by Paul Seager
This heuristic is a quick and easy way to classify people and situations, although it is prone to errors. For example, ‘the base rate fallacy’ is such an error; this is when we ignore statistical information in favour of ‘representativeness’. If for example we toss a coin five times and get the sequence ‘H-H-H-H-H’, when asked whether the next flip will be a ‘H’ or a ‘T’, most people will, assuming the coin is fair (i.e. not a coin with two heads and no tail!), plump for a ‘T’ (to represent a fair coin), even though statistically speaking there is an equal probability of either a ‘H’ or a ‘T’.
Kahneman and Tversky explained the representativeness heuristic as:
‘A person who follows this heuristic evaluates the probability of an uncertain event, or a sample, by the degree to which it is (i) similar in essential properties to its parent population and (ii) reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated.’ (p. 431)
Key idea: Representativeness heuristic
A mental short-cut used to assign a novel event to a category based on its similarity to an existing general category.
THE AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
This short-cut relies on the speed with which we can bring to mind some pertinent information. For example, if we see in various media outlets (e.g. television, newspapers, etc.) pictures of the latest millionaire lottery winner, we are more likely to believe that we have a better chance of winning the lottery jackpot (hence the reason that lottery organizers like winners to agree to publicity photos). The availability heuristic is all about how easy it is to think of examples of a situation or event.
Key idea: Availability heuristic
A mental short-cut which uses events that come to mind more easily as a starting point for a decision.
THE ANCHORING/ADJUSTMENT HEURISTIC
This heuristic shows us how we develop a ‘standard’ (which is usually quite arbitrary) upon which we base future decisions. For example, read the following statement aloud:
‘There are not too many situations to which we give too much consideration.’
Now choose a number between 0 and 10 and say it out loud.
The chances are that you chose a lower number than if you hadn’t read the statement above. This is due to the prevalent use of the words ‘too’ and ‘to’ (homophones for ‘two’ which is a low number) in the sentence. And who knows, you may even have chosen the number ‘two’ itself. Other studies have shown that our estimation of the chances that it will rain today can be influenced by a random spin of a number wheel (e.g. where the numbers 1 to 100 are arranged around the circumference); for example, if the wheel generates the number 76, then our estimates of rain tend to be higher than if it generates the number 24 (wherein our estimates of rain tend to be lower). Much of the time, we don’t even realize we are being influenced.
Key idea: Anchoring heuristic
A mental short-cut whereby an individual uses an arbitrary starting point to reach a final conclusion
Why do we fall prey to judgemental heuristics?
A number of explanations have been put forward as to why we might unconsciously utilize these short-cuts, and thus become susceptible to possible errors of judgement. For example, with regard to the ‘representativeness heuristic’, it may simply be too much effort (e.g. time and thinking power) to engage in the necessary cognitive processing required to reach a good decision. We may fail to factor in the sample size (e.g. a higher sample size will give us more confidence in our decision: hence an example of one lottery winner probably shouldn’t make us rush out to buy a lottery ticket) or the source of the information (which may affect the predictive value: for example, publicity generated by lottery organizers probably isn’t a good source on which to base our decision to play the lottery). Overall, we probably prefer the simple solution (whereby we are being a ‘cognitive miser’) to the more effortful one.
We may fall prey to the ‘availability heuristic’ because of the ease with which we can retrieve exemplars of a category. For example, a study by Schwarz et al. (1991) asked participants to recall either 6 or 12 examples of when they had been ‘assertive’. They were then asked to rate whether or not they were an assertive person. In which condition do you think that participants were most likely to rate themselves as being higher in assertiveness? If you said the ‘12’ condition, your answer is understandable but wrong: the people in the ‘6’ condition rated themselves as the most assertive.
Why? Well it’s due to the availability heuristic. It’s probably easier to think of 6 examples of your own assertive behaviour than 12, therefore participants were likely to think they were more assertive because they could bring examples of the category (‘assertiveness’) more easily to mind; those in the 12 condition found the task harder and therefore concluded that they can’t have been that assertive if they couldn’t generate sufficient examples. Thus the ease in which we can bring information to mind can cause us to fall foul of the availability heuristic.
A further reason that we may be susceptible to heuristics may be due to our personality. For example, people scoring high in a personality trait called ‘need for cognition’ (NFC: the degree to which a person is likely to engage voluntarily in ‘effortful thought’) are less susceptible to biases caused by reliance on heuristics, because they are more inclined to think harder about a situation than those scoring low on ‘NFC’.
