it when playing at home with friends. But if you were provided

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Section 5.2 Schemas and Scripts

with examples of a variety of ways to share over the course of your life, including sharing resources and time with others, you may be more able to recognize when someone needs your help and know how to provide it.

Scripts How do you know what to do when you go into a restaurant? How do you know what is expected on a first date? In our lives, it is helpful to know how to act and respond in social situations. Psychologists call an expected series of events a script, like the script in a movie or play that tells the actors what is going to occur next. Scripts can be very helpful to us. When a restaurant follows a script, both the server and the diner know what to do and what is expected of them without having to discuss the process.

If you have ever lived or traveled in a different country or if you are part of a distinctive subculture in your own country, you know that others do things differently. For example, when someone shows admiration for something done well in the Chinese culture, the appropriate response in the Chinese social script is to respond with modesty. Accord- ing to the script, the admirer’s next response should show even greater admiration for the accomplishment (Han, 2011). If you are new to a cul- ture or situation, you may find your- self confused and unsure. In those kinds of situations, you may feel like everyone else knows what is going on—you do not know the script.

Eating a meal can be understood in terms of a script (Blake, Bisogni, Sobal, Jastran, & Devine, 2008; Cavazza, Graziani, & Guidetti, 2011; Pliner & Martins, 2002). Consider how you might construct a script for an evening meal. What food would be gathered? Who would prepare the meal? Where would you eat the meal? What would you do to start the meal? What happens during the meal? What occurs at the end? If people eat in a setting that fits with their script for a meal, they tend to eat less later (Pliner & Zec, 2007). When researchers better understand the scripts people have for meals, they can find ways to help people make choices that would increase their health and well-being (Blake et al., 2008).

Dating can also be understood in terms of scripts. In a traditional dating scenario between a heterosexual couple, it is likely the man will pick the woman up at her residence for the first date; they will go to a restaurant; talk about their lives; hope to impress each other; and before parting ways, tell the other person they enjoyed the outing. Not all first date scripts fol- low this pattern, as movement toward more egalitarian scripts is happening slowly, but many do (Cameron & Curry, 2019; Eaton & Rose, 2012; Eaton, Rose, Interligi, Fernandez, & McHugh,

VLG/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images We all abide by scripts, even if we don’t realize it. What is your script for a routine activity like grocery shopping?

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Section 5.2 Schemas and Scripts

2016; Laner & Ventrone, 2000). Like schemas, we use scripts to make sense of and organize our experience. The difference between them is that schemas involve our expectations for things or concepts, while scripts involve our expectations for events or sequences of events.

Dating scripts can be quite detailed and can include behaviors that are different for men and women. In a 1989 study, undergraduate students listed 19 different actions that women would engage in and 27 different actions for men (Rose & Frieze, 1989). A 2016 study found agreement for between 35 and 49 actions that occurred while on a date (Eaton et al., 2016). Most of these students agreed about what belonged in the script, indicating that scripts are shared within a culture. Students noted that certain foods were date foods and others were not; suggested date foods were described as those that could be eaten neatly, were not too smelly, and were not likely to cause bad breath (Amiraian & Sobal, 2009). Other scripts cover hooking up and hanging out, though they have a large overlap with dating, perhaps indicating that dating is used as a script to help us navigate these new ways of engaging with romantic or sexual interests (Eaton et al., 2016). Sometimes completely new scripts are developed when the existing script in a culture does not work for people. Queer people are more likely to reject the traditional scripts entirely and develop their own (Lamont, 2017).

Dating scripts go beyond the first date, providing information on how a relationship should develop over time (Choukas-Bradley, Goldberg, Widman, Reese, & Halpern, 2015). When partners share a script for how the relationship should develop, they show greater relation- ship satisfaction (Holmberg & MacKenzie, 2002). For example, if both partners expect to call one another daily and go on a date every Friday night, each will be more satisfied than if one is expecting only a couple phone calls a week and a date every other Saturday night.

The effects of scripts on our lives are not always benign or helpful. A script that supports risky sexual behavior, such as not using a condom, may lead to high-risk behavior and, therefore, to increased rates of sexually transmitted infections (Hussen, Bowleg, Sangaramoorthy, & Mal- ebranche, 2012; Kim & Ward, 2012; Wright, Tokunaga, & Kraus, 2016). Sexual scripts come from parents, peers, school, television and the movies, as well as pornography (Hussen et al., 2012; Kim & Wells, 2017; Rousseau & Eggermont, 2018; Sun, Bridges, Johnson, & Ezzell, 2016). Heterosexual women who take in more of this media are more likely to endorse a heteronormative script and are less likely to resist unwanted hookups (Gamble, 2019), while heterosexual men exposed to scripts that connect sexual prowess to masculinity reported a greater intention to sexually coerce (Hust, Rodgers, Ebreo, & Stefani, 2019). While people can resist following a script, individuals who fail to follow the script of their culture or peers tend to feel stigmatized (Gesselman, Webster, & Garcia, 2017).

The ability to describe a script or put events in a script in the correct order seems to lie in the frontal lobe of the brain, directly behind the forehead (Baldassano, Hasson, & Norman, 2018; Grafman, 1989). Individuals with traumatic brain injury also show issues with ordering events (Allain et al., 2012). Our ability to work with scripts can be influenced by age. Older adults have more difficulty correctly ordering extensive scripts than younger adults (Allain et al., 2007). For example, an older adult may have more difficulty accurately describing the sequence of events needed to change a flat tire.

