Self enhancement
Overconfidence: unjustifiable positive belief in one’s characteristics/performance
- Overestimation: believe their ability is grater than what’s been objectively measured
- Overplacement: overestimating your relative standing in comparison to others
- Overprecision: overly confident about your estimate without having data to say so
Study: examined cultural variability of overconfidence
•ambiguous task: test apathy by reading emotions from someone else’s pictured eyes and determined what emotions the eyes are trying to communicate
•put tokens/coins (group dependent) on where you think you were correct (spread out bets based on confidence)
•took actual performance and subtracted it by expected performance (the larger the value, the more they’ve overestimated)
•the spread determines overprecision (how certain they were)
Findings:
Overestimation: without incentives (using tokens) classic self-enhancement findings (canadians overestimate, HK in the middle, and Jap underestimate) but with incentives (coins) everyone exhibits self enhancement/overestimates
Overprecision (larger spread = lower precision): without incentives, the spread of peoples bets are similar, but with incentives, the spread is culturally different (chinese and Japs are less overprecision - may think they do better but are less certain)
Evidence
•less cultural variability when examining overestimation
•more cultural variability when explaining overprecision
Agency and control
Two questions that humans ask
1. Whether people can change/ implicit theory of self/ (two possible outcomes)
•Incremental theory of self - the belief that abilities are changeable with effort
•Entity theory of self - the belief that you’re stable/largely fixed
- Whether the world (socially) can change/implicit theory of the world
•Incremental theory of the world - the belief that the world is flexible and will respond to your needs (you can change the world)
•Entity theory of the world - the belief that the world is fixed/we can’t change it
(mental map - L18 p 19)
Primary vs secondary control
Primary: exercising agency by making changes in your environment to suit your needs
•assumes an internal locus of control
Secondary: exercising agency by making changes to your goals/desires to control the psychological impact of reality
•assumes an external locus of control
Differences in control/expression of agency result in differences in choice making
•independent self construal: important decisions must be made by ourselves
•interdependent self construal: important decisions often made by close others
Study ex: if children were going to play a game, what came would they chose
•game chosen by self, stranger, or mom
Findings
•european-americans: more motivated to play games that were personal choice
•asian americans: more motivated to play games that were in group choice
Transmitting motivations
These motivations commonly are important in advertising
•ads: create, feed off, and perpetuate cultural norms - important part of cultural dialogue
•ex: individualistic cultures more likely to have ads of a single person, collectivist cultures more likely to have groups in ads
Sensation and perception
Sensation: biological/physical process where the sensory signals reach detectors in our body to reach our brain (light waves hitting retina, sound waves hitting eardrum)
Perception: process where the brain selects, organizes, and interprets the sensory information that it receives from the sense organs, creating our internal representation
•ex: upside down face is internally represented as unfamiliar
•ex2: series of dots-make image out of it
Differences in perception
Prior/cultural experience has impact on perception, creating differences in
1. Susceptibility to optical illusions
•differences in aspects of psychical environment
•interpreting 3D information (different susceptibilities)
*ex: carpentered world hypothesis/muller-lyer illusion
•Higher susceptibility for people who live in more wide open environments
*horizontal-vertical illusion/foreshadowing hypothesis: we see the horizontal line as being longer than the vertical line but they’re all the same length
•impossible figure is more difficult for europeans
- Pictorial depth perception: picture of hunter with gazelle and elephant in background
•Less western: hunger throwing his spear at the elephant because its closer
•More western: hunger throwing his spear at gazelle, elephant is on the hill - easier to see because education teaches children to perceive 2D images as 3D (more sensitive to depth cues such as): - relative size of objects: person at front will look larger than person in back, but we know its because he’s further away (not smaller)
- object superimposition: important objects blocking other parts of the picture
- vertical position: something going away from us is higher up in the visual field
- linear perspective: parallel lines come together creating a vanishing point
- texture gradient: higher resolution when something is close
Paintings historically
•western art made into 3D (all lines converged on focal object)
•asian art used oblique perspective (flattened lines criss cross) until 18th century (european contact)
- Object vs field focus: people from different cultures tend to differ on focal object vs the field around the focal object
•associated with holistic thinking style and analytic thinking style
Holistic vs analytic thinking style
Holistic: think about all the different parts as being integrated with each other
•field dependence: tendency to attend to the context that surrounds focal objects and relationships among objects in the environment (occurs in interdependent SC)
Analytic: think about specific elements, and use fixed abstract rules to explain/predict behaviour
•filed independence: tendency to separate focal object from its environment and attend to to attributes of the focal object (occurs in independent SC)
How thinking styles manifest in cultural artistic traditions
European/western paintings: horizons pretty low on painting (38% ish)
East asian paintings: horizons significantly higher (56% ish)
Difference is observable in child drawings (smaller difference but still observable)
Higher horizons tend to allow you to draw more objects (more space)
•show relationships between objects
•idea of self awareness
•more indicative of holistic thinking (more focus on contextual information, making situational attributions) than analytic (focus on internal, dispositional attributions)
Thinking styles affect on three cognitive processes
- Attributions
•fundamental attribution error: tendency to put too much focus on someone’s internal dispositions as attributes for one’s behaviour, underestimating impact of external/contextual factors (analytic thinking)
•socialization plays important role in transmitting/communicating social norms - Categorization
•Analytic thinking: focus on internal traits, leading to tendency to categorize objects based on common traits
*more likely in US children (group based on shared characteristics)
•Holistic thinking: focus on relationships between objects, leading to tendency to categorize objects based on their connections/relationships
*more likely in China/Indigenous (group based on relationships) - Dialect:
No tolerance for contradiction: traditional laws of thought - law of identity: A = A
•any object is equated to its attributes
•ex: a doctor is someone who has a medical licence, can form diagnosis, and give meds - Law of non contradiction: A=B A≠B - only one can be true
•nothing can both be and not be - Law of excluded middle
•everything must either be or not be (no other possibilities)
Naive dialects: tolerance for contradiction
•east asian tradition has higher acceptance of contradiction
Three principles
1. Change: reality changes/is fluid
2. Contradiction: because change is constant, contradiction is constant (opposite poles depend on each other for existence)
•ex: everything is nothing and nothing is emptiness
3. Relationship: because change and contradiction are constant, everything is related and cannot be isolated into independent elements
