4/6/21: Emotion

Crying on airplanes
The origins of the ABCs of social psychology in the late 1890s
- Affect
o 1890: William James reveries conventional wisdom on emotions
o Subsequent work by Schachter
- Behavior
o 1898: Norman Triplett conducts first experiment: presence of co-actors facilitates
performance
o Subsequent work on social facilitation by Zajonc
- Cognition
o 1896, Gustav LeBon speculates on the “collective mind” of the crowd
o Subsequent work on deindividuation by Zimbardo
Today: a first look at emotion
- William James turns the study of emotions on its head. Do emotions originate in the mind
of body?
Prof Savitsky learns that spring break has been cancelled  he is angry  his heart races, he
flushes, he clenches his fists
Prof Savitsky learns that spring break has been cancelled  his heart races, he flushes, he
clenches his fists --? He is angry
Perception of bodily states leads to experience of emotion. We’re sad because we cry. His
argument: can’t conclude of an emotion without physical sensation
- Expression  emotion
- No expression  no emotion

Schachter & Singer’s two factor, Jukebox Theory of Emotion

- Emotion = state of physiological arousal that is attributed to an emotional stimulus
o Like James: bodily sensation precedes emotional experience
o Unlike James: one all purpose bodily state for all emotions (arousal)
- Factor 1 (Volume)
o Undifferentiated physiological arousal determines intensity of emotion
- Factor 2 (tune)
o Cognitive interpretation, based on the situation, determines the emotional content
Experiment
- Arousal
o Placebo or Epinephrine (suproxin)
- Expectations
o Uninformed,
o informed,
 your hands will start to shake, your heart will start to pound, and your face
may get warm and flushed
o or misinformed
 your feet will feel numb, you will have an itching sensation over parts of
your body, and you may get a slight headache
- Emotion modeled
o Euphoria – exuberant confederate
o Anger – annoying questionnaire and pissed off confederate
Inducing anger
- With how many men (other than your father) has your mother had extramarital
relationships?
o 4 and under
o 5 to 9
o 10 and over

Design and Predications

Euphoria Anger
Placebo No emotion No emotion
Epi informed No emotion No emotion
Epi uninformed Euphoria* Anger*
Epi misinformed Euphoria* -
*These participants are expected to draw upon situational cues to explain their arousal, resulting
in the experience of an emotion. In the other conditions there is no (unexplained) arousal

Euphoria
- Placebo: 16
- Epi informed: 12.7
- Epi uninformed: 18.3
- Epi misinformed: 22.6
Anger
- 0.79
- -0.18
 - 2.28
- -
Why is there any emotion in the placebo condition if there’s no epinephrine
- You can have emotion on your own
Why is the informed condition lower than placebo?

Misattribution
- Paradigm #1
o Misattribute irrelevant arousal (arousal that has nothing to do with the present
situation) to an emotion source
o Enhances emotional experience: “I must really be feeling this emotion” –
Schachter & Singer
- Paradigm #2
o Misattribute emotional arousal (arousal that does, in fact, pertain to a given
emotion) to a neutral source
o Diminishes emotional experience “I guess I’m not feeling this emotion”

Bridge
- Attractive female experimenter administers questionnaire to male respondents
o Two bridges: control vs scary
o Key question: did Ss call E “for results of her study?”
- We listen to our own physiological arousal to determine how we (must) feel, sometimes
label that arousal incorrectly
- Problem: no random bridge assignment
o Follow up study compared “just off the bridge” with “on the bridge” holds
population constant: 30% vs 65%
- Still problems: E seems different?

Misattribution of Arousal in the Lab (Cantor, Zillman, & Bryant)

- Induce arousal through exercise
- View an erotic film…
o Immediately after exercise (aroused and know it)
o 5 minutes after (unperceived arousal – still have some arousal, but they don’t
think that they do)
o 10 minutes after (no longer aroused)
- Then report on the “aesthetic quality” of film
 - Evaluations of the film are highest when they have arousal and no good explanation for
the arousal
o The mere presence of arousal doesn’t guarantee misattribution effect
 You have to have arousal WITHOUT an explanation
 So immediate condition would be most analogous to the informed
condition from Schachter & Singer ****
o Arousal with an explanation
Ryan Adams (singer) - song
- Valence of arousal (positive, negative, or neutral) doesn’t matter (supported)
- Arousal will only enhance the positivity of an emotional appraisal (not supported)

Putting the Ryan Adams hypotheses to the test

- Vary the valence of the arousal
o Positive: comedy clip
o Neutral: reading from a biology textbook
o Negative: grisly crime description
- Vary the target
o Rate attractiveness of an attractive target
o Rate attractiveness of an unattractive confederate

Neutral: attractive is more attractive than unattractive

Positive (pleasant):
*valance of arousal doesn’t matter (arousal is arousal)
*Makes attractive confederate more attractive and the unattractive confederate more unattractive

4/8/21: Cognitive Dissonance Theory 1

Recap
- We sometimes explain ourselves to ourselves. At least some of our everyday emotional
experience (intensity & content) stems from our interpretations of our own arousal
- We sometimes make mistakes

Misattribution
 - #1 Misattribute unexplained, exogenous (comes from some outside source –
epinephrine), irrelevant arousal (epi, scary bridge, turbulence) to an internal, emotional
source (attraction, anger)
o Will… intensifiy emotional experience
o Consistent with primacy/importance of bodily experience (James) and idea of
explaining ourselves to ourselves; malleability of emotion (Schachter)
- #2 What if we misattribute emotional arousal (say, speech anxiety) to an irrelevant source
(placebo pill)…
- #3 Related work on facial/bodily feedback (& processing fluency)
o S&S: We look outward, to the situation
o Darwin et al: We also look inward… infer what we “must” feel and think

Misattribution: paradigm #2 (Storms & Nisbett 1970)

- Misattribute emotional arousal to a neutral or irrelevant source
o Diminishes emotional experience
o “I must not be feeling this emotion after all”
- Insomnia = arousal + interpretation of that arousal
- Gave insomniacs placebo pills
o Some told nothing
o Some told the pill was a sedative (would relax them)
o Some told the pill was a stimulant (would arouse them)
- Arousal is intact… all that changed was interpretation of that arousal

Insomniacs’ Thoughts
- Sedative condition
o “if I feel as aroused as I do, despite the fact that a drug is operating to reduce my
arousal, I must really be wound up tonight” – More trouble sleeping
- Stimulant condition
o I’m feeling aroused as always, but wait, it’s not my normal insomnia – arousal;
instead, it’s just that pill I took – less trouble sleeping
- Results
o Those who got the “stimulant” fell asleep faster than those who got the “sedative”

Similar studies
- Speech anxiety
o “subliminal noise” said to cause nervousness or not
 Misattribution = better speeches
- Cheating
o Placebo pills said to cause nervousness or not + opportunity to cheat
 Misattribution doubled cheating
  Misattributing “I might get caught” nervousness to pill causes them to
infer “I must not be that nervous about being caught” so they cheat more

Putting it all together (so far)

- Look to the situation to help us label (i.e., make emotional sense of) our experience of
arousal… sometimes do so incorrectly –
o #2 sometimes “explain away” arousal from an emotional experience, decreasing
it: ‘I must not be feeling…”
o #1. Sometimes “include” some extra, exogenous arousal in how we understand an
emotional experience, increasing it “I mist really be feeling”
- Requires a mismatch of actual amount of arousal from a source and belief about amount
of arousal from a sources (and a cognitive situational interpretation of that mismatch)
#3 Facial/Bodily Feedback
- Perhaps we also look to our own body for information about what we “must” be feeling
- Key importance of phenomenology
- Look at ourselves form another perspective
- “if you smile it will intensify your feeling of happiness”
Furrowed Brow
- An expression of “something difficult”
- Does facial expression affect one’s ability to answer trivia questions (academic task)?
o No, but it can affect how one feels, emotionally, about one’s answers
- Furrowing you brow feels like thinking “I must be having to think hard to answer these; I
guess they aren’t very easy”
o No difference in accuracy
o But less confidence with a furrowed brow (“I must be thinking hard”)

Repression softens an emotion

- Botox: paralyzes certain facial muscles and prevents you from making facial expressions
- Participants read angry, happy, and sad sentences before or two weeks after cosmetic
BTX injections in the “frown” muscle
o Will inhibition of negative facial expression inhibit negative emotions and thus
processing of negative sentences?
 Botox did not interfere with happy, but did interfere with angry and sad
sentences
- Does Botox decrease depression?
o Yes
Rhyme facilitates processing fluency, which can feel like (be mistaken for, misattributed to)
truthfulness. Thus changing a word does little to disrupt “ring of truth” ratings… unless it undoes
a rhyme and disrupts processing fluency