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Section 5.3 Heuristics

5.3 Heuristics Quick processing is a theme of our cognitive systems. As discussed, schemas help us keep information organized and can help in memory, and scripts help us know what to do without expending a lot of energy trying to figure out what is appropriate in a given situation. When making judgments, we also attempt to get quick answers. The shortcuts we use in making judgments are heuristics. If you were having trouble answering an abstract problem, you might try to think about it concretely or draw a picture in an attempt to answer the question quickly, without further taxing your cognitive system. Just as schemas and scripts can be help- ful to us, heuristics can also be helpful—we are likely to quickly come up with a pretty good answer (Lieder, Griffiths, & Hsu, 2018). But just as schemas can cause us to remember some- thing was there when it was not, heuristics can lead to incorrect judgments. Researchers who evaluate heuristics most often focus on what happens when heuristics fail us and we make incorrect judgments. Despite the problems they sometimes create, heuristics provide us with a good-enough answer most of the time.

Availability Heuristic Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter R or that have the letter R as the third letter of the word? Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1973) asked participants in their study to respond to this question. Most people responded that there are more words with R as the first letter, estimating that there are about twice as many with R as the first letter than with R as the third letter. How do people make this judgment? If you solved this like most people do, you thought briefly about how many words you knew that had R as the first letter (relatives, rainbow, rich, run). Then you thought about how many words you knew that had R as the third letter (park, more, marshmallow). As you made those calculations, you realized that you were able to come up with many more words with R as the first letter than R as the third letter. Words starting with R were more available to you in your memory.

Making a judgment this way, you and the research participants were using the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic involves the tendency to make judgments about the fre- quency of something or the likelihood of an event occurring by considering how available it is in memory. Instances that come more easily to mind, and thus are more available, are

Test Yourself

• How are schemas and scripts similar? Both are knowledge structures that help us make sense of and organize our experiences.

• How might schemas lead to false or mistaken memories? Schemas may cause us to remember that something was there because we expected it to be and because it was part of our schema even if it was not actually there.

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Section 5.3 Heuristics

judged to be more likely. As a quick and easy shortcut to decision making, we begin using this heuristic early on in life. A study of children as young as 4 years old found they used the availability heuristic to make judgments (Geurten, Willems, Germain, & Meulemans, 2015). As noted earlier, these strategies often get us the right answer, but in the case of the position of the R, our judgment is wrong. There are actually more words in the English language with R as the third letter than R as the first letter. Often this type of judgment will provide you with the right answer, but, as in this instance, there is room for error.

Dramatic events tend to come to mind easily and are therefore judged as more frequent. After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, people in Japan experienced increased anxiety about earthquakes and nuclear disasters, while they had decreased concern for other hazards, even though the risk of these had not substantially changed (Nakayachi, Yokoyama, & Oki, 2015). When thinking about the dangers they faced, the earthquake and nuclear accident that resulted from it came to mind more readily and were judged as more likely to occur again; therefore, people became more anxious about those catastrophes.

We can apply this to other realms and other experiences. If you are from the United States, how important was your home state to U.S. history? People tend to overestimate the con- tribution their state had in the history of the nation. This tendency is, in part, due to a self- serving bias, but also because information about one’s own state tends to be more available in memory than information about the contributions of other states (Putnam, Ross, Soter, & Roediger, 2018).

How successful is online dating? Many people will tell you about a cousin or coworker who met and is happily married to someone found on an online dating site. You may have such a story yourself. If so, you are likely to judge online dating as very successful. A personal experi- ence is a particularly powerful contributor to the availability heuristic (Viscusi & Zeckhauser, 2015). But how often do you hear stories about unsuccessful searchers who gave up on online dating in frustration? Occasionally, perhaps, but because we hear more of the happily-ever- after stories and fewer stories of frustration, many of us assume online dating is successful for the majority of those who engage in it.

The availability heuristic can affect how we feel about ourselves and our lives. Social media provide us with a picture of the lives of others, often an idealized portrayal. However, for peo- ple who are heavy social media users, making judgments about what other people are expe- riencing involves accessing this idealized portrait of other’s activities. Those who use social media a great deal are more likely to report that other people have better lives than they do, particularly if they follow or friend people they do not know personally (Chou & Edge, 2012). A personal acquaintance can ameliorate this effect as people see a fuller picture of the lives of people they interact with in other places .

Test Yourself

Why does the availability heuristic have the word “availability” in its name?

With the availability heuristic, we make judgments based on how easily things come to mind— that is, how available these things are in our memory.

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Section 5.3 Heuristics

Representativeness Heuristic “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and par- ticipated in antinuclear demonstrations” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983, p. 297). Which of the following is more likely?

a) Linda is a bank teller. b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

If you are like most people, you chose answer b. Why? Most people say they chose b because Linda sounds like someone who would be active in the feminist movement and who happens to be a bank teller rather than just a stereotypical bank teller. If you answered this way, for this reason, you were using the representativeness heuristic. The representativeness heu- ristic involves making decisions based on how similar someone or something is to the typical, or representative, person or situation. Because Linda seems like your typical vision of some- one in the feminist movement, you chose b.

The representativeness heuristic will often get you to the right answer when you are mak- ing quick decisions. But in the previous example, Linda is more likely to be just a bank teller than to be both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. There are more bank tell- ers than there are bank tellers who are active in the feminist movement. When we rate two things occurring together as more likely than one of those things occurring alone, we engage in the conjunction fallacy. The conjunction fallacy is the error of believing that two events occurring together are more likely than either of those events occurring by itself. It is a fal- lacy because logic dictates a single event is more likely than that same event happening with another event (Brainerd, Holliday, Nakamura, & Reyna, 2014; Costello & Watts, 2017). Use of this fallacy and the representativeness heuristic is related to tendencies to believe in conspir- acy theories and paranormal activity (Brotherton & French, 2014; Moulding et al., 2016). The researchers who found this connection speculate that some people may think about a variety of events as being part of one larger narrative, even when those events do not necessarily all belong together (Brotherton & French, 2014).

