PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Pluralistic Ignorance, Confirmation Bias, Availability Heuristic
Document Summary
Chapter 4: social cognition: thinking about people and situations. By studying errors of judgment we can understand how we make judgments and learn to avoid mistakes. Sometimes we have very little information but make judgments anyway as when people make personality judgments based on physical appearance. Mistaken inferences can arise from pluralistic ignorance, which tends to occur when people are reluctant to express their misgivings about a perceived group norm; their reluctance in turn reinforces the false norm. Information received secondhand often does not provide a full account of what happened or may stress certain elements at the expense of others. Positive information is more likely to be reported and tends to receive much more weight in people"s judg(cid:373)e(cid:374)ts tha(cid:374) (cid:374)egative i(cid:374)for(cid:373)atio(cid:374). The order in which information is presented can be important. When the information presented first is more influential, there is a primacy effect, which often results because the initial information affects the way subsequent information is interpreted.