Summary
Although it can feel like our emotions spring from within us, we construct them, at least in part,
from information we obtain from
- 1 a consideration of the situations we find ourselves in
- 2 the way our body feels
- 3 the way our thinking feels
___________________________________________________________________________
A theory of Cognitive Dissonance
4 ideas
- Our cognitions don’t always fit together
- That’s uncomfortable
- We are motivated to reduce that discomfort (it’s typically the reduction that gets
measured, not the actual dissonance itself
- We are pretty good at it
Theories of Cognitive Consistency
- Balance theory (Heider, 1946)
o Agree with your friends
o Disagree with enemies
- When violated, we do psychological work to restore balance
- People prefer and expect balanced relationships, and remember them better

Cognitive Dissonance
- What is it?
o An aversive, drive – like, motivational state that is aroused when two or more
cognitions are inconsistent
o Especially strong when one is an attitude and the other concerns one’s behavior
- For example
o I’m pro environment, yet I drive a fuel inefficient SUV
Key Idea: There are many ways to reduce dissonance
 - Denial
o “What SUV?”
- Ad consonant cognitions
o I love camping, and the SUV lets me haul more gear – not to mention all the
recyclable cans I can take to the recycling center
- Reduce perceptions of choice
o This is the car my parents bought for me – I had not other choice
- Trivialize behavior
o “one SUV won’t make nay difference”
- Or, change attitude
Reducing dissonance
- An especially interesting technique for reducing dissonance is to change attitudes
o Bring attitudes in line with behavior
 “I don’t care about the environment, global warming is a hoax!”
 “on second thought, I love Coldplay!”
 “Turns out I don’t love social psychology after all…”
o A counterintuitive result: attitudes follow, rather than guide behavior
- Conventional view
o Attitudes  behavior
- Dissonance theory view
o Behavior  attitude
- A counterintuitive result: attitudes follow, rather than guide, behavior

3 classic dissonance paradigms

- Post – decision dissonance
o I chose it, therefore I prefer it
- Effort justification
o I suffered for it, therefore I like it
- Induced compliance
o I said it, therefore I believe it

1. Post decision dissonance

o Dissonance will follow any decision between desirable alternatives
o Why? Because every choice involves a mix of positives and negatives
 Choosing among potential mates, choosing among classes to take,
choosing among colleges to attend…
o Reduce post – choice dissonance by “spreading the alternatives”
 Accentuate the positive (emphasize consonant elements)
  Positive aspects of chosen alternative
 Negative aspects of rejected alternative
 Eliminate the negative (trivialize, minimize dissonant elements
 Negative aspects of chosen alternative
 Positive aspects of rejected alternative
o Consequently, we like chosen alternative more after choosing it than before.
Behavior  attitudes

4/13/21 Cognitive Dissonance Theory 2

3 classic dissonance paradigms
- Induced compliance
o What if you advocate a position you don’t support?
- Effort justification
o What if you suffer for a something (a boring group, an origami frog) that turns out
to be unsatisfactory?
Post decision dissonance
o Accentuating positive aspects of chosen alternative, negative aspects of rejected
alternative
o Minimizing negative aspects of chosen alternative, positive aspects of rejected
alternative
o “Spreading the alternatives” reduces dissonance

Effort Justification
- When suffering leads to liking: severe initiations associated with intense loyalty and
commitment
- Can’t isolate causation without an experiment
o Common sense view: commitment  severe initiation… commitment leads
pledges to endure severe initiation
o Dissonance view: severe initiation --> commitment… severe initiation leads to
commitment
Severe Initiation Study (Aronson & Mills)
- Let’s talk about sex… after you pass the initiation
- Varied severity of “initiation” procedure
o Control: “Do you think you can handle the sex talk?” “Okay, you’re in”
o mild initiation,
 participants read aloud sex related words
o severe initiation
  participants read most obscene sex related words, definitely out of comfort
zone
- After initiation, participant join group, listen in… (nobody is in the same room) turns out,
discussion is boring
o Everyone listens to the same prerecorded discussion
- Cognitive dissonance!
o Some thoughts you have during the discussion
 “I willingly endured that [severe initiation] for… this?
 <feels discomfort>
 What can I do to reduce dissonance?
o Can’t deny that you participated in the initiation
o Can’t say that you didn’t have any choice
 What you can do to reduce dissonance is change your attitude
 “Wait a minute… maybe it was kind of interesting…”
 <feels better>
Sure, we suffer for things we like, but it can also go the other way: we like that for which we
suffer

Effort Justification
- Suffering (working) for something leads to enhanced liking of it because the thought that
you suffered (worked) for something lousing causes cognitive dissonance
- Reduce dissonance by
o Denying action (“turns out I didn’t suffer.”)… nope
o Adding consonant cogs (“I’m a masochist, I love suffering!”)… nope
o Reduce perceived choice (“I was forced!”)… nope
o Trivialize behavior (“suffering doesn’t matter,”)… nope
o Change attitude (“Maybe the discussion was interesting!”)… YES
 If discussion was interesting, then the suffering was worth it… dissonance
resolved!
 Behavior (initiation)  attitudes (liking)
- IKEA Effect
o Working for something leads to enhanced liking of it because the thought that you
worked for something lousy causes cognitive dissonance
- If the discussion was interesting, then the suffering was worth it… dissonance resolved
o Behavior (initiation)  attitudes (liking)

Strategic Suffering
- If voluntary suffering can cause cognitive dissonance, which can lead to a change in
attitudes (and subsequent behavior), can it be used strategically?
- Counterintuitive prediction
 o If you can get someone to (“willingly”) do something he or she doesn’t want to
do, you can change his or her attitudes
o Paradoxically, the more suffering the better
- Weight loss example (biggest loser)

Induced Compliance (Counter attitudinal advocacy)

- A counterintuitive prediction
o If you can get someone to advocate a position, he/she doesn’t support, you can
change his or her attitudes
- The “induced compliance” paradigm
o Subject is induced to advocate a “counter attitudinal” position, which prompts
dissonance
o Reduced by… changing attitudes in the direction of the advocacy
o Paradoxically, the less the incentive, the better. Why?
- Classical learning theory: behaviors that are rewarded get endorsed and valued.
- Dissonance theory: no, it’s the reverse, and “insufficient” reward is better

The $1 - $20 experiment

- Subject does boring task, then “debriefed”
- Three conditions
o Control: evaluate the tasks
o Two other conditions: asked for a favor…
- Lie to next subject (confederate) for money
o Behave contrary to own attitudes
o Paid $1 or $20
o Then evaluate tasks
When will they most come to believe what they have said, when they’re paid a lot or a little?
Classical learning theory says one thing, dissonance says another…

Apparently Insufficient Justification

- Subjects underestimate the power of the situation
o $20 was sufficient, and seems so
o $1 was sufficient too, but doesn’t seem so… meaning dissonance must be reduced
- Payment of $1: both sufficient and insufficient
 o Sufficient in reality (it worked; they lied)
o Insufficient psychologically: can’t explain their own behavior to themselves…
experience dissonance which must be reduced via attitude change
Counter Attitudinal Essay Paradigm
- Attitudes toward New Haven Police Department
- The less and less sufficient, the more attitude change
- Looking at graph, a “dose response” relationship: The less incentive, the greater the
attitude change, with $0 as the limit. Or is it?

Elaborating on and Refining Cognitive Dissonance Theory

- Aronson: the importance of the self concept
o Cognition about the self
o Behavior that runs counter to that cognition (violates an individual’s self concept)
o Cognitive Dissonance is not when you thought X but you said not X
 You feel cognitive dissonance when you have a mismatch between an
attitude and behavior when the attitude involves the self concept in some
way and the behavior violates that self concept
 “I’m a smart person who makes rational, reasonable choices and I
chose something that has some bad attributes
- Brehm
o “I chose that toaster” vs “That toaster has some negative tributes” becomes “I’m a
smart person who makes sensible choices” vs “I chose something that is pretty
bad”
- Festinger/Carlsmith
o “I thought it was boring” vs “I said it was fun” becomes “I’m a good person” vs
“I did a bad thing for no good reason”
Limiting Conditions
- The self
o No dissonance without invoking self concept
- Decision freedom
o No dissonance without (perceived) free choice
- Foreseeability of aversive consequences
o No dissonance if harm unforeseeable
o No dissonance if audience unpersuaded
o No dissonance if audience is unlikeable

Freely chosen effort and therapy

 - Freely chosen effort, because it inspires attitude change, may be a crucial ingredient for
successful therapy
- Dissonance aroused when we freely endure difficult therapy – and is reduced by
changing attitudes about content of therapy, whereupon the therapy “works”
- Cooper (1980)
o Manipulated content of assertiveness therapy (relevant or not)
o Held difficulty constant
o Manipulated perceived freedom of choice

