Human Psychological Facts

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WE JUSTIFY OUR OWN ACTION WITH BIAS JUDGEMENT
(ATTRIBUTION)

• In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring the causes of events

or behaviors. In real life, attribution is something we all do every day, usually
without any awareness of the underlying processes and biases that lead to our
inferences.

• For example, over the course of a typical day, you probably make numerous
attributions about your own behavior as well as that of the people around you.

• When you get a poor grade on a quiz, you might blame the teacher for not
adequately explaining the material, completely dismissing the fact that you
didn't study. When a classmate gets a great grade on the same quiz, you might
attribute his good performance to luck, neglecting the fact that he has excellent
study habits.
 • Why do we make internal attributions for some things while
making external attributions for others? Part of this has to
do with the type of attribution we are likely to use in a
particular situation. Cognitive biases often play major roles
as well.

TYPES OF ATTRIBUTIONS
• Interpersonal Attribution: When telling a story to a group of friends or
acquaintances, you are likely to tell the story in a way that places you in the best
possible light.
• Predictive Attribution: We also tend to attribute things in ways that allow us to make
future predictions. If your car was vandalized, you might attribute the crime to the
fact that you parked in a particular parking garage. As a result, you will avoid that
parking garage in the future in order to avoid further vandalism.
• Explanatory Attribution: We use explanatory attributions to help us make sense of
the world around us. Some people have an optimistic explanatory style, while
others tend to be more pessimistic. People with an optimistic style attribute positive
events to stable, internal and global causes and negative events to unstable,
external and specific causes. Those with a pessimistic style attribute negative events
to internal, stable and global causes and positive events to external, stable and
specific causes.
 EXPERIENCE OF AN EVENT TRANSFORM OVER PERIOD OF
TIME

Human brain is prone to taking shortcuts and making errors during information processing. Rosy
retrospection is an example of this. Lets get to know how our memory of a certain event transforms over
time.
According to management researchers from the University of Washington and Northwestern University,
Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson, rosy retrospection is one of the three processes that constitute the
rosy view effect.

(i) Rosy prospection- a tendency of people to anticipate events as more favourable and positive than they
describe the experience at the time of its occurrence.

(ii) Dampening- a tendency for people to minimize the favourability or the pleasure of events they are
currently experiencing or events that have occurred very recently.

(iii) Rosy retrospection- a tendency of people to more fondly remember events in the past than they felt
about the same event at the time of its occurrence.
They stated that the evaluations of events that people experience can be subject to transformation over time. More specifically,
post-event evaluations were likely to be rated as more positive when compared to the experience of the actual event. In 1992,
Robert Sutton, an organizational psychology professor from Stanford University, found that people who visited Disneyland had a
more positive post-trip recollection compared to what they reported during their trip. Their experience during the trip was
dampened by long queues, screaming children and unmet expectations but once the trip was over, after a period of time, they
forgot the things that bothered them during their visit and remembered their vacation as a more idyllic time.

• How does it work?

• Researchers have come up with several alternative explanations as to why it occurs. Back in the 1930s, Frederic Bartlett in his
classic research on memory found that when remembering things, our memory undergoes an active reconstruction. This
presents an opportunity for various biases to come into play and influence that reconstruction. Rosy retrospection has been
proposed to be a result of a similar reconstruction of memory. They suggested that people’s expectations before an event,
which are normally based on social prototypes, would influence how they actually remembered the event. For example, an
individual who has been told that trips to Disneyland are a lot of fun will be more likely to end up remembering them as a
good time. Cognitive dissonance might be one explanation as to why people would want to align their thoughts with their
preconceived notions. Furthermore, recent research by psychologists from Harvard shows that an optimistic outlook towards
an event results in a rosy memory. Other research in the field suggests an alternative explanation where people selectively
recall positive information and interpret the event differently so that they may be seen as positive.
 WE CAN’T DO MULTITASKING
• Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on
multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes
time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction
such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory
suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less
common, associations — is reduced.

• We have a brain with billions of neurons and many trillion of connections, but we
seem incapable of doing multiple things at the same time. Sadly, multitasking
does not exist, at least not as we think about it. We instead switch tasks. Our brain
chooses which information to process. For example, if you listen to speech, your
visual cortex becomes less active, so when you talk on the phone to a person and
work on your computer at the same time, you literally hear less of what the
person is saying.
WHY DO WE TRY TO DO MULTI TASK?
• Our brains are wired to respond strongly to social messaging, whether it is verbal or non-verbal.
Knowing and improving our status, expanding awareness of our group, is important to us, and as a
result information that helps us do that is often processed automatically, no matter what else we are
trying to focus on.

