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Test Bank in Conjunction with Intimate Relationships,Miller,6e
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Lecture 2 Review QuestionsInterpersonal Relations: A Self-Regulation Perspective
1. Explain why we are not very good “mind readers” (refer to lecture slides and article by Epley 2008). (clue
structure your answer around the problems associated with :actions of others; ego centrism/self-
awareness; inaccurate stereotypes; how well do we know ourselves?)
Artikel Epley 2008
People don’t perceive others’ mental states directly and must instead infer them from a variety of indirect methods,
including observations of behavior, second-hand reports from others, or sheer intuition.
First tool that people naturally and perhaps even automatically utilize to intuit other’s mental states: simulating with their
own mental states. Simulated experience becomes useful tool for intuiting another’s thoughts when people, often correctly,
assume from these clear signals that others would feel similarly. That people tend to rely on such egocentric simulations
when thinking about others is nowhere near a novel insight.
Second tool that people utilize to intuit others’ mental states: individuating information that people acquire about others,
or groups of others. Stereotypes, expectations and acquired theories about how others’ minds work provides a rich
storehouse of information for intuiting others’ preferences, attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and other mental states.
1. Egocentrism
> Attentional bias
> Construal bias
2. Inappropriate stereotypes
Lecture slides
Social feedback is often ambiguous and open to interpretation. You never know for sure what other people are thinking.
Why we are not very good mind readers:
1. Actions of others.
- Pluralistic ignorance: people in a group reject a norm privately, but assume – albeit incorrectly – that most
members of the group accept it and thus, they themselves accept it.
- Fundamental attribution error: we tend to explain others’ negative behavior in terms of internal disposition, such
as personality traits, abilities, motives etc. as opposed to external situational factors.
2. Self-awareness
- Egocentric bias: attention bias and construal bias.
- How well do we know ourselves? We are strangers to ourselves. We fail to detect mismatches between intention
and outcome in a simple decision task.
3. Stereotypes: give idea about general qualities but aren’t accurate about specific individuals. They also exaggerate
differences between groups.
2. What is meant by the anchoring and adjustment account of mind reading? Is there a difference between
adults and children in this regard? (see Epley, 2008)
The 2 tools described under question 1 – egocentric simulation and individuating information – can be used as a guide for
mind reading, but psychologic research reveals surprising features about how these tools are actually used. Research
suggests that one’s own perspective is likely to serve as a common default or starting point when reasoning about others
even among full-grown adults, and that individuating information is likely to be accessed only subsequently to adjust or
correct an initial egocentric assessment. This mental operation of adjusting an initial starting point or default is consistent
with the use of what Tversky and Kahneman called the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. Faced with uncertainty about
the answer to almost any question, people often start with something they know is close to the right answer and only
subsequently adjust that starting point in a direction that seems appropriate. When intuiting the thoughts of another
person, insufficient adjustment from an egocentric default will tend to produce final judgments biased in the direction of
one’s own initial judgment. When the self seems like poor proxy for other’s thoughts, then an egocentric assessment is
unlikely to be used as a starting point.
The subsequent ability to correct an egocentric default seems to be the critical difference between children and adults, not
the initial tendency to be egocentric. Children and adults did not differ from each other in either the speed with which they
made an egocentric inference nor in the likelihood of considering an egocentric referent, but did differ in the speed and
likelihood with which they corrected that egocentric inference to incorporate the other person’s perspective. Adults may
not end up behaving egocentrically, but it seems they may begin by thinking egocentrically.
3. Describe and explain the moderators of the process of “mind reading” Explain the role of stimulus
ambiguity in influencing accuracy of “mind reading” (see Epley, 2008)
The process of mind reading seems to be moderated by factors predicted by, or at least consistent with, an egocentric
anchoring and adjustment account. People call to mind specific anchors or defaults that are perceived to be useful, not
those that are perceived to be useless. People should therefore be more likely to call to mind egocentric defaults and rely
, upon them, when reasoning about others who are perceived to be similar to the self than when reasoning about others
perceived to be different from the self. This is precisely what people seem to do.
Major mistakes in mind reading are most likely to stem from either inappropriate egocentrism or from inaccurate
stereotypes.
