Stereotype-Consistent Information Increase Thought-Confidence and Leads to More Extreme Judgments

Clark et al. demonstrated one mechanism by which their participants came to have more confidence in stereotype-consistent thoughts.  Participants with greater confidence in these thoughts were more likely to use them when making judgments.  Specifically, Clark et al. examined the association of higher socioeconomic status with higher standardized test performance and lower socioeconomic status with lower performance in elementary school.  In two experiments, Clark et al. first randomly assigned participants to view the-in fact fictitious-test results of a child getting either 90% or 20% of the answers correct.   In both experiments, they then randomly assigned participants a biography indicating the child’s either higher or lower socioeconomic status.  In both experiments, Clark et al. asked participants to rate their confidence in their thoughts about the child and to recommend that the child be placed in either a gifted or a remedial program. 

Participants in the first experiment, which followed the procedure described above, tended to have more confidence in their thoughts when they learned that the higher performing child was also from a family with higher socioeconomic status or when they learned that the lower performing child was from a family with lower socioeconomic status.  Those participants also tended to makes stronger recommendations for the child’s academic future than participants who were presented with a high-performing student from a lower socioeconomic status family or vice-versa.  Clark et al.’s participants’ degree of thought confidence mediated the relationship between the stereotype consistency of the information and the extremity of their judgments.  A mediating variable is a variable that helps, in statistical analysis, to account for the relationship between two other variables.  In other words, participants with greater thought confidence because they were presented with stereotype consistent information also tended to make more extreme recommendations. 

In the second experiment, some participants were randomly assigned a distraction condition.  In this condition, they were forced to carry out an additional task while reading and evaluating information about the-in fact fictitious-child.  When participants were distracted, participants were less accurate when recalling the child’s test scores.  They tended to recall the scores of a low-performing higher socioeconomic status child as being better than that child’s actual scores and they tended to recall the scores of a high-performing lower socioeconomic status child as being worst than that child’s actual scores.  Participants under the distraction condition reported less confidence in their thoughts about the child than did participants who were not distracted. Participants that were distracted by an additional task also made weaker recommendations regarding the child’s academic future as well.  However, they were more biased by socioeconomic status.  This relationship was mediated by their biased recall of the child’s test scores.  In other words, participants under distraction conditions tended to believe that children from lower socioeconomic status families or higher socioeconomic status families scored poorly or well respectively and this belief helps, in statistical analysis, to explain the fact that participants tended to recommend lower socioeconomic status students for remedial programs and higher socioeconomic status students for gifted programs.  

What Biases Judgements of the Self?

According to Gilbert and Malone there are four main factors that can lead to inaccurate beliefs about others and oneself: low levels of awareness of situational forces, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations and incomplete corrections for perceived errors (1995, p. 8).  Low levels of awareness may be due to the invisibility of those causal influences on human behavior that are temporally and spatially distant (1995, p. 10).  Even if the causal influences are proximal, the observer must have a theory of influences on human behavior in order to interpret these influences.  Here, Gilbert and Malone’s first and second factors interact.  In their account, individuals regularly underestimate incentives, basic social pressures, and egocentric biases (1995, p. 11-12).  Egocentric biases occur when individuals do not fully understand why they perceive a certain situation in a specific way.  Unable to fully comprehend the reasons for their evaluations, individuals may either fall back on a naïve realism in which their impressions of objects are qualities of the objects themselves.  Alternatively, they may simply be unable, through introspection, to understand the origin of their own reactions and thus may actively apply a theoretical perspective that they believe to be accurate but are unable to test (1995, p. 11-12). 

Individual self-understandings tend to be highly biased.  In 1993, Sedikides demonstrated that, for his participants, self-enhancement and consistency motives were more influential than diagnosticity motives (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 149). Acknowledging situational influences could undermine both positive accomplishments and the consistency with which one believes that one can achieve these accomplishments.   