Another piece of faulty reasoning that may be behind these heuristics is the base rate fallacy (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). When people engage in the base rate fallacy, they fail to take into account the general frequency of a situation or behavior when making a decision and instead make a judgment based on other characteristics of the situation. Consider the follow- ing: Walter is a 47-year-old man who reads poetry, watches PBS, and plays golf in his spare time. Is it more likely that Walter is an Ivy League professor or a truck driver? For most of us, Walter sounds like an Ivy League professor. Using the representativeness heuristic, we solve this problem by thinking about whether Walter is more like a typical Ivy League professor than a typical truck driver. But Walter is more likely to be a truck driver. Why? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019), 1.8 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers are employed in the United States, to say nothing of elsewhere in the world. Consider how many Ivy League professors there are. With only eight Ivy League schools, with between a little under 1,000 faculty (Dartmouth and Brown) to just over 4,000 (University of Pennsylvania and Columbia) per school, there are about 19,500 Ivy League professors. Given the very large number of truck drivers and relatively small number of Ivy League professors, it is much more likely that Walter is among the large group than the small group.

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Section 5.3 Heuristics

When we make a decision about the likelihood of something and ignore the number of instances that occur in the population (of people, actions, diagnoses, etc.), we are victims of the base rate fallacy. Issues with base rate information that lead to the representativeness heuristic seem to be developed by around age 6 (Gualtieri & Denison, 2018). By that age, chil- dren make the same errors in judgment as adults.

Expand Your Knowledge: Heuristic Simulation

Want to think more about the representativeness and availability heuristics? You can participate in simulations of heuristics at http://cat.xula.edu/thinker/decisions/heuristics/ . Other heuristics are described as well. After making your own judgments, you can read about usual answers and explanations for these answers.

Test Yourself

• Why is the conjunction fallacy called a fallacy? It is a logical impossibility—that is, a fallacy or error in judgment—for two things to both be true than for either one of those alone to be true.

• How does the base rate fallacy contribute to making an incorrect judgment when using the representativeness heuristic? With the base rate fallacy, we place too much weight on how typical or representative something appears to be and not enough weight on the base rate, or the actual number of instances of the item of interest.

Affect Heuristic Imagine you are on a parole board deciding whether to grant parole to an inmate. You are told that 20 in every 100 people released under similar circumstances as this inmate go on to commit a violent crime. Would you grant or deny parole? What if you were told that 20% of people released who are like this inmate go on to commit a violent crime? Research par- ticipants have been asked similar questions (Slovic, Monahan, & MacGregor, 2000). Those given information using relative frequency, the first form of the question, believed there was greater danger than those with information in statistical form. Rationally, we know that 20 out of every 100 people is equivalent to 20%, but we process these bits of information differ- ently. When this information is presented in relative frequency form—in this case, the num- ber of instances out of 100—people imagine 20 perpetrators of violent crimes: a disturbing image. These images lead to a gut-level negative emotional reaction. The statistical form, a percentage in this case, seems to separate us from that image, and therefore reduces the nega- tive affect (emotional reaction).

http://cat.xula.edu/thinker/decisions/heuristics/

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Section 5.3 Heuristics

Even when presented with a less important judgment where one choice is clearly more probable, how we feel can overwhelm our rational judgment. Research participants were told they would win money if they drew a red bean from a bowl. They could choose to draw from either a bowl with 100 beans in it, 7 of which were red, or a bowl with 10 beans in it, 1 of which was red (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994). Which bowl would you choose? If you are like most participants, you would choose the 100-bean bowl, because it feels like you will be more likely to pick 1 of the 7 beans as opposed to just the 1 bean from the other bowl. Statistically, however, you have a 0.7/10 (7%) chance of picking a red bean from the 100 bean bowl and a 1/10 (10%) chance of picking a red bean from the 10 bean bowl. Your chance is statistically greater with the small bowl. Although the research participants could articulate this statistical truth, they still felt like the big bowl was better and chose their bean from that bowl.

We use our gut-level reactions to help us make decisions (Slovic, Peters, Finucane, & Mac- Gregor, 2005). This tendency to use affective reactions (gut-level emotional reactions) as information to make judgments is called the affect heuristic. Apart from the laboratory stud- ies described previously, this heuristic can have an effect in the real world. When we judge new products in the marketplace, we may use the affect heuristic, favorably evaluating those products that appear to provide us benefits with fewer risks (King & Slovic, 2014). Some- one looking for a home might use the affect heuristic. Although price, square footage, school district, and neighborhood may all be part of the judgment, if the affect heuristic is in play, homebuyers might report that the home they chose “just felt right.”

For some of the judgments we make using the affect heuristic, how a scenario is presented, also known as how the scenario is framed, makes a big difference in how people respond. The impact of the way a situation is presented and how people evaluate that situation is called framing. Older and younger adults are equally susceptible to framing (Mayhorn, Fisk, & Whit- tle, 2002; Ronnlund, Karlsson, Laggnas, Larsson, & Lindstrom, 2005).

milindri/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images Advertisers often use tactics to trigger the affect heuristic. If they can convince potential buyers that a product or service will be beneficial, they are more likely to make sales.

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There are different forms of framing, including risky choice framing, attribute framing, and goal framing (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998). The first of these types focuses on comparing risk. For example, imagine a new disease has broken out. You are given the choice between a treatment where you will be sure of saving one-third of patients or a treatment where you have a one-third chance of saving all patients and a two-thirds chance of saving no one. When framed in this way, most people choose the certain option (sure of saving one-third of the patients). People make different judgments in this scenario when it is framed negatively. Indi- viduals are given the choice between a treatment where two-thirds of patients will be lost or a treatment where there is a one-third chance of losing no lives and a two-thirds chance of losing all of the patients. When given this scenario, people choose the risky option (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). When a scenario is framed as a gain, people tend to want a certain option, while in scenarios framed as loss, people tend to be willing to take a risk to potentially avoid those losses (Kuhberger & Wiener, 2012). Risk framing has been shown to have an effect in a large number of studies, though how much of an effect can change depending on the particu- lar scenario (Heilman & Miclea, 2016; Kuhberger, 1998; Pinon & Gambara, 2005). In these scenarios, it is possible the affect heuristic is changing how we feel, and therefore the judg- ment we make depending on the way the question is framed.

