1. Intuition Chapter 2 Social Intuition

2. Thin Slicing How much can those fleeting first impressions really tell us? How much of people's personality is it possible to intuit within a few seconds, or minutes, of meeting them? Video

3. History of Thin slicing Norman and Goldberg (1966) asked University of Michigan students to rate their peers' personalities on the first day of class, before the students had had a chance to interact. They found that the students' ratings of one another tended to agree with their self-ratings, particularly on the traits "sociable" and "responsible."

4. Thin Slicing of Personality Traits (Kenny et al., 1988) Groups of four strangers rated each other on the five personality traits. Then, the strangers met in pairs and were videotaped talking to each other. Later, judges watched the extensive videotapes and rated each subject's extroversion, based on the amount of time he or she spent talking, the number of arm movements and other factors. The strangers' first-impression ratings of extroversion strongly correlated with people's rated levels of extroversion as seen on the videotape.

5. Replications Overall, the studies have indicated that people are good at sensing a stranger's level of extroversion or sociability. Some studies suggest that people can sense the other four traits as well (particularly conscientiousness and agreeableness), but those results mixed and less conclusive.

6. Teacher Effectiveness Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) videotaped 13 graduate teaching fellows as they taught their classes. She then took three random 10-second clips from each tape, combined them into one 30-second clip for each teacher and showed the silent clips to students who did not know the teachers. The student judges rated the teachers on 13 variables, such as "accepting," "active," "competent" and "confident.“ Ambady combined these individual scores into one global rating for each teacher and then correlated that rating with the teachers' end-of-semester evaluations from actual students (r = 0.72)

7. Individual Differences A Caveat When we talk about accuracy, we're not looking at single judgments, we're looking at the average of a lot of judgments. “People do vary in their social intelligence. There are dunces among us who just never get it.” (Bernieri, 2005)

8. Mood Effects Ambady (2002) found that people who were induced into a happy mood by watching a scene from a happy movie were able to more accurately predict a teacher's effectiveness from a thin-slice video clip than were people who were induced into a sad mood. Ambady thinks that this might be because people who are in a sad mood don't trust their snap judgments--they might come to the same immediate first impression as someone in a happy mood, but then doubt themselves and start second-guessing.

9. Nonconscious Learning Lewicki (1986) Method during a pre-experimental interview, participant was either insulted by the interviewer or treated in a neutral manner. Participants were then asked to go into another room and select whichever of two experimenter was free to administer the rest of the experiment. because both experimenters were actually free, subjects had to make a choice about which experimenter to choose one of the two experimenters physically resembled the interviewer who had insulted the subject

10. Lewicki (continued) Results 80% of subjects who had previously been insulted chose the experimenter who did not look like the interviewer. 43% of subjects who had not been insulted choose the experimenter who did not look like the interviewer. in a subsequent questionnaire, almost all subjects indicated that their choice was completely random.

11. Dual Attitude System Perception consist of two stages: Automatic (unconscious) Stage Uses minimal cognitive resources Can co-occur with other tasks Parallel (i.e., not vulnerable to information overload, time pressure or distractors).

12. Controlled (Conscious) Stage Intentional Conscious Controllable Effortful Fast automatic judgments were often accurate predictors of future attitudes. When asked to analysis their feeling, attitude reports were no longer good.

13. The Body’s Wisdom. The Amygdala We can process threatening information in milliseconds, without conscious awareness. The Low Road – fast connections to the amygdala (emotional control center) by- Passes the cortex. Acts as our minds alarm System.

14. Two routes to emotional reactions

15. Through the amygdala our brains are “hard- wired” to respond to threats, make split-second decisions and respond to threats.

16. Emotional Decision Making When individuals make decisions, they must assess the incentive value of the choices available to them, using cognitive and emotional processes. When individuals face complex and conflicting choices, they may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes, which may become overloaded.

17. Damasio (1977) studied biasing steps (intuitions) that uses neural systems operate below the level of consciousness. These biasing steps are referred to as Somatic markers. These are strong, learned associations between reinforcing stimuli and an emotional reaction (i.e., gut reactions). Somatic markers (memories) are stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC).

