No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
They saw a game: A case study
Abstract
When the Dartmouth football team played Princeton in 1951, much controversy was generated over what actually took place during the game. Basically, there was disagreement between the two schools as to what had happened during the game. A questionnaire designed to get reactions to the game and to learn something of the climate of opinion was administered at each school and the same motion picture of the game was shown to a sample of undergraduate at each school, followed by another questionnnaire. Results indicate that the "game" was actually many different games and that each version of the events that transpired was just as "real" to a particular person as other versions were to other people.
... Four decades of research have found that psychological, political, cultural, and sociological factors shape how people form and revise their beliefs (e.g., Alker & Poppen, 1973;Emler, Renwick, & Malone, 1983;Fishkin, Keniston, & McKinnon, 1973;Hickling, Wellman, & Dannemiller, 2001;Killen & Stangor, 2001;Schult & Wellman, 1997;Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987;Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). A cross-cutting theme in this literature is that people hold onto their beliefs even in the face of evidence by ignoring or reinterpreting information in a way that supports what they think (e.g., Babcock & Loewenstein, 1997;Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002;Ditto et al., 2018;Gilovich, 1983;Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Jost, Baldassarri, & Druckman, 2022;Kunda, 1990;Zuckerman, 1979). ...
... Social scientists often study motivated reasoning by way of conducting case studies guided by verbal theories (i.e., theories which make only qualitative predictions; Alker & Poppen, 1973;Babcock & Loewenstein, 1997;Dawson et al., 2002;Ditto et al., 2018;Emler et al., 1983;Fishkin et al., 1973;Gilovich, 1983;Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Hickling et al., 2001;Killen & Stangor, 2001;Schult & Wellman, 1997;Shweder & Sullivan, 1993;Zuckerman, 1979), rather than performing comparisons against computational models that allow for quantification of the factors that ought to impact how people update their beliefs (e.g. Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016;Jern, Chang, & Kemp, 2014;Pilditch, Roozenbeek, Madsen, & van der Linden, 2022). ...
... Although these and similar findings are compelling (e.g., Babcock & Loewenstein, 1997;Dawson et al., 2002;Ditto et al., 2018;Gilovich, 1983;Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Kunda, 1990;Lord et al., 1979;Zuckerman, 1979), verbal theories and the often implicit definitions of motivation that accompany these theories come at the cost of introducing ambiguity; it is more difficult to determine the cognitive mechanisms producing people's seemingly irrational behavior. An example can illustrate this point. ...
Psychological, political, cultural, and sociological factors shape how people form and revise their beliefs. An established finding across these fields is that people are motivated to hold onto their beliefs even in the face of evidence by ignoring or reinterpreting information in a way that supports what they think. Although these and similar findings are compelling, the predominantly qualitative theories which guide research in this domain, and the often implicit definitions of motivation that accompany these theories, come at the cost of obscuring the cognitive mechanisms that produce motivated reasoning. Here, we introduce a new Bayesian decision-theoretic framework which describes three key factors necessary for distinguishing between cases of practically rational behavior and motivated reasoning. We demonstrate how the framework works in a series of simulations and argue that it provides guidance about what psychologists need to measure to determine where the errors in people's reasoning are occurring when they fail to revise their beliefs in light of new evidence. We then propose that this framework provides guidance for thinking about the development of interventions aimed at correcting misconceptions.
... Extensive research under the framework of cognitive dissonance has found that people biasedly process information to draw undue support for their initial positions (Janis & Mann, 1977;Lord et al., 1979), even when encountering unambiguous information that their initial judgment was faulty (Ross et al., 1975). For example, Hastorf and Cantril's (1954) classic case study of the controversial Dartmouth versus Princeton football game illustrates how fans display a confirmation bias to perceive their team as playing more fairly and committing fewer infractions. Hastorf and Cantril (1954) note "The 'same' sensory impingements emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain, also obviously gave rise to different experiences in different people" (p. ...
... For example, Hastorf and Cantril's (1954) classic case study of the controversial Dartmouth versus Princeton football game illustrates how fans display a confirmation bias to perceive their team as playing more fairly and committing fewer infractions. Hastorf and Cantril (1954) note "The 'same' sensory impingements emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain, also obviously gave rise to different experiences in different people" (p. 132). ...
... In many cases, individuals employ Type 2 processing as a way of supporting an initial feeling, perspective, or inclination (Haidt, 2001). This is commonly referred to as motivated reasoning, which is an unconscious tendency to seek out and then process information in a manner that suits an end goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). Such reasoning is underpinned by biased search and assimilation (Kahan, 2011). ...
... When resource providers have a high level of confidence in their initial intuitive judgments, they will likely tend toward motivated reasoning and unintentionally seek out and process information in a way that confirms their initial judgments (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). Their high level of confidence in the first stage of the dual decision-making process can lead them to be less objective and rational in the second stage (Haidt, 2001). ...
We examine the decision process of individuals evaluating whether to support an entrepreneurial endeavor. Such decisions are made by individuals under conditions of ambiguity and equivocality. Therefore, it is nearly impossible for resource providers to adopt a purely rational evaluative process in assessing a venture. Building on insights from sensemaking and social and cognitive psychology, we elaborate a theoretical model combining sensemaking, intuition, and deliberation to account for how entrepreneurial support decisions are made. The model reflects individual and social factors that impact this decision process and provides a basis for understanding entrepreneurial support decisions across diverse actors and contexts.
... Although students watched the same game, their evaluations of the behaviour of the players and officiating depended on which school they attended. Students' perceptions and interpretations of the action on the field were influenced by their pre-existing preferences and loyalties (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). ...
... Think back to the football fans who "saw" different games. While they made different judgments about things like which team was responsible for the rough play, whether the nature of the play was unsportsmanlike, and the number of rule violations, few observers from either team thought that the game was "clean and fair," and they did see their own team commit at least some rule violations (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). What actually happened in the game influenced their perceptions and limited the possible interpretations. ...
