Chapter 3: Social Beliefs and Judgments

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In the 2008 U .S.

presidential election, both John McCain and Barack Obama completely flip -flopped on major campaign positions.

They really did?

Yeah, like McCain, who had initially opposed a major tax cut, he completely reversed course to support it.

And then Obama, who had been this, you know, fierce advocate for public campaign financing, he reversed his position and just rejected it for his own campaign.

Right.

But here's the crazy part.

Voters didn't really care about the flip -flopping itself.

They only cared about who did it.

It is such a fascinating phenomenon.

And just to be incredibly clear right up front, we maintaining strict political neutrality here.

Oh, absolutely.

We are simply reporting this example straight from the textbook to illustrate a core psychological concept.

So researchers found that partisans on both sides view their own candidates' reversal as an act of moral courage.

Like proof that their leader was open to new information or whatever.

Exactly.

But they viewed the opponent's exact same behavior as hypocritical expedience.

You know, they were just doing whatever it takes to win.

Welcome in.

So if you are sitting down with us right now, you are officially part of the Last Minute Lecture Team.

We're glad you're here.

This is a special one -on -one tutoring session, a deep dive custom tailored just for you to help you completely master Chapter 3 of Social Psychology, 10th edition.

Which is called Social Beliefs and Judgments.

Right.

Today, our mission is to explore how we perceive our social worlds, how we judge them, how we explain them,

and ultimately how our expectations can actually shape reality itself.

It's a packed chapter.

It is.

And that political example perfectly sets the stage, I think, because it proves we don't just, you know, passively record reality like a video camera.

We actively construct it.

We do.

Yeah.

And to understand how you judge the world, you first have to understand how information gets into your brain in the first place.

Right.

A vast amount of that happens completely under the radar through a process called priming.

Okay, so how does that work?

Well, think of your memory as this giant interconnected web of associations.

Priming is what happens when unattended stimuli subconsciously pluck one strand of that web.

Oh, I like that visual.

Yeah.

And then the vibration travels, activating related concepts without you ever really realizing it.

Wait, so you're saying my brain is picking up on things right now that I'm completely unaware of?

Exactly.

But how does that actually change my behavior?

It changes it dramatically.

There's this classic study by John Barg that illustrates this beautifully.

Oh, the hallway one, right?

Yes.

Researchers had college students unscramble sentences containing words related to aging.

So words like old, wise, and retired.

Okay.

Afterward, the researchers secretly timed how long it took those students to walk down the hallway to the elevator.

The students who had been primed with the aging words actually walked significantly slower than the control group.

That is just wild.

I mean, they didn't feel older, but their physical bodies just subconsciously adopted the concept of slow because of a word puzzle.

Precisely.

The concept of aging bled into their motor functions without any conscious permission.

Wow.

We see the exact same thing in Rob Holland's study.

In that one, researchers simply infused a really subtle cleaning scent into a room.

Like pine salt or something.

Basically, yeah.

And students exposed to that scent were suddenly quicker to identify cleaning -related words on a screen.

Because the web was vibrating.

Right.

And later, when they were given a crumbly cookie to eat, they actually kept their desks cleaner.

They had no idea the room smelled like cleaner, but the scent primed a behavioral response.

Which means when we encounter ambiguous information out in the world, our brains are already heavily loaded with preconceptions.

Heavily loaded.

I sort of think of it like wearing belief -tinted glasses.

You don't even realize you have them on, but they filter and color literally everything you see.

That is a highly accurate analogy.

How we interpret events is, well, it's heavily filtered by what we already believe.

Like with the media.

Exactly.

Consider Vallone's study on media bias.

Researchers showed pro -Israeli and pro -Arab students the exact same network news clips covering a 1982 massacre of civilian refugees in Beirut.

The exact same footage.

Identical footage.

Yet, both groups came away completely convinced that the media was heavily biased against their side.

Because they were watching through those belief -tinted glasses.

I mean, if you already believe the world is out to get you, any ambiguous statement is going to look like an attack.

It's true.

And filmmakers do this intentionally all the time, actually.

The Kulichov effect.

Yes, the Russian film director.

He proved that you can take the exact same footage of an actor's face with a completely neutral expression, and just by changing the image you show right before it.

You completely change how the audience perceives the emotion.

Exactly.

You show a dead woman first, and the audience thinks the actor looks deeply sad.

Right.

Show a bowl of soup.

The actor looks thoughtful.

Show a girl playing.

