耶鲁大学公开课--心理学导论英文字幕

Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 17 Transcript

April 16, 2007 << back

Professor Paul Bloom: Just to review, here's 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 we're 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 you're rich you'll get a better education, if you're smart people will like you more, if you're attractive and so on. Nobody bring up their papers at this point. They'll collect them at the end of class. What I want to talk to-- [laughter] Okay, except for you. Just hand me it now. [laughter] I'm 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 you're 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 they're asked for their impressions of the speaker people are very much biased by what they first assumed. If I'm described to you as a vivacious and creative person and you see me and I'm all kind of bouncing around and everything, you could then confirm this as, "Look how vivacious and creative he is." If I'm described as somebody who drinks too much, you might think he's an alcoholic. If he's described as somebody who's insecure and nervous, you could interpret my activity as nervous twitches. Your first impression sets a framework from which you interpret everything else.

耶鲁大学公开课--心理学导论英文字幕

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. That's very profound. I wonder what he means." And--or people would talk to him and he'd just stare at them and say--and people would say--would be intimidated by his bold and impetuous stare when actually he just totally didn't 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 don't 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. So, after clips of five seconds people are pretty good at predicting what sort of evaluations that person will have.

Remember "The Big Five," how we evaluate people on "The Big Five?" Well, you have a roommate and your roommate you could evaluate on "The Big Five." You've had a lot of experience with him or her. How much time do you need to evaluate somebody on the five dimensions of personality? The answer is, again, not much time at all. After very brief exposures to people,

耶鲁大学公开课--心理学导论英文字幕

people are very accurate at identifying them on "The Big Five." One of the more surprising findings is--concerns sexual orientation or "gaydar." That's not a scientific term [laughter] but the same psych …… 此处隐藏：43477字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……