4/15/21 Attribution Theory 1: Self Perception

So, when do you get dissonance?
- Cognitive dissonance will be felt most strongly, and attitudes changed more, when there
is felt responsibility(no dissonance if you had no free choice) for the foreseeable, aversive
consequences (No dissonance if you don’t know your essay in favor of foubling next
year’s freshman class will be given to the trustees) of one’s freely chosen, counter
attitudinal action
- This is particularly true if that action conflicts with one’s view of oneself and is done in
the absence of strong external rewards
- Or in absence of the threat of strong punishments
Inaction & Insufficient Threat
- Rewards
o Behaving in an undesired way for an insufficient reward causes dissonance and
makes individuals more favorable toward the activity
o Threats
 Failing to behave in a desired way, because of an insufficient punishment
causes dissonance, makes individual less favorable toward the activity
 More dissonance if punishment seems insufficient (mild)
 Less dissonance if punishment seems overly sufficient (harsh)
Forbidden Toy Studies
- I would be very angry if you touch the robot. I would take all the toys away and never
come back (severe threat)
o Played: 14
o Didn’t: 7
- I would be a little angry if you played with that toy (mild)
o Played: 6
 Devalued the toy in order to reduce dissonance – which was especially
necessary in the MILD threat condition
  Why am I not playing with this toy?
o I don’t think it’s the threat of the punishment
o So, I didn’t actually like that toy
o Didn’t: 15
Dissonance over INACTION
- Unused HOV carpool lane in Netherlands
- Questionnaires completed by solo drivers
o 1 month before, at gas station
o 1 month after, by mail
- Indicated importance of things associated with
o Solo driving (convenience)
o Carpooling (environment)
- Results
o Nobody used the carpool lane
 After carpool had been opened for a while, the importance of solo driving
increases and the importance of carpooling decreases
Another example of dissonance over INACTION
- Though experiment… Professor offers option extra lectures, not covered on any exam.
No one attends!
- Questionnaires completed by students on importance of free time and social psych
o 1 month before semester
o 1 month after semester
- Indicated importance of things associated with
o Not study social psych
o Social psych
- Results
o Importance of free time increases
o Importance of social psych decreases

Some Challenges to Dissonance Theory

- 1. Interpretational challenges of particular experiments
- 2. Challenge regarding the “essential” elements of cognitive dissonance
- 3. Challenge from “cold” cognition (attribution theory)

Hypocrisy as cognitive dissonance

- Advocating a position that one fails to live up to oneself
o Inconsistency? Yes
 o Feels bad? Yes
o Aversive consequences? No
 Your advocacy (despite your contrary behaviors) are still going to be good
o Counter attitudinal advocacy? No
 You act in PRO attitudinal advocacy
- Hypocrisy lacks “essential elements” of cognitive dissonance, but feels like dissonance
- So, what to do?
o Change attitude? (Maybe masks are bad)
 Doesn’t work
o Change behavior that cases discomfort?
 You can change your behavior going forward
- Example
o Advocacy: tell others to practice safe sex (mindful: you yourself haven’t always
done so
o Pro attitudinal advocacy and being made mindful of the fact that your past
behavior hasn’t always lived up to that advocacy that causes hypocrisy
 Either one on its own isn’t enough to create feeling of advocacy
Advocating a position that you yourself have sometimes failed to live up to causes feelings of
discomfort, which are relieved by a renewed dedication to the position going forward?
- Is it dissonance reduction?*****
“Hot” vs “cold” theories of psychology… dissonance FEELS bad (tension”), we are
MOTIVATED to reduce it, which FEELS better. Can we understand dissonance phenomena in
an alternative, “cooler” way?

Self Perception Theory (Bem)

______________________________________________________________________________
Attribution Theory: the study of how we assign causes to events
- 1. We form attributions every day, as “naïve scientists”
- 2. There are systematic rules we all know and follow
- 3. We don’t always get the right answer
- 4. Attributions matter
Internal (dispositional) vs external (situational) attributions
Internal/Dispositional/Correspondent Inference Attribution: Something about the person
External/Situational Attribution: something about the environment/situation
- Single observations
 o Correspondent inference theory… inferring dispositions from corresponding
behavior
 I see you slip; I think that you are clumsy
- Multiple observations
o Covariation theory… which causes covary with outcomes

Think about something negative that happened to you… what caused it?
Explanatory Style
- Is the cause something about you or is it something about other people/circumstances
o Internal: I’m not smart enough for that class
o External: that exam was too picky
- Will the cause be present again in the future?
o Stable: I’m just no good at chem
o Unstable: that cold medicine I was on made me groggy
- Does the cause influence other areas of your life?
o Global: I’m stupid and I can’t do anything right
o Specific: I’m just not a numbers person
- Pessimistic: internal, stable, global
Fixed Mindset: intelligence is a fixed trait: you have some amount of it and that’s that
Growth Mindset: intelligence, like other talents can be developed over time with effort

Causal attribution: “groping for an explanation”

Correspondent Inference theory
- When do we make correspondent inferences? (internal attributions)
o When behavior was freely chosen
o When behavior is unexpected – because it is “out of role”, socially undesirable or
otherwise surprising
 Firefighter vs citizen rushes into a burning building… altruism?
 Major vs non major signs up for PSYCH 201… interest in stats?
- In other words, where do we take behavior at face value and make internal, dispositional
attributions
 - Conform to systematic rules

The Logic of Attributions: Discounting & Augmentation (Are these internal attributions?****)
- The Discounting principle
o The role of a given cause in producing a given effect is discounted if other
plausible causes are also present
o Ex) you won the Tour de France, but you took performance enhancing drug
o “I’m feeling aroused, as always, but wait, it’s not my normal insomnia-arousal;
instead, it’s just that pill I took”
- The Augmentation Principle
o The role of a given cause is augmented if other causes are not present and/or
countervailing causes are
o Ex) you won the show “Chopped” and you have received no formal culinary
training
o “If I feel as aroused as I do, despite the fact that a drug is operating to reduce my
arousal, I must really be wound up tonight!”
Will Farrell Example
- Endorsing Old Milwaukee for free
o He loves that beer!
- Endorsing Old Milwaukee for a million dollars
o I don’t know, he is getting paid, it’s unclear

Correspondent Inference when there is apparently insufficient justification which makes the
behavior unexpected (augmentation)
Endorsing lousy beer for free is like lying for $1
- We, as observers, conclude endorsing beer for free means he must like the beer. What if
W.F observed himself (why am I doing it?... attitude change in the direction of advocacy
- Same with lying for $1… just as we infer individual’s views, so too may the individual
infer his/her own views, but without any feelings of discomfort… no dissonance
- Correspondent self inference

Attribution Theory 2 4/20/21

Correspondent Inference Theory
Ned Jones: Castro Study
- Participants read essay Pro Castro or Anti- Castro
 - Job is to figure out what the essay writer really feels about Castro
o Essay writers had either free choice or no choice as to what position they take on
Castro
- Dispositional attributions are moderated in no choice condition
Bem
- Individuals come to know their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially
by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior and/or the circumstances
in which their behavior occurs
- People employ the logic of correspondent influence theory when it comes to inferences
about themselves
- And that idea can parsimoniously explain dissonance findings

Augmentation and Discounting in Attributions About the Self (Olson)

- Read jokes while listening to canned laughter
o Told canned laughter (a) makes things funnier, (b) has no effect, or (c) makes
things seem less funny
o Then allowed to thumb through joke book; timed
- Why was I laughing?
o “the canned laugher did it; it wasn’t the jokes”
o “Canned laughter had no effect it was the jokes”
o “I laughed in spite of the canned laugher; those jokes must be hilarious!”
Cartoon Study (Bem)****
- Do people believe their own statements more under truth telling conditions than lie
telling conditions?
o 1. 200 cartoons rated for humor; 20 neutral ones selected
o 2. Establish credibility of truth and lie stimuli
 Correspond to $1 and $20 conditions, respectively
o 3. View neutral cartoon, told what to say
 Instructed to say cartoon is “funny” or ‘not funny”, ignoring lights
o 4. Re rate 20 cartoons for humor
- Results
o Believe own statements (cartoons now funnier or less funny) when statements
said in the presence of “truth” light, not “lie” light
Self – perception Theory****

Dissonance/Self Perception Debate

- Domains of applicability
o Dissonance when behavior widely discrepant from strong attitudes
o Self perception when discrepancy is minor and initial attitudes are relatively weak

Overjustification
- Doing something you love for a reward
o Skiing… for a gold medal
o Playing basketball... for millions of dollars
o Learning about social psych… for an exam grade
- Mistakenly applying the logic of discounting to self attributions undermining intrinsic
motivation with extrinsic reward
Discounting and the Overjustification Effect
- Williams students love to learn  Work hard
- Rewarded with good grades  Work hard
- Presence of extrinsic reward undermines the influence of intrinsic reward via the
discounting principle (“I guess one of the reasons I study is for the grades”)
- What happens if extrinsic reward is removed – e.g., after graduation
Overjustification effect
- 1. An attributional bias that follows that self perception theory but NOT from dissonance
theory
o Doing something you like for reward… where’s the dissonance there?
 - 2. Mistaken application of typically sensible inference (discounting)
o Normative vs descriptive
- 3. Works because extrinsic reward creates “attributional ambiguity” – uncertainty about
the cause of an event
o Attributional ambiguity characterizes much of social life
- 4. We are actually quite skilled at navigating attributional ambiguity

