"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (14) —— Self and Other

Lecture 16: Self and Other

Interestingly, in this lecture Paul Bloom mentioned Malcolm Gladwell and his book 《The Tipping Point》again. Seems he is a loyal reader of Gladwell. And there were also some familiar concepts, experiments refer to the topic of self perceptions and interactions with others.

3 aspects of the self: (From William James)

1. the material: our awareness of the physical world
2. the spiritual:the part that thinks of ourselves as thinkers -- the inner witness to events
3. the social: the part of the self that focuses on the images we create in the minds of others is called the social self.

Self and Situation:

• Self-efficacy(自我效能感): people's beliefs in their capabilities to exercise control over situations that affect their lives.
• Behavioral confirmation: our beliefs, our sense of self, create their own reality
• One of the most important factors that influence our identity is the cultural context in which we live. Culture is a matter of the common ideas and the common ways of doing things.We can view culture and self as a collaboration: culture shapes self and self perpetuates culture.

Six degree of separation: people are connected to one another via chains of people.

Self Perceptions:

• Spotlight effect: you believe that people are noticing you all the time but they aren't. They're busy noticing themselves.
• The transparency effect: we believe that we're more transparent than we are. We often feel like things bleed out of us and so people will systematically overestimate the extent to which other people notice their secrets.
• Lake Wobegon effect: involves a systematic bias to see ourselves as better than average.
• One possibility is the nature of the feedback we get. For a lot of aspects of your life you only get feedback when you're good, when you do something good.
• Another possibility is there's different criteria for goodness.
• Self-serving bias: You think that you're terrific and because you're terrific the good things that happen to you are due to your terrificness; the bad things are due to accident and misfortune.
• Confirmation bias: People want to have information that confirms what they believe in and that supports it.
  
• Cognitive dissonance: what you do makes sense. If it doesn't make sense or, more to the point, if it's something that you do that's foolish or makes you look manipulative or cheap, you'll distort it in your head so that it does make sense.
• The fundamental attribution error: we tend to over-attribute things to a person's personality or desires or nature and not enough to the situation or the context. (An attribution is a claim about the cause of somebody's behavior)
• Enhancement of the self v.s. Oversimplification of the other: When things go badly, we'll blame the situation. When things go well, the self-serving attribution bias, we'll credit ourselves. To other people we're a lot less forgiving. When things go badly, we'll blame others themselves.
• A Mattew effect: the rich get richer and the poor even lose what they hath.
• The Pygmalion effect/Self-fulfilling prophesy: if I believe you have a certain characteristic this might cause you to behave as if you have that characteristic.

Towards Others:

• The mere exposure effect: simply seeing something makes it likable.
• Impression formation：
• first impressions matter a lot
• we form impressions very fast, very quickly, and this is a literature known as "thin slices."

Stereotype: refer to information we have about categories and intuitions we have about the typicality, our frequency of certain features of categories.

• Purpose: collecting information about categories is essential to our survival because it allows us to respond adaptively to novel instances.
• Pros:
• Stereotypes are often positive;
• Stereotypes tend to be accurate
• Cons:
• Not always accurate:confirmation bias with stereotypes；misleading data from media
• Moral problems: people should be judged as individuals, not as group members
• negative stereotypes have all sorts of bad effects.

Stereotype threat: if your race or your group has a negative stereotype associated with it in any particular domain, being reminded of it serves as a stereotype threat and hence damages your performance in all sorts of domains.

3 levels of stereotypes: public, private, implicit (Use of priming: subject might not know stereotype is being activated, can’t work to suppress it)

Trish Devine's automaticity theory, which goes something like this. The idea is that everybody holds stereotypes. These are automatically activated when we come into contact with individuals. In order to not act in a stereotyped fashion, we have to consciously push them down, we have to consciously override them, and that's possible, but it takes work.

The power of situation: the situation matters not only in terms of its objective reality, but also in terms of the way it's perceived, understood, and interpreted by the people inside it.

The power of cognitive control: the power of people's beliefs to give different meanings to the situations in which they find themselves.