Mental contamination and mental correction: Unwanted influences on judgments and evaluations.

“Of those who received supraliminal thirst-related primes, 66% chose more Super-Quencher coupons.5 This lack of di! erence between the subliminal and supraliminal primes is consistent with arguments made by Bargh (1992) and by Wilson and Brekke (1994) .”

“That is, like other errors in thinking (Wilson and Brekke, 1994), erratic decisions can result from erroneous beliefs about cognition and inadequate awareness of one’s decision-making processes.”

“…notices the need for updating (cf. Figure 1; also Ecker et al., 2010a; Guzzetti, Snyder, Glass, & Gamas, 1993; Hinze, Slaten, Horton, Jenkins, & Rapp, 2014; Marsh & Fazio, 2006; Rapp, Hinze, Kohlhepp, & Ryskin, 2014; Rapp & Kendeou, 2007, 2009; van den Broek & Kendeou, 2008; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“The area of construal priming is replete with demonstrations of motivated correction (e.g., Martin et al., 1990; Schwarz & Bless, 1992; Wegener & Petty, 1995; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“There is now substantial evidence that we are in fact often not aware of our own mental processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wilson & Brekke, 1994) or of what is guiding our daily moods, thoughts, and behavior (Bargh, 1997).”

“People often underestimate the influence that stimuli have on their judgments (e.g., Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Most previous models (e.g., Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994 ) focus on the deliberative process of detecting the presence of bias and deciding to initiate control (but see Gollwitzer, 1999).”

“Although much research in social psychology has focused on reflective forms of control (i.e., Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994), recent research has demonstrated that neural processes associated with response control may be engaged without deliberation within a few hundred milliseconds…”

“That is, due to people’s general desire to hold accurate attitudes (Festinger, 1950; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), under conditions of high elaboration, consumers are apt to try to identify and correct for any undesired influence they perceive could be biasing their judgments (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“…that individuals are usually motivated to form accurate representations of the world; they hence attempt to avoid contamination by irrelevant information that may be brought to mind by incidental influences (for discussions see Kunda, 1999; Strack & Hannover, 1996; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“This suggests that EE fits readily the mold of what Wilson and Brekke (1994) described as a type of bias due to “mental contamination” (p. 117).”

“perceived goal affordances and work goals ( Wilson & Brekke, 1994 ), future research can examine this relationship more directly.”

“Indeed, people seem to overestimate the influence of such subliminal stimuli, but to greatly underestimate the influence of more potent and far more prevalent supraliminal stimuli (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Without a theory of how something might taint one’s judgment, there is no reason for people to correct for even the most salient stimulus (Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“This training module was informed by a large literature that investigates methods of debiasing (see Lichtenstein and Fischhoff, 1980; Soll, Milkman, and Payne, in press; and Wilson and Brekke, 1994, for reviews).”

“Wilson and Brekke (1994), for example, propose several necessary conditions for individuals to defend against “mental contamination,” or the unwanted effects of external stimuli such as food advertising.”

“The fact that we replicated the typical ease effect when ease was positive indicates that focusing participants’ attention on the meaning of their metacognitive experience did not in and of itself reverse the effect or lead to mental correction (e.g., Petty & Wegener, 1993; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Research shows that people have difficulty accurately identifying the influences on their attitudes and decisions, indicating severe limits to the accuracy of conscious introspection (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wilson, 2002; Wilson & Brekke, 1994; Wilson, Dunn, Kraft, & Lisle, 1989).”

“This process is similar to what has been termed “thought suppression” (Wilson and Brekke 1994) or “fact avoidance” (Gaines et al. 2007) in which rationalizers ignore conditions that create mental discomfort (Festinger 1957, 3).”

“Hence, participants might not be able to correct their perception simply because the faces look different to them (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“…1992], and the flexible correction model [Wegener & Petty, 1997]) treats contextual information, such as the characteristics of an endorser, as a separate, biasing, and contaminating source of input for which perceivers may need to correct when evaluating an object (see also Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Be it because they lack direct access to the processes that influence their perceptions and evaluations (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wilson & Brekke, 1994; Wilson et al., 2002; see also Frantz, 2006; Pronin et al., 2004, 2006) or because they lack a reference for comparison that would be necessary to…”

“…of this interaction at one standard deviation above and below the mean of the self-monitoring distribution (Aiken & West, 1991) indicated that the main effect of priming was signif- icant for low self-monitors (B 1.36), t(56) 2.07, p .04, but not for high self-monitors (B 0.98), t(56) 1.39, p .17.”

