PSY220H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Belief Perseverance, Availability Heuristic, Representativeness Heuristic
Document Summary
How do we percieve our social worlds: priming, unattended stimuli can subtly influence how we interpret and recall events, our memory system is a web of associations, and priming is the awakening or activating of certain associations. Priming experiments reveal how one thought, even without awareness, can influence another thought, or even an action: john bargh and his colleagues (1996) asked people to complete sentences containing words such as old, wise, and retired. Shortly after, they observed these people walking more slowly to the elevator than did those not primed with aging-related words. In a host of studies, priming effects surface even when the stimuli are presented subliminally too briefly to be perceived consciously: much of our social information processing is automatic. Both proponents and opponents of capital punishment readily accepted evidence that confirmed their belief but were sharply critical of disconfirming evidence.