There is certainly evidence to suggest that we can be primed to think, feel or behave in a certain way without us even knowing it (see Case study below). However, it is not always the case that priming will lead to stereotype activation and its attendant behaviour, as internal mechanisms can prevent it. For example, if a person is driven to be ‘fair minded’, then they are much more likely to process evidence more carefully and thus avoid stereotyping. Similarly, priming people to be creative can actually disrupt stereotyping.
Case study: Behavioural responses can be influenced by the activation of schemas
A study by Bargh et al. (1996) had participants engage in a word task whereby they were given several sets of words to rearrange into a meaningful sentence. In the control condition, participants were given neutral words to rearrange, but in the experimental condition, some of the words were related to old age (e.g. ‘lonely’, ‘wise’, ‘grey’). Upon completion of the word rearrangement tasks, both sets of participants were asked to take their results down the corridor to a second experimenter. Unbeknownst to the participants, they were covertly timed as to how long it took them to walk down the corridor.
The results suggested that the participants in the ‘old age’ condition took about a second longer to make the walk than those in the control condition. The researchers suggested that this was because the ‘old age’ words acted as a prime which in turn activated an ‘elderly’ category (or schema) within the participants’ memory; in turn, this schema caused the participants to behave in an appropriately stereotypical way i.e. they walked more slowly. It should, however, be pointed out that not everyone is in agreement about the findings of this study, but they are nevertheless intriguing.
This priming effect has been found in other areas too. For example, one study showed participants a picture of a professor before they took a general knowledge test (participants in the control condition were shown no such picture). It was found that those participants shown the picture of the professor were more successful on the test than those who weren’t. The researchers argued that these participants had been ‘primed’ for intelligence.
Can we quash stereotypes once they are activated?
Despite our best efforts, there will be times when we may feel that we are in danger of stereotyping, and this raises the question as to whether it is possible to stop them affecting our judgement. There are a number of factors that come into play here:
1 Are we actually aware of the potential stereotyping threat?
2 Do we have the cognitive capacity available to ‘fight’ the threat, e.g. do we have time, or are we up aga
inst a deadline?
3 Are we motivated NOT to stereotype, or don’t we really care?
If the answer is ‘Yes’ to all three factors, then it may be possible to avoid stereotyping.
Summary
People are required to process a tremendous amount of information on a daily basis, and for the most part they are able to use this information effectively, usually in a rough and ready way by using a number of different strategies. One strategy is social categorization, and this helps us to understand our environment. However, other strategies (heuristics), whilst they may lead us to acceptable decisions most of the time, do leave us susceptible to biases and stereotyping. Studying social cognition can help us understand such processes.
Food for thought
On the next occasion that you meet someone for the first time, try to put aside ten minutes later in the day and write down honestly what your first impressions of them were. Then try to explain your judgements in light of the content of this chapter.
Dig deeper
Fiske, S. T. & Taylor, S. E. (2013) Social Cognition. From Brains to Culture. Second Edition. Sage.
Hamilton, D. L. & Gifford, R. K. (1976) ‘Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392–407.
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974) ‘Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases’. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
Wheeler, S. C. & Petty, R. E. (2001) ‘The effects of stereotype activation on behaviour: A review of possible mechanisms’. Psychological Bulletin, 127(6), 797–826.
Fact-check
1 The belief that two variables are related to one another, even though there is no link, is referred to as:
a Stereotyping
b Prototypicality
c Illusory correlation
d Social categorization
2 A decision made that is likely to be good enough most of the time is characteristic of:
a A fuzzy thinker
b A cognitive miser
c A naive scientist
d A stereotypical thinker
3 A careful, logical and systematic analysis is more characteristic of:
a A fuzzy thinker
b A cognitive miser
c A naive scientist
d A stereotypical thinker
4 Which of the following is not a reason why we categorize?
a It helps us make predictions about things
b It saves us time and cognitive processing
c It gives us meaning and understanding
d All of the above
e None of the above
5 A ‘rule of thumb’ employed to make a quick decision is more commonly known as:
a Stereotyping
b Cognitive heuristic
c Social categorization
d Prototypicality
6 You toss a coin five times in front of your friend, and it lands with a sequence of H-T-T-T-T. You ask your friend to predict what side it will land on next, and they say ‘Heads’. This is an example of which bias?
