The Situational Source of Illusions

From National Geographic’s Brain Games:

Interactive experiments, illusions, and mind tricks reveal the inner workings of the ultimate supercomputer—the human brain.

Review many more Situationist posts containing illusions here.

Jeremy Bailenson on Virtual Reality

From Pacific Standard (a brief excerpt from a long, worthwhile article about the work of Jeremy Bailenson):

A few years ago, a research psychologist at Stanford University named Jeremy Bailenson effectively proved the soundness of Anderson’s recruitment methods (pdf). A week before the 2004 presidential election, Bailenson asked a bunch of prospective voters to look at photographs of George W. Bush and John Kerry and then give their opinions of the candidates. What the voters didn’t know was that the photographs had been doctored: each voter’s own visage had been subtly morphed together with that of one of the candidates.

In this and two follow-up experiments, Bailenson found what Rudy Rucker, the novelist who wrote Software, would have predicted: voters were significantly more likely to support the candidate who had been made to look like them. What’s more, not a single voter detected that it was, in part, his or her own face staring back.

In another experiment (pdf), Bailenson outfitted college students with head-mounted virtual-reality displays and then sat them across a digital table from an artificial-intelligence agent—a computer program with a human face. The students then listened as the “agent” delivered a short persuasive speech. When the agent was programmed to mimic a student’s facial movements on a four-second delay—a tilt of the chin, a look to the left, a downward glance—the students found it more likeable and compelling. And like the prospective voters, the students showed no sign that they knew they were being mimicked. Nothing, it seems, is more persuasive than a mirror.

Read entire article here.

From Google Talks (Bailenson discusses his work and book with Jim Blasovich, Infinite Reality):

Summary from Google Talks:

The coming explosion of immersive digital technology, combined with recent progress in unlocking how the mind works, will soon revolutionize our lives in ways only science fiction has imagined. In Infinite Reality, Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University) and Jim Blascovich (University of California, Santa Barbara)—two of virtual reality’s pioneering authorities whose pathbreaking research has mapped how our brain behaves in digital worlds—take us on a mind-bending journey through the virtual universe.

Infinite Reality explores what emerging computer technologies and their radical applications will mean for the future of human life and society. Along the way, Bailenson and Blascovich examine the timeless philosophical questions of the self and “reality” that arise through the digital experience; explain how virtual reality’s latest and future forms—including immersive video games and social-networking sites—will soon be seamlessly integrated into our lives; show the many surprising practical applications of virtual reality, from education and medicine to sex and warfare; and probe further-off possibilities like “total personality downloads” that would allow your great-great-grandchildren to have a conversation with “you” a century or more after your death.

Related Situationist posts:

• Virtual Bias
• Virtual Infection, Disease Dynamics, and Human Behavior
• The Situation of First-Person Shooters
  
• The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates
• The Situation of Trust
• Voting for a Face
• Botoxifying Empathy

Image from Pacific Standard.

Visualizing How Our Brains Make Visual Meaning of Our World

From TEDTalks:

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Human Vision
• Beau Lotto on the Situation of Sight,
• The Situation of Sight,
• Brain Magic,
• Magic is in the Mind, and
• The Situation of Illusion

Click here for a collection of posts on illusion.

Illusion of Motion

 

Review more Situationist posts containing illusions here.

Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji Speaks at HLS

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Friday, October 12 at 5:00 pm
Wasserstein Hall, Room 2019
Harvard Law School
1585 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA

Followed by a public reception at 7:00 pm

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People*
Mahzarin R. Banaji , Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics  at Harvard University

Most human beings take seriously the idea that their behavior ought to be consistent with their stated beliefs and values. The last fifty years of research in psychology has challenged that possibility by revealing that our minds operate, much of the time, without conscious awareness. Professor Banaji will speak to the question of how well-intentioned people behave in ways that deviate from their own intentions, and how this state of affairs compromises our decisions in legal, medical, financial, and political contexts.

*Book to be published February 2013

This is the keynote address of our Cooper v. Aaron conference. Please RSVP here if you plan to attend this talk.

The Situation of Money-Based Happiness

An excerpt from a recent, terrific New York Times piece by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton:

The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

Read the entire article, including their discussion of value of “underindulgence.”

Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending (Simon & Schuster), co-authored by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, is due out in the spring of 2013!

