[XaulZan11]

This is something that I've been thinking about for awhile and the other day in my social psychology class we talked about how people's preconceptions affect thier perception of the person. With all the predictions and discussions about the various teams before Atlanta, I thought it would be a good idea to post it now.

First, some social psychology. It has been supported by many studies that the first information you hear or know about an individual or object, carries more weight than later information (also known as the primacy effect). Secondly, people form schemas, or a mental framework or set of expectations we expect to see, once we know something/anything about an individual or object. Finally, there is the confirmation bias that is the tendency for people to look for examples that support their beliefs. For example, if you think someone is nice, you pay more attention to the incidents where they are nice and ignore the times they are mean. There was a very interesting study that took a class and told them they were going to have a speaker come talk to them. Half the class were told the speaker is a famous expert on the subject, speaking at plenty of universties and conventions. The other half was told that the speaker was a graduate student that was practicing giving speeches. Although they listened to the same talk at the same time, the two groups had significantly different opinions on the speech. Those who thought he was a famous expert on the subject, rated the speech significantly better than those who thought he was just a graduate student.

So, back to robot. I'm think these factors may contribute to people's perception of the various robots and thus could affect alliance selections. Suppose you read a thread about a team that says that they are simply amazing and have the best launcher. When scouting at the competition, you already have a schema set in place (that they have great and have a great launcher) and the confirmation bias says that you will look for examples that fulfill that schema, so when they do a successful launch, you think 'I knew they were good', but when there launch hits the overpass you think, 'well, that team was in thier way, or that was just unlucky'. On friday night you go through the scouting data and see that this team, suprisingly, isn't at the top of the list. Instead of thinking that they may not be as good as you once though, you just remember the good launches and the good matches. Come alliance selections, you may be more willing to select that team because you already had a schema set in place (from CD) and you looked for things that fulfill that schema because of the confirmation bias.

To use the study on the speaker as example. The information the two groups were told (the speaker is a expert vs just a grad student) is like the information here on chiefdelphi (the prediction thread is a great spot to see people talk about how great teams are). The speech can be compared to the team's matches and the rating of the speech is the team's scouting.

Its just a theory that I've been thinking about. I don't think that we shouldn't discuss how good teams are (that wouldn't be any fun!), but I think it is something that people should keep in mind when determing how good a team is.