Schemas and Heuristics

“Please your majesty,” said the knave, “I didn’t write it and they can’t prove I did; there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes matters much worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.” –Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Overview

• Schemas: Confirmation biases– Perseverance effect (last time)– Expectancy confirmation– Hindsight bias– Self-fulfilling prophecy

• Mental shortcuts– Representativeness– Availability– Counterfactual thinking

• Automatic vs. controlled thinking

We may confirm our expectations by selecting biased evidence.

• Snyder & Swann, 1978

• IV: Expectations about person to be interviewed: introverted vs. extraverted

• DV: Selection of interview questions. Slanted toward extraverted, introverted, or neutral.

• What were the findings?

Example of Tom W.

How might this apply to a clinician’s diagnosis?

On being sane in insane places

• David Rosenhan et al.

• +7 colleagues gained admission to mental hospitals (pseudopatients)

• “heard voices,” false name, all else true

• 7 diagnosed with schizophrenia, 1 with manic-depressive disorder

• What did Rosenhan’s demonstration show?

What are the implications of this example for the clinic? Courtroom?

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

• One person’s expectations can affect the behavior of another person.

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: The process whereby (1) people have an expectation about another person, which (2) influences how they act toward that person, which (3) leads the other person to behave in a way that confirms people’s original expectations.

Teacher expectations

• Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)

• IV: Elementary school children labeled as “intellectual bloomers” or not labeled

• DV: IQ test 8 months later

• Findings?

Mental Shortcuts or Heuristics

• Judgmental heuristics: Mental shortcuts (rules of thumb) people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently

• Research on heuristics arose in response to a view of humans as rational, thoughtful decision-makers.– Economists’ models– Tversky & Kahneman– Nisbett & Ross

What is the difference between a schema and a heuristic?

• Schema– organized set of knowledge in a given domain

(knowledge structure)– influences processing– Ex: Rude person – related traits, expected

behaviors, expectations about own reactions, etc.

• Mental shortcut– Specific processing rule – Not necessarily tied to a particular schema– Not a “knowledge structure”– Ex: Candidate=Democrat, then I will like him.

Example: Steve

Representativeness heuristic

• The tendency to assume, despite compelling odds to the contrary, that someone belongs to a group because he/she resembles a typical member of that group.

Base-rate information

Availability Heuristic

• The tendency to perceive events that are easy to remember as more frequent and more likely to happen than events than are more difficult to recall.

People often give too much weight to vivid, memorable information.

• Hamill, Nisbett, & Wilson (1980)• IV: Type of information• Vivid, concrete atypical +

statistical• Vivid, concrete typical + statistical• Control group (no information)• DV: Positivity/negativity of attitudes

toward welfare recipients in general• Results:

Demo: Karen story

Counterfactual Thinking

• We mentally change some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

Study of Counterfactual Thinking(Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995)

• Videotaped 41 athletes in the 1992 summer Olympic Games who had won a silver or bronze metal.

• Quasi-IV: Athlete won silver OR bronze medal• DV: Judges’ ratings of participants’ emotional state

from “agony” to “ecstasy.” (Judges unaware of participant’s award status.)

• Results? • Why?

Automatic Thinking

• Most biases/heuristics operate automatically (i.e., without conscious awareness)

• Some are highly automatic (e.g., availability), whereas others (e.g., counterfactual thinking) appear to have both automatic and more controlled components

• Automatic thinking: nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless

• Controlled thinking: conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful

Controlled Thinking

• Thought suppression: the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget

Example of Thought Suppression & Ironic Processing

• Homer Simpson tries to not drink beer.

Ironic processing & Thought Suppression

• Monitoring process (automatic): Search for evidence that unwanted thought is about to pop into consciousness.

• Operating process (controlled): Attempt to distract self from detected unwanted thought.

• Problem: If under cognitive load (tired, hungry, stressed, under time pressure), operating process breaks down.

Conclusions

• Schemas and judgmental heuristics – help us make sense of the world– increase our efficiency and speed– often operate automatically, without conscious

awareness

• But, they can sometimes lead to serious errors in judgment!