Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm.

Abstract

Two experiments demonstrated that self-perceptions and social perceptions may persevere after the initial basis for such perceptions has been completely discredited. In both studies subjects first received false feedback, indicating that they had either succeeded or failed on a novel discrimination task and then were thoroughly debriefed concerning the predetermined and random nature of this outcome manipulation. In experiment 2, both the initial outcome manipulation and subsequent debriefing were watched and overheard by observers. Both actors and observers showed substantial perseverance of initial impressions concerning the actors' performance and abilities following a standard "outcome" debriefing. "Process" debriefing, in which explicit discussion of the perseverance process was provided, generally proved sufficient to eliminate erroneous self-perceptions. Biased attribution processes that might underlie perserverance phenomena and the implications of the present data for the ethical conduct of deception research are discussed.

Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.

“…It is not unreasonable to suppose that the major difference between these two types of cues may be the difference between discriminanda and preferenda. And it is perhaps the difference between these cues that is also involved in the perseverance effect (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975), in that details of initial information about success (or failure) are used only to construct an overall impression of one's own task competence and are soon discarded. Thus, in debriefing, when the experimenter tells the subjects that their success (or failure) was rigged, this new information may no longer be capable of making contact with the original input (which by then has been recoded and discarded) and may therefore have little effect on its original affective consequences.…”

“…Experiments on the perseverance effect, the strong primacy effects in impression formation, and the fact that attitudes are virtually impervious to persuasion by communication all attest to the robust strength and permanence of affect. Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis, as in the case of the perseverance phenomenon when a subject is told that an initial experience of success or failure has been totally fabricated by the experimenter (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975).…”

Displacing Misinformation about Events: An Experimental Test of Causal Corrections

“…In particular, even after these false or unsupported claims are discredited, they may continue to affect the beliefs and attitudes of those who were exposed to them -a phenomenon often referred to as belief perseverance (e.g., Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard 1975;Bullock 2007;Cobb, Nyhan, and Reifler 2013) or the continued influence effect (e.g., Wilkes and Leatherbarrow 1988;Johnson and Seifert 1994). One reason for this persistence is the manner in which people automatically make causal inferences from the information they have at hand.…”

Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information.

“…It appears that specific personal impressions in a given domain concerning one's own abilities or those of a peer may survive even the complete invalidation of the evidence on which the impressions initially were based. Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard (1975), for example, provided subjects with false feedback indicating their apparent success or failure at discriminating authentic suicide notes from inauthentic ones, a task purported to assess their social sensitivity and empathetic ability. For half of the subjects the probative value of this feedback was subsequently completely negated by a thorough "debriefing" procedure.…”