richard nisbett 2015
978-0-374-71067-5
I feel the presentation is efficient, this may be due to familiarity of topics and reading more quickly as consequence…
our understanding of the world is always a matter of construal—of inference and interpretation. Our judgments about people and situations, and even our perceptions of the physical world, rely on stored knowledge and hidden mental processes and are never a direct readout of reality.
heuristics, including the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic, operate quite automatically and often unconsciously. this means it’s going to be hard to know just how influential they can be. but knowing about them allows us to reflect on the possibility that we’ve been led astray by them in a particular instance.
spreading activation
problem with our reliance on schemas and stereotypes is that they can get triggered by incidental facts that are irrelevant or misleading. Any stimulus we encounter will trigger spreading activation to related mental concepts.
more forgiving after lunch
misattribute physiological arousal produced by one event to another, altogether different one.
The effect of incidental stimuli can be huge, and you want to know as much as you possibly can about what kinds of stimuli produce what kinds of effects.
importance of encountering objects—and especially people—in a number of different settings if a judgment about them is to be of any consequence. That way, incidental stimuli associated with given encounters will tend to cancel one another out, resulting in a more accurate impression.
framing
effort heuristic
assume that projects that took a long time or cost a lot of money are more valuable than projects that didn’t require so much effort or time
price heuristic
assume that more expensive things are superior to things of the same general kind that are less expensive
scarcity heuristic
assume that rarer things are more expensive than less rare things of the same kind
familiarity heuristic
what you recall easily in more salient, preferred, seen as larger
representativeness heuristic
events are judged as more likely if they’re similar to the prototype of the event than if they’re less similar
we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don’t understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be
best predictor of future behavior is past behavior over the long run, observed in many diverse situations, not behavior observed in only a few situations, especially a few situations all of the same type
availability heuristic
The more easily examples of the event come to mind, the more frequent or plausible they seem.
salience again…
fundamental attribution error
the situations we find ourselves in affect our thoughts and determine our behavior far more than we realize. People’s dispositions, on the other hand—their distinctive traits, attitudes, abilities, and tastes—are much less influential than we assume.
when you describe the experimental setup to people, they don’t think that the situation—being late versus not—would have any effect at all on whether the seminarian would help or ignore the person in distress. Given this belief, they can only perceive failure to help as being due to poor character, something internal to the person.
role advantage of the questioner was not sufficiently obvious, either to the contestants or to the observers, to prevent them from judging the questioners to be unusually knowledgeable
social influence
choose our acquaintances carefully because we’re going to be highly influenced by them. This is especially true for young people: the younger you are, the more influenced you are by peers’ attitudes and behaviors. One of a parent’s most important and challenging roles is to make sure their children’s acquaintances are likely to be good influences.
social facilitation effect on performance
showing massive social influence and near-total failure to recognize it, the Goethals and Reckman (busing) study also makes the disconcerting and important point that our attitudes about many things, including some very important ones, are not pulled out of a mental file drawer but rather are constructed on the fly. Just as disconcerting, our beliefs about our past opinions are also often fabricated.
context is always salient for the actor
different social orientations were economic in origin
Greek livelihoods were based on relatively solitary occupations such as trading, fishing, and animal husbandry, and on agricultural practices such as kitchen gardens and olive tree plantations. Chinese livelihoods were based on agricultural practices, especially rice cultivation, requiring much more cooperation. Autocracy (often benevolent, sometimes not) was perhaps an efficient way of running a society where every man for himself was not an option.
So it was necessary for Chinese to pay attention to social context in a way that it wasn’t for Greeks’
differential attention to context results in Easterners’ having a preference for situational explanations for behavior that Westerners are more likely to explain in dispositional terms. A study by Korean social psychologists found that if you tell someone that a particular person behaved as did most people in the person’s situation, Koreans infer, quite reasonably, that something about the situation was the primary factor motivating the person’s behavior. But Americans will explain the person’s behavior in terms of the person’s dispositions—ignoring the fact that others behaved in the same way in the situation.
Easterners are susceptible to the fundamental attribution error, just not as susceptible as Westerners. For example, in a study similar to the one by Jones and Harris demonstrating that people tend to assume an essay writer holds the opinion required by the assignment, Incheol Choi and his coworkers showed that Korean participants made the same mistake as Americans. But when participants were put through the same kind of coercive situation as those whose essays they were about to read, the Koreans got the point and didn’t assume that the writer’s real attitudes corresponded to their essay position. Americans, however, learned nothing from having the situation made so obvious and assumed they had learned something about the essay writer’s opinion.
Easterners tend to have a holistic perspective on the world. They see objects (including people) in their contexts, they’re inclined to attribute behavior to situational factors, and they attend closely to relationships between people and between objects. Westerners have a more analytic perspective. They attend to the object, notice its attributes, categorize the object on the basis of those attributes, and think about the object in terms of the rules that they assume apply to objects of that particular category.
the holistic perspective saves Easterners from some serious errors in understanding why other people behave as they do. Moreover, the reluctance to make dispositional attributions contributes to Eastern belief in the capacity of people to change.
the unconscious mind
registers vastly more environmental information than the conscious mind could possibly notice. Many of the most important influences on our perceptions and behavior are hidden from us. And we are never directly aware of the mental processes that produce our perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, the unconscious is fully as rational as the conscious mind. It solves many kinds of problems the conscious mind can’t deal with effectively.