This is a very challenging time for police–community relations, one characterized by a mutual lack of trust between police and citizens. But trust is an important tenet of effective community policing. Trust between police and communities can result in better problem solving, fewer legal violations by citizens, less frequent use of force by the police, less resistance by citizens during arrests, greater willingness to share information, less inclination to riot, and greater willingness of community members and police to cooperate. One key obstacle to fostering trust between the community and police is confirmation bias—the tendency for people to take in information and process it in a way that confirms their current preconceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. Recognizing and addressing confirmation bias, therefore, plays a critical role in fostering more productive engagement. If we are to improve police–community relations and co-create a way forward, learning to approach debates with open minds, an awareness of the lens of our own perspectives, commitment to considering the opposite, and the goal of listening with curiosity are essential.
... In a similar vein, psychological research has documented how the same story or event could be perceived, discussed, and subsequently remembered in drastically different ways by different subcommunities (Coman et al., 2016). In a classic study (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954), Princeton and Dartmouth students who saw a football game remembered it in drastically different ways, consistent with their group allegiance. Another mechanism that could produce divergence involves the selection of different events to craft group-relevant narratives. ...
Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses—incentives, transfers, and prohibitions. We argue that stories can and should feature more centrally in government policymaking. We lay out how stories can make policy more effective, specifying how they complement established policy tools. We provide a working definition of stories’ key characteristics, contrasting them with other forms of communication. We trace the evolution of stories from their ancient origins to their role in mediating the impact of modern technologies on society. We then provide an account of the mechanisms underlying stories’ impacts on their audiences. We conclude by describing three functions of stories— learning, persuasion, and collective action.
... For example, when Eric says that Jake is kind, he may more accurately be relating that Jake is kind to him-even as to Eric or his audience the evaluation might feel like an objective attribute of the target (Jake) to which value is imputed. This hypothetical effect may partially explain, for example, partisan bias in the interpretation of events (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Ross, 1995;Vallone, Ross, & Lepper, 1985). Evaluative procedures in organisms, including humans, appear to be adaptations that regulate the cognition, physiology, and behavior of the individual (Jackendoff, 2006;Sznycer, 2022;Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, & Sznycer, 2008). ...
... The two main characters argued opposite positions in order to focus attention on controversy and thus encourage evaluative thinking (Browne & Freeman, 2000). The dialogues incorporated the main points of this philosophical debate, expressed in everyday, approachable terms and with humour (e.g. the customers interpreted a football match in opposite ways in an implicit reference to one of the readings for the lecture, Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). The debate was intended to normalise criticality and the case for arguing different viewpoints in ways of looking at and apprehending knowledge. ...
Through five empirical accounts of critical teaching practices, this note addresses how we can teach and seeks to understand the strategies and approaches employed by marketing scholars to incorporate critical and moral reflection into the marketing curriculum, and be more critical and imaginative in reshaping marketing practices in the face of current challenges. The pedagogic examples offered acknowledge the powerful potential of the marketing classroom in developing critical and creative mindsets of future leaders and practitioners. These illustrations of the passion and creativity of marketing teachers can inspire colleagues to experiment with and develop their ideas in the classroom, and offer a model for sharing experiences that we hope may encourage more colleagues to do likewise.
... Another, complementary explanation holds that different beliefs can bias the interpretation of the same event (12), such that opposing groups of partisans may, for example, both believe that a single news broadcast was biased against their side (13). Polarization may thus arise as the brain processes incoming information: Individuals who hold opposing political beliefs construe the same information into a polarized perspective at the moment of perception (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). ...
Despite receiving the same sensory input, opposing partisans often interpret political content in disparate ways. Jointly analyzing controlled and naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we uncover the neurobiological mechanisms explaining how these divergent political viewpoints arise. Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations of political words, experience greater neural synchrony during naturalistic political content, and temporally segment real-world information into the same meaningful units. In the striatum and amygdala, increasing intersubject similarity in neural representations of political concepts during a word reading task predicts enhanced synchronization of blood oxygen level-dependent time courses when viewing real-time, inflammatory political videos, revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain's affective valuations of political concepts. Together, this research shows that political ideology is shaped by semantic representations of political concepts processed in an environment free of any polarizing agenda and that these representations bias how real-world political information is construed into a polarized perspective.
... In the United States political landscape of 2020, not much is as apparent and consequential as partisan political polarization (Kaltenthaler & Miller, 2012). One longstanding explanation of entrenched political polarization is that people selectively search for, interpret, and integrate information that confirms and bolsters their political worldview and identity while also discounting information that challenges or disconfirms it -a phenomenon often called "motivated reasoning" (Dawson, Gilovich & Regen, 2002;Epley & Gilovich, 2016;Gilovich, 1991;Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Holyoak & Simon, 1999;Klayman & Ha, 1987;Kunda, 1990;Kunda, 1987;Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979). 1 Moreover, motivated reasoning has been found to influence a wide range of judgments, including stereotype activation and assessment (Kundra & Sinclair, 1999), science communication (Hart & Nisbett, 2012), critical reasoning skills (Dawson, et al., 2002), and even time predictions (Buehler, Griffin & MacDonald, 1997). Thus, it is easy to understand why motivated reasoning has been widely implicated as the best way to understand why political partisans are often unable to come to agreement on many (or most) topics (Lebo & Cassino, 2007;Leeper & Slothuus, 2014;Redlawsk, 2002;Slothuus & De Vreese, 2010;Vallone, Ross & Lepper, 1985;Westen et al., 2006). ...
