each by the number of questions to obtain your average response. Your average for Items 1 through 6 reflects your attitude towards interacting with robots, your average for Items 7 through 11 indicates how you would feel about the future ability of robots to socially influence people, and the average for Items 12 through 14 indicates how you think you’d feel if robots could experience emotions. See how your attitudes compare to those of your classmates. Higher numbers mean more positive views of telepresence robots.
Priming: When a concept or other knowledge structure is automatically triggered or activated by an environmental stimulus, thereby becoming more likely to affect subsequent related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
Spreading Activation: Activation of one node in the mental system leads to the activation of other concepts that are closely associated with it in memory
Think Again!
1 What is the dual mind?
2 List four of the differences between the two components of the dual mind.
3 Can you think of a task you do that once required controlled processing but is now automatic? How about one that you wish were automatic?
4 What is priming? If you wanted to prime someone to act in a very helpful way, how might you do it?
Free Will and the Dual Mind
The fact that humans possess these dual-processing systems has implications for one of our fundamental questions about human nature: whether or not humans have free will. The existence of free will hinges upon the relative roles of controlled and automatic processing in determining human behavior. If virtually everything that we do is a product of mostly nonconscious processes, then there is little free will. If, however, we have conscious control of most of what we do, then this suggests a greater degree of free will. As you learn more about social psychology, you will likely be amazed—and perhaps shocked—at the many ways that nonconscious processes seem to dominate conscious ones (Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008; Baumeister & Bargh, 2014; Dijksterhuis, Strick, Bos, & Nordgren, 2014; Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005). In fact, one prominent social psychologist has argued that conscious control is largely an illusion and that humans have little free will (Nahmias, Shepard, & Reuter, 2014; Wegner, 2002). After reviewing several common mental shortcuts, we’ll take a look at a number of ways in which humans seem to engage in willful behavior, such as deciding not to believe a claim we previously accepted, engaging in counterfactual thinking, and some types of reasoning.
Figure 3.2 Spreading Activation
Figure 3.3 Nonconscious Priming Can Make You Rude
Source: Adapted from Figure 1, Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.
HEURISTICS: MENTAL SHORTCUTS
In an ideal world, beliefs would be based on careful assessment of relevant evidence. However, we inhabit a world in which we are faced with information overload, continuous, competing distractions, and frequent pressure to multitask. These factors minimize our ability to engage in the controlled processing needed for a thorough review of the information and consequently we make many judgments in a quick and cursory fashion (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2011; Hertwig & Hoffrage, 2013; Kahneman, 2011). Given the trade-off between accurate processing and conserving mental resources, we sometimes forego accuracy for expediency, and this can lead to mistaken beliefs or inferences. That is, we often take mental shortcuts so that we can make rapid decisions either because we are not motivated to think carefully or we do not have the ability to do so. When either or both are the case, we may utilize intuitive strategies that will quickly lead us to a conclusion. These strategies are called heuristics or mental shortcuts, and they facilitate rapid inferences without much thought (Gilovich & Griffin, 2010; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Oftentimes these heuristics or rules of thumb produce successful or accurate judgments, and therefore, it makes sense for us to save time and mental energy and rely on them (see Table 3.3). However, they are easy to use, and this increases the likelihood that we will resort to them when we should not, which can lead to incorrect conclusions.
Availability
Quick, do more Americans die in homicides or suicides each year? I imagine that your first response was homicides. After all, it is pretty easy to think of the many homicides regularly reported in the press. However, according to the U.S. government, there were over 16,000 homicides and over 41,000 suicides in 2013 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Another question: Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter r or that have r as the third letter? Although you, like most people, may have guessed that there are more that begin with r, you would be incorrect. There are actually far more English words with r as the third letter (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). What led you to an incorrect inference? Well, it was probably easier for you to rapidly think of more words beginning with r, and you relied on this shortcut in providing your answer.
Table 3.3
Psychologists call this shortcut the availability heuristic; we make a judgment about the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. Information is said to be available when it comes to mind easily (Braga, Ferreira, & Sherman, 2014; Förster & Liberman, 2007; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Rather than carefully scanning our internal dictionary for the two categories of words, we base our answer on the availability of relevant information. Judgments based on the availability heuristic often have significant real-world consequences. For instance, financial decisions by investors are often made prematurely (and unwisely) when they rely too much on information that is immediately available—such as how a given stock performed in the prior year—rather than on all relevant information (Kliger & Kudryavtsev, 2010). As we will discuss later in Chapter 10, ease of recall can affect a wide variety of judgments, including how we evaluate strangers in ways that conform to available stereotypes, even if we consciously reject those stereotypes.
Heuristic: Mental shortcut that facilitates rapid inferences without much thought
Availability Heuristic: Mental shortcut in which people judge the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily relevant examples come to mind
Representativeness
Is it true that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck? Say your university has a 32-member debate team and a three-member wrestling team. You see Jose, a tall, muscular male student walking across campus dressed in athletic gear, and a friend asks you if Jose is a wrestler or a debater. At first glance and without much thought you respond “wrestler.” Why? Because Jose resembles your image of a stereotypical wrestler, you may immediately assume that he is one. However, upon further reflection, you’d realize that not only is the debate team larger than the wrestling team (which means that he is automatically more likely to debate than to wrestle) but also that debaters come in all