18. Gambling Task Study (Damasio) Normal participants and patients with VMPFC damage performed a gambling task. Subjects have to choose between decks of cards that yield high immediate gain but larger future loss (risky), and decks that yield lower immediate gain but a smaller future loss (non-risky). Skin conductance responses (SCRs) are used as an index of somatic state activation. (i.e., somatic markers)

19. Control Group Controls began to choose advantageously before they realized which strategy worked best, whereas prefrontal patients continued to choose disadvantageously even after they knew the correct strategy. Moreover, controls began to generate anticipatory skin conductance responses (SCRs) whenever they pondered a choice that turned out to be risky, before they knew explicitly that it was a risky choice.

20. PFVMC Patients Patients with PFVMC lesions choose disadvantageously in this task because they never developed anticipatory SCRs, although some eventually realized which choices were risky. The results suggest that, in normal individuals, nonconscious biases guide behavior before conscious knowledge does.

21. Classical Conditioning Stimulus generalization. Abused Children study – stronger and longer lasting emotional reactions to pictures of angry faces.

22. Social Intuitions Several lines of evidence show that intuitive responses often occur before rational ones. Mere exposure effect Spontaneous trait inference Moral intuition Contagious moods Empathetic accuracy Lie detection

23. Women’s Intuitions Hall's Meta Analysis. Females surpass males at decoding emotional messages. Females are more expressive than males in almost two-thirds of the studies surveyed. Sex or other related factors - e.g., lower social power, traditional roles.

24. Chapter 3 Expertise and Creativity “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Niels Bohr

25. Intuitive Expertise Noncounscious Learning Examples. Language acquisition Tulsa experiments (Lewicki) – complex patterns of movement on computer screen. – No one consciously guessed the pattern ($100.00 reward) – with experience they were able to track the movement. – replicated with professors and got the same effect.

26. Intuitive Stereotypes Computer Altered faces (Lewicki) - presented unfair (lengthened) and fair professors (shortened) - asked to guess about new set of professors - participants claimed they were guessing, but they categorized according to the learned pattern.

27. Learned Expertice Chicken Sexers Separate female and male chicks as soon as possible, because each sex has different diets and endgames (most males are just destroyed). The mystery is that when you look at the vent in the chick’s rear, some people just know which are female. It is impossible to explain, so the Japanese figured out how to teach this unexplainable knowledge. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into a bin. The master would then say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ based on his generally correct observation. After a few weeks, the student’s brain was trained to masterful levels. Dirty Jobs video

28. LevelStageCharacteristicsHow knowledge is treated Recognition of relevance How context is assessed Decision- making 1NoviceRigid adherence to taught rules or plans. Little situational perception. No discretionary judgment. Without reference to context None Analytically Rational 2Advanced beginner Guidelines for action based on attributes or aspects. Situational perception still limited All attributes and aspects are treated separately and given equal importance. In context 3CompetentNow sees actions at least partially in terms of longer-term goals. Conscious, deliberate planning Standardized and routinized procedures Present 4ProficientSees situations holistically rather than in terms of aspects Sees what is most important in a situation. Perceives deviations from the normal pattern. Decision-making less labored Uses maxims for guidance, whose meanings vary according to the situation Holistically 5ExpertNo longer relies on rules, guidelines or maxims. Intuitive grasp of situations based on deep tacit understanding. Analytic approaches used only in novel situations or when problems occur. Vision of what is possible Intuitive Adapted from: Dreyfus, S. E. (1981)

29. Learned Expertise Tacit Knowledge – learned with experience but without intention. Intuition is “hard-earned” – Hours of practice – With feedback

30. Creativity Component 1 – Expertise “Chance favors the prepared mind” Component 2 – Imaginative thinking skills Component 3 – Venturesome personality Component 4 - Intrinsic Motivation Component 5 – Creative environment VideoVideo (start at 3.15 to 4:53) Who is creative in the scene, there person who said the phrase, or the person who recognized how to use it?

