This module lecture will focus on providing you with key terms you need to know with respect to social and self cognition. Look at attribution and self-justification.

The Fundamental Attribution Error attributes things that happen to one's personality rather than the situation. It over estimates behavior that is due to internal factors and underestimates the role of the situational factors.

The Actor-Observer Bias sees others as the cause or explanation for your own behavior.

Egocentric thought is when your own thoughts are more central to the events than they really are.

Self-Serving Bias is the tendency to make dispositional attributions for success and situational attributions for their failures.

Here are some of the ways we try to influence someone's perception:

1. Decoy - where we present something we know they will dismiss.

2. Contrast effect - where we will compare to extremes (i.e., comparing an extremely tall person to the next much taller person).

3. Priming - putting ideas in someone's mind before they have them.

4. Framing - how something is presented or phrased.

5. Primacy effect - stating arguments first because it is more effective.

6. Dilution effect - tendency to weaken judgment or impression by too much less important information.

Heuristics are shortcuts that we use to help us make judgments quickly. Some types of heuristics are:

• Representative - similarity between two items, comparing an unknown to something you know to look for similarities.
• Availability - how easily it comes to our mind.
• Attitude - our attitude about a person or situation can cause us to develop opinions that go along with our attitude.
  • Halo effect - general bias (favorable/unfavorable) and creates reasons to justify, always looking for that aspect.
  • False-consensus effect - tendency to overestimate agreement of others with your position.

Self-Justification is how we justify our actions. We do this in a couple of different ways:

Cognitive dissonance is when we have two conflicting views, thoughts or ideas and we have to find a way to justify one and disapprove of the other. This can be disastrous if there is no behavior change and we are doing this only to make ourselves feel better!

Foot-in-the-door technique uses small favors to persuade someone to do a larger favor.

Escalation is done by starting out small and working your way up to something bigger.

Justification can be either external or internal. External justification is based upon the situation, money, or reward and is from outside motivation. Internal justification is rewarded from within. The less external rewards we use and the more internal rewards we use, the more enjoyable the task!

Justification of effort suggests that the more difficult or painful the experience is to obtain the desired goal, the more attractive it becomes.

Required reading:

Benson, B. (2016). Cognitive bias cheat sheet. Better Humans. Retrieved from https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18

Social Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab. (n.d.). Research. https://www.freemanlab.org/research

**Here's the question (Cognitive Bias Theory):

Elaborate how 3 concepts from above lecture of module tie back to personal everyday experiences. Please be sure to define selected concepts along with providing personal examples of the 3 social psychology concepts chosen.