Creating Attributional Ambiguity

- Self handicapping
o Engaging in self defeating behaviors (self – sabotage) in order to manage others’
attributions
o Failure rendered non diagnostic (discounting) and success is especially diagnostic
(augmentation)
- Consider also feigned self – handicapping
o Attributional benefits without costs. No reason for discounting but one is provided
nevertheless

Covariation Theory
- Like a scientist or a statistician, we take note of covariation. An effect is attributed to the
cause with which it covaries
- Especially covariation across
o Persons---consensus
o Entities---distinctiveness
o Time---consistency
- Why is she laughing at the comedian? Is it her (internal) or the comedian (external)?
o Consensus (covariation across persons)
 Does stimulus produce same effect in others? Do others laugh at the
comedian?
 Yes = high consensus – everyone thinks he’s funny (internal)
 No = low consensus – only she thinks he’s funny (internal)
 o Distinctiveness (covariation across entities)
 Is stimulus unique in producing the effect? Does she laugh at other
comedians?
 Yes – low distinctiveness – she laughs at everything (internal)
 No – high distinctiveness – it’s hard to make her laugh (external)
o Consistency (covariation across time)
 How reliably does stimulus produce the effect? Does she always laugh at
the comedian?
 Yes = high consistency – confidence, stable attribution
 No = low consistency
- If consensus low, distinctiveness low, consistency high, she laughs because of something
about her – certainly not the comedian
- If consensus high, distinctiveness high, consistency high, she laughs because of
something in the situation, such as the comedian: he’s funny
Covariation Theory
- Augmentation and discounting require an intuitive psychologist
o What did you do vs what would I have expected you to do?
- Covariation require an intuitive statistician
o How did the potential effect and the cause covary across various situations
- We’re good at it
o John tripped over Mary’s feet while dancing
o Only john trips over Mary’s feet (low consensus)
o John always trips over Mary’s feet (high consistency)
o John trips over everyone’s feet (low distinctiveness)
- Like a good scientist, we seek useful, diagnostic data
Correspondent inference theory (Heider) and covariation theory (Kelly) are normative theories,
not necessarily descriptive

Fundamental Attribution Effort/Correspondence Bias: Tendency to overweight dispositions and

underweight situations when making attributions, taking behavior at face value more than we
should
- Ex) Castro essay
o Explains why two lines don’t intersect when they hypothetically should

Why Correspondence Bias?

- Dispositions are desirable
o Dispositions make world understandable, predictable, comfortable
 - People are easy
o “behavior engulfs the field”
o Dispositional attributions for those who are well lit, dressed saliently
- Situations are hard
o “quiz show” study of “role conferred advantages”

Human Culture 4/27/21

Social Transmission: the transfer of information of behaviors throughout a group of organisms. It
is essentially the sharing of information (verbal/nonverbal, actions, behaviors, knowledge, and
beliefs)

Culture: a particular kind of information that is acquired from members of one’s species through
social learning – and that is capable of affecting behavior
- Particularly things that we can learn from one another
- Also: a particular group of people in which such information may be shared

Uniqueness and ubiquity of human social transmission

- We can find examples of social transmission among other species
o Chimp video example
 Chimp does not know how to eat honey from beehive when they’re born
(not a part of genetic hardware like salmon swimming upstream)
 Social transmission: baby chimp watches adult chimp and eventually
learns how to use tools
 Primitive culture
- Transmission that happens among humans is extremely efficient, can saturate an entire
group of people, and can happen with an evolution of ideas, in which we accumulate and
evolve cultural understanding over time

Adaptations for Cumulative Cultural Evolution

What exactly is the distinction between humans and other species?
 - Language: permits high – fidelity transition of cultural ideas
o I can take cultural ideas in my own head and I can transmit them with specificity
into your mind
o No error in the signal
o Can talk about things that are not happening right now (future, past…)
- Theory of Mind: knowing others’ intentions allows us to internalize their goals and be
better able to reproduce them
o Not just observe behavior, but understand what that person’s goals/intentions may
be
 Can have evolution of cultural ideas
 I see what you did there, I understand what you are trying to achieve, I
think I might be able to do it better
Chimps transmission is noisy, it doesn’t have the high – fidelity, so we lose some information
along the way
- The Rachet Effect: when we have a cultural idea, it moves forward, but we never move
backward

Cultural Influences on self and identity

Individualism cultural practices that encourage individuals to prioritize their own personal goals
ahead of those of the collective
- Personal agency and one’s role in society

Collectivism: cultural practices that encourage individuals to place relatively more emphasis on
collective goals – specifically the goals of one’s ingroups

The Independent View of Self

- People can come in and out of our lives
- Separate oneself from friends and family

Interdependent View of Self

- “self” boundary is permeable

Idiocentric/Trait Descriptions
- I am a runner, professor, gregarious
Relational Descriptions
 - I am a brother, husband
Collectivistic cultures: relational
Individualistic cultures: idiocentric
- Value uniqueness, rare, deviate from the norm
- Desire to stand out

Personal Choice and intrinsic motivation (which puzzles from who)

- Individual prefers personal choice
- Collective prefers mom’s choice
o Mom is part of your ingroup

Cultural influences on perception and cognition

There’s a dog, a carrot, and a rabbit

- Which one do you get rid of?

Analytic Thinking Style: a thinking style focused on salient objects and using rules and
categorization when organizing the environment
- Getting rid of carrot

Holistic Thinking Style: A thinking style focused on relationships and similarities between
objects when organizing the environment

Line and Box

- Analytic thinker more influenced by the salient objects and can ignore the frame
- Holistic thinker more influenced by the frame
o Asians are more influenced by the context (frame)
Other line and box
- Absolute: have to ignore the context
o Americans better
- Relative
o Asians better
Difference in the pictures
- Focal
o Americans and Asians the same
- Contextual
o Asians better than Americans

4/29/21 Liking & Close Relationships

Biological Need to Belong: a need to belong, to be included, and to be embedded in healthy
relationships, analogous to the need for food, water, oxygen
- 1. Makes evolutionary sense
o Romantic, relationships, parent child bonds, friendship
o Survival + replication of one’s genes
- 2. Culturally universal
o Although cultures differ, there are cultural universals when it comes to social
relationships
o Mother child nurturing
o Courtship and flirtation
o Dominance displays among young males
o Long term pair bonding among adults
- 3. Negative consequences when need is unmet
o Health consequences for unmarried, divorced, widowed adults: mortality rates,
psychiatric admissions, suicide, incarceration, unhappiness
- 4. Operates like a need
o We seek connections when need to belong is unmet
o The need can be satisfied (need about 6 friends)
- 5. Vigilant for signs of threat
o Self esteem as “sociometer”
If social relationships are so important, what determines liking?
- 1. Propinquity
o Enduring friendships arise between those whose paths cross frequently
 Best friends on campus?
 Best friends as adults?
o Liking  physical closeness… but also physical closeness liking
o Chance encounters breed the comfort and familiarity that can lead to deeper, long
lasting liking (and loving)
o Functional Distance: you might be physically close, but if architecture prevents
you form interacting with each other, it won’t work
o Segal (1974)
 Recruits at the Maryland State Police Academy
  45 recruits who lived and trained together
 Assigned alphabetically to dorm rooms, classroom seats
 Alphabetical order of own and best friend’s last name, r = 0.9
 The girl “next door”
o Festinger et al MIT study
 Westgate west married student housing, assigned randomly to one of 10
apts in 17 buildings
 List best friends
 2/3 of those listed as friends lived in same buildings – even though
people in same building represented only 6% of W.W. residents
 Within building
 Adjacent apartments (41%)
 2 doors down (23%)
 Opposite end of the hall (10%)
 Not just distance, FUNCTIONAL DISTANCE
 Apartments 1 and 5 twice as many friendships with upstairs
neighbors as 2, 3, 4
o Why Propinquity?
 Brings other people into your social bubble
 Disliking too!
 Anticipatory liking
 Expected to interact with A, not B… like A more
 Mere exposure
 Simply seeing something repeatedly tends to increase our liking
for that thing
o Mere Exposure (Zajonc)
 Unfamiliar stimuli
 Pronounce “Turkish” adjectives
 View Chinese pictographs
 View yearbook photos
 Vary number of presentations, guess the positivity or rate liking
 Familiar = safe
 Misattribute processing fluency
 “Preferences need no inferences”
 Rats’ music preferences
 Which one have you seen before? 48% vs. Which one do you
prefer? 60%
o True vs Mirror Image of You
 Subjects prefer mirror image and partner prefer true image
- 2. Similarity
o We are attracted and tend to like people who are similar to us
 Demographics (social class, religion_
  Physical characteristics (health, attractiveness, heigh, eye color)
 Personality characteristics (sensitivity, humor)
o But what about complementarity?
 Nope
o Why?
 I like me (you remind me of me)
 You’ll like me (so I like you)
 We’ll like each other, have smooth interactions (politics vs taste in
movies)
o Republican vs Democratic married couple
 Similarities matter more than political affiliation
- 3. Physical attractiveness
o Standards of attractiveness
 Where do universals come from?
 Some naturally drawn to “good” mating partners, others not
 Those whose idea of “attractive” = quality
o Got better mates
o Had more, healthier babies
o Passed their (heritable) preferences along
 Those whose idea of “atrtractive” =/ quality
 Didn’t evolve to like beauty per se, it’s that those who liked
reproductively advantageous partners made copies of themselves, and
their preferences became…
o Caveats:
 Need not be conscious, not a blueprint for appropriate behavior, can be
overridden, tends to assume heterosexuality and gender binary
o Is beauty in the genes of the beholder?
 Three areas of evidence
 1. Avoid anomalies; seek “average” looks – less likely to have
genetic abnormalities
 2. WTH ratio of 0.7 (for women)
 Bilateral symmetry
o Given optimal conditions, matched features come out the
same
o But conditions aren’t optimal. So, symmetry is a sign of
hardiness, parasite resistance
o Fits our intuitions about attractiveness
 The Smell by symmetry (Thornhill & Gangestad)
o Males measure for bilateral symmetry (ears, elbows, wrists,
ankles, fingers…)
o Slept in t shirt two nights
o Females sniffed shirts
  How pleasant? How sexy?
 Indicated menstrual cycle; used to assess “fertility
risk”
o Results
 Most women “prefer” symmetrical men (women
didn’t know shirts belonged to symmetrical men)
 They do so more as fertility risk increases
 During ovulation, women
o Prefer symmetrical men
o Prefer relatively masculine male
faces
o Prefer outgroup men
o Wear less
o Have partners who are more
attentive and declare more love
o Are judged to be more attractive
o Are subject to more jealousy and
“mate guarding”
o Attributes that signal health and reproductive fitness are associated with perceived
attractiveness

