Tag: Elliot Aronson

💎 After an event has occurred, people become overconfident about their ability to have predicted it (“I knew-it-all-along”)

…termed the hindsight bias, or the “I knew-it-all-along” effect. As you may recall from our discussion in Chapter 1, once we know the outcome of an event, we have a strong tendency to believe that we could have predicted it in advance. In the Fischhoff experiments, subjects were given a test assessing their knowledge of historical events. The subject’s task was to indicate the likelihood that four possible outcomes of the event could have actually occurred. Some of the subjects were told that one of the four possibilities had actually happened but were asked to make the estimates that they would have made had they not first been told the “right” answers. The results showed that subjects could not ignore this information; they substantially overestimated their prior knowledge of correct answers. In other words, even though subjects really didn’t know the answers to the test, once they were told an answer, they believed that they knew it all along and that their memories had not changed.

Excerpt from: The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson and Joshua Aronson

💎 On the meaning of a message changing dependent on the source (reign of terror or honest farmers?)

The very meaning of the message, Asch (1948, 1952) insisted, changes as a function of the source to which it is attributed. Thus, to cite Asch’s classic example, an assertion to the effect that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing” is much more widely endorsed when attributed to Jefferson than to Lenin, because it has a different meaning in the former case than in the latter. When the statement comes from Thomas Jefferson, it conjures up images of honest farmers and tradespeople throwing off the yoke of corrupt and indifferent rulers. When it comes from Lenin, the images (at least to Americans) are quite different – a revolutionary reign of terror in which mobs run amok and harsh new authoritarians take the place of the old oppressors.

Excerpt from: The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson and Joshua Aronson

💎 On multiple claims in ads reducing their effectiveness (diluting the impact of relevant information)

Zukier (1982) asked which student has the higher Grade Rank Average.

  • Tom spends about 31 hours studying outside of class in an average week.
  • Tom has one brother and two sisters. He visits his grandparents about once every 3 months. He once went on a blind date and shoots pool about once every 2 months.

If you are similar to the students in Zukier’s study, you would believe that Tim is smarter than Tom. Zukier found that including irrelevant and nondiagnostic information (such as information on siblings, family visits, and dating habits) that has nothing to do with the issue at hand can dilute—that is make less potent—the impact of relevant information (that both Tim and Tom spend a lot of time studying).

Excerpt from: The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson and Joshua Aronson