心理學導論transcript17

1、Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 17 TranscriptApril 16, 2007<< backProfessor Paul Bloom: Just to review, here's where we left off. The discussion from last lecture and for about half of this lecture is going to be social psychology. And so, we started off by talking about certain fundam

2、ental biases in how we see ourselves. We then turned to talk about a bias and how we see other people, the fundamental attribution error. And now we're talking a little bit about some aspects of how we see other people. So, we quickly talked about certain aspects of why we like other people incl

3、uding proximity, similarity, and attractiveness, and where we left off was a discussion of the Matthew effect, which is basically that good things tend to compound. If you're rich you'll get a better education, if you're smart people will like you more, if you're attractive and so on

4、. Nobody bring up their papers at this point. They'll collect them at the end of class. What I want to talk to- laughter Okay, except for you. Just hand me it now. laughter I'm going to ask the teaching fellows to stop anybody from approaching that area.I want to begin by talking about laugh

5、ter impression formation, how we form impressions of others, and tell you a couple of interesting things about impression formation. The first one is, first impressions matter a lot. They matter a lot for different reasons. They might matter a lot because humans have, in general, a confirmation bias

6、 such that once you believe something other information is then encoded along the likes to support what you believe. So, the classic study here was done by Kelley where a guest speaker comes in and some of the students received a bio describing the speaker as very warm, the other as-do not bring you

7、r paper up if you're coming in late. Just-at the end of class, yeah. laughter Others got a bio saying-thanks, Erik-the speaker was rather cold and then it turned out later on laughter when they're asked for their impressions of the speaker people are very much biased by what they first assum

8、ed. If I'm described to you as a vivacious and creative person and you see me and I'm all kind of bouncing around and everything, you could then confirm this as, "Look how vivacious and creative he is." If I'm described as somebody who drinks too much, you might think he's

9、an alcoholic. If he's described as somebody who's insecure and nervous, you could interpret my activity as nervous twitches. Your first impression sets a framework from which you interpret everything else.This was the theme of an excellent movie called Being There starring Peter Sellers. And

10、 the running joke of the movie "Being There" was that the main character, the character Chauncey Gardner, somehow through accident had the reputation for being a genius but while, in reality, he was actually mildly retarded. But he would go around and people would ask him his opinions on p

11、olitics and he would say things like "Well, I like being in the garden." And because of his reputation as a genius people said, "Wow. That's very profound. I wonder what he means." And-or people would talk to him and he'd just stare at them and say-and people would say-wo

12、uld be intimidated by his bold and impetuous stare when actually he just totally didn't know anything. So, first impressions can shape subsequent impressions not just when dealing with people.A little while ago there was a sniper, actually a pair of snipers killing people in Washington and the o

13、ne thing everybody knew about it was there was a white van involved. It turned out there was no white van at all but in the first incident somebody saw a white van, this was reported in all the newspapers, then every other incident people started seeing the white van. So, they started looking for th

14、em and they started to attending-attend to them. So, first impressions matter hugely when dealing with people because it sets the stage for how we interpret everything else.A second finding building on the first is that we form impressions very fast, very quickly, and this is a literature known as &

15、quot;thin slices." The idea is you don't have to see much of a person to get an impression of what they are. The first studies done on this were actually done on teachers, on university professors. So, university professors have teaching evaluations and you could use this as a rough and rea

16、dy approximation of what students think of them. So, what you do then is-the question that these people were interested in, Rosenthal and Ambady, two social psychologists, were how long do you have to look at a professor to guess how popular a teacher he is? So, they showed these clips for a full cl

17、ass. Do you have to see them for a full class? Do you have to see them for two classes? Do you have to see them for a half hour? How long do you have to be around a person to see him, to estimate how good a lecturer that person is? And the answer is five seconds. So, after clips of five seconds peop

18、le are pretty good at predicting what sort of evaluations that person will have.Remember "The Big Five," how we evaluate people on "The Big Five?" Well, you have a roommate and your roommate you could evaluate on "The Big Five." You've had a lot of experience with h

19、im or her. How much time do you need to evaluate somebody on the five dimensions of personality? The answer is, again, not much time at all. After very brief exposures to people, people are very accurate at identifying them on "The Big Five." One of the more surprising findings is-concerns

20、 sexual orientation or "gaydar." That's not a scientific term laughter but the same psychologists were interested in studying how quickly you can-if at all how long does it take to figure out somebody's sexual orientation?Now, what they did was-they were clever psychologists so the

21、y set it up in a study where the people did not know sexual orientation was at issue. So, for instance, they may be people like you who filled in a form, one question along a very long form was your sexual orientation, and then you're sitting down being interviewed by somebody and your interview