Pre-order it on Amazon here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Adult Well Being and Social Connection
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• On Money and Motivation
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• The Situation of Money and Happiness
• Receiving by Giving
  
• Something to Smile About
• Resisting Materialism
• Redirect
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• Law, Competition, Self-Interest
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Objectification
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

Face Blindness

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From CBS News:

Imagine you couldn’t recognize people’s faces, and even your own family looked unfamiliar. Lesley Stahl reports on face blindness, a puzzling neurological disorder.

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From CBS News:

This week on “60 Minutes” Lesley Stahl reports on people who are “face blind.” It’s a mysterious and sad condition that keeps sufferers from recognizing or identifying faces — even the faces of close family members, children, or spouses. Many “face blind” people don’t even know they have it.

If you suspect you might be “face blind,” in the above video, you’ll find a test that may provide an answer. We show you a series of pictures of famous people and ask you to figure out who they are.

If you have trouble identifying the faces in our test, we suggest that you check out www.faceblind.org/facetests/ where you can learn about face blindness and take other tests created by Professor Brad Duchaine and his colleagues at Dartmouth College.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates
• Voting for a Face
• Botoxifying Empathy
• A Reminder: Smile
• Stereotyping Political Ideology
• The Situation of Smiling
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People
• Interpreting Facial Expressions
• Smile If You Love Your Future Relationships
• Can You Turn the World on With Your Smile?
• A Look Into the Way Culture Affects Facial Expression
• Change Blindness
• Blind to our Situational Blindness
• Nancy Kanwisher on the Situation of our Brain

Leaning Tower Illusion

From The Leaning Tower illusion: a new illusion of perspective Frederick A. A. Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi, Elena Gheorghiu Perception. 2007. 36(3):475-477:

Consider the photograph in [above image] of the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur. Both towers are physically vertical, but in the two-dimensional projection their corresponding outlines are not parallel but converge as the towers recede into the distance. Our knowledge of perspective however compensates for this and leads us to perceive the inclinations of the two towers veridically.

From The Leaning Tower illusion (cont’d):

Our knowledge of perspective however compensates for this and leads us to perceive the inclinations of the two towers veridically. It follows that if the corresponding outlines of a pair of physically identical, receding objects are parallel in the two-dimensional projection, the objects cannot be physically parallel but, instead, must be diverging as they recede from view. This is clearly what we perceive in [above image], where the right-hand tower has been replaced with a copy of the one on the left. Now the corresponding outlines are parallel, and the two towers appear to diverge . . . .

From The Leaning Tower illusion (cont’d)

The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as the tram lines in above image. What the illusion reveals is not a failure of perspective per se, but the tendency of the visual system to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try, we seem unable to see the two photographs of the Leaning Tower in figure 1 as separate, albeit identical, images of the same object. Instead, our visual system regards the images as the `Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose two-dimensional projection leads to the `correct’ interpretation that one tower is leaning more than the other.

To view other Situationist posts involving illusions, click here.

Elizabeth Loftus on False Memories

From Beyond Belief Conference in 2006 (includes discussion of the role of litigation in altering people’s memories):

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of False Confessions
• Elizabeth Loftus and the Situation of False Memories
• Emotional Content of True and False Memories – Abstract
• Mood & Memory
• The Situation of Confabulation
• Emotional Content of True and False Memories – Abstract
• The Situation of Memory
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

Carol Tavris Interview – Podcast

From JamesRandiFoundation (For Good Reason):

Carol Tavris describes dissonance theory and how self-justification and self-deception often keep people from changing their minds even in the light of compelling contrary evidence, because the evidence is often dissonant with one’s self-image. She details the implications of dissonance theory for the persistence of psychic charlatans and other peddlers of the paranormal, and how it may explain how someone like Sylvia Brown can live with herself, and also how it may explain how believers remain so gullible about such unsupportable claims. She describes confirmation bias as a component of dissonance theory. She talks about how dissonance theory applies to the skeptic movement, both in terms of suggesting the best strategies for engaging the credulous, and in terms of fostering skepticism about one’s own skeptical views. And she argues that skepticism should be affirmative rather than destructive in its approach, and focused on both critical thinking and creative thinking alike.

Related Situationist posts:

• System Justification Theory and Law
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)
• Um, I don’t make misteaks . . .

The Situation of Optimism

From theRSAorg:

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot visits the RSA to explain the biological bias of optimism, and its effect on our lives and societies.