The actor looks happy.

The context creates the perception.

Okay, but what happens when someone explicitly proves to us that our perception is wrong?

Like, do we adjust our glasses?

You'd hope so, but usually no.

Yeah, I was reading about the Ross and Anderson firefighter study in the chapter, and the implications are honestly kind of terrifying.

Are we just doomed to be stubborn?

We are highly susceptible to something called belief perseverance.

Right.

Belief perseverance.

So Ross and Anderson fed participants a completely fake theory.

They told them that people who take heavy risks make better firefighters.

Which sounds plausible, I guess.

Sure.

Then they asked the participants to write down why that might be true.

Okay, so they had to invent reasons.

Exactly.

The participants went to work inventing their own logical reasons, writing things like, risk takers are brave, they won't hesitate in a burning building.

Makes sense.

Then the researchers completely pulled the rug out.

They confessed to the participants that the data was 100 % manufactured.

It was a lie.

Oh wow.

So they knew it was fake.

They knew.

Yet the belief survived about 75 % intact.

But why?

I mean, if you know the data is fake, why hold on to the belief?

Because of the cognitive mechanism at play.

Once you invent an explanation for a belief, that belief basically grows its own legs.

Ah, you've convinced yourself.

Right.

You've built neural pathways justifying it.

The initial fake data was just the seed, but the participant provided the soil and the water.

That's a great way to put it.

So even when the seed is removed,

the roots they grew remain.

So how do you fix that?

How do you weed the garden?

The textbook offers a very specific, scientifically backed remedy for this.

Explain the opposite.

Explain the opposite.

Yes.

If you force yourself to sit down and write out exactly why the alternative might be true.

Like why a highly cautious person might make a better firefighter.

Exactly.

Because maybe they avoid unnecessary hazards.

Doing that shatters the belief perseverance.

It forces your brain to build competing neural pathways.

That totally makes sense.

So our perceptions are incredibly fragile and our beliefs are really stubborn.

What about our memories?

Memories are a whole different story.

Because we tend to think of memory like a storage chest, right?

Or like a hard drive where we just pull up perfect files.

It is far from a hard drive.

Memory is actually constructed at the time of withdrawal.

Wait, really?

Constructed?

Yes.

It's almost more like a paleontologist assembling a dinosaur.

You find a few actual bone fragments which are the real facts of the memory.

And then you fill in the rest of the entire skeleton with plaster based on what you expect the dinosaur to look like.

That is a perfect analogy.

And eventually you don't even know which parts are bone and which parts are plaster.

That captures Elizabeth Loftus's research on the misinformation effect perfectly.

Oh, the misinformation effect.

Yes.

She demonstrated that if you witness an event and then someone feeds you misleading information.

Like asking how fast a car was going when it passed a yield sign.

Exactly.

When in reality it was actually a stop sign.

People will incorporate that false plaster into their memory.

So they actually remember a yield sign.

They will confidently swear they saw a yield sign in court.

That is scary.

And it affects our emotions too, right?

The concept of rosy retrospection by Michel and Thompson.

Oh, yes.

We've all done this.

Like,

you go on a grueling family camping trip.

It rains the whole time.

The tent leaks.

You are eaten alive by mosquitoes.

Miserable in the moment.

Completely.

But a month later, you look back and romanticize it.

You just remember the beautiful hike and the fresh air.

You basically rewrite the emotional history.

We rewrite our attitudes as well.

Bama McConnell had students answer a survey about student control over university curriculum.

Okay.

A week later, they had those same students write an essay arguing the exact opposite position.

Oh, tricky.

Writing the essay induced cognitive dissonance and actually changed the students' minds.

Right, because they had to justify what they wrote.

Exactly.

But here's the fascinating part.

When asked to recall what their original opinion had been on the first survey,

the students falsely remembered having always held their new attitude.

Are you serious?

They revised their own history to ensure it matched their present state.

Wow.

Okay, so if our memories and perceptions are basically plaster and guesswork, how does our brain actually weigh all this faulty information to make daily decisions?

Well, when it comes to judging our social worlds, we rely heavily on intuition and mental shortcuts.

The brain uses two systems of processing.

There is controlled processing, which is deliberate,

reflective, and conscious.

Like doing math.

Right.

And then there is automatic processing, which is effortless, habitual, and happens entirely outside our awareness.

And sometimes that automatic processing is actually the smarter system, right?

Like Dijkstra Hoos' apartment picking study.

Yes.