The other forms of framing include attribute framing and goal framing (Levin et al., 1998). With attribute framing, a single aspect (or attribute) of a situation or object is highlighted. For example, people judge ground beef to be healthier and less greasy when it is labeled 75% fat free as opposed to 25% fat, even though these two labels are logically equivalent (Levin & Gaeth, 1988). With goal framing, whether the message focuses on the positive or negative can affect behavior. People are more likely to agree and tend to make decisions more quickly with positive frames than negative frames (Jin, Zhang, & Chen, 2017). A doctor who wants her patient to undergo a procedure would be more likely to get that patient to agree if she emphasizes survival rates rather than mortality rates. With goal framing, the effect depends on whether the focus is on obtaining the benefits of engaging in a behavior or avoiding the consequences of not doing the behavior (Levin et al., 1998). A message might emphasize the dangers of not wearing one’s seat belt rather than the positives of wearing one. For both options, wearing a seat belt is a good thing to do; the difference is in whether the negatives of not doing the behavior or the positives of doing the behavior are emphasized.

Dangers and Uses of Heuristics The heuristics described in this section are not just a novelty of research studies. They can affect our lives. When judging a risk, such as a natural or human-caused disaster, we use our affective reactions to make judgments (Siegrist & Sutterlin, 2014; Vastfjall, Peters, & Slovic, 2014). Whether or not people decide to get screened for cancer can be influenced by the affect heuristic (Scherer et al., 2018). In a study of women who were being tested for genetic vulnerability for breast and ovarian cancer, researchers found extensive use of the availabil- ity heuristic and the representativeness heuristic (Kenen, Ardern-Jones & Eeles, 2003). The women described vivid stories of others they knew who had been treated for or died of can- cer, which affected how vulnerable these women felt in terms of their cancer risk. The repre- sentativeness heuristic caused the women to judge their own cancer risk by how similar they felt they were to others who had died of cancer.

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When explaining particular judgments, we may wonder if one heuristic is more powerful than another. In a study pitting the availability heuristic against the affect heuristic, researchers found that the availability heuristic was more important to judgments when it relied on direct experiences, such as making a judgment of one’s heart disease risk based on personal experi- ence with a family member dealing with heart disease (Pachur, Hertwig, & Steinmann, 2012). There were times when the affect heuristic became a better predictor of judgments. However, most powerful of all was when a combination of the availability and affect heuristic was used.

The errors we sometimes make with heuristics do not mean that heuristics are not useful or that we should abandon their use entirely. Heuristics allow for quick judgments, judgments that we must often make with limited information. Use of heuristics is not a sign of poor intelligence, although there is some evidence that individuals with higher intelligence are somewhat less likely to use some heuristics (Belhekar, 2017). Those with higher intelligence or those who spend more time thinking about thinking may be better able to decide in which circumstances the use of heuristics will be most fruitful (Michalkiewicz, Arden, & Erdfelder, 2018; Noori, 2016). However, other research does not find much connection between intel- ligence and the use of heuristics (Teovanovic, Knezevic, & Stankov, 2015). Individuals high in the personality characteristics of neuroticism and agreeableness were more likely to use the availability and representativeness heuristics (Belhekar, 2017). Wherever you fall, knowing that heuristics are part of the way we make decisions may help you to use them well and to identify when they might contribute to poor judgment.

Test Yourself

Why would information about a new literacy program that helps 60 out of every 100 children sound better to people than if the new literacy program were described as helping 60% of children?

According to the affect heuristic, thinking about 60 children helped by a program provides more of an emotional reaction, whereas the percentage separates us from the image of the happy children and therefore lessens our emotional reaction and our subsequent evaluation of the program.

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Social Psychology in Depth: Heuristics and Politics

When you vote, do you spend all the time and energy required to consider all the issues for all the candidates? If not, you are not alone. Voters often use heuristics to make judgments about political candidates. The time required to find, sort through, and evaluate information on all the candidates is more than many people can afford. How, then, does that affect the decisions themselves?

Richard Lau and David Redlawsk (2001) note that voters often use party affiliation or candidate ideology to make quick decisions in voting. Most of the time, such decision-making strategies get the voters what they want, but there are times when party affiliation or ideology can lead a voter astray. A candidate might be categorized incorrectly. For example, the media may say that a candidate for governor is a conservative when she is actually more of a moderate in her policies. Candidates may also differ from the party line. A voter may assume that because the candidate is Republican she is pro-life, but she may actually be pro- choice .

Beyond party affiliation and ideology, a voter might also use endorsements to make decisions. If a favorite celebrity shows support for a particular candidate, that voter might choose to vote for that candidate. Endorsements may come from individuals one trusts, like a close friend or a celebrity, or from organizations one believes in, like the National Rifle Association or the National Organization for Women. When searching online for information on a candidate, one might also encounter the evaluations provided by others, such as comments, “likes,” or other tallies (Pierce, Redlawsk, & Cohen, 2017).

Polling data also provides a simple cue to a voter. When a particular candidate is ahead in the polls, voters might vote for that candidate because that candidate is popular or because they perceive that candidate will win. Candidate appearance can also influence voters, particularly when other information is not available or people have not accessed that information (Lev- On & Waismel-Manor, 2016; Stockemer & Praino, 2015).

One reason why we might use heuristics is an evolutionary history of living in small social groups (Petersen, 2015). These heuristics may have been less problematic for our decision making in such a situation. We use heuristics more when we are cognitively taxed, such as when we have a large number of candidates to choose from (Crowder-Meyer, Gadarian, Trounstine, & Vue, 2018). This can disadvantage minority candidates because we are more likely to use schemas or implicit attitudes in those moments, rather than our more conscious, rational thought processes.

