Summary for Tuesday, 5/22/17 Psychology of Consciousness
On Tuesday, we continued talking about conformity bias, which is the tendency to take cues for proper behavior from the actions of others rather than exercise our own independent judgment. This session, we focused on how conformity bias can lead to very serious and terrible consequences:
Here’s a video from a very famous experiment in the 1960s.
We also briefly discussed the Stanford prison experiment which was recently used as the subject of a movie.
We spent the rest of the session exploring explicit and implicit biases. Explicit biases refers to attitudes and believes we have about a person or a group on a conscious level (that we report), whereas implicit biases are attitudes and stereotypes about people or groups that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. We tested the strength of our implicit biases about different social groups. and learned how our biases can affect our behavior. For instance, some researchers are trying to gain human perspective on moral decisions made by intelligent machines like self-driving cars. What happens when a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians? How do our biases affect the way we judge those outcomes? We referred to MIT to judge different hypothetical scenarios.
Until next time,
Lily
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Lily Tsoi
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
Boston College