First College Paper

First off, I transferred from Texas A&M to Southwestern because I wanted an academic program that wasn't an easy diploma and would prepare me for graduate school. I only wrote one paper last year at A&M, and I realized I needed to be doing much more to be prepared for graduate work.

Anyway, I received my first paper back last Friday and was very disappointed with my grade. Almost to the point of disbelief. I thought that I had been working very hard these past several weeks to keep on top of all of my classes, give myself enough time to complete homework thoroughly, and especially write my first paper with extra care and dedication. However none of my effort was reflected in my first grade. Very upset, I of course did not blame myself and partook in self-serving cognitions. A self-serving cognition is a self-enhancement technique, or mechanism that we used to not only elevate our normal self-esteem but save our self-esteem in the face of negative information (Taylor, 1989). These cognitions, such as self-serving bias (see last blog), allow us to disprove and therefore cope with negative feedback while thinking we are objective instead of biased (Pronin et al., 2004). I thought I was graded too harshly; the teacher put the wrong grade on my paper; the teacher, a business professor, favored business majors. All of which are false, but seemed very likely at the time.

The grade on my paper also rattled my cage because it violated self-verification or the desire for others to see us as we see ourselves (Swann, 1987). I thought of myself as a good student which I thought was reflected in my paper, but the grade I receive reflected that I was not as good of a student that I thought. This made me particularly upset when my boyfriend, without reading my paper, said that I probably deserved what I got. That's two people contradicting my self-perception.

As time went on however, I came to realize that though I spent extra time on my paper, I still took my usual shortcuts and only spent extra time making it look pristine. Now I accepted that I truly earned that grade, and therefore, accepted my boyfriend's comments that I deserved it. Now his view is the same as mine and consistent with self-verification, so it doesn't bother me.

Surprisingly to me this all happened in the span of about three days. If asked if how I would feel about this same situation earlier, I would have predicted that my melancholy would have persisted at least a week and probably until I received a better grade from that class. However, due to affective forecasting I would have been wrong. Affective forecasting is the uncanny ability for people to wrongly predict how they will feel about future events. People can usually predict whether they will feel good or bad about an event, but now how intense the feeling will be or how long it will last (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003, 2005). This happens not only because people underestimate their ability to cope with bad situations, but because they do not take into account other aspects of their life into their predictions about a specific event (Gilbert et al., 1998). For example, I got over my bad grade so quickly because I have gotten good grades in my other classes.

What also helped was that I remember this is exactly why I came here. To hone my writing, critical thinking, and other academic skills. Without high expectations, I would not be pushed to find my potential.

Taylor, S. E., & Lobel, M. (1989). Social comparison activity under threat: Downward evaluation and upward contacts. Psychological Review, 96, 569-575.

Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. (2004). Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: Divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others. Psychological Review, 111, 781-799.

Swann, W. B., Jr. (1987). Identity negotiation: Where two roads meet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1038-1051.

Wilson, T. D., Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 131-134.

Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 617-638.

Band and Bias

Band, like any team activity, elicits a lot of motivational biases. Motivational biases skew our perception because they show us what we want and need to see instead of an objective view. As a member of a marching band, it is really easy to blame a bad performance on the stadium, the crowd, the drums, the drum major, the weather, judges, etc. When other bands are announced as better than our band, it's because they went later in the day and didn't have the sun in their eyes, because their director is good friends with a judge, or because they have a tract record of being good. Of course a good performance is not attributed to any of these things but are a fair result of hard work and skill. When we are announced as better than other bands, it's because we worked harder, our marching show takes more skill, or we play our instruments better. This bias to attribute successes to ourselves and failures to outside influences is called the self-serving bias and is prominent in most people outside of Eastern cultures (Mezulis et al., 2005).
As a member of band, a tight-knit group of students with the same goals, it is also easy to fall prey to the false-consensus effect. This is our tendency to think that others agree with us to a greater degree than they actually do (Krueger, 1998; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). For example, when we start saying all of these bad things about other bands, our companions back us up which results not only fulfilling their own self=serving bias, but giving us a sense that everyone agrees with us. Of course our teammates are going to back us up though. This causes us to think that everyone agrees with us. Really, we are only one band out of 20 or so, and all of the other bands think the same things about us as we do about them.
While in band I also was a believer in a just world. Belief in a just world means that bad things happen only to bad people, and whatever misfortunes befall a person are deserved (Lerner, 1980). This is a defense bias because otherwise bad things would happen to good people, and we would be at risk the same as everyone else. While at a very important competition, I heard that a band, who usually placed higher than us, came from the same area as us, and took the same roads, had a bus wreck on the way to competition. As a result of the wreck and inevitable delay, the band was unable to compete that day. To justify not only the bus wreck that didn't happen to our band but finally taking the first place trophy, we said that we were always better performers, and they only place higher than us because they are so much bigger and more impressive though we are more talented. They deserved to be disqualified because they had taken our first place trophy from us many times before. This was wrong. Even if our claims were true, a bus full of band members did not deserve to be in a wreck and the whole band be disqualified. However, this is how we justified that it would not happen to us.

Krueger, J. (1998). On the perception of social consensus. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 163-240.

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 711-747.

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279-301.

Winning Him Over

My boyfriend, after dating for several months, admitted to me that he did not like me when we first met. As I reflect on the time between when I met him and when we started dating, it all makes a bit more sense. I remember meeting him and immediately having a crush. However, I was 14 and a bit ...inept at how to snag a boy. I worked really hard at winning him over -- throwing every move I had at him (all two or so of them). I assumed he was just playing hard to get. Especially when he ended up liking me, I just figured that I was right in my assumption. In social psychology, this affect is called confirmatory hypothesis testing. Confirmatory hypothesis testing happens when we search for information with a specific goal in mind rather than collecting information without bias (Snyder & Swann, 1978). For example, if a person expects someone to have a certain trait, that person will discover that trait by acting in a way that allows the trait to be evident (Zuckerman et al., 1995). I was looking for him to like me, so I only acted in ways that allowed him to show that he did like me.
The primacy effect, however, was the reason that I had to work so hard to get him to like me. The primacy effect means that we weight information collected earlier more heavily than information collected later (Asch, 1946). When I made a bad first impression on my boyfriend, I had to make several good impressions to neutralize the initial impression. Luckily we were in band together, so we had to be around each other all the time. Otherwise, I might be the victim of biased experience sampling which is the tendency to avoid the people we have bad first impressions of never giving them a chance to reconcile themselves and leading us to believe our impression was correct (Denrell, 2005).
Of course this all happened so long ago that I might be using a confirmation bias, the bias to remember information that supports beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them (Darley & Gross, 1983), to support my ideas.

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Darley, J. M., & Gross, P. H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 20-33.

Denrell, J. (2005). Why most people disapprove of me: Experience sampling in impression formation. Psychological Review, 112, 951-978.

Snyder, M., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1978). Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 1202-1212.

Zuckerman, M., Knee, C. R., Hodgins, H. S., & Miyake, K. (1995). Hypothesis confirmation: The joint effect of positive test strategy and acquiescence response set. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 52-60.