DEBATE & EXPERIMENT Readings Psychology 324 PDF

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DEBATE: ARE OUR SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS OFTEN INACCURATE? YES Ross, L. and Nisbett, R.E. (1999). The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Pages 55-60.

Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2 The lessons and challenges of social psychology ................................................................ 2 The weakness of individual differences .............................................................................. 2 Power of situations ............................................................................................................ 3 The personology and lay social psychology ........................................................................ 4 Lay disposition and the fundamental attribution error ............................................................... 4 Inferring dispositions from situationally produced behaviour .................................................... 4 1. 2. 3.

Failing to discount the implications of behaviour in view of constraints on it ................................... 4 Attributing volunteering to a disposition rather than to the compensation ...................................... 4 Ignoring role determinants in favor of dispositional inferences ......................................................... 5

How could we be so wrong? ...................................................................................................... 6

What to take from the reading? ........................................................................................ 7 Questions to ask: ....................................................................................................................... 7 How to get a high mark: ............................................................................................................. 7 Notes on the reading: ................................................................................................................ 7 Debate: FOR inaccuracy ............................................................................................................. 7 Points of similarity with article against inaccuracy: .................................................................... 8

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Introduction In social psychology, most basic assumptions about the nature and causes of human behaviour are challenged. • Even the insights that they are most confident about, will tend to have the effect of making them less certain than their peers about predicting social behaviour and making inferences about particular individuals or groups. • Social psychology rivals philosophy in its ability to teach people that they do not truly understand the nature of the world

The lessons and challenges of social psychology Many of our fundamental beliefs that we shared with most other people in our culture and that had remained intact or even been strengthened by our undergraduate courses in humanities, were abruptly challenged in ways that have shaped our subsequent careers. • these challenges, which we present below, provides a departure point for our discussion of the contributions of our discipline. • It attempts to reconcile common sense and common experience with empirical lessons and challenges that lie at the core of social psychology

The weakness of individual differences Scenario 1: • While walking briskly to a meeting some distance across campus, John comes across a man slumped in a doorway, asking him for help. • Will john offer it, or will he continue on his way?

Before asking such a question, most people would want to know more about John • What kind of person is John and how has he behaved when his altruism has been tested in the past? • Only with such information, most people would agree, could one make a sensible and confident prediction However, nothing one is likely to know or learn about John would be of much use in helping predict his behaviour in the situation described. • Research taught us that in this situation, and most other novel situations, one cannot predict with any accuracy how particular people will respond • One can at least not do so based on information about an individual’s personal dispositions or even his past behaviour Even scientists who are most concerned with assessing individual differences in personality would concede that our ability to predict how people will respond in particular situations is very limited.

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The predictability ceiling is typically reflected in a maximum statistical correlation of 0.30 This ceiling is based on a correlation between measured individual differences on a given trait dimension, and behaviour in a novel situation that plausibly tests that dimension This ceiling, for example, would characterize our ability to predict on the basis of a personality test of honesty how likely different people will be to cheat in an exam. A correlation of 0.30 still leaves a great bulk of variance in people’s behaviour unaccounted for. A correlation of 0.30 is a good deal lower than it would have to be to provide the type of predictability that most laypeople anticipate when they make predictions or inferences about behaviour or personal attributes.

Despite such evidence, most people believe that individual differences or traits can be used to predict how people will heave in new situations • Such dispositions are widespread in out culture

Power of situations While knowledge about John is little in value, details about the specifies of the situation would be invaluable • What was the appearance of the person in the doorway? • Was he clearly ill or drunk? • What did his clothing look like? • Such considerations have been shown by empirical research to be important factors influencing bystander intervention. Scenario 2: • Subjects are students in a religious seminary on their way to deliver a practice sermon. • While walking briskly to their seminar, they come across a man slumped in a doorway, asking for help. • Will they offer it, or will they continue on their way? The study has shown what is important factors influencing bystander intervention • If the subjects were in a hurry, only 10% helped • If they were not in a hurry, about 63% helped Social psychology and empirical parables 1. Pick a generic situation 2. Identify and manipulate a situational or contextual variable that you believe will make a difference 3. Note the difference Sometimes you will be wrong, and your manipulation will not work. • But often the situational variable makes quite a big difference