31. Creativity

32. The Perils of Intuition Chapter 4 Intuitions about our Past and Future

33. Illusory Intuitions Cognitive Errors that exist in the present because they led to survival and reproductive advantages for humans in the past. e.g., Sexual Overperception Bias (Haselton & Buss, 2000) Men overestimate women’s sexual interest while women tend to underestimate men’s interest.

34. Why? Reproductive costs of sexual Underperception are greater for men than the risk of making false positives. For, women, evolutionarily speaking, sexual overperception is more costly than underperception. women who over-perceived the commitment of a male, are more likely to end up with an unintended pregnancy, lack of a partner to raise a child with, and her own reputation at risk.

35. Constructing Memories Memory Point of View. Memories viewed from your original perspective Field Memories because they encompass your visual field of view. Observer memories are when you see yourself in your memory as an outside observer would have seen you.

36. Observer Memories are evidence that memories are not exact copies of experienced events Daniel Offer conducted interviews of 73 high school male freshmen. He followed those subjects for eight years and then caught up with most of them again when all were in their late 40s. The 48-year-old subjects had little ability to accurately recall answers they had given in the original study. E.g. Is sex in high school okay?, were you physically disciplined?.....

37. Begun in 1938, the Grant Study of Adult Development charted the physical and emotional health of over 200 men, starting with their undergraduate days. “It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been butterflies”. George Vaillant

38. Relationship Studies Diane Holmberg and John Holmes (1994) Interviewed 373 newlywed couples, most of whom reported being very happy. When resurveyed two years later, those whose marriages had recalled that things had always been bad. “Such biases can lead to a dangerous downward spiral. The worse your current view of your partner is, the worse your memories are, which only further confirms your negative attitudes.”

39. Memory of Pain Daniel Kahneman and Colonoscopy pain Video (min 4– 6:35)Video Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive emotions differently. The peak–end rule- psychological heuristic in which people judge experiences based on how they were at their peak (i.e., most intense point) and at their end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. It occurs regardless of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.

40. Robert Spitzer and Reparative Therapy " The Fatal Flaw in the Study –- There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation.... the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.” “The findings can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex- gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.” (2012) For More Info

41. Other failures of Intuitions about our past. Mood Dependent Memory -when depressed recall negative past events when happy we recall happier events. Misinformation Effect e.g. Loftus’ studies

42. False Memories e.g., Ceci and Bruck (1995) Source Misattributions The inability to distinguish an actual memory of an event from information you learned about the event elsewhere.

43. The illusion of confidence In court room deliberations, a jury can easily fall victim to confusing a speaker’s confidence with his or her credibility, with more confident speakers deemed more credible. It appears to make “intuitive” sense that you should trust your doctor more if they appear more confident when they are giving you medical advice. We might intuitively lose confidence in doctors who have to consult with a reference book before advising us. However, research has shown that confidence is not a good indicator of ability (e.g. Kruger & Dunning, 1999).

44. How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events? Daniel Gilbert – Stumbling on Happiness Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. “Bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.” TED Talk TED Talk if you are Interested

45. Misinterpreting Our Own Behavior Swim and Hyers study on responses to sexist comments. 109 women were asked to imagine themselves as part of a small group given the task of assigning castaways roles on a deserted island. The participants read that one of the men in the group repeatedly said sexist things, such as "I think we need more women on the island to keep the men happy," and "one of the women can cook."

46. Fifty percent anticipated commenting publicly on the inappropriateness of the guy's comments. About 40% of the participants anticipated that they would also use sarcasm and humor to confront the sexist remark. 8% anticipated that they would hit or punch. All in all, a full 81% of the women in the study predicted that they would give at least one confrontational response.

47. Study 2 Swim and Hyers actually ran the study, and recorded the behavior of the female participants who were part of such a group. The results? Only 16% of women who actually participated in the study commented on the inappropriateness of the response. Two percent grumbled, and nobody hit or punched.