Related Situationist posts:

• Dan Gilbert at HLS on The Situation of Good Decisions
• Missing the Situation Leads to Optimism Among Powerful
• Neural Origins of Optimism,
• Self-Serving Biases
• Some Situational Sources of War
• The Situation of Reason
• Power Goes to the Head

The Situation of Human Vision

Experimental psychologist Professor Bruce Hood illustrating how human vision works (from the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2011).

Related Situationist posts:

• Beau Lotto on the Situation of Sight,
• The Situation of Sight,
• Brain Magic,
• Magic is in the Mind, and
• The Situation of Illusion

Click here for a collection of posts on illusion.

The Bystander Effect at Penn State

From Time:

The grand jury investigation that resulted in 40 counts of child abuse against Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, has raised profoundly unsettling psychological and moral questions about the actions — or lack thereof — of others involved in the case.

Head football coach Joe Paterno was fired by the university on Wednesday for his failure to intervene upon learning about the alleged long-running abuse. But many more questions center on Mike McQueary, who is still employed by Penn State; he witnessed child rape firsthand in 2002, when he was a graduate assistant coach, but did not alert the police.

How is it that a powerfully built ex-quarterback could watch the rape of a 10-year-old boy and do nothing to stop it? Why did he neglect to report what he saw to legal authorities for nearly a decade, even knowing that the perpetrator spent much of his time with at-risk youth? And why did the team and the university fail to act at every possible step?

McQueary, who is now a wide receivers coach at Penn State, did tell his superior, Paterno, about the attack he witnessed eight years ago, but he did not call the police or get help for the boy at the time. (Now reportedly the focus of death threats, McQueary won’t be coaching Saturday’s game against Nebraska.) McQueary isn’t the only alleged witness to do nothing: a Penn State janitor witnessed a separate assault on a child two years earlier, and similarly failed to contact police.

The rest of us would like to believe that no matter how small or scared we were, if we saw a child being raped, we’d step in and stop it, or at the very least call 911 immediately. But social psychology research on “bystander” behavior suggests that many of us might actually turn away.

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. . . Mark Levine, a social psychologist at Lancaster University in the U.K., * * * says that group dynamics do influence our actions, but not exactly the way we think. His own research has shown that being with others doesn’t always — or even typically — reduce altruistic behavior. However, the type of group we’re in and the relationships we have with its members, and with outsiders, do tend to influence how likely or unlikely we may be to help.

When the actions of a group are public and visible, insiders who behave in an unacceptable way — doing things that “contravene the norms of the group,” Levine says — may actually be punished by the group more harshly than an outsider would be for the same behavior. “It’s seen as a threat to the reputation of the group,” says Levine.

In contrast, when the workings of a group are secretive and hidden — like those of a major college football team, for instance, or a political party or the Catholic priesthood — the tendency is toward protecting the group’s reputation by covering up. Levine suggests that greater transparency in organizations promotes better behavior in these situations.

“It’s the norms and the values of the group that are important,” Levine says, noting that this fact doesn’t reflect very well on Penn State. Indeed, the riot that broke out after the firing of revered coach Paterno — who appears to have covered up for his former colleague, Sandusky, or at least looked the other way, rather than reporting him to the police — suggests that group solidarity with the football team still takes priority over support for abused children at the school.

Another factor that may have prevented action by McQueary and others is denial. Social psychologist Stanley Cohen identified several forms of denial that may cause people to ignore atrocities. There’s the denial that commonly occurs in response to difficult situations like receiving a cancer diagnosis or becoming addicted to drugs: the simple repressing of information and refusal to admit that the problem exists or has occurred.

In McQueary’s case, however, there seems to have been another type of denial at play, which Cohen labeled “interpretative.” “You don’t deny that something happened, but try to transform the meaning of it,” says Levine, explaining that a witness might minimize the significance of a crime or try to see it as something other than it was.

McQueary may well have been psychologically unable to accept that a man like Sandusky, someone he admired, had actually committed the abhorrent crime he witnessed. Research suggests that when people are faced with situations that threaten their view of the world as relatively fair and decent, rather than revising their own perspective, they often create accounts that deny reality, blame the victim or otherwise rationalize the situation.

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A third factor that influences the likelihood that people will intervene in violence is whether they feel their actions will be supported by others in the community around them. Levine studied the case of James Bulger, a 2-year-old who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered by two older boys in 1990 in Liverpool. Many witnesses saw the boys with the bleeding toddler, but since the boys claimed to be the victim’s brothers, no one confronted them.