At the same time, it is not clear how these biases in self-judgment would bias judgments of other people.  Judgments of others are typically more realistic.  For example, in 1988 Taylor and Brown demonstrated that “people overestimate their successes and good traits . . . underestimate their failures and bad traits) . . . overestimate how much control they have over their lives and their fate . . . [and are] unrealistically optimistic, believing that they are more likely than other people to experience good outcomes and less likely to experience bad ones” (cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 150).  Further, as Zuckerman demonstrated in 1979, people tend to look to situation causes to explain their own failures (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 150) but do not extend the same courtesy to others (Gilbert and Malone, 1995).  When individuals do admit to having negative traits they “persuade themselves that their good traits are unusual whereas their bad traits are widely shared” (Baumeister, 2010, 150).  

It is possible that judgments of self influence lay theories that are applied to both the self and the other.  However, Gilbert and Malone point out other cognitive reasons for unrealistic expectations-the availability bias leads to inaccurate judgments of the typicality of certain behaviors (1995, p. 13) and lay theories of situational influence can lead individuals to underestimate even their own dispositions (1995, p. 14).  Inflated categorization of behavior occurs because individuals seek to resolve ambiguity and thus see behavior as more strongly conforming to expectation than it actually does (1995, pg. 14).  Last, individuals tend to make either situational or dispositional attributions based on the motives of the moment, and correcting for these attributions can be difficult (1995, p. 15-16).  

What Moderates Attitude-Behavior Consistency?

Attitude structure, as mapped through different measures of attitude strength, influences attitude-behavior consistency. For example, the accessibility of an attitude, the ease with which it comes to mind, has been positively correlated to voting behavior, consumer product choices, puzzle completion, and the choice to donate to charity (Fabrigar and Wegener, 2010, p. 187-188.)  To take another example, just believing that you’ve thought about something can lead to greater certainty and with that certainty, greater attitude-behavior consistency (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 241).  Other, more general features of attitude structure, such as the content of knowledge structures and the valence of evaluations, have been respectively correlated to influence on instrumental and consummatory behaviors (2010, p. 188).  In both cases there is a match between the content of knowledge structures linked to the attitude and the motivations in that particular situation.    

Ambivalence is usually negatively correlated to attitude-behavior consistency (2010, p. 188-189).  This is the case even for complex attitudes, which can include multiple evaluations of different valences.  Normally, these attitudes may be considered “informative guides even when the goal of the behavior has little direct relevance to any of the dimensions of knowledge (2010, p. 195), perhaps because they have been tested across a variety of situations and are considered generally relevant.  However, ambivalence decreases confidence in these attitudes, their perceived situational relevance, and, in some cases, willingness to act.   Less-complex attitudes may be even more affected (2010, p. 195).  

According to Petty et al.’s Meta-Cognitive Model, the MCM, individual evaluations and knowledge structures may be “tagged” with meta-evaluations of their likelihood, the confidence with which they should be held, accuracy, and certainty (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 218-219).  Ambivalence can cause clashes between attitudes which may be experienced as discomfort and prompt an adjustment of these tags (2010, p. 219).  Attitudes with meta-cognitive tags indicating certainty and confidence should be better correlated to behaviors both deliberative and automatic.  Attitudes with tags indicating their weakness and personal lack of confidence in them should, eventually, cease to affect behavior.  However, they may persist as implicit attitudes that affect automatic reactions (2010, p. 219). 

Because attitudes can form by many routes, including evaluative conditioning, heuristic, and elaborative processing (2010), it is possible for behaviors to change attitudes.  For example, “[a]ttitude self-reports filled out in front of a mirror . . . better predict subsequent behavior,” (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143) presumably biases attention toward the reflexive self.  Further, participants who have recalled “extraverted versus introverted tendencies” (2010, p. 146) typically begin to think of themselves as introverted or extroverted which can lead to the expression of introverted and extroverted behaviors (2010, p. 146).  Role playing can also induce attitude change (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 221). 

Moral Behavior

Posts tagged with the “Moral Behavior” label examine the relationship between moral attitudes and moral behavior. Some posts may explore attitude theory in general. 

Distinct Moral Convictions Increase Social Distancing, Reduce Cooperation

When people report that attitudes are an important part of their personal moral perspective, they are more likely to:

·  physically distance themselves from people with different moral attitudes

·  have difficulty resolving conflicts with people who don’t share their moral convictions.

These actions are independent of the content of the moral conviction—an individual who has a moral conviction that supports abortion rights will be as likely to withdraw from someone who disagrees with him as an individual who has a moral conviction that opposes abortion rights (Bauman & Skitka, 2009, p. 344).