“A variety of evidence points to potential limitations in adult's ToM, particularly in situations in which adults must ignore their own knowledge, in order to consider the mental states of another, naive individual (Apperly, Riggs, Simpson, Chiavarino, & Samson, 2006 ; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003 ; Wilson & Brekke, 1994…”

“The main goal of the present chapter is to review the available empirical evidence on the correspondence bias from the perspective of theory-based bias correction (cf. Strack, 1992; Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“…are various ways in which source memory errors could occur (for recent reviews see Ceci & Bruck 1993; Johnson et al. 1993; Roediger 1996; Schacter 1995; Wilson & Brekke 1994): The schema-based inferences we make in simply comprehending events initially can later be misattributed to perception.”

“In an effort to overcome the fragmentation of the field, various classification schemes have been proposed that offer a framework for the categorization of debiasing strategies.(6,9,10,14,15,18) Larrick,(10) for instance, suggested a distinction between motivational, cognitive, and technological strategies.”

“…the automatic nature of these egocentric evaluations leave no hint of subjectivity, attentional effort, or bias to stimulate judgmental correction (Wilson and Brekke, 1994), producing perceptions that appear to be caused by the stimulus itself rather than by the biased evaluations of the…”

“…their actions and the actual sources of their evaluations and subjective feelings about the external world (Bar-Anan et al. 2010; Nisbett & Wilson 1977; Wilson & Brekke 1994) – access they would be expected to have if they were consciously aware of making those choices and deciding what to do.”

“Thus, whenever a test requires people to report a highly integrated representation rather than single pieces of information, people may not rely on careful source monitoring to discount unwanted influences but on other discounting strategies, such as correction by contrast (see, e.g., Wilson & Brekke, 1994 ).”

“Whether they can do this may depend on their theories about the source of their judgments (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Bias is rarely recognized as such (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Goals allow one to correct-for (e.g., Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991) or decontaminate (e.g., Wilson & Brekke, 1994) cognition from the biasing influence of an already-activated stereotype, overriding it with a more appropriate response (“putting the brakes on prejudice,” e.g.,…”

“However, these processes might also operate without intention or awareness on the part of the observer.”

“Verbalizing reasons for making such ratings may have changed the usual process by which people arrive at similarity judgments (see Wilson & Brekke, 1994, for a review of how cognitive processes are changed by verbalization).”

“Self-regulation of behavior-priming effects is difficult because, by definition, people do not realize when priming affects their behavior (Oettingen, Grant, Smith, Skinner, & Gollwitzer, 2006; Wilson & Brekke, 1984).”

“described by Wilson and Brekke (1994) , such “mental contamination” can be difficult to avoid if”

“…that the original misinformation has been refuted by later information is a necessary precondition for revising and updating one’s original beliefs about the cause of the outcome (Marsh & Fazio, 2006; Rapp, Hinze, Kohlhepp, & Ryskin, 2014; Rapp & Kendeou, 2007, 2009; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“... what does the research show about decision makers’ ability to reduce or eliminate those effects? Generally speaking, the research on debiasing (or correction) indicates that in order to purge judgments of unwanted bias, the decision maker must be (i) aware of the unwanted influence; (ii) motivated to correct the b…”

“However, Wilson and Brekke (1994) suggest that correction processes may be relatively rare.”

“Overcoming the influence of implicit biases requires 1) awareness of the implicit biases, 2) the motivation to break the “habit” of their use, and 3) training in ways to overcome the implicit bias [15, 16, 18].”

“…stimuli, the ambiguity of the target stimulus, and the timing of the priming episode—seems too complex to be explained in terms of demand characteristics or people's naive theories about how to correct for perceived bias (see Strack et al., 1993; Petty & Wegener, 1993; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Because behavior is often driven by automatic mechanisms, self-reports of mental processes are notoriously unreliable and susceptible to many forms of contamination (Bem, 1967; Wilson & Brekke, 1994 ).”

“If people believe that their thoughts are biasing in some way, they can adjust their judgments in a direction opposite to the implication of the thoughts (correction processes; Petty & Wegener, 1993; Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“Because awareness of bias is the first step to counteracting it (e.g. Wilson & Brekke, 1994), manipulations that draw attention to people’s implicit stereotypes (Devine & Monteith, 1999; Monteith, 1993) or that teach them how to control for bias (Schaller, Asp, Rosell, & Heim, 1996) may prove…”

“After exposure has occurred, attempts to restore oneself to a pre-exposure state are effortful (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988) and often ineffective (Wilson & Brekke, 1994).”

“People exhibit numerous systematic biases in judgment (Tversky and Kahneman 1974, Kahneman et al. 1982, Nisbett and Ross 1980), many of which are due to unconscious processes (Morewedge and Kahneman 2010, Wilson and Brekke 1994).”