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While it is not clear exactly how the norms or values of Penn State may have affected the lack of action by its leadership in response to such vile abuse, it is clear that something went very wrong. A pedophile should not have been allowed to operate with impunity, especially after having been caught in the act twice.

Understanding the psychology of these situations can help increase the chances that bystanders will step up when people need assistance, but it does not excuse the failures of those who do nothing.

More.

• Bystanders in Child Abductions
• The Situation of Bystanders,
• The Situation of Gang Rape,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situational Effect of Groups,
• The Positive Situation of Crowds,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situation of Hazing, Torture, Gender, and Tears, and
  
• Journalists as Social Psychologists & Social Psychologists as Entertainers.

The Wacky, Wonderful McGurk Effect

When I was a law clerk working on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit several years back, a case came up involving the competency of blind jurors.  I wasn’t assigned to the case — and, as a result, don’t remember any of the details — but the general question of when someone’s disability ought to be grounds for excluding him or her as a judicial decision-maker continues to intrigue me.

Overall, I remain skeptical of attempts to disallow participation.  Part of my skepticism stems from psychological evidence suggesting that we naively believe that we see the world as it actually is and that those who do not, must necessarily have some dispositional flaw.  Dan Kahan, David Hoffman, and Donald Braman’s 2009 Harvard Law Review article on the impact of cultural cognition in interpreting the facts of a police chase video provides an excellent example of the dangers of when judges determine that there is only one reasonable view of a case (and that those who see things differently cannot participate in the judicial assessment process).  It turns out that we’re not always very good at judging others’ disqualifying biases (for a situationist critique of Kahan, Hoffman, and Braman’s article click here).

The second reason that I’m wary is that there is good evidence that having complete use of one’s facilities doesn’t necessarily improve perception of key information.  Research on lie detection suggests that people are often mislead by focusing on visual cues (like whether someone is averting his or her gaze).  Perhaps the best demonstration of how our eyes can lead us astray is the McGurk Effect (demonstrated in the brief video below).  What I love about the McGurk Effect is that even though I am fully aware of what is going on (i.e., that my eyes are leading me astray) and desperately try to control for it, I can’t.

Take a look for yourself!

Related Situationist posts:

• Chris Chabris and the Invisible Gorilla
• The Situation of Eyewitness Identification
• “The Situation of Attention and the Gorilla in the Room,”
• “Change Blindness,”
• “Neuroscience and Illusion,”
• “Brain Magic,”
• “Magic is in the Mind,”
• “The Situation of Illusion,”
• “‘The Grand Illusion’ — Believing We See the Situation,”
• “Neuroscience and Illusion,”

Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy

From TEDTalks:

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we dont get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things dont go as planned.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
• Dan Gilbert on Why the Brain Scares Itself
• “Dan Gilbert To Speak at Harvard Law School,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions,”
• “Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Psychology,”
• “The Situation of Climate Change,”
• “The Heat is On,”
• “The Situation of Happiness,” and
• “Conversation with Dan Gilbert.”

The Situation of Eyewitness Identification

Read the Innocence Project’s “Reevaluating Lineups” report on eyewitness misidentifications here (pdf).

From the BBC, here are some revealing clips from their series, Eyewitness.

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Related Situationist posts:

• The Norfolk Four and the Situation of False Confessions,
• Memory Biases as Source of Prejudice, and
• The Situation of False Confessions.

Paul Bloom on the Situation of Pleasure

From TedTalks:

Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

Related Situationist posts:

• Susan Boyle and the Situation of Sound,
• “Busker or Virtuoso? Depends on the Situation,” 
• The Painful Situation of Guilt
• The Science of Songs Stuck in Your Head
• “The Situation of Music,” 
• “Hillary Clinton, the Halo Effect, and Women’s Catch-22,” 
• “The Situation of Pain,” 
• “Attributing Blame — from the Baseball Diamond to the War on Terror,”
• “The Magnetism of Beautiful People,” and
• “Survival of the Cutest.”

On Money and Motivation

This lively RSAnimate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, examines some the ways that money doesn’t always buy motivation.

Related Situationist posts:

• Shocking for Money
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• “The Situation of Money and Happiness,”
• “Receiving by Giving,” and 
• “Something to Smile About.” 

To review a collection of Situationist posts exploring the causes and consequences of happiness, click here.

The Illusion of Health

From Time:

If a box of chocolate cookies had an “organic” label, would you feel less guilty about eating them? Would you think they were more nutritious, or tastier?