Less sophisticated voters tend to make poorer decisions when they rely on these heuristics (Lau & Redlawsk, 2001). These voters would be better served if they examined the issues the candidates stood for and made a logical, rational choice rather than relying on heuristics. Using a shortcut is detrimental to decision making for these voters. More sophisticated voters, those with greater interest and knowledge of the political system, make good decisions while using heuristics. This finding is somewhat ironic given that sophisticated voters are least likely to need heuristics, but they were the ones whose decisions making did not suffer from using them.

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5.4 Errors in Judgment Heuristics often get us the correct answer and do so quickly. At times, however, our cognitive systems use shortcuts that make it more difficult for us to find the right answer. These ways of thinking create and perpetuate errors by leading us to keep believing in something even after our reasoning has been disconfirmed. The cognitive shortcuts might also cause us to ignore or discount information that goes against our beliefs. When we believe we have more control than we actually do, we are making an error in our judgment.

Belief Perseverance Imagine you were presented with evidence that firefighters who are risk takers are better firefighters. These firefighters are willing to do risky things like climb up tall ladders and run into burning buildings. Their risk-taking tendencies also help them to find new and inventive ways to fight fires. After you have seen this evidence, you are told it is completely false. There is no relationship between firefighters’ abilities to fight fires and their risk-taking tenden- cies. Would you continue to believe what you were told? Researchers found that research participants presented with such evidence continued to believe it, even after the researchers told them they had falsified the data (Anderson, 1983). They continued to believe it when the researchers checked with them one week later. Maybe because the idea that risk taking is needed in firefighting is so self-evident, it is the logical thing to believe, even when the story is debunked.

The problem with this conclusion is that the researchers only told half of the participants that good firefighters are risk takers. The other half were told that risk aversion is a good quality in firefighters. Firefighters need to carefully analyze situations and only go into a burning building when they know the risks, so they can get themselves and others out safely. The par- ticipants told about the positive effects of risk avoidance also continued to believe the story they had been told even after they found out it was fabricated.

The tendency to believe something even after the initial reasons for that belief are discredited is called belief perseverance. Belief perseverance can be problematic in many situations and is difficult to address (Chan, Jones, Jamieson, & Albarracin, 2017; Kassin, 2017). For example, if your romantic interest becomes secretive, you might suspect him or her of cheating on you. Even when you find out the secretiveness was part of planning a romantic surprise for you, your suspicion might remain. Students who come to believe they lack a certain ability may persevere with that belief despite evidence that their poor performance is a result of poor instruction, rather than inability (Lepper, Ross, & Lau, 1986). If you had a poor math teacher in the fourth grade, you may continue to think of yourself as bad at math even though the teacher taught badly. The reason you did not understand fractions was the poor instruction, not your ability to do math.

Our belief perseverance is not always complete. Individuals who read a research article and were then told that the article had been retracted because the data had been fabricated were less likely to believe the conclusions of the article. However, they believed the results more than participants who were simply told about the findings without reading the article (Greit- emeyer, 2014a).

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One way to counteract belief perseverance is to come up with explanations that are opposite of that belief. When research participants had to explain why risk-averse firefighters might be good firefighters, the opposite of their initial belief, they showed less belief perseverance (Anderson, 1982). However, if people try to come up with an alternative for their initial belief and find it difficult to do so, they come to hold their initial belief more strongly. When using the availability heuristic, people assume that an explanation that is difficult to think of is an unlikely explanation. Another counterintuitive way to fight against belief perseverance is to ask people to come up with a large number of explanations for the initial belief (Nestler, 2010). If it is difficult to develop 10 reasons why risk-taking firefighters might be better fire- fighters, then people come to believe that conclusion less.

Beliefs do not always persevere. When we learn that positive information about a public fig- ure is not true, we may actually develop a negative opinion of the individual (Cobb, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2013). Overcompensation in the negative direction is not mirrored by overcom- pensation in the positive direction; when we learn positive information about a figure we view negatively, we may become slightly more positive in our viewpoint but persevere in our original belief.

Confirmation Bias Once a belief is established, people tend to search for information that will confirm that belief, a phenomenon called the confirmation bias. This is not something people do consciously or deliberately (Gibson, Sanbonmatsu, & Posavac, 1997). Nonetheless, when information is presented, the material that supports a preexisting belief is seen as convincing, while mate- rial that refutes a belief is examined closely and criticized (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979; Mep- pelink, Smit, Fransen, & Diviani, 2019; Pearson & Knobloch-Westerwick, 2019). For example, a professor might evaluate a student paper whose argument aligns with his beliefs on eco- nomic policy very favorably. However, he might attack the logic or arguments of a paper that goes against his position on economic policy, even if it is as well written as the other paper. In accessing information online, we often look for and pay attention to the information that agrees with our preexisting viewpoints and ignore or discount information that goes against our beliefs (Meppelink et al., 2019; Sude, Knobloch-Westerwink, Robinson, & Westerwick, 2019).

This tendency might be particularly dangerous in criminal cases. When someone commits a crime, police and district attorneys need to find the person responsible and make a case against that person. If the police and prosecutors believe a particu- lar person is guilty, they are likely to search for information that con- firms that belief and may discount or ignore information that goes against their belief (Liden, Grans, & Juslin, 2018). If they are correct about the guilt of the person, belief

serezniy/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images People’s preexisting beliefs might be confirmed by reading a newspaper that supports their opinions.

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perseverance is not too problematic. It is when an innocent person is accused that belief per- severance is most dangerous. For example, early identification of a particular suspect colors perceptions of later evidence, even when that identification is made with little confidence in its accuracy (Kassin, Dror, & Kukucka, 2013; O’Brien, 2009). Police officers might push harder in interrogation for someone they believe to be guilty than someone they are less sure of and see evidence of someone’s innocence as less reliable (Ask, Rebelius, & Granhag, 2008; Kassin, Goldstein, & Savitsky, 2003; Kerstholt, & Eikelboom, 2007). Also, when a potentially guilty suspect has been identified, fewer alternative avenues may be pursued (O’Brien, 2009; Ras- sin, Eerland, & Kuijpers, 2010).