Sex difference in mating strategies start with differences in parental investment
- Differential minimum parental investment
o Women: carry fetus, nurse
o Men: less
- Limits on number of offspring
o Records for women (69 really 24), men 888(higher)
Short term mating preferences
- Females should be relatively choosier when selecting a partner
 Why? A single incidence of mating comes at a greater potential costs to
her
- Males should have relatively more interest in multiple partners
- 4. Desirable attributes for short or long term relationships
Jealousy
- A psychological adaptation designed guard one’s mate against rivals
- Analogies in the insect kingdom
o Douglas fir bark beetle: sequestration
o Black winged damselfly – “scrubs” away rival males
o Plecia nearcticas: love bugs – days long embrace
 o Johannseniella nitida – an even more drastic solution
 Male will burrow whole body into female reproductive track
Psychological adaptation designed to solve a problem
- Male jealousy
o Made to attempt to solve problem of keeping potential mates off of your mate

Jealousy in men
- Men are more likely to be taking care of the child of another man if not protective enough
- Uncertainty of paternity
o Women’s EPC’s timed with ovulation
o With a symmetrical man
o Making orgasm more likely
o Increased chance of conception
- Sexual jealousy
- Romantic jealousy
Jealousy in women
- Women will full paternal confidence should be more threatened by emotional infidelity
than sexual infidelity
o Because their mating strategy involves finding and retaining a mate willing to
provide long term investments in children
o Emotional infidelity increases the probability that a man’s time, attention, and
ultimately, resources will be redirected to a rival woman and her children
Which is worse?
- Imagining your romantic partner forming a deep emotional attachment to someone else
o Prompts emotional romantic jealousy  signals potential withdrawal of indirect
resources (support, protection)  relatively more troubling to women
- Imaging your romantic partner enjoying a passionate sexual encounter with someone else
o Prompts physical sexual jealousy  signals potential withdrawal of direct
resources (mating opportunity), as well as potential cuckoldry  relatively more
troubling to men

5/4/21 Negotiation
Types of Issues in a negotiation
Distributive (fixed sum, zero sum, fixed pie)
 - Negotiators’ interest are directly opposed
- A gain for one party is an equal loss for the other party
- Only a certain amount of value; who gets it?
Compatible (common value)
- Negotiators’ interests are exactly the same
- A gain for one party is a gain for the other
- If found  minimal conflict (household chores)
o One person like vacuum and one like washing dishes
- If not found  inefficiently (the Abilene Paradox)
o Pluralistic ignorance
o Driving in tough conditions to go to dinner, but nobody wants to go to dinner

Integrative (trade – off)

- Negotiators’ interests are opposed, but weighted differently
- A gain for one party is a loss for the other party, BUT NOT AN EQUAL LOSS
- Room for cooperation and mutual gain, but requires communication and joint problem
solving
Failing to discover compatible issues is. “lose – lose”
- Poor communication (misrepresented preferences), backfired bluffing, a misguided
attempt to split the difference
- An assumption of opposing interests
Making Efficient Trades: Pareto Optimality
- An agreement is pareto optimal when the parties achieve the maximum joint gain
possible, and neither party can do better in an alternative agreement unless the other does
worse
- Groups that get close to pareto optimal
o Split the difference on distributive issues
o Agree on compatible issues
o Maximize join gain on integrative issues
o Tend to sit longer, proposals and counterproposals, relentless reexamination of
issues, renegotiation of agreements
 Beating a dead horse
Do BATNAs help?
- Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement
- “Urgent memos”
o Recruiter: another candidate worth 3000
o Candidate: another offer worth 3000
o Can take the (weak) alternative and walk
 - Did it help? Yes… usually
o +453 for Rec, +738 for Cand

The Power of BATNA

- With a high BATNA you
o Get better deals
o More often walk away
o … but that (almost) never happens
- Then how do BATNA work?
o Power and confidence
o Ability to bluff, threaten
o Psychological edge
- Take home message
o Have a BATNA (don’t lie) and know it
o Communicate it (not exactly)
o Make it as high as possible; cultivate the number and quality of your BATNA

Key Issue: Distributive vs. Integrative (How to handle)

Distributive approach
- Win/lose: search for solutions that meet own needs
- Conceal info or use it selectively and strategically
- Focus on single issues
o Salary and then moving…
o Sequential
- Short term relationships
o Buying a car
Integrative approach
- Win/win: search for solutions that meet both parties’ needs
- Share information (relatively) openly
- Focus on multiple issues simultaneously, packages
- Long term relationships
o Employer-employee or business partners

Fixed pie bias

- Tendency to assume all negotiations distributive
o Maybe used cars??
- Adopt an adversarial zero sum, “tug o war” mentality
o My loss is your gain
- Maybe split the difference, and please no one
o Parable of the two sisters
 Both want orange
 Turns out, one wanted peel and other wanted juice
 In an effort to satisfy everyone, you satisfy no one
o Planning a vacation
 One want to go to Montreal, other want to go to Miami
 Split the difference: go to Baltimore
- Instead of just dividing the pie, you can enlarge it first
- You can create value
Fixed pie bias
- Miss opportunities to create value together (and build rapport)
o Miss out on value that is offered: if the other side offered it, it must be bad for me
(“Reactive devaluation”
o Miss out on the chance to offer value: if I want it, it must be bad for the other side
- This is how groups miss Job A and SF

Fixed pie bias

- Not merely a tendency to focus on maximizing one’s own outcomes, also a tendency to
assume that others will always do the same
It seems that most pairs embraced a zero sum (your loss is my gain” approach
3 correlational lessons
- Noy always easy to determine negotiation productivity
- An adversarial, hard fought stance impedes creation of value
 - A cooperative stance facilitates it
Advantages of Integrative Agreements
- Minimize impasse (no agreement is reached)
- Stabilize and strengthen enduring relationships
- Contribute to the welfare of the broader community by creating value
- Can improve personal outcome, not just total value
o Can often get more when there’s more to be gotten

Creating value BEFORE a negotiation

- Define your own BATNA
o You always have one, even if it’s lousy
o Needed to evaluate offer, also provides leverage, confidence
- Improve you BATNA
- Clarify BATNA
o If it is vague and undifferentiated, it makes it hard to use as a point of comparison
for evaluating offers in this negotiation
- Communicate about your BATNA
o Not too much though
- Research your counterpart’s BATNA
- Have specific negotiation goals
o Salary, benefits, vacation, schedule
o Nonspecific goals lead to compromise solutions
o Prep time in our mock negotiation
- Construct multi issue proposals
o Going sequentially, issue by issue, misses integrative solutions – forces you to
treat each issue as distributive

Creating value DURING a negotiation

- Take your time (and breaks)
o Time pressure interferes with integrative solutions
- Take cooperative approach; build trust
o Share info about interests, priorities, not bottom line
 Revealing preferences for specific alternatives may lead to a disadvantage,
but individual gain is not typically hindered by revealing priorities among
issues (rank ordering)
  “salary is more important to me than job assignment,” not “Give me
‘Frisco and we’re done!”
- Gather information
o Ask for their info about interests, priorities
o Make and ask for proposals
- Make equivalent proposals: “if you like this, then you’ll probably also like that”
o Can create value for other party and build trust
 You haven’t lost anything, but you build value for the other
o Can gather info about hidden compatibilities (discover counterpart prefers one
thing over another)
- Ask for equivalent proposals
o A no brainer: You can increase the value of your outcomes while holding the
other person’s outcome constant
o “We already agreed on this, but give me another equivalent combination”
- Try to a low risk “post settlement settlement”
o Can’t do worse, maybe discover hidden compatibilities
o Nested, gradually escalating disclosure
 If you improve value, then make that the new vault
o Create a “baseline” that you already agreed upon

