Stephen Berglas and Edward Jones (1978) first described self-handicapping as a strategy that an individual uses to build an excuse for possible failure in the future. According to the class lecture, individuals can either implement real (behavioral) self-handicapping by which they take actual steps to ensure that they do not succeed, or they can implement feigned (self-reported) handicapping by which they simply downplay their abilities so that others do not expect them to succeed. A common type of feigned self-handicapping is called sandbagging, a self-presentation strategy that people use to ensure that no one expects them to succeed (Gibson & Sachau, 2000). Self-handicapping is useful as a self-presentation strategy because it often creates a win-win situation: if no one expects you to succeed then they won't be surprised or disappointed when you fail, but if no one expects you to succeed and you do succeed then your achievement will look even greater.
I will demonstrated self-handicapping in my own life with another soccer example (I'm beginning to see concepts from social psychology pop up everywhere in sports). As most people at the school know, Southwestern's biggest rival in sports is Trinity University in San Antonio. We play Trinity every year in soccer and have never beaten them. They have a pretty good program as they have won the conference championship for the past seven years with us behind them in second place for four out of those seven. They are usually in the top ten in the nation every year when we play them, and we always give them a good game. In the two years that I have been on the team we have lost to them by one goal both times that we have played them. The first time I played them they were ranked #1 in the nation and they beat us 1-0 at home on an own goal (not by me fortunately). This past season when we played them they were #7 in the nation and they beat us 3-2 in double overtime at their place, with one of their goals coming from a dodgy penalty kick call.
The self-handicapping comes into play because we are never expected to beat them. Although we have a good program (we made it to #20 in the nation this past season), we are always the underdog going into the game. Their high ranking always gives us an opportunity to say something like, "well, they are top ten in the nation, and we are not expected to beat them, so if we lose it won't be a big deal. But if we win it will be huge!" While this isn't a great mindset, it does allow us as players and as a team to create a better self-presentation after the game is over. Personally, every time somebody asks me how the game went against Trinity this past year I always tell them, "we lost 3-2, but they were #7 in the nation so it was still pretty good for us." I also usually throw in a little self-serving bias (attributing failure to external factors) by saying that we would have won had the referee not given them that penalty.
Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405-417.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
It sucks being the bad guy
Sometimes I have a really hard time thinking of things to write about on this blog, and other times it's really easy for me to come up with situations in my life that I can apply social psychology concepts to and write about. I was having a very hard time coming up with something to write about for this particular blog when the noise in my dorm suddenly gave me an idea for something that I could write about. To begin with, I need to explain the concept that I would like to talk about.
The writers of our textbook write that the cardinal lesson of social psychology is that situational contexts have a profound impact on a persons behavior (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). This means that peoples behavior can change from one situation to another. For example, a person who is very comfortable getting up and speaking or performing in front of a lot of people can be very uncomfortable in smaller, more personal settings. As social perceivers, we take cues from these situational factors when shaping our opinions about others. However, we often underestimate the role of situational factors on a person's behavior and overestimate the role of personal factors on a person's behavior when shaping our opinion of them. In other words, we tend to explain a person's behavior more by their personality rather than by their environment. The formal name for this is the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977).
I fear that I have fallen victim to the Fundamental Attribution Error several times throughout this year. It happens to me often because I am an RA and often have to tell people things that they don't want to hear, like to turn down their loud music or to stop having loud parties in their room at 2:00AM. To give a specific example, I will write about the relationship that I had with a couple of my residents. For the first semester I lived on the second floor of my building, and there were more than a few instances when I had to go up to the third floor to tell the guys that lived above me to turn town their music. These guys didn't just have normal loud music; they had a sub-woofer that shook my ceiling and drove me nuts.
Eventually, after I had already told them several times not to turn it up that loud, I went off on them and got pretty angry. After that they really didn't like me and I heard them talking to other people about me calling me a tool and other names that I don't wanna write here. For the second semester, though, I ended up having to move up to their floor to be the new RA on the third floor. My new room was right across the hall from them, and it was kinda awkward for a while when I would pass them in the hallway. However, after a while I started striking up conversations with them, and one of them ended up telling me that he really didn't like me before because of the few interactions that we had when I had to tell him and his roommate to turn their music down. He said that after getting to know me, though, he thought I was pretty cool. It was very good example of letting situational factors influence his opinion of me, when, in reality, I wasn't the tool that he thought I was. I don't blame him for forming the initial opinion of me that he did because I probably would have done the same thing had I been in his shoes. It mad me realize, though, that it really sucks to have to be the bad guy.
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 174-221). New York: Academic Press.
