Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 17 TranscriptApril 16, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: Just to review, heres where we left off. The discussion from last lecture and for about half of this lecture is going to be social psychology. And so, we started off by talking about certain fundamental biases in how we see ourselves. We then turned to talk about a bias and how we see other people, the fundamental attribution error. And now were talking a little bit about some aspects of how we see other people. So, we quickly talked about certain aspects of why we like other people including proximity, similarity, and attractiveness, and where we left off was a discussion of the Matthew effect, which is basically that good things tend to compound. If youre rich youll get a better education, if youre smart people will like you more, if youre attractive and so on. Nobody bring up their papers at this point. Theyll collect them at the end of class. What I want to talk to- laughter Okay, except for you. Just hand me it now. laughter Im going to ask the teaching fellows to stop anybody from approaching that area.I want to begin by talking about laughter impression formation, how we form impressions of others, and tell you a couple of interesting things about impression formation. The first one is, first impressions matter a lot. They matter a lot for different reasons. They might matter a lot because humans have, in general, a confirmation bias such that once you believe something other information is then encoded along the likes to support what you believe. So, the classic study here was done by Kelley where a guest speaker comes in and some of the students received a bio describing the speaker as very warm, the other as-do not bring your paper up if youre coming in late. Just-at the end of class, yeah. laughter Others got a bio saying-thanks, Erik-the speaker was rather cold and then it turned out later on laughter when theyre asked for their impressions of the speaker people are very much biased by what they first assumed. If Im described to you as a vivacious and creative person and you see me and Im all kind of bouncing around and everything, you could then confirm this as, “Look how vivacious and creative he is.“ If Im described as somebody who drinks too much, you might think hes an alcoholic. If hes described as somebody whos insecure and nervous, you could interpret my activity as nervous twitches. Your first impression sets a framework from which you interpret everything else.This was the theme of an excellent movie called Being There starring Peter Sellers. And the running joke of the movie “Being There“ was that the main character, the character Chauncey Gardner, somehow through accident had the reputation for being a genius but while, in reality, he was actually mildly retarded. But he would go around and people would ask him his opinions on politics and he would say things like “Well, I like being in the garden.“ And because of his reputation as a genius people said, “Wow. Thats very profound. I wonder what he means.“ And-or people would talk to him and hed just stare at them and say-and people would say-would be intimidated by his bold and impetuous stare when actually he just totally didnt know anything. So, first impressions can shape subsequent impressions not just when dealing with people.A little while ago there was a sniper, actually a pair of snipers killing people in Washington and the one thing everybody knew about it was there was a white van involved. It turned out there was no white van at all but in the first incident somebody saw a white van, this was reported in all the newspapers, then every other incident people started seeing the white van. So, they started looking for them and they started to attending-attend to them. So, first impressions matter hugely when dealing with people because it sets the stage for how we interpret everything else.A second finding building on the first is that we form impressions very fast, very quickly, and this is a literature known as “thin slices.“ The idea is you dont have to see much of a person to get an impression of what they are. The first studies done on this were actually done on teachers, on university professors. So, university professors have teaching evaluations and you could use this as a rough and ready approximation of what students think of them. So, what you do then is-the question that these people were interested in, Rosenthal and Ambady, two social psychologists, were how long do you have to look at a professor to guess how popular a teacher he is? So, they showed these clips for a full class. Do you have to see them for a full class? Do you have to see them for two classes? Do you have to see them for a half hour? How long do you have to be around a person to see him, to estimate how good a lecturer that person is? And the answer is five seconds.