Keep in mind that this is an unconscious process. Serious, well-meaning, and ethical police and attorneys may fall victim to this general human tendency. Individuals in other profes- sions are just as likely to experience belief perseverance. Psychiatrists, for example, may seek information to confirm a certain diagnosis they believe to be true (Mendel et al., 2011). One technique that can be helpful to fight against the confirmation bias is to deliberately discuss evidence both for the belief and against it (O’Brien, 2009). Arguing against a belief can help make people aware of other possibilities and explanations. Presenting information in a way that requires deep processing can also reduce confirmation bias by forcing people to engage in careful thinking that analyzes the issues (Hernandez & Preston, 2013). In the political realm, individuals who believe their favored candidate or party is going to lose show less confirmation bias than individuals who believe their party will win (Knobloch-Westerwick & Kleinman, 2012; Pearson & Knobloch-Westerwick, 2019). Perhaps knowing they will not have to change their minds closes people off to considering contradictory information.

Overconfidence Without using any resources to look up the answer, how many U.S. servicemembers do you think served in World War I? If you were asked to develop a range within which you would say you are 98% confident of the number of soldiers who served, what would be the bottom and top end of that range? When people are asked questions like this, they are often more confi- dent in their answer than they have a right to be, because their answers are often incorrect (Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982; Paek, Lee, Stankov, & Wilson, 2013). This phenom- enon is called overconfidence .

Overconfidence can affect what people do and the decisions they make. People who bet on sports often show the overconfidence bias in predicting outcomes, potentially resulting in financial losses (Erceg & Galic, 2014). Chief executive officers who found their own companies tend to be overconfident in their judgments of the success of their companies (Lee, Hwang, & Chen, 2017). Investors are largely unaware of this overconfidence, potentially investing more than they should. Students who are overconfident about their exam performance do not tend to change in that confidence even after receiving a poorer grade than they expected on an exam (Foster, Was, Dunlosky, & Isaacson, 2017). This tendency is seen in men and women equally (Sharma & Shakeel, 2015). At times, we are accurate in our judgments, so overcon- fidence is not always in play, but it can have negative effects on our lives when it is present (Miller, Spengler, & Spengler, 2015). Were you more confident than correct in your estimate of WWI soldiers? According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a total of 4,734,991 U.S. servicemembers served during World War I (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, n.d.).

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Overconfidence might have its roots in other tendencies. The hindsight bias (discussed in Chapter 1)—the tendency for people to say they knew it all along and could have predicted the outcome of an event—may also contribute to overconfidence. Looking back, we might believe we had known the outcome when, in fact, we did not, leading us to be overly confident in our own abilities (Arkes, 2013). Optimism may also play a role. More optimistic inven- tors were more likely to continue spend time and money on projects, even when told to quit (Astebro, Jeffrey, & Adomdza, 2007). The self-serving bias (discussed in Chapter 2) leads us to think better of ourselves than we objectively should. The better-than-average effect is related. As the name implies, it is the tendency for individuals to see themselves as better than aver- age. Believing oneself to be better than average implies that one’s judgments should be more accurate as well. There may be some effect of the better-than-average effect’s contribution to overconfidence; however, some evidence suggests that the contribution is not a strong one (Logg, Haran, & Moore, 2018).

Illusion of Control Our cognitive shortcuts allow us to hold, maintain, and persevere in our beliefs, even when reasons behind our beliefs are no longer valid. These shortcuts also cause us to make errors in our judgments about the control we have in situations that involve chance. Despite knowl- edge to the contrary, we treat many chance situations as circumstances in which our choice, skill, or hard work will make a difference—a phenomenon shown in Ellen Langer’s studies of illusion of control. In the 1970s, Langer did a series of studies investigating the amount of control people believe they have in situations involving chance. In one of these studies, Langer asked people if they would like to buy a $1 card to participate in a $50 lottery. Half of the participants were allowed to choose the card from a deck of cards, while the other half were handed a card from that same deck. When Langer later asked participants if they would be willing to sell the card they held, those who had chosen their card wanted an average of $8.67 for the card. Those who were handed a card said they would sell for $1.96. Why the dif- ference? Langer (1975) proposed that choice gave people a sense that they had some control over the outcome of the lottery, even though all cards were equally likely to win.

When people participate in a game of chance and believe that their actions somehow influ- ence the outcome, they have an illusion of control. An illusion of control occurs any time we approach a situation believing and acting as though we have more control than we actually do (Kwak, 2016; Stefan & David, 2013). This is true when we have no control and act as though we have some, or when we have some control and act as though we have more than we do (Presson & Benassi, 1996).

The illusion is greater when people are more involved in the task and when the task or aspects of it are more familiar (Langer, 1975; Thompson, 1999; Wohl & Enzle, 2002), though there is some debate about involvement (Yarritu, Matute, & Vadillo, 2014). A state lottery that allows you to choose your own numbers is using both of these to increase your sense of control. By choosing your own numbers, you are more involved. Many people play the lottery with famil- iar, sometimes much loved, numbers such as birth dates or wedding anniversaries.

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Success at a task also increases illusion of control. When people get the outcome they desire, particularly at the beginning of a string of outcomes, their illusion of control is greater (Langer & Roth, 1975; Thompson, 1999). For example, if someone is playing a slot machine and has a string of wins early on, that person would have a stronger illusion of control and may, with that illusion, be more likely to continue to play. Gamblers whose habit has become patho- logical tend to have an illusion of control in gambling and in other parts of their lives (Orgaz, Estevez, & Matute, 2013).

