“Telling More than We Can Know…” – Nisbett & Wilson
- Overall: verbal reports on mental processing
- Assumption that subjects are:
- Unaware of stimulus or reasoning behind a
response
- Unaware of stimulus or reasoning behind a
- People might not be aware of personal cognitive
processes but they can still accurately report them
“Unskilled and Unaware of It…” – Kruger & Dunning
- Unskilled/incompetent people tend to overestimate their skills and abilities
- Skills needed to be good at something are same skills necessary to evaluate competence in same area
- people do not overestimate in fields they do not at least minimally know
Cialdini - Chapter 1: Influence
- Human behavior often works in a mechanical type way
- Contrast principle: if first thing is worse the thing after will not seem as bad as it actually is
Power of Situation over You - Lovaglia
- individual attitudes and decisions less important in our lives than we think, only good as situation we are in
- knowledge of social psychology gives power to shape character and social circumstances
- situational attribution, fundamental attribution error, correspondence bias
“The Power of Experiments” – Lovaglia
Hallmarks of a good experiment:
- Comparison between two similar groups
- Controlled situations that allow study to be repeated
- Follow up studies that confirm previous experiments
- Spawning a new theory supported by results
Pitfalls to avoid:
- Results cannot be exported to other contexts/culture
- Not considering ethical problems carefully
“The Correspondence Bias” – Gilbert and Malone
- Correspondence bias: tendency to draw inferences from a person’s dispositional factors that can be explained by situation in which they occur
- Causes of correspondence bias:
- Lack of awareness
- Unrealistic expectations
- Inflated categorizations
- Incomplete corrections
Cialdini - Chapter 2: Reprocity
- Rule of reciprocation: try to repay what another person has provided
- Rejection then retreat sequence: starting with an extreme request allow requester to successfully move to a desired small request
Cialdini - Chapter 3: Consistency
- related to commitments:
- after making a commitment people more willing to
agree to requests that are in keeping with prior
commitments - bad commitments often have tendency of people
to add new reasons and justification to support the
commitments made
- after making a commitment people more willing to
“The Effects of Group Pressure Upon…Group Judgments” – Asch
- Structure of situation molds group forces and determines direction as well as strength
- Forms of reaction:
- Independant: confident in group, do not react
emotionally, adhere to judgments on basis to deal
with task - Yielding: distortion of perception, judgment, and
action
- Independant: confident in group, do not react
Cialdini - Chapter 4: Social Proof
- social proof: people determine what is correct or make decisions based on finding out what other people think is correct
- pluralistic ignorance: tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing
- the greater the number of people who find any idea correct the more a given individual will perceive the idea to be correct
Cialdini - Chapter 5: Liking
- Physical attractiveness or good looking people have an advantage in social interactions
- People like people who are similar to them
Cialdini - Chapter 6: Authority
- Strong pressure in society for compliance with request from authority
- submission to authority done in a decision-making shortcut
“Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability” – Salganik, Dodds, and Watts
- Experts fails for predict which products will succeed
- Individuals do not make decisions independently but rather are influenced by behavior of others
- Results support hypothesis that information of choices of others contribute to both inequality and unpredictability in cultural markets
“Threshold Models of Collective Behavior” – Granovetter
- Hazardous to infer individual decisions from aggregate outcomes or to assume that behavior was directed by agreed upon norms
- Thresholds affected by determinants of individual behavior like background, social class, education, occupation, and social position that help establish valuation of individuals to different outcomes in a situation
Cialdini - Chapter 7: Scarcity
- People assign more value to opportunities when they are less available
- Psychological reaction theory: response to loss of freedoms by wanting them more than before
Cialdini - Chapter 8: Instant Influence
- Accelerating pace of modern life deprives us of proper conditions to make a careful analysis of pros and cons
- Tendency for cognitive overload in society
