Page 176 - The Social Animal

158 The Social Animal

you most talkative?”Those expecting to meet an introvert were likely
to ask questions like “In what situations do you wish you could be
more outgoing?” and “What things do you dislike about loud par-
ties?” Notice that, if the question is sincerely answered, the subjects’
hypothesis about the person is likely to be confirmed. That is, a per-
son who is neither extroverted nor introverted will look extroverted
when he or she answers the first set of questions and introverted
when he or she answers the second set of questions.
Not only do we tend to confirm our hypotheses, but we are often
quite confident that they are true. This can be illustrated by what
Baruch Fischhoff termed the hindsight bias, or the “I-knew-it-all-
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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 Fis-
chhoff experiments, subjects were given a test assessing their knowl-
edge of historical events. The subject’s task was to indicate the
likelihood that four possible outcomes of the event could have actu-
ally occurred. Some of the subjects were told that one of the four pos-
sibilities 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 in-
formation; 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 be-
lieved that they knew it all along and that their memories had not
changed.
The confirmation and hindsight biases provide support for the
proposition that human cognition tends to be conservative. That is, we
try to preserve that which is already established—to maintain our
preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes. Through-
out this book we have seen numerous examples of cognitive conser-
vatism: The first information received is almost always the most
influential; easily accessible categories are overused in forming judg-
ments; representative, availability, and attitude heuristics are some-
times misused; stereotypes distort information processing and
confirm the apparent usefulness of the stereotype; and memory is re-
constructed to fit with current perspectives.
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In a provocative article, Anthony Greenwald has argued that
cognitive conservatism has at least one benefit: It allows us to per-
ceive the social world as a coherent and stable place. For example,