One’s sensory experience of the external world is distinctly embodied. Such embodiment creates 2 major classes of
egocentric biases that are likely to influence everyday mind readers: attentional bias and construal bias. Attentional bias:
people see the world through their own eyes, looking out at the world from their own perspective onto others. Means that
people are more likely to notice themselves, their contributions and their private thoughts and experiences more than
others will. Construal bias: a person’s own perspective not only gives a different orientation and focus for their perceptual
experience but it also provides a lens of pre-existing beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and mood states that alters how they
encode or interpret that perceptual experience, or how they reconstruct it from memory. Stimulus ambiguity will be an
important, but potentially unappreciated, determinant of accuracy. Ambiguous stimuli are more open to divergent
construal than are more concrete stimuli. Ambiguous stimuli are therefore likely to increase the magnitude of egocentric
biases and mind readers should generally be less accurate in ambiguous contexts than in unambiguous ones.
People try to disregard their own perceptions when reasoning about someone perceived to be very dissimilar to them and
in these cases base a mental state inference on the very stereotypes that make these others appear different. These
stereotypes often contain some degree of accuracy for predicting a group in general, but because they are generalized
representations, they may not be accurate predictors of any single individual within that group. Stereotypes may also
serve to exaggerate small differences between groups than can therefore adversely influence the accuracy of any
judgment. Stereotypes will increase accuracy as function of their correspondence with group averages but are unlikely to
be sensitive to the wide variability within these stereotyped groups.
4. How can we become better “mind readers” ? (see article by Epley 2008 and video- available as a weblink)
Video: Interview with Epley
A little humility about yourself. A recognition that you might not understand where somebody else is coming from, what
their point of view is, what their intention actually is. Once you have some awareness that you might be mistaking yourself,
then you can think about what you would do to be better. Data suggested that body language doesn’t reveal nearly as much
as we think it does. You can’t nearly read somebody as well as you might imagine you could. Attempts to put ourselves in
somebody else’s shoes, to imagine if we are a rich person what it would be like to be poor. The data that we’ve got suggest
that perspective taking doesn’t increase accuracy all that much. The only thing that does is asking somebody a question
directly. Solution to other mind’s problem, to understanding somebody else, goes back long way in evolutionary history. It
comes through a person’s mouth, the answer is. That’s why we have language in the first place: to communicate what’s on
our mind to somebody else. The people who understand each other the best, who are the most perceptive necessarily, who
watch body language closely, it’s the people who recognize their own limitations and then ask. You know more what it’s
like to be poor if you’d ask a person who is poor to describe what it is. You know what it’s like to be in a situation you’ve
never been in before, because somebody else tells you about it. There are limits of course to language. You have to put
people in a position where they’re able to tell you what they know honestly. And you have to ask them questions that they
can actually answer. “What are you feeling right now? What was your day like yesterday?” Don’t ask them to
psychoanalyse themselves. But if you know the limits of language, then you can be much better in understanding
somebody else by becoming a good questioner.
Article Epley 2008
The intuitive and obvious solution to the other minds problem is to make an active and concerted attempt to get into
another’s shoes. Categorically improving the accuracy of judgment is not among the beneficial social consequences of
perspective taking. Sometimes perspective taking is likely to help and sometimes it is not. Actively considering another’s
perspective is useful antidote to mistakes resulting from biased attention because these result from overlooking
information that might otherwise be available. If egocentric default leads mind readers to overlook information that is
otherwise available, then altering attention through perspective taking should serve to calibrate their inferences. Actively
considering another’s perspective will likely be of little or no use for second class of mind reading mistakes based on
biased construal (or for mistakes resulting from inaccurate stereotypes). Reason is that biased construal resulting from
one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies alter the way a stimulus is encoded at the time of evaluation, or the way it is
reconstructed in memory. Overcoming construal-based biases therefore requires a different approach for improving
accuracy, one focused not on simply trying to add new information to one’s judgment by adopting another’s perspective,
but rather one focused on attempting to alter people’s initial encoding of a stimulus in the first place. Accurately intuiting
another’s impression would require leading people to construe themselves at a higher level of abstraction, focused on
central and defining features of themselves rather than on low-level details or idiosyncrasies taking a big picture look at
themselves that is more consistent with how they are viewed by others could make people better at intuiting others’
impressions.
Lecture slides
Best thing we can do is: ask and clarify, don’t assume. Taking other’s perspective is a starting point, but not the best thing
to do. As a relationship counsellor, what’s the best advice you can give to two people in a relationship? Starting point is to
recognize the uniqueness of the other person; they have different backgrounds, different values, different interests that
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