Biases and Cognitive Tendencies Vocab Flashcards
The tendency to make internal attributions for the behavior of others and external attributions for our own behavior
When we are observers, the other person is a salient part of our visual field, but when we ourselves are acting in the world, we are usually focused on our surroundings rather than on ourselves.
actor-observer effect
The tendency to assume that information that comes easily to mind (or is readily available) is more frequent or common
Try to make the following judgment as quickly as possible. Which of the two word fragments listed below could be completed by more words?
1. ING
2. N
If your first inclination was to choose option 1, you just exhibited what is referred to as the ___
availability heuristic
A tendency to seek out information and view events and other people in ways that fit how we want and expect them to be
A fundamental problem is that we rarely are objective observers and interpreters of the world around us. Everything we observe, through all of our senses, is influenced by our desires, prior knowledge and beliefs, and current expectations.
confirmation bias
The tendency to see a casual relationship betweenan event and an outcome when they happen at the same time
If Frank arrives late to a party and, soon after, a fight breaks out, it is likely that you’ll entertain the hypothesis that Frank caused the melee, especially if the co-occurrence of Frank’s arrival and fights happens repeatedly.
covariation principle
An imagined alternative in which the outcome is worse than what actually happened
When visiting a friend in the hospital who broke both her legs in a car accident, people might offer consoling comments such as, “You were lucky— you could have had spine damage and been paralyzed for life.”
downward counterfactuals
A general tendency to assume that other people share our own attitudes, opinions, and prefrences
Even when a person we meet doesn’t remind us of someone specific, we often project onto him or her attitudes and opinions of the person we know the best—ourselves!
false consensus
A tendency to assume that people with one positive attribute (ex, who are physically attractive) also have other positive traits
In Western cultures people see beautiful people (compared with those of average attractiveness) as happier, warmer, more dominant, mature, mentally healthy, and more.
halo effect
The tendency to believe that simply having thoughts about an event before it occurs can influence that event
Zach believes that his hoping and wishing and praying played a role in determining the election outcome.
magical thinking
The process by which cues that are given after an event can plant false information into memory
Clearly our memories are biased by our schemas both when we first encode new information and when we later recall it. These biases can even lead us to remember things that didn’t actually happen.
misinformation effect
The idea that what we learn early colors how we judge subsequent information
The audience has more difficulty learning the arguments in the second message because their mind is still focused on the first, so you should volunteer to go first.
primacy effect
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood that a target is part of a category if they person has features that seem representative of that category
As long as the description seems more representative of an engineer than a lawyer, participants guess engineer
representativeness heuristic
The phenomenon whereby initially false expectations cause the fufillment of those expectations
teachers’ positive expectations for their students can shape how well those students actually perform.
self-fulfilling prophecy
A tendency to map on, or transfer, feelings for a person who is known, onto someone new who resembles that person in some way
We o en automatically perceive certain basic characteristics about a person and then infer that the individual will share the features that we associate with similar people. Sometimes this quick inference might result from the person’s reminding us of another person we already know.
transference
An imagined alternative in which the outcome is better than what actually happened
“If only he had gone to the store where he usually shops!”
negative outcomes resulting from unusual or almost avoided actions are easier to imagine having gone better
upward counterfactual
