SPED102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Carmen Lawrence, Confirmation Bias, Recall Bias
2 Jun 2018
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Cognitive Biases – Part Two:
• Anchoring Effects (cognitive bias):
o The tendency of arbitrary baseline values to affect decisions
o The common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of
information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions
o For example, Ariely et al. (2006) → offered to charge $2 or pay
students $2 to attend a poetry recital
▪ Would you be willing to attend the recital for free? Paid – 8%,
charged – 35% yes
• Framing Effects:
o People react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how
it is presented e.g. is this a loss or a gain
o Value attached to an item is influenced by irrelevant alternative
choices
o We usually do not have an inherent idea of value – it is ‘framed’ by
comparisons
o These can be and are manipulated to affect our choices
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
o Those that are most incompetent tend to overestimate their social and
intellectual ability
o They misinterpret and their incompetence robs them of their
metacognitive ability to recognize their errors
o Celebrity ‘expert’ phenomena → celebrities often illustrate this (they
demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge) – celebrities think they
become experts e.g. Jenny McCarthy, American model, claims that
vaccines cause autism – this is not the case but she claims information
and thinks that opposing evidence and scientific knowledge is all
wrong
• How does memory work?
o Not the reliable data store that we assume
o Vulnerable to all kinds of misleading information, social influence and
individual differences
o Memory is malleable
o No correlation between confidence and accuracy – people can be
confident about their memory of events, yet not be quite as accurate
• The Misinformation Effect
o Researchers have shown ways in which misinformation can
manipulate a person’s memory
o Elizabeth Loftus experiment in the late 1970s showed how susceptible
and changeable memory can be
• False Memories
o Loftus and colleagues went on to show that even memories of a
completely fictitious event can be created under the right
circumstances → this changed our view of memory
o The ‘Shopping Mall’ experiment → false memory given to a child who
then proceeded onto telling his story about getting lost at the shops
• False memory creation in the lab – ‘crashing memories’ paradigm → creates
false memories of seeing non-existent film footage of public events e.g. Bali
bombings, aircraft crashes
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