PSYC2020 in-class experiments
Generally helpful materials:
- Dan Ariely flashcards about irrationality biases Collection1 / Collection2
Week #1: Replication Crisis
Resources:
- Course reading: Book chapter: Replication Crisis in Psychology
Week #2: Morality
- Hindsight bias
- Takeaways:
- We think we knew the answer all along even when we didn't/don't.
- Why do people cheat?
- Video: Comfortable cheating
- How we study cheating
- Video: The Matrix Experiment
- Video: The Corruption Experiment
- Takeaways:
- You can study unethical behavior in the lab
- There are some fascinating findings in behavioral ethics social psychology studies.
- Who cheats more?
-
- Takeaways:
- We all cheat
- We all cheat about the same
-
- Cheating behaviors (you versus average HKU student)
- Video: The Fudge Factor
- Takeaways:
- We lie and yet still think of ourselves as good honest people
- Justifying own unethical behavior
- Experiment: Employee versus manager manipulation
- Unethical judgments depend on context/perspective and individual differences
- You need to understand the social context
- Morality in every day life
- Takeaways:
- Understanding morality is very important for everyday life, in everything we do
- Fundamental attribution error bias
- Morality of self-driving car
- Takeaways:
- Understanding morality is very important for everyday life, in everything we do
- We make moral decisions all the time, even when not realizing it
- A good example, is when faced with having to articulate decision for a machine, very uncomfortable and confusing
- Website: Moral machines project
Resources:
- Dan Ariely's TED talk: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)
Week #3: Judgment and Decision Making
- Cognitive illusions
- Akiyoshi Kitaoka
- Judgment and decision making cognitive biases
- Free money experiment
- Bias: Escalation of commitment
- Cooperation versus self-interest
- Heuristics: Availability Heuristic
- Heuristics: Representative Heuristic Bias
- Bias: The decoy effect
- Bias: Ease of Recall Bias
- Bias: Retrievability Bias
- Bias: Framing effects (Prospect Theory)
- Bias: Anchoring effect
- Bias: Action effect
- Theory: Norm Theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986)
Resources:
- Course reading: Book chapter: Judgment and Decision Making
Week #4: Social cognition and attitudes
- Stereotypes and consistency
- Riddles experiment
- Riddle Me This (Skorinko, 2018, PLT)
- The case of stumpers (Bar-Hillel etal, 2018, JDM)
- Takeaways:
- We can study this in the lab using simple (fun) experiments.
- We all have these biases.
- Implicit association test
- Website: Project implicit
- Takeaways:
- Difference between explicit and implicit jugdments.
- There are tools to study either.
- They don't always correlate, both not always strongly correlate to behavior.
- Country face detection
- Website: Alllooksame
- Website: Face research
- Takeaways:
- Stereotypes don't always work and can lead to wrong judgments.
- People generally randomly guess country of origin.
- On average, the variations in appearance are very subtle, and all judged as attractive.
- Lie detection
- Takeaways:
- There are some behaviors we associate with lying
- We are generally very bad at detecting lies
- If we are to make evaluations, we need to know the baseline (person) well and rely on objective quantifiable measures.
- Bias: Truth bias, we are inclined to believing others and trusting.
- Intuitions about life/physics/math
- Takeaways:
- Are often biased and wrong. Again, we need objective reliable trustworthy sources rather than our intuitions.
Resources:
- Course reading: Book chapter: Social cognition and attitudes
Week #5: Persuasion and manipulation
- Influence tactics
- The 6 influence tactics by Robert Cialdini
- Effects
- Contrast Effect
- Scarcity Principle - importance of loss aversion and competition
- Consensus Principle - importance of similarity
- Consistency Principle - importance of active and public commitment
- Reciprocity Principle - importance of tailored, significant, and unexpected
- Manipulation techniques
- Foot-in-the-door [FITD] (Freedman & Fraser, 1966)
- Door-in-the-face [DITF] (Cialdini)
- Low-balling [LB] (Cialdini)
- That’s not all [TNL](Burger, 1986, 1999)
- Creating similarity [CS]
- Nudging
- Defaults (Opt in opt out in organ donations)
- Focusing attention (urinals)
- Perception and context (plate size)
- Social information (tax compliance)
Resources:
- Course reading: Book chapter: Persuasion
Week #6: Cooperation
- Economic games
- The homo-economicos hypothesis - actors are fully rational
- Game theory games to study economics and show deviation from the neo-classic economics hypothesis
- Dictator game
- Dictator (giving) game (the classic)
- Social change 1: Dictator (taking) game
- Social change 2: Dictator (giving) game (the classic), but public
- Social change 2: Dictator (taking) game, but public
- Ultimatum game
- Social change: Ultimatum game, but public
- Trust game
- Prisoner's dilemma
- Social change 1: Prisoner's dilemma, but with a judge
- Social change 2: Multiple rounds (learning, adjusting)
- Demos
-
- Example of one analysis, there are many others: An Awesomely Evil Test Question And Its Mathematical Answer – Game Theory Tuesdays
-
Resources:
- Course reading: Book chapter: Cooperation
Class #7: Helping / Prosocial behavior
- Misalignment between what we expect from society/others and ourselves
- Misalignment between causes of deaths (people affected) and funding to address.
- Differences in helping between countries - not what you thought
- Ruining a 1000US$ suit to help a drowning child versus donating 1000US$ to save a girl from South America
- The importance of relatability, statistics versus faces/names/people
- Risking your life to help others
- The bystander effect (Darley & Latané, 1968)
- Hurdles to helping those in crisis
- Biases
- Identifiability
- Compassion fade & psychic numbing (Slovic, 2007; Västfjäll, Slovic, Mayorga, & Peters, 2014);
- Scope neglect (Desvousges, Johnson, Dunford, Boyle, Hudson, Wilson, 1992)
- Proportion over number (Slovic et al., 2002)
- Futility thinking (Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, & Friedrich, 1997)
- Videos: