PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Pluralistic Ignorance, Law School Admission Test, Representativeness Heuristic
Chapter 4: Social Cognition: Thinking about People and Situations
Studying Social Cognition
• By studying errors of judgment, psychologists can understand how people make
judgments and learn what can be done to avoid mistakes
The Information Available for Social Cognition
• Sometimes people make judgments on the basis of very little information, such as
making 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
o Defined as misperception of a group norm that results from observing people
who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the
social consequences; those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm
• People’s judgets a see to the ore aurate tha they really are eause of the
self-fulfilling prophecy
o Defined as the tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing
they expect to happen
o More specifically, people can draw mistaken inferences about others that seem
valid because they act in ways that elicit the very behavior they were
expecting—ehaior that ould’t hae happeed otherise
• Information received secondhand often does not provide a full account of what
happened, instead stressing certain elements at the expense of others
• Negative information is more likely to be reported than positive information, which can
lead people to believe they are more at risk of various calamities than they actually are
How Information Is Presented
• The way information is presented, such as the order of presentation, can affect
judgment
o A primacy effect arises when the information presented first is more influential,
because it affects the interpretation of subsequent information
▪ A type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by
information presented first in a body of evidence
o A recency effect arises when information presented last is more influential,
often because it is more available in memory
▪ A type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by
information presented lsat in a body of evidence
• Order effects are a type of framing effect
o Other framing effects involve varying of the language or structure of the
information presented to create a desired effect
o The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, such
as the order of presentation or the wording
• The temporal framing of an event can also influence how it is interpreted
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