Economists who study social psychology refer to something called the “halo effect,” a bias in judgment that causes you to assume that one positive attribute comes packaged with a bunch of others. For example, you might perceive your attractive coworker as being more capable as well.

According to a new study by Jenny Wan-chen Lee, a graduate student at Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, the halo effect extends to food too: if people are told a food is “organic,” they’re also biased to believe it’s more nutritious and better tasting.

Lee’s study involved 144 people, recruited at a local mall for a taste test: Lee presented shoppers with chocolate sandwich cookies, plain yogurt and potato chips, each in two varieties — “conventional” or “organic.” In reality, there was no difference between the food pairs; everything was organic.

Participants used a nine-point scale to rate various attributes of each food, including overall taste and estimated fat, fiber and calorie content. Tasters also estimated the price of each food.

Uniformly, the participants reported preferring the taste of the foods labeled “organic,” and believed them to be lower in fat, higher in fiber and lower in calories than the conventional alternatives. They also judged the organic foods to be higher in price.

Even in the cases of the cookies and chips — which wouldn’t be considered healthy under any circumstance — most participants believed that the organic versions were more nutritious.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Cut the “Natural-Cut”
• The Bagel Situation
• “Dr. David Kessler Waxes Situationist,”
• “The Situation of Eating – Part II,”
• “The Situation of Eating,”
• “The Situation of the Dreaded ‘Freshman 15′,”
• “Our Situation Is What We Eat,”
• “Social Networks,”
• “The Situation of Fatness = Our ‘Obesogenic’ Society,”
• “Innovative Policy: Zoning for Health,”
• “McDonalds tastes better than McDonalds, if it’s packaged right,” and
• “The Situation of Repackaging.”

Memory Biases as Source of Prejudice

From Miller-McCune:

A recent poll finding nearly half of Mississippi Republicans disapprove of interracial marriage is a disturbing reminder of the continuing prejudice faced by minority groups in 21^st-century America. Why is such bias seemingly immune to eradication, and why does it seem to be more prevalentamong social conservatives?

A fascinating new study from Italy suggests at least part of the answer can be traced to the way we process information and form political attitudes. Psychologists Luigi Castelli and Luciana Carraro of the University of Padua present evidence that our perception of minority groups is often distorted due to inaccurate recall of information.

This phenomenon, they add, is more pronounced among social conservatives.

Presented with a series of facts about members of two groups, “Conservatives developed more negative impressions towards the minority group,” which were reinforced by ”consistent memory biases,” they report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Strikingly, the researchers found this effect without making reference to race, religion or sexual orientation. All it needs to be activated, it seems, is the presence of a larger group and a smaller one.

In their first experiment, 234 students read a series of 39 sentences, each of which described an action of some sort. The person engaging in this behavior was identified as either a member of Group A or Group B.

Twenty-seven of the sentences described positive behavior (Jim gives up his seat on the bus to an elderly woman), while 12 described negative behavior (James often tells many lies).

Twenty-six of the sentences referred to someone from Group A, while only 13 referred to a member of Group B. The ratio between positive and negative behavior was the same for each group: 18 positive and 8 negative for Group A, 9 positive and 4 negative for Group B.

After reading the sentences, participants evaluated the two groups, rating the applicability of such adjectives as “intelligent,” “sociable” and “lazy.” They were then provided with all the sentences and asked to estimate how many of the described actions were performed by members of each group, and how many of each group’s actions were negative.

Finally, the students’ level of social conservativism was measured by having them give their views on five hot-button topics, including immigration and gay marriage.

The researchers found “an illusory association between Group B and negative behaviors.” Specifically, “the perceived proportion of negative behaviors” was significantly higher for Group B, although in fact the two groups were identical in this regard.

“Increased levels of social conservativism were associated with more negative evaluations of Group B as compared to Group A,” the researchers add. “The illusory correlation between Group B and negativity was accentuated among conservatives.”

The researchers then performed the experiment a second time, with one change: The proportions were reversed, . . .

More.

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Related Situationist posts:

• Paul Bloom on Disgust
• The Situation of False Confessions
• Social Neuroscience and the Study of Racial Biases
• “Yuck!” “EWW!” and Other Conservative Expressions
• “The Situation of Political Disposition”
• “Ideology is Back!,”
• “The Situation of Confabulation,”
• “Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Processes,”
• “Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning,”
• System Justification Theory and Law