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AUTOMATICITY (continued) Judging frequency

Hasher & Zacks (1984) talked about judging frequency. They said

• People are good at judging relative frequency of events.
• There is considerable evidence to suggest that this information is encoded automatically.
• This knowledge allows us develop expectancies about the world.

Predicting flight performance

Gopher & Kahneman (1971) found that flight attendants frequently emphasized the importance of selective attention in learning to fly high-performance aircraft. Like Pakistan air force has many planes. Flying these planes need sophisticated skills. Then the selective attention is very important. They have to understand which plane needs more attention.

Flight cadets often failed because they could not appropriately divide their attention among simultaneous activities or were slow to recognize crucial signals that arrived on unattended channels.

Gopher and Kahneman tested 100 cadets in Israeli Air Force. In that experiment, two different messages came to different ears through headphones. A tone signaled which ear was relevant. High tone was for right ear and light tone was for left ears. Subjects had to report all the digits from the relevant ear.

There were three groups of cadets.

• Group 1: 17 cadets rejected early during training on light aircraft.
• Group 2: 41 cadets rejected during training on jet aircraft.

• Group 3: 42 cadets had reached advanced training on jet aircraft. Group 3 was best group. Because they had passed advanced training on jet craft.

Results

Results of that experiment were;

Those that made 3 or more errors: 76% of Group 1 made 3 errors or more. 56% of Group 2 made 3 errors or more. 24% of Group 3 made 3 errors or more.

The results showed selective listening task was the best predictor of flight performance. It means selective listening task is more appropriate than other tests in recruitment process. This has implications for fighter pilot training in Pakistan Air Force as well.

Predicting Road Accidents

Kahneman, Ben-Ishai & Lotan (1973) studied bus drivers. Accident prone drivers: 2 or more severe accidents in one year Accident-free drivers: no accidents in the same period Intermediate drivers: in-between the two groups

Selective Listening task had a high correlation with driver safety. Those drivers performed best in selective listening task they were safe drivers and had low rate of accidents.

Other road accident experiment

Mihal & Barett (1976) used seven tests to predict accident involvement of commercial drivers. They found selective listening task to be the best predictor. Surprising result was because a visual task was not as good a predictor as listening.

Perhaps because selective listening task is a general measure of attention. Those good at switching attention in an auditory task are also good at visual tasks (Hunt, Pellegrino & Yee, 1989)

Thought suppression

Wegner and colleagues (1987) studied thought suppression.

We can think anything like pink elephants. Suppose If someone says us to don’t think about purple elephants we must think about purple elephant even someone tells us to don’t think.

They wanted to investigate the attention to internal sources of information. They studied

• Thought suppression &
• Thought expression

There were two situations of experiment.

• Suppression: Don’t think of a “White Bear”
• Expression: Think of a White Bear

For five minutes subjects were put in a situation. Subjects were instructed to don’t think of a “White Bear”. You must ring a bell whenever you think of a White Bear.

Results

Results shows

• Suppression before Expression
• ƒSubjects started 3.5 rings down to 1 ring
• Suppression after Expression
• ƒSubjects started from 4.4 rings down to 1 ring
• Expression before Suppression
• ƒSubjects started 4.5 rings down to 1.8
• Expression after Suppression

ƒSubjects started 4.5 rings up 5.2

Implications

• Paradoxical effect of thought suppression is that it produces a preoccupation with the suppressed thought.
• Subjects use environmental cues to help with thought suppression which become associated with the thought.
• It is better to work on suppression in an environment which is different from one’s usual environment.

Remedies for rebound

• Competing thought actually reduces the rebound effect.
• Instructions to think about a red Volkswagen instead of a White bear reduced White Bear thoughts during expression (Wegner et al, 1987).
• Subjects who changed their surroundings had fewer White Bear thoughts (Wegner & Schneider, 1989).