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 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.

Blog 1: Social Perception

Social perception is the way that people observe and come to conclusions about their understanding of the people around them (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). Everyone uses social perception everyday while in the classroom, in the workplace, and in every imaginable social situation. We make quick judgments of others by the way that they look and dress, their body movements, and many other factors.

I like to think of myself as a good social perceiver; I think I’m usually pretty good at understanding people just by watching them and being around them for a short period of time. I can usually judge pretty quickly whether someone is honest and responsible or if they are someone that I don’t trust. When I judge someone as being honest and responsible, my impression turns out to be right most of the time. However, when I judge someone as being a person that I can’t trust, I am proven wrong occasionally. When someone proves me wrong it is very hard for me to change my first impression of him or her. This is known as belief perseverance. Belief Perseverance is the tendency to hold personal beliefs even after those beliefs have been disproved (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008).

Unfortunately, I recently demonstrated belief perseverance after judging someone on my soccer team. This person was someone that I had a bad feeling about from day one. I thought they were arrogant and cocky and I let them know that. I don’t know what it was about them, but I could not force myself to like them. Everything that they said I judged through the impression that I had already formed in my head. No matter what they did I could not change my impression of them. Eventually, I ended up getting stuck next to the person on a plane on one of our trips and was forced to talk to them. I started to realize that I actually had a lot in common with this person, and I slowly changed my mind about them. However, it took me a long time to really learn to like them. Looking back on it, I can see that there were many times when my first impression of the person should have been changed, but because my beliefs persevered so strongly it took a very long time to change my opinion of them.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Welcome

Well, this is the first blog that I have ever done, and, honestly, I don't ever really read blogs. So, this whole thing is pretty new to me. I guess for starters I will write a little bit about myself. I am a sophomore psychology major at Southwestern, and I'm on the soccer team here. I'm pretty into outdoors stuff like mountain biking and camping, and I like reading a lot too. I came into college thinking that I was going to be an English and education double major, but I ended up taking a psychology class my first semester and realized that psychology was something that really interested me. I took some more classes and decided that I wanted to be a psychology major, so now I am a psych major with an English minor. Right now I'm taking two psych classes: research methods 2 and social psych. I'm pretty excited about both of them and I'm also pretty excited to see how this blog thing works out. Hopefully I will get better and more comfortable with it as the semester goes on.