People who possess greater mathematical skills (i.e., numeracy) are generally more accurate in interpreting numerical data than less numerate people. However, recent evidence has suggested that more numerate people may use their numerical skills to interpret data only if their initial interpretation conflicts with their worldview. That is, if an initial, intuitive (but incorrect) interpretation of data appears to disconfirm one’s beliefs, then numerical skills are used to further process the data and reach the correct interpretation, whereas numerical skills are not used in situations where an initial incorrect interpretation of the data appears to confirm one’s beliefs (i.e., motivated numeracy). In the present study, participants were presented with several data problems, some with correct answers confirming their political views and other disconfirming their views. The difficulty of these problems was manipulated to examine how numeracy would influence the rate of correct responses on easier vs. more difficult problems. Results indicated that participants were more likely to answer problems correctly if the correct answer confirmed rather than disconfirmed their political views, and this response pattern did not depend on problem difficulty or numerical skill. Although more numerate participants were more accurate overall, this was true both for problems in which the correct answer confirmed and disconfirmed participants’ political views.
... For simplicity, we will refer to the amalgamation of an individual's internal states (e.g., attitudes, affect, memories, experiences, identity, perceptions, etc.) as that individual's "subjective reality." Biases in individuals' subjective realities can lead to situations where two different individuals perceive the same stimuli but give divergent accounts of what was real (e.g., Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Vallone et al., 1985). ...
In the present review, we propose a theory that seeks to recontextualize various existing theories as functions of people’s perceptions of their consistency with those around them. This theory posits that people seek social consistency for both epistemic and relational needs and that social inconsistency is both negative and aversive, similar to the experience of cognitive dissonance. We further posit that the aversive nature of perceiving social inconsistency leads people to engage in various behaviors to mitigate or avoid these inconsistencies. When these behaviors fail, however, people experience chronic social inconsistency, which, much like chronic rejection, is associated with physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. Finally, we describe how mitigation and avoidance of social inconsistency underlie many seemingly unrelated theories, and we provide directions for how future research may expand on this theory.
Public Abstract
In the present review, we propose that people find inconsistency with those around them to be an unpleasant experience, as it threatens people’s core need to belong. Because the threat of reduced belongingness evokes negative feelings, people are motivated to avoid inconsistency with others and to mitigate the negative feelings that are produced when it inevitably does arise. We outline several types of behaviors that can be implemented to avoid or mitigate these inconsistencies (e.g., validation, affirmation, distancing, etc.). When these behaviors cannot be implemented successfully, people experience chronic invalidation, which is associated with reduced physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. We discuss how invalidation may disproportionately affect individuals with minoritized identities. Furthermore, we discuss how belongingness could play a key role in radicalization into extremist groups.
... Over sixty years ago, Hastorf and Cantril (1954) conducted a classic study showing that football fans who watched the same game had vastly different perceptions of what happened based on their team preferences. Not only did divergent perceptions emerge, but the divergence was so extreme that "the game seemed to reflect many different games, with each version of the events as "real" to one person as other versions were to other people" (p. ...
Decades of research has demonstrated that people can arrive at starkly different perceptions in the same social situations. Divergent perceptions are not inherently dysfunctional. However, if divergent perceptions are not managed effectively, they can have deleterious effects that can undermine functioning in the workplace. Drawing on a motivated cognition perspective, we outline why divergent perceptions may emerge as well as overview the benefits and drawbacks of divergent perceptions in organizational contexts. Next, we highlight the complexities associated with divergent perceptions in the workplace, including why, how, and when divergent perceptions may become dysfunctional. We also showcase theoretical insights from a motivated cognition perspective that can enhance our understanding of how divergent perceptions can be effectively managed. We conclude by outlining key theoretical insights and avenues for future research, including how organizations can use a motivated cognition perspective to manage divergent perceptions related to complex societal issues and issuing a call to adopt a systems approach that recognizes the importance of contextual layers for understanding and effectively managing divergent perceptions in organizations.
... When challenged with incongruent information, people often act as motivated reasoners and "rationalize the facts, figures, and arguments that they cannot effortlessly discount, depreciate, denigrate, or deny" (Lodge and Taber 2013, 59). They can do this through selective perception (Ceci and Williams 2018;Kahan 2016), altering their perceptions of a given event in ways that fit better with their initial beliefs and motivations (see also Anduiza, Gallego, and Muñoz 2013;Hastorf and Cantril 1954;Kahan et al. 2012;Kunda 1990;Walter and Redlawsk 2019). ...
Democracy often confronts citizens with a dilemma: stand firm on democracy while losing out on policy or accept undemocratic behavior and gain politically. Existing literature demonstrates that citizens generally choose the latter—and that they do so deliberately. Yet there is an alternative possibility. Citizens can avoid this uncomfortable dilemma altogether by rationalizing their understandings of democracy. When a politician advances undesired policies without violating democratic rules and norms, people find ways to perceive the behavior as undemocratic. When a politician acts undemocratically to promote desired policies, citizens muster up arguments for considering it democratic. Original survey experiments in the United States, and 22 democracies worldwide, provide strong support for this argument. It is thus not deliberate acceptance, but a fundamentally different perceptual logic that drives the widespread approval of undemocratic behavior in today’s democracies.
... These changes in self-evaluation have also been found to boost implicit self-esteem, which affects how individuals evaluate objects that are relevant to their identity [86]. For example, people have been found to inflate the monetary value of their property [87], view individuals who are similar to them as more attractive [86], and view individuals within their social group more positively [34,88,89]. ...
Self-enhancement (SE) is often overlooked as a fundamental cognitive ability mediated via the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC). Here, we present research that establishes the relationship between the PFC, SE, and the potential evolved beneficial mechanisms. Specifically, we believe there is now enough evidence to speculate that SE exists to provide significant benefits and should be considered a normal aspect of the self. Whatever the metabolic or social cost, the upside of SE is great enough that it is a core and fundamental psychological construct. Furthermore, though entirely theoretical, we suggest that a critical reason the PFC has evolved so significantly in Homo sapiens is to, in part, sustain SE. We, therefore, elaborate on its proximate and ultimate mechanisms.