Test Yourself

• While doing an internet search on the topic of gun control, Andy quickly zeroes in on a story that is consistent with his views and ignores a story that goes against his point of view. Which of the concepts discussed in this section best describes Andy’s behavior? Confirmation bias. Andy paid attention to information that supports his preexisting belief and ignored or discounted material that contradicted his belief.

• Before rolling the dice in a game, Sue always blows on the dice and whispers what she wants them to be. Which concept in this section best describes Sue’s behavior? Illusion of control. Sue seems to believe that her behavior will change the outcome of the roll of the dice, but the outcome of a roll of the dice is random.

5.5 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Can our judgments about another person affect that person’s behavior? In other words, can one person’s expectations affect how another person acts? This question was investigated by Robert Rosenthal in a study involving teachers and students (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966). After giving students what appeared to be a test of intelligence, Rosenthal told teachers that certain students were predicted to “bloom” over the school year; that is, these students were expected to make great intellectual gains. In reality, these students’ names were randomly chosen from each classroom. The students were not told anything about the tests or what their teachers expected of them. When the researchers returned at the end of the school year, they found that these randomly chosen students did indeed make gains. The researchers concluded that because the students were no different from their classmates at the begin- ning of the study, it must have been the teachers’ expectations that affected the students’ performance.

This tendency for our expectations to affect the behaviors of others is called the self- fulfilling prophecy. We “prophesy” someone else’s behavior—that is, we believe something will happen, and through our actions resulting from that belief, we make it come true (Figure 5.2). The behaviors we engage in to make these prophecies come true is behavioral confir- mation. Left alone, the prophesied behavior would likely not have happened; these students would not have made the gains they did. Because of the prophecy and the teacher’s subse- quent behavior, the teacher managed to create a situation where the prophecy would come true. The teachers called more often on the students they expected to make gains, gave them more feedback, and created a generally more welcoming learning environment. Researchers

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themselves can fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy. When conducting an experiment, a researcher has expectations for how the study will turn out, stated in the study’s hypothesis. If controls are not put in place, the researcher might act in a way that leads the participants to behave in a way that fulfills her expectations.

Figure 5.2: The self-fulfilling prophecy

The self-fulfilling prophecy demonstrates that our beliefs about other people and our subsequent actions toward them can influence other people’s beliefs and actions.

Source: Adapted from Kaufman, C. (2012, October 11). Using self-fulfilling prophecies to your advantage. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-writers/201210/using-self-fulfilling-prophecies-your-advantage

Our beliefs about ourselves

Monica’s belief:

Men never want to talk

to me because I am not

attractive. I have nothing

to offer.

Monica’s action:

Monica does not initiate or

engage in conversation with

men and does not take care

of herself physically.

Jarrod’s action:

Jarrod does not initiate

or engage in conversation

with Monica.

Jarrod’s belief:

She is not interested in

getting to know me and

does not want to talk.

Our actions toward others

Others’ beliefs about us

Others’ actions toward us

Reinforce Influence

ImpactCause

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One explanation for how individuals come to behave in ways others expect them to is self- verification theory. According to self-verification theory, people want to confirm or verify what they believe to be true about themselves (Swann, 1987). Even when our beliefs about ourselves are negative, we desire to confirm those beliefs because it allows for a stable self- concept and a predictable social world (Howarth & Forbes, 2015; North & Swann, 2009; Rosen, Principe, & Langlois, 2013). For example, if you believe you are awkward in social situations, you would want others to acknowledge that because then you would not have to change your self-concept and others would not expect you to be suave and self-confident in social situations.

Self-verification interacts with self-fulfilling prophecy when the behaviors of the person mak- ing the prophecy lead the person to internalize those beliefs and then work to fulfill that sense of self. For example, in longitudinal studies of teens and their parents, researchers found that parents’ beliefs about their child’s future drinking behavior or marijuana use influenced the child’s belief about his or her future drinking or drug use behavior (Lamb & Crano, 2013; Madon et al., 2008). The child’s belief led to self-verification behaviors and, therefore, the fulfillment of the parents’ drinking or marijuana use prophecies.

Self-fulfilling prophecies have multifarious effects. Individuals who believe that they can get close to others online are more likely to engage in online self-disclosure with others and, as a result, fulfill their own prophecy by having successful interactions (Clark & Green, 2018). Teens followed from age 13 to 25 who believed they would have negative interactions with their peers became less romantically appealing and reported problems in social functioning in young adulthood (Loeb, Hessel, & Allen, 2016).

As noted, parents’ beliefs about their child’s underage drinking can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to greater or lesser drinking later depending on the prophecy (Madon, Guyll, Spoth, Cross, & Hilbert, 2003; Madon, Willard, Guyll, Trudeau, & Spoth, 2006). Within relationships, individuals with high rejection sensitivity—those who expect that the other person will reject them—act in ways that lead to rejecting responses. These people proph- esied rejection and, by their actions, created rejection in their romantic partners (Olsson, Carmona, Downey, Bolger, & Ochsner, 2013; Sreehari & Natarajan, 2014). Older adults who agreed at an earlier time that old age was a time of loneliness were more likely to report being lonely later in their lives (Pikhartova, Bowling, & Victor, 2016); however, older adults who expected positive changes in friendships had more friends two years later, so it is not all bad news (Menkin, Robles, Gruenewald, Tanner, & Seeman, 2017).

Expand Your Knowledge: More on the Self-fulfilling Prophecy

For a more expansive discussion of the self-fulfilling prophecy, check out the article found here: https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-fulfilling-prophecy/

The author provides information on additional research on the self-fulfilling prophecy and gives examples, as well as discussing the relationship between self-fulfilling prophecy and depression.