The writers of our textbook write that the cardinal lesson of social psychology is that situational contexts have a profound impact on a persons behavior (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). This means that peoples behavior can change from one situation to another. For example, a person who is very comfortable getting up and speaking or performing in front of a lot of people can be very uncomfortable in smaller, more personal settings. As social perceivers, we take cues from these situational factors when shaping our opinions about others. However, we often underestimate the role of situational factors on a person's behavior and overestimate the role of personal factors on a person's behavior when shaping our opinion of them. In other words, we tend to explain a person's behavior more by their personality rather than by their environment. The formal name for this is the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977).
I fear that I have fallen victim to the Fundamental Attribution Error several times throughout this year. It happens to me often because I am an RA and often have to tell people things that they don't want to hear, like to turn down their loud music or to stop having loud parties in their room at 2:00AM. To give a specific example, I will write about the relationship that I had with a couple of my residents. For the first semester I lived on the second floor of my building, and there were more than a few instances when I had to go up to the third floor to tell the guys that lived above me to turn town their music. These guys didn't just have normal loud music; they had a sub-woofer that shook my ceiling and drove me nuts.
Eventually, after I had already told them several times not to turn it up that loud, I went off on them and got pretty angry. After that they really didn't like me and I heard them talking to other people about me calling me a tool and other names that I don't wanna write here. For the second semester, though, I ended up having to move up to their floor to be the new RA on the third floor. My new room was right across the hall from them, and it was kinda awkward for a while when I would pass them in the hallway. However, after a while I started striking up conversations with them, and one of them ended up telling me that he really didn't like me before because of the few interactions that we had when I had to tell him and his roommate to turn their music down. He said that after getting to know me, though, he thought I was pretty cool. It was very good example of letting situational factors influence his opinion of me, when, in reality, I wasn't the tool that he thought I was. I don't blame him for forming the initial opinion of me that he did because I probably would have done the same thing had I been in his shoes. It mad me realize, though, that it really sucks to have to be the bad guy.
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 174-221). New York: Academic Press.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Base-rate Fallacy
Decision making is a very interesting thing. Many people are naturally very good decision-makers, while others struggle with every little decision. People use different decision-making strategies. Some are very good at making quick on-the-spot decisions, and others are very good at taking time to weigh their options look at every possible outcome before making the correct decision. Many people, however, base their decisions on non-statistical information that doesn't correctly portray the statistical probability of an event happening.
The base-rate fallacy is based on the fact that people tend to be insensitive to probabilities and are more influenced by more vivid, dramatic events (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). An example would be someone deciding to drive across the country rather than fly because they have seen so many images and news reports of plane crashes where hundreds of people die. However, if one were to look at the statistics, they would realize that you are more likely to die driving in a car than you are flying in a plane. Stanovich calls this effect vividness (Stanovich, 2007). Those images of the plane crashing on the news with fire trucks all around a people panicking are much more vivid in one's mind than the car crashes that don't get televised as much. Therefore, people will be more likely to base their decisions off of the vivid images that come to their mind first.
My parents fall victim to the base-rate fallacy pretty often. The thing that first comes to mind when I think of this is what my parents think of my truck. When I was getting my first car, the one that I wanted most was a 2003 Ford F-150. I had wanted a truck like this for a long time, and we found a used one that was in very good condition and within our price range. We ended up getting it, but it took a lot of convincing on my part to get my dad to agree to it. He had a bad experience with a Ford car that he had, and since that time had been strongly against Ford. What bothered me was that the bad experience that he had was many years ago and was with a Ford car, not a Ford truck. However, that one bad experience made him turn against Ford forever, and to this day he still occasionally gives me grief about my truck and talks about how his Chevy has been running forever.
The base-rate fallacy is based on the fact that people tend to be insensitive to probabilities and are more influenced by more vivid, dramatic events (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). An example would be someone deciding to drive across the country rather than fly because they have seen so many images and news reports of plane crashes where hundreds of people die. However, if one were to look at the statistics, they would realize that you are more likely to die driving in a car than you are flying in a plane. Stanovich calls this effect vividness (Stanovich, 2007). Those images of the plane crashing on the news with fire trucks all around a people panicking are much more vivid in one's mind than the car crashes that don't get televised as much. Therefore, people will be more likely to base their decisions off of the vivid images that come to their mind first.
My parents fall victim to the base-rate fallacy pretty often. The thing that first comes to mind when I think of this is what my parents think of my truck. When I was getting my first car, the one that I wanted most was a 2003 Ford F-150. I had wanted a truck like this for a long time, and we found a used one that was in very good condition and within our price range. We ended up getting it, but it took a lot of convincing on my part to get my dad to agree to it. He had a bad experience with a Ford car that he had, and since that time had been strongly against Ford. What bothered me was that the bad experience that he had was many years ago and was with a Ford car, not a Ford truck. However, that one bad experience made him turn against Ford forever, and to this day he still occasionally gives me grief about my truck and talks about how his Chevy has been running forever.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)