... Our approach builds on prior research that has demonstrated benefits [23][24][25][26][27] and risks 28,29 of information sharing and that has identified cognitive biases 30 that can be reliably produced in experimental settings. In particular, we examined how social networks can amplify motivated perception, a bias in judgment and decision-making in which people perceive events in a way that supports their desires [31][32][33][34][35] . ...
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation strategies. Here we show under controlled laboratory conditions that information transmission through social networks amplifies motivational biases on a simple perceptual decision-making task. Participants in a large behavioral experiment showed increased rates of biased decision-making when part of a social network relative to asocial participants, across 40 independently evolving populations. Drawing on techniques from machine learning and Bayesian statistics, we identify a simple adjustment to content-selection algorithms that is predicted to mitigate bias amplification. This algorithm generates a sample of perspectives from within an individual's network that is more representative of the population as a whole. In a second large experiment, this strategy reduced bias amplification while maintaining the benefits of information sharing.
... Our membership within social groups not only influences how we think and behave but also affects how we perceive other people and events (see Xiao et al., 2016). For instance, our affiliations with different cultural groups, sports teams, or political parties can change how we perceive visual illusions (Henrich et al., 2010), football matches (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954), or inauguration crowd sizes (Schaffner & Luks, 2018). One well-known example of intergroup perceptual bias is the other-race effect (ORE; also called the own-race bias or cross-race effect), in which humans, from a variety of cultures, show improved recognition memory for faces from their own ethnic group, when compared with faces from other ethnic groups (see Meissner & Brigham, 2001;Zhou et al., 2021). ...
Humans show improved recognition for faces from their own social group relative to faces from another social group. Yet before faces can be recognised, they must first be detected in the visual field. Here, we tested whether humans also show an ingroup bias at the earliest stage of face processing – the point at which the presence of a face is first detected. To this end, we measured viewers’ ability to detect ingroup (Black, White) and outgroup faces (Asian, Black, White) in everyday scenes. Ingroup faces were detected with greater speed and accuracy relative to outgroup faces (Experiment 1). Removing face hue impaired detection generally, but the ingroup detection advantage was undiminished (Experiment 2). This same pattern was replicated by a detection algorithm using face templates derived from human data (Experiment 3). These findings demonstrate that the established ingroup bias in face processing can extend to the early process of detection. This effect is ‘colour blind’, in the sense that group membership effects are independent of general effects of image hue. Moreover, it can be captured by tuning visual templates to reflect the statistics of observers’ social experience. We conclude that group bias in face detection is both a visual and a social phenomenon.
... These changes in self-evaluation have also been found to boost implicit selfesteem, which affects how individuals evaluate objects that are relevant to their identity 86 . For example, people have been found to inflate the monetary value of their property 87 , view individuals who were similar to them as more attractive 86 , and view individuals within their social group more positively 34,88,89 . ...
Self-enhancement (SE) is often overlooked as a fundamental cognitive ability mediated via the Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC). Here we present research that establishes the relationship between the PFC, SE, and the potential evolved beneficial mechanisms. Specifically, we believe there is now enough evidence to speculate that SE exists to provide significant benefits and should be considered a normal aspect of the self. Whatever the metabolic or social cost, the upside of SE is great enough that it is a core and fundamental psychological construct. Furthermore, though entirely theoretical, we suggest that a critical reason the PFC has evolved so significantly in Homo sapien is to, in part, sustain SE. We therefore elaborate as to its proximate and ultimate mechanisms.
... Specific mechanisms remain contested, including the extent to which beliefs affect basic perception (Vetter and Newen, 2014). Nevertheless, the overall impact of beliefs on attributions and subjective experience is evident across many experimental paradigms (Hastorf and Cantril, 1954;Jones and Russell, 1980;Gilovich, 1991;Gregory, 1997;Irwin, 2009;. As such, beliefs, including delusional forms, provide an incredibly powerful lens that shapes our experience, affecting what we attend to, perceive, remember, and consider plausible as an explanation. ...
... People are more likely to promote and defend those groups from which they derive the greatest sense of personal identity. 18 The importance of group identity to public debate is reflected in frequent discussions about identity politics, although that term is not used in a consistent way. Understanding the group memberships that people consider important to their identities is essential to understanding the current political landscape. ...
... While we may see the most extreme manifestations of this divide in situations of intergroup conflict and violence, the tendency to draw lines between varying classes of others is not limited to these contexts. Rather, social psychologists have long observed that, across many situations, humans distinguish between people we perceive as belonging to our in-group versus those we perceive as belonging to an out-group (e.g., Allport, 1954;Brewer, 1999;Brown, 2011;Hastorf & Cantril, 1954;Sherif et al., 1961). These perceptions in turn influence the degree to 102 which we feel empathy, compassion, and the motivation to help (e.g., . ...
Humans have a remarkable capacity to feel and enact care for others. But this capacity is not universally expressed: decades of research have elucidated the contextual, social, cognitive-affective, and relational factors that limit the tendency to experience empathy and engage in prosocial action. Buddhist contemplative traditions have long been concerned with the alleviation of suffering and expanding the boundaries of those who we hold in our circle of care. Recent years have seen a growth of interest in contemplative approaches to cultivating compassionate responses to suffering. This dissertation explores contemplative approaches to training compassion, focusing on the question of whether we can, with volitional training, expand the boundaries of our circle of care.
Chapter 1 draws on contemporary research from cognitive, affective, and social psychology to provide an integrative review of empirical studies of compassion training. I consider what constitutes compassion training and offer a summary of current meditation-based approaches. I then provide an overview of the empirical evidence for a relationship between compassion training and changes in socioemotional processes, prosocial behavior, and physiological stress responses to the perception of others’ suffering. I further address challenges in interpreting data from these studies, considering training-related mechanisms of change and how compassion-relevant processes might develop over time. I conclude by outlining key theoretical challenges for future research.