Making the first offer

- Should you make the first move?
o Definitely “no”
 Winner’s remorse: imagine having your 1st offer instantly accepted
o Or maybe “yes”
 Anchor on your value, insufficient adjustment
- Solution
o Only make the 1st offer when you have lost of information

The Negotiator’s Dilemma: Creating vs claiming value

- Integrative negotiating takes two. But what if your counterpart is less forthcoming than
you are?
o Approaches to creating value (disclosure) are vulnerable to claiming tactics
o Tactics that claim value an impede its creation
- The insidious pull of claiming
Is there a way out of the negotiator’s dilemma?
- Emphasize ongoing relationship, build trust
o Offer information, ask for reciprocity
o But note: ongoing relationship is a tangible, calculable value
 If no relationship, no need to devote time to it
- Get info by asking about interests, not bottom line
o Provide, and ask for, rank ordering of importance of issues
- Look at pattern of concessions
o If concessions getting smarter, other person’s reservation point is near
- Reciprocal information sharing (related to “logrolling”)
o The surprising power of the norm of reciprocity

Negotiation Summary
- Pitfalls
o Reluctance to engage in “awkward” negotiations
o Fixed pie bias
o Negotiation without proper prep, knowledge
- Opportunities
o Finding integrative solutions and creating value
o Using social psych: self perception
5/6/21 Emotion 2
What is Emotion? – William James
There is AGREEMENT
- The affective aspect of consciousness: a state of feeling
- A brief, adaptive response involving physiological and cognitive reactions to obejcts,
people or situations
o Brief
 Facial expressions 1 – 5 sec
 Emotions several minutes
o Specific
 Have an “intentional object”
o Goal directed
 Anger, fear, sadness
 Arises to make something happen
 Fear: motivated to run away/fight
o Social
 Embarrassment
 Require other people
 Gratitude for other people? No
 Embarrassed when alone? No
There is DISAGREEMENT
- Tension between two ways of understand emotions
o Evolutionary approaches
 Biologically based
 Culturally universal
 Adaptive (fear)
o Cultural approaches
 Socialized
 Influenced by values, roles, institutions
- The BIG QUESTION: Universality vs. Cultural variation

Paul Ekman and the study of facial expressions of emotion

The Evolutionary Perspective
- Phylogenetic continuity
o Parallels between human emotions and displays in other species
 o Early data on universality in emotional expressions (English missionaries)
 Missionaries did not find other cultures have different emotions
- Two claims
o The encoding hypothesis
 The experience of emotions should lend itself to the same expressions
across cultures
o The decoding hypothesis
 People in different cultures should interpret particular expressions the
same
- 6 basic emotions, produced. recognized universally
o Fear
o Surprise
o Happiness
o Anger
o Disgust
o Sadness

Encoding/Decoding Emotions – Ekman and others

- 3000 photos of 6 basic emotions, selected easily identifiable examples
- Choose emotion term that best fits each
o Participants from Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, U.S
o Accuracy rates between 80% and 90% (where chances are 17%)
- Critics unconvinced
o Are these REALLY different cultures?
 All have at least some sort of the same culture
Cross cultural encoding – Fore tribe, Papua, New Guinea
- Show the expression you would make if you were the individual in the story
- Expressions readily interpretable by Western college students (except for fear)
Cross cultural decoding – read a story, select emotion from three pictures
- Average 84 and 92 (adult/children) when chance = 33%
Critiques of Ekman’s Universality Studies
- Multiple choice critiques
o Researchers provided the emotion terms + right answer was always present (no
“none of the above”) Maybe participants would have guessed other emotions
and/or made some educated guesses
- The specificity critique
o Ekman studies only six emotions… are there others
o Embarrassment: gazed averted, controlled smile, head down and left
o Shame: gaze and head down
 o Sympathy: inner eyebrows up, lips pressed together
o Others? Contempt, joy, interest, awe, even homicidal rage
- The modality critique
o Other ways to convey emotions? Voice, touch etc

Awe
- “An emotional response to perceptually cast stimuli that transcend one’s current frames
of reference”.
- Tends to create a sense of Humility, decreased sense of self, awareness of embeddedness
in social networks. Also inference of intentional agency

Predicted vs Actual accuracy of emotion recognition

- Predicted recognition accuracy > actual recognition accuracy

Evidence of Cultural Specificity: Language Differences

- Emotion words
o 2000 in English
o 750 in Taiwanese
o 58 among Ifaluk in Polynesia
o 8 for the Chewong of Malaysia
- Some languages “hyper cognize” certain emotions
o 46 terms of anger in Tahiti
- Language specific labels
o Hygge, gurakadj…

Culturally Specific Display Rules

- Intensifying
o Laugh harder at a joke told by your (non funny) professor
- De intensifying
o Stifle your laughter out of pity when a friend falls on the ice
- Neutralizing
o Maintaining
Culturally Specific Display Rules
- Cultural variation in emotional expression display rules
o Inuit and anger, pleasure over personal accomplishment in some Asian cultures
- American and Japanese subjects watching a disturbing video in the dark or light
- Ritualized displays – embarrassment in India
The Illusion of Transparency
- Tendency to overestimate the extent to which one’s internal states are apparent to others
o Focus on own internal state
o Realize that other have less access than you do, but correct insufficiently
- Lots of domains
o Lie detection, disgust, alarm, speech anxiety, negotiation preferences, gult in an
interrogation, emotions
The Taste Test Study
- Induce internal state
o Subjects taste 2 sets of 5 drinks with a neutral facial expression
 4 Kool Aid
 1 awful drink
o Then predict % who can tell which is which
- Compare predicted % with actual %
o Controls make predictions but do not drink the drinks
- Results

The Self 5/11/21

Egocentrism: a tendency to see the social universe from your own perspective
- Correcting insufficiently from your own perspective when attempting to adopt others’
perspectives
Special status of the self in everyday social judgment – self is the center of narrative gravity in
everyday life, and also the starting place for many social judgments

“dual process” model

- People think: “I see things as they are, and others can be expected do see, know, and
focus on what I do”
- Then they sometimes correct that initial assumption… secondly, effortfully, insufficiently
We get better at step 2
We never really outgrow step 1
Egocentrism in Social life
- We are fundamentally egocentric
o We occupy the center of our own “universe” and see things from our own
perspective
o Because it’s so plentiful, and comes to mind so readily, information about the self
can exert a disproportionate influence on our judgments – e.g. interfering with our
attempts to see things as others do
- Naïve realism
o Anchor on how / see things
o Adjust (insufficiently) to capture others’ perspectives
- Interplay between motivation and cognition

False consensus effect: tendency for people who think or do or prefer X to think that a higher
proportion of others will also than do those who don’t think/do/prefer X
- How many people think this… how many people agree with me
- NOT that we think we’re the majority
- NOT that we necessarily overestimate consensus
- We think more agree with us than do those who disagree with us. Those who make a
certain choice estimate higher consensus for that choice than do those who don’t
Estimates of consensus are higher when they come from people inside the group
Why?
- Perhaps it stems from our motivations
o Comforting to think our preferences and attitudes are common, shared by “many
people” ie. Social support, implication that we are correct
o Less so for skills and abilities (and certain attitudes)
- Also from egocentrism
o We encounter a biased sample of other people (similar to us), and we fail to
realize and/or correct sufficiently for that fact (smoking)

Actor observer effect (how we see other people): tendency for actors, relative to observers to
attribute their own actions relatively more situationally and less dispositional
- Own behavior  situation
- Others’ behavior  dispositions
- We do commit fundamental attribution errors about ourselves (think of $1 condition) but
we do so more for others
- People are more likely to endorse particular traits for others than for themselves
o Other people are like this or like that, me I’m complicated
 I depend on the situation
- Why?
o Motivations
 See myself as complicated, interesting, varied
 See others are predictable
o Actors and observers have access to different information
 I know my behavior in any given moment is distinctive (“I’m like this
now, but I’m like that at other times”)
 High distinctiveness = external attribution)
 Observers don’t know this… for all they know you’re always like this
 Low distinctiveness = internal attribution
o Actors and observers have different visual perspectives
 Actors see the situation
 Observers see the actor

Spotlight effect (how we think other people see us): tendency to overestimate extent to which
one is salient to others
- Focus on our own appearance
- Assume others are probably less focused on it than we are
- Correct insufficiently
- Estimates of how much or little others notice us are egocentrically biased
Barry Manilow Study

- Putting subjects “in the spotlight”

o Target subject dons embarrassing t shirt
o Briefly enters room with other subjects
o Then predicts % who noticed shirt
- Compare predicted % with actual %
o Controls make predictions but do not wear the shirt