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Sometimes it makes all the difference and information that other people thought all important proves all but trivial Such empirical parables are important because they illustrate the degree to which ordinary men and women are apt to be mistaken about the power of the situation

The fundamental attribution error • People’s inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions • People’s failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behaviour

The personology and lay social psychology Lay disposition and the fundamental attribution error People are inclined to offer dispositional explanations for behaviour instead of situational ones • People make inferences about the characteristics of actors, instead of making inferences about the characteristics of situations We will show that people: 1. Infer dispositions from behaviour that is manifested situationally produced 2. Overlook situational context factors of substantial importance

Inferring dispositions from situationally produced behaviour 1. Failing to discount the implications of behaviour in view of constraints on it Scenario 3: • College students are asked to read essays or listen to speeches presumably written or spoken by fellow students • They were told that the communicators were assigned to one side of the argument; They had to defend a specific side of the topic • Despite the fact that subjects clearly perceived the heavy constraints on the communicators, their estimates of the true opinions of the communicator markedly affected by the particular position the communicator had espoused Aim of study is to show that subjects could make appropriate inferential use of information about situational constraints • Not to demonstrate that lay perceivers fail to be appropriately sensitive to situational constraints • The study indicates that observers are too willing to take behaviour at face value, even when it is made abundantly clear that the actor is under severe external constraints 2. Attributing volunteering to a disposition rather than to the compensation Scenario 4: • Observer subjects were allowed to watch actor subjects in a make belief study on decision making

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They announced that the campus needs volunteers for entertainment and campus tours during an event; If they could volunteer, they would be compensated for Some subjects were offered $0.50, others were offered $1.50. Only a fifth of the low payment actors volunteered, while two thirds of the high payment actors volunteered.

The study showed that even an obvious widely appreciated situational factor, such as a financial incentive, can be slighted in explanation and prediction if there is a possibility of explaining behaviour in dispositional terms • Volunteering was largely due to the sheer amount of money offered for doing so Both actors and observers were afterward asked about their perceptions of the actor’s reasons for volunteering or not • Observers thought that volunteering actors would be substantially more likely to volunteer than non-volunteering actors; regardless of whether they are compensated for doing so • Observers were misled by the actor’s behaviour, assuming it reflected a dispositional tendency to volunteer rather than a response to a suitably compensated opportunity 3. Ignoring role determinants in favor of dispositional inferences Scenario 5: • Subjects were asked to play a brief type of quiz game’ one subject was to ask the questions and the other was to answer them • The questioner had to generate 10 challenging but not impossible questions • Questioners took advantage of their role to display esoteric knowledge in the questions they posed and in the incorrect answers that were supplied • At the end, participants and observers were required to rate the questioner’s and contestant’s knowledge. • Both contestants and observers rated the questioner as far more knowledgeable than the contestant or the average student People can also fail to perceive the extent to which subtler factors, such as role relations, can determine the nature of the behaviour • One might expect that it was clear to the observers that the questioner had a substantial role advantage, but it was not clear to them • The advantage of the questioner did not prove to be sufficiently obvious either to the contestants nor to the observers to prevent them from judging the questioners as being unusually knowledgeable Scenario 6: • Subjects were told that the study was interested in how people work together in an office setting • Some subjects were selected to be managers and some were selected to be clerks • The managers and clerks were given time to familiarize themselves with their tasks • The new business team then went about their work for 2 hours

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the managers did high-skilled tasks and directed the activity of the clerks; the clerks performed the low-skilled jobs and had little autonomy at the end of the work period, managers and clerks rated themselves and each other on role related traits, as well as what they would be likely to display in the future in a specific job on all these traits, managers rated their fellow managers more highly than their clerks, on all but “hardworking” clerks rated their managers higher than their fellow clerks

The aim of the study was to show that people find it hard to penetrate beyond appearances to the role determinants of behaviour • even when the random basis of role assignment and the particular prerogatives of particular roles are made clear • Are people blind to the importance of more familiar social roles as well?

