Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I want look at
some potential obstacles to problem solving and the first of these is
overconfidence. This refers to the idea that we can be overly confident that we
already have the correct solution, that we know the answer. As a result we
don't consider possible alternative answers. Now one way of demonstrating
this is to ask people to spell difficult to spell words and when we do this we
see that people are more confident than they are correct. So you ask people to
spell difficult to spell words and then you ask them "how confident are you
in that spelling" and you look at the words. When people say "I'm a hundred
percent confident, I know I've spelled that word correctly" and they're only
correct about 80 percent of the time. So we could think about this as when people
are misspelling this word, the reason they're misspelling it is because
they're not considering that they might be spelling it wrong and so they're not
checking. They're not looking into other possible spellings that might be
correct. Of course this applies to more than just spelling. If we think we
already have the solution, if we think we know the answer, then we don't
investigate further. We don't consider possible alternatives and as a result we
continue making the error. So this can prevent us from getting to the actual
correct solution to a problem because we think we already have the correct
solution and therefore we're done working on the problem. Now it's easy
when you hear about overconfidence to dismiss it as a problem that other
people have. This is a mistake that other people make but not me, I'm better than
that I don't make this particular type of error. That actually leads us to
the next potential obstacle to our problem-solving, that's this tendency to
think that we're better than other people, that we don't make the same
mistakes that other people make when they're solving problems. This is
known as illusory superiority.
Alright, so we tend to think of ourselves as being better than other
people and not prone to the same errors that other people are prone to and we
can see this if we ask people to assess their attractiveness or their driving
ability. It turns out most people say that they're above average. Of course
this is statistically impossible; most people cannot be above average but this
is how people will answer and this is often called the Wobegon effect. This
is after the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from Garrison Keillor's "A
Prairie Home Companion" where "all the women are strong, all the men are
good-looking, and all of the children are above average". Now we might think of this
as an error and it can be an error but there may be some positive purposes for
this illusory superiority. It might be the case that by thinking that we're
capable and that we're competent in a number of things this actually helps
motivate us and it helps us to make decisions. It prevents us from being
plagued by doubt. If you always think that you're doing things wrong and that
you're not capable then it's gonna be a lot harder to actually take action and
get things done. One supporting piece of evidence for this is the idea that
people who don't show this illusory superiority, a group of people who don't
show this, are people who are suffering from depression. So this indicates that
while this illusory superiority can mislead us and cause us to make errors
it may also be serving some positive functions in sort of maintaining our
psychological well-being. It's sometimes referred to as our psychological immune
system; it sort of wards off negative thoughts by thinking that we are more
capable than we actually are. Ok, so we also have a problem that our
beliefs can influence our ability to think about problems and this is called
belief bias. So this is the idea that our pre-existing beliefs can disrupt our
ability to think logically about a particular problem. What makes this
especially difficult is the fact that it's hard to change our beliefs even when we
have contradictory evidence .This is referred to as belief
perseverance, the idea that we have a belief we're told, we're shown evidence
that that belief is incorrect and yet we maintain the belief. We still cling to it.
This was demonstrated in a study by Lee Ross, Mark Lepper, and Michael Hubbard
and what they did was they gave people a task, participants completed some tasks,
and then they were given feedback on their performance. Some
people were told they did well some people were told they did poorly and
then they said, "I'm so sorry I gave you the wrong feedback. This
feedback has nothing to do with your performance. It's totally unrelated, this
is, you know, some random other piece of feedback. It's not yours." Then they asked, "how
well do you think you did? Could you estimate your performance?" and the
estimates that people gave matched the false feedback that they had been given
even though they knew that the feedback was false. Even though they were told
this feedback is not yours, it has nothing to do with your performance,
people still made estimates that followed that feedback. So the people who
were told they did well still thought they did pretty well when they gave an
estimate and the people who were told they did poorly and then told that
wasn't your feedback still thought you know "I don't think I did very well, I
think I did pretty poorly". This shows how we cling to our beliefs once they're
formed. It's very hard to change them so how can we go about reducing the
influence of this belief bias? One way comes from research by Charles Lord
and colleagues and what they did was they gave people a controversial topic
where people probably already had some existing beliefs and then they gave them
evidence on both sides of the issue and they wanted to see how this changed
people's beliefs or whether it changed their beliefs. One thing that tends
to happen is that when when you do this it actually makes people's beliefs
stronger. So the topic that they gave them evidence on was either supporting
or refuting the death penalty as a punishment strategy. So you have
people who support the death penalty and people who are against it and then you
give them evidence on both sides of the issue with them, you know, a sort of
balanced view of the topic and you might think that this would bring people
together. The people at the extremes would say "you know, now that I see
that there's some evidence contradicting my view, I
should moderate my opinion a bit". That's not what happens. What happens is it
tends to polarize people even more because the people who are on, let's say
they support the death penalty, they look at this balance of evidence and
they only pay attention to the evidence that supports their opinion, right? They
say "these are the well conducted studies, this is the the right research".
Then they dismiss the stuff they don't agree with. They say "well, you know
what, this had some methodological flaws to it" and "there's a number of
reasons why we can ignore this information". As a result they end up
even more strengthened in their view because now they say "okay, you know let's
say we looked at six pieces of evidence here. Now I have three things supporting
me and, yeah there were three things that disagreed with my opinion, but they were
done poorly and so they don't count" and so I have all the more reason to believe
my view and the people at the other end do the exact same thing. They find, you
know, let's say they're against the death penalty, they look and they pull out
those studies that are also against it and I say "look at all this great
evidence supporting my opinion" and you know "I can dismiss the other
thing because this is done poorly". So what Charles Lord and colleagues did
was they tried to come up with a way to prevent this from occurring. One way
we might think would work, we just ask people don't be biased, don't let your
personal opinion influence your evaluation of this evidence. It turns out
that doesn't work very well but what does work a little better is what's
called a "consider the opposite" approach. What this asks people to do is, when
they look at the evidence, consider the opposite and what do I mean by that? It
means would you evaluate this study the same way if the results produced the
opposite effect? So in other words when you're looking at that study that say
supports the death penalty and imagine that you also support it, you say okay
yeah this seems really well done. Look at how, look how great this evidence
is and then ask well would you think it was so great if the result had been the
opposite? This helps people to try to separate their pre-existing belief and
to analyze it without the belief influencing their evaluation of it
because now they're evaluating it from the opposite perspective. It turns out
this consider the opposite approach worked fairly well in preventing people
from becoming more polarized when they viewed this evidence. So this is
something that we can keep in mind whenever we find ourselves with a
particular belief or we think we have a particular solution to a problem. We can
ask "would I consider this evidence in the same way if the results were the
opposite" and hopefully that can allow us to set aside our bias and evaluate it a
little bit more carefully. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like
the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!