What's fascinating there is that when people were given a massive amount of complex variables about different apartments,

the ones who were given time to deliberately analyze the data actually didn't make the best choices.

Really?

Yeah.

The people who were distracted and unable to consciously focus, who had to rely on their automatic unconscious processing, they made the most satisfying decisions.

The unconscious mind is remarkably good at weighing complex, competing variables.

It proves there is real scientific validity to the idea of sleeping on it.

But that same automatic processing also leads us into the overconfidence phenomenon, right?

We are consistently more confident than we are correct.

We are overwhelmingly so.

Hold on.

I buy that for random college students in a lab.

But surely professionals whose jobs rely on accuracy, like stockbrokers or city planners, eventually learn to correct these biases, right?

You'd think so.

Does an experience teach us to be realistic?

It actually doesn't, largely because of the planning fallacy.

The planning fallacy?

Right.

We consistently underestimate how long tasks will take, regardless of our expertise.

Look at Boston's Big Dig Highway project.

Oh, that wasn't that.

It was supposed to take until 1998 and cost $2 .6 billion.

It dragged on until 2006 and cost $14 .6 billion.

Or consider stockbrokers.

They confidently believe they can beat the market, even though decades of data show that mutual funds selected by experts do not outperform randomly selected stocks.

And David Dunning's research explains exactly why this happens is because incompetent people are the most overconfident.

Exactly.

If you are terrible at grammar, you inherently lack the grammar skills required to recognize how bad your grammar is.

You literally don't know what you don't know.

Add to that the confirmation bias.

The Wasson 2 -4 -6 study is a brilliant demonstration of this.

What beat through that one?

Participants were given the number sequence 2 -4 -6 and asked to guess the underlying rule by testing their own three -number sequences.

Okay, if I'm doing that, my brain immediately thinks the rule is counting by twos.

So I would test 8, 10, 12.

Exactly.

And the researcher would tell you, yes, that fits the rule.

Oh, sweet.

So you would proudly announce the rule is counting by twos, but the actual rule was simply any three ascending numbers.

Oh, I completely missed that.

Participants almost never tried to disconfirm their hypothesis by testing a sequence like 1, 2, 3.

Because we just want to be right.

We actively seek out information that proves us right and completely ignore ways to prove ourselves wrong.

So to speed up this whole clunky decision -making process, our brains use heuristics.

Yes, heuristics.

These are basically mental shortcuts.

Fast, frugal thinking strategies designed to keep us alive, not necessarily to make us perfectly accurate.

That's exactly what they are.

Can we break down the representativeness heuristic?

The textbook uses the example of a guy named Frank.

Let's do it.

You were told Frank is twice divorced,

spends his free time at the country club, and deeply regrets not following in his esteemed father's footsteps.

Okay, poor Frank.

Then you are asked,

is Frank more likely a lawyer or an engineer, assuming he was drawn from a room containing 70 engineers and 30 lawyers?

Well, Frank sounds exactly like a lawyer, so I'd say lawyer.

And that is the heuristic at work.

People overwhelmingly say lawyer because he represents our stereotype of one.

But I'm completely ignoring the math.

You are ignoring the base weight probability.

The actual mathematical reality is that he has a 70 % chance of being an engineer simply because of the makeup of the room.

Wow.

We ignore the math if the story fits our mental template.

It's the same trap with the availability heuristic, right?

Exactly.

Like, if I ask you, do more people live in Tanzania or Iraq?

Most people guess Iraq.

Yes.

Why?

Because we see Iraq on the news constantly, the image is readily available in our memory, but mathematically Tanzania has millions more people.

And this specific heuristic can actually have deadly consequences.

How so?

After September 11th, images of plane crashes were highly vivid and cognitively available in everyone's minds.

Right.

It was everywhere.

As a result, people feared flying and chose to drive instead.

But driving is statistically far more dangerous.

The textbook notes that from 2003 to 2005, U .S.

travelers were 230 times more likely to die in a car crash than on a commercial flight.

That is awful.

I read that one researcher calculated that the switch from flying to driving in the months after 9 -11 caused an excess of 350 traffic deaths.

Yes.

That is the tragic cost of probability neglect.

We fear the vivid available image and completely ignore the boring statistical reality.

Our judgments are also deeply warped by how we imagine alternatives,

which is known as counterfactual thinking.

Oh, this is the Olympic medalist study.

I love this one because it's so counterintuitive.

It really is.

Bronze medalists are actually measurably happier than silver medalists.