Chapters 2 and 3 empirically investigate two key issues in contemplative approaches to training compassion: the generalization of training effects, and the volitional expansion of the circle of care. Leveraging EEG data collected as part of the Shamatha Project—a multimethod study of the psychobiological effects of intensive meditation retreat training—these chapters work to contribute to the understanding of the neurocognitive consequences of intensive contemplative training.
Establishing whether effects instantiated through meditation training generalize to other, non-meditative states is an essential link in understanding how contemplative training may influence behavior—including responses to suffering—outside of the meditative context. In Chapter 2, I examine retreat-related changes in the resting brain. I show that rest is not a static baseline but rather indexes behaviorally meaningful effects of retreat training. Notably, the training-related changes in the resting brain observed in Chapter 2 closely mirror patterns of change observed in these same participants when they actively practiced mindfulness of breathing meditation. This offers support for the idea that changes instantiated during meditation practice may generalize to other, non-meditative contexts, providing key evidence for the generalization of meditation-related change.
In Chapter 3, I explore whether brain activity recorded during compassion meditation provides evidence that contemplative training can extend the circle of care. Using microstate analysis, I first show that the general patterns of retreat-related change observed during compassion meditation are similar to those of the resting brain. This finding establishes global shifts in brain dynamics as a core consequence of intensive meditation training. I next use sequence analysis to compare temporal patterns of brain activity during compassion meditation when a close other, a difficult other, and all others are taken as the object of compassion. I hypothesize that the mental representations of these various others—reflected in the ongoing activity of the brain—should become more similar with training. I find consistent differences in microstate sequences as a function of the target of compassion. I do not, however, find any evidence that these sequences become more similar with training. Thus Chapter 3 establishes microstate sequence analysis as a viable method for distinguishing target-based differences in brain activity during compassion meditation, but does not offer evidence for the extension of the circle of care.
As a whole, this dissertation grapples with how we can understand and measure the consequences of contemplative practice. The empirical studies offer two small contributions to the greater project of understanding if and how we can collectively expand our circles of care.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g60k1bg
... For many people, group membership influences a wide range of cognitive processes, such as the interpretation of social events (Hastorf and Cantril, 1954), face memory (Bernstein et al., 2007;Cikara et al., 2011), visual attention (Brosch and Van Bavel, 2012), and selective attention (Park et al., 2016). For example, Park et al. (2016) found that group membership affects selective attention. ...
The present study tested whether cardiac vagal activity—which is known to play a vital role in social cognition and engagement—predicted the impact of faces of other ethnicity on selective attention under load. Based on the neurovisceral integration theory, we hypothesized that participants with higher resting heart rate variability (HRV) would exhibit better task performance of a target detection task in trials with face distractors of other ethnicity than participants with lower resting HRV, when cognitive resources were scarce under high load. Caucasian participants were instructed to detect a target letter among letter strings superimposed on Black or White male distractor faces under high and low perceptual load. Consistent with the prediction, under high load, HRV was positively correlated with accuracy in trials with Black distractor faces, but not in trials with White distractor faces. The current research demonstrated that individual differences in cardiac vagal tone predicted successful inhibition of an ethnicity-related distractor with limited cognitive resources, which allowed for completing goal-directed behavior more successfully.
... These phenomena are well studied at the behavioral level and associated with a plethora of theories, such as motivated reasoning, attribution, and others (Donsbach, 2008;Heider & Simmel, 1944;Kunda, 1990). For instance, in their classic study of selective perception entitled "They saw a game," Hastorf and Cantril (1954) examined how spectators of a contested football match interpreted identical events in strikingly different ways based on team affiliation. A clear next step would be to use ISC-based approaches to pinpoint neural correlates of such group differences in interpretation of the same physical input. ...
When a mediated message is processed by different recipients, it prompts similar responses in separate brains. These hidden, but collectively shared brain responses can be exposed by computing cross-recipient correlations of brain activity time series, called inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis. Here we provide an overview of this approach, review its findings to date, and discuss why it is highly relevant for communication science.
... Instead, judgments about the validity, reliability, relevance and sometimes even the meaning of proffered evidence are biased by the apparent consistency of that evidence with the perceiver's theories and expectations' (Lord et al. 1979(Lord et al. , 2099. This polarizing effect has been widely replicated across a range of topics (Chen et al. 1992;Hastorf and Cantril 1954;Houston and Fazio 1989;Kunda 1987;Liberman and Chaiken 1992;Munro and Ditto 1997). ...
When public opinion gets polarized, the population’s beliefs can experience two different changes: they can become more extreme in their contents or they can be held with greater confidence. These two possibilities point to two different understandings of the rupture that characterizes political polarization: extremism and radicalism. In this article, I show that from the close examination of the best available evidence regarding how we get polarized, it follows that the pernicious type of political polarization has more to do with radicalism than with extremism. Reinforcing the confidence in the core beliefs of the group we identify with makes our beliefs immune to the reasons coming from the other political side. Finally, I also suggest that the rise of political polarization is not necessarily the result of an irrational process.
... In a political context, partisans are apt to engage in directionally motivated reasoning [9,10], leading them to seek out information that reinforces preferences (i.e., confirmation bias), and to counter-argue information that contradicts preferences (i.e., disconfirmation bias; [11]). Perceptions of physical states and features of the environment can be motivated as well [12][13][14]-a perceptual bias that can occur as a result of political partisanship [15][16][17][18][19]. Along these lines, Kahan [20] proposed a politically motivated reasoning paradigm, which highlights how one's political affiliation can lead people to perceive, interpret, and come to very different conclusions about the same event. One recent study strikingly demonstrated that committed Trump supporters, when shown Obama and Trump's inauguration crowd, judged Trump's obviously smaller inauguration crowd as the larger of the two [21]. ...