a The base-rate fallacy
b The availability heuristic
c Anchoring
d None of the above
7 Reading recent stories in a newspaper about house burglaries makes you start to think that your house is more likely to be burgled than perhaps it was a year ago. This is an example of:
a The base-rate fallacy
b The availability heuristic
c The adjustment heuristic
d The representativeness heuristic
8 You tell a stranger who you met for the first time today that you work at a university. Then you ask them to guess what your job is: either a cleaner or a professor of psychology. They guess professor. They have just employed which heuristic?
a The availability heuristic
b The adjustment heuristic
c The representativeness heuristic
d None of the above
9 Which of the following has not been put forward as a reason for why we fall prey to the various judgemental heuristics?
a It requires too much effort to engage in the necessary cognitive processing required to reach a good decision
b It is due to the ease with which individuals are able to retrieve exemplars of a category
c It is because humans are generally too self-reflective
d It is because of certain personality traits that some individuals possess
10 Which of the following is not a factor in determining whether or not an individual is able to quash the activation of a stereotype?
a Awareness of a potential stereotyping threat
b Available cognitive capacity
c High levels of the personality trait ‘need for cognition’
d The extent to which the individual is motivated not to stereotype
5
Interpersonal attraction: liking and loving
As the Blues Brothers (amongst others) famously sang: ‘Everybody needs somebody to love.’ and the topic of this chapter is all about the psychological aspects of how we make friends, fall in love, and all too frequently split up with partners. There can be no doubt that we do need others, as various chapters in this book have shown and will show, but how do we come to find that other person?
Why are relationships important?
According to the ‘belongingness’ hypothesis, humans have a fundamental need to socialize and form relationships with others (see Spotlight below). Failure to do so can lead to long-term problems, such as increased levels of stress, a decrease in levels of happiness and long-term health problems (although such findings do tend to be correlational in nature). There are many reasons which could contribute towards this need for affiliation, and these include the need for positive experiences (being in the company of people we like), the need for emotional support (seeking guidance and sympathy), and the need for comparison (to compare ourselves and our situation to those of others).
Spotlight: The ‘need-to-belong’
According to Baumeister and Leary (1995), humans have a very basic motivation to belong; that is, they need to form a number of interpersonal relationships of good quality which are of a lasting and positive nature. They reviewed a number of strands of evidence and concluded:
‘Again and again, we found evidence of a basic desire to form social attachments. People form social bonds readily, even under seemingly adverse conditions. People who have anything in common, who share common (even unpleasant) experiences, or who are simply exposed to each other frequently, tend to form friendships or other attachments. (p. 520)
Factors affecting friendship formation and liking
Having determined that we need to form relationships with others, we now need to look at how we do this and what factors might affect the success or failure of such relationship formation. One of the earliest studies to investigate this issue was by Leon Festinger and his colleagues; they discovered that proximity is a key determinant in how and why friendships form (see below). However, many other factors have also been found to play an important role in this process.
PROXIMITY
Generally speaking, this is one of the most important factors to determine whether or not we form a friendship with another person. The more we encounter someone, the greater the chance of a relationship forming. For example, if you regularly sit next to someone in a lecture, or in church, or work in the same room as them, then this physical proximity will likely lead to some form of friendship formation. Such proximity can also contribute to deeper relationships such as love. Also, proximity can overcome dissimilarity too: older studies have found that, in less tolerant times, those of different race formed friendships (despite societal forces suggesting that they shouldn’t) simply by living next door to one another. Of course, there will be situations where proximity can be a bad thing – for example, when our neighbours do things that annoy or anger us, and also when we simply get bored of a person (per
haps they tell us the same jokes every time we see them).
Key idea: Proximity
The degree to which an individual is close to (in distance), or comes into contact with, another person.
A strong reason why proximity is an important predictor of friendship formation is familiarity: we like things that are familiar to us – we are conditioned through evolutionary forces to be suspicious of strangers and unfamiliar situations. Generally speaking, we like things that are predictable (but perhaps not too predictable – the old adage goes that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’). The more familiar we are with someone, the less effort it takes us to interact with them, and the more likely we are to continue to interact with them – which in turn brings us back to the predictability factor.
SIMILARITY
In addition to proximity, similarity is also a strong predictor as to why we form friendships with people. Again, there is truth in the proverb that says that ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ – very rarely do ‘opposites attract’! Many studies have manipulated experimental situations, through the use of questionnaires, to suggest to participants that they are either very similar or very different to other people in the experiment (even though no such similarity or difference actually exists): results conclude that we like people who we perceive to be similar to us more than we like people who we think are dissimilar to us.