Examine things especially when they're important to you.
Don't fall prey to your own thinking biases. As we'll see,
biases are very prominent in our thinking. Categorical thinking
is the default for human beings, right? Schema-based processing. Once
you've come up with a rule for interpreting something,
we tend to apply it whether it applies or not and oftentimes we'll skew the
information we get later
to actually justify the rule that we have because we don't want to believe
that we're making bad assumptions. So one these biases is the confirmation
bias.
It's the tendency to seek
evidence that confirms one's belief. When we get into the social psychological chapter,
we're going to talk about self-fulfilling prophecies...
how believing something about some body or situation
leads to you actually causing the situation to come out in a similar
manner as you thought it would come out, thus confirming your original bias, but
had you not had the bias...
might have turned out differently.
A rather classic example of this were when kids in
a classroom were randomly assigned
by a researcher to be either thought of as good students are bad students.
So they took, you know, bogus feedback and they gave it to the teachers
and they told them they were either good students or bad students and the teachers then
created good students and bad students. Not intentionally,
but because they thought they had a belief
that was well based in reality and then they would treat
the kids different in a way that actually caused them
to behave different. So if you think a kid's a bad student
you treat them a little differently. If you they're a good student you
treat them a little differently.
Not consciously because most people will say, "why would never do that,
that's not fair. That's not the kind of person I am." But the idea is that once you have
a idea it becomes a schema that then guides your behavior in ways that
you're not conscious of.
Implicit operation then causing you to behave in ways that actually
cause other people, if you remember back to reciprocal determination,
behave in ways that then confirm your bias. Not only because you change
their behavior as a function, but because then you are selective in seeking
the information. Alright, you then are likely to interpret it in a way
that's consistent with your already, you know,
prejudged belief. Illusory correlation...
Erroneous belief that two variables are related when they're actually not
or they're related in directions you don't believe they are related in.
We tend to focus on instances
where there seems to be a relationship, ignoring disconfirming instances.
Now my favorite example, though you could dicker
with its accuracy depending on how we slice and operationally defined the
key variable,
is a stereotype which we'll talk more about.
So, if you generally stereotype...now, you have to admit that stereotypes exist,
and then just tell me which one is a stereotype: "Women are great drivers" or
"women are bad drivers"?
What's the stereotype? Not, what you believe, what's the stereotype?
Ok, it's a fairly commonly held stereotype
that women are bad drivers. Now, what is a bad driver to me?
Bad driving means you cause a crash,
right? Now, if you look at the crash data
and you look at maybe how we operationalize
crash... bad crash vs. minor crash.
Looking at property damage, time lost from work, and other
kinds of related issues..injuries
and deaths. Who causes more of those,
women or men? Men...
by far away. If you know anything about actuarial tables
and how insurance companies charge people premiums, who gets charge more for
driving? Men or women? So who's the dangerous driver? Who's the bad driver?
Well, that's a great point here. People, that's belief perseverance.
So in the face of evidence, people wanna keep believing what they've always been
believing.
But to look at the illusory correlation what you would have in practice would be
something like this:
let's say I held that stereotype that women are bad drivers,
right. And I get cut off in traffic, and of course nobody ever cuts anybody else off
right? It's always..
you would never do that, you would never accidentally cut somebody off in traffic, but
somebody cuts me off and I motor up real quick to see who did that me.
And if it's a female I'm going to go, "I knew it! Woman driver, that's how they are, you know.
Everybody knows they can drive." But
if I motor up and I look in and it's a guy I'm gonna go,
"Asshole." He's just one of those that can't, but he's an exception
to my rule. You see what I'm saying? In other words I'm going to
hold that data as an exception
to my general rule. If I was looking to validate my general on more
realistic criteria I would find my general rule
doesn't generally hold it all, in fact, might
want to switch it up a little bit.
But people don't do that. People do what they've always done.
Once they get beliefs, once they hold
particular kinds of heuristics or cognitive processes,
they wanna hold on to them. I took off belief perseverance cause this is focusing you
in on test material.
Thank you for coming today, right? But that's the idea...
is we actually skewed data in our real-world
and interpret it consistent with our already existing beliefs.
That's not fair, but it is reality.
And if you know this about yourself
it should make...should give you pause
to wonder about well, I wonder about these rules that I apply to interpreting all
these situations..whether they're really valid.
And it should give you maybe a little better compassion, hopefully
you help people see the error of their ways with the new knowledge you've got,
but, at the same time, if you see people making mistakes like this you would go,
"well they're not total jerks trying to be wrong, they're
normal people operating under normal circumstances
that unless they've been trained to think differently, they won't!"
And that's a hard thing to do, it's a hard task to come up against to try to
get people
to objectively evaluate their own way of looking at the world and interpreting the
world and judging.
We're judging machines. We judge quick
and we judged very harshly in some cases.