Self enhancement Motive: the fundamental datum of our science is a fact that at first seems
banal, or irrelevant; it is the fact that all organism like to feel good about themselves
Self enhancement as Egocentrism
- Egocentric knowledge of intentions
o Know our own good intentions, not others’
- Egocentric construal of expertise
o We choose our definitions strategically
- The paradox of incompetence
o We don’t know what we don’t know

The Psychology of Happiness

What doesn’t affect happiness
- Age
- Gender
- Race
- Education
- IQ
- Attractiveness
- Life setbacks
- Political loss/sports defeat
- Heartbreak/negative tenure
Money?
- Are people in rich countries happier then people in poor ones?
o A little, but not much
o Consecutive years of democracy
- Within a country, are rich people happier than poor people
 o A little but not much
o “action” at the lower end of the curve

Habituating: enjoy things you like in smaller quantities

Immune neglect

Why experiences satisfy

- Possessions fade; experiences often improve with time
- Experiences have more social value
o Contact with others
o A story to tell
o The real you
- Experiences prompt fewer disadvantageous comparisons

Textbook Readings
Chapter 6: 247 – 261
Role Playing
- Irving Janis: attitude change would persist more when it is inspired by our own behavior
than when it stems from passive exposure to a persuasive communication
o Conducted study where one group of participants listened to a speech that
challenged their position on a topic and others were handed an outline and asked
to five the speech themselves
 Participants changed their attitudes more after giving the speech than after
listening to it
 Role playing works to change attitudes because it forces people to learn
the message
 People tend to remember arguments they come up with on their
own better than they remember arguments provided to them by
other people
 Attitude change is more enduring even when people who read a
persuasive message merely expect that they will later have to
communicate it to others
- Self generated persuasion
o More attitude change is produced by having people generate arguments
themselves than listen passively to others making the same arguments
 When college students were instructed to advocate for a policy that was
largely consistent with their own attitudes (tuition should be lowered),
 more self – persuasion occurred when their intended audience was another
student
 When asked to advocate for a policy that they opposed (tuition should be
raised), more self – persuasion occurred among students who had sought
to convince themselves as opposed to another student
Cognitive consistency: a state of mind in which one’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are
compatible with each other
Cognitive Dissonance Theory: theory holding that inconsistent cognitions arouses psychological
tension that people become motivated to reduce (Leon Festinger)
- What hurts is the knowledge that you committed yourself to an attitude discrepant
behavior freely and with some knowledge of the consequences
o When that happens, dissonance is aroused and you become motivated to reduce it

Insufficient Justification: a condition in which people freely perform an attitude discrepant

behavior without receiving a large reward
- Unless you can deny your actions, you’ll feel pressured to change your attitude about the
task. If you can convince yourself that the experiment wasn’t that bad, then saying ti was
interesting is all right
Insufficient deterrence: a condition in which people refrain from engaging in a desirable activity
even when only mild punishment is threatened
- The less severe the threatened punishment, the great the attitude change produced
(Children toy experiment)
Leon Festinger
- Participants who were paid only $1 rated the experiment as somewhat enjoyable
- Having engaged in an attitude discrepant act without sufficient justification, these
participants reduced cognitive dissonance by changing their attitudes
- Noteworthy aspects
o When people behave in ways that contradict their attitudes they sometimes go on
to change those attitudes without exposure to a persuasive communication
o They contradicted the time honored belief that big rewards produce greater
change
 The more money participants were offered for their inconsistent behavior,
the more justified they felt and the less likely they were to change their
attitudes
Self persuasion:
- when people behave in ways that contradict their attitudes, they sometimes go on to
change those attitudes without exposure to a persuasive communication
- Contradicted the time honored belief that big rewards produce greater change
 o The more money participants were offered for their inconsistent behavior, the
more justified they felt and the less likely they were to change their attitudes
Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills
- Female students
o Pass “embarrassment test”
 Severe, mild, no initiation
o Listen in on a group discussing sex behavior
o Participants who had endured a severe initiation rated the discussion group more
favorably than did those who had endured little or no initiation
Jack Brehm
- Female participants in evaluating various consumer products
o High dissonance condition
 Offered a difficult choice between two items they found equally attractive
 After reading a few research reports, then reevaluated all the products
 Ratings increased for the chosen item and decreased for the item
not chosen
 Participants coped by reassuring themselves that they had made the
right choice
o Low dissonance condition
 Offered an easier choice between a desirable and undesirable item
Robert Knox and James Inskter
- Bettors who had already placed $2 bets on a horse were more optimistic about winning
than were those still standing in line
Dennis Regan and Martin Kilduff
- Voters were more likely to think that their candidates would win when they were
interviewed after submitting their ballots than when they were interviewed before they
submitted them
- Since bets and votes cannot be taken back, people who had committed to a decision were
motivated to reduce post decision dissonance, so they convinced themselves that the
decision they made was right
Emily Balcetis and David Dunning
- College students and grass skirts, coconut bra…
- High choice condition: led to believe that they could decline in favor of a different task
(insufficient justification)
- Low choice condition: no alternative tasks were available (sufficient justification)
- Needing to justify their embarrassing antics, those in the high choice condition
underestimated how far they had walked relative to those in the low choice condition
 o The motivation to reduce dissonance can alter our visual representations of the
natural environment
Joel Cooper and Russel Fazio
- 4 steps are necessary for both the arousal and reduction of dissonance
o The attitude discrepant behavior must produce unwanted negative consequences
 Festinger and Carlsmith: not only did participants say something they
knew to be false, but they also deceived a fellow student into taking part in
a painfully boring experiment. Had these participants lied without causing
hardship, they would not have changed their attitudes to justify the action
o A feeling of personal responsibility for the unpleasant outcomes of behavior
 Freedom of choice: when people believe they had no choice but to act as
they did, there is no dissonance and no attitude change
 Had Festinger and Carlsmith coerced participants into racing about
the boring experiment, the participants would not have felt the
need to further justify what they did by changing their attitudes
 Must also believe that the potential negative consequences of their actions
were foreseeable at the time: when the outcome could not realistically
have been anticipated, there is no dissonance and no attitude change
o Physiological arousal
 Robert Croyle and Joel Cooper: participants wrote essays that supported or
contradicted their own attitudes (some ordered to do so, but others were
led to believe that the choice was theirs)
 Those who freely wrote attitude discrepant essays were the most
aroused
 Participants who arite attitude discrepant essays in a “free choice”
situation report feeling high levels of discomfort
o A person must also make an attribution for that arousal to his or her own behavior
Self perception theory
Impression management theory
- What matters is not a motive to be consistent but rather a motive to appear consistent
- Or we are motivated not by a desire merely to appear consistent but by a desire to avoid
being held responsible for the bad consequences of our action
- If correct, cognitive dissonance does not produce attitude change at all
o Only reported change
o If research participants were to state their attitudes anonymously or if they were to
think that the experimenter could determine their true feelings then dissonance
like effects should vanish
Self esteem theories
Chapter 4: Attribution Theories (117 – 129)
Attribution Theory: a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior
Personal Attribution: attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability,
personality, mood, or effort
Situational attribution: attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or
luck

Jones’s Correspondent Inference Theory

- Each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behavior
- Correspondent inference theory: predicts that people try to infer from an action whether
the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the actor
o Person’s degree of choice
 Behavior that is freely chosen is more informative about a person than
behavior that is coerced by the situation
o Expectedness of behavior
 People think they now more about a student who wears three piece suits to
class or a citizen who openly refuses to pay taxes than about a student who
wears blue jeans to class or a citizen who dutifully filed tax return
o Intended effects or consequences of someone’s behavior
 Acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal a person’s
specific motives as clearly as acts that product only a single desirable
outcome
Kelly’s covariation theory
- Covariation principle: a principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute
behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does
not
o In order for something to be the cause of a behavior, it must be present when the
behavior occurs and absent when it does not
o Consensus
 See how different persons react to the same stimulus
 If others also rave about it, then this stranger’s behavior is high in
consensus and is attributed to the stimulus. If others are critical of this
film, then the behavior is low in consensus and is attributed to the person
o Distinctiveness
 See how the same person reacts to different stimuli
 What does the stranger think of other films? If the stranger is generally
critical of other films, then the target behavior is high in distinctiveness
 and is attributed to the stimulus. If the stranger raves about everything he
or she sees, then the behavior is low in distinctiveness and is attributed to
the person
o Consistency
 What happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the
stimulus both remain the same
 How does the stranger feel about this film on other occasions? If the
stranger raves about the film on video as well as in the theater, then the
behavior is high in consistency. If the stranger does not always enjoy the
film, the behavior is low in consistency
Attribution Biases

Availability heuristic: the tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how
easily instances of it come to mind
False consensus effect: the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share
their opinions, attributes, and behaviors
- Participants’ beliefs about other people’s personalities were biased by their own self
perceptions
- We tend to associate with others who are like us in important ways, so we are more likely
to notice and recall instances of similar rather than dissimilar behavior
Base rate fallacy: the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information
presented in the form of numerical base rates
Counterfactual thinking: the tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have
occurred but did not
Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and
underestimate the impact of situation on other people’s behavior
- First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution, then we correct or
adjust that inference to account for situational influences
o The second quires attention, thought, and effort

