PERSUADING OURSELVES

Selective Perception

• Attention - tendency to pay closer attention to messages that support our existing attitudes or current feelings
  • Horoscopes
  • Personality tests
  • P.T. Barnum effect

• Schema activation (stereotypes)
  • Influences:
    
  • processing of ambiguous information
  • filling in missing information
  • initial affective reactions
  • blue-collar workers
  • computer nerd
  • freshman
  • absent-minded professor

• Self-generated Persuasion
  • generating positive cognitive responses
  • refuting negative cognitive responses
    • think about/discuss "reasons why"
    • role playing
    • imagine - visualization
    • try to persuade others

• Subliminal "Self-Help"
  • Consumers spend $50 million annually on self-help tapes (1990)

  • Controlled experiments find little or no therapeutic effects.

• Hindsight Bias
  • - affects our explanations of past events

  • - affects our interpretation of ambiguous events

  • - has a stronger effect if we know the outcome

  • - can affect our judgments of decision-makers' abilities (unfairly?)

  • - may make us "over confident" of our abilities to predict future events.

  • - may increase feelings of guilt or responsibility

  • - affects things as diverse as gambling and reactions to social-science research