Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Bill Clinton vs. Steve martin

We are always trying to make sense of the world around us. We try to make sense of things like events, situations, and people all of the time. This is especially true when making judgments of other people. Fritz Heider (1958) first proposed that we are all scientists that make judgments about the world around us by taking in information, analyzing it, and making a judgment. The theory behind this is called attribution theory because it says that the explanations that we come up with are called attributions. Attribution theorists seek to understand people's perceptions of behavior rather than that actual cause of the behavior.

There are two types of attributions that people use to explain other people's behavior: situational attributions and personal attributions (Heider, 1958). Situational attributions are made about people when we explain their behavior by saying that it was provoked because of situational factors and was not due to their actual personality. Personal attributions are made when we explain behavior as being due to personality rather than situational factors. In other words, situational attributions are made when we think that the behavior is isolated to the certain situation, and personal attributions are made when we think a person will behave in a certain way across all situations.

Several different attribution theories have been developed such Jones's Correspondant Inference Theory and Kelley's Covariation Theory. Jones's theory states that we try to figure out whether or not people's actions correspond with personal characteristics by looking at three different factors: degree of choice in the behavior, expectedness of the behavior, and the intended effects of the behavior (Jones & Davis, 1965). Kelley's theory states that people seek to explain behavior by using consensus information to see how others act in the same situation, distinctiveness information to see how the same person acts in other situations, and consistency information to see how the person acts in the same situation at a different time (Kelley, 1967).

Although it is convenient to think that all of our attributions can be made by taking in information, analyzing it, and making a decision, it doesn't always work that way. We have distractors all around us that prevent us from being able to devote enough time to going through all of these steps, not to mention the fact that many of us are too lazy to go through all of these steps when making an attribution about someone. Because of this, we have to take shortcuts, and we sometimes make mistakes because of what are known as attribution biases. The shortcuts that we use are called cognitive heuristics (Gilovich et al.; 2002, Kahneman et al., 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). One such heuristic that is commonly used is the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic occurs when we estimate the likelihood of something happening based on how easily we can come with instances in which it has happened. Tversky and Kahneman (1973) demonstrated this by asking participants of their study which was more common, words that start with the letter r or words that have the letter r as the third letter. Most people said that there are more words that begin with r, however, that is not the case. This was a classic example of people being able to come up with more instances of one situation than another.

In order to demonstrate this concept myself, I decided to try to get people to fall into the availability heuristic. I did some research and found two famous people with pretty high, but equal IQ's. The people that I chose were Bill Clinton and Steve Martin who both have IQ's very close to 140. I decided that I was going to show people pictures of Clinton and Martin and have them decide which one they thought had a higher IQ. I figured that people would be able to come up with more instances of Bill Clinton acting in a way more closely related to having a higher IQ (as he was president of the United States) and that people would be able to come up with less instances of Steve Martin acting in a way more closely related to having a higher IQ (as most of his stand up routines and movies portray him acting very goofy).



The results came out mostly in the way that I expected them to. Four out of the five people I interviewed in the video said that Bill Clinton had a higher IQ than Steve Martin, even though they both have the same IQ. The one person that chose Steve Martin said he chose him because he did not like Bill Clinton. Most of the people said that they chose Bill Clinton because he was a president, which makes me think that they chose him because of the availability heuristic. None of the people had seen the pictures beforehand, and all of them were forced to make a quick decision based simply on a face and a name. They were forced to come up with whatever information about the person that they could and then make a judgment based on that information. I believe that most people chose Bill Clinton because they more readily thought of him as a president and associated that with a higher IQ and that they thought of Steve Martin as a comedian and associated that with a lower IQ.

References

Gilovitch, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002). Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965). From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in person perception. Advances in Experimental Psychology, 2, 219-266.

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.) (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kelley, H. H. Attribution in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 15, 192-238.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.

1 comment:

  1. That's an interesting variation to looking at the attributions we thrust upon people; it does make sense that people would use the availability heuristic, for sure, considering the demands of presidency more visible call for intelligence than one might think for a comedian/actor (though actually, humor can require a good bit of intelligence). I actually didn't know Steve Martin and Bill Clinton had the same IQ, so I feel like I would have been just as likely to make that mistake. I've never thought him to be unintelligent, but I didn't really assume him to be exceptionally intelligent, either.

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