22、 is being filmed, and then other people are shown-who don't know you are shown the film. And the finding is that people based on thin slices are quite good at detecting sexual orientation. Everybody's good at it, gay people are better at it than straight people, and, again, you don't nee

23、d much time. You just need about a second. You see somebody for about a second, you could make a guess. You're far from always right. In fact, you're just a bit better than chance but you are better than chance at telling sexual orientation. So, these two facts taken together, thin slices an

24、d the power of first impressions, means that just by a brief exposure to somebody it shapes so much of how you're going to think about them in the future.Now, we can look at this from the other direction. We're talking about the perceptions of other people, how we perceive other people, but

25、social psychologists are also interested in the question of what happens to other people as a result of being perceived in a certain way. So, one question is, "What would cause me to perceive somebody as intelligent or stupid, gay or straight, anxious or level-headed?" A second question is

26、, "What are the effects of being judged that way?" And psychologists have coined a term, talk about self-fulfilling prophesies, and the claim here more specifically is what's known as "the Pygmalion effect." And the Pygmalion effect is if I believe you have a certain characte

27、ristic this might cause you to behave as if you have that characteristic.The name comes from the play by George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion, and the quote here is "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Pro

28、fessor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will," made into a better known movie, My Fair Lady. But I think that the same theme is better exemplified in a far better movie, La Femme Nikita, where a cold-blooded killer is treated with respect and affection and then sh

29、e becomes a much more warm and accessible person, and then she kills a lot of people but that-laughter but still it illustrates the point.And this point has tons of empirical validity. The classic experiment was by Rosenthal and Jackson where they told teachers that some of their kids were really sm

30、art and other kids were less-were not really smart, they weren't expected to show a huge jump or spurt in their IQ, and this was of course trickery. The children were chosen at random but the children who were described as showing-as expected to show a jump in IQ, in fact, did show a jump in the

31、ir IQ scores and this isn't magic. It's basically-if I am told that you're a genius and your genius is about to be in full-flower throughout this class and it's a small class as these classes were, I'll focus more on you, I'll give you more of my attention. If I'm told &q

32、uot;not so much for you," you'll suffer relative to him. And so the Pygmalion effect shows how our expectations can really matter.This brings us to the final-the issue of expectations and how we judge people is a story that could be told about individuals but it's also a story that coul

33、d be told about groups. And this is where I want to end this section on social psychology by talking about groups. A lot of social psychology is concerned with the question of how we think about human groups and we've already discussed this in the lecture on morality when we talked about the hum

34、an dynamic pushing us to think in terms of "us" versus "them" as shown in the Robber's Cave study and also shown in the minimal group research by Tajfel showing that from a motivational, emotional standpoint it's not difficult for us to think in terms of "my group&qu

35、ot; versus "your group." And this way of thinking has real consequences for our emotional life, our affective life, and how we choose to distribute resources. What I want to talk about here though is a different aspect of how we think about human groups. I want to talk a little bit about s

36、tereotypes.Now, "stereotypes" in English often just is a bad word. To have a stereotype is to be-is to have something wrong with you. You might say it's not good to have stereotypes. Psychologists tend to use the term in a broader sense. We tend to use the term to refer to information

37、we have about categories and intuitions we have about the typicality, our frequency of certain features of categories. And it turns out that collecting information about categories is essential to our survival. We see novel things all the time and if we were not capable of learning and making guesse

38、s, educated guesses, about these novel things we would not be able to survive. So, when you see this object over here you categorize it as a chair and you recognize that you could probably sit on it. This apple is probably edible, this dog probably barks and has a tail and eat me-eats me and doesn&#

39、39;t speak English. These are all stereotypes about chairs and about apples and about dogs. It doesn't mean they're logically true. This could be a vegetarian dog, a poison apple, an explosive chair, but laughter they're typically true. And if you were suddenly stripped of your ability t

40、o make generalizations, you'd be at a loss. You wouldn't know what to eat, how to interact. So, some sort of ability to record information and make generalizations is absolutely essential to making it through life.What's interesting though is we also categorize types of people. So, we ha

41、ve stereotypes in our heads about men and women, about children, adolescents or adults, whites, blacks, Asians and so on. Now, this is not essentially a bad thing for a couple of reasons. First, some of these stereotypes are positive. You might have positive stereotypes about certain groups. You mig

42、ht believe some groups are unusually creative or intelligent. You might have a particularly positive stereotype about your own group even if your own group is Yale students or your own group is people from France or your own group is people from such and so college. You might have positive stereotyp

