Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett

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You Feel About Robots? (Part 1)

      The 2014 Hollywood movie The Imitation Game relays the story of Alan Turing, a British computer scientist who was instrumental in decoding secret German military communications and, consequently, helping to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Turing worked in the area of artificial intelligence and was fascinated with whether or not a computer would ever be able to think as well as a human. Indeed, one of his lasting legacies is what is called the Turing Test: A computer could be said to think like a human if, when verbally interacting with a human, the human could not distinguish it from an actual human conversation partner. The fact that artificially intelligent machines are already assuming many complex tasks that previously only humans could accomplish is scary for many people. What are your attitudes toward intelligent robots? Take a minute and answer the following questions and then turn the page to see what others think.

      Table 3.2Feel

      Source: Tsui, K. M., Desai, M., Yanco, H. A., Cramer, H., & Kemper, N. (2010). Measuring attitudes toward telepresence robots. International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, 1–11.

      Self-Reflection 3.2

      How Do You Feel About Robots? (Part 2)

      These questions are drawn from an online study of Americans and Asian Indians conducted by Tsui, Desai, Yanco, Cramer, and Kemper (2010) into people’s attitudes toward telepresence robots. Robots are telepresence when they cannot be moved around without direct human control. To obtain your results, first reverse the scoring for the final three items (1 = 5, 2 = 4, 3 = 3, 4 = 2, 5 = 1) and then total Items 1 through 6, 7 through 11, and 12 through 14 to get three totals. Finally, divide each by the number of questions to obtain your average response. Your average for Items 1 through 6 reflects your attitude towards interacting with robots, your average for Items 7 through 11 indicates how you would feel about the future ability of robots to socially influence people, and the average for Items 12 through 14 indicates how you think you’d feel if robots could experience emotions. See how your attitudes compare to those of your classmates. Higher numbers mean more positive views of telepresence robots.

      Priming: When a concept or other knowledge structure is automatically triggered or activated by an environmental stimulus, thereby becoming more likely to affect subsequent related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

      Spreading Activation: Activation of one node in the mental system leads to the activation of other concepts that are closely associated with it in memory

      Think Again!

      1 What is the dual mind?

      2 List four of the differences between the two components of the dual mind.

      3 Can you think of a task you do that once required controlled processing but is now automatic? How about one that you wish were automatic?

      4 What is priming? If you wanted to prime someone to act in a very helpful way, how might you do it?

      Free Will and the Dual Mind

      The fact that humans possess these dual-processing systems has implications for one of our fundamental questions about human nature: whether or not humans have free will. The existence of free will hinges upon the relative roles of controlled and automatic processing in determining human behavior. If virtually everything that we do is a product of mostly nonconscious processes, then there is little free will. If, however, we have conscious control of most of what we do, then this suggests a greater degree of free will. As you learn more about social psychology, you will likely be amazed—and perhaps shocked—at the many ways that nonconscious processes seem to dominate conscious ones (Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008; Baumeister & Bargh, 2014; Dijksterhuis, Strick, Bos, & Nordgren, 2014; Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005). In fact, one prominent social psychologist has argued that conscious control is largely an illusion and that humans have little free will (Nahmias, Shepard, & Reuter, 2014; Wegner, 2002). After reviewing several common mental shortcuts, we’ll take a look at a number of ways in which humans seem to engage in willful behavior, such as deciding not to believe a claim we previously accepted, engaging in counterfactual thinking, and some types of reasoning.

      Figure 3.2 Spreading Activation

      Figure 3.3 Nonconscious Priming Can Make You Rude

      Source: Adapted from Figure 1, Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.

      HEURISTICS: MENTAL SHORTCUTS

      In an ideal world, beliefs would be based on careful assessment of relevant evidence. However, we inhabit a world in which we are faced with information overload, continuous, competing distractions, and frequent pressure to multitask. These factors minimize our ability to engage in the controlled processing needed for a thorough review of the information and consequently we make many judgments in a quick and cursory fashion (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2011; Hertwig & Hoffrage, 2013; Kahneman, 2011). Given the trade-off between accurate processing and conserving mental resources, we sometimes forego accuracy for expediency, and this can lead to mistaken beliefs or inferences. That is, we often take mental shortcuts so that we can make rapid decisions either because we are not motivated to think carefully or we do not have the ability to do so. When either or both are the case, we may utilize intuitive strategies that will quickly lead us to a conclusion. These strategies are called heuristics or mental shortcuts, and they facilitate rapid inferences without much thought (Gilovich & Griffin, 2010; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Oftentimes these heuristics or rules of thumb produce successful or accurate judgments, and therefore, it makes sense for us to save time and mental energy and rely on them (see Table 3.3). However, they are easy to use, and this increases the likelihood that we will resort to them when we should not, which can lead to incorrect conclusions.

      Availability

      Quick, do more Americans die in homicides or suicides each year? I imagine that your first response was homicides. After all, it is pretty easy to think of the many homicides regularly reported in the press. However, according to the U.S. government, there were over 16,000 homicides and over 41,000 suicides in 2013 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Another question: Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter r or that have r as the third letter? Although you, like most people, may have guessed that there are more that begin with r, you would be incorrect. There are actually far more English words with r as the third letter (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). What led you to an incorrect inference? Well, it was probably easier for you to rapidly think of more words beginning with r, and you relied on this shortcut in providing your answer.

      Psychologists call this shortcut the availability heuristic; we make a judgment about the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. Information is said to be available when it comes to mind easily (Braga, Ferreira, & Sherman, 2014; Förster & Liberman, 2007; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Rather than carefully scanning our internal dictionary for the two categories of words, we base our answer on the availability of relevant information. Judgments based on the availability heuristic often have significant real-world consequences. For instance, financial decisions by investors are often made prematurely (and unwisely) when they

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