Moral Others

Entries tagged with the “Moral Others” label look at moral judgments of other people. What is judged? Behavior is judged yes, but also the morality of the members of different social categories. These entries will deal with both observed and assumed moral differences between the self and the other. 

Tag: Moral Others

The Private and Public Moral Self

According to Baumeister, the heart of the self is reflexive consciousness (Baumeister 2010, p. 142).  The object of this reflection, however, is somewhat mysterious.  Who we are and what we will do is not a given. We learn about ourselves by observing past and current behaviors and making predictions  (Baumeister 2010, p. 142). However, only a few of these beliefs about the self “are active in focal awareness at any given time” (Baumeister 2010, p. 145).  The presence of specific beliefs in focal awareness is moderated both by internal processes such as self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143) and the extent to which awareness is focused on the self to the exclusion of other objects of awareness (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  For example, as Duval and Wicklund found in 1972 attitude “self-reports filled out in front of a mirror are more accurate (in the sense that they better predict subsequent behavior) than those filled out with no mirror present” (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).

Self-awareness can bring ongoing mental processes into the forefront of consciousness, intensifying, as Scheier and Carver found in 1977, either awareness of emotional reactions or emotional reactions themselves (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  Increased self-awareness is also positively correlated to successful self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p.  143).  However, if individuals are engaged in behaviors that are at odds with their self-concept, self-awareness may be avoided (Baumeister, 2010, p. 144) often through effortful and biased self-justification and selective recall.   

The self, then, is, can be acted upon.  Rather than being a given, it is a flexible store of self-knowledge of varying degrees of accuracy and subject to revision or minimization in a variety of situations, social and non-social.  For humans, at least, social situations predominate, and, Baumeister writes, “[t]he first job of the self is to garner social acceptance” (as cited in Baumeister & Finkel 2010, p. 140).  Social acceptance requires “self-understanding on things that connect [the self] to other people, including family, groups, country, and other relationships” (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  When the self identifies with each of these categories, relationships and roles are made salient (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140). At another level of identification, the individual may look to the group in order to learn about herself.  Not only must an individual seeking greater status or seeking to maintain status within the group understand the standards against which she is being judged but she must further internalize these standards so that self-monitoring proceeds automatically (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  

People effortfully defend their private moral self-concept. As Haidt and Kesbir (2009) argue, "[w]hen people behave selfishly, they judge their own behavior to be more virtuous than when they watch the same behavior performed by another person." However, this pattern is not exhibited when participants are under cognitive load, suggesting that individual reappraisal of selfish action as virtuous is effortful and deliberate. 

The presence of an audience, however, does increase prosocial behavior (Baumeister, 1982). Even the presence of security cameras, acting, perhaps, like the mirror in Duval and Wicklund (1972), increased helping behaviors (Van Rompay, Vonk, & Fransen, in press, cited in Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). Indeed, if participants play a dictator game on a computer that has been given "stylized eyespots on the desktop background" they will give more generously (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). 

Curiously, when the audience can be deceived, individuals will often fall back on behaviors that are selfish, not prosocial, and dishonest. For example, Batson, Thompson, Seuferling, Whitney, &  Strongman (1999) "asked participants to decide how to assign two tasks to themselves and another participant. One of the tasks was much more desirable than the other, and participants were given a coin to flip, in a sealed plastic bag, as an optional decision aid. Those who did not open the bag assigned themselves the more desirable task 80-90% of the time. But the same was true of participants who opened the bag and (presumably) flipped the coin. Those who flipped may well have believed, before the coin landed, that they were honest people who would honor the coin’s decision: A self-report measure of moral responsibility, filled out weeks earlier, correlated with the decision to open the bag, yet it did not correlate with the decision about task assignment" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009).

Privacy, then, can reduce the incidence of prosocial behaviors, even when these behaviors are supported by strong cultural mandates. In Japan, for example, "when participants are placed in lab situations that lack the constant informal monitoring and sanctioning systems of real life, cooperation rates in small groups are low, even lower than those of Americans (Yamagishi, 2003)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). It could be argued, however, that the social context of the laboratory would predictably be differently marked in context-sensitive collectivist cultures.