lphonse ordered the veggie burger with onion rings but instead got the veggie burger with fries.
availability heuristic = “ease of recall” rule. Tversky & Kahneman (1974) showed it drives errors like overestimating accident deaths. it’s conceptually parallel to face-dominance in Media 1: both are cognitive shortcuts where one salient channel overwhelms the full dataset.
Alphonse ordered the veggie burger with onion rings but instead got the veggie burger with fries. “Oh, well,” he says, “I’ll just eat the fries.” This starts a discussion of whether he should have sent back his order, and some of your friends accuse Alphonse of not being assertive enough. Suppose he turns to you and asks, “Do you think I’m an unassertive person?” How would you answer?
availability heuristic = “ease of recall” rule. Tversky & Kahneman (1974) showed it drives errors like overestimating accident deaths. it’s conceptually parallel to face-dominance: both are cognitive shortcuts where one salient channel overwhelms the full dataset.
horoscopes that give generic feedback, which could apply to just about anyone.
the horoscope/personality test effect mirrors universality of expression: we map vague, generic input onto our own representative cases. the trick is that representativeness feels diagnostic even when it’s just broad enough to fit anyone.
divide-the-money task we just described, but having some participants first write or think about God and their religion, whereas others first wrote or thought about a neutral topic such as the contents of their apartments.
the $10 divide-the-money experiment is basically a goal-priming test. fits with Stroop: whichever schema/goal is most activated “wins” automatically unless controlled thought intervenes.
People who grow up in East Asian cultures (e.g., China, Japan, or Korea) tend to have a holistic thinking style,
Masuda & Nisbett’s airport scene study shows cultural tool preferences: westerners lock on objects (analytic), east asians scan context (holistic). Ekman’s universality work adds nuance. Core emotions look the same, but interpretation rules (display vs context) diverge by culture.
The Bantu people’s memory for cattle is so good that they do not bother to brand them; if a cow happens to wander away and gets mixed up with a neighbor’s herd, the owner simply goes over and takes it back, having no trouble distinguishing his animal from the dozens of others.
the Bantu cattle memory vs. stock market schemas is a culture-driven accessibility effect. schemas reflect what’s chronically primed by daily life, just like how goal primes bias the $10 money-split task (Bargh)
They administered a test to all the students in the school and told the teachers that some of the students had scored so well that they were sure to “bloom” academically in the upcoming year. In fact, this was not necessarily true: The students identified as “bloomers” were chosen at random by the researchers.
Rosenthal & Jacobson’s bloomers study is a textbook case: expectation - subtle changes in treatment - performance shifts. notice it was automatic, not conscious favoritism (Chen & Bargh, 1997). Demonstrating deception; where unconscious micro-signals leak through despite intentions.
Priming and AccessibilityIn the second of a pair of studies, people were asked to read this paragraph about Donald and form an impression of him. In the first study, some of the participants had memorized words that could be used to interpret Donald in a negative way (e.g., reckless, conceited), while others had memorized words that could be used to interpret Donald in a positive way (e.g., adventurous, self-confident). As the graph shows, those who had memorized the negative words formed a much more negative impression of Donald than did those who had memorized the positive words.
priming is a clean example of automaticity. Higgins et al. (1977) showed that just memorizing words like “reckless” or “adventurous” shaped impressions of Donald. this matches Ekman’s (1964) point that static snapshots miss how quickly preceding context primes interpretation.
He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant—there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr. Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him . . . for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. (pp. 109–110; emphasis in original)
the passage on Korsakov’s patients inventing coherence links nicely to how redundancy across channels strengthens impressions (Media 1). without memory continuity, the mind “confabulates,” which is basically a desperate attempt to build a schema on the fly.
One version said, “People who know him consider him to be a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined.” The other version was identical except that the phrase “a very warm person” was replaced with “a rather cold person.” The students received one of these personality descriptions at random.
schemas aren’t just useful. They can actually override direct evidence. Mehrabian & Ferris (1967) found that when faces and voices conflict, people weight the face 1.5× more. it’s the same logic as Kelley’s warm/cold professor study: a single cue can set the frame for interpreting everything else.
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Rodin’s Thinker is a great visual for controlled, effortful cognition. but the irony is that most of our judgments are automatic; fast, unconscious, and effortless. this is the same split shown in the Stroop task: automatic reading overrides our deliberate control unless we slow down.