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-fulfilling-prophecy/

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Summary & Resources

The self-fulfilling prophecy may influence our experiences of pain or illness. Teens who believed they would have more pain after surgery ended up feeling more pain and using more pain medication than those who believed their pain would be minimal (Logan & Rose, 2005). It may be that the teens who were expecting pain were more anxious and paid more attention to every twinge of discomfort, leading to a more severe experience of pain. In a similar way, naval cadets who believed they would experience little seasickness and that any seasickness they did experience would be unlikely to affect their work did better when at sea (Eden & Zuk, 1995). In neither of these situations did the prophecy eliminate the pain or seasickness, but it did make it better for both.

Test Yourself

How is it that self-fulfilling prophecies come true?

Self-fulfilling prophecies come true because people engage in behaviors that make them come true. In this section’s example, teachers created a better learning environment for the students they expected to make gains, so those students actually made the prophesied gains.

Conclusion Our cognitive systems are designed to work as efficiently as possible, with the automatic sys- tem taking over as much as it can, while the conscious system deals with the nuanced and dif- ficult problems that the automatic system cannot handle. The use of schemas and heuristics helps make this possible. These mental shortcuts can be helpful to us, but, at times, do lead to errors .

Summary & Resources

Chapter Summary

Conscious and Automatic Processes

The human cognitive system operates on two levels: a conscious level and an automatic level. The conscious system is directed by the individual and works slowly and deliberately on problems to provide nuanced answers. The automatic system works outside of conscious awareness and without intention. The automatic system works quickly, is largely effortless, and provides general answers.

Schemas and Scripts

Schemas are knowledge structures that allow for the organization of information. Schemas can be helpful in memory but can also provide misleading cues when something we expect because of our schema is not present. Scripts are knowledge structures about events. Scripts can be helpful by allowing individuals to predict what will happen and therefore to engage in expected behavior.

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Summary & Resources

Heuristics

The automatic system allows us to make quick judgments through the use of mental shortcuts called heuristics. When we use the availability heuristic, we judge the likelihood of an event based on how available that event is in memory. The representativeness heuristic involves judging the likelihood of an event based on how closely it resembles the typical case. When we make errors in judgments using these heuristics, it may be due, in part, to the conjunc- tion fallacy or the base rate fallacy. With the conjunction fallacy, we judge the likelihood of two things occurring together as more likely than one of those occurring alone. When we ignore the rate of events and make judgments that suggest the unlikely event is more likely, we have engaged in the base rate fallacy. The affect heuristic occurs when we make judgments based on gut-level emotional reactions to events. Framing can influence how we think and feel about situations and therefore push us toward certain decisions.

Errors in Judgment

Particular ways of thinking can contribute to errors in judgment. When we engage in belief perseverance we continue to believe in something even after our reasons for believing have been disconfirmed. Confirmation bias occurs when we ignore or discount information that goes against our beliefs and search for and pay attention to information that fits with our beliefs. With overconfidence, we are more certain of our knowledge than our accuracy can support. When we believe we have more control in a situation, we have an illusion of control.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Others’ expectations of us can influence our behavior. Researchers have found that proph- ecies for behavior—in other words, what people think others will do—can become self- fulfilling when individuals act in ways that elicit that behavior from the other.

Critical Thinking Questions

1 . How might schemas be helpful and harmful in one’s life? 2 . What might your life be like if there were no scripts? 3 . Consider a time when you might have used the availability, representativeness,

or affect heuristic in making a judgment. How did it affect the accuracy of your judgment?

4 . Although the examples in the chapter concern times when heuristics lead us to incorrect answers, why are heuristics helpful and used regularly?

5 . What might you do to recognize and fight against belief perseverance, confirmation bias, and overconfidence?

6 . Have self-fulfilling prophecies ever affected your life?

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Summary & Resources

Key Terms affect heuristic A shortcut in making judgments that involves the use of automatic (gut level) emotional reactions to make decisions.

automatic system The part of the cognitive system that processes information outside of consciousness. Processing occurs quickly, is relatively effortless, has a large capacity, and allows people to do many things at once.

availability heuristic A shortcut in making judgments that involves assessing the frequency of something or the likelihood of an event occurring by how available it is in memory. Instances that come more easily to mind, and thus are more available, are judged to be more likely.

base rate fallacy The error people make when they ignore the number of instances of an event in the population and base a judgment on other characteristics of the situation, such as representativeness.

behavioral confirmation The behaviors engaged in to make self-fulfilling prophecies come true.

belief perseverance The tendency to believe something even after the initial reasons for that belief are discredited.

cocktail party phenomenon The ability of the conscious system to focus on a particular conversation or activity in a busy or chaotic environment, while the unconscious system is monitoring for other things that may be important.

confirmation bias The tendency to search for information that will confirm a preexisting belief.

conjunction fallacy The error of believing that two events occurring together is more likely than one of the events occurring alone.

conscious system The part of the cognitive system that people are consciously aware of and can direct. Processing occurs slowly and is effortful. The conscious system has a limited capacity but allows for nuanced responses .

framing The way a scenario is presented. Three types of framing include risky choice framing, attribute framing, and goal framing.

heuristics The shortcuts used in making judgments.

illusion of control An inaccurate judgment about the amount of control one has. Shown when people approach a situation believing and acting as though they have more control than they actually do.

overconfidence The tendency for people to be more confident in their knowledge than their accuracy can support.

representativeness heuristic A shortcut in making judgments that involves making decisions based on how similar someone or something is to the typical, or representative, person, thing, or situation.

schema A knowledge structure that organizes what people know and may affect how they process information.

script A knowledge structure that allows people to predict what is likely to occur in a situation (e.g., first date) and therefore engage in expected and appropriate behavior.

self-fulfilling prophecy Predictions individuals make about the behavior of others that become self-fulfilling when the individual who has the belief acts in a way that leads the other to act in the expected manner.

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Summary & Resources

self-verification theory The theory that proposes that people want to confirm the characteristics they believe they possess.

Stroop effect The slowdown in response time that occurs when dealing with two conflicting stimuli. Originally found when people were asked to state the color of the ink with contrasting color names.