How could we be so wrong? The question here is often phrased in the terms of evolutionary theory • Judgements about other people are often important to survival and therefore we could not be expected to be terribly wrong about them • These arguments are very dangerous in psychology • Just because some ability would be great value to survival does not serve that an organism must have it Are personality judgements really all that important to humans under the conditions under which they evolved? • This has been characterized as “social psychology of strangers” • It has asserted that errors that characterize our judgements about strangers, may have nothing to do with judgements about intimates The lay personality theory discussed above, may apply mostly to judgements about people we do not know well. • Evolutionary pressures are more likely to have been applied to the judgement of intimates than to strangers • However, we spend most of our time with non-intimates, so the error of lay personality theory are not mere foibles

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What to take from the reading? Questions to ask: 1. What are the primary perceptions of the reader? 2. What are the key arguments that the author makes to motivate their position? 3. How do arguments that they make relate to the theory of chapter 3? (Attributions)

How to get a high mark: Need to be able to link the readings and the theory

Notes on the reading: We cannot truly predict a person’s behavior; we are limited in our ability to do so. • Professionals and laypeople cannot make predictions about a person’s behaviour in a particular situation based on knowledge about how they acted in prior situations • Layperson = everyday person (not a professional) • Using individual traits and differences can be used to predict how a person will act in a new situation. People tend to ignore a role advantage • More room to explain behaviour other than personality differences We fail to look past constraints • When looking at situational factors • Example: situation that forces you to behave a certain way, financial incentives, correspondence bias Social perceptions are often inaccurate • We spend more time interacting with people we don’t know • Make more internal attributions

Debate: FOR inaccuracy people infer dispositions from behavior that is manifestly situationally produced • (Fundamental attributional error) if you look at research on people’s personality differences and their behavior, the correlation does not go higher than 0.3 • (Predictability ceiling) people overlook situational context factors of substantial importance a) people fail to account the implications of behavior in view of the constraint’s places on it • (Speech and essay experiment) b) people attribute volunteering to disposition rather than the compensations or financial rewards offered, and infer a more altruistic personality because of the compensated volunteering

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(Volunteering experiment) c) People are blind to the importance of roles when judging personalities • (Questioner – contest experiment and manager clerk experiment) •

Points of similarity with article against inaccuracy: Both articles claim we are more accurate with our judgement when judging peers or “inmates” • For inaccuracy article then argues that we spend most time interacting with strangers in any case so our social perceptions are still inaccurate

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DEBATE: ARE OUR SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS OFTEN INACCURATE? NO Funder, D. C. (1987). Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgement. Psychological Bulletin, 101. Pages 75-90.

Table of Contents Introduction:............................................................................................................................................ 2 Evolution of Research in Accuracy and Error: ........................................................................................... 2 Assumptions: ...................................................................................................................................................... 3

Two meanings of error:............................................................................................................................ 3 Errors in the study of Visual Perception ............................................................................................................... 3 Production of Errors and Illusions........................................................................................................................ 4

Social errors in Wider Context: ................................................................................................................. 4 1.

Over attribution: ......................................................................................................................................... 4

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Processing Inconsistent Information: ..........................................................................................................4

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Social Roles: ................................................................................................................................................ 5

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The Information Given, and Beyond: ........................................................................................................... 5

Getting Fix on Accuracy: .......................................................................................................................... 5 Some Evidence on the Accuracy of Judgements: ....................................................................................... 6 Correlations Between Self-Judgements and Other Judgements: ..........................................................................6 Correlations Among Other Judgements: .............................................................................................................. 6 Correlations Between Behavior and Judgements of Personality: ......................................................................... 6 Size of the Relations: ........................................................................................................................................... 6

Remaining Questions: .............................................................................................................................. 7 What to take from the reading?............................................................................................................... 8 What is the primary position? ............................................................................................................................. 8 What are the key arguments that he makes to support that position? ................................................................ 8 What, if any, are points of agreement between the two readings? ...................................................................... 8 What are the key points of disagreement? ..........................................................................................................9 Where and how can you relate the reading to the theory? .................................................................................. 9

Introduction: Comparison between error and mistake: A. Error: “a judgement of an experiment stimulus that departs from a model of the judgement process” B. Mistake: “A mistake, by contrast, is an incorrect judgment of a real-world stimulus and therefore more difficult to determine” Another way to describe an error • An indispensable to...