It is well-recognized that increasingly polarized American partisans subscribe to sharply diverging worldviews. Can partisanship influence Americans to view the world around them differently from one another? In the current research, we explored partisans’ recollections of objective events that occurred during identical footage of a real protest. All participants viewed the same 87-second compilation of footage from a Women’s March protest. Trump supporters (vs. others) recalled seeing a greater number of negative protest tactics and events (e.g., breaking windows, burning things), even though many of these events did not occur. False perceptions among Trump supporters, in turn, predicted beliefs that the protesters’ tactics were extreme, ultimately accounting for greater opposition to the movement and its cause. Our findings point to the possibility of a feedback loop wherein partisanship underlies different perceptions of the exact same politically relevant event, which in turn may allow observers to cling more tightly to their original partisan stance.
Deviant group members normally represent a threat to the group’s collective identity. Paradoxically, however, because group processes themselves evoke dilution of the individual’s identity, deviants may simultaneously play an important role in the group’s identity consolidation. The group’s relatedness with deviants is based on complex group and intergroup dynamics that influence not only the group’s attitude toward the deviant but also what the deviant represents for the group. This article touches on what the deviant’s role may be in a group’s projective processes and how the group may use the deviant in an attempt to maintain its collective identity. At times, what may benefit the group may not be seen as such, whereas what may harm the group may be regarded as preferable. Some of the unconscious processes that may underpin such dynamics are also addressed along with the introduction of the concepts of advancing and depreciating deviants. The article also evaluates how the deviant’s role for the group may change depending on the context.
We explored how immigrants’ dual (ethno-national) identity affects the hostile media effect in the context of broadcast news of international sporting events. A mixed-methods approach to collecting data was used comprising an online experiment and in-person focus group interviews with Korean Chinese immigrants residing in South Korea. The results demonstrate that hostile media perception in favor of the out-group was greater for out-group broadcast news than for in-group broadcast news. The hostile media perception was linked to support for in-group players only for immigrants with a strong dual identity. The results of the focus group interviews suggest that the dual-identity participants reinforce their national identity and increase their support for the in-group players to deal with the threat to their self-esteem when collective self-esteem connected to their national identity is threatened by what they considered broadcast news biased against Chinese players.
The present research investigated whether and (if so) how one’s perception of gender discrimination would vary as a function of age and gender in Korea. Since gender-related conflicts have escalated in Korea especially among younger adults, we predicted that (1) there would be gender differences in one’s perception of gender discrimination in Korea and (2) such differences would be particularly large among younger adults. Consistent with the predictions, we found that Korean men underestimated discrimination against women and overestimated discrimination against men, relative to Korean women. Also, such tendency was more pronounced among younger men than among older men without significant differences in sexism between them. Moreover, young men claimed that men were at least as discriminated against as women in Korea unlike other groups who believed that discrimination against women was larger than discrimination against men. Our data also suggest that such perception of gender discrimination among younger Korean men is possibly due to their beliefs that social atmosphere in Korea is disadvantageous to their gender. We further showed that gender differences in perception of gender discrimination were associated with corresponding differences in emotional reactions (i.e., anger) to gender discrimination.
This article evaluates an emerging element in popular debate and inquiry: DYOR. (Haven’t heard of the acronym? Then Do Your Own Research.) The slogan is flexible and versatile. It is used frequently on social media platforms about topics from medical science to financial investing to conspiracy theories. Using conceptual and empirical resources drawn from philosophy and psychology, we examine key questions about the slogan’s operation in human cognition and epistemic culture.
Conspiracy theories arise during important societal and political events, with negative consequences. Yet, conspiracy theories remain to be investigated in the context of sporting tournaments, in spite of the importance of such events in contemporary societies. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, conspiracy theories alleging that the newly introduced video Assistant Referee (VAR) was used with malevolent motives gained popularity online. In this paper, we used a Twitter content analysis to explore VAR conspiracy theories during the World Cup (N = 2,768 tweets). Conspiracy tweets peaked after eliminations of some teams and were strongly associated with labels referring to self-categorization at the group-level, supporting the notion that conspiracy beliefs are triggered by contexts threatening one’s social identity. Conspiracy tweets were also correlated with tweets expressing skepticism or defiance against the VAR, suggesting that conspiracy beliefs might be related to sport fans’ other identity management strategies. Finally, we drew an intergroup typology of VAR conspiracy beliefs’ recurrent figures, highlighting that higher ordered categorization helped conspiracy narratives and content to adapt throughout the tournament. We discuss the identity management strategy status of sport fans’ conspiracy beliefs.
Gender representation inequality occurs across various STEM sub-disciplines. For example, the sub-disciplines of computer science and engineering are male-dominant, while psychology and biological sciences are female-dominant. One possible cause of this gender inequality is the STEM professional stereotype; created, in large part, by media portrayals of STEM scientists. Across four studies I analyze the gender representation in portrayals of STEM skills in Marvel comics and their relation to real-world STEM educational outcomes, namely, bachelor’s degrees attained in STEM. Study #1 shows that the portrayals of many STEM skills are gender biased for Marvel characters debuting before 1991. Study #2 shows that this gender bias in Marvel comics correlated with real-world STEM educational outcomes. Study #3 shows that Marvel characters debuting after 2000 show no gender biases in the portrayals of STEM skills. Finally, Study #4 makes predictions of how real-world educational outcomes are expected to change due to the increased gender equality in the portrayal of STEM skills in popular media.