Which seems impossible, right?

Silver is objectively better.

Right.

But if you win silver, your counterfactual thought like the easily imagined alternative your brain conjures up is winning gold.

Yes.

You compare yourself upward, you ruminate on that slight mistake you made, and you just feel regret.

Exactly.

But if you win bronze, your easily imagined alternative is finishing fourth and getting absolutely nothing.

So you compare downward and feel thrilled just to be on the podium.

The happiness scale literally goes one, three, two.

We also fall victim to illusory thinking, where our brains desperately search for order in random events.

Like finding patterns in the clouds?

Exactly.

The illusory correlation is when we perceive a relationship where none actually exists.

In the Ward and Jenkins study, people were shown totally random data about days when clouds were seated and days when it rained.

Even though the data had zero mathematical correlation, people walked away convinced they saw a pattern simply because they expected cloud seating to cause rain.

And that leads right into the illusion of control, I bet.

It does.

Ellen Langer's gambling study showed that people who were allowed to choose their own lottery ticket number demanded four times as much money to sell their ticket compared to people who were just handed a random number.

Four times as much.

They genuinely felt that their personal choice gave them control over pure chance.

And this illusion of control makes us fail to recognize a fundamental statistical reality, right?

Regression toward the average.

Regression to the mean, extreme scores or behaviors naturally tend to return to their normal average over time.

This one always trips me up.

Can you explain the Schaffner -Herald computer simulation?

Certainly.

So students were told to train a virtual boy named Harold to arrive at school by 8 .30 am.

The computer was programmed to generate completely random arrival times between 8 .20 and 8 .40 am.

Students would praise Harold if he was early and severely reprimand him if he was very late.

And because the times were random, if Harold arrived extremely late one day, say 8 .39, he was almost mathematically guaranteed to arrive earlier the next day, right?

Like a rubber band snapping back to the middle.

Exactly.

But the students didn't see it as statistical regression to the mean.

What did they think happened?

They thought, I yelled at him yesterday at 8 .39 and today he was better.

My punishment worked.

They confused a natural statistical bounce back with their own causal influence.

All right.

So if our brains are this bad at judging the present moment, what happens when we try to look backward and figure out why someone just did something?

We are obsessed with cause and effect.

We really are.

And this is the realm of attribution theory.

Okay, let's get into it.

The core idea is that we attribute behavior to one of two things, either internal dispositions.

Like a person's personality traits and motives.

Right.

Or external situations, the environment and circumstances pressing in on them.

But we get this wrong constantly.

Misattribution is a huge issue.

Huge.

Like, in Tony Abbey's research shows that men are significantly more likely than women to misread a woman's friendly warmth as a sexual come -on.

Yes.

They attribute her behavior to an internal romantic interest rather than just the external social script of being polite.

We also make spontaneous trait inferences effortlessly.

What's that?

James Yulman had students read a sentence like, the librarian carries the old woman's groceries across the street.

Okay.

Later, the best memory cue to help them remember the sentence wasn't the word groceries, it was the word helpful.

Oh, wow.

The brain instantly, unconsciously assigned a character trait to the librarian.

It's an efficiency mechanism.

Which builds to social psychology's single most important lesson.

The fundamental attribution error, or F .A .E.

Yes, the big one.

When explaining someone else's behavior, we constantly underestimate the situation and overestimate their personal disposition.

The classic demonstration is the Jones and Harris -Castro speech study.

Oh, right.

Students read a debate speech that was either pro -Castro or anti -Castro.

When they were told the debater chose their position, the students obviously assumed the speech reflected the debater's true feelings.

Which makes total sense.

But when the students were explicitly told that the debate coach forced the debater to take that position, the students still assumed the debater secretly held those beliefs.

Even though they were forced.

The situation was obvious, yet they could not ignore the dispositional pull.

Or Lee Ross's simulated quiz game.

They randomly assigned students to be either a questioner or a contestant.

Right.

The questioner got to make up incredibly difficult trivia questions based on their own quirky hobbies.

Obviously, the contestant got them wrong.

Of course.

But when observers rated their intelligence later, they rated the questioner as vastly more intelligent than the contestant.

They completely ignored the massive situational advantage the questioner had.

I always compare the F .A .E.

to watching an actor play a ruthless villain in a movie and then assuming the actor is actually a horrible jerk in real life.

That's a great comparison.

You are completely ignoring the fact that they are just reading a script given to them by a director.

But, I mean, why do we do this?