• Remote distractions, the ones aided by technology, are often unaware of current demands on us.
People who call you at work, send you emails, or send texts can’t see how busy you are with your
current task. Nor can Twitter feeds or email alerts. As a result, every communication is an important one
that interrupts you.

• Also, we crave access to more information because it makes us comfortable. People tend to search for
information that confirms what they already believe. Multiple sources of confirmation increase our
confidence in our choices. Paradoxically, more information also leads to discomfort, because some of it
might be conflicting. As a result, we then search for more confirmatory information.
 HUMANS GET EASILY INFLUENCED OR
PERSUADED

• Persuasion, the process by which a person’s attitudes or behaviour are,

without duress, influenced by communications from other people. One’s
attitudes and behaviour are also affected by other factors (for example,
verbal threats, physical coercion, one’s physiological states). Not all
communication is intended to be persuasive; other purposes include
informing or entertaining. Persuasion often involves manipulating people,
and for this reason many find the exercise distasteful. Others might argue
that, without some degree of social control and mutual accommodation
such as that obtained through persuasion, the human community
becomes disordered. In this way, persuasion gains moral acceptability
when the alternatives are considered. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s
evaluation of democracy as a form of government, persuasion is the worst
method of social control—except for all the others.
• In the universities of Europe during the Middle Ages, persuasion (rhetoric) was one of the
basic liberal arts to be mastered by any educated man; from the days of imperial Rome
through the Reformation, it was raised to a fine art by preachers who used the spoken word
to inspire any number of actions, such as virtuous behaviour or religious pilgrimages. In the
modern era, persuasion is most visible in the form of advertising.

• The process of persuasion can be analyzed in a preliminary way by distinguishing

communication (as the cause or stimulus) from the associated changes in attitudes (as the
effect or response
• Analysis has led to the delineation of a series of successive steps that a person undergoes in
being persuaded. The communication first is presented; the person pays attention to it and
comprehends its contents (including the basic conclusion being urged and perhaps also the
evidence offered in its support). For persuasion to be effected, the individual must yield to, or
agree with, the point being urged and, unless only the most immediate impact is of interest,
must retain this new position long enough to act on it. The ultimate goal of the persuasive
process is for individuals (or a group) to carry out the behaviour implied by the new
attitudinal position; for example, a person enlists in the army or becomes a Buddhist monk or
begins to eat a certain brand of cereal for breakfast.
 THINKING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE MAKES
YOUR DECISIONS MORE RATIONAL.

• Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that thinking in a foreign

language leads to more rational decisions making, Eurekalert reported. The study,
titled “The Foreign Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision
Biases”, appears in the current issue of Psychological Science.

• According to the study’s co-author, Sayuri Hayakawa, this is in large part because
people can’t disassociate their native tongues from their emotions, which confuses
logical thinking. On the contrary, the lack of emotional connection with a foreign
language allows for a more rational thought process.

• “An emotional reaction could lead to decisions that are motivated more by fear
than by hope, even when the odds are highly favorable,” said Hayakawa, a
University of Chicago graduate student.
• In one experiment, the team tested University of Chicago students who were native English speakers and had gained
Spanish proficiency through college courses. From previous research, Hayakawa and co-author Sun Gyu An knew that
people are naturally risk-averse, often forgoing numerous opportunities despite how advantageous they could end up
being. Through this study, they discovered this characteristic was drastically reduced when decision making was done
in Spanish.

• For example, one of the tests done involved risk-taking in a coin toss. Participants received $15, of which they could
contribute $1 to a coin toss bet. If they won the bet, they received $1.50; if they lost the coin toss, they’d lose the
original $1. Statistically, if the participants risked all 15 bets, they would gain money because of the 50/50 chance of
the coin toss itself.

• Despite this statistic rationality, when the students were challenged in English, they accepted the bet 54 percent of the
time. When challenged in Spanish, they accepted the bet 71 percent of the time.

• Ultimately, they concluded, as more countries and people across the world start to participate in a global economy
and, consequentially, begin to learn foreign languages, more rational and favorable (read: risky) decisions will be made.

• “People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language might be less biased in their savings, investment and
retirement decisions, as they show less myopic loss aversion,” the authors wrote. “Over a long time horizon, this might
very well be beneficial.”
 SOURCES:
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/foreign-language-decision-making_n_1453615
• https://www.britannica.com/science/persuasion-psychology
• https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=13355
https://www.boredpanda.com/things-everyone-experienced-in-chi
ldhood/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
https://www.verywellmind.com/attribution-social-psychology-2795898

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