Es un hecho que el entorno de seguridad actual se caracteriza por desafíos que son cognitivamente difíciles de comprender, tales como: las amenazas terroristas, la proliferación de armas de destrucción masiva y la guerra no estatal, hacen que se deba de actuar sobre secuencias diferentes a los desafíos clásicos, donde los eventos imprevistos e impredecibles no responden a patrones previsibles. Este hecho es especialmente cierto cuando se interactúa en el escenario internacional y aún más, en el caso de ocuparnos de la seguridad nacional o en las grandes crisis de seguridad de los últimos veinte años, ya sea el 11 de Septiembre, la Primavera Árabe, el fiasco de las armas de destrucción masiva de Irak, el Estado Islámico, la actuación de los lobos solitarios, la ruptura de Siria y su éxodo, la anexión de Crimea, o el enfrentamiento nuclear entre India y Pakistán, donde todos estos eventos aparecen como una sorpresa para los agentes pertinentes. Esto parece sugerir que las emergencias militares actuales desafían tanto el poder de predicción como la capacidad de intervención. El propósito de este trabajo es analizar cómo la estructura de nuestra maquinaria mental influye y constriñe los análisis de inteligencia, ocupándonos del funcionamiento de la mente humana, y en concreto del tipo de razonamiento que se utiliza, qué limitaciones encuentra y en qué herramientas se puede confiar, centrándonos en cómo estas características cognitivas afectan a los analistas de inteligencia dadas las limitaciones ambientales peculiares, discutiéndose en particular, la heurística y los prejuicios que constituyen los efectos secundarios adversos de los juicios bajo la incertidumbre, y los peligros de la plausibilidad intuitiva de los juicios cuando no se basan en hechos; además del impacto que el tiempo y la presión tienen en la exactitud de los resultados.
This research examined the hypothesis that people judge as true those claims aligned with the normative content of their salient social identities. In Experiment 1a, participants’ social identities were manipulated by assigning them to ‘inductive‐thinker’ and ‘intuitive‐thinker’ groups. Participants subsequently made truth judgements about aphorisms randomly associated with ‘science’ and ‘popular wisdom’. Those with salient inductive‐thinker social identities judged science‐based claims as more truthful than popular wisdom‐based claims to a greater extent than those with salient intuitive‐thinker social identities. Experiment 1b was a preregistered replication, with additional conditions eliminating an alternative semantic‐priming explanation. In Experiment 2, American Conservatives and Liberals judged as more true claims associated with the ideological content of their social identities. This difference was attenuated through a manipulation that framed participants as more moderate than they had originally indicated. Overall, these experiments suggest an identity‐truth malleability, such that making salient specific social identities can lead to related perceptions of truth normatively aligned with those identities.
Social media can both decrease and increase polarization between social groups. Communicative behaviors associated with intergroup conflict are ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. In the current paper, we propose that bias in social-media use can be assessed by focusing on live Twitter commentaries posted by sports clubs. Specifically, we focus on four bias types: biases in (1) communication volume, (2) balance, (3) fairness, and (4) recipient engagement. We analyzed Twitter commentaries placed by soccer clubs in the Dutch Eredivisie during the 2019/20 season (232 games, Ntweets = 13,789). Results on volume showed that clubs placed more tweets during wins (vs. draws or losses). For balance, we found that teams devoted a larger percentage of their feed to positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events. For fairness, a larger proportion of positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events were reported in the Twitter commentaries. Furthermore, fans engaged more with tweets about positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events. By contrast, we did not find differences for negative ingroup (vs. outgroup) events for balance, fairness, or engagement. Taken together, our results show that sport clubs’ live Twitter commentaries reflect ingroup favoritism, but not outgroup derogation.
Despite unprecedented access to information, partisans increasingly disagree about basic facts that are backed by data, posing a serious threat to a democracy that relies on finding common ground based on objective truths. We examine the underpinnings of this phenomenon using drift diffusion modeling (DDM). Partisans (N = 148) completed a sequential sampling task where they evaluated the honesty of Democrat or Republican politicians during a debate based on fact-check scores. We found that partisans required less and weaker evidence to correctly categorize the ingroup as more honest, and were more accurate on trials when the ingroup candidate was more honest, compared to the outgroup. DDM revealed that such tendencies arise from both a prior preference for categorizing the ingroup as more honest (i.e., biased starting point) and more precise accumulation of information favoring the ingroup candidate compared to the outgroup (i.e., biased drift rate). Moreover, individual differences in cognitive reasoning moderated task performance for the most devoted partisans and maintained divergent associations with the DDM parameters. This suggests that partisans may reach biased conclusions via different pathways depending on their depth of cognitive reasoning. These findings provide key insights into the mechanisms driving partisan divides in polarized environments, and can inform interventions that reduce impasse and conflict.
This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was not a variable for study. Other pillars faced first-hand a type of sexism that was hardly subtle, when women were not permitted into the faculty dining room. Still others have lived through a tremendous diversification of social psychology, not only in the United States but in Europe and Asia, that characterizes the field today. Together these stories, always witty and sometimes emotional, form a mosaic of the field as a whole – its legends, their theories and research, their relationships with one another, and their sense of where social psychology is headed.
Past studies on how political value (i.e., ideology) and identity (i.e., party identity) predict support for candidates often fail to consider both the perspectives of citizens and candidates, introducing omitted variable problems. To address them, this paper introduces the multiple matching perspective, which considers how citizens’ ideology and political identity are matched (i.e., moderated) by a candidate’s ideology and party affiliation. Four studies using this approach reveal: 1. The effect of ideology match is large, robust, and consistent. 2. candidates’ ideology plays more role than candidates’ party identity except during the final stage of a presidential race. 3. Citizens’ party identity can guide them to support a candidate based on the candidate’s ideology (Republicans will support conservatives), but it is less so for the reverse of it (conservatives do not always support Republicans). Therefore, this approach helps theory-building in political psychology by uncovering novel effects of ideology and partisanship.