43、es. More importantly, we collect stereotypes about groups of people through much the same way we collect stereotypes about categories like chairs and apples and dogs. And so they're pretty often accurate.When there are studies which ask people who is more likely to be a lawyer, someone who's

44、 Jewish or someone who is Hispanic, who is likely to be taller, somebody from Japan or somebody from Sweden, people can answer these things. They have their stereotypes that guide their answers, and the answers are not arbitrary or random. Their answers are often correct and often possessing stereot

45、ypes lets us make reasonable and correct generalizations about the world.That's the sort of good news about stereotypes but there's also bad news. One problem is that they're not always accurate and there's a couple of factors that could lead them away from accuracy. One is what we t

46、alked about before regarding first impressions, which is a confirmation bias. If you believe that homosexuals are effeminate, that gay men are effeminate, then this is going to shape how you see future gay men. If you see an effeminate gay man, you'll probably say, "Ah, more evidence for my

47、 theory." If you see a man who is not effeminate, you might ignore it or say maybe he's not really gay after all. If you believe black men are criminals, then when you see a black man who is a criminal you'll chalk it down as support but you'll pay less attention to evidence that wh

48、ite men are criminals and some black men are not criminals. You won't look at this as a scientist objectively scanning data. Rather, you'll be biased in certain ways. You'll be biased to put extra weight on the cases that support your theory and diminish cases that refute it.Furthermore,

49、 our data is not always reliable. So-oh, and this is actually an example of this at work. It turns out in the world of classical music there's a stereotype of women being simply less proficient than men: they play smaller than men, they don't have the same force and they have smaller techniq

50、ues, they're more temperamental and so on. If you asked somebody who was a judge, the judge would say, "Look. This is just the way things are. I'm not being biased at all." The test of this then is to have blind auditions where people do their auditions behind a screen so you can&#

51、39;t tell whether they're man or a woman, or for that matter, white or black or Asian or whatever. It turns out when you do that women get hired far more suggesting that the stereotype is A, incorrect and B, has a real negative and unfair effect on people getting hired.A second problem is what I

52、 was talking about immediately before this is some of our data are misleading so we get a lot of the information about the world from the media. The media would include television and movies but would also include plays and books and stories. And to the extent these portray an unrealistic or unfair

53、or biased perception of the world we could construct stereotypes that are faithful to the data we're getting but the data is not representative. And so people, for instance, object to the fact that when there's Italian Americans on TV they're often members of the Sopranos, a mobster fami

54、ly. Throughout history Jews have been upset at the portrayal of Shylock in "Merchant of Venice," not a very nice guy. And often in response people who want to foster more positive views will often try to-will often put in representatives from other groups in unusual ways to make that point

55、. Anybody here ever see the television show Battlestar Galactica? Okay. Who's that? He's the star of "Battlestar Galactica." You don't know because you're too young. In the original "Battlestar"-laughter and I hate you. laughter In the original "Battlestar Ga

56、lactica," this was the star. This was the main character known as "Starbuck," who got transformed into a woman in the more recent one, a sort of example of how portrayals are shifting in interesting ways.There's also, of course, moral problems over stereotypes. So, it's fine t

57、o judge chairs and apples and dogs based on the stereotypes. It's even fine to judge breeds of dogs. If I told you that I decided to buy a greyhound instead of a pit bull because I wanted a dog of a gentle temperament, nobody would scream that I'm a dog racist laughter involving-and-but hone

58、stly, it's a stereotype. Greyhounds are supposed to be more passive and gentle than pit bulls. I think it's a true stereotype but it's a stereotype nonetheless. But we have no problems when it comes to things like breeds of dogs with stereotypes. We have serious problems judging people t

59、his way. So, for instance, it's a moral principle that some of us would hold to that even if stereotypes are correct it is still immoral to apply them in day to day life. The term for this would be "profiling."Now, it gets complicated because there are some cases where we do allow ster

60、eotypes to play a role. When you all go and get driver's licenses or when you did get driver's licenses you have to pay higher auto insurance premiums than I do. I think this is perfectly fair because young people like you get into a lot more accidents with your reefer and your alcohol laugh

61、ter and so it is-now, some of you are saying "that's a stereotype." And it is a stereotype but it's a statistically robust one and nobody lines up to protest this. It's an acceptable stereotype to make a generalization from. On the other hand, what if insurance companies determined that people from Asia got into more accidents than people from Europe? Would people be equally comfortable charging people from Asia higher rates of insurance? Almost certainly not. So, the issues are complicated as to what sort of generalizations we're-are rea