Primarily it's about camera perspective bias.

Camera perspective bias.

Yeah.

When we act, our environment commands our attention.

But when we watch another person act, they become the center of our attention and the environment fades into the background.

Lazarder demonstrated this with police confession tapes.

If the camera is focused tightly on the suspect, jurors perceive the confession as genuine like it's coming from their disposition.

Right.

But if the camera shows both the suspect and the detective equally,

jurors suddenly see the situational pressure and the confession looks coerced.

Time also changes things, right?

The day after an election, voters will say the winner won because of their great personality.

A year later, they say it was the strong economy.

The situation becomes clearer as the person fades into memory.

Exactly.

And culture matters tremendously, too.

Oh, true.

Western cultures lean heavily into blaming the individual, while Eastern cultures are much more sensitive to the situation.

So an example of that would be?

Well, if a boy snags his jacket, Westerners say Tom caught his sleeve on the gate.

Easterners might say the gate caught Tom on his sleeve.

Wow.

That subtle shift is powerful.

And if we follow this logic forward, we arrive at the final section of the chapter, expectations of our social worlds.

Right.

We've looked at how we explain the past and the present, but the ultimate twist is that our explanations and beliefs about the future can actually create the reality we expect.

Self -fulfilling prophecies.

Sociologist Robert Merton coined this.

Like a bank run.

Exactly.

If enough people expect a perfectly healthy bank to crash, they all panic, withdraw their money, and their expectation actually causes the bank to crash.

It applies directly to human potential, too.

Look at Rosenthal and Jacobson's classic study on teacher expectations.

Spurter study.

Yes.

They gave an elementary school a fake test and randomly labeled certain kids as ready to intellectually spurt ahead.

A year later, those randomly selected kids actually had larger increases in their IQ scores.

Now, to be clear, the textbook points out that it's not magic.

Teachers don't just beam intelligence into kids telepathically.

Right.

Right.

But because the teachers expected greatness, they unknowingly changed their microbehaviors.

They gave those spurters more time to answer questions, more eye contact, more smiles, and more challenging material.

So the expectation changed the teacher's behavior, which then changed the student's reality.

Exactly.

This is behavioral confirmation.

Getting from others what we expect.

Mark Snyder did a brilliant telephone study on this.

Oh, this one is wild.

Men were about to talk to a woman on the phone.

They were shown a picture of either a highly attractive woman or a highly unattractive woman.

But the pictures were totally fake.

They had nothing to do with the actual woman on the phone.

Right.

Yet the men who thought they were talking to an attractive woman spoke more warmly and enthusiastically.

And when researchers listened only to the woman's side of the recording, she actually responded more warmly and sociably.

That's crazy.

The man's expectation caused him to act in a way that drew out the exact behavior he expected to see.

Ridge and Reber found the exact same thing in job interviews.

Men who were secretly told a female applicant was romantically attracted to them acted more flirtatiously during the interview.

Yes.

And the woman, reacting to his warmth, unconsciously flirted back, completely confirming his false expectation.

The real world application here is profound.

Miller did a study where they tried to persuade kids not to litter.

Did it work?

Persuasion worked a little bit.

But when they explicitly congratulated the kids on being so neat and tidy, setting a high expectation of their character,

the kids started putting 80 % of their trash in the bins.

We quite literally shape the behavior of the people around us by what we expect of them.

We do.

Which brings us to the end of our deep dive into chapter three.

If we synthesize all of this, it boils down to this.

Our social thinking is deeply flawed.

We are biased, overconfident, and quick to make attribution errors.

But these flaws are actually highly adaptive evolutionary shortcuts.

They are fast, frugal heuristics that keep us alive.

We aren't unfeeling logical computers.

We are survival machines, making the best snap judgments we can with limited bandwidth.

And studying social psychology isn't meant to make you feel stupid.

It's meant to make you more rational, more empathetic, and deeply aware of your own belief -tinted glasses.

Exactly.

Whether you are using this to crush your exam, navigate a boardroom, or just understand your own family better, we hope it helps.

A massive thank you from the Last Minute Lecture team for sitting down with us today.

Thanks for listening.

As you head out into the world, we want to leave you with a final thought to mull over.

If we know that we are all walking around judging others based on fundamental attribution errors, how might your relationships change tomorrow if you assume the absolute best about the disposition of a stranger who wrongs you and instead blame their situation?

Take off your belief -tinted glasses and you might just change your reality.

Catch you next time.