Chapter 9: Attraction and Close Relationships

Need for Affiliation: The desire to establish and maintain many rewarding interpersonal
relationships
- Stress: a condition that strongly arouses our need for affiliation
 o An external threat triggers fear and motivates us to affiliate with others who face a
similar threat
o Rofe: stress sparks the desire to affiliate only when being with others is seen as
useful in reducing the negative impact of the stressful situation
- Embarrassment
o Being with others is more likely to increase our stress than reduce it

Schachter: an external threat triggers fear and motivates us to affiliate with others who face a
similar threat
- People facing an imminent threat seek each other out in order to gain cofnitive clarity
about the danger they are in
- Under stress we adaptively become motivated to affiliate with others who can help us
cope with an impending threat
John Caci0ppo
- Being alone and feeling lonely motivates people of all ages to connect with others in
order to satisfy a “reaffiliation motive”
Charleen Case
- Individuals who lack power and influence also feel a need to seek out other people
Loneliness: a feeling of deprivation about existing social relations
- 1. Intimate
o When someone wants but does not have a spouse, significant other, or best friends
to rely on for emotional support, especially during personal crises
- 2. Relational
o When someone wants but lacks friendships from school and work and family
connections
- 3. Collective
o Remote relationships and the social identities we from alumni of schools and
clubs we join
o The more voluntary associations we have, the lower one’s collective loneliness
Online Dating
- Exposure and access to large numbers of profiles of potential romantic partners
- A means of communicating through email, instant messaging and live chat via webcams
- A matching “algorithm” that brings together users who are likely to be attracted to one
another

The Proximity Effect: the best predictor of whether two people will get together is physical
proximity of nearness (at least used to be)
The Mere Exposure Effect: The phenomenon whereby the more often people are exposed to a
stimulus, the more positively they evaluate that stimulus
- Can influence us without our awareness
Group Attractiveness Effect: the perceived physical attractiveness of a group as a whole is
greater than the average attractiveness of its individual members
- Participants unwittingly spent more time looking at the most attractive members, which
skewed upward their perceptions of the group as a whole
Beauty
- People tend to rate others similarly regardless of their attractiveness
- Members tend to evaluate specific others similarly regardless of how high or low their
own ratings were on the site
Why are we blinded by beauty?
- It is inherently rewarding to be in the company of others who are aesthetically appealing,
that we derive pleasure from beautiful men and women the same way that we enjoy a
breathtaking landscape
What is beautiful is good stereotype: the belief that physically attractive individuals also possess
desirable personality characteristics
4 types of similarity that draw people together
- Demographic (age, education, race, religion, height, level of intelligence, socioeconomic
status)
- Attitude
- Matching hypothesis: the proposition that people are attracted to others who are similar in
physical attractiveness
- Similarity in subjective experience
o “I sharing”: people who I share, even if they are otherwise dissimilar, feel a
profound sense of connection to one another
We avoid associating ingroup who are dissimilar; the, among those who remain, we are drawn to
those who are most similar

What about “opposites attract”

- Complementarity Hypothesis: people seek others whose needs “oppose” their own, that
people who need to dominate are naturally drawn to those who are submissive
o Not true

Reciprocity: a mutual exchange between what we give and receive: liking those who like us
People like others more when their affection takes time to earn than when it comes easily
Hard to get Effect: The tendency to prefer people who are highly selective in their social choices
over those who are more readily available
- Issue: we are tuned off by those who reject us because they are committed to someone
else or have no interest in us
- We tend to prefer people who are at least somewhat selective compared to those who are
not selective or too selective
Participants with high scores on the Fear of Being Single Scale also expressed an interest in
profiles that were not attractive or responsive
When mate seekers can’t have it all and must therefore focus on what’s most important, they
prioritize their choices in the ways predicted by evolutionary theory

Intimate relationship

Norton – The IKEA Effect

- When people imbue products with their own labor, their effort can increase their
valuation
o Labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor
- Aims
o Document and explore the magnitude of the IKEA effect
 Increased valuation that people have for self assembled products
compared to objectively similar products which they did not assemble
o Whether exerting effort is enough to increase valuation or whether completion of
a project is necessary for the effect to emerge
- Effort justification: The more effort people put into some pursuit, the more they come to
value it
- Effectance: an ability to successfully produce desire outcomes in one’s environment
- Experiment 1A (IKEA boxes)
o Use boxes for 2 reasons
 No opportunity for customization exists, suggesting that any increase in
valuation due to labor we observe is likely not due to customization
 Consumers value their own creation over anything else, so experimenters
used mundane, utilitarian products that are intended for private
consumption to demonstrate that labor can lead to valuation even in the
absence of additional sources of value
o Results
 Participants saw IKEA boxes are more utilitarian than hedonic
 Builders bid significantly more for their boxes than non builders
  Those who assembled their own box were willing to pay a 63%
premium compared to those who were given the chance to buy an
identical preassembled box
- Experiment 1B (Origami)
o Results
 Builders valued their origami more than others did
 Nearly 5 times higher than what non builders were willing to pay for these
creations
 Builders were willing to pay nearly as much for their own creations as the
additional set of non builders were willing to pay for the well crafted
origami made by experts
o It is possible that they were willing to overbid for their creation to avoid losing it
- Experiment 2 (The role of completion)
o The IKEA effect is large enough to cause people to value their creations as highly
as the creations of experts
o Examine how participants’ bids for their own products compare to their bids for
objectively similar products created by others
 Participants imbue products they have created with value, and thus predict
that participants’ bids for products they complete themselves will be
higher than their bids for products that others have completed
o “build and unbuild” condition
 Allows experimenter to begin to document the important role of task
completion in the emergence of the IKEA effect
 Predict that builders would value their creations more than individuals
given pre build products, but that building and then unbuilding products
thereby “undoing” one’s successful completion of a task, would lead to
lower valuations
o Results
 Across all three conditions, participants were willing to pay more for the
sets that they had been assigned than those assigned to their partners
 Bids overall were highest in the build condition than in the unbuild and
prebuilt conditions
 Only in the build condition, were participants’ bids for their own creation
significantly higher than their bids for their partners’ creations
 Building and then “unbuilding” negated this effect
- Experiment 3: The role of incompletion
o Building and then unbuilding one’s creations caused the IKEA effect to dissipate
o Allowed some participants to build an IKEA box, while others were allowed to
complete only half of the steps to complete the box
 Expected that failing to finish a product would lead to lower valuations
than completing it
o Results
  Builders bid significantly more for their boxes than incomplete builders
 While both groups were given the chance to buy the identical
product, those who were given the chance to complete their
creation imbued it with significantly more value, and were willing
to pay more than twice as much to keep it
- Discussion
o People prefer goods with which they have been endowed, raising the possibility
that overvaluation may be due merely to ownership of products rather than effort
expended in creating theem
o Greater time spent touching objects can increase feelings of ownership and value
 Experiment 2 (build and unbuild) had more time touching, but reported a
lower WTP
 Shorter time and less contact led to higher evaluations, consistent
with our account and inconsistent with an explanation centered on
the endowment effect or touch
o It is possible that building products increases both thoughts about the positive
attributes of that product and positive affect and emotional attachment to that
product both of which have been shown to influence WTP
o Self assembly of products may allow people to both feel competent and display
evidence of that competence thus permitting them to signal desired attributes to
themselves and others
o Saving money by buying products that require some assembly may induce
positive feelings associated with being a “smart shopper”

Crosby et al – Where Do We Look During

Potentially Offensive Behavior
- Use eye movement recordings to investigate from the perspective of the people looking at
the offended bystander
- Social Referencing: seeking out the responses of a potentially victimized group member
to help them assess the situation
- Minority groups may be seen as
o Experts in the area of morality
o Experts on prejudice
o More influence than majority group members over judgments of discrimination
- Association hypothesis
o Manipulated whether or not participants believed the Black discussant heard what
was said
o Predicts that the Black individual would be looked at more than the available
White discussants in both conditions
- Social referencing hypothesis
 o He would be fixated only if he could have an informative reaction
o Predicts that he would be fixated regardless
o Predicted only in the headphones – on condition, when he could hear the remark
and have a potentially informative reaction
- Results
o Participants looked at the Black individual roughly 5 times longer in the
headphones on condition than in the headphones off condition
o Participants showed little interest in the Black bystander when they believed that
he could not hear what was being said

Picture yourself at the polls – Libby

Registered voters in Ohio were instructed to use either the first-person or the third-person perspective to picture
themselves voting in the election

- Picturing voting from the third-person perspective caused subjects to adopt a stronger pro-voting mind-set
correspondent with the imagined behavior

Observers tend to under- stand behavior as a function of the actor’s disposition, whereas actors tend to understand
their behavior as a function of the situation

Synchrony and the Social Tuning of

Compassion