It is commonly assumed that algorithmic curation of search results creates filter bubbles, where users’ beliefs are continually reinforced and opposing views are suppressed. However, empirical evidence has failed to support this hypothesis. Instead, it has been suggested that filter bubbles may result from individuals engaging selectively with information in search engine results pages. However, this “self-imposed filter bubble hypothesis” has remained empirically untested. In this study, we find support for the hypothesis using eye-tracking technology and link selection data. We presented partisan participants (n = 48) with sets of simulated Google Search results, controlling for the ideological leaning of each link. Participants spent more time viewing own-side links than other links (p = .037). In our sample, participants who identified as right-wing exhibited a greater such bias than those that identified as left wing (p < .001). In addition, we found that both liberals and conservatives tended to select own-side links (p < .001). Finally, there was a significant effect of trust, such that links associated with less trusted sources were attended less and selected less often by liberals and conservatives alike (p < .001). Our study challenges the efficacy of policies that aim at combatting filter bubbles by presenting users with an ideologically diverse set of search results.
Wieso kann man nach einem Fußballspiel hitzige Diskussionen zwischen den Fans der beiden Mannschaften beobachten, die so klingen, als hätten diese nicht ein und dasselbe Fußballspiel, sondern zwei völlig unterschiedliche Partien gesehen? Wie entscheidet ein Handballspieler während eines Spiels, wohin er den Ball wirft? Unterscheiden sich erfolgreiche und weniger erfolgreiche Sportlerinnen und Sportler darin, auf welche Ursache sie einen sportlichen Erfolg zurückführen? Dieses Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie Menschen sich selbst und ihre soziale Umwelt „konstruieren“. Es stehen also kognitive Prozesse im Vordergrund, die sich entweder mit sozialen Inhalten beschäftigen oder die durch die Präsenz anderer Individuen beeinflusst werden. Aus der Vielzahl der sozialen Kognitionen werden beispielhaft Urteils- und Entscheidungsprozesse sowie Attributionsprozesse herausgegriffen. In Bezug auf Urteils- und Entscheidungsprozesse werden Urteilsheuristiken (z. B. Simulationsheuristik, Take-the-First-Heuristik) und ihre Bedeutung für sportliches Handeln dargestellt. Für die Attributionsprozesse erfolgt ein kurzer Überblick über theoretische Ansätze, die Effekte von Attributionen sowie Verzerrungen im Attributionsprozess.
Dieses Buch beschäftigt sich mit Sportzuschauern aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln (Fans, Ökonomie, Geschichte, Physik, Literatur, Medizin usw.). Der Beitrag ist das erste Kapitel und gibt einen Überblick über das Buch.
The impact of data-driven business conduct on consumer welfare is multidimensional. From an economic point of view, data collected by firms will be used to improve the quality of the services and thus benefit consumers. Studies have also shown that consumers are aware of the benefits of personalized products that are provided through collecting consumers’ personal data. Economic studies of price discrimination have also shown that the effects on consumers are uncertain: for price discrimination based on consumer preferences, the effects increase the intensity of competition and thus benefit total consumer welfare, although the distribution of wealth among different consumer groups may not be fair. For price discrimination based on searching habits, the overall effects on consumer welfare are negative, but with exceptions. The strongest arguments that data-driven conduct may also violate consumer privacy have raised counterarguments, and the enforcement of competition law may not be the best instrument to protect consumer privacy. This chapter discusses the impact on consumer welfare, including the loss of consumer welfare, the measurement of the impact of consumer welfare in the context of a data economy, a comparative case study and trade-off between consumer welfare and other objectives in data monopoly cases.
This chapter describes five working theories that can be useful to practicing community psychologists. They are the brain children of David McMillan in collaboration with others including J. R. Newbrough and Ray Lorion. The five theories are: 1. A four major-element, twenty-six sub-element theory of Psychological Sense of Community; 2. A four-part typology of communities building on Tönnies 1800’s two types of community, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – McMillan adds two additional types, Gefolgschaft and Notschaft; 3. Community moods: McMillan proposes that emotions are contagious. He offers nine basic emotions common to humankind and proposes that these emotions can function like a virus and can be treated similarly with emotion antidotes; 4. Communities have developmental stages: McMillan builds on Erikson’s (1968) eight stages of human development and adds two other stages, conception and termination; 5. The last practical theory McMillan offers is Newbrough’s (1995) Third Position Theory. This theory creates a negotiation, mediating problem-solving strategy that can undo dichotomous gridlock.
This comprehensive handbook provides community psychology approaches to addressing the key issues that impact individuals and their communities worldwide. Featuring international, interdisciplinary perspectives from leading experts, the handbook tackles critical contemporary challenges. These include climate change, immigration, educational access, healthcare, social media, wellness, community empowerment, discrimination, mental health, and many more. The chapters offer case study examples to present practical applications and to review relevant implications within diverse contexts. Throughout, the handbook considers how community psychology plays out around the world: What approaches are being used in different countries? How does political context influence the development and extension of community psychology? And what can nations learn from each other as they examine successful community psychology-based interventions? This is essential reading for researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers involved with community well-being.
We report the results from a four‐wave longitudinal study (N = 951–1349) investigating perceptions of the 2020 US Presidential Election as legitimate. Specifically, the role of homophily (“love of same”) was examined in creating politically homogenous social and informational networks that facilitate and amplify polarized perceptions of the election's legitimacy and belief in voter fraud across time. Consistent with our hypotheses, Trump voters’ susceptibility to misinformation about voter fraud and refusals to accept the election results as legitimate drastically increased to the extent to which they were entrenched in politically homophilic networks. Biden voters modestly strengthened their views of the election results as legitimate when entrenched in politically homophilic networks. Moreover, the influence of politically homophilic networks in facilitating this polarization grew stronger with the passage of time. Longitudinal modeling revealed that, among Trump voters, politically homophilic networks decreased perceptions of election legitimacy through increased belief in voter fraud.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.